Past Editorials
Each quarter, we invite a guest editor to comment on general or specific research issues.
We would to thank the authors for their contributions.
**
EDITION THREE: SUMMER 2007
Dr Robert Knight, Loughborough University, writes:
Remember Kurt Waldheim? This year
is the 20th anniversary of his elections, which has prompted a few
outpourings, though fortunately nothing like on the scale of last year “Year of
Thoughts”. Emotions evidently still run high. Peter Huemer, historian, journalist
and activist of the anti-Waldheim group
recalled the excitement of the Mahnwache
(the vigil outside St, Stephens Cathedral) and was reprimanded and ridiculed by
Austrian mathematics professor Rudolf Taschner for turning his experiences into
the stuff of legend, an ironic twist perhaps to the indignation aroused by
Waldheim’s own autobiographical legend. Taschner’s conclusion was that
historians should not write their own history - “ein Historiker möge nie die
eigene Geschichte thematisieren – ihm entgleitet die Objektivität.” Presumably
he does not think that the only people who should comment on the Waldheim
affair are non-historians (Taschner is a mathematician). But it does raise the
question of when or how events become history – the question of “Historisierung.”[1]
The term carries some baggage, much
of it acquired in the course of the Historikerstreit,
which was running in West Germany at the same time as the Waldheim affair. It
appeared in the garb of “Geschichtsphilosophie” when Ernst Nolte attempted to
reposition the Holocaust in a broader historical and geographical context, with
the Bolshevik revolution and Pol Pot made equally important points of
reference. In a further step of convoluted reasoning, Nolte saw the Holocaust
as a possible pre-emptive reaction to the crimes of Bolshevik regime. A more
serious discussion came in the form of Martin Brozsat’s “plea for a
historicisation of National Socialism.” Broszat suggested that Nazi Germany
could and should be understood as something both more ordinary and more complex
than the black-and-white distinctions (victim or resistance fighter) which he
feared were leading to an “unhistorischen Monumentalisierung”. Brozsat’s “plea”
seemed to come from a genuine paedagogic concern and one possible antidote was
to stress the “everydayness” of life in the Third Reich. Saul Friedländer’s
rejoinder was that seen from the point of view of Jewish victims, black and
white were precisely the stark colours of their every day existence.[2]
In sum, “historicisation” was a thoroughly ill-defined term which, in Charles
Maier’s words “must risk apology, but need not lead to it.”[3]
Whether or not Waldheim’s wartime
career is now history, there seems no reason to believe that his delayed
revelations about it twenty years ago have been, or should be. Above all,
Broszat’s paedagogic rationale for historicising national socialism surely does
not apply to the mundane politics of reconstruction and compromises of the
post-war period. Post-war hardships were real enough, of course, but the
tendency to cite them as reasons, or actually excuses, for failings on issues
like restitution or denazification appears far less convincing and nearly
always veers towards a kind of apologetic determinism. What else could Austria
have done given the economic conditions/the “Moscow Declaration”/the mass of
former Nazi party members (delete as required). Agency and with it
responsibility evaporates.
Twenty years I was attacked by the
then Austrian Foreign minister, Peter Jankowitsch, for an article in the TLS which was meant to place Waldheim in
the context of a post-war history of evasion. The minister invited historians
to refute what he called my “hair-raising arguments” One of these was my
statement that the role of Austrian resistance “has been much inflated.” The
historians did not oblige, though a journalist on Die Presse did his best. Jankowitsch feared that if views like this
became established
“Viele der Werte, mit denen in der
Vergangenheit Österreich, insbesondere aber die zweite Republik identifiziert
wurden, würden in ihr Gegenteil umgekehrt. Im nachhinein würde ein “Anschluss”
Österreichs an eine Vergangenheit vollzogen, von der sich unser Land und seine
Menschen längst befreit wähnten.”
Jankowitsch seems to have been
confusing two things: the internalisation by Austrians of
anti-fascist/anti-Nazi values and the outside world’s identification of Austria
with those values on the basis of a historical account which claimed that
Austrians had been anti-Nazis during the Anschluss.
By 1986, though he did not realise it, the historical account of Austrians as
collective victim was already crumbling. But the values, which had been weak in
many parts of post-war Austrian society, were by now more strongly embedded.
