Austria, Living in Past, Rejects Its Recent History

In Austria, where kaisers once ruled 50 million people of more than 10 different nations and races, when kings modulated all the discords of a far-flung empire, politicians now preside in an atmosphere of wariness and anxiety. Nowhere else in Western Europe is the physical and psychological exhaustion of the people so palpable as in Austria. The nation that for centuries thrived by bringing together Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Jews, Magyars, Poles, Slovaks, Italians and Russians now appears paralyzed, unable to deal with its most recent past.

The international outcry over President Kurt Waldheim’s role in the World War II German Wehrmacht has left Austrians bewildered and angered. To most of them it is not only their president who is on trial in the minds of the outside world, but Austria itself.

Is Austria a nation of unrepentant Nazis? Are the men and women of Salzburg, Innsbruck and Vienna a bunch of graffiti-smearing anti-Semites? Does the land of Mozart and Strauss suffer from a severe case of amnesia?

The latest polls clearly indicate there has been no discernible change in the public’s attitude toward Jews. Today 22% of all 7.5 million Austrians feel a “physical or personal discomfort” when shaking a Jew’s hand, while 16% find Jews “repulsive,” with twice as many finding them “unpleasant,” Hilde Wiess, a sociologist, reported recently on nationwide TV. She found that a striking 23% think it’s important that Jews not become influential in politics, business or the country’s schools, and that just as many respondents say they have no problems with such discriminating practices.

Austria, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, was the “first country to have fallen victim” to Hitler’s wars of conquest, as the wartime Allies declared. In Vienna, this sentiment was immediately interpreted as a reprieve from the past. It also protected Austrians from the more thorough de-Nazification measures imposed on Germany. But even half-hearted efforts to cleanse Austria of its most notorious Nazis came to a standstill with the unfolding of the Cold War, the Berlin blockade, the Marshall Plan and the establishment of the Atlantic Alliance.

Austria the victim, like Germany the villain, became a pawn in the political chess game between rival forces in East and West. Yet unlike Germany, Austria’s political, social and economic infrastructure survived the division of Europe. And when the occupying powers (the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union) left in 1955, the country was declared a neutral state.

Left to its own devices, Austria steadfastly refused to turn inward. There was no reflection on its recent history of willful collaboration with the Germans in the execution of nearly 30,000 of its compatriots for Resistance activities; Austria turned a blind eye on the fact that 70,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps. The country was preoccupied with carving out a new role for itself, one that would remind the world of former glory and grandeur.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the nation’s recent history was only sketchily taught in its schools. Not until the late 1960s did historians hesitantly begin to look at Austria’s role in Nazi Germany and the anti-Semitic sentiment that has always been close to the surface of Austrian life. That nearly half of all Austrians still believe the Jewish community makes up 10% of Austria’s population is a measure of their unwillingness to look at the country more realistically. For the once-thriving Jewish community of 200,000 before World War II has all but disappeared. A mere 6,000 Jews still make Austria their home. But while the demographics have changed dramatically, the Austrian disposition has not.

Clearly, the country’s politicians and press are aware of these moods and facts. So their decision to come to the rescue of the embattled Waldheim must owe as much to today’s political climate as to the overriding desire to stay in harmony with a culture that does not like conflict.

Austria’s intellectuals deplore their country’s failure to face its past as part of Nazi Germany. And they point to their northerly neighbor, which under more trying circumstances has come to grips with the 13 years of Hitler’s savage reign. To be sure, it has been rough going for the Germans and there have been occasional backlashes. But with the passing of time, Hitler’s henchmen have been purged from public life, Nazi war criminals have been tried and imprisoned.

But through it all the important questions were raised: Why did the Germans do it? Why did it have to happen to the Jews? Why did not the Germans resist the deceptive promises of National Socialism? The ensuing debate often pitched conservative Christian Democrats against liberal Socialists and dogmatic Marxist-Leninists, Protestants against Catholics and Jews, parents against their children.

Surely West Germany also has its Waldheims and the die-hards who see their country not as the villain but the victim. But it has also had leaders like Richard von Weizsacker and Willy Brandt, who tell people they have to face facts and that only through a rigorous analysis of the past can they regain self-respect and in time earn the respect of others. For it is only by unambiguously repudiating anyone and anything associated with Nazism can the Germans prevent its resurgence in the future.

The more reflective Austrians, particularly intellectuals and the young, say the time has come for the country to deal with its tainted past. But they hasten to add that Austria, regrettably, has neither a man of Von Weizsacker’s nor Brandt’s stature, capable of inspiring enough confidence and compassion among their compatriots to open up.

Peter Handke, Austria’s leading writer, feels many people are mourning inside and dare not come out of their shells. They need someone, he insists, to “unlock them,” because “they cannot hide forever--lest they are determined to isolate themselves from the world community.”