Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age 9781789204537

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NATIONALISM REVISITED

AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES

General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics, and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, social, and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Recent volumes: Volume 25 Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age Christian Karner Volume 24 Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Klaus Hödl Volume 23 Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna Heidi Hakkarainen Volume 22 Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 Edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon Volume 21 The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century Allyson Fiddler

Volume 20 The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary Bálint Varga Volume 19 Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire Ulrich E. Bach Volume 18 Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman Volume 17 Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen Volume 16 The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/austrian-habsburg-studies.

NATIONALISM REVISITED Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age

d Christian Karner

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Christian Karner

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Karner, Christian, author. Title: Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age / Christian Karner. Description: New York: Berghahn, 2020. | Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies; volume 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019040130 (print) | LCCN 2019040131 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789204520 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789204537 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nationalism—Austria—History. | German language—Political aspects— History. | Habsburg, House of. Classification: LCC DB47 .K247 2020 (print) | LCC DB47 (ebook) | DDC 320.5409437—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040130 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040131 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-452-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-453-7 ebook

CONTENTS

d Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

1

1. The Crystallization of Discursive Structures

26

2. National Closure in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond

55

3. The Darkest Sides of Modernity: World Wars and the Holocaust

82

4. From Political and Discursive Reconstruction to Selective Memories and “Banal Nationalism”

111

5. Multiple Crises Turning Banal Nationalism(s) “Hot”

139

6. Localizing Strategies against Global Flows

165

7. Renationalization Gathering Pace

189

8. Conclusion

214

References

223

Index

247

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

d I

t is stating the obvious to say that a book of this length and with such a prolonged period of gestation would never have seen the light of the day without the help of many, only some of whom I have space to explicitly thank here. Sources of vital support over the past decade and more have been provided by institutions and individuals. Starting with the former, thanks are due to my former colleagues at the University of Nottingham’s School of Sociology and Social Policy for providing a supportive and stimulating intellectual environment, in which a pluralism of thematic interests, methodological approaches, and theoretical perspectives continues to thrive. Within my own area of specialism, the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Center Austria at the University of New Orleans provided me with temporary intellectual homes during two sabbaticals in 2015 and 2018 respectively. The hospitality, interest, and practical support provided both in Minneapolis and in Louisiana were inspiring, enormously helpful, and hugely appreciated. Special thanks are due to Gary Cohen, Howard Louthan, and Jennifer Hammer in Minneapolis, and to Günter Bischof, Marc Landry, and Gertraud Griessner in New Orleans. As far as other individual companions are concerned, the following in particular have been a continuous source of friendship and inspiration over recent months and years: Meryl Aldridge, Giorgos Bithymitris, Zinovia Lialiouti, Marek Kazmierczak, José Lopez, Frédéric Moulène, Laura Morowitz, Despina Papadimitriou, Aline Sierp, Bjørn Thomassen, and Bernhard Weicht. All I can hope is that I have been able to show them at least some of the kindness and help they have continually given me. My profound gratitude also extends to some who, sadly, are no longer with us. Though their thematic specialisms differed from my own, the late Alan Aldridge and the late Christopher Johnson each influenced me in important ways: Alan as a sociologist, Chris as a historian of ideas—each of them showed me and many others what their craft was capable of achieving. More importantly, they were both living proof that humility, generosity, and scholarly excellence can and indeed should go hand in hand. Their presence is sorely missed.

Acknowledgments

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I would also like to acknowledge my sincere gratitude to long-term, though here unnamed, companions and friends, and to my cousin Sandra Schnabl, at home in Austria, whose presence and support both predated and continued throughout the years I spent working on this book. Further thanks are due to Chris Chappell, Soyolmaa Lkhagvadorj, and Elizabeth Martinez at Berghahn Books for all their support and for making the journey to publication as smooth as possible, and to three anonymous referees whose insightful comments helped me refine and sharpen the manuscript. Of course, responsibility for the contents and arguments contained in this book, particularly for its limitations, remains mine alone. My deepest debt of gratitude goes to my parents Christa and Peter Karner for all their practical and emotional help—all my life and on a daily basis they have been reminding me of what really matters—and, in Greece, to the Lekka family and in particular my in-laws Dimitris Lekkas and Aggeliki Vasili for showing me what I had known but never experienced—that human beings can indeed have more than one home. Finally, words do not suffice to thank my wife—την Χρυσάνθη που δίνει νόηµα στα πάντα.

INTRODUCTION

d T

wo superficially minor, though on reflection significant, events took place while I was on a European Union–funded teaching exchange in the western Polish city of Poznan in May 2014. Given my family history and long-standing research on national and ethnic identities in Central Europe,1 particularly in Austria, the fact that these occurrences interested me was not surprising. Their wider significance, however, only occurred to me in due course. Eventually, it became clear that these seemingly banal occurrences exemplified the very essence of the questions this book poses. As such, they provide an ideal starting-point. The first event occurred in the military cemetery Park Cytadela in Poznan, a remarkable, inevitably somber place that reflects the successive political eras, wars, and countless lives lost in the course of Poland’s tumultuous recent history. Late in the day, near the outer edges of the cemetery, I suddenly caught sight of a gravestone with a name most familiar to me: Matula. This had been my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, whose father had been Czech and whose mother half Slovenian, and who until her death in 2004 had told me and the rest of my Austrian family barely anything about her parents—so little, in fact, that no one even knows what role, if any, ethnic/linguistic ancestry had played in my grandmother’s earliest years. My grandmother’s autobiographical silence persisted despite interest by several family members. There are, of course, other, very different, much-better-known, and collectively shared silences that were prominent across Central Europe for much of the post-1945 era; those were the politically opportune, but ethically deeply problematic, silences of “reconstruction” that dominated on both sides of the Iron Curtain and left particularly the Holocaust largely unthematized for several decades. My grandmother’s silence was of a very different kind, it endured longer, and covered other stretches of time. Having been born in the hugely significant year that was 1918—only months before the end of World War I, the final disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, and the creation of the First Austrian Republic—my grandmother was particularly reluctant to talk about her childhood during the 1920s. This stood

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in contrast to many others of her generation. We know that my grandmother was a relatively poor child of the multinational empire who lost both her parents while still relatively young. The sociologist and grandson in me has often wondered whether her silence was partly also that of the classical “stranger”— defined by Georg Simmel (1908) as a person who “comes today and stays tomorrow”—who felt to some extent out of sync with her surroundings and the increasingly nation-centered form they took in the course of her childhood, youth, and adulthood. Ten years after my grandmother’s death, standing in this cemetery in Poznan, my Polish friend reminded me that “Matula” was of course a common “Slavic” surname not only in what is now the Czech Republic but also in parts of Poland. The second event took place during a visit to an outdoor heritage museum— the Wielkopolski Ethnographic Park Dziekanowice—not far from Poznan. A collection of traditional farmhouses from across the region that had been reassembled in the same locality, the museum resembled another one of its kind, which as a teenager I had visited regularly. Both sites, the Polish one near Poznan and the Austrian one near Graz, are impressive though romanticizing attempts to preserve a rural, premodern past. As post-hoc (re)constructions, such museums frame, whether by design or inadvertently, the past they depict in national terms. The museum I visited as a schoolboy thus presents itself as an Austrian outdoor museum, implying that its fields, houses, and other buildings depict a distinctly Austrian agricultural past (in its regional variations). The (sub)texts to the Polish museum seemed very similar; what was represented here was Polish history. Looking at the exhibits in one of many meticulously reconstructed houses, my Polish friend and I suddenly found ourselves in what had been a German family’s farmhouse, reflected in the written prayers displayed on the walls, in an old German translation of the Bible on the kitchen table, and in a postcard next to it. The latter had been written, in German, by a soldier, seemingly one of the family’s sons, in 1915. German farmhouses in what is now Western Poland hardly constitute a historical discovery. What was perhaps more noteworthy was its inclusion in an ostensibly Polish site of memory and national identity celebration. However, what surprised and touched my Polish friend and me was something different, namely the text on the postcard: far from the wartime rhetoric one may have expected to find in a message sent from the front, its author—whose subsequent fate we know nothing about—described a hitherto uneventful daily routine, expressed concern for his family and mentioned a girlfriend or possible fiancée. While, of course, one has to be careful not to take documents of this (or any) kind as straightforward or singularly sufficient mirrors of historical realities (Langewiesche 2012; Haring 2013: 305–306), the postcard and its surroundings nonetheless reflected—in their juxtaposition to the rest of a space presented as quintessentially Polish—a tension that runs through this book: between, on one hand, political worlds that have come to be structured in ethnonational terms;

Introduction

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3

and, on the other, everyday domains that also contain ambivalences, ambiguities, or “indifferences” (Judson and Zahra 2012) to “the national.” This is an ambitious book. In its empirical coverage, its historical and geographical reach, it attempts to cover larger terrains than many contributions to a field now known as “nationalism studies.” Typically, those have fallen into one of two categories. In the case of the most seminal, conceptually focused scholarship of transdisciplinary impact, the focus has tended to be on large historical questions about the origins of nationalism (e.g., Anderson 1983); its social functions in industrializing societies (Gellner 1983) or as the quintessentially modern “sacralization of politics” (Gentile 2006); its utilization of long-established, premodern cultural phenomena in the service of modern political projects (e.g., Smith 2008); or its unnoticed structuring of our daily lives and most “banal” symbolic surroundings (e.g., Billig 1995). Alternatively, there is a large, continually expanding body of empirically focused research, reflected in a growing number of specialist academic journals, that examines the workings of nationalist politics in particular, carefully delineated geographical settings that often coincide with the territories of a given nation-state (e.g., van der Veer 1994; Brubaker 1998; Rancour-Laferriere 2001; Liven 2005; Csergo 2007; Banac 2014). For this latter category, the analytical trajectory tends to foreground understanding of contextspecific details rather than comparative, theoretical insights. The present book combines elements of these often separate concerns and foci, the general with the specific, the conceptual with the strictly context-bound. Unlike some available literature (particularly in the second strand of scholarship just mentioned) and much political discourse, this monograph does not take any one nation-state or its nationalist ideologies of (self-)legitimization as a priori parameters to the discussion but regards their genesis and ongoing institutional and ideological reproduction as themselves requiring analyses. Empirically focused on various territories within the former Habsburg Empire, and more narrowly, in later chapters in particular, on what is now present-day Austria, this book examines successive historical eras in which processes of “nationalization” (e.g., Guérard 1934: 5; Mosse 1975; Judson and Rozenblit 2005) have played key roles in constructing political institutions and cultural discourses of self-/other definition in national terms. Through close engagement with scholarship in Austrian and Habsburg Studies and detailed analyses of a range of historical and contemporary empirical materials, this book also traces how for more than two centuries territories and populations in (Austrian) Central Europe—important regional differences and obvious historical discontinuities notwithstanding—have experienced a recurring tension: between, on the one hand, nationalism’s discursive and institutional rigidity and singularity (i.e., premised on ascribed, exclusive identities and the ethnicization of land and people); and, on the other, ambivalent identifications, “pluricultural” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014) localities, complex life-worlds of

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inter-ethnic “entanglements” and lived “hybridity” (Bhabha 1990). Crucially, this book further adds to existing constructivist literature (e.g., Judson and Rozenblit 2005; Wingfield 2003) in the study of (Central European) nationalisms in three respects: first, in its long historical coverage; second, in drawing attention to an additional dimension within nationalist discourse—its contextual fluctuations between “banal” (Billig 1995), or taken-for-granted, and “hot,” or aggressively mobilizing, nationalisms; and third, most significantly, through its theoretical focus on forms and processes of “social closure” (e.g., Murphy 1988) and their discursive manifestations. An ambitious longue durée perspective distinguishes this book from many existing studies of national(ist) identity politics (e.g., Wodak et al. 1999; Guibernau 2007), and the successive historical contexts examined here inform this monograph’s chapter structure. I thus begin with an examination of romantic thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to their claims regarding nations and their histories, which are subsequently shown to have been reappropriated across successive eras since then. Chapter 2 traces the processes of “nationalization” of Central European localities especially during the latter stages of the “long nineteenth century” (Hobsbawm 1962, 1975, 1987). Rather than reflecting the primordial solidarities and units of political action they are widely assumed to be, “nations” had to be constructed in processes implicating civil society associations in a growing public sphere (e.g., Judson 2005a, b), including politicians as well as the media and cultural elites (e.g., Engemann 2012). Yet there is also evidence of, and a consequent need to discuss, various forms of resistance and indifference to nationalist endeavors (e.g., Judson and Zahra 2012). Focusing on the period from 1914 to 1945, chapter 3 examines the historical era that can be described as the heyday of nationalism and as the most infamous illustration of the dehumanizing, murderous dimensions of modernity (Bauman 1989). While the discussion covers again large, complex historical terrain that includes World Wars I and II and the Holocaust, the analytical focus rests on particular contexts that illustrate the workings of (increasingly extreme) nationalist social closure on the part of ethnic majorities and the concomitant experiences of exclusion, persecution, and—in the case of genocide—systematic murder suffered by those “othered” by nationalist politics. Moving on to the post-1945 context and the backdrop of the Cold War, chapter 4 examines what Michael Billig (1995) terms “banal nationalism,” which— while barely noticed—provides the symbolic means underpinning the ongoing, daily reproduction of national boundaries, institutions, and identifications. The chapter expands on this by examining the role and content of cultural memories and amnesias—the latter particularly relevant to long-dominant, selective narratives of World War II and the Holocaust—underpinning the postwar construction of “national mythscapes” (Bell 2003) and their constitutive, at times competing, discourses on the past.

Introduction

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5

Tracing the contours and effects of a further historical rupture, chapter 5 examines the rise of neo-nationalism (McCrone 1998; Gingrich and Banks 2006) since the 1980s. This is analyzed as reflecting further processes of social closure and a concomitant transformation of (or, seen in broader historical perspective, a “return” from) banal to hot nationalisms (see Skey 2009: 340). This discussion continues in chapter 6, where I explore the growing tensions between the economic and technological changes of the contemporary era, on the one hand, and national counterreactions—often premised on cultural nostalgia for the postwar decades (see Piketty 2014: 96)—on the other. Further examples of a current “re-nationalization” (Hartleb 2012) are explored in chapter 7 and its examination of (EU-skeptical and digitally highly “literate”) right-wing populism. In its conclusion, Nationalism Revisited distills core empirical findings and conceptual insights contained in the preceding chapters. Overall, this book also pays particular attention to the context-specific unfolding of a broadly recurring pattern: nationalist discourses and politics, their historically variable force and consequences notwithstanding, invariably aim for different types of social closure and have historically done so most effectively in contexts of structural/material crises or perceived social decline. Before embarking on this long historical journey, the conceptual apparatus enabling my discussions needs to be outlined. I now turn to the required theoretical groundwork, which revolves around the question as to how social closure can be defined, researched, captured, and analyzed.

Social Closure Through analyses of wide-ranging historical and contemporary materials, this monograph develops a central argument that spans historical contexts and geographical settings: it traces how the politics of nationalization have manifested in successive eras through forms of “social closure” that lead to “various more or less institutionalized forms of inclusion and exclusion” and that, following ethnonational patterns, are also subject to contestation, shifts, and reconfigurations over time (Wimmer 2004: 6).2 As we will discover, the common denominator across a range of historical and regional settings examined consists of a repeated narrowing of life-worlds and identifications to ethnonational levels, effecting institutional exclusion and discursive foregrounding of “the nation” over and above other forms of solidarity and historical points of reference. We begin these theoretical preliminaries with a discussion of one of the book’s core concepts (to be elaborated on in later chapters)—the notion, originally derived from Max Weber and paraphrased by Frank Parkin, of social closure: By social closure [Weber] means the process by which various groups . . . improve their lot by restricting access to rewards and privileges to a limited circle . . . [T]o do

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this they single out certain social or physical attributes that they themselves possess and define these as criteria of eligibility . . . [A]lmost any characteristic may be used to this end provided it can serve as a means of identifying and excluding “outsiders” . . . Exclusionary social closure is thus action by a status group designed to secure for itself certain resources and advantages at the expense of other groups . . . The most effective and complete form of social closure are those which employ criteria of descent and lineage. (Parkin 1982: 100)

This is a collective exercise of power along established or emerging social hierarchies. Elsewhere, Parkin (1974a, b) distinguished between two modes of social closure—exclusion, “downward” exercise of power by dominant groups; and usurpation, “upward” resistance by the subordinated (also see Murphy 1988: 108). Subsequently, Raymond Murphy (1988: 1), arguably the most influential proponent of a refined, (neo-)Weberian “closure theory,” explored various “codes of social closure: [the] formal or informal, overt or covert rules governing . . . monopolization and exclusion.” Important questions follow: first, what—in any given social setting—is being monopolized, and from what is another group being excluded? Second, what are the “codes” or “rules” employed to affect such closure? Detailed answers to these general questions are context-specific and can only emerge through close analysis of relevant empirical data of the kind examined in later chapters. But a more generic response is already possible at this stage: (neo-) Weberian closure theory recognizes that social life includes struggles over (collective) access to various rewards and resources, privileges, rights, status, wealth, or a combination of these and other political goods, and that access for some entails exclusion for others. Further, and relevant to the “codes” dominant in any given epoch, Raymond Murphy recognized that while the “structural fault” of some exclusion is characteristic of all social formations, its particular form(s) have always been subject to historical shifts: Forms of domination and exclusion . . . accepted as legitimate for centuries, such as those based on lineage (aristocratic society, caste society), race (slavery) and gender, have been successfully challenged as illegitimate by . . . usurpationary movements. There is no reason to believe that contemporary forms of domination and exclusion . . . will be forever free from similar challenges. Popes have run up against reformation movements, presidents of capitalist enterprises have faced revolutionary movements, and now doctors are encountering resistance to their monopolistic power. The successful usurpation of . . . an accepted code of exclusion and its replacement by another is characteristic of the most important social transformations in history. (Murphy 1988: 47–48)

This dynamic, as later chapters show, provides a way of illuminating nationalisms and national identities, from their early manifestations as discourses of usurpation, to their later twentieth-century reign of dominance (as the then most con-

Introduction

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7

sequential channels of “monopolization and exclusion”). Such historicization also acknowledges that future shifts may take very different forms, be it in the direction of a further (re)trenchment of the national or in a possibly “post-national” direction; either way, closure theory predicts new forms of monopolization and exclusion rather than their utopian transcendence. Already in Weber and with heightened urgency in Murphy’s elaborations there is a recognition that ethnonational sentiments and identifications can be powerful conduits for social closure. Weber (1978 [1922]: 40–41) mentioned national communities—alongside “religious brotherhoods” and families—as examples of communal relationships (Vergemeinschaftung) premised on strong “subjective feeling[s]” of belonging together, as opposed to “associative relationships . . . of rationally motivated interests.” We here encounter an early version of what subsequently a founding father of nationalism studies would term nationalism’s “spell,” or rationally inexplicable, affective power (Gellner quoted in McCrone 1998: 84). Murphy (1988: 126) again builds on Weber in observing that “firmly rooted sentient communities” or “communal status groups”—based on “race, ethnicity, language and religion” (i.e., the very symbolic anchors to many a national group’s self-definition)—can effectively channel “usurpation and resistance to exclusion” by providing “important organizational resource[s],” that is, a recognized, “pre-existing community.” At the same time, (dominant) nationalcommunal status groups exercise “downward” “collectivist closure,” manifest in the institutions of citizenship and in restrictions on immigration (Murphy 1988: 181). The (neo-Weberian) concept of social closure will be the theoretical driver for the analyses to be developed in what follows. This application will also critically reflect on social closure and the associated concept of a communal status group. We will thus see that what are taken and clearly often felt to be “pre-existing communities” had to be “imagined” (Anderson 1983), socially and politically constructed—although usually on the basis of already existing, premodern cultural practices, symbols, traditions, and connections (Smith 1986; 2008)—and reified in the first place. Put differently, while nations require(d) active ideological work to be willed into existence, they have proved remarkably plausible, effective, enduring, and appealing as mechanisms variously enabling the monopolization of, and exclusion from, political rights and social advantage. This book’s major theoretical contribution therefore consists of the application of the concept of social closure to the constructivist study of nationalisms in Central Europe. This will enable a diachronic tracing of different forms of exclusivist identity politics in their lived, institutionalized (and institutionalizing) manifestations and, more narrowly in the particular examples of discursive data examined in chapters 1 to 7, of the crystallizations and workings of nationalist closure. First, however, further preliminary questions remain to be addressed,

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including the tricky issue as to how nationalist social closure can be recognized and researched.

Detecting Nationalist Closure Taken on their own, the concepts of social closure and communal status groups, or even a constructivist approach to nationalism, would not suffice as drivers for the ensuing analyses. Instead, the question as to how these notions and understandings can be operationalized in the service of empirical research needs to be answered. Importantly, how can nationalist social closure be recognized, understood, “captured,” documented, and analyzed by social scientists and historians? Which methodological-cum-analytical strategies might work here? While I elaborate on the particular materials to be examined later, the premises underlying my application of social closure as a concept need to be spelled out first. As demonstrated in Murphy’s neo-Weberian formulation, social closure recurs as a structural process throughout human history, albeit in context-specific and hence changing forms. The central question for my purposes arises as to when, where, and how social closure takes nationalist form, and how this can be detected. It is well established and will be corroborated in the ensuing chapters that, since the nineteenth century, nationalist closure has implicated particular political actors, institutions, and cultural practices. Crucially, nationalist closure also manifests in language use of various kinds and in multiple settings. This opens up the central analytical line pursued below: what follows can be described as a search for, and examination of, the discursive traces left by nationalist forms of social closure. How do we recognize such traces? And how might we then make analytical sense of such evidence? For the present book, my first methodological decision was to approach a wide range of relevant textual/discursive materials (see below) as qualitative data; I take such historical materials to contain and transmit culturally shared but also often debated and contested meanings, values, interpretations, and political positions. However, not fully satisfied with standard thematic analyses of such materials, whereby recurring themes are first identified and coded in the data and then interpreted in relation to one another and to relevant established scholarship, the ensuing discussions here work with a linguistically more fine-grained, always carefully contextualized, approach. This I find, across the following discussions, in an analytical strategy combining core concepts from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and select contributions to social and anthropological theorizing. To spell out my central epistemological premise: it is this combination of conceptual strands that will enable me to detect, record, and make sense of nationalist social closure in its discursive (and institutional) manifestations.

Introduction

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This poses definitional questions. While usually tied to language (as we see below), discourse has also been conceptualized more broadly, as going beyond the linguistic. For example, Rom Harré (1998: 132) defines “discursive activity [as] the work we severally or jointly engage in when we make use of a common system of signs for the accomplishment of some task or project.” This is relevant to some of the cultural practices and materials that feature in later chapters alongside more typical “language-based” data. Focusing on the latter, CDA defines as discourse all written and spoken language, of any form and in any register, which it conceptualizes as forms of “social practice” (Fairclough 1989; Weiss and Wodak 2003). Language-mediated social practices are seen to emerge from, and hence need to be understood in relation to, their wider social and political contexts (e.g., Kumiega and Karner 2018), which discourse in turn feeds back into, either as a contribution to structural reproduction or as a force of ideological resistance. Put differently, discourse is both shaped by and in turn has impacts on its wider contexts (e.g., Weiss and Wodak 2003; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). CDA has born particularly impressive results in illuminating the discursive “construction, perpetuation or justification, transformation . . . or dismantling” of national identities (Wodak et al. 1999: 33). Building on this, later chapters examine similar processes of reasserting, negotiating, or at times refusing identifications on several geographical scales, most centrally in relation to “the nation,” but also with symbolic reference to localities, regions, ethnic and religious communities, and more recently in relation to “Europe.” Such discourses will be traced across contexts, across a wide range of social and cultural domains, and as articulated by a diversity of (structurally and ideologically differently positioned) historical actors. Broadly defined, and to reiterate, CDA approaches language not as a neutral medium of communication but as a form of “social practice” that is shaped by, and in turn feeds back into, its generative social and institutional contexts. In other words, language in all forms needs careful contextualization and examination for its (often implicit) ideological trajectories and political effects. Critical discourse analysis recognizes written texts and spoken utterances as being inevitably socially positioned, both in terms of origins and effects. While CDA is a “broad church” of conceptually diverse and mutually complementary schools of thought, my approach selects, combines, and elaborates on those core concepts most suited to examining the linguistic crystallizations of political processes of monopolizing rewards and resources, of including some in, and excluding others from, access to rights, goods, and privileges. I next turn to those core concepts, largely though not exclusively derived from critical discourse analysis, which will enable my analyses in chapters 1 to 7. In doing so, there are three analytical levels, or foci, to be distinguished. For the sake of clarity, I will describe them as the levels of discursive form, ideological/ argumentative content, and context.

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Discursive Form: Boundary (Re)Production and Inter-category Relations Rather than being used in a set chronological sequence, the three analytical levels, here summarized under the headings of form, content, and context, will be employed concurrently in the following chapters. Yet, for the sake of theoretical exposition, I outline them separately first. This distinction bears similarities but also noticeable differences from Wodak and Reisigl’s (1999: 188) analytical steps constitutive of their “discourse-historical approach”: Having (a) uncovered the contents or topics of a specific racist, anti-Semitic, nationalist, or ethnicist discourse, (b) the discursive strategies (including argumentation strategies) are investigated, and (c) the linguistic means and the specific, context-dependent linguistic realizations of the discriminatory stereotypes are then looked into. (Italics added; also see Wodak 2015: 35)3

As we will discover, my approach works with a less rigid chronology to these analytical steps and underneath a different overarching theoretical umbrella, namely social closure theory. But the use of discourse analytical tools, alongside others, and a focus on discursive forms, contents, and their wider contexts will also be central to the present book. Social closure, as a process of enabling the monopolization of rights, rewards, and resources and concomitant mechanism of exclusion, inevitably involves the drawing of boundaries. For social closure to work, “the deserving,” “the entitled,” the privileged, or the included need to be defined and distinguished from those that are henceforth to be excluded from contextually relevant and finite goods or entitlements. Without the drawing, definition, and maintenance of boundaries, closure cannot work or occur. Therefore, a crucial question to be put to all of the data to be examined across later chapters is what those materials reveal about (context-specific) understandings of a (national) “ingroup” and its various others. It is precisely in relation to the issue of boundary-drawing and maintenance that the first key concept, borrowed from critical discourse analysis, provides vital momentum to discussions of nationalist social closure. The concept in question is that of the linguistic deixis, which Michael Billig (1995: 94) includes among the “linguistically microscopic habits of language,” which operate “beyond conscious awareness” but play a crucial role in the ongoing reproduction of our world of nation-states. Billig (1995: 106–109) elaborates on this component of “banal nationalism”: Deixis is a form of rhetorical pointing . . . [through w]ords such as “I,” “you,” “we,” “here” or “now” . . . To understand the meaning of a deictic utterance, listeners have to . . . [put] the speaker at the centre of the interpretive universe . . . with “we” frequently being the listener and speaker, evoked together as a unity . . .

Introduction

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Politicians, rhetorically presenting themselves as standing in the eye of the nation, evoke the whole nation as their audience . . . This place has to be unimaginatively imagined and the assumptions of nationhood accepted . . . [D]eixis can do its business unobtrusively, running up the flag so discreetly that it is unnoticed even by the speaker or writer . . . Utterances are not merely produced by contexts, but they also renew those contexts . . . They help to shut the national door on the outside world . . . [N]ational identity is a routine way of talking and listening; it is a form of life, which habitually closes the front door, and seals the borders.

