Sometimes a man is more interesting dead than when he was alive, and one may even be able to write a biography of his posthumous career. Lucile Dreidemy not only proves this proposition, but also fruitfully uses the afterlife of Engelbert Dollfuß, the Austrian Federal Chancellor and the founder of the Ständestaat dictatorship, as the vantage point from which to offer a thought-provoking account of the political culture, national self-identity, and memory wars of the Alpine Republic in the past eighty years.

Every ten years, a visceral debate flares up around the anniversary of that regime's brutal suppression of Social Democrats (February 1934). Should the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) continue to hang Dollfuß's portrait in their parliamentary caucus office? The recurrent nature of this controversy is contrasted by the general population's unfamiliarity with Dollfuß the politician. Less than half of the polled Austrians in 2007 knew about his dictatorship. Why does he lead such a double (after)life, as both “one of the most controversial personalities in recent Austrian history” (14) and a tabooed and unknown figure? Dreidemy's book takes us to 1934, when Dollfuß became a myth.

Dollfuß's murder by the Nazis on 25 July 1934 transformed the man into a versatile symbol. Immediately after the assassination, he was promoted to “the eternal Führer” of the Vaterländische Front (and Austria) and literally—in the form of portraits, photographs, busts, or gigantic death masks—important regime gatherings and accompanied his decidedly uncharismatic successor, Kurt Schuschnigg. With the church's blessings, a heavily choreographed state cult of Dollfuß was built on associations with the image of Christ and Catholic devotions. Dreidemy's meticulous autopsy shows that the Schuschnigg regime attempted to create both discursive and physical landscapes saturated with a sacralized Dollfuß. In addition to a flood of hagiographic writings, a “memorial boom” was under way. By March 1936 there were already 3,399 “memorial signs (Gedenkzeichen)” of all sorts, and another 478 under construction. The name Dollfuß was given to bridges, mountains, observatory, fountain, playground, shooting range, fire retention pond, water main, new breeds of pear and dahlia, trees, not to mention squares and streets (in Tirol alone, 125 and 50, respectively).

Dreidemy argues that the ubiquitous presence of Dollfuß “played a central role in [the attempts to] legitimize propagandistically” the Schuschnigg regime and its policies (89). When the regime was resisting the Nazi pressure, Dollfuß the murder victim and martyr would be called; when it sought accommodation with and made concessions to the Nazis, Dollfuß the (good) German reconciler and peace seeker (an explicit Christian allusion) had his day. Based on exhaustive research and illuminating analysis, Dreidemy presents a convincing case that Dollfuß had already consciously created some elements of his own myth, after which the Schuschnigg regime and other Catholic-conservative activists added many motifs and tropes that have enjoyed surprisingly long shelf life. In this regard, this book is an insightful account of the Schuschnigg regime and its political religion. One of its main conclusions, however, that the regime spent too much energy on the state cult (instead of “real,” day-to-day politics), and that its heavy-handed cult choreography turned people off, is more suggestive than compelling. After all, desperately overplaying the dead führer can be read as a sign of having no options rather than making a wrong choice. Unable to alleviate economic woes and lacking a popular ideology, ancestral/martyr worship might have been the only card left to play. This begs a question that the book does not answer fully: Was Dollfuß (dead or alive) really so popular in the first place that the Schuschnigg regime could fantasize about living off his “cult” for good?

Dollfuß's post–World War II afterlife was shaped as much by the political needs of the postwar grand ÖVP–Socialist (SPÖ) coalition, which discouraged open discussion of old, pre-Anschluss wounds, as by the Catholic-conservatives' search for their share of putative anti-Nazi Austrian identity. The old founding myth of the Second Republic, of Austria being “the first victim of Nazi aggression” was already in circulation among conservative exiles before being incorporated into the Moscow Declaration (November 1943). This “victim thesis” Dreidemy observes, was “from the very beginning very often linked to the myth of Dollfuß as resistance fighter, martyr, and the first victim” of the Nazis (214), a factually incorrect motif first created by his 1930s hagiographers. Many Catholic-conservatives since then continue to maintain this conflation. They present the dictator as the spiritual father of the Austrian nation (factually suspect at best), or even a forefather of the (democratic) Second Republic. Railing against the perceived demonization of Dollfuß by the Left, a modern apologetics emerges in the past forty years and claims to offer objectivity and fairness. Dreidemy's painstaking parsing of their rhetorical strategies and discursive components reveals that beneath its increasingly “semiscientific” (271) surface, the core does not stray far from the old hagiography.

The SPÖ also played its part in prolonging Dollfuß's second career. Their internal anger against “the murder of workers” was matched only by a self-interested willingness to tolerate or even abet the conservatives' Dollfuß cult. Even their criticisms reinforced the mythical Dollfuß. To Dreidemy, this is a feature of the Austrian political culture: without the SPÖ's countermyth, the Dollfuß myth would not have been so important to the identity of some Catholic conservatives. Both the image and mirror image equate Dollfuß to the Austrofascist regime, and this personification structurally secures his identity-forming significance and helps other regime figures escape critical scrutiny even today.

Based on this symbolic-structuralist interpretation, it is not surprising that Dollfuß worship/rehabilitation may not ebb anytime soon. Because, as Dreidemy argues, “the resistance fighter and Austrian patriot” Dollfuß serves as a substitute for the “victim thesis” (fading in the wake of the Waldheim affair) in sustaining the Catholic-conservative version of the Austrian identity. This unsparing critical view of the ÖVP, and to a lesser extent the SPÖ, will be controversial to the partisans. To outsiders, this provocative but intriguing thesis may need more elaboration; beyond reporting the phenomenon, the book does not offer enough from the Catholic-conservative milieu to explain why, beyond the binary identity structure, many clung and cling to Dollfuß so tightly.

This pathbreaking study combines innovative methodology, imaginative and extensive use of new and old archival sources from several countries, meticulous analysis of commemorative discourses, objects, and practices, and the author's sometimes surprising access to actors from different sides of the Dollfuß debate. Dreidemy's book sets a new model in the historical study of the Dollfuß–Schuschnigg regime and postwar Austrian national identity, and it should inspire new research and debate in the relevant fields.