Introducing the Affair

Just as a Socialist parliamentarian spoke these words on 31 March 1965, an affair surrounding the Viennese University Professor Taras (von) Borodajkewycz culminated in the Second Republic's most violent street fights and allegedly sole political death to date. In the course of the early 1960s, the professor's antidemocratic references and nostalgic statements on the Third Reich in his lectures had also come to the attention of the wider public. Clashes in March between Rightist and Leftist students ensued, and the Borodajkewycz Affair finally reached its height when on that last day in March the right-wing student Günther Kümel delivered a deadly blow to a 67-year-old Communist.

The Affair came to fruition in the context of a higher education system that remained dominated by both Catholic-conservative and Pan-German or German nationalist (Deutschnational) elements after 1945. Educators of youth like Borodajkewycz, boasting a dubious Third Reich past and expressing latent anti-Semitism, had by the mid 1950s found refuge in this particular postwar institutional setting. The professor was merely one among many rehabilitated former National Socialists,Footnote ² but his scandal arguably embodied the early Second Republic's sole “exceptional normality,” which in microhistorical terms the author defines as a marginality and extremeness informing larger phenomena that are often hidden below the surface.Footnote ³ Whereas the Affair originated as a typical, short-lived dispute of the 1960s, a blend of coinciding factors ensured that the conflict permeated all levels of Austrian society. In reaching a wider public, it brought prevalent attitudes toward a silenced Nazi past to the surface for the first time. When this silence receded in the wake of the Affair, even if merely for a fleeting moment, Austria's postwar malaises were fully exposed in many of their natural habitats. In effect, the professor's case presented itself as the sole public instance until the Waldheim Affair of 1986, which motivated citizens to take a stance on the meaning of nationhood and Vergangenheitsbewältigung.Footnote ⁴

This article offers the first microhistorical account on the Borodajkewycz Affair, arguing that “rehabilitations” formed the cornerstone of the scandal in two regards: former Nazis became “rehabilitated Austrians” when the Second Republic's dominant political parties began reintegrating them almost indiscriminately; the postwar youth, born into a silenced past, were molded into “rehabilitated Austrians” by adopting their parent's old traditions uncritically and seamlessly. In failing to unanimously accept the liberal democratic tradition already manifest in theory, and instead resurrecting and waging the previous generations' battles, the Austro-youth of the “sixties”—and society at large—left the task of embarking on a path of Vergangenheitsbewältigung to future generations.

Save for two doctoral dissertations, which examine the affair on a global or macrohistorical level, there is to my knowledge no serious secondary literature on the Borodajkewycz Affair. The existing dissertations paint a picture that is far too general; their methods fail to capture the Affair's deeper significance. Maria Zimmerman's analysis Die Affäre Borodajkewycz (2001) is limited in scope to an examination of media, and Gerard Kasemir's Die Borodajkewycz-Affäre 1965 (1994) alleges that the case represented a rare example of Austrian conflict resolutionFootnote ⁵ (yet what the case resolved remains unclear).Footnote ⁶

In the absence of a thorough historical account, the Affair has continuously been cited as a brief example for broader Austrian developments. Scholars who have alluded to the Affair over the decades mistakenly turn it into something that could be likened to a game of “telephone,” where the facts are passed along and recycled so many times that countless falsifications occur. One prime example can be found in David Art's The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria.Footnote ⁷ Art begins by asserting that “Austria, unlike Germany, assumed no responsibilities for the crimes of National Socialism.”Footnote ⁸ This interpretation ignores the fact that immediately after the war, Austria actually introduced the strictest anti-Nazi legislation in Europe, which indiscriminately barred over half a million former Nazis from voting and working. Art's point applied more to the post-1949 period, when the approximately five hundred thousand Minderbelastete (those categorized as “less severe”) Nazis were reintegrated into the political process, and Austria's political parties subsequently began competing for their votes.Footnote ⁹

In order to understand the 1960s, scholars need to trace the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung as it worked at the social and cultural levels, beyond tracing the actions and words of elite political actors. The grounded nature of this article seeks to capture the atmosphere, emotions, and mentalities of a generation that adopted its parents' ideologies and rehabilitated their traditions and attitudes uncritically. By drawing on oral testimony from actors who participated in the Affair, I take the reader through the various local sites in which it unfolded: from the lecture rooms of a Viennese university, within which professors could freely propagate their antidemocratic and anti-Austrian ideologies, to the Second Republic's fiercest protest, revealing youths who were too absorbed in battling out unresolved national conflicts to break with old traditions and join the global student movement of the “long sixties.” Without microhistorical groundwork on this case, it is difficult to explain that the Austrian youths' preoccupation with fighting old ghosts in the early 1960s may have resulted in a “1968” that scholars have likened to “a hot quarter of an hour”Footnote ¹⁰ or a “tame revolution.”Footnote ¹¹

A microapproach is also necessary both to correct factual mistakes and to establish the atmosphere and public mindsets of the period. Each section of the article explores a specific case that ultimately contributed to the wider social, political, and media dimensions of the Borodajkewycz affair, ranging from the university culture and the nature of the judicial process to the nature of the press and Austria's Vergangenheitsbewältigung. By gradually widening the scope of the article, the “exceptional normality” of this Affair emerges in both a more global and also nuanced depiction of Austria's conservative postwar years. Precisely as a result of the absence of an established secondary literature on the Borodajkewycz case, it is necessary to further draw on unconventional approaches. Yet, even a microapproach alone cannot so easily detect the fine and concealed elements mentioned above. An appreciation of this Affair's complexity emerges when one additionally draws on oral and written testimonies from an ideologically diverse range of subjects.

The article is based predominantly on fourteen oral testimonies, four written testimonies, and one expert interview, all conducted by the author. In identifying my interview subjects, I selected the leading pro- and anti-Borodajkewycz youth activists (born between the late 1930s and mid 1940s), observers who act as control subjects (as they were not implicit in the Affair), leading media and theater celebrities who were both involved in the Affair and experienced the interwar period (born between 1926 and 1927), as well as a number of Austria's leading historians and political scientists. Today, the majority of my subjects represent Austria's intellectual elite, and most of them are still active in politics, academia, or the media. Including testimony by actors from both sides of the political spectrum is most significant in the context of this generation, because every eyewitness admitted to adopting his or her parent's ideologies unequivocally.Footnote ¹²

“Lecture Notes on the Third Reich”: Collecting the Evidence

On 1 December 1961, Ferdinand Lacina sat in the professor's lecture room at the Hochschule für Welthandel (HfW)—the University of World Trade in Vienna. The nineteen-year-old economics undergraduate was attentively taking notes on Borodajkewycz's history lecture. At the time, the Education Ministry required schools to teach more contemporary history, which motivated Borodajkewycz to hold an extracurricular lecture series on the interwar period and Third Reich. Lacina neither knew his lecturer upon entering his classroom, nor had he heard of him before.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, as a staunch anti-Fascist, he soon sensed anti-Semitic and pan-German sentiments in his professor's lectures and remarks. Borodajkewycz apparently never failed to point out an individual's Jewish background (or to falsely assume that someone might be Jewish, as he did when referring to Karl Liebknecht), and some of his students proceeded in a similar fashion. Lacina recalls that during a lecture break in 1961, while he was reading Walter Hofer's edited volume Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933–1945, a fellow student approached him provocatively and blurted, “Put away that Jew's book!” Lacina was well aware that his university accommodated teachers who represented various persuasions or ideological strains of the Fascist camp.Footnote ¹⁵ Borodajkewycz therefore met little resistance when he glorified the Freikorps—many of whose leaders later joined the ranks of the SS—for having fended off the Bolshevist threat.