While reiterating CDA’s premise that language is produced in, or “by,” contexts, which texts and utterances in turn “renew” (in either pre-established or altered fashion), this account offers ideal analytical anchors for an examination of how boundaries required for nationalist social closure are (re)drawn linguistically. Consequently, attention will be paid to personal pronouns as well as to other deictic references, such as those to particular times or places, in chapters 1 to 7. Rather than treating social closure in the abstract, a focus on the deixis at work in the materials to be examined enables us to record and capture the drawing of boundaries—and hence processes of monopolization and exclusion—as they unfold; or, more accurately, as they are or were accomplished in particular texts, documents, or statements. Of course, not all deictic references rhetorically point to “the nation.” All social hierarchies and “axes of power, inequality and exclusion” (Brah 1996) provide people with frames of reference in their talk, writing, and actions. Thus, a central analytical task below will be to identify statements that indeed point to a/the nation. Ideological content and discursive form are, as was hinted earlier, intertwined and need to be analyzed in tandem. In this instance, this means that attention to formal rhetorical features—including personal pronouns and topographical or temporal references—requires simultaneous attention to the kind of group, place, or time being referenced and the type of boundary-work accomplished. Put more simply, my central, though not exclusive, focus will here lie on identifying forms of national deixis (rather than deictic references to localities, class, religion, gender, age, etc.). In the spirit of allowing empirical materials and insights to critically reinflect and refine the theoretical frameworks employed, it should already be mentioned at this stage that some of Billig’s central claims will be treated as posing open empirical questions to be tested rather than as definitive answers: although accurate for the context Billig himself examined, historically many nationalisms have been far less banal, not yet routinized, but, rather, explicitly politicized, highly self-conscious, and anything but unnoticed. The broad, longue durée perspective adopted in the present book draws attention to both the forms of banal nation-

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alism that Billig examines, and the types and periods of “hot nationalist passion” (Billig 1995: 43–44) he contrasts them to. That difference is also, importantly, a difference in the kind or depth of cultural-political consciousness implicated and draws attention to the wider circumstances giving rise to one or the other type of nationalism. Examples of explicit, aggressive nationalist “pointing” abound in the materials examined below, thereby emphasizing this key question as to how to theorize the relationship between “hot” and “banal” nationalisms respectively. While this can only be answered through my later empirical discussions, Billig’s outline above serves the more immediate theoretical purpose of illustrating how discursive activity can be approached as social closure in action. Boundaries create categories, and the latter pose the follow-up question as to how the relationship between the categories in question is (con)textually defined. This opens up a second avenue to be pursued in the discussions to follow. In a contribution to social and anthropological theorizing, Gerd Baumann and André Gingrich (2004) identify different “grammars of identity.” The insight that all identifications require otherness—or that any ingroup self-constitutes through the construction of boundaries and difference—is well established and, as such, also underpins nationalism studies in their entirety. Building on seminal works by Edward Said, Edward Evans-Pritchard, and Louis Dumont, and connecting them to contemporary ethnographies, Baumann and Gingrich take a vital next step: not content with recording discourses of otherness, they pose the question as to how the relationship between “self ” and “other” is defined in a given political discourse, cultural practice, or social setting. Retranslated into my present concerns, this enables us to subject processes of social closure to further scrutiny. While nationalist closure, like all social closure, effects the exclusion of some “other” in facilitating a monopolization of certain rights and resources for the (national) ingroup, I will also ask the following questions of different nationalisms: who is the “other” they construct? Is there only one outgroup, or are there several? In the latter scenario, are all outsiders “othered” in identical ways? Does the discourse in question posit a degree of absolute or relative, permanent or temporary, difference between “self ” and “other”? In a given context, does nationalist discourse enable, demand, or prohibit the other’s potential assimilation into the “national community”? Put differently, how context-specific or diachronically enduring are particular discursive constructions of difference and hence exclusion? Baumann and Gingrich (2004) distinguish three grammars of identity: the first, which they derive from Said and term “orientalization,” constructs categories of “self ” and “other” as permanently, mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, negative “mirror images” of one another (i.e., along the pattern of “everything we are, they are not and will never be”). The second grammar, constructed on the basis of tribal affiliations first recorded by Evans-Pritchard, is defined as “segmentary” and regards identifications, alliances, and oppositions as contextbound, on a sliding scale of successive inclusions and exclusions; the pattern here

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is to turn local enemies into allies when confronted by an external, common enemy; the latter may in turn become an ally when faced with yet another group of outsiders on a larger geographical scale, and so on. Finally, a third grammar, building on Louis Dumont’s work on the Indian caste system, detects identifications of “encompassment” whereby an overarching category of belonging is held to subsume various categories of people, albeit without their necessary agreement and allocating them places of hierarchical inferiority (i.e., following the pattern of “you are really one of us, whether you recognize it or not, but your status is lower than mine”). As we discover later, it bears analytical dividends to interrogate the discursive form nationalist discourses can take also for their grammars of identity, for the way(s) in which they not only draw boundaries but also define the relations between “self ” and “other(s).” Echoing the question posed earlier about the cultural assimilation dominant majorities have demanded of “the other” in some contexts, there may indeed also be other “grammars of identity” at work in some political positions; Baumann and Gingrich’s list of three grammars should therefore not be seen as exhaustive but as merely a theoretical starting point. In any case, the notion of grammars of identity, and the kinds of analytical questions they facilitate, will help sharpen our lens for the workings and various dimensions of different forms of nationalist closure. Put more simply, a strongly assimilationist nationalist discourse, for instance, which demands that minority communities lose all markers of cultural distinctiveness and be subsumed by the dominant majority, does not cease to be nationalist; but its discursive “logic” and ideological demands are clearly different from other nationalisms that construct “the other” as fundamentally different and permanently “alien.” Finally, while identity grammars are tied to boundary-construction and hence a feature of what I term discursive form, they also implicate—as we have just begun to discover— the larger claims and interpretations articulated in the discursive materials with which I concern myself in this book. Repeating what has been said, our different analytical levels—form, content, and context—are closely intertwined and will have to be approached in tandem. With this mind, I turn to my second, closely related, analytical layer.

Ideological Content, Argumentative Structures, Narratives of History Much of what has been outlined calls for more elaborate definitional remarks concerning key terminology employed in this book. This applies particularly to the notion of ideology. There is an important link to be mentioned between discourse and ideology; as Bo Stråth and Ruth Wodak (2009: 28) emphasize in their outline of critical discourse analysis, “speaking and writing always represent,

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produce and reproduce attitudes, beliefs, opinions and ideologies” (italics added). What, then, are the latter? How is ideology, a term that has already featured in this introduction and will recur throughout this book, defined here? Ideology lies at the heart of much scholarship in the intellectual (sub)disciplines on which I here draw, including (political) linguistics, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, history, and political science. The term demands definitional clarity, particularly since it is also part of everyday language and political rhetoric, where it is often left undefined, invoked vaguely, yet put to a range of subtle though important argumentative purposes. To avoid complicity in such unreflected rhetorical trickery, I propose to follow Martha Augoustinos’s (1998) definition of the “ideological” as comprising all language and (other) social practices that contribute to the reproduction or contestation of existing relations of power. Thus defined, the concept avoids pronouncing on the veracity or otherwise of what people say and do; ideology, in this definition, can be either dominant or resistant, which makes it conceptually particularly pertinent to nationalism as a form of politics that has variously found itself in power and opposition. Either way, ideology is understood as words or actions that are socially situated and politically consequential. This feeds into this book’s epistemological core: I here work with the premise that in paying analytical attention to the contexts, meanings, and workings of written and spoken language and other sign systems, one can help illuminate wider processes of institutional reproduction and transformation and the implicated self-identifications and boundary negotiations. An important practical question remains: namely, how to operationalize this conceptualization of ideology, as a process, in research focused on various texts. In other words, how will nationalist ideology be detected, captured, and made sense of in the following discussions? Two concepts, one also derived from critical discourse analysis, the other from seminal contributions to nationalism studies, will prove vital here. The first is the notion of the topos. CDA defines topoi as “structure[s] of argument” (e.g., Krzyżanowski, Triandafyillidou, and Wodak 2009: 9)—that is, those “parts of argumentation,” the “explicit or inferable premises . . . [that] connect the argument . . . with the . . . claim” (e.g., Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 74–75). Described as “obligatory premises,” topoi (e.g., of purported threats, dangers, decline, etc.) are “central to . . . seemingly convincing fallacious arguments . . . widely adopted in prejudiced discourse” (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 22). Relevant topoi captured in the literature, to which the ensuing discussions will add, include argumentative structures centered on alleged “threats and dangers” (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 112), giving rise to a shared and heightened sense of cultural anxiety that, as will be shown, has a long record of driving nationalist sentiments; topoi of “national unity” (Kovács, Horvaáth, and Kinsky-Müngersdorff 2009) encountered in politically top-down or bottom-up invocations of an allegedly homogenous

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national community; but also various topoi of national or indeed transnational “solidarity” and “history” (Krzyżanowski 2009). Relying on a priori assumptions rather than open-minded engagement with all available evidence and counterevidence, topoi effect circular, ideologically “naturalized” arguments in which conclusions are presupposed and unreflexively asserted rather than arrived at in the course of a critical, dispassionate examination of diverse sources and data. Among the most prominent argumentative schemes to be analyzed with the help of the discourse analytical notion of the topos are those pertaining to a nation’s purported history. I will here build on a core insight in the existing nationalism studies literature that pertains to nationalist historiography or “myth making” (Bell 2003). The workings of nationalist ideology across Central Europe (as indeed elsewhere) will thereby be shown to consistently approximate John Hutchinson’s (1987: 13) seminal outline of the “moral regeneration” theme, or trope, typical of (cultural) nationalism: Nationalist historians—Palacky of the Czechs, Michelet of the French, Iorga of the Rumanians, Hrushevsky of the Ukrainians—are no mere scholars but rather “mythmaking” intellectuals who combine a “romantic” search for meaning with a scientific zeal to establish this on authoritative foundations . . . [O]nly by recovering the history of the nation through all its triumphs and disasters can its members rediscover their authentic purpose. These histories typically form a set of repetitive “mythic” patterns, containing . . . a founding myth, a golden age of cultural splendour, a period of inner decay and a promise of regeneration.

As an interpretative schema (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004) that offers a ready-made, frequently encountered, ideologically motivated and mobilizing reading of history, such narrative patterns postulating a nation’s long-distant “golden age,” followed by its subsequent decline, while awaiting its promised “re-awakening,” is well established in the literature (e.g., Karner 2006; Smith 2008). The following analyses build on this in tracing such topoi of a (national) golden past, a present decline, and a future revival across long stretches of time, in a range of sources, as well as their manifold political uses and their contestation by those offering alternative constructions of history. In addition to this characteristically nostalgic yet hopeful narrative of history, nationalist discourse also revolves around concerns about (perceived) social (dis) order. As we will discover, the two components—nationalism’s often damning judgments of the present (premised on perceptions of a “disorderly” or “unjust” here and now) in contrast to its views of both the past and the anticipated future—tend to go hand in hand. Underlying its glorifying constructions of a particular past, though not one inevitably located in the national community’s distant history, and its disgruntlement with the present is the nationalist tendency to conceive of “communities” in functionalist-organic terms; what Ernest Gellner

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(1998: 76) detects among the early romantics will be shown to have recurred, in different forms, across contexts and generations since: They taught that the organic unity of a traditional, rural community was preferable to the extreme division of labour, the functional specificity, of a modern urban society. They set out to codify the old peasant cultures, and use them as the basis of a new ethnically defined . . . nationality, which was to become the new basis of politics, replacing dynastic loyalty, religious identification, and pride of status by pride of culture.

Such romantic organicism—defining “the community or the ongoing tradition as the real unit, transcending the individual, who only finds the possibility of fulfilment[,] creativity and thought . . . [and] identity . . . within that community” (Gellner 1998: 181)—provides many nationalisms with their social ontology. Such ontological assumptions will be shown to have shaped Central Europe profoundly, albeit in contextually variable ways, since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In parts of what follows, I also touch on how (Far) Right/nationalist discourses offer a characteristic juxtaposition and synthesis of what social scientists recognize as functionalist and conflict theories of society. The crux of each is already contained in the “label”: functionalists conceive of social life as a well-oiled machine, in which different components (e.g., institutions) perform mutually complementary roles to ensure the successful reproduction of the whole (i.e., “the community”). By contrast, social conflict theorists detect antagonisms, oppositions, and exploitation in social life. What are mutually exclusive positions on the level of social theory turn out to sometimes be mutually complementary components for political discourse. Nationalists typically extol ideal visions of “their” communities—ones first located in the past, sorely missed in the present, but promised for the future: back then, or soon again, according to the subtle or often explicit nationalist claim, things “worked,” were “just,” or will be “made right” and “make sense once more.” However, while internally functionalist (i.e., with regard to the assumed, naturalized workings of “our” community), nationalists tend to conceive of external, intergroup relations through a conflict paradigm: whether informed by forms of sociobiological evolutionism or other interpretative frames, at the heart of nationalism’s ontology is the assertion— prominent among its defining topoi—that conflict between culturally diverse groups is inevitable (or even desirable). The analyses developed across the ensuing chapters also take the longestablished, obvious insight that studies of nationalism require careful contextualization one step further: we will repeatedly discover that nationalisms are often best analyzed in tandem with their ideological competitors, in wider political fields of disagreement and struggle for dominance (e.g., King 2002). With regard to the topoi and social ontology sketched above, it is already worth noting how nationalism’s obvious political “other”—the political Left—differs with regard

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to their competing and constitutive argumentative structures. As written into the very foundations of the political Left, it regards “the history of all hitherto existing society [as] the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 1967 [1848]: 79). To restate the obvious, at the root of a Marxist social ontology lies a conceptualization of societies as internally ruptured by exploitation and (class) antagonism. Yet this conflictual paradigm can—as in the case of some anti-nationalist/anti-racist discourses recorded among the contemporary Left and mentioned in later chapters—sit alongside remarkably functionalist interpretations of external, intergroup relations; ethnocultural pluralism is thereby seen as facilitating forms of invariably enriching and, unless or until disrupted by nationalist interference, effortless forms of “convivial” (Gilroy 2004) diversity and boundary crossings. Put more simply, I explore in parts of what follows just how these competing interpretative frames applied to social life—“internally homogenizing” and “externally antagonistic” (van der Veer 1994: 105) in the case of nationalism, and internally conflictual and externally functionalist in the case of some discourses on the Left—have manifested in parts of Central Europe at particular moments over the last two centuries. Both frames offer ready-made “explanations” of history, the present, and the future; both positions purport to offer (anecdotal) evidence supporting the veracity of their claims; and, typical of topoi, both can be remarkably reluctant to acknowledge counterevidence. Methodological lessons follow from this. As with all social science, contextualization plays the central role in the following discussions—on at least four levels. First, as has already been hinted, the study of nationalist politics generally demands careful contextualization, which is the conditio sine qua non for scholarship to generate empirical insights, which are of course inevitably context-bound, and wider conceptual-theoretical momentum. Second, as one of my main analytical drivers, critical discourse analysis demands, as we have also seen, careful contextualization of texts or utterances in the wider contexts, out of which language—here understood as “social practice”—emerges, and upon which it in turn acts. Third, the introductory outline of particular topoi above provides a first indication of the divergence between complex social realities (in the plural), on one hand, and their ideological-interpretative simplifications, on the other. Some of the most seminal scholarship in Habsburg/Austrian/Central European Studies (e.g., Cohen 2014; Feichtinger and Cohen 2014; Judson 2006; Judson and Rozenblit 2005; Judson and Zahra 2012; King 2002; Wingfield 2003) has explored such divergences between historical realities and their ideological distortions, particularly with regard to nationalist attempts to reshape social life in line with its own visions. The success of the present book will need to be judged by whether or not it can further develop insights generated by these justmentioned authors. Building on their work—thorough contextualization of nationalist discourse, including the use of a wide range of sources for the purposes

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of triangulation and to be able to “read” any one discourse “against the grain”— will prove vital. Finally, there is a fourth, even broader but equally important, dimension to contextualization, to which I turn next. This concerns the macroprocesses of modernization, industrialization and, more recently, of postmodernity and postindustrialization, out of which nationalisms and contemporary neo-nationalisms have emerged.

Modern and Postmodern Contexts to Nationalist Closure Crucial parts of the contexts to the following analyses are to be found in defining events and phases in (Central) European history (see Okey 2001) since the French Revolution. These have included the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the end of the Holy Roman Empire; the Congress of Vienna, the eras of the Vormärz (Pre-March) and of the German Confederation (see Gruner 2012); the Revolutions of 1848/1849 (e.g., Sperber 2005) followed by successive periods of neo-absolutism and constitutional monarchy; a gradual shift from liberalism to the “nationalization” (e.g., Judson and Rozenblit 2005) of Central European societies toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth; World War I and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire; the interwar period as an age of (new) nation-states, of economic crises, the rise of fascism and Nazism; World War II and the Holocaust; the period of the Cold War and superpower rivalry from the second half of the 1940s until 1989/1991; the age of European integration; and our current era of an apparent “renationalization.” Thus sketched, the large and complex historical terrains to be covered make the task of contextualization a very formidable one. The challenge assumes even greater dimensions once we look beyond historical key dates to capture deeper social changes and structural shifts that were their conditions of possibility. To trace nationalist closure in former Habsburg Central Europe since the nineteenth century, one needs to engage with profound social transformations generally subsumed under the term modernization. Its many dimensions comprise the Enlightenment as well as reactions against it, and, arguably yet more centrally, the fundamental changes to the social fabric brought about by industrialization and urbanization, their geographically wider, yet unequal impact enabled by the railway, educational reforms, and new technologies of communication (e.g., Judson 2006: 7). Modernization further entailed democratization, the rise of mass politics, and both the growth of vibrant public spheres and the expansion of state bureaucracies. It involved increasingly global markets dominated by European/ Western powers, and long-distance connections of supply, production, and distribution. What is more, modernity is associated with cultural shifts generally

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attributed to the secularization and individualization of social life. Yet, modernity has also seen the persistence, often indeed an exacerbation, of steep social inequalities (e.g., Piketty 2014), extreme ideological polarization, including politics of hatred and racism, and the technological capacity to conduct warfare on a global scale. As we move from a discussion of modernity to postmodernity, its muchdebated successor, we face yet other profound shifts. For formerly industrialized parts of the world, this has often entailed a postindustrial shift (Bell 1973) leading to significant loss of previous working-class employment to service-sector jobs or indeed to permanent “redundancy” (Bauman 2000; 2004). Culturally, the postmodern loss of faith in modernity’s “meta-narratives” (Lyotard 1984)— that is, science, the Enlightenment, a belief in progress—seems to be matched by growing political apathy or a generic distrust in elites, authorities, and established structures. The digital revolution since the 1970s, meanwhile, has given rise to a “network society,” indeed a new “mode of development,” defined by global flows and interconnections as well as by new exclusions and resistance identities (Castells 1996, 1997). As we discover in later chapters, some such resistance identities assume distinctly neo-nationalist forms and need to be understood as symptoms of our postindustrial, digital age. The following chapters examine a wide range of materials that illustrate that nationalist rhetoric, organizations, and politics have emerged—as prominent forms of social closure—from some of the very contexts and experiences most profoundly shaped by modernity and postmodernity. Two related points need to be made already at this stage. The first is to emphasize that nationalism cannot be explained away as merely a reactionary force of anti-modernity or of parochial traditionalism. As we will discover, nationalism’s and neo-nationalism’s relationship with core dimensions of (post)modernity is considerably more complex. One particularly well-documented illustration of this is the fact that nationalist associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries utilized “a new and universal education system”; they emerged from contexts reshaped by “new transport and communication infrastructures and . . . the growth of interregional commerce” and self-defined as the vanguard of modernity and “progressive change” (Judson 2006: 67–68). Similarly, as we shall also see, in the early twentyfirst century, prominent politicians on the neo-nationalist Right have been quick and adept at embracing digital communication technology and social media, for which growing sections of the electorate, notably including many young voters, have rewarded them at the ballot box. Put simply, (neo)nationalisms are not anti-modern but need to be understood as part of (post)modernity. Related to this, “modernity” needs to be shorn of any lingering utopian connotations; rather than delivering on the Enlightenment promise of progress and equality for all (see Malik 1996), (post)modernity has seen new forms of social closure, many of which have taken nationalist forms.

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The second point to be anticipated concerns a core theoretical issue explored in this book and mentioned earlier: contextualization of nationalist rhetoric and politics demands their analysis in conjunction with their ideological competitors and opponents. Repeatedly and across very different contexts we will discover that nationalism is never an uncontested ideological force, but one among several mutually competing political blueprints. It follows that we need to include the wider circumstances that trigger political-discursive contests. An important, though underused, passage in the early work by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) will prove important here. Bourdieu argued that at certain moments of crisis people subject a previously taken-for-granted cultural common-sense, the “universe of the undiscussed” or doxa, to critical examination. The result of such crisis-induced cultural reflections, Bourdieu predicts, is never consensus; instead, crises trigger heightened consciousness and result in a “universe of [competing] discourse[s]” (Bourdieu 1977: 166–171; also Vertovec 2000; Karner 2005b, 2007b, 2011). What, then, triggers such consciousness-raising, politicizing, and ultimately polarizing or fragmenting crises? Bourdieu’s (1977: 168) answer lies in the “objective crises” brought about by “culture contact” or by “the political and economic crises correlative with class division.” This book develops this line of argument further by postulating that modernity and postmodernity, in their entirety and their multiple dimensions summarized above, can be read through Bourdieu’s lens: far-reaching structural shifts and cultural changes associated with these successive historical epochs are thus seen as dislodging previously taken-for-granted life-worlds, triggering collective debate and disagreement about formerly undisputed, now rapidly changing, cultural environments, and in some contexts as generating endemic crises that are met by competing political responses, of which nationalism is but one. Seen from this theoretical vantage point, nationalist social closure can be related to its wider historical/structural contexts and examined alongside its ideological opponents. While the relevance and value of this thus-refined conceptual framework will be demonstrated throughout the following discussions, we also need to remember that nationalisms should themselves not be reified: for example, the difference between “hot” and “banal” nationalisms, in Billig’s terminology, and the transformation of one into the other (Skey 2009), will also be examined across a range of contexts. Synthesizing these conceptual strands, my challenge lies in capturing forms of nationalist rhetoric and mobilizing in specific parts of (former Habsburg) Central Europe, latterly in present-day Austria in particular, and across time. This requires an analytical strategy that combines thorough contextualization with attention to the argumentative-discursive details in the textual materials to be examined. Each of the theoretical strands thus outlined (i.e., social closure, deixis, identity grammars, topoi, the effects of modern crises) will recur throughout the following chapters and guide the analyses they offer. In turn, this will provide

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insights into the workings of different forms of nationalist social closure, in part also through contrast with its political competitors.

Concluding Introductory Remarks By way of a conclusion to this introductory chapter further remarks concerning the approach taken in the following discussions, as well as their geographical scales and foci, are in order. As has been outlined, this book follows a qualitative trajectory in examining a wide range of historical and contemporary materials pertaining to nationalism in (former) Habsburg Central Europe, with particular foci on parts of Cisleithania and, subsequently, contemporary Austria. Conceptually, I build on (neo-)Weberian “closure theory” to explore how social closure can be recognized, captured, documented, and analyzed. More specifically, the emphasis lies here on nationalist social closure, which we will find to be a historically recurring process with context-specific, and hence rhetorically and institutionally variable, manifestations. This entails asking the prior question as to when and how social closure acquires nationalist contours. Key to my methodological operationalization of closure theory is a discourse analytical focus on (written and spoken) language of diverse registers and in manifold settings. The critical discourse analytical approach to investigating all language as “social practice,” shaped by and in turn impacting its contexts, will be shown to be ideally suited to examining the linguistic manifestations of nationalist closure and its articulation by different political and social actors in specific institutional settings and through various cultural practices. Put simply, this is a book that examines the traces of nationalist social closure in a particular part of the world and over the (relatively) longue durée. Much hinges, of course, on the choice of settings and materials involved in this endeavor. It is therefore useful to compare my approach to two of the most significant contributions to Habsburg/Central European Studies of recent decades. Jeremy King’s (2002) “local history of Bohemian politics” provides an important point of reference, insofar as it masterfully moves between geographical scales, from the wider regional and (trans)national contexts to the particular locality—that is, Budweis/ Budějovice—that constitutes King’s focus. King thereby offers wider contextualization of local events and political shifts in Budweis/Budějovice over the entire troubled century between 1848 and 1948. What follows seeks to emulate this long historical lens and its insistence on relating local developments to their considerably wider contexts. Yet, while King remains singularly focused on Budweis/ Budějovice, my approach is geographically broader and more eclectic. Pieter Judson (2006), meanwhile, traces the workings, frustrations, and “successes” of nationalist activists in a way that is historically more narrowly delineated than King’s study—that is, stretching from the 1880s to the 1920s—yet

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geographically wider and more comparative, bringing together research on Bohemia, southern Styria, and, to a lesser extent, Tyrol and Trentino. Methodologically, the present book shares Judson’s eye for a wide range of relevant sources and his multiregional approach. At the same time, Nationalism Revisited re-widens the historical focus considerably—to stretch from the Romantics’ “national revival” (Timms 1991: 901) to the digital age of the early twenty-first century— and is, in geographical terms, not confined to the “language frontiers of Imperial Austria” (Judson 2006). The (broadly) discourse analytical perspective adopted considers careful contextualization of all data a methodological imperative. While the present book’s historical depth and geographical breadth underscore the importance of continuous contextualization, they also demand that in each case the relevance of the particular historical and geographical context and of the particular discursive data examined are made clear. Put differently, the selection of particular sources and documents to be analyzed will require justification. Contextualization and a rationale for the inclusion of particular data will be core tasks. One obvious selection criterion for many of the materials discussed in what follows is that they reveal the discursive crystallizations of nationalist closure. However, across the ensuing chapters it will transpire that this does not by itself suffice. Nationalism, as has been mentioned, needs to be understood as part of ideologically broader discursive fields; for those to be captured more fully, as this book strives to do, a wider range of political positions needs to be examined. Reiterating another point already anticipated, nationalisms themselves need to be recognized in their discursive plurality. To do so, the materials examined in what follows will therefore include well-known “top-down” textual impositions of nationalist political agendas, the articulation of nationalist and other positions in media and other forms of public discourse, as well as their everyday, “bottom-up” negotiation by the less prominent, often problematically labeled “ordinary social actors.” In each case, a rationale for the selection of the particular voices captured and discussed will prove important. Their analysis further develops empiricalhistorical scholarship on the political contests and shifts that have shaped Central Europe, and Austria more narrowly, over a period of more than two hundred years. What is more, the theoretical apparatus applied and refined in the present book provides new insights into the workings of nationalist discourses per se. Finally, there are additional empirical questions and conceptual angles particular to single chapters, rather than applicable to this monograph in its entirety, which have not yet been mentioned but which are introduced when relevant. These additional questions are also meaningfully addressed by the conceptual perspective and its methodological operationalization (i.e., nationalist closure to be examined with the help of CDA and other pertinent theoretical “leads”) adopted here. The likelihood remains that my selection of particular texts and other data for analysis will be questioned by critical readers. Selection is of course inevitable. It

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is my contention that the following discussions achieve analytical coherence and manageability through a consistently applied strategy. In each historical context, my focus will be on two types of texts and statements: first, discursive turningpoints that altered the broad course of events or reflected a change in prominent ways of talking, thinking, and acting; second, recurring (or typical) texts and statements representing widely-circulating, frequently encountered patterns of argumentation and mobilization. Each thematically and historically focused chapter explores its core issues through carefully researched textual examples and their settings from within the (former) Habsburg Empire, especially from present-day Austria. In addition to close engagement with relevant historical and social scientific scholarship, Nationalism Revisited is underpinned by detailed analyses of a wide range of pertinent discursive materials: these include philosophical/literary writings (especially in chapter 1), political manifestos and media discourse (i.e., parts of chapters 2 to 7), biographical writings (especially in chapter 3, parts of which discuss select life histories of Holocaust survivors), other relevant cultural and media representations (especially chapters 4 to 6), and readers’ letters to tabloid newspapers (especially chapters 6 and 7). Each chapter thereby follows a similar analytical structure: an outline of the wider historical context is followed or accompanied by the selection and analysis of particular discursive data that reflect the workings of (nationalist) social closure in its respective contexts. As the discussion unfolds, and alongside such structural commonalities, the relative analytical weight to be placed on secondary literature and primary materials will also noticeably shift. In chapters 1 to 3, the emphasis will lie on secondary literature, which will meet the crucial purpose of providing the historical contextualization needed for a longue durée analysis. This having been said, these earlier discussions will also already be complemented by relevant primary data (i.e., philosophical texts, political statements and speeches, prominent cultural representations, and the aforementioned life histories) that will be presented as some key formulations of proto-nationalist and early nationalist discourse or, conversely, as reflections on experiences of enduring extreme discursive and social closure. From chapter 4 on, the relative analytical emphasis will gradually shift toward a more systematic focus on primary materials, to be found in a wide range of relevant sources, which are analyzed as instances of nationalist rhetoric and mobilization since the postwar era. Secondary literature will of course continue to play a vital contextualizing function in those later chapters as well. However, new data will occupy a (relatively) more prominent place there, through which both continuities and some discontinuities with nationalist discourse and social closure in earlier eras will be traced. Further, my moves in and out of different local and regional contexts are a deliberate and necessary part of the analytical strategy employed. It is precisely by departing from exclusively and a priori national units of analysis that this book helps illuminate the political-discursive work invested, across complex and highly

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heterogeneous historical contexts, in processes of nationalist closure. Where much political and some academic discourse works with the circular assumption that nationalisms merely reflect the purportedly inevitable “convergence”—in Ernest Gellner’s seminal paraphrasing (1983)—of “political and cultural units,” Nationalism Revisited develops the constructivist counterargument (e.g., Cohen 2003; Wingfield 2003) further. It does so, first, by employing its discourse analytical strategies to capture processes of social closure as manifest in a wide range of empirical data; second, the book’s longue durée perspective demonstrates how different, yet broadly comparable, institutional and discursive mechanisms of boundary-definition and entrenchment can be discerned from the late eighteenth/early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries across a diversity of localities, regions, and often distinctly “pluricultural” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014) life-worlds. The value of the diachronic approach adopted here thus manifests in its sustained attempt to highlight how (nationalism’s) discursive and organizational features recur, or rather have been reappropriated, over time and across contexts, yet in context-specific fashion. We discover that argumentative structures and mobilizing strategies hark back, albeit often undoubtedly inadvertently, to older claims and ways of arguing and organizing. The latter are thereby remolded to fit new circumstances. I will capture the discursive dimensions of this through the heuristic category of the palimpsestic rewriting of older textual and ideational strands (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). Adopting a broad and ambitious historical perspective, then, this book builds most directly on Pieter Judson’s (2006: 17) seminal study of the late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century “process[es] of attempted nationalization,” which were driven by nationalist activists and organizations and their “hard ideological labor” dedicated to creating “frontiers” and to imposing reified, singular, distinctly national identities. In his conclusion, Judson (2006: 257) raises the possibility that “we may perhaps liberate ourselves from the unnecessary discursive prison that nationalists around us continue to re-create.” Current developments across and beyond Europe reveal that renewed nationalization has become a hallmark of the early twenty-first century. As later chapters show, boundaries are currently rehardening, identities are being re-reified, and calls for national frontiers to be protected or closed are louder than they have been for decades. Nationalist social closure is, once again, with and all around us. In what follows, I pay close attention to how exactly, on the linguistic/discursive and organizational levels, such nationalist “prisons” have—across different contexts and during successive eras in Central Europe’s, especially in Austria’s, experiences of modernity and postmodernity—been created, institutionalized, and experienced, but also contested.