National Socialism was by now a “moral point of reference” (Lepsius) for a
sizeable segment of the population. The years since Waldheim seem,
notwithstanding Jörg Haider, to have shown this, to the point that now, in
Huemer’s words:
jenes Klischee,
dass sich seit Waldheim international durchgesetzt hat: Österreich als Land des
Verschweigenes und des Vergessens, eben seit Waldheim nicht mehr wirklich
stimmt.
Huemer sees this, perhaps a little
blithely, as an appropriate irony of history, the pay-back for all the previous
Sound of Music stereo-typing.[4]
For others, like Norbert Leser, the anti-Waldheim campaign, was neither a
heroic epic, nor the catalyst for an honest self-appraisal, it was “eine üble
Machination und Dreistigkeit.”[5]
But at least he doesn’t claim to be writing a history of the 1980s.
[1] Peter Huemer, “Wir waren dabei,” Die Presse, 27 May 2006; Rudolf Taschner, ‘Quergeschrieben: “….und
haben Geschichte gemacht”, Die Presse,
1 June 2006.
[2] Martin Broszat, ‘Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des
Nationalsozialismus,’ originally in Merkur
1985, reprinted in Hermann Graml,
Klaus-Dietmar Henke, eds. Nach Hitler.
Der schwierige Umgang mit der Vergangenheit Beiträge von Martin Broszat, Munich
1986, 159-173 here 169.
[3]
Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past,
93
[4]
Peter Huemer, ‘Erinnern und vergessen,’(Teil I), Die Presse, 10 December 2005.
[5] Norbert Leser, ‘Ein unrühmliches Kapitel,’ Die Presse, 11 September 2006.
**
EDITION TWO: SUMMER 2006
Dr Jill Lewis, Swansea University, writes:
There is little doubt that, in the field of Austrian Studies in the UK, political history and the
social sciences were, for a long time, eclipsed by two colossi of research and interest, namely fin-de-siècle
Vienna’s cultural and intellectual history, and twentieth-century German Studies, especially of Nazism and the
Third Reich. Compared with these two themes, the small ‘truncated’ entity which was the successive Austrian
Republics and the Ostmark appeared to be relatively insignificant. However, the collapse of the Iron Curtain
marked a major change, for, as Tony Judt recently observed in the introduction to Postwar, ‘Vienna in
1989 was the palimpsest of Europe’s complicated, overlapping pasts’. The end of the Cold War also challenged
the culture of political consensus, later consolidated into the Social Partnership, which had dominated Austria
since 1945. The ‘Waldheim Affair’ led to accusations of ‘historical amnesia’, whilst the rise of the political
right in the 1990s provoked allegations, inter alia, of growing xenophobia and the re-emergence of anti-Semitism.
The themes of nationalism, political radicalism (of Right and Left alike), of historical narrative,
identity and memory dominate much of the research on Austria currently in progress both in British universities
and Austria alike. Some of this work is closely linked to the cultural and literary research which was the
subject of Professor Sagarra’s earlier editorial. This is most clearly illustrated by the activities of the
Centre for Jewish Studies at Sussex University, including Edward Timms’s work on Karl Kraus and work by
Lisa Silverman (who has since departed for the USA) on Jewish identity, particularly that of Jewish women, in
Red Vienna. Indeed, the diagram of interlocking circles of thinkers in Imperial Vienna included in the first
volume of Professor Timms’s biography of Karl Kraus explains one key to Viennese culture and politics: the
intimacy of intellectual life in a compact, even dense city, in which public and private spheres traditionally
overlapped in coffee-houses and restaurants. The Sussex Centre is also the hub of research in Britain on the
Kindertransporte (and a book by Andrea Hammel on the subject is forthcoming). The wider history of
Habsburg Jewry has been the subject of research by David Rechter (Oxford), whose book, The Jews of Vienna and
the First World War was published in 2001 and who is now focusing on Bukovina, whilst Larissa Douglass (Oxford)
is about to complete a doctoral thesis on the Jewish Question and Czech Democracy, 1895-1920.
The scope of Austrian history is, of course, not limited to the political borders of the present state.
Robert Evans (Oxford) has written extensively on the history of the Habsburg Empire, and in particular the
influence of language. He is now working on Hungary, but his encouragement of students of Austrian history
continues unabated. Mark Cornwall (Southampton), who is currently writing a history of memory and masculinity
in the successor states after 1918, will return to the subject of the relations between Austria and Hungary in
the First World War, one theme of his earlier book, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary.
