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The Second Republic: Austria Seen as a Continuum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Dieter A. Binder
Affiliation:
Associate Professor at the Institute for Canonical Law and the Institute of History, Karl-Franzens University, A-8010 Graz, Austria.

Extract

TheOldAustrofascists returned from the concentration camps and from their time of suffering and brought back with them some democratic convictions. That was the “Austrian miracle,” as Leopold Figl used to say. Those on the Left who had emigrated remained mostly wherever they were, for safety's sake. Only a few returned to their homeland, where, in the beginning, they were not very welcome. In the distressful postwar situation, the politicians, all of whose reputations had become somewhat tarnished since 1934, remembered an aging Social Democrat who was beyond suspicion, a politician who in 1918 had already founded a “Republic of German-Austria’ and who, because of his consistent call for the annexation (Anschluβ) of Austria by Germany, had lived through the Nazi period unmolested in Gloggnitz. That is how Karl Renner first became federal chancellor and later was elected president of Austria. Under pressure from the Allies he discarded his pet idea of Anschluβ, became an Austrian in his old age, and was eventually honored with a monument by Alfred Hrdlička that all of Austria mocked because it was created by a “Communist,” and because it portrayed the sovereign [Landesvater] the way he really looked.

Information

Type
Fifty Years of the Second Republic
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1995

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