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Notes 1. Instead of engaging with ongoing debates (e.g., Piontek 2018) as to the precise outer limits of Central Europe, I start from the premise that as an internally highly diverse area it includes—but is not limited to—the territories that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867 until 1918. 2. It is worth noting that in his most recent work, Andreas Wimmer (2018) explores issues of “nation building” in particularly impressive historical and geographical breadth, posing the question as to Why Some Countries Come Together while Others Fall Apart. 3. More recently, Ruth Wodak (2016: 19) has returned to the distinction between “form and content,” insisting that an analysis of contemporary right-wing populisms must span both of these dimensions. I here draw on this important argument, while developing it in novel empirical and conceptual directions.

Chapter 1

THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES

d A

t the dawn of the post–Cold War period, Arjun Appadurai (1990: 308, 295– 296) observed in the then “new global cultural economy” a “contest” between “sameness and difference.” Contrary to the fear that modernization involves inevitable standardization, Appadurai located a “tension between cultural homogenization and . . . heterogenization” at the heart of the late twentieth century. Appadurai argued further that “five cultural flows” underpinned these struggles between universalism and particularism. He termed these flows “ethnoscapes” (i.e., the movement of people), “finanscapes” (i.e., the cross-border flow of capital), “technoscapes” (i.e., the transnational diffusion of technology), “mediascapes,” and “ideoscapes.” The latter two “cultural flows,” in particular, warrant closer examination here. Mediascapes, according to Appadurai (1990: 299), include “the capabilities to produce and disseminate information ([e.g., through] newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios etc.) . . . and the images of the world created by those media.” Ideoscapes interface with the latter dimension, for they include these and other “images of the world” that are “often directly political, [articulating] ideologies of states [or] the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.” Later chapters of this book will corroborate the continuing relevance of Appadurai’s argument—particularly of his awareness of the often hostile confrontations between centripetal and centrifugal political forces—to contemporary globalization and (neo-)nationalism. Yet, nearly thirty years on, Appadurai’s framework needs to be extended: each of the “cultural flows” he identified in 1990 have since acquired novel dimensions, contexts, and characteristics (e.g., digital social

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media and their more recent impact on each of the five “scapes”). In the present chapter, however, my intention is different. I here propose to project Appadurai’s ideas backwards and to show that at least some of the above-mentioned flows have a considerably longer history. In fact, some flow of the media of exchange, of technology, people, images, and ideas across social and geographical boundaries is a hallmark of all human civilization. The key question is therefore not whether such cultural flows occur in a given historical setting but what form they take and what consequences they have. Premised on a historical broadening of Appadurai’s framework, I argue here that two of its core insights can be extended to illuminate the early stages in the history of nationalism in former Habsburg Central Europe. The two core insights concern, first, the closely interrelated phenomena of mediascapes and ideoscapes as defined above, and, second, the observation that, rather than enabling homogenization, cultural flows can trigger political opposition, counterreactions, and tensions. My historical focus in this chapter is the period from the 1780s until the period prior to the revolutions of 1848/49. More specifically, I focus on thinkers and writers commonly associated with the romantic movement and their impact—often across geographical and cultural distance—on the predominantly German-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire. It is not my aim to develop a philosophical or literary analysis of particular texts. Instead, this discussion is geared toward contextualizing a number of lasting contributions to scholarly, cultural, and political life made in the period in question, and, most importantly, toward revealing their discursive patterns and argumentative structures that, as we shall discover, were to subsequently shape nationalisms across (former) Habsburg Central Europe. Put simply, this chapter reveals discursive structures in the writings of some key figures of (German) romanticism. It then discusses moments, places and cultural sites of crystallization, when romantic (national) discourses manifested in the historical and geographical context in question.

Locating, Tracing, and Analyzing Romantic Discourse Before providing conceptual and methodological groundwork for this chapter, it seems prudent to offer more preemptive disclaimers. While it is a purpose of this chapter to trace the structures and circulation of romantic ideas across considerable distances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is crucial not to postulate uniformity among the discourses in question. Romantic ideas, throughout the period in focus here, showed considerable internal diversity and underwent shifts in the positions being adopted. It will turn out that the thinkers and texts to be examined display important family characteristics typical of romanticism (e.g., Safranski 2013), while also furnishing different, not always easily coexisting, “grammars of identity” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004)

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and argumentative topoi. Therein lies a main challenge: to extrapolate the discursive patterns, argumentative strands, and structures of interpretation that defined romanticism, in its internal diversities, and that—as we discover in later chapters—were subsequently, and repeatedly, reappropriated and rewritten by later generations of nationalists (see Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). This raises questions of broader disciplinary relevance. This book involves a sociologist treading on intellectual terrain already exceptionally well covered by historians and philosophers. What, then, will this sociologist offer that promises to be novel and relevant across disciplinary boundaries? The answer to this important question lies in the particular analytical apparatus sketched in the introduction: that is, the application of critical discourse analytical tools, complemented by Baumann and Gingrich’s notion of “grammars of identity,” to texts that are here understood as social practices to be analyzed both in their generative contexts and in relation to their political intentions and (later) impact. Crucially, the discursive structures and their early crystallizations discussed in this chapter pave the way to the second step to be taken in later chapters: in this second step it will be shown how particular ideas, interpretations, and claims came to enable social closure over the longue durée. Further, it is important to briefly sketch how this fits into nationalism studies at large. As will become clear, this discussion does not set itself the task of addressing, let alone resolving, the long-standing, paradigmatic clash between modernist (e.g., Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983) and ethnosymbolist (e.g., Smith 1986; Özkirimli 2000) positions on the historical origins of nationalism and its sociological conditions of possibility. Instead, to repeat, I here examine discursive characteristics of romantic, (proto-)nationalist discourses and their textual and cultural crystallizations in predominantly German-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire between the end of the eighteenth century and the momentous events of 1848/49 that are often referred to as “the romantic revolution” and the “springtime of the peoples” (e.g., Sperber 2005: 1). An examination of how such an analysis may reinflect the modernist-ethnosymbolist debate will not be offered here. That said, such a wider discussion is certainly desirable, and I hope that the arguments developed here may spur broader theoretical reflections. For instance, future research could probe historically yet deeper and examine whether—and, if so, where—the discursive-argumentative characteristics of romantic nationalism discussed below already featured in the age prior to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. While earlier epochs lie beyond my present historical focus, a potential resolution of the modernist-ethnosymbolist debate will require such a longer historical lens (e.g., Smith 2008). There is more to be said concerning the methodological approach adopted here and in subsequent chapters. I have referred to the textual and cultural crystallizations of romantic nationalism as my focus in this chapter. While I will persist with this terminology throughout, there is another metaphor that usefully

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captures the approach adopted below. Instead of a focus on one particular locality, in its complexities and over a prolonged period of time, as defines some of the most compelling historical scholarship on former Habsburg Central Europe (e.g., Boyer 1995; King 2002), the questions examined here demand a different methodological strategy. The capturing of “cultural flows” à la Appadurai requires geographical flexibility and the tracing of movements and appropriations of ideas across distances and boundaries. Metaphorically, this may be likened to what biologists do when researching mushrooms connected, often over surprising distances, by subterranean hyphae. My coverage of considerable historical and geographical distances resembles this: I locate and analyze texts as prominent, visible “outgrowths” of larger networks of interconnected ideas—of an ideational mycelium, so to speak. To continue the analogy: for biologists researching (rather than picking) mushrooms, not only the fungi above surface level but also their deeper roots and wider interconnections across space matter. Similarly, while different texts and thinkers examined here could be looked at in isolation, this would miss the structural characteristics and less obvious connections shared between them. My focus here thus comprises the structural-discursive similarities as well as historical connections and ideational “flows” between texts and thinkers. The following analysis shares ontological assumptions with conceptualizations of language as “an elementary medium for understanding and changing the world”; the uses of political narratives are thereby recognized as including the articulation of meaning and the construction of legitimacy, and as enabling powerclaims (Gadinger, Jarzebski, and Yildiz 2014: 3; 10–11, my translation, italics added). The ways in which romantic discourses offered increasingly prominent interpretations of the world and political blueprints for altering it are here analyzed through concepts outlined in the introduction: these include the identitybestowing discursive work performed by rhetorical pointing, or deixis; coexisting “grammars of identity” postulating different relationships between “self ” and “other”; and recurring topoi and interpretative schemata, offering a distinctive view of history. Also keeping with the approach sketched in the introduction, I begin with contextualization.

Contexts Habsburg Central Europe’s best-known, historically most consequential feature was its multinational makeup. This is succinctly summarized by Robin Okey’s (2001: 12–13) geographical and demographic “snapshot” of the situation in 1780: Excepting far-flung possessions in the Austrian Netherlands . . . and the duchies of Milan and Mantua in Lombardy (all acquired in 1714–1715) and the scattered Vorlande . . . in south-west Germany, the core of the Monarchy contained a dozen nationalities, albeit in a relatively compact territory (by 1780) of over 230,000 square miles

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. . . The population . . . was approaching 22 million (the Hungarian lands contributing some 45%, the Czech and Alpine lands 40%, Galicia and the Bukovina 15%) . . . Vienna [was] the hub of a wheel whose three chief spokes since 1526 had been German, Magyar and Czech, making up . . . approximately a quarter, a fifth and a sixth of the population of the central lands.

Ethnic and geographical units were anything but congruent. Each big territorial component—that is, the Czech, Alpine, and Hungarian lands (with the latter two stretching far beyond present-day Austria and Hungary), Galicia, and the Bukovina—was inhabited by culturally-linguistically diverse populations. Moreover, and an aspect that would acquire utmost political importance in due course, power was distributed highly unequally on an aggregate level among the Empire’s constitutive groups: for instance, (some) German-speakers occupied privileged positions as “the land-owning and bourgeois class in Slav areas”; in terms of political loyalty, the Habsburgs could “most naturally rely” on the geographically scattered German-speakers who “had never acquired a collective identity to match their historic loyalties to province, dynasty and, where relevant, Holy Roman Empire” (Okey 2001: 15, 13). Yet, while ethnic sentiments existed and mattered in the late 1700s, they could not at this stage—and not yet for at least another century, particularly in some of the Empire’s most heterogeneous areas (see King 2002; Judson 2006; Cohen 2014)—command the singular, exclusive identifications nationalism presupposes and demands. The subsequently highly divisive overlap and articulation of ethnic diversity and social hierarchy notwithstanding, this was not yet the period of nationalist mass mobilization but still a world dominated by late feudal structures and, for the majority, by a largely agricultural mode of production, although the epochal transformations of urbanization and gradual industrialization lay not too far ahead. In this context, “peasant identity was a diffuse mix of religious, linguistic, social and regional factors,” with (emerging) “national consciousness” largely confined to “historic nations,” such as Hungary, which had previously “had a state of [her] own” and which had retained a linguistically and in some cases religiously marked (e.g., Calvinist) elite; in the Czech case, “memories of Bohemian independence,” combined with the widespread experience of status subordination (see above), furnished a “Bohemian Slav” identity, which was much less pronounced in neighboring Moravia (Okey 2001: 17). In political and cultural terms, the late eighteenth century also saw, as elsewhere, the growing impact of the Enlightenment. In Habsburg Central Europe, taking the shape of an “enlightened absolutism” (see Okey 2001: 25–52) associated with the reigns of Maria Theresia (1740–1780) and her successor and son Joseph II (1780–1790), this manifested in educational and legal reforms, some administrative centralization and “stream-lining,” military conscription, and some extension of civil rights (for the complexities of Theresian-Josephinian reforms, see Beller 2006: 91–102).

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In longer historical terms, an enduring particularity of the Habsburg lands must be remembered: the fact that over successive historical epochs, Habsburg territories, viewed in their entirety, straddled different political units and thus subsumed different loyalties, identifications, and points of political orientation. Put simply, until its dismantling in 1806, the Holy Roman Empire’s southeasterly boundaries cut across Habsburg lands, internally separating the Alpine and Czech parts from the Hungarian territories as well as from the Tuscan and Lombardic possessions. In turn, the Holy Roman Empire was “not a state” but a “legal or peace order” subdivided into smaller feudal units with only minor “provisions for . . . diplomacy and war”; it provided a “channel for handling disputes between its members and between individual rulers and subjects” and was “associated, at elite level, with a . . . German ‘patriotism’ which in turn Austria and Prussia claimed to represent” (Breuilly 2002: 5). This incongruence, or only partial overlap, of different and coexisting political and territorial-cultural units continued after the Congress of Vienna (1814/15), when the newly created German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) subsumed the Czech and Alpine lands of the Habsburg Empire, and of German-, Czech-, Italian-, Slovene-, Croat- and Polish-speakers (Langewiesche 1992: 356), but again excluded the Hungarian territories, including present day Slovakia, Transylvania, and large parts of the Balkans. The consequences of these territorial-political overlaps and ambivalences would prove persistent and complex. As Wolf Gruner (2012: 99) argues, Vienna’s leadership within the German Confederation after 1815—and subsequently the growing tensions with Prussia—need to be seen in the context of the Habsburgs’ centurieslong role as both a major power in Central Europe and as closely entangled in German history. John Breuilly (2002: 104) emphasizes that ethnonational categories often imposed rigidly in hindsight were in flux for centuries, when “Germany was a cultural and political ‘zone,’ not a country with distinct boundaries,” and were still being formed in the nineteenth century: the “terms ‘Germany,’ ‘Austria,’ and ‘Prussia’ are elusive,” Breuilly (2002: 6) concludes; “they refer to political entities which underwent constant territorial and institutional change and shifts in relationships both among themselves and with the rest of Europe.” The thinkers and texts discussed here played important roles in the ideological struggles over boundaries, identities, and histories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Arguably the most crucial contextual factor to these political-definitional struggles was the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars across Central Europe, in and beyond Habsburg lands. As this chapter illustrates, an internally heterogeneous discursive formation, comprising literary, philosophical, and political writings often subsumed under the notion of “romanticism” and commonly, though too simplistically, seen as an anti-Enlightenment reaction (e.g., Malik 1996), played a particularly prominent part here. In addition to preparing the ground for later nationalist poli-

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tics, this discursive formation also spanned the German-speaking world at the time, originating largely outside the Habsburg Empire but impacting it directly. Thus, we here come face to face with a late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury media- and ideoscape. Further, this cross-boundary “flow” of romantic ideas and texts underlines the close historical connections between the territories of present-day Germany and Austria. As significant contributions to historical scholarship suggest (e.g., Kretschmann 2003), post-1945 Austrian society has sometimes been too preoccupied with presentist concerns, including the delineation and reproduction of clear symbolic boundaries separating Austria from Germany (e.g., Thaler 2001; Karner 2005a), to engage with their historical entanglements. Harry Ritter (1984: 235) has gone further in declaring that while this relative historiographical neglect since 1945 is politically understandable, the regrettable weakness of a “comparative history” of Germany and Austria “has meant that developments in Germany have [often] been treated in unwarranted isolation from those of Austria-Hungary.” This chapter, in examining the discursive structures and ideational flows of romantic discourse, also makes a modest but particular contribution to redressing this imbalance.

The Origins of the Romantic Ideoscape Our ideational “archaeology” of proto-nationalism starts with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). The discursive line stretching from Herder’s wide-ranging thought, which included a form of “humanistic nationalism” (Wimmer 2002: 46), to later nationalist movements has been widely asserted (e.g., Gellner 1998: 30–34; Avraham 2016: 513) and anchored in Herder’s understanding of “human history” as revolving around culturally distinct “ways of life” whose “standards of excellence” are “internal to themselves and . . . expressed in distinctive languages” (Pinkard 2002: 133). Yet, Pinkard also argues that the nationalist “re-cycling” of Herder’s “organic” understanding of culture and language occurred in a “manner unintended by Herder” (also see Eggel, Liebich, and Mancini-Griffoli 2007: 54– 55, 75; Bhatti 2014: 23). This suggests a discursive ambivalence, arguably even a polysemy, in Herder’s thought that requires discussion. Rather than merely reasserting Herder’s ideological-philosophical relevance to later nationalists, we need to get a clearer sense of which particular discursive assumptions, claims, and features in Herder’s oeuvre have subsequently recurred and been selectively reappropriated in nationalists’ speeches, texts, organizational efforts, and political “logics.” The breadth of Herder’s contributions has led to him being portrayed as a “poet, critic, linguist, philosopher, educationalist and theologian” all in one, with his enduring legacies being summarized as follows:

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Alongside Justus Möser, he discovers [sic] the terms “peoplehood” and “nation.” As a philosopher, he develops a new historical consciousness that transcends the Enlightenment’s optimism of progress to postulate a different development . . . [through which] the whole universe is seen as humanity’s historical space. He discovers the folk song for Germany . . . [R]omanticism’s song and the new image of the middle ages are unthinkable without him. . . . In contrast to the Enlightenment, Herder saw all poetry and language as grounded in the people [and its original strength, and] . . . he was open to other cultures . . . Herder the poet discovers himself in the exotic. As translator of folk songs in diverse languages, of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, English, Italian and Spanish poetry, he enriches the German spirit. An incomparable gift of empathy and understanding enables him to turn the most distant into the most intimate. (Flemmer 1960: 5–6, 12, 15)1

The ambivalence of Herder’s legacy, his use and appeal to later generations of nationalists and his simultaneous relevance to a multicultural recognition of the “integrity and diversity of other cultures” (Bowie’s 1996: 15; also Chirot 1996; Spencer 1997; White 2005: 167, 180–181), is discernible in this account. While discussions of Herder’s corpus of work have to acknowledge its reach and heterogeneity, it bears particular analytical dividends for a longue durée study of nationalism to pay closer attention to some of the central discursive building blocks in his writings. Several features stand out. The first is Herder’s critical assessment of his immediate present, the eighteenth century, which he regarded as a weak, “aged” epoch that he juxtaposed to a “greater future,” one he wanted to help bring about (Flemmer 1960: 18). The following extracts, taken from his Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität and from the fifteenth book of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, are telling in this regard: One should not predict from Europe’s aging the general decline . . . of all of humanity. The latter’s wellbeing is generally unaffected by the demise of some of the branches of its much larger, stronger tree. New ones appear instead and prosper. Why should the western part of our northern hemisphere be the sole possessor of culture? (Herder 1960 [1795–1796]: 33) Everything is transitory in human history . . . We kick our ancestors’ dust and move on the sunken rubble of destroyed human kingdoms . . . Nations flourish and decline. In a declined nation, young, more beautiful blossoms will not reappear . . . In a new place, new capabilities will flourish, those of the old place will disappear. (Herder 1960 [1784–1791]: 128–129)

When, elsewhere, Herder (1960: 184) asserts that “the better a state, the more it will protect humanity,” and that “perfectibility is . . . the means and end for all the character of the human species demands and enables,” he offers an early version of a view of history that we will encounter time and again among later nationalists (though not only among them): the idea that current ills will be

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reversed in a better future, that from a present point of weakness one builds toward purported improvements and “possible regeneration” (Spencer 1997: 6; also Eggel, Liebich, and Mancini-Griffoli 2007: 76). Yet, even here there are ambivalences and competing strands in Herder’s writings, rather than a singular discursive logic. In his earlier Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, we detect only a partial corroboration of, and at times a skeptical response to, a topos postulating cultural decline followed by revival: I am not writing a history of the age when, oppressed in spirit and body and unnerved by disunity and ignorance, Germany lost her character . . . Then came a time of new education, ways of thinking and religion, of law and morality . . . when nations sunk in dust lifted themselves, when one by one countries dispersed the darkness . . . when the sciences . . . were revived. May I carry on? No, I must not, when the fairytales of a golden age of science is taken as historical fact . . . when the notion of complete wisdom displacing past barbarism is accepted . . . when all history is derived from these gloriously poetic tales, then I cannot write. (Herder 1960 [1767]: 238–239)

Herein we also encounter parts of what would prove useful to nationalists: first, Germany and other “nations” are treated as basic ontological units (for an earlier discussion, see Hayes 1927: 720–726); second, a hefty dose of skepticism regarding Enlightenment notions of linear progress and of science as singularly sufficient for it to come about. Herder’s alternative view of history implicates his other central discursive building blocks: the centrality of language, Christian faith, concepts of naturalness (as opposed to “artificiality”), and a preoccupation with cultural units understood in primordial fashion—put simply, “romanticist notions of fullness, spirituality, depth, sensitivity, and authenticity” (Hansen 1999: 40–42). Herder’s belief in the primacy of culture, rather than of the individual or science, becomes especially apparent in his take on language, which—again in Über die neuere deutsche Literatur—he defined as the “first and greatest of all inventions.” Particularly significant, for our purposes, are the postulated interconnections between one’s mother tongue and “the nation”: If words are not just signs, but containers for thoughts, then a language [is] a vast country of thoughts that have become visible . . . We think in language . . . Every nation speaks as it thinks, and it thinks by speaking . . . [and] the three goddesses of human knowledge, truth, beauty and virtue, became as national as language . . . [Our] mother tongue, the whole domain of terms we took in as mother’s milk, this whole world of knowledge that is not taught yet gives rise to all . . . good sense, what a collection of ideas! A mountain, in contrast to which a few philosophical abstractions are but a molehill, drops compared to the ocean. (Herder 1960 [1767]: 246–249)

One may condense key propositions in Herder’s writings that would subsequently help shape the history of nationalism in and beyond Central Europe (see

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Karner and Kazmierczak 2017): first, a dynamic, nonlinear understanding of history defined by ruptures and shifts, instead of a linear model of Enlightenment progress from “barbarism” to “civilization”; second, a collectivist ontology that defines individuals as intrinsically embedded in communities and to which we will return in this book’s later chapters; third, and in contrast to some later reappropriations of Herder’s ideas, a patriotism that was “democratic” rather than chauvinistic, keen to stress both virtues and vices among all nations—premised, in other words, on respect for cultural pluralism (Safranski 2013: 24–28; also Hayes 1927: 734). The already mentioned ambivalence in Herder’s ontology, reflected in his insistence on the interrelations between “language, places and people,” calls for further discussion. Sonia Sikka (2007: 174–175) cites two well-known passages in Herder’s writings: “‘The mode of representation of each nation is the more deeply imprinted upon it because it is their own, bound to their sky and their earth, sprung from their form of life (Lebensart)’ (Ideen, 298)” and “‘Whoever is raised in the same language, whoever learns to pour his heart, to express his soul in it, belongs to the people (Volk) of this language’ (Briefe, 304).” Sikka illustrates (see Karner and Kazmierczak 2017) that paradigmatic ideas are articulated here: life-worlds include historically enduring traditions, or “collective patterns of significance” (Sikka 2007: 175), along with their geographical settings (i.e., the importance of place) and the individuals born into them. Seen from this perspective, the world is constituted by linguistic groups (see Robinette 2011: 199). This organic understanding of culture, with its equation of linguistic and cultural categories, entails a preference for “unitary” identities (rather than complex, hybrid identifications), seen as being rooted in particular places and their histories. With reference to the “limits” of Herder’s “tolerance,” Sikka (2007: 178) pinpoints a key juncture: While he enthusiastically admires . . . the ancient Hebrews, he is much less enthusiastic about the . . . Jewish . . . diaspora. According to Herder, once the Jewish people were no longer . . . in a particular place, their culture deteriorated and their language became “a sad mixture” (Ebräischen Poesie 678). The remedies [Herder] proposed . . . are a return of Jews to their homeland . . . or their full assimilation to the cultures upon which they have been . . . grafted.

This reveals the contours of an essentialist “logic,” a reification of an assumed “organic unity of the original culture” (White 2005: 172), which—all implicated distortions notwithstanding—helps explain Herder’s subsequent, still continuing, appeal to later nationalists. In the latter discourses, as we shall discover, this reappears in binary “grammars of identity” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004) that construct the national “self ” and “other” as mutually exclusive and permanently and diametrically opposed to one another. Elsewhere, I have described such partial rewritings and selective reappropriations of philosophical texts and ideas, which often occur over long stretches

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of time, through the trope of the “palimpsest” (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017; also Bhatti 2014: 36), to which I return in later chapters. Such reuses of, and elaborations on, earlier ideas are selective, committed to present political agendas rather than to a history of ideas or the integrity and complexity of the original texts. In Herder’s case, later ideological palimpsests of his ideas have tended to pay little attention to the shifts and ambivalences in his thinking, to which I have alluded and which are comprehensively discussed in the relevant secondary literature (e.g., Eggel, Liebich, and Mancini-Griffoli 2007; Robinette 2011; White 2005). Also noteworthy, though not always noticed by later nationalists, is Herder’s (1960 [1793–1797]: 200–202) warning, reflecting at least a shift in discursive emphasis, concerning what he terms Nationalwahn, only unsatisfactorily translated as “national madness”: National madness is a terrible name. Whatever has taken root in a nation, how could this not be truth? . . . Language, law, education, daily life—all confirm it . . . Whoever doubts it is an idiot, an enemy, a heretic or stranger . . . The characters of different peoples, sects, social ranks . . . push against one another, and each settles more on its core . . . What is terrible, however, is how madness can attach itself to words . . . [like] blood . . . inheritance, property . . . In our lifetime we have witnessed what frenzy the words rights, humanity, freedom, equality can cause in a vibrant people; what hatred the words aristocrat and democrat have triggered within and beyond its borders . . . War, whenever it is not forced self-defense, but an attack on a docile, neighboring nation, is an inhumane undertaking . . . Can there be a worse sight . . . than two opposing armies murdering one another? . . . Every nation must consider it a threat when another is insulted . . . Hated be those who disregard others’ rights and welfare, who insult others’ customs . . . [W]hoever crosses borders . . . to force their gods onto their neighbors . . . shall find an enemy amongst all other nations . . . and an alliance of all civilized nations against such single aggressors.

While there is an immediate context to Herder’s reflections, namely the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, we here also reencounter—alongside the obvious “humanistic warning” (Löwy 1999: 80)—other discursive features that would prove to be of lasting appeal to later thinkers and politicians centered on their respective nation-states, particularly in the context of real or perceived external threats. In particular, this passage displays and combines two discursive characteristics: first, the recognition that social and political life is subject to powerful forces (e.g., words that galvanize the masses) and interventions (e.g., the forging of countermovements, such as the anticipated “alliance of civilized nations”); also, Herder here articulates views that are indeed “anti-despotic and anti-imperialistic,” objecting to the “unnatural enlargement of states and the wild mixture of various nations under one sceptre” (Schmidt 1956: 408). Second, Herder again naturalizes, rather than questions, nations and borders as his basic ontological entities. Herder’s life journey took him from East Prussia and Riga to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and back to Germany. A frequent traveler, he spent much of his

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later years in Weimar. His subsequent impact on the emerging nationalisms in Habsburg Central Europe was, as we shall discover, an indirect and mediated one from afar, so to speak. Therein lies the relevance of the concept of the ideoscape, which frames this chapter and with which I seek to capture the spread of ideas and more elaborate worldviews across geographical distances and, in this case, over lengthy stretches of time. We now turn to the next major node in this ideoscape (or metaphorical mycelium) of romanticism that emerged and grew from the late eighteenth and then well into the nineteenth centuries, and one of whose “outgrowths” we can discern as nationalism.

