Das Habsburger-Trauma: Das schwierige Verhältnis der Republik Österreich zu ihrer Geschichte ed. by Clemens Aigner, Gerhard Fritz and Constantin Staus-Rausch (review)

This publication brings together nine papers presented at a symposium that was held in Vienna in March 2012 and organized by the Katholisch Österreichische Landsmannschaft maximiliana. The immediate impulse for the symposium was the funeral of Otto von Habsburg (1912–2011) in Vienna the preceding summer. As the editors note in their Vorwort, the Second Republic likes to bathe in the Glanz of the Habsburg past; its president resides in the Hofburg, and its many foreign tourists visit places closely connected with the Imperial past. However, modern Austria has been much less eager to embrace living Habsburgs, most of all “Dr. Otto Habsburg” himself, who was not allowed to return to his native land until 1966. The root cause of this problem was not the character or actions of Otto von Habsburg but the problematic identity of the Austrian Republic itself. As the constitutional lawyer Manfried Welan notes in his contribution to this volume, none of the three Volksabstimmungen that have taken place in the Republic—in 1938, 1978, and 1994—asked the population to legitimize the republican form of the state. Welan reflects on Erhard Busek’s description of Austria in the late 1960s as “die unvollendete Republik” and asks a pertinent question: “Wir sind zu einem der friedlichsten und reichsten Staaten der Welt geworden. Sozialer Friede und soziale Gerechtigkeit sind auch Ergebnis unserer Demokratie. Aber wurden wir eine Republik?” (116).

Most of the contributors to this volume are academics—Dieter Binder, Norbert Leser, and Roland Girtler, for instance—but some are individuals with close associations with Otto von Habsburg’s work, such as Rudolf Logothetti, who was his office manager in the European Parliament, and Eva Demmerle, who in his later years was his assistant and press officer. Furthermore, the work concludes with a essay by Otto’s eldest son, Karl Habsburg-Lothringen. All the contributors are thus sympathetic to the Habsburg legacy, though from varying standpoints. There are areas which might have been included but are not: Apart from Peter Parenzan’s brief discussion of the “Sissi-Trilogie,” there is no analysis of the presentation of the Habsburgs in Austrian film, and Leser’s appreciation of Csokor’s play 3. November 1918 aside, the “Habsburger-Trauma” in modern Austrian literature is not examined.

The papers by Binder (“Von 1918 bis zum ständesstaatlichen Kokettieren mit dem Legitimismus”) and Leser (“Die Angst der Sozialdemokraten vor der Rückkehr der Monarchie”) are complementary: The former looks at the ambivalent position of the Christlichsoziale Partei towards the Habsburgs in the First Republic, whereas the latter examines the “anti-Habsburg Kampagne” of the Social Democrats in the Second Republic seen as an “Ablenkungsmanöver von der innerparteilichen Krise der spö.” Binder traces the path of the Christian Socialists from a party that supported the Altar and Throne before 1914 to one that after the collapse of 1918 feared a split between the proand anti-monarchist wings and between its Viennese core (led by Seipel) and its provincial supporters. Binder sees the Habsburgergesetze of 1919 as a product of the new Republic’s radical phase, when it sought to present itself to the Allies as a Nachfolgestaat that had drawn a line under its past. It was advantageous for Deutschösterreich to reduce Austria-Hungary to the “Kriegskaiser” Franz Joseph and Karl (though this was unjust to the last Emperor’s attempts to negotiate a peace in 1917–18) and make them responsible for the war; it also needed, if it were to achieve the Anschluß with Weimar Germany that a majority of its population wanted, to separate from its Habsburg past. All that may have been, in the desperate times of 1918– 19, tactically necessary, but the anti-Habsburg laws with the expulsion of the Emperor and his family from Austria were, as Binder concludes, “eine Quelle latenten Unbehagens” (18). Fifteen years later, in...