Prize-winning historian Erika Thurner, who taught at the University of Innsbruck for many years, first published this short book in 2000. The current version, with only a new forward from the author, still feels fresh. The topic of gender and nationalism she referred to as “unworked” in 2000 remains underexplored in the realm of history, although literary scholars have taken up the challenge in the interim. Thurner's organizing questions and findings are complex and enlightening. Nationalism has long been considered the realm of men, but women were central to its expression. Her thesis, developed in dialogue with the work of Nina Yuval-Davis, is that women and men build and experience nationalism differently. The suggestion of a “neutral” nationalism is a lie.

Drawing upon a range of sources that include political speeches, national celebrations, literature, cultural commentary, and economic statistics, Thurner shows throughout her book that a very special form of nationalism was developed in postwar Austria, based in part on exclusion. Despite the inclusion of women in the rebuilt nation by political parties, those who did not fit within the desired categories of wives and mothers were “othered.” Her book reads as a series of essays, some quite engaging, that illustrate the way national identity is not top-down but rather relational. In Second Republic Austria, it rested on a bipolar notion of masculinity and femininity, which was created and enforced through culture. Beginning with the notion of “good” mothers and “shameless” women who fraternized with occupying soldiers, continuing through ideas of state-neutrality (but not gender-neutrality), and ending with essays on sport and on tourism, Thurner creates a convincing portrait of an Austria in which the day-to-day experience and maintenance of nationalism was gendered. Austria's postwar integration with Western Europe (and American consumer culture) is crucial here, but so too are its particularities. Fascinating topics, like the Spanish Riding School and the Wiener Sängerknaben, remind us that Austria has something important to teach us about gender and national self-identity.

Thurner's study highlights the possibilities of intersectionality (ethnicity, class, religion, and local concerns) early in the book, but does not deeply engage with the problem. Her most successful investigations, particularly that of “Project 1946,” the 950th year celebration of Austria, are instead concerned with memory and myth-making. This may reflect the original study's place as a part of a millennial project funded by the Vienna Institute of Conflict Research under the direction of the respected Austrian historian Anton Pelinka. He offers a useful introduction to the first edition, pointing out that Thurner's work “makes clear that the Austria of men is not the Austria of women” (15). This is underlined by Thurner's attention to masculinity (and not just women and their concerns) during the course of her study. Indeed, this interaction with modern concepts and practices of masculinity strengthens Thurner's work. It is also puts her into conversation with the late-career research of George Mosse, which she fruitfully explores. She ends this edition of the book with reference to Elfriede Jelinek, who long before her 2004 Nobel Prize in literature was engaging with gendered “Austrian-ness” and its postwar relationship with capitalism and patriarchy. The last line of Thurner's book is a bitter shot: “Oh, glückliches Österriech!” (167).

Historians of political history, culture, and gender will all find material in Thurner's book to build upon. It is this “opening up” of a new field that makes the book most exciting, and likely suggested its reprinting now. How Austria thought about itself in the twentieth century has become a topic for historical investigation, and this book offers particularly clear evaluations of that process. The active, gendered practices of nationalism Thurner highlights in daily life and in political discourses have altered with the coming of European Union membership, as with the new awareness of queer studies. But they are still very much with us.