Political Romanticism In his discussion of “modernity’s segmentation into nation-states,” Andreas Wimmer (2002: 44–47) locates the ideational precursors to later and contemporary forms of primordialism, which treat ethnicity as “a basic factor of social life,” not only in Herder but also in “political romanticism, such as Fichte’s idea of educating the nation.” Political romanticism is here considered an extension of the cultural and literary phenomenon that was romanticism (discussed below). While the two share important family characteristics, there are similarly significant distinctions to be drawn between them. Rüdiger Safranski (2013: 393) condenses the latter by stating that “the romantic is a necessary part of any vibrant culture,” whereas “it is political romanticism that is dangerous.” Safranski substantiates this by surveying some of political romanticism’s many historical manifestations over the last 220 years, from anti-Napoleonic politics and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist organizations of increasingly anti-Semitic bent, to Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism’s stählerne Romantik (steel-like romanticism) with its “vulgarized,” murderous synthesis with a (mis)reading of Darwinian sociobiology (Safranski 2013: 348–369; also Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). Political romanticism displays the aforementioned essentialism, a reifying “logic” that regards individuals as mere epiphenomena of their ascribed cultural community, which in turn is reduced to its presumed primordial “essence.” The individual subject thereby loses its “philosophical and epistemological primacy,” being discursively “abandoned,” as it were, “to tradition like the wave is subsumed into the ocean” (Mertens 2014: 273–274). Such is the tenor of the collectivizing organic romanticism (Gellner 1998) that has reappeared in reified discourses and monolithic portrayals of “culture,” “tradition,” “nation,” or “race” during successive epochs and across contexts, and that works with a stock of distinctive topoi, forms of rhetorical deixis, and identity grammars. Among the family characteristics common to both romanticism and political romanticism is a defining element of social critique. This manifests in opposition

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to modern(izing) society’s functional division of labor and concomitant disciplinary specialisms (Safranski 2013: 60; Bowie 1996: 13; Wellbery 2012: 24), and implies a romantic self-perception as a counter-hegemonic, subversive, ultimately reintegrative force; in Safranski’s (2013: 392) words, “the romantic . . . is almost invariably involved whenever a disquiet with the real . . . triggers a search for alternatives” and the “possibility of transcendence.” This element of social and cultural critique further connects, discursively and axiologically, with a view of history the contours of which we began to note in our discussion of Herder and that would come to resonate in much nationalist historiography and “myth-making” (Bell 2003) over successive eras: this is a schematic construction of history as having allegedly passed through a now bygone—and ethnically defined—“golden era,” followed by a “fall from grace” that has led to present circumstances found unsatisfactory and alienating (e.g., Dusche 2013: 42) and that are in turn juxtaposed to an anticipated future promising a return to former glories or a state of social and individual completeness (e.g., Hutchinson 1987; Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). Such constructions of history thrive on perceptions of present crises, in reaction to which a (nationalist) response is formulated, and often employ historical analogies (see Müller 2002; Dalos 1999) in their interpretations of the present and their promises for the future. In relation to these discursive features, the significance of the Reden an die deutsche Nation (Speeches to the German nation) by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) cannot be overstated. While Fichte’s post-Kantian idealist philosophy significantly impacted the “Jena group” of romantics, to which we will turn next, it was in Fichte’s later Reden (1807/1808) that he made the most enduring contribution to an emerging nationalist discourse. Fichte’s speeches reveal strong anti-French sentiments, to be read in the context of the Napoleonic domination of Germany at the time (Hagen n.d.: 1), and have been widely recognized as a major boost to the German national movement in the early nineteenth century, a historical context in which Fichte ascribed a special role to the German people (e.g., Abaschnik 2013: 237). Over longer historical stretches, Fichte’s construction of the “German nation” would in due course be variously interpreted: after 1871, as an “anticipation” of the German Empire; after 1945, as part of Nazism’s precursors; and from today’s vantage point, as part of the wider construction of nation-states in the nineteenth century (Reitz 2012: 47). However, Fichte’s thought also underwent significant shifts over time, which transformed his attitude toward France and the Revolution. Thus, as late as 1799, Fichte showed admiration for France, stressing that he was “eager to . . . support the Republic and open the eyes to Germans”; his decisive change of heart, identification of France as “the enemy,” and turn toward “patriotism and romantic irrationalism” did not occur until 1804 (Sweet 2000: 249, 252). Viewed in its entirety, Fichte’s intellectual trajectory has been described as a turn from his early cosmopolitan-

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ism, to the nationalism of his Reden, followed by a “return to cosmopolitan ideals in his final peroration” (Chambers 1946: 388). In Fichte’s Reden, then, we encounter a series of discursive oppositions and homologies that equate the authentic, natural, honest, and clear with Germany, and “the artificial,” arrogant, and deceptive with “the foreign” (Reitz 2012: 52, 61), thereby revealing a binary, “orientalist grammar of identity” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004) that allows for no ambiguity, overlap, or movement between the categories of the German “self ” and non-German “others” thus constructed and naturalized. Fichte accomplishes such reification through his frequent appeals to a postulated “state of nature” (der natürliche Zustand), purported “natural laws,” and “the rule-governed order of things” (e.g., Fichte 1807/1808: 4, 5). A binary grammar also surfaces in Fichte’s criticism of the use of foreign terminology by the German intelligentsia and in his general insistence on national unity and on clear boundaries vis-à-vis others (Reitz 2012: 59). Such a topos of national unity is further reinforced by a topos of national purity, which manifests in Fichte’s bold claim that “honourable people” desire the “permanent continuity of their people,” which in turn necessitates the “maintenance of national purity” (Reitz 2012: 57). In his eighth speech, Fichte (1807/1808: 6–7) argues thus: The honorable person’s belief in the permanence of his actions is based on his hope in the perpetuity of his people . . . whose uniqueness should not be spoiled by things that do not belong there. This uniqueness is the eternal . . . and it alone grants [the individual] an extension of their brief biography into enduring life. . . . Only the sovereign continuity of his nation promises him such permanence; to salvage this, he must even be willing to die, so that his nation may continue.

Further related to such a notion of transcendence in and through collective, ethnic belonging is what Reitz describes (2012: 58) as Fichte’s postulate that the German language was unique in its direct continuity with its origins. In discourse analytical terminology this furnishes a topos of German primordialism and unique authenticity that surfaces particularly clearly in Fichte’s portrayal of the Germans as an Urvolk: “Assuming that our examinations have proceeded correctly, then it must become apparent that only the original German . . . truly has a people, and is entitled to count on one, and that only he is capable of true and reasonable love for his nation” (Fichte 1807/1808: 3). As significantly, in Fichte we encounter an early version of what would become nationalism’s distinctive schema of history. Reitz (2012: 62) summarizes this as a view that “structures the horizons of future action through agreement about what a society was, is and can become.” This narrative of (German) history manifests in Fichte’s appeals to fight “slavery” and “tyranny.” In order to substantiate his claim that an “original,” authentic Volk “requires its freedom,” Fichte (1807/1808: 10) employed—and

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later nationalist discourses would (inadvertently) emulate this tactic—historical analogies: In this belief our earliest common ancestors, our original people . . . bravely opposed ancient Rome’s encroaching world domination . . . Freedom, to them, meant remaining Germans . . . independent and authentic . . . and it meant being able to pass this on to their descendants. All things Roman were tantamount to slavery, as they would have required them to become half-Roman. It can be taken for granted . . . that they would rather have died, that a true German only wants to live to be and remain German.

Underpinning this is one of the most “innovative discourse techniques” developed by nationalism in the early nineteenth century: its direct appeal to “us,” in this particular case “the Germans,” to become what they are “interpellated as and presumed to already be,” namely Germans conscious of their ethnic status and historical mission (Reitz 2012: 65). We thus discover in Fichte, and then repeatedly among later nationalists, the crucial role performed by personal pronouns: the “we” and “they” in the discourses concerned, as forms of “rhetorical pointing” or deixis (Billig 1995), construct and reify national identities. What is more, this is tied to Fichte’s (1807/1808: 8–9) identification of his present as a time of acute crisis calling for urgent action and national reawakening: In reproducing constitutions, laws and stately prosperity, there is no life as such, no original decision. Previous circumstances and long dead legislators created all this. Their epoch merely continues on established tracks . . . In such times, an actual government is not even needed. However, when regular continuity is threatened, and unknown circumstances demand decisions, real life is required. Which spirit, then, should put itself in charge? . . . Not the spirit of the quiet citizen and adherent to the constitution and its laws, but the passionate flame of higher patriotic love, which captures the nation as a container of the eternal, for which the honourable will gladly sacrifice themselves.

In Herder and Fichte we thus encounter rhetorical-discursive features that have, as we shall discover, since featured in nationalist discourses: a binary grammar of identity that defines and naturalizes the categories of “self ” and “other” as diametrical opposites; argumentative topoi that postulate national unity, uniqueness, purity, and authenticity; a view of history that works with historical analogies and contrasts a state of perceived present crises, or acute cultural and political “decline,” to a past “golden age,” as well as, significantly, to a better future, which the discourse in question sets out to help bring about. Fichte’s main “stations” in life were Jena, Leipzig, Zurich, Erlangen, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), and Berlin. As with Herder, his influence on the (later) emerging nationalisms of Habsburg Central Europe would be a mediated one, across geographical distance so to speak. In our next analytical step, we thus begin to pay attention to how Herder, Fichte, and the romanticism they helped spur,

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as well as the latter’s various discursive features, came to impact on Habsburg Central Europe more directly.

From Romanticism to the Romantic, from Jena to Vienna The tracing of the romantic ideoscape of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries requires more definitional work and a closer interrogation of romanticism’s impact on Habsburg Central Europe and of its chief discursive features. In respect of the former, it is worth returning to Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under his pseudonym Novalis, who declared that he “romanticized . . . by granting a higher meaning to the ordinary . . . by giving the dignity of the unknown to the familiar and a glow of infinity to the finite.” This underpins Rüdiger Safranski’s (2013: 13) interpretation of romanticism as a strategy for reenchanting the modernizing world, as a “continuation of the religious by aesthetic means.” While this echoes romanticism’s aforementioned and characteristic social critique, Safranski (2013: 12–13) adds an important conceptual distinction: Romanticism is an epoch. The romantic, [conversely], is an attitude that cannot be confined to an epoch. While the romantic found its most complete expression in Romanticism, the former is not restricted to the latter. The romantic still lives on today. It is certainly not an exclusively German[-speaking] phenomenon, but it has been particularly salient in Germany.

As shown elsewhere (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017), (early) romanticism as a literary and philosophical movement refers primarily to the writings by a heterogeneous, for some time in late-eighteenth century Jena “tight,” group around the literary critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, writer Ludwig Tieck, philosopher Friedrich Schelling, and the poets Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin, whose major points of reference and debate included Herder, Schiller, and Fichte (Pinkard 2002: 132). Conversely, the romantic, das Romantische, as a quality and set of aesthetic and subsequently politicized dispositions, spread from Jena, Berlin, and Heidelberg to the rest of Europe (Pinkard 2002: 131). This spread, according to Safranski (2013), has been wide and enduring, leaving traces of the romantic in most Germanspeaking intellectual production and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Feuerbach to Heine and Marx (see Gouldner 1973), from Wagner to Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal to Thomas Mann, and from Heidegger to elements of Nazism, to even the student movement of the 1960s. Two key questions arise here: first, how and through whom did romanticism spread, as part of an emerging ideoscape, to Habsburg Central Europe in the early nineteenth century? And, second, what further discursive features require our attention since they—as part of the broader category of the romantic—would

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then reappear in later nationalist discourses? It has been rightly pointed out (e.g., Müller-Funk and Schuh 1999; Müller-Funk 1999; Lipowatz 1999) that the connection between romanticism and nationalism is not a direct or immediate, but a partial and contingent, one. The two phenomena are not identical, nor are they connected by a directly causal relationship. Yet, they overlap. It is my proposition in and beyond this chapter that this significant, historically consequential overlap is to be found in the broader domain of “the romantic,” its argumentative structures, schemas, and strategies. This builds on Wolfgang Müller-Funk’s (1999: 27–32) observations of a “rhetorical structure” common to nationalist narratives in the nineteenth century, including their “binary code,” the centrality of the concept of freedom and of an “imagined return to a glorious beginning.” A central figure in respect to both questions raised above was the earliermentioned Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). The cross-border movement of people and ideas, captured by Appadurai’s ethnoscapes and ideoscapes, describes important features of Schlegel’s biography. Schlegel spent key periods of his life— set during one of Europe’s most tumultuous periods from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars to the Congress of Vienna, the era of Restoration, and the (broadly defined) Vormärz—in Göttingen, Leipzig, Jena, Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Cologne, and Vienna. With Schlegel, who had been central to the abovementioned “Jena circle” of early romanticism and its periodical Athenäum, the romantic truly arrived in Vienna in person. What is more, in Vienna Friedrich Schlegel, who had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1808, came to occupy high-powered bureaucratic and diplomatic positions for the Habsburgs, both at the Congress of Vienna and as a member of Austria’s delegation to the Diet in Frankfurt (Dusche 2013: 44); this was after he had founded and edited, during Austria’s war with Napoleon, the Österreichische Zeitung and, subsequently, Der Österreichische Beobachter, which would become “the leading media organ of the Metternich era” (Behler 1966: 110–111). Friedrich Schlegel’s intellectual journey needs to be retold more fully, though, for the common mistake of “neglecting his earlier, cosmopolitan and republican writings” in the service of a singular focus on his “later, conservative and nationfocussed” work produced after his “patriotic turn in 1804” (Löwy 1999: 81) should be avoided. Like Herder and Fichte, Schlegel emerges as a complex thinker whose preoccupations and dispositions varied and shifted over time. Both Herder and Fichte exercised considerable influence on the young Schlegel, without ever commanding his unquestioning discipleship. Herder was among the thinkers whose work Schlegel had studied during his student days in Göttingen; by the time of the Jena circle’s (early) romanticism, Fichte had become a major influence on Friedrich Schlegel, and would soon become a close friend (Behler 1966: 22, 48–49). This was, however, several years before Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation. In 1796 Friedrich Schlegel had authored his Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus, a text—inspired by Kant—that distills Schlegel’s republican convictions,

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including his insistence on civil rights, political representation, and “the people’s general will” (Volksmajestät), and on his agreement with Kant’s proposition that only a “supra-national, universal world republic” could ensure “eternal peace” (Huyssen 1978: 233, all translations are mine). In these earlier stages, Schlegel’s work reveals important, “though often denied,” interconnections “between the Enlightenment and romanticism” (Huyssen 1978: 229; also Schmidt 1956: 413; Vick 2014: 142). Further, Schlegel then postulated that the “era of revolution” and republican freedom would achieve a reconciliation of “subjectivity and objectivity,” undoing the “dissociation of philosophy, religion, science and art”; indeed, Schlegel then hoped that the French Revolution would be followed by a “German aesthetic revolution to transcend the division of labour of a[n emerging] bourgeois society” (Huyssen 1978: 230–231). Therein we encounter one of the earlier mentioned features of romanticism—its opposition to modern society’s occupational and cognitive specialisms and divisions (e.g., Safranski 2013: 60). We see the same impulse in Schlegel’s outline of romantic poetry: “Romantic poetry is a progressive and universal poetry destined not only to reunite all presently divided kinds of poetry but also poetry with philosophy and rhetoric. It sets out to fuse poetry and prose, ingenuity and criticism . . . to make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetic” (Schlegel 1978 [1798]: 90). Also relevant here is the “political theology” formulated by Novalis, Schlegel’s close associate during his time in Jena. Central to this is the perception of a present crisis, accompanied by a “backward-looking utopia”; Novalis foresees a “post-Enlightenment order,” underpinned by a Christian “new mythology” and (conservative) social reconstruction to be performed by an “artist-king” (Müller-Funk 1999: 45–47). In Schlegel we also see another feature of the romantic, namely its tendency toward the Dionysian, the spirit of excess and life-affirming individualism. This manifests in a relativist, anti-foundationalist subjectivism (Berlin 2004): “There is but one reason and it is the same in all. But just like every human has their own nature and their own love, they also carry their own unique poetry in them. This must remain theirs . . . as certain as there is something original in them. No criticism must deprive them of their innermost being, their innermost force” (Schlegel 1978 [1800]: 165). This extends to a collectivist subjectivism reflected in a celebration of particularistic traditions and the romantic preoccupation with premodern myths and folktales (e.g., Safranski 2013: 153–171) that we will re-encounter in our discussion of later nationalist veneration (in the course of the nineteenth century) for its purported premodern roots. We also find in Schlegel further manifestations of a “golden-past-topos,” articulated in conjunction with a topos of an imminently better future, and often framed in national terms. This becomes obvious in the following extracts: The Germans only now need to follow Goethe’s example in exploring forms of art everywhere back to their origins in order to revive and combine them . . . to revive and

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liberate the old force, the high spirit that still slumbers in the documents of national pre-history [starting with] the Lied der Nibelungen. (Schlegel 1978 [1800]: 184) What is missing in our poetry is a center, like mythology used to be for the ancient. All things important in which modern poetry lags behind antiquity can be summarized thus: We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to finding one, it is high time we helped bring one about. (Schlegel 1978 [1800]: 190). If only the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of antiquity. What new source of poetry could flow to us from India, if only some German artists with their universality and depth of spirit, with their genius of translation, were given the opportunity that a nation becoming blunter and more brutal does not know how to use. In the Orient we must search for the highest romanticism . . . Live up to the importance of our era, and the fog will lift . . . ! It will become light around you. . . . [Whoever] understands this epoch, that great process of general rejuvenation . . . will recognize the character of the golden age about to commence . . . Humans would then understand the earth, the sun and what they themselves are. This is what I mean by new mythology. (Schlegel 1978 [1800]: 196–197)

This interest in the Orient also prefigures an important discursive turn Schlegel took during his subsequent Parisian sojourn (1802–1804), the results of which can be described, in the analytical terms adopted here, as a distinctly binary grammar of identity that juxtaposes the “German self ” and “French other” as mutually opposed categories. During this period, as Michael Dusche has shown, Friedrich Schlegel’s “proto-nationalist writings” began to articulate a “cultural defensiveness and German chauvinism” through a “positive Orientalism” that revered Indian antiquity for its purported “holistic spirituality”; Germany was constructed as “Europe’s true Oriental self,” as a direct “descendent” of Sanskrit culture, and hence as a “countermodel” to modern (i.e., “degenerate”) French society (Dusche 2013: 32–40). This needs to be seen in the context of Schlegel’s lack of occupational success in Paris, which turned him critical of France and increasingly conscious of his “German-ness” (Behler 1966: 95–96). We here discern a process that will become increasingly familiar in our later discussions: the observation that experiences of crisis tend to trigger a heightened state of reflection and, often, more pronounced national self-identification. Schlegel’s orientalism comes to oppose “French cultural (later political) hegemony”; it reveals a disquiet with “modern city life, its industry and commerce”; it reveals “nostalgia for a time of joyous living and high morality” and “romanticiz[es] the feudal and agrarian world of the Middle Ages” (Dusche 2013: 31–32). In our analytical terms, Schlegel here operates with two of the discursive features that would subsequently reappear in much nationalist thinking: a binary grammar of identity, on the one hand, and a historical “schema” (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004) postulating a recent decline leading to the present and (soon) to be followed by an anticipated rejuvenation, on the other. The former manifests

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in Schlegel’s account of a “Manichean struggle . . . between . . . good and evil,” in his portrayal of Paris as “the new Sodom” and in his “hostility to Napoleon”—the latter in portrayals of the “history of humanity as a process of continuous decline” and the idea of “Germany’s destiny to save the Continent from its degeneration under French leadership” (Dusche 2013: 35–37, 34). This, then, is the point at which Schlegel’s transition from his earlier republicanism and universal poetry to his subsequent commitment to Catholic Restoration (Huyssen 1978: 243) and mysticism sets in. Crucial to note, however, and relevant to the critical discourse analytical perspective adopted here, is the fact that by no means all of Friedrich Schlegel’s thinking was premised on such a binary or “orientalist” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004) identity grammar. Shortly before and still upon his arrival in Paris, Schlegel argued for an understanding of Europe based on a “close association, indeed fusion of Germany and France” (Behler 1966: 88). Ernst Behler (ibid.) elaborates: During this time [Friedrich] Schlegel wrote in one of his notebooks: The big question—should the Europeans become one people (all fused) or shall every nation just be itself alone? . . . To work on this great goal of a “spiritual fusion” . . . Schlegel was among the first of many literary figures to whom German-French rapprochement was the first, necessary step towards European fusion . . . Europe in the inclusive sense—as . . . a pluralistic alliance of nations . . . awakened in him a proud consciousness of a cosmopolitanism of European culture, for which [his brother] August Wilhelm Schlegel coined the term “European patriotism.”

We here encounter, for the first though certainly not the last time, self-other relationships based on “encompassment” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004), an alternative grammar of identity that postulates an overarching category to subsume internal differences in a state of assumed internal harmony, while the overarching category is ideologically privileged over the rest. Such a grammar of encompassment centered on Friedrich Schlegel’s calls for a restoration of “true Empire” (by which he then referred to an Austrian German, and hence also Catholic, empire) reappears, culturally part of an affirmation of “an organic society based on hierarchy and faith” (Okey 2001: 70), in his notebooks in 1807: True Empire must be restored . . . [T]his can only be at the hands of the German people, therefore through Austria . . . Austria’s condition is the only one that is still German and free, an honorable alliance of nations, where each remains what it is and shall be . . . Such a German, free and Christian universal monarchy, based on lawful social ranks, is precisely the idea of Empire. (Quoted in Behler 1966: 107)

Yet, the two grammars—encompassment and binarism—sit alongside and at times work in tandem with one another. The idea of a restored Austrian German Empire of wider, European, supranational reach (i.e., encompassment) is thus

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articulated in opposition to (i.e., expressive of the binarism of an “orientalist grammar”) Napoleon’s France. It was in Habsburg Austria that Schlegel invested his hopes for a “re-ordering of Europe,” thereby calling for a “conservative revolution”—perhaps the clearest possible manifestation of the decline-followed-byrejuvenation schema—and articulating a “genuinely German variety of European conservativism” (Behler 1966: 114–115). Like much of the romantic discourse of which it was part, Friedrich Schlegel’s discourse underwent shifts over time and contained, taken in its entirety, different argumentative strands and identity grammars. His later Catholicism, for instance, sat alongside a principled defense of Jewish civil rights. Most notably, for the critical discourse analytical position adopted here, when one takes Schlegel’s literary legacy as a whole, several, not always easily reconcilable, grammars of identity and topoi emerge. This becomes particularly obvious when one compares some of the periodicals Schlegel edited over time. As Behler (1966: 118) has shown, the “cosmopolitanism” of Athenäum thus already differs from the “European patriotism” encountered in Europa; both contrast with Schlegel’s “patriotic tone” in Deutsches Museum, which he edited in 1812 and 1813 and for which—perhaps not surprisingly given the immediate context (see below)—he invited contributions on “anything truly German” while excluding “anything that praises the enemy.” Having covered large discursive terrain in this chapter, and having traced through Friedrich Schlegel the definitive arrival of the romantic ethos in Habsburg Central Europe, we next turn to some other ways in which “proto-nationalism” manifested there in the period stretching from the French Revolutionary Wars to the Vienna Congress.

The Romantic in Early Nineteenth-Century Habsburg Central Europe The next step in the present analysis must be a more detailed tracing of particular instances of romantic thought and writing (and their underpinning discursive patterns) as they manifested in Habsburg Central Europe in the period between the beginning of the French Revolution and the “springtime of the peoples” less than sixty years later. This enables historical appreciation of the fact that the romantic had not merely become part of a geographically dispersed ideoscape led by some of the epoch’s most prominent philosophical and literary figures, but that it had also started to take local discursive root and to crystallize culturally. Highly relevant here is Laurence Cole’s research on “patriotic mobilization” and its expression of increasingly vocal regional and national sentiments in the Austrian province of Tyrol in the 1790s. Against the backdrop of the centralist state reforms by Maria Theresia and Joseph II, the clearest local impact of enlightened

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absolutism, Cole (2000: 476–479) traces Tyrolean opposition—and the role of the provincial clergy and nobility in it—to the “Theresian-Josephinian programmes.” In inadvertent corroboration of a central argument developed throughout the present book—namely, that protracted and multiple crises provide ideal typical contexts to the (conscious) articulation of nationalist agendas—Cole shows that not only economic hardship but a particular defining event added decisively to Tyroleans’ deep opposition to administrative reforms, conscription, and the dissolution of Catholic monasteries in the region. This most seminal event was the beginning of war with France in 1792. Through careful analysis of printed documents and memoirs, Cole (2000: 482) describes central features of the Tyrolean countermobilization as follows: The war turned Tyrolean opposition to Enlightenment into a convinced counterrevolutionary movement, which in 1796 found symbolic expression in . . . a formal alliance between Tyrol and the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus . . . [and] cemented the association between national feeling and religious belief . . . From the outbreak of war onwards . . . there was a shift towards a crusading . . . tone within Tyrolean national discourse, as the clergy launched an impressive wave of propaganda against “Philosophy,” “Enlightenment” . . . “Freemasonry,” and “Unbelief.”

This “conservative, ‘proto-romantic’ reaction to the Enlightenment” (Cole 2000: 418) contains a chief discursive feature stressed in this discussion already: a binary identity grammar that—in this particular context—pits the local, Catholic, Tyrolean “self ” in diametrical opposition against the “enemies of the church,” most particularly the invading French armies; starting with, and in response to, Napoleon’s military successes in northern Italy, Tyroleans embraced the cult of worship of the Sacred Heart as a “spiritual weapon” to provide “protection of the chosen” and a “source of integration at a time when the state had lost its authority because of its religious reforms and the conditions of war” (Cole 2000: 483–484). Moreover, the Tyrolean self-identifications traced by Cole (2000: 491) provide evidence of discursive binarism working in conjunction with another grammar of identity mentioned earlier—a logic of encompassment, which here operated with a model of concentric or overlapping identity circles: “It is possible to draw out three strands within the . . . identity articulated by German-speaking Tyroleans: first, and most strongly, consciousness of the Tyrolean Fatherland; secondly, an allegiance to Austria, and, to a lesser extent, a sense of solidarity with other Austrian territories; thirdly, a cultural . . . identification as Germans with Germany.” Thus, Tyrolean anti-French resistance predated Andreas Hofer’s 1809 rebellion, in the first instance “against the new Bavarian masters” (Okey 2001: 71), considerably. In its earlier version, as articulated through the religious idiom of the Sacred Heart, Tyrolean mobilization worked with argumentative characteristics earlier identified with the romantic (e.g., discursive binarism, anti-Enlightenment sentiments, a reification of ethnic/linguistic/religious/national groups). It also, as we

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have just seen, utilized a second identity grammar, namely encompassment, combining a “plurality” of concentric or “overlapping loyalties” (Cole 2000: 496), to the province, the House of Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire respectively. More needs to be added concerning the early romantics’ reception in Austria (see Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). Friedrich Heer (2001: 159–176) relates German romanticism to urban poverty in the late eighteenth century, the frustrations among the university-educated, and resulting youth rebellion. As we have seen, chief romantics, including Friedrich Schlegel, whose conversion to Catholicism was linked to his associating a Germanic revival with the Habsburg empire (Heer 2001: 161;171), were among Prussian émigrés to Vienna in the early nineteenth century. Noteworthy, in this context, were contrasting Viennese responses to Schlegel. Konstantin Kaiser (2006: 18–19) interprets distrustful reactions to Friedrich Schlegel’s offer of his services as a publicist as symptomatic of an allegedly Austrian dislike of individual agency (Subjektlosigkeit). This is a recurring trope, applied to successive historical epochs (e.g., Pelinka 1990b: 24), in reflections on the enduring legacy of feudal hierarchies and the purported delay in the development of Austrian civil society. Kaiser argues that Schlegel’s status as a Catholic convert, paradoxically in Catholic Vienna in the early 1800s, aroused suspicions among those whose (German) future he sought to build. Alternative readings of this paradox are possible. First, distrust of converts from Protestantism may need to be related to what Heer (2001: 84–87) terms Vienna’s “crypto-Protestantism” of outwardly neo-Catholics still privately self-defining as Lutheran following the counter-Reformation. Second, the earlier-mentioned romantic strand opposing the subject’s “philosophical and epistemological primacy” and subordinating it to the power of “tradition” (Mertens 2014: 273) arguably also resonates in such distrust of converts’ agency. Put differently, an organic-romantic understanding of culture, in which individuals are but channels and expressions of their ascribed (and hence supposedly unchangeable) “form of life” (Gellner 1998: 97–98, 104–105), is at ideological loggerheads with someone’s biographical redefinition achieved by conversion. Seen thus, the distrust Schlegel encountered in the early 1800s arguably suggests that Vienna was in this particular respect already more romantic than Jena, Berlin, or Heidelberg, or than even one of the chief romantics (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). Yet, there were also decidedly more positive reactions to Friedrich Schlegel. This included his very well-received historical lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte, delivered in Vienna in 1810 (Timms 1991: 903). In the context of the imperfect congruence of only partially overlapping geographical-political units and ethnic loyalties emphasized at the start of the present chapter, Schlegel here articulated a topos of (German) unity: [Schlegel’s] problem is how to combine two conflicting . . . patriotism[s]: the one “German” in the sense of including all German-speaking territories; the other relating

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to Austria as a collective state . . . including its Hungarian and Slav populations. Schlegel was no more successful than any of his successors in squaring the circle . . . [H]e opted for Austria . . . constructing a Habsburg-centred model of European history . . . These patriotically inspired lectures were well received by his Viennese audience . . . [but] also made a positive impression in other parts of Germany [sic] . . . [and] were designed to inspire a patriotic revival . . . Schlegel argues that the contemporary crisis can best be understood by means of historical investigation of earlier crises . . . [including] the Crusades or the Reformation . . . and the struggle for hegemony in Europe between Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor [from 1520 to 1555], and Francis I, King of France . . . Schlegel [sees this] as a paradigm for the contemporary struggle between Napoleonic France and Habsburg Austria . . . The Empire of Charles V, which encompassed Germany, Austria . . . parts of France and Italy, as well as the Netherlands and Spain, is celebrated as a “true” empire . . . based on [“the Austrian principles” of ] peace among the Christian powers of Europe [and] unity in the face of a common enemy, the Turks. (Timms 1991: 903–904)

In addition to a central historical issue that enduringly shaped Habsburg Central Europe and some of its successor states, namely the “German question” and its relationship to Austria, we here also re-encounter several discursive features extrapolated from the romantic above and which we will see time and again in later nationalist politics: topoi of national unity and revival; the use of historical analogies as interpretative frames for present circumstances, and coexisting grammars of encompassment, with regard to German-Austrian-European relationships, and binarism—that is, vis-à-vis the French or, (then) previously, the Turkish “other.” Schlegel’s cultural impact can also be traced elsewhere in Habsburg Austria, particularly through his patriotic publications during the anti-Napoleonic Wars in 1809 and, to a slightly lesser extent, in 1813–1815. Foremost among them, as Karen Hagemann (2006) has shown, were Schlegel’s poems (as well as other German and Austrian “poets and essayists”) extolling “national devotion” and “martial masculinity” in the context of broad, compulsory “patriotic-national mobilization,” including a wartime militia, for Austria’s war of liberation in 1809. While censored in some German territories, Schlegel’s poetry was welcomed and widely circulated in Austria; its images of current subjugation, self-sacrifice for the nation, and an imminent “bursting of chains” (quoted in Hagemann 2006: 41–42) bore discursive hallmarks already discussed earlier: a binarism pitting “us” against “them”—a historical schema premised on topoi of current national suffering, of the individual’s willingness to devote him/herself to the national cause, and of future national liberation. Moreover, romantic-national writings during the antiNapoleonic Wars provided further evidence of the workings of a transnational ideoscape spanning Austria and Prussia. For instance, and though previously censored, some of Schlegel’s poetry was republished in Berlin between 1813 and 1815 in a collection by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Hagemann 2006: 42), a well-known educationalist, founder of the German gymnastic movement, and leading figure

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in the national movement. Meanwhile, back in Austria, and although “patrioticnational poetry” and brochures played a comparatively less prominent role there from 1812 until 1815 than they did in Prussia, “songs and poems by the best authors from Prussia and other German regions . . . such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Theodor Körner, [and] Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué” appeared in Friedrich Schlegel’s earlier-mentioned journal Deutsches Museum (Hagemann 2006: 53). We thus arrive at other key contributions to the wider German national movement against Napoleon’s France that warrant at least brief mention. These included the (language-focused) “race theory” of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, who was “widely read and admired in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (Chambers 1946: 388), Heinrich von Kleist’s political writings (see Meister 1999), and the work of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860). While not part of the inner core of the romantic movement, Arndt has been described as “the most radical proponent of an anti-Semitic national hatred” whom the Nazis would later consider one of their predecessors (Löwy 1999: 78; also Langewiesche 2012: 199); there are nonetheless discursive commonalities worth stressing here, including a by-now-familiar historical schema also contained in a speech Arndt (quoted in Elwenspoek 1925: 93–94) gave in 1807: Friends, you know . . . the Germanen eventually destroyed the Roman empire and created many new states . . . You know how we became a distinctive people under the first Karolinger and obtained the name Germans. From the tenth until the fifteenth centuries we were Europe’s most powerful people . . . Later others became stronger through unified governments and constitutions, while we weakened ourselves through subdivisions. We . . . cannot complain that others completed the task . . . We did everything to disintegrate through internal wars and theft. We became easy targets and will remain so, until suffering yields to force and anger, which will teach us to become one, in order to be free.

