Nationalism Revisited by Christian Karner

Author:Christian Karner [Karner, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Nationalism & Patriotism, History, Europe, Austria & Hungary
ISBN: 9781789204520
Google: 4VCBxQEACAAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-12-03T05:22:48+00:00

Hot Nationalism’s “Interruptions”

National mythscapes are, per definition, internally contested between “dominant” and alternative, including “subaltern,”13 memories (Bell 2003 and above). Postwar Austria was no exception. Alongside its official “myth of victimhood,” the country—starting in the late 1940s and gathering considerable local momentum in numerous towns and villages throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s—also saw a pervasive “populist countermyth”: centered on the “heroism” of (fallen) World War II soldiers portrayed as “dutiful” defenders of the Heimat, this alternative “narrative of war memorials and the ceremonies connected with them” constructed Austrians “not [as] victims of Nazism, but rather [as] victims of the war against Nazism” (Uhl 2011: 185ff., original italics). The implications of these alternative, “bottom-up,” but nonetheless (especially regionally) prominent cultural memories were far-reaching. Discursively, if “only” on the level of another banal nationalism of implicitly pan-Germanic orientation, such “counternarratives of heroism ascribed to Austrians who fought in the Wehrmacht” (Uhl 2011: 190) inadvertently challenged the identity grammar underpinning the Second Republic’s official self-understanding at the time: if local Austrians were seen and portrayed as having fought “dutifully” between 1939 and 1945, then their still widely assumed “German-ness” resonated, however implicitly, in such depictions and cultural practices of remembering. The Austrian particularism accomplished, in part, through the official narrative of “victimhood was thus here,” in what Heidemarie Uhl (2011: 192) captures as a “competing culture of remembrance,” challenged by alternative self-definitions that, if not explicitly pan-Germanic, at least presupposed an enduring ethnocultural proximity between Austria and Germany.14 As we shall see in due course, these “rival memorial cultures” (Uhl 2011: 195) would resurface rather dramatically in later decades’ moments of hot nationalist politics.

However, it would not take very much longer for the first indications that the recent past was dealt with by contrasting ways of remembering and by clashing political positions, and still contained more than merely the potential for violence. As early as 1959 a “torchlight procession” crossing Vienna’s Ring “on the occasion of the Schiller anniversary” was interpreted by many as a “warning symptom of returning German nationalism” (Uhl 2011: 195). In 1963, against the backdrop provided by the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the by-now shockingly forgiving approach to Nazi war criminals taken by Austrian juries led to both domestic (i.e., particularly among some of the younger generation) and international protests. The most infamous trigger for this was the case of Franz Murer, former high-ranking SS officer who had been involved in the mass murder of Jews in Vilnius, who was later temporarily imprisoned in the Soviet Union and then transferred to Austria in 1955; eight years later, and despite further evidence against Murer made available by Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian jury passed a verdict of acquittal (Portisch 1996: 246ff.). Two years later, in 1965, polarization of parts of the Austrian public over the Nazi past became yet more apparent. This occurred in the context of street clashes—culminating in the Second Republic’s first violent political death—between sympathizers with, and critics of, Taras Borodajkewycz, a professor at what was then Vienna’s University for World Trade.

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