While painting a heroic picture of the Freikorps, Borodajkewycz failed to convey to his students that two of its officers had murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, or that many of its leaders later joined the ranks of the SS and ultimately played significant roles in orchestrating the Holocaust. Yet, the professor was hardly an ideological exception among faculty members. HfW Chancellor Walter Heinrich himself found inspiration in Italian Fascism and became the closest of Othmar Spann's disciples, whom he continued to defend until his own death in 1984. In 1929, Heinrich had acted as a leader of the Austrian Heimwehr and taken the 1930 Korneuburg oath (Korneuburger Eid), which had directly opposed social democracy and had constituted the first programmatic plan to overthrow Parliament. Throughout the subsequent era of Austro-Fascism, he held an HfW professorship, but in being briefly imprisoned in the concentration camp Dachau by the Nazis, lost his position after the Anschluss. After the Third Reich, Heinrich continued to expound antidemocratic sentiments and advocated Spann's more universal and somewhat less racially defined superiority of the German Volk, favoring a state that bore a mixture of Christian, national, state-socialist, and authoritarian elements of Fascism. In Heinrich's view, Jews and other religious groups remained inferior only by refusing to convert to Christianity.Footnote ¹⁷ Under Heinrich's watch, a devout Catholic antidemocrat like Borodajkewycz felt free to educate the youth within the limits of his personal ideological preferences. As the professor pursued the course of cultivating German nationalist and antidemocratic students, Lacina continued to collect the evidence in note-form:

Even for Lacina, who represented a segment of the critical minority, the authoritarian atmosphere at the HfW was so prevalent that challenging professors publicly was unthinkable; debates and discussions were nonexistent.Footnote ¹⁹ Lacina was born into a Social Democratic family who, though not politically minded, always voted SPÖ.Footnote ²⁰ As conscious members of the Czech minority in Vienna, however, they did not share with other Austrian families the same German nationalist enthusiasm for the Third Reich era and thus spoke freely and critically about the past. In stark contrast to the majority of other Austrian postwar family milieus, Lacina's background had also instilled in him anti-Fascist sentiments from the start. His early politicization and anti-Fascist convictions encouraged him to join the left-wing, Socialist middle-school organization (VSM). Upon enrolling at the Welthandel, he became a member of the left-wing faction of the Socialist student organization (VSStÖ).Footnote ²¹ One of his central motivations to read economics, in fact, stemmed from a conviction that Fascism in Austria and Germany had been in part a product of the Great Depression and the dire global financial situation. Despite his relatively open-minded stance, Lacina was aware that his career greatly depended on a degree of conformity with Austria's political culture of securing and maintaining a strong party affiliation.

From the birth of the Second Republic, political party loyalty in Austria had served as a “cradle to grave” form of identification. Those on the Left striving for a successful career generally entered the VSM as pupils, the VSStÖ as students, and the Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ) at the start of their professional life—regardless of whether they embarked on a career in politics or business. Unlike Lacina, the students at the HfW overwhelmingly shared a conservative background and generally directed their “cradle to grave” loyalty toward The Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). A sizable segment of the student population remained altogether politically inactive. The political culture at the HfW was in no way conducive to the development of a critical minority that openly addressed the professor's blatant anti-Austrian, latent anti-Semitic, and poorly disguised revisionist tendencies:

Over a year earlier, Erwin Leiser's archival-based documentary film Mein Kampf (1960) had flooded Austrian movie theatres. Just as Marcel Ophüls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) had raised the collaborationist nature of the wartime Vichy regime in France, Leiser had traced National Socialism's long but evident path of destruction and death, from the early days of the Weimar Republic to the horrors of the Holocaust and a Europe in ruins. Although the film's point of view did not agree with the professor's narrative, the bulk of his students would have known that the Third Reich was essentially a problematic regime. Many, however, lacked the basic critical awareness and sensors that could pick up the underlying implications of their professor's comments.

Gerald Kriechbaum, recent Austrian Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, frequented Borodajkewycz's lectures prior to the Affair and student uprisings. He cannot recall hearing German nationalist or anti-Semitic comments. Kriechbaum visited the professor's lectures sporadically because the history element was a marginal part of the degree course and Borodajkewycz was a minor professor. The professor was an extremely popular examiner because of his soft stance; students simply regurgitated scripts and passed with ease. Like most students, Kriechbaum experienced Borodajkewycz as a humane, pleasant, and traditionalist lecturer.Footnote ²³ At the HfW, which was allegedly far more apolitical than most other universities, Kriechbaum and his group of friends represented the norm: they were neither involved in student politics, nor did they join the pro- or anti-Borodajkewycz ranks in the March 1965 protests. Above all, this group was interested in entering the world of business.

Although born into a deeply Catholic background, his father's profession meant that the Kriechbaums shared close relations with Jewish families. Aware that uncompromising Catholics had often met a similar fate to that of many Jews, Kriechbaum suggests that a degree of solidarity came naturally. He remembers driving through Europe with Jewish friends who experienced the Holocaust: “We drove. We got along very well. The people were evidently very happy that there were also other Austrians with whom they could identify again [zu denen sie zurück finden konnten], and perhaps did not want to strain this through conversations among friends … People did not want to talk: on the one side because they were guilty, on the other side because they were simply already overburdened.” Because World War II remained largely taboo in both the public and private realms, Kriechbaum's school history lessons had stopped at the year 1918.Footnote ²⁴ Apart from the prevalent apolitical, Catholic milieu that Kriechbaum embodied, the more marginal Social Democratic tradition of the Lacinas, and Heinrich's waning Austro-Fascist Christianity, ideological hints of two other “rehabilitated” traditions—National Socialism and the Catholic-national idea that sought to unite Catholicism with pan-Germanism—appeared at the HfW amid the silence over the Nazi past in the early 1960s:

The professor embodied a rare and contradictory mixture of traditions. Since 1934, Borodajkewycz had succeeded in pursuing an unwavering ideological course as a Catholic, as German nationalist, and as National Socialist, all at once. In finally spelling out his own hybrid ideological positions, the professor concluded the 1961/1962 contemporary history lecture series on interwar Germany and the Third Reich, adding one last note of clarification: “[Reinhard] Heydrich's grandmother was a Jew—and this was well known to the SS, despite the fact that he personally was a good-looking blonde, intelligent and simpatico man.”Footnote ²⁵ As Lacina left Borodajkewycz's lecture room, he was unaware that the notes he had assembled over the past year would provide the source for the Second Republic's fiercest public controversy to date.