In addition to the topoi of national (dis)unity, of former glory juxtaposed to subsequent decline, present crisis, and future rejuvenation, we here also again encounter a national deixis that interpellates fellow Germans, as fellow Germans, through the personal pronoun “we” and by addressing them as “friends.” Yet, political romanticism’s ideological “success” in establishing national frames as hegemonic sources of identification cannot be taken as given. Leighton James (2013: 188, 115) shows that throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars different patriotisms persisted in German Central Europe and that “individual reactions and . . . memories were rarely [as] monolithic” as political Romanticism’s one-sided and all-subsuming juxtaposition of “German culture” to the “supposedly decadent, effeminate French.” There is ample evidence that romanticism spurred not only nationalism but also, often concurrently, “a strengthening of . . . regions, provinces and ethnic groups” (Vick 2014: 43). Recent research has shown that at the Vienna Congress, the point of

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historical transition from “the Revolutionary-Napoleonic” to the “RestorationBiedermeier” periods, civil society associations were stronger and more vibrant than the “classic image” of Metternich’s Austria acknowledges (Vick 2015: 113). What is particularly significant for our purposes is the documented coexistence of competing discourses of identification in Vienna’s public sphere at the time of the Congress—and hence of Europe’s restorative reordering—in 1814/1815 (for the contextual details and results of the Congress, see Beller 2006: 112ff.). On the one hand, there was top-down emphasis, involving Emperor Franz and Prince Metternich, on a “federative” dynastic Austrian patriotism capable of combining “German, Magyar, Czech, Slovene and other elements”; language boundaries had not yet transformed, as they later would, into “hard rather than soft borders between ethnic nations” (Vick 2015: 119–120). This was, in the terms of the present analysis, encompassment in political practice. At the same time, although there had been less focus on patriotic poetry in Austria during 1813/1814 than in 1809 (see above), during the Congress nationalist poetry by “enthusiastic north Germans” and particularly “the collection Lyre and Sword by the . . . dramatist and fallen volunteer Theodor Körner” were in widespread circulation (Vick 2015: 112). Körner (1791–1813), who had worked at Vienna’s court theatre in 1812 before joining the Lützow volunteer corps (Hagemann 2006: 59), had made some of the best-known contributions to the “poetry of the Wars of Liberation” and its focus on “the one tyrant Napoleon” shortly before dying in battle in 1813. With his collection of war poetry published posthumously by his father in 1814, Körner was to be become a nationalist symbol of heroism for much of modern German history. His passionate lyrical depictions of self-sacrifice in the service of national liberation clearly invoked a German national ingroup (Hillmann 2005: 200–210). At the start of the Restoration, which as a period of “repression and incompetence . . . political and intellectual stasis” (Beller 2006: 117) would lead through the Vormärz to the Revolutions of 1848/1849, a tension that will accompany us throughout the remainder of this book was already discernible: between competing discourses of identity—with different points of ethnic and political reference and self-definition—or between “heterogeneity and internal consolidation” (Bhatti 2014: 23). Having traced romantic discursive features and some of their cultural manifestations in Habsburg Central Europe in the early nineteenth century, we now turn to further contextual factors that pave the way for our subsequent discussion of how these features enabled processes of nationalist social closure later in the century.

Connecting Contexts The observation that, in parts of Europe, by the late eighteenth century “national characteristics . . . [were becoming] a source of pride . . . [and] national conscious-

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ness . . . doctrine” (Guérard 1934: 2) has been long established. This chapter has built on more recent attempts to distill, in greater detail, the “rhetorical structure” (Müller-Funk 1999: 29) of the romantic and its nationalist applications, its “phantasies,” “myths” (Lipowatz 1999: 64), and narrative, “emotional architecture” (Morden 2016: 448–459). This has required a return to the writings of Herder, Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel, whose real impact would only transpire decades later (e.g., Langewiesche 1992: 354), and a tracing of their and other articulations of the romantic in an emerging “proto-nationalist” ideoscape. Importantly, the resulting picture is one of discursive heterogeneity and shifts over time. Some early (German) nationalists indeed acknowledged their “mixed ethnic heritage,” which included an emphasis on “assimilation and digestion . . . not the rejection of foreign” influences in parts of Herder’s writings (Vick 2003: 242–244). In later chapters, I will describe similar discursive tendencies as an assimilationist identity grammar. This contrasts with the topos of national purity more prominent in Jahn and Arndt, for example, as well as with a later, more general shift from “assimilationist” to “purist” conceptions of German national identity (Vick 2003: 245, 249). At this point, further forward-looking contextualization is needed. The changing political trajectories of the romantic movement are relevant here, not least as they reflected broader social-cum-ideological shifts in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thanos Lipowatz (1991: 61) observes that while some romantics still believed in the Revolution at the start of the century, their collective preference clearly shifted in a reactionary direction thereafter; yet, starting in 1830, a “new, revolutionary romanticism” appeared. This needs to be seen as part of the wider social transformations—including industrialization, early proletarianization, population growth, and greater infrastructural and communicative integration in parts of Habsburg Central Europe (e.g., Okey 2001: 81–90)—of the first half of the nineteenth century. Politically and culturally, reflecting the continuing workings of a cross-border ideoscape, north German ideas were still “discussed and assimilated by the Austro-German intelligentsia and administrative elite” during the Vormärz, despite the Habsburg Restoration’s “efforts to quarantine the monarchy” (Ritter 1984: 236). The “conservative absolutism” under Francis and Metternich (Okey 2001: 71ff.) notwithstanding, the post-1815 period also saw a clash of paradigms in Austrian historiography: between Enlightenment historians and civil servants still steeped in the “Josephinian spirit,” on the one hand, and the “Catholic Romantics,” including Friedrich Schlegel, on the other (Sutter Fichtner 1971). The earlier-mentioned entanglements of the forces of Enlightenment and romanticism therefore continued to manifest in the Restoration era. The prominence of the protagonists and discursive categories of political romanticism could also be observed elsewhere. In the broader context of the German Confederation, the idea of a German Empire persisted among student fraternities, in Jahn’s gymnastic movement, at the Wartburgfest of 1817—including

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its infamous burning, by a group of Jahn’s student followers, of books authored by their leader’s diverse opponents (see Press 2009)—and, after 1820, in regional male choirs; and while the Revolution of 1848/1849 came to be framed in national categories—that is, as expressions of national consciousness, unity, and sentiment—the concept of the “nation-state” (let alone its institutions) was not yet widely established in Pre-March German political discourse (Langewiesche 1992: 346, 349). Crucially, the romantic ideoscape had begun to span ethnic and linguistic boundaries, and Herder’s romantic celebration of language took root elsewhere too. In the context of growing “contempt” for the absolutist regime and emerging national civil societies (including vernacular newspapers), nationalism was becoming “an international movement” whose originally German ideas were now “recycled in the Monarchy’s polyglot institutions by Slavs and Magyars”; the “nascent movements of the . . . non-dominant nationalities” were driven by “youthful nationalists,” often recruited from the “upper levels of the common people,” who “share[d] liberal hopes for change” and found the romantic “appeal to the past” and concurrent promises of “rebirth” and “revival” politically most useful (Okey 2001: 102–124). As Hans Kohn (1952: 25) put it some time ago, romanticism was reaching the peak of its influence across Europe in the 1820s and 1830s, combining a new “fascination of . . . the Middle Ages” with “the appeal of the future happiness of free men.” Among the most prominent figures to be mentioned here were the Hungarian editor and later national leader Lajos Kossuth and his strong calls for Hungarian “socio-economic renewal” (Okey 2001: 121), the Czech historian František Palacký, and the Slovak founding fathers of (early) Pan-Slavism—Jan Kollár and Pavol Šafárik. Following its “modest beginnings” in the eighteenth century, a linguistically focused Czech revivalism gained “real momentum” in the early nineteenth century, “in the shadow of the German language movement,” increasingly articulating itself in opposition to German culture but “inspired by the same sources and transmitted by students at the same German universities” (Evans 2004: 7). In Palacký’s 1836 work on the History of Bohemia, one re-encounters two discursive characteristics of the romantic discussed above: the centrality of a national reading of the past and the availability of a binary identity grammar. For Palacký’s work “covered only the period to 1526, the year of the union of Bohemia with Austria under the Habsburgs,” since he “found in the Czech Reformation the culmination and meaning of Czech history”; at the same time, for early Slav history Palacký endorsed Herder’s opposition of “the peace-loving, naturally democratic Slavs” to “the bellicose and aristocratic Germans” (Kohn 1952: 41). Šafárik, meanwhile, aspired to be a “prophet” of Slavic “awakening”; in Kollár’s case, the continuity with romantic nationalism is even clearer—he had been a student in Jena between 1817 and 1819, participating in the Wartburg festival, and acknowledged, indeed “glorified,” Herder (Kohn 1952: 28–31).

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Thus we look ahead to 1848, when “the revolutionary national demands for equal rights . . . , resting substantially on linguistic criteria, opened a new constitutional era” (Evans 2004: 8), or the path toward it. It is there that the next chapter starts, and with it our analysis of how the discursive structures of (romantic) proto-nationalism would enable nationalist social closure later in the nineteenth century.

Note 1. All translations from German are the author’s.

Chapter 2

NATIONAL CLOSURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND BEYOND

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his is a book about the construction, hardening, and shifts of collective boundaries and identities in (former) Habsburg Central Europe over time. While national categories and self-other definitions have been most prominent throughout the period in question, they are certainly not the only mechanisms of collective mobilization and exclusion. Part of the challenge is to address the articulation of national, ethno-linguistic, and religious categories between 1848 and 1914. In the process, we face a recurring tension already touched upon earlier: between, on the one hand, a politics of increasingly divisive and rigid ethnonational boundaries, and, on the other, a domain of the quotidian, wherein lived biographies often continued to defy the artificiality of purportedly singular, exclusive identifications. The phenomenon of life-worlds shaped by complex rather than monolithic solidarities has a longer history. In an overview of research concerning religious life in early modern (i.e., 1500–1800) Central Europe, Howard Louthan (2011: 3) reports “the most diverse confessional culture” in which religious boundaries were “often ambiguously constructed, poorly defined, and highly fluid.” In what follows, we discover that such “fluidity” of complex belonging, of “hybridity, crossover and interaction . . . across the boundaries of nation and language,” (Louthan 2011: 4) continued throughout the nineteenth century, its dominant movement toward the “nationalization of society” (Judson and Rozenblit 2005) notwithstanding. By the “springtime of the peoples,” the point at which our previous chapter concluded, the participants of the 1848 revolutions, “students of the French Revolution and heirs to the Romantic Era,” had started to attach “great importance to the symbolic dimension of their struggles,” such as national

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dress, giving rise to a veritable “explosion of symbolic activity” (Nemes 2005: 39). In Habsburg territories, the “absence of a supra-national . . . civic political culture at the imperial centre” had indeed contributed to the “ethnicization of Austrian politics” (Beller 2006: 121). We now turn to subsequent trajectories and the widening impact of nationally defined discursive and political activity in the decades from the 1848 revolutions until the beginning of World War I. Analytically, the previous chapter focused on discursive features of a protonationalism discernible in the broad literary and cultural tendencies subsumed under the label of “the romantic.” In the present chapter, I continue to pay attention to the argumentative and rhetorical features of nationalisms in former Habsburg Central Europe as they came to be formulated with greater clarity and articulated with greater force in the course of the nineteenth century. The key concepts utilized thus far (i.e., rhetorical deixis, argumentative topoi, and identity grammars) will again be applied to diverse textual data. Alongside the discursive domain, however, this chapter opens up a crucial second dimension of analysis. Andreas Wimmer (2002: 9) has observed that while much had been written “on the discursive properties of nationalism,” this has not been matched by sufficient attention to “the mechanisms that tie nationalist principles to institutionalized practices of inclusion and exclusion in modern states.” This chapter begins to redress this imbalance, as I complement my attention to nationalism’s discursive properties with a discussion of how and where those properties came to underpin increasingly institutionalized patterns of inclusion and exclusion along ethnonational lines. Here the concept of social closure, and its “theory of monopolization and exclusion” (Murphy 1988) outlined earlier, begins to assume a central role. Building on Max Weber’s outline of how status groups united around shared “honor” are held together by common “restrictions on social intercourse,” John Rex describes how such “endogenous closure” can acquire additional force in the case of (ethnic) groups claiming “common descent.” Whichever criteria of membership are employed, the hallmark of social closure is that it describes processes through which a group “seeks to monopolize political and legal privileges” (Rex 1986: 12–15). The relevance of the (neo-)Weberian school of thought for our purposes manifests when Andreas Wimmer (2002: 52) underlines the “nation-state as a form of social closure.” Modern nation-states would in due course become, across (by then former Habsburg) Central Europe, the later institutionalization of sentiments and self-definitions that had, as we saw in the previous chapter, gained prominence by the middle of the nineteenth century. We need to ask how thus discursively crystallizing nationalisms were now being molded into the new political realities they would become by the early twentieth century (i.e., the institutions of nation-states). Since this has been one of the most fundamental questions to historians of Central Europe for decades, it is important to restate wherein the novelty and significance of the approach outlined here lies. To reiterate points already made,

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I contend that the dual focus on micro- and macrolevels that defines this book sheds new light on the workings of nationalist politics, both their sedimentation in particular localized texts and speech acts, as well as their impact on much larger institutions, populations, and historical shifts. Understanding all language as “social practice” (Fairclough 1989; Weiss and Wodak 2003), which bears the imprint of its social contexts and in turn impacts them, it is the critical discourse analytical approach to social closure developed here that enables this focus on both specific texts and wider historical contexts, as well as on their interconnections. Methodologically this chapter again moves in big strides between historical and geographical settings particularly relevant to the questions being asked—that is, how nationalisms in Habsburg Central Europe operated discursively and organizationally in the period between 1848 and 1914. This is an enormous question, and the discussion below is thus inevitably selective with regard to the particular texts, contexts, and developments it foregrounds. While certainly not claiming to exhaust or even address all pertinent examples, I will illustrate the wider relevance of the particular phenomena selected for analysis. As in the previous chapter, I will move from wider contexts to specific discursive and organizational nationalisms at work in the period in question. Further, our empirical net will have to be cast with skill and flexibility, for some prominent examples of ethnonational social closure to be discussed—Vienna’s Christian Social Movement being a case in point—are generally classified not as examples of nationalism but instead under the rubric of “political radicalism” (Boyer 1995). We thus return to the historical juncture that marked the end of the previous chapter and that provides the first vital context to the present one—the revolutions of 1848/1849.

From the “Springtime of the Peoples” to Neo-absolutism As we saw in the conclusion to the previous chapter, by the period stretching from the 1820s to the 1840s, Czech, pan-Slavic, Italian, and other patriots were establishing themselves more prominently within their respective ethnolinguistic communities. Drawing substantial inspiration from Herder, heightened national consciousness was given additional impetus by growing disdain for Habsburg absolutism, especially in the later years of the pre-March period. Similarly significant, particularly for the rise of nationalism in its longue durée, were the roles linguists, folklorists, art, national vernacular newspapers, and growing civil societies played in heightening national feelings. The situation in Hungarian-dominated territories had its own particularities, for Magyar nationalism—pushing for greater emancipation from Vienna—saw itself internally challenged by (South) Slavs, including the Croat movement (Okey 2001: 106–126).

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This is part of the backdrop to the widespread revolutionary events of 1848/1849, whose common description as the “springtime of the peoples” underlines the mobilizing force “bottom-up,” popular politics, much of it framed in ethnonational terms, had acquired by the mid-nineteenth century. That having been said, broader economic, social, and political contextualization is needed. Jonathan Sperber (2005: 5, 12–13) reminds us that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, continental Europe’s economic system remained predominantly agricultural. Early industrialization and manufacturing—particularly through a system of “outworking,” whereby craftsmen worked for merchant capitalists who provided the required raw materials and tools—and the gradual expansion of a railway network notwithstanding, a full-scale Industrial Revolution involving larger proportions of populations, as had occurred in Britain, still lay ahead for most of the continent and was far removed for its southern and eastern regions. In a social system where wealth was closely tied to landownership, as recently confirmed by Thomas Piketty’s (2014: 200–201) comparative analyses of inequalities over time, the quarter century before 1850 had seen increases both in wealth for the privileged and in widespread poverty, accompanied by declining living standards for the demographic majorities; the more immediate economic context and catalyst for the events of 1848/1849 would be provided by deep economic crises, namely successive harvest failures in 1845 and 1846 and the recession of 1847/1848 (Sperber 2005: 26). Herein we encounter a prominent instance of a pattern that we will discern time and again: periods of crises, often structural and of wide-reaching material consequences, have repeatedly shown the capacity to heighten collective self-awareness and to trigger political mobilization (Bourdieu 1977: 167–169; Karner 2011). As we will discover repeatedly, national(ist) self-other definitions can play a particularly prominent and effective part in such contexts and processes of collective debate and politicization. In the period prior to the European revolutions of 1848/1849, then, capitalist markets had shown their “disruptive force, dissolving previously existing social and economic arrangements and exacerbating inequality” (Sperber 2005: 26). This was an early example of The Great Transformation of capitalist disembedding, and of political counterreactions against it, as depicted by Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]). Within this broader historical and economic context, we also must remember the specific structures of Habsburg Central Europe and their divergence from the ideal type of a unified and centralized state: In the Habsburg monarchy, [the] paradigm of uniformity, central administration, and equality before the law was completely irrelevant. The small central bureaucracy in the imperial capital of Vienna oversaw . . . a realm sprawled across central and eastern Europe, covering all the territory in today’s Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian republics, as well as parts of Italy, Poland, Croatia, Yugoslavia [sic], Roma-

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nia, and Ukraine, and consisting of a collection of separate provinces, each with its own rights and privileges, containing different forms of administration, varying kinds of taxation, and widely differing legal systems. (Sperber 2005: 31)

Let us recap: on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, such political complexity in Habsburg lands coincided with the experience of pre-March conservatism and repression, the availability and appeal of nation-centered discourses of selfunderstanding and mobilization, and wider economic crisis. Starting in Sicily and others parts of Italy, gathering decisive momentum in Paris and spreading from there to the German states, the Habsburg Empire, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and all the way to Wallachia and Moldavia, revolutionary activities varied in kind and intensity: from mass meetings, demonstrations, and street/ barricade-fighting, to well-orchestrated, sustained insurrections with clearly articulated demands and, initially, considerable success. Within the Habsburg Empire, Vienna, Budapest, Zagreb, Venice and Milan, Prague, Cracow, and Lemberg/Lviv became key sites of confrontation, while Slovak, Serb, and Romanian national movements also gathered pace (Sperber 2005: xii). Cutting across locally specific power structures and resulting schisms, there were also commonalities: The speed with which petitioners formulated their goals showed the pervasive influence of the liberal alternative to the ancien régime. Their programme had three facets. Socially, it called for the freedoms of speech, the press, association and assembly, the abolition of serfdom, and public justice by oral procedure and jury trial. Institutionally, it demanded representative assemblies, parliamentary budgets and National Guards, with ministries responsible to the assemblies. At the level of nationality it located freedom in the transfer of sovereignty from monarch to people, a term implicitly or explicitly linked to the language group. (Okey 2001: 130)

Within the parameters of this book, this contains a crucial insight, namely that prominent discursive nationalisms, here manifest in the galvanizing potential of linguistic-cum-national groupings, operated—at this particular historical juncture—as part of a broader alliance of counter-hegemonic, modernizing, indeed democratizing, forces (see Langewiesche 1992: 355). In the conceptual terms of social closure theory, this was an alliance of usurpation, an “exercise of power in an upward direction . . . to bite into the advantages” of the structurally privileged (Murphy 1988: 108; Parkin 1974), and aimed against dynastic hierarchies and absolutist conservatism. The eventual outcome of Europe’s (attempted) revolutions is well known. The “springtime of the peoples” turned out to be a relatively brief interlude in a “decades-long winter of oppression,” soon to be internally undermined by “nationalist rivalry, interconfessional hostility [and] contradictory political agendas” (Sperber 2005: 123) and externally crushed by the forces of reaction. Across Europe, this era saw a proliferation of journalistic and civil society activity, with

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mutually competing political clubs along a broad ideological spectrum stretching from “radical” democrats and republicans via “liberal” constitutional monarchists all the way to conservatives (Sperber 2005: 160–180; also Okey 2001: 136) mushrooming in different parts of the continent. This competition among differing political blueprints and their organizational forms again resembles a recurring pattern that was anticipated in the introductory chapter and will accompany us in much of this book: crises tend to generate a diversity of mutually contesting political responses (Bourdieu 1977: 168–169); it follows that a contextually sensitive analysis of any position or camp, nationalist or otherwise, is most convincing when it locates the ideology in question in its wider structural context and contested political “fields.” In Habsburg Central Europe, the revolutionaries’ early success was soon reversed and the insurgents defeated—at the hands of Radetzky’s troops in northern Italy, by Windisch-Graetz in Prague, by Jelačić and Windisch-Graetz in Vienna, where “from the start it [had been] unclear whether the revolution was AustrianHabsburg or German” (Beller 2006: 125), and with Russian and Habsburg forces defeating Kossuth’s government in Hungary. According to a recurring interpretation, the insurgents’ defeat across Central Europe was tantamount to a suppression, without which the Habsburg Empire would have disintegrated already seventy years prior to its eventual demise, of “centrifugal, national tendencies and social rebellion” (e.g., Kuzmics 2013a: 109–110). The “conservative restoration” (Okey 2001: 151) started under Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, who reasserted imperial authority, with the Austrian Constituent Assembly being at first reconvened (in Kremsier) and later dissolved, and a just-decreed constitution being immediately suspended and subsequently abolished, while Vienna called for the dissolution of the German National Assembly and the restoration of the status quo ante. The pre-1848 German Confederation was indeed soon to be restored, with Russian backing, under Austrian leadership (Sperber 2005: xvi–xx, 233, 244). Against this backdrop, the following “dispatch” of February 1849 by Schwarzenberg to the later Austrian chancellor Anton Schmerling reflects on the increasing prominence of a German national movement and reveals Habsburg opposition (see Breuilly 2002: 51) both to any truncation of its multiethnic lands and to a (kleindeutsch) German nation-state that would exclude it: The formation of a unified state seems . . . impracticable for Austria, and undesirable for Germany . . . [Our] government must not neglect the rights and duties incumbent on her in relation to the non-German elements within the monarchy . . . Just as she is unable to untie the knot which has bound together the German and non-German provinces for centuries, so too she just [cannot] accede to the unilateral abolition of the German federation . . . [as] an essential part of the European network treaties. But a unified state such as envisaged appears . . . undesirable for Germany as well . . .

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each individual member . . . will have removed from it any form of independent existence which will be transferred to some artificially created central focal point. For Austria . . . either it will completely exclude us from this new Germany or else it will dissolve the union between the German patrimonial dominions and the non-German parts . . . Austria and Germany will not have their development furthered in any way by these proposals . . . both will be hurt . . . perhaps incurably . . . the continuation of Austria as a political unit is needed by Germany [and] by Europe. (Reproduced in Breuilly 2002: 143–144)

The crucial factor to be remembered here concerns the question as to who was saying this, in which context, and for which reason. Schwarzenberg, as Sperber (2005: 233) points out, “scarcely hid [his] intent to revert to absolutist rule,” although this subsequent “return” would not entirely reinstate pre-March structures but be adjusted to new circumstances (Okey 2001: 159; see below). Within the power struggles of 1848/1849, the statements above are historically and discourse analytically significant. First, they reflect the continuing incongruence, or only contingent and partial overlap, of uneasily coexisting political- and linguistic-ethnic “units” that decisively shaped Central Europe during and beyond the nineteenth century. Second, the terms “Germany” and “Austria”—as well as “Europe”—were “elusive” and subject not only to “territorial and institutional change” (Breuilly 2002: 6) but, as reflected in this and many similar historical documents, the object of ongoing discursive work and definitional struggles. What is more, we see the workings of political deixis—here applied to “us” Austrians, defined in dynastic, supranational terms—and of a topos assertively predicting a particular future (i.e., decline for Austria, Germany, and Europe) as the consequence of a potentially unified German nation-state. Finally, the political blueprint that was advocated, namely restoration, operates with an identity grammar of encompassment that subsumes “German” and “non-German parts,” albeit hierarchically and arguably in terms that reflected the discursive reification of national categories already widely available at the time, under the overarching category “Austria.” With restoration of absolutist rule (see Breuilly 2002: 50), Habsburg Austria became yet more centralized than it had been in the pre-1848 era, since the “feudal legislatures, the Diets, were not revived, leaving no institutions to check the power of the emperor,” now the young Franz Joseph, and his “civilian and military officials” (Sperber 2005: 273). Neo-absolutism took institutional form under the influence of Baron Kübeck, who played a key role in the undoing of constitutional provisions through the “Sylvester Patent” of 1851, and of the interior minister Alexander Bach’s system of “streamlined administrative structures and uniform chain of command,” censorship, and “police and informer networks” (Okey 2001: 160–163; also Beller 2006: 131). Overall, the neoabsolutist “experiment of the 1850s” that followed “the collapse of the revolution” entailed the “only attempt to rule all the Habsburg lands through a single lan-

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guage,” and it was “the only period when the entire realm was officially described as ‘Austria’”; this was a period of “brief German hegemony” in administration, higher education, the courts, and “across the whole public domain throughout the monarchy” (Evans 2004: 7). This hegemony, and reversals of earlier moves toward non-German educational provisions, explains why the “treatment of nationality”—or, more accurately, the omission of any commitment to national and linguistic equality in its multinational empire—turned into “one of the sorest points” of Habsburg neo-absolutism (Okey 2001: 162). In our theoretical terms, neo-absolutist restoration of centralizing, dynastic powers and its clear privileging of German (speakers) were examples of a particular type of exclusionary closure involving the “exercise of power in a downward direction”: Weber[’s] concept [of a] “status group” deal[s] with domination and exclusion having to do with the cultural and social make-up of groups . . . Races, ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups . . . are examples of status groups . . . Monopolization of goods and skills (and exclusion) along any of these lines constitutes status-group closure, which . . . influences the probability of those involved procuring more goods, positions and satisfactions. (Murphy 1988: 108, 113–114)

Yet, neo-absolutist status-group closure notwithstanding, the discursive terrain had shifted decisively and political alternatives had established themselves in the course of the revolutionary events of 1848/1849. Despite their temporary subsequent suppression, alternative institutional visions for the future of multiethnic Central Europe were in circulation and would assume ever greater plausibility and appeal in due course. All of this had been exemplified in the Kremsier constitutional Entwurf, or outline, of 1848. Drafted by a committee of elected representatives of the monarchy’s different national groups, with the exception of Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia, although not enacted, this provided a novel blueprint: one based on the decentralizing redistribution of “various powers to the federal, crownland, and local, or Kreis (canton) levels,” with the latter to be redrawn—wherever possible—along ethnolinguistic lines; importantly, the document also declared the “equal rights of each of the peoples” and foresaw “legal equality of all languages in schools and government agencies” (Reifowitz 2001: 442). In the Kremsier Entwurf, one discerns a new identity grammar, one premised on relatively more horizontal relationships between linguistic-national in- and outgroups, aiming for some opening of established structures of social closure. As we see in the next section, however, this alternative discourse was, at least for some of its proponents and in some of its versions, internally ambivalent (Reifowitz 2001: 441, 453), combining the counter-hegemonic political vision just sketched with an enduring disposition to uphold hierarchical topoi of “German superiority” and to also be driven by elements of an instrumentalist, binary-Orientalizing grammar juxtaposing “German civilization” to an external, threatening (e.g., Russian) “other.”

