The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (review)

David Art’s comparative study focuses on the manner in which the Nazi past has influenced political debate among opinion-makers in Germany and Austria from the end of World War II to the present. Having conducted some two hundred “unstructured” interviews with politicians, public intellectuals, civic activists, and journalists in both countries, and having researched an extensive survey of periodicals, Art argues that debates among elites have been primarily responsible for influencing the public’s position toward Nazism. In Germany elites have forged a “culture of contrition,” a consensus that marginalizes right radicalism, accepts Germany’s responsibility for the Second World War, and recognizes the Holocaust as the defining event of German history. In Austria, however, a different view prevails in the face of continuing and contentious debate, a view that normalizes the Third Reich, minimizes Austrian complicity, and maintains Austria’s role as the “first victim” of Nazi aggression.

During the first ten years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship in West Germany, the integration of former Nazis assumed priority, while interpretations of the Third Reich placed the blame for Nazism on a small clique of leaders and exonerated the German population as victims of both Nazi terror and Allied bombing. In 1961, however, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt exposed the West German public to the inner workings of genocide and the role of seemingly ordinary Germans in it. They shook that comfortable consensus, as did 1960s student protesters who raised questions about their parents’ activities during the Third Reich, along with broader questions about the relationship between capitalism and fascism. Nevertheless, not until the mid-1980s did the collective desire to render the Nazi past harmless really begin to give way.

Bitter debates ensued between the center-left and the center-right over the effort of CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl and conservative advisors such as Michael Stürmer to normalize the Third Reich and make German nationalism respectable. Kohl’s invitation to President Ronald Reagan to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg, and finally the Historikerstreit, the debate over the place of the Third Reich in the overall course of German history, achieved resolution thanks largely to key interventions by major conservative publications and political leaders who normally supported the CDU. Thus, the 1985 address of Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker to the Bundestag on the anniversary of Germany’s surrender acknowledged the complicity of elites and ordinary Germans in Nazi crimes and named May 8 a day of “liberation” rather than a day of “defeat.” Similarly, the conservative tabloid Bild-Zeitung sided with Jürgen Habermas’s “constitutional patriotism,” which condemned the strident nationalism of the past as irrevocably discredited by Auschwitz. By 1995 the “culture of contrition” had been firmly anchored in post-unification Germany. The product of a widely publicized debate among elites, this consensus ultimately persuaded the broader public to recognize National Socialism for the criminal and genocidal regime that it was, as well as to acknowledge the regime’s popular acceptance while in power.

In Austria, on the other hand, a discourse that normalizes the Nazi past has proven more durable, even if it now allows space for the expression of contrition for Austria’s role during the Third Reich. Immediately after the war, Austria’s two largest political parties, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) converged on an official memory that emphasized Austria as the Third Reich’s “first victim,” a narrative reinforced by the language of the Allied “Moscow Declaration” of 1943, which committed the Allies to Germany’s unconditional surrender. In 1947 that emerging consensus facilitated the general amnesty for some 500,000 former Nazis, who provided the core of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded in 1956. The utility of Austria’s “victimhood” for political elites proved so irresistible that beginning in the sixties, Social Democratic Party leader Bruno...