The Situation at Vienna's Universities: A Graduate Goes to Court

Although Austria's prevalent amnesia over war crimes showed no signs of abating, a conscious minority on the Left nevertheless sought to break the habit of silence. In a rare display of unity, the SPÖ's Justice and Interior ministers, as well as two editors of leading Austrian newspapers and respected personalities on the Left, initiated an illuminating series of essays in the Socialist monthly Die Zukunft under the heading “Does neo-Nazism Exist?” Contributing to the series in April 1962, Heinz Fischer, Austria's current president, published the above article to heighten public awareness of “The Situation at Austrian Universities.” Fischer explains: “The article in the Zukunft developed when a slightly younger friend, Ferdinand Lacina, told me about Borodajkewycz and his lectures, and showed me his notes.”Footnote ²⁷

When Fischer attacked the professor in the Arbeiter-Zeitung,Footnote ²⁸ the Affair-to-be acquired its first conflict dimension. Prior to publishing these articles, Fischer had not informed Lacina of his intent. Yet, it was not long before one of their friends, Albrecht Konecny, told Lacina that the professor had filed a lawsuit against Fischer and the Arbeiter-Zeitung's editor Alois Brunnthaler on grounds of personal libel (Ehrenbeleidigung). Konecny worked with Fischer in the Social Democratic Parliamentary Club, and the three originally became friends as active VSStÖ members.Footnote ²⁹ Like Lacina, Konecny too rose through the ranks of the Left: at school he had also joined the VSM, was automatically absorbed into the VSStÖ's Leftist faction as a law student, and later became a leading SPÖ parliamentarian. Atypically, however, his group was also connected to Communist Party-affiliated (KPÖ) student groups. Given the extent of Austria's extreme political compartmentalization, such cross-ideological and intermilieu affiliations tended to be exceptional—not just within Social Democratic circles. As Konecny puts it:

Konecny embodies a revolutionary and strictly democratic tradition; over the past one hundred and fifty years members of his family had been either shot, imprisoned, forced into exile, or jobless for political reasons. When he moved into a new apartment, his mother noticed one thing only: “Oh my, this apartment has two entrances! This your father and I would have wished for, so that we could slip out at the back when the police comes through the front.” Because the Nazis had killed his uncle, the Borodajkewycz episode strengthened his anti-Fascist resolve, and “in some sense [this activism] was also a part of rehabilitating our family history.”Footnote ³⁰

As a wartime Jewish emigré, the prominent lawyer and member of the Constitutional Court Dr. Wilhelm Rosenzweig was similarly galvanized by Fischer's case and personally defended his friend's son free of charge.Footnote ³¹ In early 1962, Konecny also offered his assistance by asking Lacina to present the lecture notes to Fischer's lawyer. Fearing repercussions, Lacina complied under the condition that the evidence remained anonymous.Footnote ³² HfW students were cautious, and rightfully so: when one of their fellow female students attending a quiz show told the programme's host that the university taught her the art of deceiving people, she was promptly expelled.Footnote ³³ Whereas Fischer fortunately no longer had a university to answer to, Austria's courts of law were even more infested by judges with dubious pasts.

As a witness in court, Borodajkewycz proved again that he had both mastered the art of walking the fine line of the 1947 Verbotsgesetz (“Prohibition Act”) and that Austria's responsible agencies were willing to overlook his comments. Although admitting to commenting on Leiser's Mein Kampf film and Heydrich's Jewish grandmother, he denied the more serious allegations. When Borodajkewycz mentioned the well-known Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl, he introduced him only as “a historian.”Footnote ³⁴ Höttl had in fact acted as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials, testifying that Eichmann had confided in him about the extermination of six million Jews. Upon being rehabilitated in the Second Republic, he had become the director of a school in the Upper Austrian countryside. Borodajkewycz also never denied knowing about the Jews' annihilation, which was no coincidence. Without the help of Höttl and General Edmund Glaise-Horstenau—the Austrian First Republic's second most prominent Nazi figure and Austria's vice-chancellor shortly before the Anschluss—Borodajkewycz could not have escaped his nearly certain concentration camp fate in 1943 thanks to his too uncompromising, public, Catholic-national stance. The professor's son, the lawyer Dr. Olaf Borodajkewycz who was two years old at the time of this NSDAP incident, recalls:

Hundreds of Third Reich files on the professor's love affair with National Socialism are stored in Austria's archives. From these we learn that although he signed his letters “Heil Hitler,” many high-ranking SS officials in both Berlin and Vienna had sought to remove him, and this had even prompted the Gestapo to conduct house searches. One of countless SS official complaints noted that Borodajkewycz boasted about his friendships with Minister Glaise-Horstenau and the famous Nazi Minister Arthur Seyß-Inquart (who was later executed at Nuremberg), that he had acted as the right hand of Kurt Schuschnigg (who had paid for Mrs. Borodajkewycz's holidays to Tirol), that he had found protection from Höttl and other influential Nazis, and that he represented the most dangerous of an intelligent breed of Catholic-national activists.Footnote ³⁶ The professor's opportunism had helped him remain loyal to his beliefs and dodge prosecution—always by knowing the right people, whatever the regime. Höttl and Horstenau were the professor's protectors and closest friends, who supported his perilous effort to reconcile the church and National Socialism. Back in court in the early 1960s, however, he did not need saving. As a respected ÖVP associate (but not member), with close ties to the party's leaders, Borodajkewycz felt at ease in the courtroom. Rosenzweig thus tried in vain to unsettle him. “Are you an anti-Semite?” he asked, and the professor professed:

After Borodajkewycz likewise proclaimed, “I did not make a single neo-Nazi statement after 1945,” the professor told the court that he also read excerpts from Mein Kampf to the students.Footnote ³⁷ In the end, the court attributed Borodajkewycz's continued ideological beliefs to a private “character trait” and sentenced Fischer and Brunnthaler to fines of 4,000 and 3,000 Austrian schillings, respectively.Footnote ³⁸ Konecny reports that he and his group witnessed all of the court proceedings and that it had been clear to them from the start that the judge was “not one of the good ones.” The sentence thus came as no surprise to them.Footnote ³⁹ Fischer, too, perceived the verdict as both unjust and proof of a particular mindset that was still prevalent in the judiciary of the time, “yet the ruling did not infuriate me; it only strengthened my resolve.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Fischer's proof—the lecture notes on the Third Reich—had been rejected by the court because of their anonymity. Yet, little did the rehabilitated professor know that in just over two years this evidence would resurface.

“Breaking the Silence”: The Political and Media Frenzy

In 1957, for the first time, a member of parliament alluded to the professor's ideologically laden writing and harmful influence on Austria's youth. Over half a decade had passed, and Borodajkewycz had continued to propagate his worldview at the HfW. Even so, no further parliamentary reference to his harmful ideology was made until 20 January 1965, when SPÖ deputies Karl Mark and Dr. Stella Klein-Löw demanded that the Education Minister Theodor Piffl-Percevic initiate a disciplinary hearing against Borodajkewycz.Footnote ⁴² This demand signaled the end of the professor's relatively undisturbed ideological honeymoon.