The study of contemporary Austrian history and politics is also growing. Tim Kirk (Newcastle) and
Jill Lewis (Swansea) both work on Austrian labour history. Lewis’s research focuses on Social Democracy
in both the First and Second Republics, and she has just completed a book entitled Workers and Politics
in Occupied Austria 1945-1955. Kirk is an expert on fascism in Austria, the Nazi occupation, and urban culture
in the Habsburg Empire. His book, Nazism and the Working Class in Austria, was recently reissued. Robert Knight
(Loughborough) publishes widely on Austrian attitudes and policy towards the legacy of the Third Reich and
right-wing extremism, and on ethnic relations and minority rights in the Second Republic, with particular
reference to the Slovene minority in Austria. The second, revised, edition of his influential book, "Ich
bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen”. Die Wortprotokolle der österreichishen Bundesregierung von 1945
bis 1952 über die Entschadigung der Juden was published in 2000. Knight and Alice Teichova (formerly East
Anglia and Cambridge) were both members of the Austrian Historical Commission, which was set up by the
Austrian government in 1998 to investigate expropriations in Austria during the Third Reich and report on
restitution and compensation. Richard Luther (Keele) is an expert on the Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ)
and has recently contributed the chapter on this party in the current edition of H. Dachs et al. (eds.),
Politik in Österreich. Das Handbuch (2006).
Finally, the appointment in 2004 of Ruth Wodak as Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University is of
major significance. Professor Wodak takes an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of politics, history,
discourse and language. She examines the construction of collective and individual historical narratives and
memory, most recently that of the image of the Wehrmacht in the context of the 1995 and 2002 exhibitions
(published in 2003 in German, to be published in English by Palgrave in 2007). But her work extends far beyond
this to questions of gender, identity, work and unemployment, racism, right-wing populism, xenophobia and
anti-Semitism in Austria, starting with a book written together with an interdisciplinary team on the
Waldheim affair and post-war anti-Semitism (1990). She is one of the most exciting present-day Austrian
thinkers – and she is in Britain.
**
EDITION ONE: WINTER 2005-06
Prof. Sagarra, Trinity College, Dublin, writes:
Undergraduate student numbers in German may be decining in the UK and Ireland,
but Austrian studies are flourishing.
The ‘house journal’ of Austrian studies has been re-established under
Judith Beniston (UCL) and Robert Vilain (Royal Holloway). There are now
four established Research Centres: at Edinburgh & Aberdeen (under the aegis
of Andrew Barker and Janet Stewart); the Nestroy Centre at Exeter
(W.E. Yates et al.); the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature
(Martin Liebscher, London); the centre for Exile Studies at the Institute of
Germanic and Romance Studies, London. There is also the Oxford Austrian and
Central European Studies group (OACES) (Robert Pyrah and Larissa Douglas);
and given the significance of its Austrian material and the lead role of
Edward Timms, we should also add the Sussex centre for Jewish studies.
[ All are linked from this site].
A survey of their regular conferences and those of active researchers in other
British and Irish universities suggest a dominant focus on the 20th century.
Themes include: classical modernism (Barker; Gilbert Carr, TCD; Daniel Steuer,
Sussex); Holocaust / memory /exile (Colin Beaven, Southampton; Charmian Brinson,
London; Mary Cosgrove, Edinburgh; Richard Dove, ORT; Allyson Fiddler, Lancaster;
Anne Fuchs, UCD; Anthony Grenville, London; Andrea Hammel, Sussex; Florian Krobb;
NUIM; Jutta Vinzent, Birmingham); identity, incl. State Treaty (Pyrah, Vickie Smith,
Nott.). [There will be a conference on the latter at TCD on 25/26 November; details
on the ‘Calendar’ page]. In particular, the interwar years (Barker; Beniston; John
Warren) and post-1945 literature (Rüdiger Görner, London; Gillian Pye, UCD;
Charlotte Ryland, London; Andreas Stuhmann, UCC) are now attracting growing
interest. The 19th century, apart from the current work of Ritchie Robertson
(Oxford; now also working on the Austrian Enlightenment), and Nestroy, has
suffered a relative decline. In Ireland, especially at Galway (NUIG) and Cork
(UCC) student theatre has long been active in promoting the performance of
near/contemporary and classical Wiener Theater, and there have been sporadic
performances elsewhere, notably of Reigen in Oxford in 2001.
**
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