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Guilty Victims: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider

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last year while studying at the IES Vienna program, I was confronted with the new elections and creation of government in Austria. The man at the center of all this attention was Jorg Haider, then the leader of the of the FPO. Hell Pick's book "Guilty Victim" effectively presents the background to the Austria as a paradox in association to Anschluss and WWII. On one ahnd there is the national lie that Austria was the first victim of the Third Reich. This reinforces Austrian indentity in modern Europe. The other side is that Austria bears responsibility for participating in the actions of the third Reich. Austria suffers the dilemma of reconciling with its guilt from the past, so that it may enter into accord with the other nations of the EU. This book is best sumed by her words qouted "Those who choose to forget history are condemned to live through the same again. Those who do not want to know precisely what took place will never be able to learn the lessons of history... We have a duty to understand the past - and as far as possible, to accept wrong-doing and make amends." Pick's purpose in this book is to reconcile with the actions of the nation that she was born into. This book represents a contemporary approach to modern European history in the hopes that lessons will be learned in rder to prevent disasters and distructions of the past. The EU provides potential in the continent reconciling with their actions during the second world war. I believe this book is best for those interested in contemporary Austrian or modern European history. Austria is no longer a nation confused about its national identity but is confronted by the new dominant force in Europe, the EU. Only time will determine the fate of Austria in a larger Europe.

Leider ist das Buch bereits veraltet.Finde interessant, dass sich die Leute für so was interessieren.

Manche amerikanische Leser sollten sich damit abfinden, dass der zweite Weltkrieg zu Ende ist. Haider wird in Österreich auch nicht ernst genommen und seine Partei ist bereits in 2 Parteien zerfallen.

Man kann ihn nur als Politkasperl akzeptieren.

Seit langem ist Österreich kein kriegsführendes Land mehr, im Gegensatz zu den USA. In Wien sind wir sozialistisch regiert und stolz drauf. Freundschaft !!!

This excellent and judicious book opens with the celebrations in 1980 of the 25th anniversary of the State Treaty which had given Austria her independence in 1955. In 1980 the prestige of Austria was at its height. Economically she was remarkably successful; the electorate had rejected communism and embraced western-style democracy; Austria's consensus-based political system was very stable. Above all, in international affairs she followed a policy of "active neutrality": although committed to western values, she had good relations with both the Eastern and the Western bloc, and especially under Bruno Kreisky (foreign minister from 1959 to 1970 and Chancellor from 1970 to 1983), played a mediating role between them and hosted many an East-West conference. Kreisky tried to play a mediating role in the Middle East also, being in 1974 the first western statesman to engage in public discussion with the PLO.

His small country had offered asylum to 180,000 Hungarian refugees in 1956 and to 96,000 Czechs after the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968. When the Soviet bloc began to allow Jewish emigration to Israel, Austria provided transit facilities for 270,000 Jews; and she did all this without seriously endangering her relationships with the Soviet Union. Kurt Waldheim, a former Austrian foreign minister, had been chosen by East and West alike to be Secretary General of the United Nations: his war-time career had, amazingly, not then been investigated. And the fact that the Jewish Kreisky had been elected Chancellor seemed to acquit Austria of continuing anti-Semitism.

However, many Jewish refugees had rejected invitations to attend the celebrations of 1980; and inside Austria Simon Wiesenthal tried to make the country face up to the guilt it had shared with the Nazis. But in 1980 his was a lonely voice. In 1943 the Allies had recognized the Austrians as Hitler's first victim rather than as his eager collaborators; and this helped the Austrians to present themselves in that light also. So when Jewish organizations began to press for compensation, Austrian governments told them that these demands should be addressed to the successor government in Germany. In 1961 they set up a risibly small fund of just 6 million dollars to pay pensions to some 4,000 Jews.

Austrian democratic governments aimed for consensus even with ex-Nazis. Four members of Kreisky's Cabinet had belonged to the Nazi Party, one of them even to the Waffen-SS. Kreisky had friendly relations with the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, home for many ex-Nazis. He bitterly resented the agitation of Simon Wiesenthal for trying to disturb this complacent attitude towards the past.

But eventually Wiesenthal gained a wider hearing in the world outside Austria, and the rosy picture of the 1980 celebrations began to be tarnished. In 1983 Kreisky's Socialist Party lost its overall majority; Kreisky retired; and his successor, Fred Sinowatz, actually made a coalition with the Freedom Party. In 1985 his Defence Minister welcomed home with a handshake the former SS-Major Walter Rede, a convicted Nazi war-criminal who, at the behest of both Kreisky's and Sinowatz's governments had been released by the Italians from serving the life-sentence to which he had been sentenced. This created a major storm both inside and outside Austria; but a rising member of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, defended Rede as a soldier who had only done his duty.

And then Kurt Waldheim, at the end of his term at the United Nations, became a candidate for the Presidency of Austria. It was only now that rumours surfaced about his Nazi past and presence in Yugoslavia while members of his unit carried out massacres there. During his six-year presidency not only was he himself treated as a pariah by Western governments, but his image rubbed off on the Austrian nation: the world was now alerted to the fact that Austrian politicians had never confronted the past.

Austrians, for their part, initially dug in their heels in bitter resentment. Waldheim's term ended in 1992, but in every election Jörg Haider, now leader of the Freedom Party, gained more votes. As he had praised Hitler's employment policies, inherited property that had been confiscated from Jews, and opposed immigration of foreigners, his rise caused great unease and did further damage to the image of Austria in the rest of the world.

On the other hand, now that the question of Austria's past had been so sharply raised and her standing in the world so besmirched, other Austrians woke up to their responsibilities. When Haider became leader of the Freedom Party in 1986, Chancellor Franz Vranitsky ended his alliance with it and went back into coalition with the Conservatives. A determined effort was now made to confront the past: in 1991 Vranitsky publicly admitted the guilt of many Austrians and apologized for it in the name of the whole nation. Real efforts were now made in the areas of education, memorials, commemorative events, and reparations.

But in the 1999 elections in Austria, Haider's party , with 27% of the vote, came second and held the balance of power between the Socialists (the largest party) and the Conservatives. These two parties had been in coalition continuously since 1986; but that coalition now broke up, and the Conservatives brought the Freedom Party (though not Haider himself) into the government. It seemed that many Austrian were prepared once more to risk their country's good name in the rest of the world, and indeed there was a temporary boycott of bilateral relations between the individual governments of the European Community and the Austrian government. Haider, from outside the Cabinet, tried to force extreme policies on his ministers; but that split his party. The Haiderites resigned; the coalition came to an end; and in the elections of 2002 the Freedom Party's vote dropped from 27% to 10.2%. Has the ghost of Austria's ambivalence towards the past at last been laid to rest?