The deputies quoted passages from an article that the professor had published in the supplement Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte of the German weekly Das Parlament only a few months after his triumphant lawsuit against Fischer and Brunthaler. Referring to 1945, Borodajkewycz had stated that it was merely a part of the Gesamtdeutschen (total German) catastrophe that Austrian Germans had for a second time within a generation lost their greater fatherland. The two parliamentary deputies further summarized a statement composed by Borodajkewycz in the wake of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. The professor noted then that as an NSDAP member since January 1934, he had permitted leading Austrian Nazis to use his apartment for illegal meetings and had even stowed secret SA plans for his comrades, adding: “My academic works and lectures served the idea of National Socialism.” Finally, one of the deputies quoted Lacina's anonymous lecture notes as evidence that Borodajkewycz's outlooks had not changed.Footnote ⁴³

The HfW Student Union responded the very next day with an official statement of support for the professor; it praised his academic style and reiterated that neither his students nor the VSStÖ had ever filed, or heard of, a complaint.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to the Tiroler Tageszeitung the new Affair consequently spun into motion when Borodajkewycz almost prompted a political showdown by suing Mark and Klein-Löw on grounds of libel for their requests and comments to the Parliament. Yet, this action availed little, because the Parliament decided on 26 March that both officials' parliamentary immunity would not be revoked.Footnote ⁴⁵ Borodajkewycz, a determined man, subsequently issued a statement requesting the abrogation of the deputies' parliamentary immunity on the grounds of libelous character assassination:

Although the issue quickly acquired a political dimension, subsequent episodes gave birth to the full Affair. As a media spectacle unfolded, it became clear that this time the conflict would play out differently. The spark came on 18 March, when the satirical television programme Das Zeitventil broadcast an “interview” with a masked actor posing as the professor. Although the interview was staged, the words came from Lacina's lecture notes on the Third Reich. Oscar Bronner, whose father managed the Zeinventil show, contributed to its journalistic editorials, which were based on current events and facts. Although until today Bronner—founder of the Austrian magazines Trend and Profil, as well as founder and current editor of the respected daily Der Standard—never joined a political party, he sympathized more with the Social Democrats at the time, and SPÖ's Club Secretary Fischer moved within his close circle of friends. Bronner recalls that:

Indeed, so convinced was the professor of his innocence that he proceeded to sue Bronner's father, and weeks later proudly stated, “I am not so cowardly and unprincipled as to deny my past, but have overcome it long ago!”Footnote ⁴⁸ As his plentiful supporters continued to concur, a critical mass arose to break the silence.

On the morning of the Zeitventil broadcast, the direction of the HfW requested that Borodajkewycz fulfill his Socialist students' wishes to meet for a discussion, and he gladly complied. However, when the professor arrived at the meeting on 23 March 1965, the Socialist students were absent, while instead the press, television media, and hundreds of his supporters flooded the auditorium.Footnote ⁴⁹ After being pressured into participating in this unannounced press conference, the professor complied again, but this time reluctantly. Borodajkewycz held an introductory speech to clarify that the anonymous lecture notes, which the court had originally suspected were a fabrication, had now suddenly resurfaced. He claimed that these falsified notes served as a basis for the parliamentary request and had allowed the Zeitventil cabaret to put words in his mouth. Borodajkewycz had supposedly never said that Hitler's Heldenplatz speech and the Pope Pius XII's election were the two greatest days of his life, but merely noted they were the largest mass congregations he had ever witnessed. Furthermore, the way in which the parliamentary officials quoted his articles proved to him that either they had not understood them or these texts had proved too intellectually challenging for them to handle. The professor then proceeded to defend racial accusations against him:

A keen observer of the Affair, Karl Tambornino, today one of Lacina's colleagues, recited this statement to me by heart, adding:

When the professor opened the floor to questions, the tension intensified, and he was forced to fend off one alleged “character assassination” after another. The first person to speak confronted both the audience for laughing at the mere reference to a Jewish individual, as well as the man chairing the press conference for failing to intervene.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, Lacina saw segments of the conference on TV in the evening news, and noted how Borodajkewycz chimed in with the students’ scornful laughter when the aforementioned individual confronted the audience. He was struck by the untypically long and detailed nature of the TV news report. According to Lacina, the students even pushed two journalists from the Kurier and Wiener Zeitung daily papers out of the auditorium, after they had posed critical questions.Footnote ⁵³

When one of the reporters presented information from the professor's Third Reich files, Borodajkewycz stated that these were facts, and that, unlike other former NSDAP members who claimed that they were forced to join the party, he accepted his past. The students applauded as he confessed, “If I had been such a good democrat back then, I would have probably never finalized a membership with an anti-democratic party.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thereafter, he criticized his opponents for never mentioning that he had been expelled from the NSDAP on 7 June 1943, “since I did not keep my mouth shut back then, either.” When a journalist asked if the professor stood by his description of the myth (Geflunker) of an Austrian nation, and whether his views had changed, he admitted to still holding this view. “So you think that one should teach the youth that the Austrian state is a fiction?” the journalist asked. Borodajkewycz became animated. The professor and reporter bombarded one another with insults until the chairman had the journalist physically removed from the lecture theatre. Borodajkewycz nevertheless enlightened his audience, explaining that while an Austrian nation had never existed, Austria had indeed existed as a State, as today, or as a Reich, such as during the Habsburg monarchy: “I can say we are part of an Austrian Staatsnation (“state-nation”), but we are members of the German Volk (people) in Austria.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The professor's comments were a godsend for the media, as one of his colleagues prophesized during the questioning: “Professor, I believe that tomorrow the respected and objective press will report that you and 150 to 200 students staged a neo-Nazi event.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Indeed, the next day, on 24 March, a Kurier headline read, “Anti-Jewish Student Declaration.” As the political and media landscape exploded, a process of polarization began to unfold. Trade unions, businesses, banks, newspapers, student groups, and many more suddenly felt compelled to take a stance either for or against the professor. In an official statement, Vienna's municipal council condemned the professor's handling of the press conference, and requested that immediate disciplinary measures be taken.Footnote ⁵⁷

Important to the context is the fact that Austrian protest culture never became more than the business of a small minority. After all, the political student demographic remained conservative until the 1970s. A typical flyer of the student group Internationaler Versöhnungsbund said it all: “Let us avoid any further radicalization! ... Let us promote a readiness to negotiate—each in his own camp.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As the frontlines developed, however, a war of words took off. In an open letter to the professor, a former parliamentary deputy and provincial mayor wrote:

When the professor exited the front door of his apartment building on 26 March at 9:58 a.m. with his son Olaf, who planned to chauffeur his father to the HfW for his morning lecture, both were still in high spirits. According to press reports, when father and son stepped onto the street, three to four men attacked them, and only his son suffered a minor injury to his lip.Footnote ⁶⁰ Borodajkewycz, Jr., recalls otherwise:

Now guarded by a special task force—deployed by the police for his safety—the professor finally proceeded to his 10:45 lecture. A vast crowd of students had already assembled at the HfW. Some students wore banners around their necks that read: “Austria's students tolerate no anti-Semites and antidemocrats”; others—the vast majority—received the professor with loud cries of “bravo!” and animated cheers of the like.Footnote ⁶² As the Socialist (VSM) and Catholic (MKV) middle-school pupils united in front of the Hochschule to join the side of the demonstrators, the first significant expression of protest materialized.

