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A Nation in
Denial
"Some years ago, at a summer school in Germany, I met a
Scottish lady who had lived in Vienna for many years, where she worked for the
Atomic Energy Authority. Her 18-year-old son couldn’t wait to get out, and she
fully supported his plan to go to university in Germany. Vienna, she told me,
was suffocating. There was a meanness about everyday transactions, snobbery,
poisonous gossip and a frigid disapproval of difference.
I was put in mind of this when Austria this week
commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, and an opinion poll showed
that almost two thirds of Austrians wanted an end to the "endless
discussion" of the country's Nazi past.
While Germans have long since been forced to confront
their complicity in the crimes of the Nazis, the Austrians, who lined the
streets to cheer as Hitler’s troops marched in, were allowed to view themselves
as the victims of a hostile invasion – a delusion fostered by the Allied powers
at a time when they feared Austria might join the Soviet bloc. As Otto von
Habsburg, the 95-year-old son of the country's last emperor, put it this week:
"No state in Europe has a greater right than Austria to call itself a
victim."
Even today, any effort to promote an honest review of
the country’s wartime history arouses violent resentment. This is, after all, a
nation that elected Kurt Waldheim as its president after his career as an SS
officer responsible for war crimes in Serbia had been exposed, while the entry
into a coalition government of Jorg Haider's far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in
early 2000 led to the imposition of sanctions by the EU.
The British artist Rachel Whiteread, who created a
memorial to Austria’s 65,000 murdered Jews, was shocked by the hostility she
faced. “Vienna?” she told an interviewer. “I absolutely hate it … The opulence,
the lack of black faces the fact you can lift up the corner of any carpet in
Vienna, and you're going to find something fairly nasty underneath.”...”
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