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Discursive Ambivalences in the Age of Liberalism and Constitutional Monarchy Alongside its centralism and authoritarianism, the neo-absolutism of the 1850s witnessed an increasingly confident Austro-German bourgeoisie and signs of modernization, including railway expansion, a “more flexible banking system,” significant steps toward “peasant emancipation,” closer economic integration of the Western and Hungarian parts of the monarchy, and the trade treaty with the German Customs Union (Okey 2001: 166–173). In wider geopolitical terms, the 1850s saw developments, military confrontations, and decisions that would shape the subsequent course of history. These included Austria’s antagonizing of Russia, her ally in the suppression of insurgent Hungary only a few years previously, during the Crimean War (1853–1856); a shift in the balance of power in Prussia’s favor within the reconstituted German Confederation; and the Habsburg’s humiliating defeat at Solferino (1859) at the hands of France-backed Piedmont-Sardinia, which would pave the way toward Italian unification. Following military defeat and faced with economic depression, Austria started an uneasy transition from neo-absolutism to political, civic, and economic reform (e.g., Okey 2001: 176) and the ensuing constitutional era (e.g., Gruner 2012: 100) in 1860/1861 (see below). Even more wide-ranging and profound was the impact of Austria’s military defeat by Prussia in Königgrätz (Hradec Králové) in 1866. This final act of being “pushed out” of the wider German domain, and the disbanding of the German Confederation (Gruner 2012: 96–97), was the “bloody finalization” of a prolonged process of Austria’s earlier political and economic isolation within the Bund and her subsequently enforced departure (Kretschmann 2003: 434; for wider contextualization see Beller 2006: 136ff.). It is difficult to overestimate the historical and internal political consequences of 1866. Up until the dissolution of the German Confederation, Habsburg Austria, as a core element of Central Europe, had, as was stressed earlier, also been closely connected to wider “German history” (Gruner 2012: 99). We will see in this and later chapters that an ambivalence of identifications and memories, reflecting uneasily coexisting, or indeed positively contradictory, self-understandings that have been described as Central European, “multi-national,” and “Germanic” (e.g., Brook-Shepherd 1996: xix) in turn, has continued to haunt the German-speaking parts of former Habsburg Central Europe ever since. More immediately, Königgrätz revealed military shortcomings in the Habsburg army, on the levels of armaments and technology, education, organizational structure, and leadership (Kuzmics 2013a: 115). Crucially, the events of 1866 helped further spur national conflicts within the Habsburg realm and to strengthen the “balkanization” of its internal politics (Kretschmann 2003: 434). We thus turn a metaphorical page to the subsequent epoch, in which national

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categories would acquire even greater resonance. Moreover, this would not only deeply affect interethnic relations among the monarchy’s nationalities jostling for power and revealing the workings of social closure of both exclusionary (i.e., “top down”) and usurpationary (i.e., upward) kinds (see Murphy 1988: 10). Defeat at Königgrätz and the resulting kleindeutsche geopolitical realities, at Austria’s exclusion, also sharpened pan-Germanic sentiments among significant sections of the Habsburg monarchy’s German-speakers, as testified by their naming numerous streets and squares after Bismarck after 1866 (Kuzmics 2013a: 115). Two recurring phenomena crucial to understanding Central European nationalisms manifest here again: first, the already mentioned, only partial “congruence” of political structures—then the Habsburg Empire, later the nation-states created on its rubble—and geographically dispersed, ethnolinguistically defined populations, which continue to shape Central Europe to this day (e.g., Waechter 2016); second, the consciousness-raising effects of crises, as a result of which ethnonationalist sentiments acquire greater salience, though also often more opposition. The next crucial development, and part of the wider contexts to the discursive phenomena examined below, was the creation of Austro-Hungarian dualism, a “structure of bipolar constitutionalism established by the Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867” (Evans 2004: 7). The early 1860s saw, as hinted earlier, initial federalist concessions to Hungarian, Bohemian, and Galician nobles, soon followed by a centralist constitutional counterreaction favored by the AustroGerman liberal bourgeoisie that in turn led to the suspension of the Hungarian Diet in the summer of 1861 (Breuilly 2002: 65). As Okey shows (2001: 180–182), “grass-roots national awareness” had continued to flourish during and despite neo-absolutism, creating conditions conducive to the later “breakthrough of Slav movements” and widening the gulf, by the beginning of the constitutional era, between “Austro-German centralists, Slav federalists, and Magyars.” Against the backdrop of Austria’s military-political and economic woes, the next decisive shift in the internal workings of power went hand in hand with the Compromise in 1867. Premised on the Hungarian “dualist programme” and marked by Franz Joseph’s crowning as King of Hungary, this created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary whose Cisleithanian and Transleithanian parts would share but three ministries, including defense and foreign policy, as well as various “matters of common [economic] interest” to be renegotiated periodically by the Austrian and Hungarian Parliaments; unsurprisingly, this resulted in deep resentment on the part of the Slavs, for after “a generation of constitutional and national upheaval, Austro-German and Magyar liberals had been unequivocally rewarded and the others sent away empty-handed” (Okey 2001: 188–190). Yet, the Cisleithanian “December Constitution” of 1867 had finally enshrined individual civil equality, recognizing “the equality of all customary languages in school, office, and public life” (Evans 2004: 8). While article 19 of the Fundamental Law (Staatsgrundgesetz über die allgemeinen Rechte der Staatsbürger)

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granted “equal rights” to “every race” in the state to “cultivate its nationality and language,” the categories “‘race’ and ‘nationality’ remained undefined,” and the Austrian Parliament also “failed to specify how . . . article 19 was to be implemented” (King 2002: 37). On an aggregate level, a profound structural asymmetry that favored German- and Hungarian-speaking parts of the population at the expense of the others persisted. At this juncture, it is worth returning to conceptual and methodological points already made—namely, that political fields are best captured in their heterogeneities and contestations; further, singular positions within them can themselves contain unexpected, yet revealing, tensions. This applies, for instance, to Adolf Fischhof (1816–1893), a prominent German left-liberal politician of Jewish background who had been involved in the drafting of the Kremsier constitution. Two decades later, Fischhof proposed a new “Nationalities Law” envisaging wide-ranging cultural, linguistic, and educational autonomy to each nationality in Cisleithanian Austria. Subsequently, Fischhof contributed, ultimately in vain, to proposals for a “Bohemian language compromise” and Austrian decentralization (Reifowitz 2001: 443). While Fischhof has been described as “perhaps the most pro-Slav German liberal politician in Austria on the nationalities question” (Reifowitz 2001: 453), his positions also contained another strand, one resonant with wider cultural understandings (see below) and the growing discursive hegemony of national frames of interpretation and mobilization. The following extracts from Fischhof ’s work warrant discussion here. The first, from 1869, reveals a palimpsestic rewriting (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017), by a left-liberal, of the topoi of national unity and organic belonging that we earlier encountered as hallmarks of the romantic: The national state is the family of a people . . . All citizens of a national state are related through the physical bond of blood, through the spiritual bond of language, as through their common fate, literary as well as military glory. A thousand relationships of the soul bind all citizens to one another . . . There exists the unity of sensibility . . . the unity of the state is self-generated. (Fischhof quoted in Reifowitz 2001: 451)

Even more relevant for our purposes was Fischhof ’s following account, also part of his treatise on Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes: The German Geist will stream out from Vienna over the whole Reich, not to . . . suffocate the national cultures of its peoples, rather to pollinate them. And the German language, as in ancient times, will become the idiom of educated peoples . . . The German-Austrian should be neither the task-master of subjugated peoples, nor the nurse of peoples . . . wasting away, but the leader of powerful and free peoples. That is his cultural mission, . . . his civilizing call. (Fischhof quoted in Reifowitz 2001: 449)

We here re-encounter discursive features discussed in the previous chapter, including the analogical use of particular pasts (i.e., “as in ancient times”) in the service

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of a schematic reading of history that anticipates an imminent improvement, encapsulated in the notion of a “German cultural mission,” of present circumstances. This resembles what has been described as the (German) Romantics’ linking “the best of both worlds” in “look[ing] forward to renewed greatness without neglecting the [national] past” (Gouldner 1973: 325). This also illustrates an “ideological dilemma” (Billig, Condor, and Edwards 1988)—namely Fischhof ’s difficulties in “balanc[ing] his . . . pluralism with his desire to spread German culture to the South and East” (Reifowitz 2001: 449). Competing discursive strands were at work in Fischhof ’s politics: on the one hand, its decentralizing push for recognition and equality for the monarchy’s nationalities; on the other, Fischhof self-defined as German, ascribed cultural and “intellectual superiority” and a “paternalistic,” “Germanizing mission” to German-Austrians, through which “Austria was to provide a home for the small nations between Germany and Russia (thus thwarting Pan-Slavism)” (Reifowitz 2001: 445–450). In our analytical terms, several identity grammars therefore cofeatured in, and underpinned, Fischhof ’s thought: a hierarchical one (i.e., purported German cultural superiority); an orientalist grammar premised on the idea of a “looming battle between civilization and backwardness” (Reifowitz 2001: 447); related to both, an assimilationist grammar, written into the notion of a (German) mission, that we will encounter again in due course, but also elements of a pluralist grammar of mutual collective recognition. Harry Ritter (1984: 241, 230) once called for a close (re)construction of the “texture, surface imagery, and metaphorical structure” that defined Austro-German liberalism, to whose chief advocates Adolf Fischhof belonged, and which “enjoyed only a fleeting taste of parliamentary leadership—based on a severely limited franchise—in the 1860s and 1870s.” The decline of Austro-German liberalism is conventionally tied to the financial crash of 1873 (Schorske 1981: 212; Schwarz 2014: 54). Paying close attention to liberalism’s discursive workings helps underscore both some overlaps with, and decisive differences from, its main ideological competitors—that is, nationalisms and political radicalisms—that came to gradually displace liberalism in the next phase of Central Europe’s “nationalization” (Judson 2005a: 4). Both the partial overlaps and the defining discontinuities matter, for as Ian Reifowitz (2001: 453)—corroborating Pieter Judson’s conclusions—argues, “even the most ‘liberal’ of German politicians still displayed strong nationalist feelings.” Reifowitz (2001: 453; also see Promitzer 2003: 188) continues: National chauvinism existed within German liberalism from its very start. Liberalism . . . centered around a hierarchical vision in which the educated and economically successful . . . earned the right to govern on behalf of all . . . [C]itizens possessed equal civil rights, but the liberal hierarchy separated them into those with active and passive rights, the rulers and the ruled . . . This new elite was, in theory, open to members of any ethnic group . . . [but this assumed] that those joining the educated elite would adopt its . . . German values . . . [I]n the last two decades of the nineteenth cen-

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tury . . . this fluid division between Germans and non-Germans was transformed . . . into a biologically defined chasm that could no longer be overcome by education and assimilation.

We therefore approach a highly significant juncture in the modern history of Habsburg Central Europe, at which boundaries hardened further, enabling distinctive patterns of mobilization and structural exclusion.

The Dawning of a Nationalist Age Continuing structural asymmetries notwithstanding, the liberal epoch had also created new “political opportunities” (Judson 2006: 25–26). Many of these, particularly in the context of the (economic) crisis-induced end of the era of liberalism and the politicization of larger segments of the population, contributed to the “nationalization of culture” (Czáky 2014: 193) that defined the closing decades of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries across Habsburg Central Europe. We next turn to a brief outline of further contextual factors and sociopolitical shifts during this period, which will enable a meaningful application of a refined closure theory to illuminate the workings of different politics of exclusion and usurpation, each premised on distinctive discursive and organizational features. Major (geo)political and domestic developments to impact the “nationalization process” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014: 6) after 1870 included the following: the German-French war of 1870–1871 and the formation of the German Empire; the stock market crash in 1873 (Beller 2006: 149), followed by economic depression, commonly seen as the turning point marking “the onset of liberalism’s demise” in Austria (Ritter 1984: 242); the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and its annexation in 1908 (e.g., Promitzer 2003: 192–193.); the formation of a military alliance (the Zweibund) between Germany and Austria established in 1879 and its wider implications for geopolitical “block-building” (Kretschmann 2003: 438; Angelow 1998); the liberals’ defeat in Cisleithania in 1879, followed by the era of Count Taaffe’s conservative, clericalSlavic “Iron Ring” and subsequent coalition until 1893, accompanied by increasingly prominent Slavic national movements and student nationalisms (e.g., Boyer 1995: 280; Beller 2006: 151); the growing divisiveness, especially from the 1890s on, of language politics centered on questions of schooling and the civil service (see below)1; and the election reform of 1907, which established “universal manhood suffrage,” abolished the hierarchical curiae system of privileged voting for the propertied classes and higher tax-bands, and aimed for ethnically homogeneous electoral wards (Boyer 2013: 154). Before tracing some discursive manifestations of these developments in the period between the 1870s and the

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eve of World War I, it is important to remember that, at earlier stages, some of the most prominent spokespeople of “Austroslavism” or, more narrowly, of “Czechness” had considered the Habsburg Empire the best available option for their national ingroup in the face of the external powers Russia and Germany. Journalist Karel Havlicek (1821–1856) had pronounced that “the Austrian monarchy is the best guarantee for the preservation of . . . our nationality” (quoted in Kohn 1952: 45). More widely known is the assessment by František Palacký (1798-1876), figurehead of the Czech national revival and author of The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia, in favor of an Austrian federation; reflecting on 1848 and its aftermath, Palacký had once declared that “if the Austrian Empire did not exist, it would be in Europe’s and humanity’s interest to create it” (quoted in Timms 1991: 901). Such assessments soon gave way to an internally more polarized situation, captured in Jeremy King’s (2002: 30; 48) study of Budweis/Budějovice but relevant to wider stretches of Cisleithania, between centralists and federalists, the former partly anchored in German liberalism and the latter often self-defining in rigidly ethnonational ways. In our analytical terms, the former was premised upon a hierarchical grammar of encompassment, whereas the latter—in whose favor political debate would shift over the coming decades—revealed a binary grammar of radical ethnonationalist otherness. Importantly, both grammars enabled forms and structures of social closure, albeit very different ones. The former, earlier, hierarchical grammar still typical of the liberal era maintained particular exclusions, as most clearly epitomized in its limited franchise. The latter, binary grammar, by contrast, typified a new era of mass politics and discursively underpinned a system of horizontal (rather than vertical/hierarchical) closure and exclusion premised on (ascribed) ethnonational subject positions and, in due course, thus defined citizenship. Also worth noting, as a countertrend to the “ethnicizing process” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014: 4) fragmenting Central European societies in the late nineteenth century, was a “militarization,” or the “pervasiveness” of a military culture, in late imperial Austria: conscription had become universal in 1868; an “agent of the unitary state,” the army served as a remaining pillar of dynastic, multinational loyalty, as a “countermodel to nationalist organizations,” which the latter in turn opposed by taking on “anti-militaristic dimensions” (Cole 2014: 3, 17).2 Such militarization sat in turn uneasily, thus illustrating the workings of an increasingly diverse and strongly contested political field shaping late imperial Austria, alongside fin-de-siècle pacifism. This counterdiscourse, associated most of all with Bertha von Suttner and the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft, synthesized pacifism, feminism, and supranational connections and loyalties (Laqua 2014). Overall, however, the dominant ideological thrust in the final decades of the Habsburg Empire undeniably pointed in the direction of more rigid ethnonationalist self-definitions and political fragmentation, despite the concomitant

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persistence of countertendencies, such as some “pluricultural” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014: 10) domains and life-worlds. A central analytical challenge involves the tracing of what Dieter Langewiesche (1992: 370–371) has termed nationalism’s “functional change” and its “gradual slippage” to the Right from the 1870s on; although earlier nationalisms had already shown exclusionary potential, the latter became increasingly “internally and externally aggressive” after the end of the liberal era. McMillan (2005: 51) draws the contrast even more sharply in speaking of a “transition” from the 1870s to the 1890s “between the emancipatory nationalism of the left and the increasingly racialist nationalism of the right.” The remainder of this chapter examines two core dimensions of this shift in nationalist discourse and the forms of social closure it enabled. The first comprises nationalist closure focused on (markers of ) language and ethnicity. The second includes even more aggressive, more radical, racist forms of closure, most prominent among them anti-Semitism. Both also call for parallel discussions of counterdiscourses and aspects of social life that resisted the claims and demands of nationalist politics.

Ethnic/Linguistic Closure and Usurpation The intensifying interplay of discursive, national “othering” and conflicts over rights, entitlements, and exclusions requires more discussion. In both “halves” of the Dual Monarchy, language—ever more widely defined, in romantic fashion, as a marker of purportedly timeless ethnonational belonging (Gellner 1998)— came to play a central role to collective self-definitions and the competing politics of continuing closure versus usurpation. In Transleithania, the legal enshrinement of Hungarian as the “state language” sat uneasily alongside “formal rights of other vernaculars in lower fora,” with minority language provision ultimately a distant second to an “openly nationalist agenda” (Evans 2004: 11). Policies and processes of Magyarization (e.g., see Waechter 2016; Cabanel 2009: 33) indicated an additional identity grammar, which has received little attention thus far but plays an important role in the discursive repertoire of many nationalisms: the “anthropophagic” (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Bauman 1993) expectation that “the other” assimilate into the dominant majority. “Otherness” is here acknowledged, though as a precursor to its expected transformation—its merging into, and absorption by, the dominant group. I refer to this as an assimilationist grammar, one that demands movement from the category of “the other” into that of the hegemonic ingroup, at the cost of exclusion or disadvantage for those refusing this “switch.” In Cisleithania, language was becoming a central issue around which questions of identity and conflicts over rights, entitlements, and the distribution of power revolved, with particular importance being attributed in the public imagination

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to schools, the civil service (and hence to interactions with state institutions), and to areas that came to be constructed as “language frontiers” (Judson 2006) in nationalist discourses. Mobilization around language rights took important turns during the Taaffe era of the 1880s, with attempts to grant Czech-speakers equal rights in the Bohemian administration being countered by an unsuccessful campaign to turn German into Cisleithania’s official state language; against the backdrop of burgeoning, competing nationalist language and school societies, German-speakers’ “frenzied defense of their linguistic Besitzstand”—or perceived “property” and standing—in Bohemia was part of a “first stage of a terminal ‘linguistic crisis’” (Evans 2004: 9ff.). The latter peaked again in 1897 when then premier Count Kazimierz Badeni sought to impose bilingualism on all civil servants in Bohemia (see King 2002: 92ff.). The German parties’ agitation against the “language decrees” and German-speakers’ riots in and beyond Bohemia were to be Badeni’s downfall (Beller 2006: 161–162). In our conceptual terms, language here revealed its use to the maintenance of a German-speaking “status group” (Rex 1986: 12) seeking to protect historically entrenched “political and legal privileges.” When viewed from a Czech national perspective, or in a longer historical context, we here also see early signs of what would ultimately turn into the “successful usurpation” of a “previously . . . accepted code . . . of exclusion from positions, rewards, resources and opportunities” (Murphy 1988: 48). There is more to be said about the increasingly exclusivist national identities being mobilized from the late nineteenth century on. As Nancy Wingfield (2003: 2–4) has shown, “essentializing” accounts of “the other” played as significant a role in the hardening of ethnonational boundaries as did the self-stereotyping of “the Czech ‘national democratic spirit’ . . . the Polish ‘Bulwark of Christendom’” or the “German civilizing mission in Central and Eastern Europe,” all of which found growing audiences in expanding public spheres and through the work of nationally defined voluntary associations. There one encountered some of the central topoi of Czech, Polish, and Austro-German self-understandings and their underpinning identity grammars: both their binary/essentialist and assimilationist or encompassing forms (the latter seen in the “civilizing” trope and its hierarchical construction of more or less “advanced” ethnonational communities). Jointly, they enabled, for example, “anti-Slavic attitudes” in Austria, which responded to “real or imagined Slavic demographic threats” by purporting to guard the “cultural frontiers between ‘civilization’ and ‘backwardness’” and ascribing superiority and a “missionary role [to] Germans as propagators of civilization” (Promitzer 2003: 189–190). A clear manifestation of this emerges in the 1912 novel Das deutsche Leid, by Rudolf Hans Bartsch. Part Heimat novel and “romantic hymn” to the settlement work in southern Styria by the German nationalist organization Südmark (Judson 2006: 135; 17), and part Entwicklungsroman focused on the novel’s protagonist Georg Botzenhardt, Bartsch’s fictional account bears discursive hallmarks of nationalism and particular topoi

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of its Austrian-German variant of the late imperial era, including its “defensive anti-Slavism” (Boyer 1995: 29): “Listen,” Georg shouted with agony, “one hears foreign voices in these beautiful houses . . . formerly German properties are now in the hands of Slavic merchants, lawyers and civil servants, who hate Goethe’s language . . . Slavic sewage has risen from the canals of discontent and hatred right to the summit of the vineyards . . . What kind of re-conquest is this meant to be, compared to the German settlement a thousand years ago? . . . At that time Germans brought the Bible . . . dried swamps, built castles and churches, founded cities and brought, God-like, a higher existence . . . Conversely, these people come crawling from the depths of envy and knife us . . . Us Germans pay twelve times as much in tax, for schools that educate our enemies . . . If only we could keep this Styrian soil, next to Tyrol it is the only part of the south that the eternal German suffering has been able to retain, looking towards the blue Mediterranean.” (Bartsch 1912: 203–205, my translation)

Discursive features that define the novel in its entirety and reflected much nationalist thought at the time appear here in condensed form. These include nationalism’s schematic-mythic narrative of history (Hutchinson 1987), which juxtaposes a glorified past to a present judged to be deeply unjust. Couched in the narrative’s other central topoi—of age-old German suffering, of national resilience and unity in the face of external threats—Bartsch (1912: 270, 401, 28) looks ahead to a “new time” of an imminent national revival. Most centrally, Das deutsche Leid revolves around a German—and not even an explicitly “Austrian-German”—category of self-interpellation, thus also reflecting the pervasiveness of pan-Germanism in the final years of the Habsburg Empire. Moreover, the novel incorporates the topos of national-revival-through-unity that had become a hallmark of nationalist discourses across Habsburg Central Europe by repeatedly pointing at central actors and institutions (e.g., teachers, civil servants, priests, educational associations) of such self-designated national revival movements. All this presupposes, as the above illustrates, a Manichean, binary identity grammar separating friends and foes as mutually exclusive categories. Tropes of a “civilizing mission” and of the purported need for access to the Mediterranean and the Orient also present in Bartsch’s novel need to be read in their wider historical, geopolitical contexts, namely the aforementioned Habsburg occupation (in 1878) and later annexation (in 1908) of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Scholarship has traced Bosnia’s multiple material and ideological uses to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: as “popular tourist destination,” “proximate colony and nearby frontier,” as site for the self-designated “civilizing mission,” and as a “comfortably Oriental” screen, onto which the “image of Austria as a “colourful ethnic mosaic”“ was projected; crucially, the intention here was “the creation of subalterns, not equals” (Reynolds-Cordileone 2015: 45–46). In terms of the identity grammars at work, Austria’s (cultural) politics in Bosnia

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thus included typically Orientalist-binarisms and patterns of hierarchical encompassment (i.e., the paternalism of a mosaic of dominants and subalterns) and the assimilationist civilizing trope. This relates to André Gingrich’s (2005) refinement of Edward Said’s magnum opus. Gingrich questions Said’s understanding of Orientalism as premised on a singular representational and political “logic.” Observing forms of “frontier Orientalism” in central, eastern, and southern Europe instead, Gingrich (2005: 515) shows this in Austrian juxtapositions of “the ‘bad Muslim alien’ to the ‘good’ (servile, loyal) Muslim, such as the Habsburg court’s ‘Bosniaks’” in the later imperial era. The “dichotomy between good and bad orientals” (i.e., Bosnians and Ottomans respectively) intrinsic to Austrian orientalist discourses postulated “shared experiences with the Southern Slavs,” which in turn constructed the Orient as “both a threat and an opportunity” and thus helped legitimize Austria’s “colonial and cultural mission”; it also manifested in the Habsburgs’ Islamgesetz, or Islam Law (1912–1915), which, most progressively across Europe, recognized the Hanafi legal school as a “religion of the state” (Heiss and Feichtinger 2013: 149ff.). While we will encounter later, “palimpsestic,” reappropriations (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017) of such frontier Orientalisms, for now we ought to take note of other, less frequently remarked upon and at times positively counterhegemonic, uses of orientalist thought (see Hodkinson and Walker 2013) in the final years of the Dual Monarchy. Such counterdiscourses have been shown, for instance, in some of the literary classics of the fin-de-siècle. Self-critical and selfreflexive forms of orientalism have thus been detected in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka, who, “far from promulgating Western imperialism, . . . subvert received . . . national and cultural identity . . . problematize the very practice of orientalism . . . [and] invoke the oriental ‘other’ not to bolster Occidental imperialism but . . . to express [doubt] about their troubled empire” (Lemon 2011: 1). Returning from the outer edges of the late Habsburg Empire, it was along and across its internal, increasingly hardening ethnolinguistic boundaries that nationalist closure could be observed most clearly. It is there that attention to the discursive workings of social closure and usurpation pays arguably the most substantial analytical dividends. Richard Reutner (2009) has examined Cisleithanian parliamentary debates of 1884, 1886, and 1897, and their various foci on proposals to turn German into the official state language and on Badeni’s “language decrees.” Reutner reveals discursive features and argumentative patterns prominent among increasingly defensive German-speaking members of parliament. These included metaphors of “dams” and “bulwarks” and the trope of a “Babylonian language confusion,” with which a variety of German-speaking politicians sought to counter a perceived “Slavic flood.” Such topoi further connected a variety of postulated external and internal dangers, including those ascribed to the Ottomans, the Czechs, the empire’s Slavic peoples more generally and the “Russian power”

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suspected behind them, as well as a more diffuse “Asiatic danger” (Reutner 2009: 321ff.). Reutner testifies to the role played by such discursive tropes and topoi in the formulation of a politics of social closure aimed at protecting Germanspeakers’ hegemony and at preserving their self-designated Besitzstand (perceived/ claimed property), at a time when many German-speakers feared that their longestablished cultural and political dominance and claimed territorial “possessions” were in jeopardy. Further, Reutner points in the direction of another discursive feature that (indirectly) calls for further refinement of the conceptual apparatus employed here. The recurring trope of a feared “Slavification” (Slawisierung) (Reutner 2009: 327) of territory, politics, and people at the time reveals another identity grammar at play. With Magyarization and the purported AustrianGerman “civilizing mission” reflecting assimilationist and hierarchically encompassing grammars, fears of the loss of parts of the national ingroup reveal another discursive “logic”: a strongly negative evaluation of the specter of some of “us” being turned into “them.” I propose to call this a grammar of (national) apostasy. An additional part of nationalism’s discursive repertoire, this is the inverse of the assimilationist grammar; while the latter advocates the ingroup’s expansion and civilizing mission, the apostasy grammar reveals a dread of, and opposition to, “defectors” or any other loss of what is constructed as part of the nation in question. This coexistence of the grammars of apostasy and assimilationism is also discernible in Pieter Judson’s findings concerning the activities and narratives of nationalist organizations in southern Bohemia, south Styria, and south Tyrol in the final decades of the Habsburg Empire. Judson (2006: 49) documents that “Czech and German nationalist school associations repeatedly accused each other of working secretly to Czechify or Germanize the unwilling children of the other nationality,” i.e., expressive of the fear of national apostasy, while “minority schools, whether Slav, Italian, or German, worked to nationalize the children who passed through their rooms” as a strategy of expansion through assimilation. What is more, Judson provides insights into other facets of ethnolinguistic politics along the internal “language frontiers” of late imperial Austria, which further illuminate the processes of nationalist closure at the time. First, crucially, nationalist organizations in any of the self-constituting “camps” were not backward-looking traditionalists, for “in rural Austria around 1900 . . . Czech and German nationalist activists defined themselves . . . obsessively as the very embodiment of modernity in what they considered to be an otherwise backward society” (Judson 2006: 8). This nationalist self-perception as quintessentially modern needs to be seen in conjunction with the concurrent insistence on romantically reified, purportedly preexisting ethnonational categories of self- and other-ascription. Looking both back and forward, this is how nationalists, in their distinctive historical schema, reappropriated the romantic proclivity to “look forward to renewed greatness” (Gouldner 1973: 325) by promising a national revival of purportedly previous and collective glories, in sharp departure from a present found wanting.