The pupils sought to raise awareness by handing out flyers promoting a current Auschwitz exhibition, and thus remind the professor's spectators where a certain politics—to which Borodajkewycz still subscribed—could ultimately lead.Footnote ⁶³ Konecny recalls how his group, including Communist Party students, invented the legally nonexistent Antifaschistische Studentenkomitee to create these flyers, a necessary construct because the majority of the VSStÖ members rejected their anti-Borodajkewycz stance.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Lacina notes, their committee was composed of mostly Social Democrats, some left-wing Catholics, and of course Communists, who together announced the demonstrations.Footnote ⁶⁵ While thanking his supporters as he passed, Borodajkewycz also accepted the youths' flyer before slipping inside the HfW. It was not long before the police shut down any further flyer distribution because the students had not sought permission from the responsible authority.Footnote ⁶⁶ The conservative provincial daily Tiroler Tageszeitung reported on the new hail of protests that day. It suggested that just as another rally in front of the Education Minister's office had brought Catholic MKV pupils together with Socialist student demonstrators, the professor had received standing ovations at his lectures, and was greeted by a cheering crowd of three hundred students as he exited through the back gate. Footnote ⁶⁷

The next day the Kurier, the most widely read Austrian daily at the time, reported “Heil shouts for Borodajkewycz.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The Kurier editor Hugo Portisch, the most renowned journalist at the time, who was also a devout anti-Fascist, declared war on Borodajkewycz: “I knew we would probably lose a lot of readers, but I commanded my staff to support the antifascist cause—the Kurier declared war, and we were the only widely-read paper that did so.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Emotions began to run high and a critical anti-Fascist minority emerged. Education Minister Piffl-Percevic, who had just returned from Poland and a visit to Auschwitz, and who had refused to involve himself in the Affair, finally began to shed his ambivalence. He recommended that all those students who had found cause to laugh during the press conference on 23 March when a Jewish name was mentioned should visit Auschwitz: “then their smiles will freeze.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In late March, the Affair also spread to the provinces like wildfire. The Upper Austrian daily Tagblatt, for example, sensed that the scandal surrounding the professor was acquiring ever-greater dimensions and definitively positioned itself in the anti-Borodajkewycz camp. Praising the earlier parliamentary inquiries, the paper declared: “Out with him! ... For a man like Borodajkewycz there should no longer be any room at any Austrian university!”Footnote ⁷¹

On Monday, 29 March, at six o'clock the Affair began to acquire its militant dimension: five hundred predominantly young members of various Leftist groups assembled at the Viennese Opera House in an expression of protest, clashed with “peaceful” pro-Borodajkewycz students.Footnote ⁷² The media reported hearing the anti-demonstrators calling out “character assassinators,” “vivat academia, vivant professores,” and “the free press is embarking on character assassination,” while the demonstrators cried “liquidate anti-Austrian clubs” and “Nazis go home to the Reich, long live Austria.”Footnote ⁷³ Professor Rudolf Gelbard, one of the few Theresienstadt concentration camp children who survived (between 1942 and 1945), and a current leader of Vienna's Jewish Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien), recalled how fierce these fistfights in front of the Viennese Opera were.Footnote ⁷⁴ Lacina too noted that:

After a brief exchange of firepower (rotten apples and eggs), the police broke up the counterdemonstrators and permitted the resistance movement to pursue its protest route through the city center to the Monument of the Republic. Die Presse stressed that most of the spectators supported the professor, and it further attacked the newspapers Kurier and Neues Österreich for falsely reporting that Catholic and Socialist students had planned to take part in the demonstration. The Socialists' representatives meanwhile alleged that they had discouraged their members from joining, and that none of their governing factions would take part, whereas the Catholic students had apparently never considered demonstrating. Borodajkewycz himself had already canceled his lectures in the interest of “peace and order”Footnote ⁷⁶ until 3 April. His announcement came in the wake of a three-and-a-half hour HfW professor collegiums' meeting at which his colleagues postulated a resolution condemning racial discrimination, while concurrently reiterating the importance of the freedom of independent teaching and research.Footnote ⁷⁷ When the demonstrators massed in front of the Parliament, the vice president of the Austrian Resistance Movement Josef Hindels held the closing speech:

“The Clash of Rehabilitated Austrians”

Members of Parliament debated the professor's fate and alluded to the Affair's broader implications on 31 March 1965. They had been unaware that in just a few hours the Second Republic's most violent clash of traditions was to erupt. The physical expression of these clashes would peak with the deadly blow to the head of the elderly Communist Ernst Kirchweger by Günther Kümel, a young chemistry student and coincidentally also the very individual who had fired on Parliament in 1961. Broadly speaking, Kirchweger and Kümel were representatives of the two opposing camps that fought each another in outright street battles on that day in March. Kümel and his “allies” sought to protect Hochschulautonomie (academic autonomy) and fight their Leftist enemies in the process; their opponents set out to crush the Right in an expression of distaste toward a reversed denazification process at the social and institutional levels. The unfolding of this event prompted the collision of different worlds: deep-rooted conflicts exploded in the Second Republic's most expressive clash of traditions to date.

The demonstration began in a peaceful and typically Austrian fashion: the Resistance Movement and Leftist individuals assembled at the Karlskirche; their opponents—ranging from a moderate conservative majority pledged to academic freedom, to an extreme right-wing minority who circulated anti-Austrian and antidemocratic sentiments—amassed at the nearby Technische Hochschule (Engineering University). The former leader of the FPÖ Norbert Steger, a devout Catholic who at the time practically led the FPÖ-associated students' party Ring Freiheitlicher Studenten (RFS), because Chairman Friedhelm Frischenschlager rarely made public appearances, participated in this rally for the academic freedom of universities. Nevertheless, he was soon convinced to leave the scene:

Tambornino, who had an appointment that day, stayed only long enough to witness mounting emotions and rising hysteria among participants. He described the antidemonstrators as a “howling pile.” A few held what he called a “ridiculous” banner that read “first graduate, then demonstrate,”Footnote ⁸¹ which yet again exposed a certain mindset demonstrative of the conservative student and authoritarian Burschenschaft logic—that only academics were justified in criticizing other academics. Here Lacina entered the scene. He wore a white ribbon around his arm; an insignia of the student “forces of order” meant to ensure the safety of the demonstrators. Yet this clear labeling not only made him and his colleagues vulnerable to counterdemonstrator attacks; they were also soon outnumbered.

Die Presse, which played an ambivalent political role in its coverage of the Affair, noted that whereas the professor's supporters held posters that read “Hoch Borodajkewycz” and “Where is our academic autonomy?”, his opponents sported slogans such as “the devil should take the Nazis,” “locking down the University is no solution,” and “Borodajkewycz must be removed.” Unlike the Monday demonstration, the anti-professor demographic now included many more middle-aged people. The Presse further reported that both groups were still peacefully marching alongside each other until the Opera, when a Volkswagen bus from the anti-professor camp unexpectedly shot across the Ringstraße, followed by fellow demonstrators who charged into the ranks of the Borodajkewycz supporters with waving flags.Footnote ⁸² Although neither side sought peace, the mystery man in that VW bus, whom no source has identified to this day, was none other than Konecny, the unwavering democrat and friend of Lacina's:

When ten minutes later Kirchweger received a deadly blow from Kümel, Konecny was absent; he had gotten lost in the streets of the city center. Sympathizing with the professor—because he “also viewed Austrians as a part of the German nation”—Kümel made a fatal “last-minute” decision to join the pro-Borodajkewycz protestors.

Kümel's past is as dubious as his present, but to take the commentators who soon labeled him a neo-Nazi murderer at face value would be to succumb to a retrospective analysis. His personal history prior to 31 March therefore requires some attention. The lengthy testimony that Kümel provided me with—the only written testimony to date—paints a more nuanced picture than do the existing secondary sources. Kümel now regards the categorization of himself as a “neo-Nazi” to be a “deliberate intellectual short circuit” [Kurzschluss] that prompts politicians to denounce those who subscribe to the pan-Germanism as National Socialists. These tend to adopt the contemporaries' labels, mostly classifying him as a neo-Nazi. Tracing the footnotes in the existing secondary literature reveals that verifiable evidence of his neo-Nazi stance is relatively thin. The archival-based “proof,” when there is any at all, is too often based on one particular source. This document suggests how Kümel's mother held fervent German nationalist views, and that a Christmas tree decorated with swastika-shaped gingerbread was discovered during a house search.Footnote ⁸⁴ Far from imagining himself in this National Socialist vein, he recalls his participation at a German-nationalist Friedrich Schiller celebration (Schillerfeier) in October 1959 as the “expression of an awareness of life that Austria's rich culture was a part of German culture.”

