This volume should be seen as a companion to Das Dollfuß/Schuschnigg-Regime 1933–1938: Vermessung eines Forschungsfeldes, published by Böhlau in 2013 and edited by two of the contributors to the 2012 volume, Florian Wenninger and Lucile Dreidemy. The publication of both volumes arose from two interdisciplinary conferences jointly held by the Institute for Contemporary History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna in January 2011, and there are several overlapping themes, as well as contributors, across both publications.

The 2012 volume has two distinguishing features from its companion: a focus on legal history and the inclusion of postwar restitution politics up until the recent legislation to rehabilitate former Austrian Wehrmacht deserters and political victims of the Austro-Fascist state (passed in 2009 and 2011, respectively). Chapters on the 1934 constitution and the Austrian concordat of 1933/34 highlight this legal focus. Ewald Wiederin's legal “exegesis” of the 1934 constitution shows the inconsistency between its federalist language and centralizing governance practices, whereas Stefan Schima's contribution on the negotiations for a new concordat takes a case study approach to divorce with a brief foray into school reforms. Wiederin is the only contributor in this volume to mention regional politics, and Schima's chapter leaves out a great deal about church-state relations—with regard to youth especially—beyond the issue of crucifixes in classrooms.

Among the chapters on opposition movements and political violence and justice, Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal, Christiane Rothländer, and Karin Bruckmüller address the issue of confiscation of property of individuals and their families, as well as political parties outlawed by the Austro-Fascist state. Although these deal only with Communists, Nazis, and Social Democrats and their party organs, the term Beschlagnahme also applied to the licenses of newspapers that remained in legal circulation and needs to be analyzed within a wider conceptual framework of complicity and dissent. Pia Schölnberger's chapter on “everyday life” inside the Wöllersdorf concentration camp—which remained in official parlance both before and after 1938 a “detention camp” (Anhaltelager)—points to the radicalizing effect of incarceration on Nazi inmates after their release in 1936, separated in the main from their Communist and Socialist counterparts inside the camp. One of the problems confronting historical research of deaths in custody under Austro-Fascism, as Winfried R. Garscha's contribution shows, is the lack of integration of methods of archival research and studying popular memoirs by former inmates who went on to forge political careers after 1945. The issue then is less “taboo” than a gap in the field, which this volume—and its companion—seeks to redress, at the very least by identifying a future research agenda.

Chapters on the economy, labor, and gender tend to summarize the existing research with the exception of Karin Nusko's chapter on biographies of women resisters, which highlights the neglected area of women's contributions to political and social life before 1938 and broadens the notion of resistance in line with social histories of resistance and gender elsewhere in Europe. Yet, Nusko still does not manage to overcome an unhelpful political binary between women's roles within a Socialist or Communist political movement, and the “anti-modern” milieu of the “Catholic housewife mother,” despite the evidence of the devout Catholic mother of one woman resister in Nusko's study who assisted her husband and daughter in the underground Social Democratic resistance networks.

A welcome transnational approach is found in the contributions by Dreidemy, Wenninger, and Oliver Rathkolb. Wenninger demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon (chiefly American and British) scholars up until the early 1960s were far from being neutral “outsiders” on the subject of Austro-Fascism, but rather were engaged in the strategic affairs of the Austrian state from abroad alongside their Austrian emigré counterparts. Dreidemy analyzes biographical writing on Dollfuss in the genre of modern hagiographies, which were as influential within Austria as outside in France, Britain, and the United States and therefore can be seen within a wider framework of Allied cultural policy during occupation. Oliver Rathkolb's chapter on American postwar foreign affairs reveals the bewilderment of American foreign policy makers contending with former Austro-Fascist functionaries who equated democracy with the fight against Nazism and did not see the civil war waged against Social Democrats as antidemocratic.

The inclusion in this volume of postwar restitution blurs the legal and political issues of dealing with two dictatorships in Austrian history. Although warranted perhaps for an Austrian readership, the burden of a double dictatorship, as in Germany, can at times intrude into the larger fascination of Austria's place within European—and global—histories of the twentieth century.