Die Gescheiterte Republik is a summation of a lifetime's work for Anton Pelinka. It is also a useful introduction to the First Republic for anyone embarking on a research project about the Austria's twentieth century. Despite the title, it is heavy on political history and injects culture as a kind of leavening agent. Nevertheless, it has much to offer to scholars who want a review of the latest literature, in German and English, on the tumultuous period between World War I and the Anschluss.

As Pelinka (or his publishers) employs parenthetical citations throughout, one can easily trace the range of work that has gone into his scholarship. Those familiar with his opinions on the First Republic will recognize phrases such as the “Lager system,” which he uses to describe the deep affiliations citizens felt for the overpowerful political parties of the era, and “centrifugal democracy,” which denotes the weakness of Austria's Republic. Both terms, so closely associated with Pelinka's work, in this book are attributed to earlier scholars (Adam Wandruszka and Arend Lijphart, respectively). Pelinka continues to rely on these concepts, as well as that of a “cold war” between the parties for the years 1920 to 1933, replete with theories of “containment.” Throughout, Austria is described as a cultural giant, but politically handicapped. Playing on the idea from Viktor Reimann's double biography of Ignaz Seipel and Otto Bauer, Pelinka concludes that the parties created for the First Republic and their dreams/illusions were “too big for Austria” (245) and ultimately suggests that they destroyed the fragile democracy. However, he also writes that the Lager system, and the strong political cultures that would so divide the Republic, were not an invention of 1918 but rather were inherited from the Habsburg Empire and would therefore had to have been dealt with no matter what the conditions had been at the birth of the new nation.

Perhaps the most engaging sections of the book are those that deal with the Ständestaat. Pelinka is uneven in his descriptions of this moment in Austrian history—he refers to it as both a “half-hearted authoritarian, half-hearted fascistic system” (14) as well as the “appendix” of the Republic (178)—but in his chapter on “Periodization,” the parts devoted to 1933/4–1938 are thorough and fascinating. His habit of flashing forward to the Second Republic, however, which he does throughout the book as a means to illustrate the weakness of the First Republic, is at times confusing and repetitive. It is as if the failure of the First Republic is deemed too painful for the reader to take without the silver lining of learned lessons the second time around.

As always, the story of the First Republic is dominated by that of the Social Democrats and Christian Socialists, although Pelinka gamely does his best to inject the German Nationalists into the mix whenever possible. In an interesting chapter entitled “Unused Potential,” he also considers the Liberal option, which he describes as being expressed in culture rather than politics. In all his party descriptions, he introduces both famous and less-well-known politicians who embody, illustrate, and enliven the story of this deeply divided country. Importantly, Pelinka reminds us that all parties after 1918 suffered a reorientation “From the Center to the Periphery” (as one chapter is named), feeling the loss of Vienna as a nexus of power and instead looking to Berlin (or Moscow, or Rome) for inspiration and guidance. Only a very few visionaries, such as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose story is told in the context of the Pan-Europe movement, could conceive of Vienna playing an important, unifying role in the future.

It is this “nowhere-ness,” ultimately, that does the young Republic in, according to Pelinka (178). In a best-case scenario, he writes, the Republic was a provisionary step toward a future that never materialized, and that just was not enough to keep it together. The parties involved were not committed to its democratic structure, and its culture far outweighed its political abilities. Pelinka's penultimate chapter follows his historical actors into exile, imprisonment, suicide, and death. The “amnesia” of 1945 (284), the papering over of Austria's culpability during World War II and the Holocaust, combined with a new political pragmatism designed to create a viable nation, is what Pelinka ends with. Perhaps this is meant to be cheerful, but somehow it feels bitter.