Yet, Kümel's actions and friendship milieu prior to 1965 had been unequivocally antidemocratic, members with strong National Socialist leanings notwithstanding. Contrary to what is still written, Kümel insists that he had been part of neither the RFS nor Olympia, an illegal right-wing student dueling fraternity at the time. He alleges instead to have had close contact with the right-wing nationalist youth league Bund heimattreuer Jugend (BHJ), where he developed a close relationship with his BHJ-fraternity brother Gerd Honsik (who received a four-year prison sentence in 2010 for propagating Holocaust denial, but was released in 2011 because of his “old age”).

Regardless of whether or not Honsik and Kümel adopted a common National Socialist identity, their relationship and actions in the early 1960s put them both on a problematic course. In 1961, for example, Honisk, Kümel, and Peter Melzer actively pursued their “struggle for Southern Tyrolean independence.” As Kümel recalls, “Late at night we drove behind the Parliament and shot at it with pistols.” In the wake of these events, he and hundreds of BHJ members were interrogated and prosecuted, which acted as a most definite turning point in the BHJ's conviction:

Thus, on 31 March, it appeared to Kümel that another opportunity for retaliation had presented itself. Yet, many in Kümel's “unarmed” army of two thousand—consisting primarily of young men who wore “white shirts and shorts”—scampered home after apparently being assaulted with weapons, bombarded with butanoic acid, and confronted with weapon-bearing men on the roofs of VW buses (“They simulated a tank and infantry scenario”). After breaking up the counterdemonstrators, the “communists” proceeded to build “illegal protest formations,” and members of their “Kommando” beat the students with two-meter-long wooden planks. Kümel ran to the Opera to observe his chanting enemies. When he reached the Hotel Sacher and “Kurier Eck” where the Kurier headquarters were located, a group of one hundred Communists charged at the pro-Borodajkewycz camp to shatter their defense lines yet again. Kümel sprinted for his life:

The man, who fell to the ground close to Lacina, was the resistance fighter Ernst Kirchweger, who sustained mortal injuries in the process. Lacina later appeared as a witness in court, testifying against Kümel. He now only remembers seeing Kirchweger collapse and subsequently storming into Hotel Sacher with his coat drenched in butanoic acid to call the police and ambulance: “emotions were incredibly high, I was almost in a trance.” When I asked Lacina in our interview about the change in his initial police account of Kümel taking one step toward Kirchweger (self-defense, Selbstverteidigung) to two steps in his court testimony (excessive force, Notwehrüberschreitung), he recalled seeing it only from the corner of his eye: “I really did see someone run towards him, and then away again. The man was wearing the classical Nazi attire, as one still knew them from the pictures taken at the time of Nazi illegality.” Lacina further noted that the attacks were mutual, and that the sixty-seven-year-old retired Kirchweger was not a threat to anyone; he was no taller than 165 centimeters. That the fallen resistance fighter Kirchweger died a few days later, and that Kümel subsequently received a ten-month jail sentence, is well known. What to this day only the trusted circle of a few knows is something that exposes how fierce this clash of ideologies really became. Konecny reveals:

Anton Pelinka, who also demonstrated against the professor as a left-wing Catholic (CV) student at the time and is now one of Austria's most respected political scientists, was taken aback: “I was shocked by the growing radicalization and polarization—I had not counted on the immense hatred from the counterdemonstrators.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Gelbard, who was part of Kirchweger's group, but did not know him personally, saw the body in a pool of blood moments later. He had a terrible feeling at the time: there was a jeweler in a blue coat—a former concentration camp inmate—who acted ruthlessly, and he feared that Kümel accidently mistook him for Kirchweger. Was this the same jeweler we came across earlier in this article (and whose identity remains a mystery to Olaf Borodajkewycz)? Regardless, the contentious atmosphere was inconceivable, and the violent street fights endured for hours: “I was part of the fistfights, which was a matter of self-evidence for a former concentration camp inmate.” Gelbard also remembers the presence of monarchical organizations, which were not anti Fascist, but certainly anti-Nazi.Footnote ⁸⁹

Following the Kirchweger-Kümel episode, reverberations from this event were manifest in reactionary behavior, wherein the aggravated protesters continued to move through the city center along the Kärntner Straße and all the way to Minoritenplatz. In the meantime, Lacina had concluded his “visit” at Hotel Sacher and began running along the Kärntner Straße to catch up with the front of the protestors, because he was due to deliver a speech at Minoritenplatz. The episode left him far behind the others, but he managed to catch up with the front of the demonstration at Michaelerplatz, after an 800-meter sprint. As Lacina ran, he noticed that mostly elder protestors, who could not walk as fast and were thus lagging behind, were being attacked by counterdemonstrators with stones and fists: “I was so emotionalized at this point that I actually screamed at a police officer to do something, which was not something you did back then, but this policeman was a rare Leftist—ironically, he soon turned out to be the father of my communist girlfriend and later wife!” For Lacina, who thought Kirchweger was already dead, this traumatic experience forever cautioned him against taking protests lightly.Footnote ⁹⁰ Rather than acting as a catalyst for radicalization, the political death seemed to caution youth radicalism in Austria.

At some point that evening, as the protestors passed the Burgtheater near the University of Vienna, Lotte Tobisch suddenly heard Nazi paroles and peered out the window: “I thought the devil had come to get me.” Someone was standing on her VW car with a banner, which read something along the lines of “Home to the Reich” of “Hail Borodajkewycz,” though she does not remember precisely. Tobisch ran downstairs and pulled the student off her car, who retaliated by beating her over the head with the banner. The attack immediately prompted the media to exaggerate the story, partly because of her well-known public status in Austria. When Tobisch next visited her mother, she was confronted in a traditionally bourgeois, Viennese manner:

While allegedly one side continued shouting “Nazis out!” and the other side responded by shouting “Jews out!”, the final wave of clashes occurred near the Hungarian Embassy in the Bankgasse.Footnote ⁹² Bronner, who also witnessed Kirchweger lying on the floor and remembered the puddle of blood, now observed both “sides” charging at each other in this tight alleyway, with nowhere to escape. Whereas he had not experienced the interwar period, his father experienced these clashes as a moment of déjà vu.Footnote ⁹³ The Socialist youth group (SJ) drove their Land Rover into the Bankgasse, which they manned with six armed people, to attack the counterdemonstrators.Footnote ⁹⁴ At around eight o'clock, the leader of the RFS, Friedhelm Frischenschlager, finished an exam and joined his comrades, just in time to witness the outburst in the Bankgasse. He came from a National Socialist family background, later joined the FPÖ as defense minister, but was then sacked for warmly welcoming a Nazi war criminal upon his return to Austria.