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Second, Judson documents the growing power of a nationalist (re)framing of local conflicts, which were not a priori nationalist in origin and occurred along the language frontiers being drawn between German- and Czech-speakers, German- and Slovene-speakers, and German- and Italian-speakers. This took various shapes, including the “genre of the schoolhouse drama,” which offered journalists a “narrative structure”—one premised on “vague but pervasive conspiracies” and the binary construction of the “enemy’s fanaticism” as opposed to the national ingroup’s alleged “reasonableness”—that purported to explain “apparently random incidents of violence” and thereby “created nationalist incidents out of events whose deeper nationalist significance [was] not at all evident” (Judson 2006: 53ff.). Similar nationalist reinterpretations of ambiguous or unexplained incidences of violence by politicians and journalists have been documented in South Asia, where the imposition and instrumentalization of ethnic categories have also been shown to pursue a nationalist interpellation and division of the intended audiences (Brass 1997). Such empirical insights corroborate a recent “cognitive turn” (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004) in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, which detects in both phenomena schematic “ways of seeing”—that is, of classifying, interpreting, and thereby actively constructing—the social world. Projected back onto the historical setting at hand, the actors and organizations prominent along the late Habsburg Empire’s internal “language frontiers” played core roles in the construction and circulation of the discursive categories and interpretative frameworks that made nationalist closure and usurpation possible. Nationalists’ projects were further bolstered by the homogenization of publicly declared identifications demanded by the “one-language principle” (at the expense of bilingualism) written into the census; by protectionist, nationalizing consumption practices that extended to national boycotts such as the “Czech ‘Each to his Own’ campaign [and] German equivalent[s]” (King 2002: 59, 67, 127ff.; also Judson 2005b); and by a wider discursive “nationalization of culture” enabled by the (neo)romantic, “nineteenth-century appropriation of traditions . . . [and] the ‘territorialization’ of culture” (Czáky 2014: 193). The eradefining developments leading up to, during, and following the end of World War I would testify to the growing appeal and, measured by its own goals, ultimately the success of nationalist politics across Central Europe. Yet, nationalists did not have it all their own way. The emerging hegemony of “nationalist master narratives” and their impact on “collective memory” notwithstanding, there is also ample evidence of the stubborn persistence of “pluriculturality” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014: 7–10), which refused the nationalist reduction to singular, ethnolinguistically defined life-worlds. This manifested in lived bilingualism—“biethnic” and hence “nonnational” actors with often “uncommitted” political positions or the ability and willingness to situationally switch allegiances (see King 2002). The “sites of indifference” to nationalist demands for exclusive, singular loyalties

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extended to “mixed marriages,” local “fraternization,” religious practices, and demands for children’s bilingual education, each of which perplexed and “frustrated” nationalist activists (Judson and Zahra 2012). Faced with reluctant national subjects, nationalists had to “import . . . beliefs about national difference,” particularly to rural regions with engrained “pluricultural practices,” where conflicts undeniably existed but did not map onto purportedly preexisting and fundamental ethnolinguistic divides the way nationalists insisted (Judson 2014: 61). Furthermore, such divergences between nationalist imaginaries and lived realities were not rural particularities. Indeed, nationalist closure and pluriculturality also often sat in close yet uneasy proximity in urban settings around 1900. This is shown by Gary Cohen’s (2014: 1–4) research on Prague, where, he argues, “deep national division, competition and conflict” notwithstanding, “portraits of the political and social encapsulation of the Czech and German communities and . . . increasing exclusion of Jews from both after the 1890s have been drawn too starkly and simply.” “Nationalist rhetoric and agitation” were indeed prominent characteristics of Prague’s social “landscape,” but so were more “convivial” (see Gilroy 2004) daily encounters across national and religious boundaries experienced by city residents in the domains of work and commerce. Cohen also documents a tension between “nationalist visions of sharp divisions” and everyday “boundary-crossings.” Paying close attention to “theaters, concerts, literary life, and art exhibitions,” Cohen (2014: 5–6) thus reveals social and cultural spheres in which “national boundaries proved more porous . . . than the nationalist rhetoric claimed.” In his examination of an urban setting in which not two but three ethnic categories—“Czech,” “German,” and “Jewish”—assumed ever greater political prominence, Cohen also points us toward the second major dimension of nationalist closure, to which we turn next. There, much older structures of exclusion and prejudicial “ways of seeing” were reconfigured under the influence of then new discourses of “race,” giving rise to forms of nationalist closure that were to manifest in the course of Central Europe’s twentieth-century history more violently and murderously than any other.

Anti-Semitic Closure Building on centuries of religiously rooted anti-Judaism (Bukey 2000: 22, 105), anti-Semitism began to turn into its distinctly modern, most dehumanizing, and subsequently most murderous form in the second half of the nineteenth century (Pauley 1998). In its later, most infamous manifestation under Nazism, anti-Semitism would selectively combine, as we see in the next chapter, strands of a political romanticism “of steel” (stählerne Romantik) with a deeply “biological” racism (Safranski 2013: 348ff.). Yet, the palimpsestic rewriting and bricolage of different ideational components in the service of a racial anti-Semitism was

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already apparent in its nineteenth-century “explosive . . . mix of romanticism, anti-capitalism, völkisch nationalism and hatred of Western liberal democracy” (Wistrich 1994: 55). A binary identity grammar combined with conspiratorial topoi in the service of attempts to reinstate older structures of social closure, a strategy that found growing audiences particularly in times of socioeconomic turmoil triggered by the stock market crash of 1873 in Vienna, Berlin, and beyond. Early indications of this merging of racist essentialism with the topos of a purportedly imminent, necessary cultural revival included Richard Wagner’s propagation, under the influence of French historian Arthur Comte de Gobineau, of “blood purity” and of a “cleans[ing] of European civilization from the spiritual and physical pollution of the Jews” (Wistrich 1994: 57). Anti-Semitic social closure was beginning to manifest among German and Austrian university students in the late 1870s and 1880s, who were excluding Jews from their fraternities (Beller 1990: 191–192), identifying them “as dangerous competitors in the liberal professions” of the post-emancipation era, and substituting “the social boundaries that had fallen with the ghetto walls . . . with new biological criteria” (Wistrich 1994: 58; also Wodak and Reisigl 1999: 177). Paraphrasing Egon Schwarz (2014: 91–92), this new biological racism now turned “being Jewish” into an “inescapable” fate, shutting off any avenues (e.g., conversion) for changing ascribed group membership. With regard to the deepening overlap of anti-Semitism and prominent German self-understandings, Brian Vick (2003: 247–250) also observes that toward the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently in the first half of the twentieth, older “assimilationist conceptions of German national identity,” such as that transported by the topos of a “German civilizing mission,” were giving way to “more purist” notions (of the kind here discussed as signs of essentialist-binary identity grammars). The interplay of far-reaching social change, palimpsestic reappropriations and combinations of various ideological influences, and collective struggles for political advantages became manifest. In Germany, the “social and economic disruption” experienced during “rapid industrialization and agricultural depression of the early Kaiserreich” triggered “new exclusionary interpretations of the organic elements of the romantic Volk concept . . . [that acquired] overtones of struggle in the era of social Darwinism”; further tied to “anti-French and anti-Polish sentiments,” especially from the 1890s on, “biological theories of race” became more salient, as did anti-Semitism, within “newer versions of German national identity” (Vick 2003: 249–250). In Austria, a key role in the appropriation and politicization of pan-Germanic and anti-Semitic discourse was performed by the infamous irredentist Georg von Schönerer. Subsequently “credited” by Adolf Hitler as a “forerunner” of racist propaganda, both symbolically and organizationally, Schönerer was “the first to perceive the possibilities of [a radical and racial] antisemitism as an instrument for . . . disrupting . . . the internal structure of the state” (Karbach 1945: 3, 9).

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Schönerer’s career was subdivided into two epochs: a first phase of close association with student fraternities, when Schönerer acted as a spokesperson for “young and angry men”; and a second phase shaped by an increasingly radical anti-Semitism, his conviction and temporary disbarment following his breaking into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, his anti-clerical, Protestant Los von Rom (away from Rome) campaign, and his return to Parliament in 1897 (Höbelt 1982). The context to the first phase was provided by an atmosphere of political radicalism in the 1870s and 1880s, which saw a “reaction of Austrian youth” against liberalism coupled with a “determination to start the world anew on the basis of German nationalism [or] socialism which at this time were not [necessarily] considered incompatible” (Daviau 1982: 163). It also needs to be remembered that Schönerer’s initial “attachment to the Liberal cause” was at first not questioned, which continued to his early prominence in the Deutschnationale Bewegung and his coauthorship of the “Linz Program” in 1882: the latter demanded, among other things, “dissolution of the union with Hungary,” “closer alliance with Germany” and German-language dominance, “anti-capitalist taxes,” protectionist measures for farmers, and “penal settlements,” while not yet making explicit reference to “the Jewish question” (Karbach 1945: 7–8). Yet demands for pan-Germanic social closure3 had already been clear in Schönerer’s 1881 call for a “völkisch closing of ranks” (in Schnee 1943: 126–127): combining topoi of German unity with a binary identity grammar, Schönerer therein called for a “national party on liberal and popular foundation,” for the “protection of the national interests of the Germans in Austria” in their “struggle with Slavdom” and “against reprehensible class rule”; for a definition of German as “the language of the State” and an “organic and constitutional relationship with Germany”; and, in a typical anti-Semitic trope, for a “distanc[ing] from all cosmopolitan and unreliable elements.” Racial anti-Semitism and its politics of social closure were soon becoming ever more pronounced with Schönerer and his followers, whose publications, rhetoric, and demands included calls for the “elimination of Jewish influence from all spheres of public life,” for the “segregation of Jewish children and . . . the complete exclusion of Jewish teachers, even if baptized, from the schools of our race,” and for the abrogation of Jewish emancipation “to reduce them to their former restricted legal status” (see Karbach 1945: 15–17). The discursive utilization of topoi of conspiracy and revival and of racist essentialisms also defined speeches Schönerer delivered in Vienna in February 1885 and November 1886, which struck rhetorical registers and a racial deixis that would become ever more familiar in the course of the decades to come. Schönerer (n.d.: 45, my translation) bemoaned a “rotting in the press” and asked “who will finally liberate us from those cosmopolites, from those parasites sapping the people’s life?” On the second occasion, he anticipated the nation’s “moral rebirth” based on the “removal of Jewish influence,” defining anti-Semitism as a “cornerstone” of the nationaler Gedanke (or “national thought”), insisting on “differences of

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blood and race” and declaring that “Czechs are far less alien from us than the Semitic race” (Schönerer n.d.: 52–57, my translations). After Schönerer’s return to Parliament, the pan-Germanic movement fragmented, eventually splitting in 1902/1903 into Schönerer’s Alldeutsche Partei (All-German Party) and the Deutschradikale Partei (German Radical Party) led by Bohemian Karl Hermann Wolf (Angelow 1998: 378). By then, another, competing, radical politics had established itself from its power-base in Vienna: the Christian Social Movement. In his magisterial analysis of the origins and workings of the Christian Socials, as a “pseudo-mass party” premised on its figurehead’s—Karl Lueger’s—blend of modernizing and traditional, charismatic politics, John Boyer (1995) has shown the structurally conditioned motivations of diverse audiences and social bases to lend their support to the Christian Socials. This culminated in 1896 in a Christian Social coalition taking “control of the capital city,” marking the “first time in the modern urban political history of Central Europe [that] a major metropolitan area had fallen to non-Liberal rule” (Boyer 1995: 385). In terms of the present analysis, interest politics and social closure had played key roles, to be read against the backdrop of socioeconomic and technological change, the widening of the franchise, and the beginnings of the era of mass politics. In this context, the Christian Social movement had managed to mobilize ever wider sections of the petite bourgeoisie, particularly the city’s artisans and master craftsmen, teachers and civil servants, the “radical clergy,” and in due course also significant parts of the rural vote and of the Viennese property owners. Ultimately, the Christian Socials’ success was due to its “social pluralism and flexible political structure” and its ability to “reaffirm . . . the class consciousness . . . of the Austrian Bürgertum as a means to sustain social privilege” (Boyer 1995: 314, 416). To return to discursive and organizational features repeatedly shown here, Lueger’s Christian Socials successfully applied a nostalgic topos—of a hierarchically ordered past threatened by the present— in the service of “collective self-enhancement and anti-Socialist defensiveness” (Boyer 1995: 39). Also significant was Lueger’s “naivete on the national question,” albeit one tempered by his anti-Hungarian hostility (Boyer 1995: 412–413). Illustrating that nationalism is best understood in its overlaps with other forms of social closure, political anti-Semitism provided the ideological glue for the Christian Socials’ diverse constituencies. This anti-Semitism combined an “anticapitalist” and protectionist “impulse,” appealing to many in times of economic crisis and anxiety in the post-1873 era, with a “hierarchical paternalism” premised on “traditionalism” and “honoured status positions” (Boyer 1995: 67, 108, 121). Karl von Vogelsang, “German expatriate” and “ex-Protestant” Catholic convert who tied anti-Semitism to “a sharp critique of the Liberal hegemony and capitalistic exploitation of labour” and to “a fear of secularizing trends . . . resulting in decline of Christian belief ” (Wistrich 1994: 58; also Tietze 2007: 227–228), played

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an important role in this respect. Here again the discursive and organizational interplay of topoi of the past and present, and the palimpsestic reappropriation of earlier ideational currents in the service of a politics of social closure, surfaced. As Boyer (1995: 122–123, 157–158) illustrates, Vogelsang’s journalism drew the lower Viennese clergy, who shared “past-oriented conceptions of their now threatened social status,” into the anti-Semitic movement. A “pragmatic neo-Romantic,” Vogelsang formulated a “Catholic social theory” partly premised on “early nineteenth-century romantics like Adam Müller,” which “naturalized” both history through “idealized constructions of the past” and a corporatism of “vertical, hierarchical divisions of various broad economic sectors” (Boyer 1995: 169–180). Anti-Semitic stereotypes and essentializing constructions of Jews as perennial, threatening strangers were part of this. Some of Vogelsang’s core topoi and constitutive discursive categories are illustrative here: he reified a “Christian social order,” which he located “prior to massive technological change,” juxtaposing the purported “unity,” “calm and contentment” of the Middle Ages to a “deeply unsatisfactory present,” which had allegedly seen “social decay brought about by the doctrines of Liberalism,” causing the “social body to rot and disintegrate”; ascribing “wealth and influence” to “the Jews,” Vogelsang called for Christian social reform and a “rebuilding” of social order (Vogelsang n.d.: 1–65, my translations). Such (and many similar) formulations prominent in Habsburg Central Europe in the decades leading up to the Dual Monarchy’s disintegration condensed core parts of a “deep structure” that had come to characterize nationalist discourses and other political radicalisms: the combination of group essentialisms, often though not exclusively premised on binary identity grammars, with a historical topos—or a combination of topoi amounting to an ideological master-narrative of history (Hutchinson 1987)—that contrasted a “golden past” to a present found deeply unsatisfactory and promised an imminent cultural/ national revival. With regard to anti-Semitism, mention must again be made of its growing cultural salience and vehemence in the late imperial era. Literature has traced the urban and rural prominence and workings of anti-Semitic tropes and hostility (e.g., Rose 2014), the intersection of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and “East”/“West” essentialism across Habsburg Central Europe (Raggam-Blesch 2008), and the role of journalistic and criminological discourses in the spread of anti-Semitism (Vyleta 2012). Analogous to my previous discussion of ethnic closure and its counterdiscourses or counter-sites, broader contextualization also offers further insights here. Such contextualization draws attention to the role played by the cosmopolitan centers of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in the “emergence” of “complex” Jewish identities and confrontations (e.g., Baric, Coignard, and Vassogne 2014). Yet, such complex identification has also been traced in Moravia, where Marsha Rozenblit has shown the “fluidity of ethnic and national allegiance” in German-Jewish schools, which resisted the exclusive

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logic demanded by both Czech and German nationalists: these schools operated largely in German but were not “outposts of Germanism”; also teaching Czech, while self-defining as primarily German-speakers, these German-Jewish schools “felt comfortable in their Czech-language milieu” (Rozenblit 2013: 3). Returning our gaze to Vienna, the contradictions and tensions facing Jews, pervasive anti-Semitic exclusions, and the “limits of assimilation” have been shown to have left a clear “imprint” on the modernist culture of the fin-de-siècle (Herzog 2011: 1–4; also Ashby 2013a, b). No one has traced the connections between the experience of anti-Semitic closure and some of the best-known manifestations of Viennese modernism more compellingly than Steven Beller (2001: 19): once “modernity had taken a wrong turn” with the political “success” of anti-Semitism and the collapse of Viennese liberalism had ended Jewish hopes for full emancipation and inclusion, leading figures of the fin-de-siècle were reacting against these ever more hostile anti-Semitic realities through “retreat into the temple of art, into the psyche, but also into the Promised Land of Zion, to socialism and social reform.” Thus, we approach the next crucial juncture, at which monumental geopolitical events and the era-defining cataclysm of World War I would further shape nationalism’s discursive and institutional vehicles.

Concluding Remarks Albert Guérard (1934: 5) observed long ago that “every country in the nineteenth century was engaged in [the] task of nationalizing itself.” Carl Schorske (1981: 174) has described this as a “politics of the new key” that, in different ideological forms, “tapp[ed] the wellsprings of a deferential past to satisfy the yearnings for a communitarian future.” This chapter has retraced this process in Habsburg Central Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, which was to prove decisive to, and pave the path toward, the eventual demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Chronologically, we have reached the point that would mark the beginning of one of the darkest periods in human history, a period comprising two world wars and the Holocaust, to which we turn in the next chapter and in which nationalisms would play the central ideological role. Politically, we have reached a watershed that would see the fragmentation of the soon-to-be-former Habsburg Empire into a number of smaller nation-states, in whose self-definition and self-constitution the nationalist quest for a “convergence” or “fusion” of “culture and polity” (Gellner 1983: 49), with the former usually defined in linguistic-romantic terms examined in this and the previous chapter, proved crucial. Conceptually, this chapter has revealed core nationalist topoi—including those of national unity and revival and of external threats—that would continue to feature prominently in most if not all nationalist

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discursive repertoires in the decades to come. At the same time, developments and materials examined above have also led to a conceptual broadening, as the identity grammars employed in the service of various Central European nationalisms were shown to have included different binary, hierarchically encompassing and assimilationist grammars, as well as the latter’s inverse, namely a grammar of apostasy. Highly significant has been this chapter’s demonstrations of how the discursive patterns and argumentative characteristics of nationalism (and closely related ideological specimens) enabled (competing) politics of social closure or usurpation: appeals to, and mobilizations of, nations as ethnic-linguistics groups were thus part and parcel of struggles over rights, resources, and power, or, more accurately, of struggles between differently positioned “status groups” (Collins 1971: 1009) and their relative access to—or exclusion from—“positions, rewards, resources and opportunities” (Murphy 1988: 48). Andreas Wimmer (2002: 33) rightly stresses that the “process of social closure,” or the exclusion of “those who are not felt to belong [effected by] drawing a dividing line between the familiar and the foreign,” can lead to different fissures, variously along boundaries of class, subculture, gender, ethnicity, or nation. It is equally true that all these fissures have helped shape Central European history. Yet, the crucial role played by nationalist closure in era-defining shifts, events, and phenomena, both in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth centuries is undeniable and requires further examination. Moreover, we have begun to see, thanks to the analytical concepts and strategies employed here, that there is more to the “drawing [of ] a dividing line” than one might expect. Such discursive-cumpolitical processes follow different patterns; the boundaries drawn vary in their relative rigidity or porosity, and the resulting intergroup relations also differ very significantly. We next turn to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, at core moments of which dominant identity grammars were to become ever more rigid/ binary and the social closure thus accomplished ever more absolute.

Notes 1. Rok Stergar (2017) has corroborated the argument that, far from a historical inevitability, ethnolinguistic divisions and categories were constructed and entrenched, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century and through schools, nationalist organizations, and the state’s classificatory efforts. 2. Also see Schorske’s (1981: 237) assessment of the Secessionist movement as another, cosmopolitan, countertrend to nationalists’ discovery and exaltation of “ethnic arts.” 3. As emerges from Carl Schorske’s summary, a politics of social closure was already evident in the Linz Program’s combination of “radical democracy, social reform and nationalism” and its support for “home industries”: the program spoke to the “grievances of the anti-Semitic Viennese artisan associations . . . [as] survivors of an earlier economic era now hard-pressed by the advent of the factory, the retail store, and the Jewish peddler” (Schorske 1981: 126).

Chapter 3

THE DARKEST SIDES OF MODERNITY World Wars and the Holocaust

d W

orld War I’s historical Eckdaten (key data) are well known. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914, by Bosnian Serb revolutionary Gavrilo Princip, followed by Austria’s ultimatum and subsequent declaration of war on Serbia, triggered geopolitical chain reactions that resulted in an era-defining war pitting the Central Powers—that is, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires (plus the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria)—against Russia, France, the British Empire, Belgium, Serbia, Italy (as of 1915), Romania (as of 1916), Japan, the United States (as of 1917), and other allies. The human costs of the twentieth century’s first near-global, catastrophic war are calculated as having amounted to nearly ten million military casualties and twenty million wounded soldiers, with an estimated further seven million civilian casualties (Tucker 2005: 273). What is more, the next apocalyptic events to follow just over two decades later, which were to take humanity into the depths of state-run genocide of unprecedented scale and to the brink of selfdestruction or at least the technological potential to self-destroy, themselves need to be analyzed against the backdrop provided by the events of 1914–1918 (Hamann 2008: 10–13). Before turning to a thirty-one-year period that changed the face of the world and our understanding of civilization and its fragility, the arguments developed in this chapter need to be located in relation to the longue durée perspective adopted in this book in its entirety. The previous chapters built on recent historical scholarship (e.g., Wingfield 2003; Feichtinger and Heiss 2013) and relevant discursive data to illuminate processes of “nationalization” of Central European localities and societies during the “long nineteenth century” (Hobsbawm 1962;

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1975; 1987; Trencsényi et al. 2016). Rather than reflecting primordial solidarities and units of political action they are widely assumed to be, “nations” had to be constructed in processes implicating civil society associations in growing public spheres (e.g., Judson 2005a; 2006: 17), politicians, the media, and cultural elites (e.g., Engemann 2012). At the same time, we have encountered evidence of resistance or indifference to nationalist endeavors (Judson and Zahra 2012), reflecting “pluricultural,” multilingual life-worlds and complex identifications (e.g., Feichtinger and Cohen 2014). Focusing on the period from 1914 to 1945, this chapter turns to the historical era that can be described as simultaneously the heyday of nationalism and as the clearest, most infamous illustration of the dehumanizing, murderous dimensions of modernity (Bauman 1989). While this discussion again covers extraordinarily complex ground, including World Wars I and II and the Holocaust as undeniably the most momentous catastrophes in recent history, the focus rests again on particular contexts that illustrate the workings of nationalist social closure on the part of ethnic majorities and the concomitant experiences of exclusion, persecution, and—in the case of genocide— systematic murder suffered by those “othered” by nationalist politics. In contexts shaped by deep political divisions—implicating the forces of liberal capitalism, socialism, nationalism, and fascism—and covered by an enormous body of continually growing scholarship, my discussion must again be highly selective. I here turn to the role nationalism played, and the shapes it took, in the German-speaking Austrian territories of what turned, in 1918, from the Habsburg Empire into its successor nation-states. In the process, the two forms of nationalist closure revealed in the previous chapter, ethnic-linguistic closure and then anti-Semitic closure, will be traced further as decisive phenomena in the successive periods in question. Analytically, this chapter deepens our attention to the discursive and institutional workings of exclusion, as well as to some of their context-specific interrelationships (i.e., particular shifts from discursive to institutionalized closure). We thereby build on three insights recently sketched by Benno Herzog (2013: 4–8): first, a conceptualization of exclusion as a process that makes particular subjects (i.e., individuals or groups) “participatorily irrelevant” (partizipationsirrelevant) in a given context, with inevitable material disadvantages; second, the realization that such denial of “subject status” is often accompanied, or preceded, by ever more pronounced ideological work being performed on “the other” as an “object”; third, the realization that exclusion through objectification follows not only binary patterns (i.e., us versus them) but can be multifarious and, often, gradual. Put more simply, I here approach social closure as entailing a denial of rights or entitlements to a particular group of people who have acquired ever greater discursive prominence as the “other,” against which ingroups self-constitute. Importantly, the discursive aspect of the process of social closure operates, as we have seen, with more than just a simple binary identity grammar. We saw this in the

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previous chapters in relation to nationalism’s other discursive-cognitive patterns, including grammars of hierarchy, assimilation, and apostasy. This having been said, in the course of the present chapter the analytical trajectory will change direction in line with the historical contexts being discussed. Starting from nationalism’s internally (and perhaps unexpectedly) heterogenous discursive repertoire, in terms of its key topoi and various grammars of identity, I here document its gradual narrowing and reduction to a radical binarism that came to underpin extreme social closure assuming destructive and ultimately genocidal proportions. There are preliminary points about my method and approach to be repeated. As in previous chapters, I will again proceed chronologically and in large strides across extraordinarily difficult historical terrain that is undoubtedly among the most thoroughly covered by existing scholarship. My intention, though, is particular and in keeping with previous chapters. I will again focus on select texts that are approached discourse analytically and therefore—by definition—in their wider contexts. The discursive data to be discussed stretch from political statements and positions all the way to some relatively little-known “life documents” (Plummer 2001)—autobiographical or family historical accounts—by a very small sample of those objectified in nationalist discourse. Some of the materials to be examined therefore provide vital insights into the experiences of those targeted, excluded, oppressed, or even “erased” by nationalism’s politics of social closure.

Toward the Twentieth Century’s First Global Cataclysm A contextualization of the origins of World War I must (re-)emphasize the significance of particular developments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the early years of the twentieth century, which would turn into the monarchy’s terminal period. These key developments can be described as some of the next steps toward the full institutionalization of the process discussed thus far: the initially discursive and symbolic construction and hardening of ethnonational boundaries that were to become the chief axis around which struggles of social closure and usurpation revolved. By the end of the nineteenth century, as we saw earlier in relation, for example, to the “Badeni crisis” of 1897 and the monolingualism written into the census, there were ample indications that those processes had progressed very considerably. Transleithanian politics, meanwhile, had seen both liberal anti-clericalism and “a policy of largely permissive but also partially coercive Magyarization of the populace” (Beller 2006: 165), which was mentioned earlier as a manifestation of nationalism’s assimilationist grammar. A next pivotal crisis revealing the contradictory forces of imperial centralism and ethnonational self-assertion involved Hungarian demands for its regiments to be commanded in Magyar,

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which would have undercut the unifying role of the supranational but Germanspeaking Habsburg army (Beller 2006: 166; also Cole 2014). A further significant event in Cisleithanian lands was the Moravian Compromise of 1905, when “the a-national state” began to metamorphize into a “multinational” one through legal recognition of “nations”: “political and administrative provincial competences” were now divided between “separate Czech and German national bodies oblig[ing] Moravians to register as either Czech or Germans” (Judson 2006: 13). This involved, as Jeremy King (2002: 143) has shown, “national cadasters” of “self-declaration,” which divided locals “in mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive fashion” and whose consequences included children’s subsequent assignment to schools based on “cadestral membership.” Formalization of ethnonational separation (also Beller 2006: 163) was given further inadvertent impetus in the era of mass politics and through the electoral reform of 1906–1907. While the election of 1907 resulted in relatively poor showings for the national parties and large gains for the Social Democrats, structurally the reform—which intended to diffuse national conflict—saw the introduction of universal male suffrage and the abolition of the curiae system and also a shrinkage of electoral districts “with an eye to making each district nationally [/linguistically] homogeneous” (King 2002: 133–134). An additional indication of the widening and entrenchment of the national paradigm, at the expense of previously supranational frames of reference, was provided by the Social Democratic Party’s internal “splitting along national lines” in 1910 (Beller 2006: 165). While these developments helped shape, albeit often unintentionally, the course of subsequent history, larger geopolitical shifts contributed more immediately toward setting the tracks that would take central and southeastern Europe, and with it in due course much of the world, into war. Internally thus preoccupied with protracted national conflicts, which were only partly offset by a buoyant economy in the early years of the twentieth century, the Dual Monarchy was to discover its real “Achilles heel” in irredentism—ethno-national movements seeking unification with a “homeland” outside their current structural-geographical location. As shown by Steven Beller (2006: 178ff.), irredentist tendencies among parts of the monarchy’s German-, Italian-, and Romanian-speaking populations were directed toward Habsburg allies and thus proved less immediately consequential than South Slavic irredentism. Split between Austrian and Hungarian administrations, and profoundly affected by the empire’s political asymmetries, many Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs came to view Serbia, a kingdom since 1882 with growing Russian support, as an “alternative power center” (Beller 2006: 179). Relations between the Dual Monarchy and Serbia deteriorated dramatically and through a succession of events: Austria-Hungary responded to a SerbianBulgarian customs union in 1905 through ineffective trade barriers against Serbia, heightening tensions that would be exacerbated much further by the Dual Monarchy’s annexation of (previously occupied) Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to

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a very sizable Serb population, in 1908. Serbia emerged victorious and considerably stronger from the two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, while continuing domestic stalemates and political crises as well as new financial challenges hampered both halves of the Dual Monarchy, where perceptions of a Serbian threat, including claims on Bosnia, were becoming more pronounced (Beller 2006: 183; Hanisch 1994: 230ff.). Against this backdrop, the events of June and July 1914 unfolded. A month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo, and following an almost “unacceptable ultimatum” against Serbia (Hamann 2008: 20), EmperorKing Franz Joseph issued his famous proclamation “To My Peoples”: Criminal evil-doings reach across the border [in the monarchy’s southeast] . . . to unsettle the loyalty to dynasty and fatherland of the people to whom, in paternal love, I devote My full care, as well as in order to lead the young astray and to incite them to criminal acts of madness and high treason . . . In this grave hour, I am fully aware of the entire range of implications of My decision, and of My responsibility before the Almighty. I have examined and considered everything. With a clear conscience, I enter upon the course to which duty directs Me. (Quoted in King 2002: 147–148)

Thus, Franz Joseph linked his decision to wage war on Serbia to a “a series of murderous attacks” by Serbia, interpellating “My peoples”—in the characteristic, supranational plural—as part of a topos of external threats, in response to which—so the claim—war against Serbia had become unavoidable. What the Habsburgs had believed would turn into a swift, successful campaign quickly escalated. The complex power-geometry of preexisting alliances led to Russia’s immediate signaling of support for Serbia and to Germany’s declaration of war against Russia, mobilization against France, occupation of Luxembourg, and invasion of Belgium (Hamann 2008: 25–29). Serbia turned into a far more resilient enemy than the Austro-Hungarian army had expected. All of Europe was soon engulfed in the above-mentioned, highly explosive military chain reactions. On their far end, unexpected in the early days of patriotic enthusiasm, awaited an abyss that came to be shared by a continent’s warring armies (plus by many troops recruited in colonies and imperial outposts much further afield) and allies, an abyss now associated with World War I’s most infamous battle fields, which included the Marne, Przemyśl, Gallipoli, parts of the southern Alpine peaks, Belgrade, Verdun, the Somme, and the Isonzo.

