There can be little doubt that John Lauridsen's survey of the Heimwehr/Heimatbloc and the Austrian Nazi Party in the First Austrian Republic is a labor of love. The original text was completed in Danish in 1979 but remained unpublished until Lauridsen's employer, the Danish Royal Library, provided the means for the author to revise his work and have it translated into English. The final manuscript was ready in 1994 but not published until 2007. The main aim of the book is to show that fascism in Austria was not a foreign implant, but was the product of the politics and socioeconomic structure of the First Republic.

The first chapter contains a lengthy and energetic critique of work on the collapse of the First Republic since 1945 and the development of what the author describes as “coalition, as opposed to confrontation historiography” (25). His main thesis is not unusual—namely, that, after 1945, it was in the interests of the two main political parties, the ÖVP and the SPÖ, to promote cooperation and avoid questions about the reasons for the violent conflict that had divided their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s. But the clarity and force with which the author sets out the role of the respective parties, as well as that of individual historians, constitute what he himself describes as “a broadside.” Unfortunately, the debate has moved on since 1979 and even since 1994. Nevertheless, the introduction provides a useful, if combative, outline of earlier constraints on the study of Austrian politics in the First Republic.

The remaining chapters are more problematic. Beginning with an over-general description of the structure of the Republic, the author attempts to develop separate statistical analyses of the expansion of the Heimwehr and the NSDAP in Austria into mass parties. These are interspersed with detailed accounts of the internal divisions besetting both parties and their respective relationships with the Christian Social governments, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism. The result is an uneven account that moves between sweeping generalizations, and what appears to this reviewer to be crude class analysis, and conventional and descriptive political history. The research for the latter draws almost exclusively upon secondary sources, for, as Lauridsen repeats several times, his material was limited to what was available to him in Denmark. This is quite astonishing, partly because of the length of time Lauridsen worked on the book, and more so because he frequently indulges in robust and sometimes intemperate attacks on the very historians on whose work he has relied, accusing several of ignorance of their subject and dismissing their interpretations without giving reasons.

Lauridsen argues that his own methodology is based on a wider range of election statistics, combined with a more sophisticated statistical analysis than that employed hitherto. This is also questionable. In forty-eight tables he purports to show, amongst other things, the socioeconomic structure of the membership and electorate of both movements. In the case of the membership figures, Lauridsen acknowledges that it is almost impossible to find reliable evidence. Nevertheless, he creates tables, in one extreme case gleaning his information from four secondary sources and a few memoirs that, in turn, draw on some fourteen separate sources to arrive at the membership of the Heimwehr from 1927 to 1930 (139). The figures are not comparable and, curiously, they omit the Tyrol. More worryingly, Lauridsen's argument that the NSDAP's successes in local elections in 1932 were due to its ability to woo peasant voters away from the Christian Social Party, though probably correct, is not strengthened by his assertion that the greatest Nazi triumphs were in the Alpine provinces (367). As his own table 36 indicates, the largest Nazi vote was in Vienna, namely, 17.4 percent of votes cast in the capital. This proportion of Nazi votes was surpassed by only one province—Salzburg.

The book is also studded with minor mistakes, some of which may be attributed to the translator, as in a strange note on page 9. Hence, Steyr is frequently misspelled and confused with Styria (73). Other mistakes are less forgivable: “a middle-class elite” was not in power in the monarchy in 1918 (95), the Heimatbloc won its basic mandate in 1930 in Upper Styria, not East Styria (235), and there was no general election in 1932 (358).

In conclusion, given that one aim of this book is to refute the argument that fascism was a foreign import, then this is a battle that has largely already been won. The author's second aim, which is to have produced a sound statistical analysis of the rise of the radical right in Austria, has not been achieved.