Frischenschlager reveals that the RFS was completely marginalized and unorganized, and torn between the liberal and national (Burschenschaften) camps. He recalls the RFS as having no more than 150 members, and being “completely outnumbered when the Borodajkewycz opponents raised their nail-embedded wooden planks and charged at us.” This was an old Communist trick from the 1950s, he explained. As Frischenschlager thus recognized the gravity of the situation, he immediately cried out to the police officers to open all barriers: “Please open up; there are going to be major injuries!” This experience left a mark on Frischenschlager, and revealed to him the many hidden conflicts that the Affair provoked.Footnote ⁹⁵

“Anti-Fascist Solidarity”: The Political Death

Ernst Kirchweger's funeral on 8 April moved thousands upon thousands of mourners to flood the capital's city center in an unprecedented expression of solidarity. One after another, students and politicians of Vienna's anti-Fascist Socialist, Catholic, and Communist elite addressed the vast crowds. Konecny, as representative of the anti-Fascist student committee, was the first to speak to the grievers:

The Catholic student Reinhold Knoll followed suit, describing the death as “bloody proof that in Austria we hastily made peace with those who still do not want this State, with those who still do not want our fatherland.”Footnote ⁹⁷ When the vice president of the Austrian resistance movement Josef Hindels concluded the ceremony and summoned upon all Austrians to cast aside their party-political affiliations to unite for democracy against the new Fascist threat, thousands cheered.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although the compartmentalization of society and party loyalties ensured that people would stay entrenched in their respective camps, a degree of solidarity nevertheless surfaced for just long enough to display that the citizens of Austria—even as most remained overwhelmingly apolitical—unanimously rejected any potential fascist malaise.

In the days following the protest, the astounding upsurge of nationwide anti-Fascist solidarity prompted the Student Union and Catholic representatives (CV) at Graz University to pledge allegiance. Seeing the hefty demonstrations in Vienna as a logical consequence of the responsible Austrian State agent's wavering and indecisive stance in dealing with issues of the National Socialist past, they demanded immediate action to thus prevent the foundations of the Republic from being further jeopardized by antidemocratic currents and compromises with the Nazi past.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, the sudden pro-Borodajkewycz solidarity, which even transcended national boundaries, was equally astounding. Under the heading “Soldier Newspapers for Borodajkewycz,” the Volksstimme revealed that the professor also found eager defenders in West Germany, such as the National- und Soldatenzeitung, the paper of the SS, Greater Germans, and revanchists. These reports reduced the critical minority who previously handed out flyers at the HfW (Konecny and friends) to “little boys,” deemed the parliamentary requests a “character assassination,” and condemned the Jewish Community for joining in on the Kesseltreiben (battue). The German paper's style was exemplary of this ideological group's rhetoric, and indeed strikingly similar to the line of argument used by many of the Austrian Borodajkewycz supporters.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Vienna's Engineering University Student Union further highlighted the growing ideological rift between the two camps. In an official statement, its representatives condemned the neo-Nazi accusations against the students. They alleged that armed Rollkommandos from Lower Austria dominated the demonstrations, while Kirchweger was accidently beaten up by his own people. (Coincidentally, this very same rhetoric was used in 2012 by the current FPÖ-Chairman Heinz-Christian Strache in an attempt to shift blame away from the Right shortly after Konecny was brutally beaten on his way home from a demonstration against the right-wing fraternity ball of the Wiener Korporationsring).Footnote ¹⁰¹ The students concluded, “This ordeal is no longer about Borodajkewycz; it is about the freedom of education and autonomy in the universities.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Although the Affair provoked a response from the most politically oriented groups, the majority remained somewhat indifferent or ambivalent.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Protestant student community pledged for University autonomy, while condemning both racial discrimination and violent protests. It welcomed the professorial HfW collegium's commitment to Austrian sovereignty and independence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Far from politicizing the youth, the Affair soon “fell asleep”—as Steger asserts.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Tobisch remembers a similar response by one of her closest friends Theodor W. Adorno:

The stern Germans knew their southern Austrian neighbors' mindset all too well. Die Zeit eloquently prophesized the ultimate fate of the debacle: “How will the Borodajkewycz Affair end? Probably, since we speak here of an Austrian affair, the grass will grow over it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As the media had predicted, by the end of April the wider public reassumed old pre-Affair patterns of remembering the past. Leftist Catholic middle school students (MKV)—who had helped advertise the anti-Borodajkewycz demonstrations front of the HfW only weeks before—were no exception. One hundred members from Vienna and Lower Austria took part in a ceremonial commemoration at Mauthausen to celebrate the tenth and twentieth anniversaries of the State Treaty and Austrian “liberation,” respectively. While paying their respects to those who had suffered the horrors of a concentration camp existence, an emphasis rested on the suffering of people from their own ranks. Once again, the anti-Semitic contagion was left unaddressed. Although one may argue that many of the Affair's conflicts persevere today, on 21 May 1966 Die Furche published an article whose title declared “The End of an Affair,” which was prompted by the professor's forced retirement shortly before it was due:

Concluding the Affair

The final task is to place this “exceptional normality” into the context of a wider macrohistorical analysis of the early Second Republic. The analysis of five central dimensions that surfaced in the Affair portrays a people living in the silent shadow of their past that constructed myths for their present. In their failure to identify themselves as uniquely Austrian, the citizens of the early Second Republic still embodied competing versions of nationhood. The long battle over national identity came to the fore at a moment when the horrors of the Nazi past had been buried under a mountain of mythical constructs. When the Affair struck—thanks to a chance combination of highly explosive ingredients—this mountain of malaises was almost entirely exposed for the first and last time until the Waldheim Affair of 1986. In contrast to the Borodajkewycz Affair, however, the Waldheim Affair produced a significant turning point in Austria and did not instigate the same clash of traditions. The earlier Affair surrounding the professor had far more to do with an older struggle between a German and an Austrian national identity. The Waldheim scandal may have revealed similar unsuccessful attempts to conquer the Nazi past, but it took place among a people who now felt proud to be Austrian. According to statistical evidence from the late 1980s, just 1 percent of them felt more German than Austrian. Thus, the Borodajkewycz Affair was not merely about the National Socialist past. Each event over the course of the Affair revealed unresolved problems of Austria's national identity, as well as disagreements over Austria's denazification process, showing how both issues had survived to inhabit a “new” generation of allegedly rehabilitated youth.

In its very earliest stages, the Affair-to-be still remained fully within the context of the university. When Lacina attended a Socialist youth summit in the early 1960s called Rote Jugendtage and described his professor's mindset to the SPÖ party leader Bruno Pittermann in a discussion, the dominant VSStÖ right-wing faction's chairman Hannes Androsch stifled his words.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even at a meeting of Austria's young “Socialist” elite, any discussion of unbroken Rightist traditions remained taboo. Fischer's subsequent article demonstrated that conscious attempts to confront social injustices only circulated within and among a critical minority. At this stage such efforts lacked mainstream media attention and failed to reach a wider public. The 1962 journal series “Does Neo-Nazism Exist?” ought to be viewed within the contours of this broader development. In the early 1960s, the Social Democrats had only just discovered the conservative and neo-Nazi University misère. Fischer's article therefore represented merely one of many pieces within a greater wave of critical publications, such as the anti-Fascist Adolf Kozlich's book Wie wird wer Akademiker?, which condemned the conservative stranglehold at Austrian universities that barred Socialist academics from entering the system, a fate that Kozlich would soon share.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Within the domain of historical academic texts, a wide array of professors with monarchical backgrounds ensured that the “spiritual world of the monarchy” persevered, and unbroken traditions of Großdeutschtum and National Socialism remained strong. Because few actors with power paid any attention to the critical minority, it was possible for antidemocratic “educators of the youth” to pass down their personal ideological preferences. Gertrude Czipke, a VSStÖ protagonist, remembers how in the early 1960s one of her professors stated that the shift toward democracy after 1945 had gone too far, and that he had subsequently declared that his deepest regret was not having been selected for a Third Reich tank division. His greatest joy, meanwhile, had been to teach a member of the Habsburg family.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bruckmüller and Kriechbaum explain that Austrian universities became conservative for the first time in 1945, because the entire post-1934 era had weeded out all liberal elements, particularly the Jews:Footnote ¹¹² “Our biggest mistake after the war was that we failed to welcome back into Austria all that Jewish talent.”Footnote ¹¹³ Whereas Czipke suspected the prevalence of this malaise, she notes that it was only once the Affair began that it manifested itself more clearly. Bruckmüller likewise suggests that the reversal of denazification completely bypassed him in the 1950s, because it was swept under the rug to join the general silence surrounding Nazi war crimes.Footnote ¹¹⁴

