Historians working on the twentieth century will likely be familiar with the terrain covered early in David Art's study of the influence of the Nazi past on German and Austrian contemporary politics. Much of what Art takes up in the first half of the book, where he tracks the struggles and reluctance of Germans and Austrians to come to terms with atrocities committed in their name, has been explored elsewhere, e.g., in Charles Maier's The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge, 1988) and Anton Pelinka's Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past (Boulder, 1998). Nevertheless, there is a great deal to admire in Art's study, particularly in terms of methodology, and the author succeeds in making several important contributions to the field of comparative politics, where he is clearly most at home.

After providing readers with a helpful statement of purpose in the opening chapter (Art seeks an explanation for the varying success of right-wing populist parties in the Reich's democratic successor states) and laying out his investigatory map in the next (175 interviews conducted over two years with political elites in Germany and Austria and a thorough dissection of mass-media, and especially tabloid, news outlets), Art traces a dramatic parting of ways in the pages that follow. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, both Germany and Austria existed in a similar state of denial with respect to the complicity of their citizens in the crimes perpetrated under the Nazi regime. Elites in both countries maintained a wall of silence, which discouraged frank discussion of the recent past, offered support to compatriots who wished to view themselves as the primary victims of Nazism, and treated the murderous ideology of the former regime as an “historical aberration” (9). In the absence of any serious challenge to its legitimacy (Art gives some consideration to the German student movement in the late 1960s), this unrepentant climate remained in place in both countries until the 1980s, when a new round of public debate set the Germans and Austrians on separate paths. Ultimately, Art contends, the Germans embraced what he terms a “culture of contrition” (chapter 3), whereas the Austrians remained divided among themselves, with conservatives unwilling to break from the “victim culture” (chapter 4) that took hold following the Reich's dismantling. The rest of Art's study is devoted to explaining the reasons for this divergence and to assessing the strategies that politicians in the German and Austrian mainstream have employed (with starkly different results) in the face of resurgent right-wing challenges and periodic attempts at historical revisionism.

Art's central claim is his insistence that elite-led public debates are the proper forum for pursuing these questions. For Art, public deliberation matters when it comes to understanding the social and cultural norms that determine how a nation will deal with the past. Public debates, Art writes, “do not merely reflect existing ideas … but the process of debate also changes the ideas of political elites” (28). In other words, politicians—and, by extension, their constituents—learn how to talk about the past and also what moral obligations they are expected to carry with respect to the past through processes of public deliberation. Where Adenauer once sought to distance the German people from the crimes of the Nazi era, Germany's political elites and public intellectuals have since converged around a “contrition frame,” which has “widened the sphere of complicity” (87) to implicate ordinary Germans in the crimes that earlier were framed as deviant acts committed by a fanatical few.

The signposts Art follows along this route are, again, mostly well known. He explores, by turn: the newspaper battles over the meaning of 8 May (defeat or liberation?), the Bitburg Controversy in which Ronald Reagan made a much-criticized appearance, the Historians' Debate (Historikerstreit) that matched Ernst Nolte against Jürgen Habermas on the question of historical normalization, and most recently, the willingness of novelist Günter Grass to flirt with the narrative of victimization that Germany's contritionists have so powerfully rejected. In his treatment of Austria, Art includes details from the Waldheim Affair, traces the career of Jörg Haider and his rebranding of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and considers the role of tabloid journalism, especially the influence of Austria's hugely popular Kronen Zeitung franchise.

The most interesting and engaging aspects of Art's work appear in the second half the book (chapters 5 and 6). Here, Art explores the failure of Germany's far-right Republicans (REP) to consolidate their position within the German party system and the meteoric rise of the FPÖ in Austria following Haider's takeover of the party in 1986. Given the overall similarities between these two states at the macro level, why did these twins of the far right fare so differently, i.e., crashing with a thud in Germany and catapulting into power with a bang in Austria? The crucial factor, for Art, is the response of the established political parties. Where political parties have attempted to tame far-right elements, for example through a strategy of cooperation and/or by saddling these self-proclaimed outsiders with the responsibilities of governance, these measures have typically backfired. Such was the case with Austria and the FPÖ, where, according to Art, politicians and journalists alike adopted an ostrich-like policy with respect to Haider's xenophobic railings and the Nazi-esque atmosphere that characterized some of his rallies. By contrast, where politicians have used a combination of confrontation, cooptation, and marginalization—a formula Art refers to as “combat strategy” (160)—they have managed to keep far-right populist movements at bay. This was the case in the Federal Republic, where politicians (in lockstep with the national media) regarded the REP as an imminent threat to German democracy and vigorously moved to sweep the party to the fringes.

Ultimately, Art's study marks a contribution to the field of studies that teaches open democracies how to manage the threat of extremism without eroding the freedoms of the political marketplace. Where small protest movements are unable to claim any victories and voters perceive their support for these fringe parties as a potentially wasted vote, a predictable process of atrophy will unfold. As Art seems to say here, each generation will need to learn the lessons of Weimar over again.