When Fischer and his associate were summoned to court and the embryonic Affair acquired its legal dimension, the verdict came as no surprise. His trusted circle of friends was well aware that Austria's legal landscape was crawling with rehabilitated Nazi judges and Rightist personalities who did not shy from suing left-, right-, and center- affiliated opponents. All of Konecny's friends thus faced their fair share of legal cases. Konecny also stood trial at that time for libel: at a televised youth discussion moderated by Helmut Zilk, the SPÖ gave him material with which he could undermine and permanently tarnish a leading FPÖ candidate's reputation. The verdict therefore “did not enrage us; we all had our libel-cases, and were all accused as witnesses.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a strikingly similar fashion, Lacina explains, “in court one did not feel like a witness, but rather like an accused who had tarnished the reputation of the HfW.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Their criticisms of society were difficult to publicize in the media. Until the late 1960s, the “friends of the extreme Right sported a high degree of affinity for lawsuits,” which also inhibited members of the media, who likewise could be held liable.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb explains that the excessive amnesty laws beginning in the late 1950s constituted one of the Second Republic's greatest institutional mistakes. By the 1960s it was no longer possible to sue a so-called Nazi Blutrichter “blood judge”; this approach persevered throughout the Kreisky era and ended only after Christian Broda—who first became justice minister in 1960—left office as justice minister in 1983.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The political dimension developed, however, when a critical minority (as with Neugebauer, Mark, Klein-Löw, and their associates), acquired a media platform through which they could address the silence over Nazi rehabilitations. Despite implementing the strictest anti-Nazi legislation and most ruthless denazification acts in Europe, Austria's incipient re-education process had been reversed from 1948 onwards. As the majority of my subjects noted, the denazification process had gone too far in the immediate postwar period, with around 650,000 people barred from employment and voting, including all who had joined the illegal NSDAP before 1938. Even the Russians quickly complained that “nothing in our zone is working, we have no staff.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Guarded by myths, however, the reversal of the denazification and Vergangenheitsbewältigung process generally went unremarked. By playing up the notion that Austria had been Hitler's “first victim,” any form of debate could be stalled before it reached the wider public. Furthermore, in extending the victimization concept to all Austrians, compensations to Jews and other persecuted groups could successfully be bypassed.Footnote ¹²⁰ My subjects generally agreed that some degree of rehabilitation was important, because the country simply had to function again. When in 1949 around half a million Minderbelastete (“less severe Nazis”) were allowed to vote again, the parties began to compete for their support and so forsook a policy of re-education for one of rehabilitation. Whereas the ÖVP held the secret “Oberweis” conference in 1949—which Borodajkewycz attended—for the newly enfranchised Minderbelastete, the SPÖ that had lost far more members to concentration camps showed an even greater desire to win over Nazis by making concessions and encouraging generous reintegration.Footnote ¹²¹ This politically-motivated move left the major parties each with its fair share of Nazis. Although they remained fiercely opposed to one another, the SPÖ, ÖVP, and FPÖ (successor to the Verband der Unabhängigen—VdU—after 1956) unanimously agreed to place a secure blanket of silence over Austria's Nazi past. Rehabilitations increased with ease from the 1950s to the 1970s. The political elite's reserved role throughout the Borodajkewycz Affair demonstrated how committed it remained to its combined post-1949 course; it was well aware that if just one party was exposed that all would be dragged through the wringer.

In the midst of the media frenzy instigated by Portisch at the Kurier, Bronner's Zeitventil, and the professor's self-inflicted press conference ordeal, the Affair's national dimension further exposed Austria's comparatively limited capacity for youth radicalization and denazification at the time. According to Ernst Bruckmüller, in the 1960s a consensus on Austrian identity did not yet exist.Footnote ¹²² The status of Austria's national identity remained a point of contention, prompting a clash of competing persuasions attempting to assert their versions of nationhood, and consequently dampening the progress of overcoming the past and of forging liberalization. Following 1918, Austrians had been effectively brought up as Germans.Footnote ¹²³ As the youngest democracy in Western Europe, Austria had required time to develop a secure identity after World War II. Governments after 1945 had embarked on a depoliticizing process that discouraged youth from addressing internal issues that might destabilize the state's shaky foundations. The “victim” myth that the allies conceived through the Moscow declaration of 1943, and granted Austrians thereafter, gave people the necessary time to construct a national identity before domestic issues exploded in the 1980s. Throughout the “sixties,” the state thus remained shielded by myths, and strong social and political pillarization kept radical elements at bay: student parties like the VSStÖ and RFS remained under tight control of the SPÖ and FPÖ until the 1970s.

When a clash among rehabilitated Austrians on 31 March 1965 exposed a generational dimension of Austrian politics, it proved that the aforementioned issue of nationhood was the main task for this youth. Throughout the 1960s, Austria's higher education system remained a preserve of students with elitist backgrounds. Its exceptionally rigid and traditional makeup showed few signs of vulnerability and stood in stark contrast to its Western European counterparts. Because university education was predominantly reserved for those students whose parents boasted an academic background, the privileged segment of the youth constituted the majority of all enrollees.Footnote ¹²⁴ The combination of a conservative and Rightist scholarly elite dominating the intellectual scene, and a generation of youth adopting their parent's ideologies uncritically, fostered a logical consequence: student culture gravitated toward the right side of the political spectrum and securely undermined progressive elements. Gertrude Czipke's background typifies the extent of social compartmentalization at the time: she rose through the traditional Socialist ranks and “felt very foreign at University: firstly, as a working class child, secondly, as a social democrat, and thirdly, as a woman. I was simply out of place.”Footnote ¹²⁵ This compartmentalized and milieu-defined character of Austria's youth also kept the Left divided. Austrian radicals neither had the necessary domestic support nor the time to foster a serious culture of political debate that could break free from, function outside of, and undermine conventional party politics. It thus comes as no surprise that the Affair's effects faded as quickly as they appeared. Austria's subsequent “1968,” however tame, was a product of imported radical elements from West Germany; traditional hierarchical structures and strong familial ties went relatively unbroken.Footnote ¹²⁶ Far from proclaiming generational change, the Affair appears to suggest that the 1960s might have been the continuation of the 1950s and past conflicts. Bruckmüller suspected that “the introduction of Austria's national holiday was the only direct, positive consequence of the Affair.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Although the Austrian Left of the “sixties” ultimately failed to join the global student movement at the barricades, its perseverance in the Affair nevertheless proved both that Austria's youth was slowly winning the “clash of traditions” for a democratically oriented Austrian nation and that its combined forces could evoke widespread anti Fascist solidarity from an otherwise politically apathetic public.