From Determination to Death and Disintegration Citing pacifist Stefan Zweig, Brigitte Hamann (2008: 40) captures widespread war-euphoria of the summer of 1914 as tied to a seductive “self-transcendence” and a “hysteria of hatred” that had been enabled by years of nationalist mobi-

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lization all across Europe and that now manifested in a “wave” of patriotic sentiments and willingness to sacrifice. In the terms of our analysis, this clearly reflected the emotional-aggressive potential of nationalism’s binary identity grammar and its uncompromising, absolute oppositions (i.e., self versus “the other,” us against them) as well as the galvanizing power of the topoi of internal unity and external threats. According to Friedrich Heer, 1914 saw such “eruptions of hatred,” “mass psychoses,” and “war hysteria” in Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Vienna. Yet the Austrian variant of this early war enthusiasm was also particular, the unique crystallization of a greater Habsburg patriotism that temporarily superseded political and national divisions; after all, despite examples of desertions, “the sons of 30 million Slavs” also fought for the Dual Monarchy—its nationalist portrayals as a Völkerkerker (peoples’ prison) notwithstanding—until its collapse in 1918 (Heer 2001: 321–329).1 Yet, contextualization of course also reminds us of contradictions created by established cultural idioms and the political logic underpinning (late) Habsburg rule: despite equal (individual) rights for its multiethnic citizens, this “logic” included a “hierarchical relationship” premised on assumptions of Germanophone “superiority in the manner of an [internal] colonial power” (Lemon 2011: 3) that were indicative of an identity grammar of “encompassment” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). As we saw earlier, Austrian rule and its self-designated “civilizing mission” were, particularly in relation to its Southern Slavic populations, motivated by hierarchical separations of the dominant and the subaltern rather than by horizontal relationships of cultural equality (Reynolds-Cordileone 2015: 46). While the war saw an initial shift of attention toward the greater “patriotic cause” and “far fewer incidents” of internal nationalist violence than previous years (Judson 2006: 220–222), this unfolded against a domestic backdrop in which “the Empire could only satisfy the demands of some [of its constitutive populations] by infuriating the others” and it “could easily infuriate all of them and only with luck accommodate any” (Gellner 1998: 34). The complex internal interethnic relationships and their wider geopolitical contexts also manifested in “almost paranoid suspicions” of pro-Serbian sympathies and Russophilia leveled by some Habsburg generals against their Czech and other Slavic troops (King 2002: 148). Patriotic enthusiasm and optimism were short-lived as the reality and brutality of the war soon caught up with all implicated parties. Among the numerous available biographical and literary (e.g., Remarque 1929) accounts of World War I’s many killing fields, one may cite the following depiction of the trenches of 1915 by a twenty-three-year-old student who died seventeen days after writing the following: Stagnant streams of blood in the trenches after an attack, entangled French and German corpses block one’s way. Climbing over them one inevitably touches the cold hands, faces and those terrible, bloody wounds. Mud and blood mix and coagulate on

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one’s boots and clothes. Walking upright was impossible . . . One sat or stood on the dead, as though they were rocks. Whether one person’s head had been ripped off, or another’s bloody bones poked through their coat, one had become numb. (Quoted in Hamann 2008: 105)2

While the suffering described in such accounts needs little additional commentary, its tragedy is thrown into even sharper relief by the realization that World War I “resolved nothing” but incurred human losses as staggering as, for example, that of “half of Serbia’s male population between 18 and 55” (Judt 2010: 4). For Habsburg lands and troops more narrowly, their “two-front war” quickly turned into a disaster. Surprised by Serbian resilience, Austria-Hungary initially lost Lemberg/Lviv to Russia in the east, being forced back across the Carpathians and only later able to regain, with German help, Galician ground. The early months of the war already imposed a “devastating cost” on Habsburg forces: “four-fifths of the trained infantry and half of the army’s original officer corps had been lost. The traditional Habsburg army was effectively destroyed on the battlefields of Galicia, and Austria-Hungary never fully recovered” (Beller 2006: 187). The year 1915 brought mixed fortunes for the Dual Monarchy: having lost a total of eight hundred thousand (i.e., fallen, missing, wounded, and captured) soldiers in the Carpathians just between January and April (Hamann 2008: 108), the monarchy also saw some military “success”—with Bulgarian and German assistance—in Serbia and Galicia, while Italy, former partner in the Dreibund with Germany and Austria-Hungary, in a decisive turning-point joined the Entente. Further setbacks in the war against Italy and Russia followed in 1916, with the Austro-Hungarian army once again requiring German help and, through the establishment of a German-led “Austro-German Joint High Command,” partly transforming into a military “German satellite” (Beller 2006: 188). As significant was Franz Joseph’s death in November 1916, marking the end of a reign that had lasted sixty-eight years and the disappearance of the Dual Monarchy’s strongest integrative symbol. The following year saw further decisive developments: crucially, the United States’ declaration of war against the German Empire, triggered by the latter’s submarine war; a change of fortune on the Isonzo front where heavy Habsburg defeats turned—once again following Germany’s decisive intervention—into “victory” at the twelfth Isonzo battle; and the February and October Revolutions in Russia, with the latter precipitating a first, temporary armistice in the east (Hamann 2008: 235, 275–276, 290, 307). While during peacetime Austria-Hungary had had the smallest army among the great powers, its losses—troops killed, missing, wounded, or captured—in the course of World War I are estimated at 6,920,000 and hence as more numerous than Germany’s, Russia’s, Britain’s, France’s, and Italy’s (Kuzmics 2013a: 169). Of course, the war also had far-reaching consequences among civilian populations far from the fronts. The most devastating of these included chronic

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and often deadly hunger, displacement and refugee flows, serious epidemics and shortages of vital commodities, press censorship, and the enormous economic costs of warfare that were partly met by war bonds and, in due course, drastic tax rises (Hamann 2008). So how did nationalism manifest during World War I among the populations of the soon-to-disintegrate Habsburg Empire? We can distinguish between two forms of such manifestations. The first of these was an outward-facing and belligerent patriotism, of the kind well known in times of war, as articulated in political propaganda and in the initially widespread groundswell of enthusiasm for a military confrontation mentioned earlier. In arguably its crudest form, this surfaced in macabre, widely used “street slogans” (Beller 2006: 184) and wordplays, including the much commented upon Serbien muss sterbien (Serbia must die). Unsurprisingly, this was not an Austro-Hungarian particularity. Similar war phrases—invariably indicative, in our analytical terms, of a bellicose identity grammar of binary antagonisms (i.e., us against them)—were ubiquitous across Europe at war. The German propaganda greeting Gott strafe England (May God punish England) can be cited as just one among many other such discursive workings of war (Hamann 2008: 35). Other manifestations of wartime nationalism to be mentioned here were internal to the Habsburg Empire. Although the “ethnonational factor” played no significant domestic role in the very early stages of the war (Kuzmics 2013a: 208), the national paradigm was by now—as we have seen—deeply rooted and firmly established in the Dual Monarchy. It was therefore perhaps to be expected that the greater the frustrations, suffering, and deprivation of war, both on the fronts and among the empire’s civilian populations, the more pronounced the centrifugal forces of internal nationalism became again. There were counterexamples, such as a discernible and temporary change in student politics during the war years. Long a bastion of the Right, including its pan-Germanic, often violently anti-Semitic fraternities, Vienna University had seen a “waning of the Furor teutonicus spirit of the Burschenschaften” (Haag 1984: 302) already in the years prior to World War I. With the absence of male students due to their being called up, the establishment of a hospital for wounded soldiers at the university, an influx of women and Jewish refugees, and growing disillusionment with the war, student life became more liberal, partly shaped by anti-war and left-wing movements, than it had been in the prewar period, a tendency that was soon to be radically reversed after 1918 (Haag 1984: 306). However, the dominant tendency, as war progressed, was toward greater national fragmentation within the Dual Monarchy. One infamous example of this was Hungary’s closing of the border to Cisleithania in 1915, at a time when the empire’s western regions had—following Russia’s occupation of large parts of Galicia and Bukovina—become ever more reliant on Hungarian grain imports; this exacerbated dramatic food shortages in Cisleithania and raised serious

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doubts as to the long-term viability of the multinational empire. By 1916, reports of growing “national animosities” in the army proliferated, some of them reflecting German- and Hungarian-speaking officers’ hierarchical and nationalist disdain for their Slavic troops (Hamann 2008: 126–129, 216). More can be gleaned about the workings of both the military’s Habsburg patriotism and its centrifugal ethnonationalisms from Sabine Haring’s (2013) close reading of regimental histories and biographical writings. Casting light on the construction and maintenance of ingroup solidarity in juxtaposition to an external enemy during World War I (in our analytical terms this again condenses the workings of a binary identity grammar), Haring (2013: 301) shows how such a “friend-enemy dichotomy” featured alongside another one of nationalism’s recurring topoi, namely an “apocalyptic reading” of the recent past leading to the present. Crucially, nationalism’s long-term trajectory within the Habsburg Army was of a very different kind when compared to the German Empire’s: in the Austro-Hungarian forces the notion of a “national awakening” did not sustain a supranationally “integrationist function” but fed those internal conflicts that ultimately hastened the monarchy’s disintegration (Haring 2013: 317). Yet, Haring documents the following account, from as late as the 1918 battle at the Piave, of a still supranational Habsburg patriotism—lack of water, summer heat, desperation and cholera notwithstanding—taking on overpowering modern warfare: The men were grey and drawn, but an iron will united them in attack. The old army rose as one, storming towards the river’s western shores. One more time it showed its force. One more time its soldiers demonstrated that what mattered was not their nationalities, but the common bond of the supranational family . . . Not humanity won, but technological force: on the Piave’s eastern shores honor, the knightly code of the Emperor’s soldiers rose one more time—on the western shores there was only soulless, merciless technology. (Lichem quoted in Haring 2013: 362)

In Baumann and Gingrich’s (2004) terminology, we see two grammars of identity at work concurrently here: a “grammar of encompassment” that subsumes the Dual Monarchy’s peoples under a single discursive and institutional umbrella; second, a binary grammar that juxtaposes the Piave’s eastern and western shores as symbolic of the clashing armies and their diametrically opposed portrayals (i.e., purportedly “honorable” Habsburg forces versus the technological juggernaut they faced). Thus revealing a supranational Habsburg deixis at work, the same regimental history also reflects (on) a particular, ethnically narrower, Germanspeaking proximity and solidarity shown, in combat in the southern Alps, by Styrian and Tyrolean battalions: There they were, the Styrians, the Styrian panther in their coat of arms, and the Kaiserschützen, whose symbol is the Tyrolean eagle. And so their brotherhood in arms commenced . . . and lasted in timeless faithfulness, undefeated on this particular front

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until the bitter end. Here unfolded one of the most moving chapters of Alpine brotherhood. Tyroleans and Styrians stood in one inseverable chain. (Lichem quoted in Haring 2013: 384)

In the context of the Central Powers’ alliance, and against the backdrop of a by then long-established tradition of Cisleithanian pan-Germanism, the important question arises as to whether the Hohenzollern Reich was also included in the discursive ingroup (re)constructed in the documentary sources in question. The answer emerging from Haring’s research (2013: 389–391) is one of diversity, stretching from an enthusiastic pan-Germanism on one end of the spectrum, via an ambivalence toward the German ally, all the way toward a counterdiscourse by individual soldiers expressing shame at being ethnolinguistically associated with German destruction. While Russians are frequently viewed through the prism of a “danger from the east” (Ostgefahr), Haring also reveals the limits—and a perhaps unexpected impotence—of nationalist topoi at key moments. Even though Austria-Hungary viewed Italy’s entering the war on the Entente’s side as the ultimate “betrayal,” some Habsburg soldiers fighting Italian troops in the Alps came to view the war as senseless and their Italian opposites as part of the same “community of fate” and suffering (Haring 2013: 411). Arguably, we here encounter a different version of what Baumann and Gingrich (2004) have described as the “implosion” of identity grammars in contexts of violence: this suggests that official grammars of identity and topoi of war could and did fail in moments when faith in the institutional hierarchies of the military and the state wavered. There was “no space for ideology,” according to one commentator, during warfare in the mountains (quoted in Haring 2013: 411). Yet none of this detracted from the ubiquity of wartime propaganda, its characteristic topoi and discursive workings. In another example of the “palimpsestic rewriting” of older textual fragments for political purposes at hand (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017), World War I postcards and the Central Powers’ propaganda materials made liberal use of quotations by the aforementioned Theodor Körner and Ernst Moritz Arndt (Haring 2013: 422), thereby revealing the perceived continued relevance of romantic thought and of cultural memories of the Wars of Liberation. Soon much more than an identity grammar was to implode. Another regimental history discussed by Haring places the disintegration of the Habsburg army and monarchy in wider geopolitical and deeper historical contexts: The historical turning-point was reached, when the nationalities turned away from the Habsburg Empire with demands of sovereignty. One is not mistaken in regarding the Bolshevik call “To All” and Wilson’s “14 Points” as the basis for Austria-Hungary’s disintegration . . . Even reliable Slovenian regiments refused orders now . . . The “yearning for home” grew stronger . . . Almost all along the entire front fighting ceased, soldiers fraternized. The k.u.k. Army was now a thing of the past . . . Never again would such a diverse army . . . come about. (Fröhlich quoted in Haring 2013: 394, 416)

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When it unfolded in the autumn of 1918, the Dual Monarchy’s disintegration occurred in a succession of steps and in a context of wider developments hastening the end of the war. On 26 September, the Czech national assembly (then in Paris) announced the creation of a sovereign state, preparing the ground for the founding of Czechoslovakia in Prague on 28 October. Bulgaria capitulated on 29 September. On 5 October, the Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian national assembly self-constituted in Zagreb, leading to its declaration of union with Serbia just over three weeks later. The Polish national assembly was formed in Krakow on 11 October. On 24 October, Hungarian troops retreated from the Piave, precipitating the Hungarian declaration of independence from Austria. Turkey agreed to an armistice at the end of the month. When the provisional national assembly of “German-Austria” (Deutschösterreich)—the territorially severely truncated, Germanspeaking heartland of now former Cisleithania—agreed on a provisional constitution, with Social Democrat Karl Renner leading its government, an eventual Anschluss to Germany was widely expected as another logical consequence of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination (Hamann 2008: 326; Beller 2006: 191). The national paradigm was more than deeply entrenched by now, it had become the indisputably dominant political principle, redrawing boundaries and creating new political structures across a continent emerging from four years of cataclysmic warfare.

“Nationalizing States” in the Interbellum The building of nation-states on the rubble of the disintegrated Habsburg Empire created new discursive and institutional realities. The years 1918/1919 and the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain marked milestones in the “nationalization of culture” through ubiquitous claims that “the nation constitutes a homogenous or necessary unit” (Czáky 2014: 193). In my analytical terms, this translated into a yet more pronounced discursive hegemony of nationalism’s binary grammar, allowing only for singular identifications in opposition to a purportedly similarly monolithic “other,” and the topoi of “internal unity,” “external threats,” and “national (re)awakenings.” This happened to the exclusion of the Habsburgs’ previous grammar of supranational, albeit distinctly hierarchical, “encompassment.” At the same time, the assimilationist grammars mentioned previously, manifest in attempts to “civilize,” “nationalize,” and transform ethnolinguistically others constructed as “inferior” by merging them into the dominant and purportedly “superior” national ingroup, also continued to be part of nationalism’s discursive arsenal. It is instructive to briefly consider some political dynamics along what had previously been constructed as “language frontiers” (Judson 2006) internal to both Cisleithania and Transleithania, once those frontiers had become external

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boundaries for the “nationalizing states” (Judson 2005a) of the interwar period. Examples of assimilationism included processes of “Germanization” and “Magyarization” of Slovene minorities in Austrian Carinthia and Hungary during the era in question. Building on nineteenth-century, neo-Herderian associations between language and ethnicity, on negative constructions of “dialects” in contrast to “languages,” and the idea that the latter “embodied” a nation’s “character, soul and aspirations” (Priestly 1996: 371–372), the interwar context saw more fully fledged formulations of two pseudoacademic theories known as the Windischentheorie and the Vend-theory: these ideas were applied to Slovene-speakers in Carinthia (in the case of the former) and the Porabje region of Hungary (in the latter’s case), whose Slovene dialects were constructed as improper deviations from “standard Slovene,” and their speakers thereby as legitimate targets of Germanization and Magyarization. This was epitomized by the central premises of the Windischentheorie of the 1920s: where the derogatory term “windisch” had long been applied by German-speakers (who regarded German as unquestionably superior to Slovene) to “Slavs,” the emphasis now shifted toward stressing the differences and alleged “incomprehensibility” between Carinthian Slovene and “standard Slovene,” toward imagining a “natural” assimilatory propensity on the minority’s part, and thereby toward facilitating the “Germanization” of the windische peasant (Priestly 1996: 377–380). Tensions between nationalism’s ideological blueprint and the social realities nationalists encountered and sought to transform, already mentioned in previous chapters, still persisted. The “interwar states replac[ing] the Habsburg Monarchy explicitly regarded themselves as nation-states” (Wingfield 2003: 10), and nationalists exercising considerable influence on the new state governments added to the ascriptive power of (artificially) singular identities (Judson and Zahra 2012: 28), with the result that the successor states’ “harsh nationalizing policies” after 1918 (Judson 2014: 77) made “a-national” (Judson 2005b: 103) or “pluricultural” (Feichtinger and Cohen 2014) life-worlds harder to sustain. However, even then, and even in some of the most ethnolinguistically charged environments (e.g., in Prague and Bohemia and Moravia more generally), there was still evidence of some continuing national “ambivalence” or repeated “cross[ings] from one camp to another” (Cohen 2014: 5), of a “plurality” or “indifference to nationality” in some settings that would later even still create difficulties for the Nazis in “defining who was Czech and who was German” (Čapkova 2005: 6). The structural transformations of 1918 are well captured through social closure theory, according to which the “most important transformations in history” involve the “usurpation” of a previously “accepted code of exclusion” and domination by another (Murphy 1988: 48). Social and political life are here conceptualized as the “struggle for advantage” relative to “various ‘goods’—wealth, power and prestige”; the primary actors in such struggles and periodical shifts to their surrounding political structures are “status groups,” many of which self-

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define with reference to “cultural conditions . . . geographical origin, ethnicity [or] religion” (Collins 1971: 1009). Applied to 1918, the creation of post-Habsburg, successor nation-states involved a major usurpation of the previous, supranational (or latterly multinational), monarchy by a new system of nation-states, in which exclusion/domination was enabled by the principle of ethnonationally defined citizenship, which bore the hallmarks of romantic thought—and its organicist subsumption of the individual in a purported community of language and descent (Gellner 1998)—discussed earlier. All this having been said, as shown by Pieter Judson (2005a: 12–13), even at this point these processes need to be seen as precisely that—ongoing processes rather than faits accomplis: for the interwar years still saw ongoing attempts by the “new nation-states (better characterized as nationalizing states) to create the national societies, on which they claimed they were in fact based.” Thus, we need to turn to some institutional, nationalizing efforts of the interwar period and see them in relation to nationalism’s discursive characteristics. For instance, the just-mentioned Windischentheorie was used to legitimize the very “assimilationist pressures” that enabled a particular form of ethnolinguistic closure (i.e., “become one of us, or find yourself excluded”). In the Carinthian context, and based on the notion that “windische” farmers were in fact closer to German-speakers than to their Slovene cousins whose standard Slovene they were now alleged not to understand, “some bilingual schools were closed, others made unilingual . . . Slovene property was bought and resold to German immigrants . . . [and] Slovene place-name signs were removed” (Priestly 1996: 385). The for-our-purposes central question concerning the historical epoch under consideration emerges from Kuzmics’s reflections (2013b: 541) on World War I sources revealing that there was, at the time, as yet very little evidence among Habsburg troops of the racist “rhetoric about sub-humans” that was to become so enormously consequential only two decades later. Yet, Kuzmics also detects in World War I documents in question some empathetic “numbing” (Abhärtung) and an overvaluing of hierarchical leadership, which could—in the context of acute and catastrophic economic and political crises—play some role in helping to trigger “fatal” political consequences. Put differently, the ideological-discursive conditions of possibility for the genocidal abyss that would soon open up were not yet fully in place in 1918. We thus need to consider some of the shifts, developments, and events of the interwar period that would subsequently play a role in creating the context for the most murderous and dehumanizing form of nationalist closure. In so doing, I now narrow my geographical focus to the territories that had become the Republic of German-Austria on 12 November 1918. The scale of the geopolitical, truly historical transformations that occurred toward the end and in the aftermath of World War I is difficult to overstate. Not only the Habsburg Empire had fallen, but 1918 also marked the end of the Hohenzollern in Germany; the Romanovs’ earlier abdication during the 1917

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February Revolution was followed by their execution in July 1918; and the end of World War I also led to the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution. Arguably, however, none of this quite matched the Dual Monarchy’s “virtual disappearance” leading to “two successor states, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, [that] were only interested in claiming what pertained to their national heritage,” while much of “the rest of the Monarchy’s territory was integrated into . . . newly restored Poland, Romania, Italy and newly created Yugoslavia” (Beller 2006: 192). Viewed from the First Austrian Republic’s perspective, compared merely to former Cisleithania the new Austria was reduced, as enshrined in the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain, “from thirty million to some six-and-a-half million in population, and from 180,000 square miles to barely 50,000” (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 249). These losses included the Sudetenland with its large German-speaking population in what was now Czechoslovakia, southern Styria to Yugoslavia, and—most controversially—the “rewarding of Italy with not only the Italian-speaking areas of the former Monarchy, but also the Carinthian Canaltal and, notoriously, the solidly German-speaking area of Tyrol south of the Brenner,” thereby making “a mockery” of Wilson’s principle of “national self-determination” (Beller 2006: 199). Their asymmetrical implementation notwithstanding, Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” of January 1918 (or, more particularly, points 9–14) were the single most consequential political blueprint of its era, emphasizing national belonging, autonomy, and sovereignty, thereby formalizing the nationalist principle of the “convergence” or “fusion of will, culture and polity” (Gellner 1983: 48) at the highest political level. Following Saint-Germain and the prohibition of an Anschluss to Germany, meanwhile, the Austrian Republic had come to be regarded as a “rump” or remainder unwanted by most of its population, a “land without a name,” “a country which had no right to exist,” or “the state nobody wanted” (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 252). Internally, the First Republic faced profound challenges right from the outset. Still prior to its creation, during the war’s last and notorious winter of 1917/18, civilian deprivation had spilled over into “bread queues” and labor unrest triggering a succession of strikes (Beller 2006: 191). After the end of the war and in German-Austria’s very early stages, severe socioeconomic problems were exacerbated further by the “Spanish flu” epidemic (Hamann 2008: 322), by Czechoslovakia cutting most of Bohemia’s and Moravia’s coal supply to Austria, and through serious shortages in potatoes, meat, and grains, which—only partly offset by an Allied Famine Relief program—were reflected in a medical survey at the time showing more than 80 percent of Viennese schoolchildren to be undernourished (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 234). In territorial terms, some of the new borders were strongly contested. This became particularly clear when Slovene forces captured the town of Ferlach in traditionally bilingual southern Carinthia, followed by a more concerted push by the joint Yugoslav forces in the spring of 1919 and the Carinthian Abwehrkampf

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(defensive struggle) by the patriotic and local “militia units” of the Heimwehr (Beller 2006: 191; Brook-Shepherd 1997: 235–236). The Carinthian issue was eventually resolved through a plebiscite in October 1920, when 59 percent of the electorate, including some ten thousand Slovenes, voted for Austria and an “undivided Carinthia,” with the Slovenian vote reflecting economic considerations (i.e., a largely farming population perceiving the market advantages of an Austrian Republic suffering food shortages) trumping national sentiments (Hanisch 1994: 273). Following Saint-Germain, Austria had also stood to make some comparatively minor territorial gains from Hungary, herself severely “punished” under the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. In 1921, Hungarian units initially resisted the hand-over of what subsequently, on 5 December, became Austria’s “youngest” and most easterly province of Burgenland; following a plebiscite widely thought to have been “manipulated” (Hanisch 1994: 274), however, the new territory gained did not include the city and area of Ödenburg/Sopron. Similarly significant, for our purposes, regarding Austria’s contested border regions was their discursive framing by German-speaking citizens of the young republic. Against the backdrop of widespread, long-established pan-Germanism, prominent German-speaking political discourse in the areas concerned interpellated its intended audiences not as citizens of the new Republic of Austria but through topoi and deixes that bore the hallmark of the romantic equation of (German) language and belonging. In 1921, voters in and around Ödenburg/ Sopron were thus encouraged to “vote German”; despite its regional focus, Carinthia’s defensive patriotism was framed in wider deutschnationale terms; and South Tyrolean politician Reut-Nicolussi claimed to detect a possible “German slave rebellion, so that all Germans will be free once more and German soil no longer be exploited” (Hanisch 1994: 272, italics added). In the latter statement one detects not only an ethnonational, pan-Germanic discourse at work, but also one of nationalism’s key topoi: its historical schema contrasting a present felt to be unjust to a more positively evaluated past and an eagerly awaited, purportedly better future. However, not all German-speaking nationalizing practices were oriented toward the presumed and greater pan-Germanic whole.3 Reflecting historical affinities and geographical proximity, in a plebiscite held in Austria’s westernmost province of Vorarlberg on 11 May 1919, 81 percent of the region’s electorate voted for negotiations for secession from German-Austria and for union with Switzerland to commence (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 237). Ultimately, however, Swiss skepticism—as Vorarlberg’s accession would have altered Switzerland’s internal religious and linguistic balance—and the wider geographical settlements defined by the Treaty of Saint-Germain a few months later prevented Vorarlberg’s movement for union with Switzerland from progressing any further. Saint-Germain’s overall impact on Austria can hardly be overstated: this included enormous territorial losses, widely perceived to be in contravention of Wilson’s very principle of national self-determination that underpinned Central

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Europe’s reordering after the war, and the perhaps most painful loss of South Tyrol to Italy, from which the “addition” of Burgenland could hardly detract; the prohibition of the widely wished-for union with Germany, reflected in the young Republic’s very renaming from German-Austria to Austria; and the dissonance between a now externally prohibited union with Weimar Germany—a union that had been advocated across most of the ideological spectrum, among others also by the “Austro-Marxist” Social Democrats around Otto Bauer—and widespread lack of confidence in the very viability of an independent Austria. Such lack of belief in Austria outside of a wider German entity was perhaps most famously professed by the republic’s first state chancellor (and much later first president of the Second Republic), Social Democrat Karl Renner (Heer 2001: 334–337). Yet, the post–World War I era also witnessed political milestones. Otto Bauer, by then foreign minister, proved able to “outmanoeuvre the communists and ensure working class loyalty to the democratic republic,” thereby “saving” Austria “from Bolshevism”; the Constituent National Assembly election on 16 February 1919, at which the Social Democrats received the highest proportion of votes, also finally marked women’s suffrage; and the constitution of 1920, which bore the hallmarks of “Christian Social influence [and] Social Democratic compromise,” turned out to be a “liberal document” (Beller 2006: 204–205). Arguably the (early) interwar period’s most decisive feature for Austria was its prolonged, profound economic crisis. While war reparations had been threatened at Saint-Germain, the former monarchy’s debts were spread across its successor states, and Austria came to rely greatly on Western loans. In 1921, the First Republic’s enormous budgetary deficit amounted to 64 percent of state expenditure; by the following year the country was facing the trauma of hyperinflation. With a stagnating economy, gross national income lagged far behind 1913 levels, only reaching those once during these tumultuous years, namely in 1929 (Hanisch 1994: 271, 280). As Steven Beller summarizes, “runaway inflation” gathered frightening pace during the postwar crisis, erasing capital savings, reaching its “highpoint” in 1924, two years after the Geneva Protocol and a currency reform financed by a large loan from the Allies; the schilling replaced the crown in 1925, by which time Austria was “virtually a ‘League of Nations colony’”; the country’s “unemployment crisis was never overcome” and “unlike in Weimar Germany there were no ‘good years’ for the interwar Austrian economy” despite some growth between 1925 and 1929 (Beller 2006: 203–208). Against this backdrop it is worth remembering another conceptual node that has guided earlier analytical sections and that will recur again in later chapters. The theoretical insight in question derives from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977: 168ff.) observation that periods of structural crisis effect a transformation of a previously uninterrogated, or “undiscussed,” cultural commonsense (i.e., doxa) into a domain of political debate, mobilization, and competing ideological blueprints (i.e., discourses). As shown elsewhere (Karner 2011), this accords well with, first,

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nationalism’s propensity to acquire widespread appeal and plausibility in periods of upheaval and crisis; and, second, with the concurrent realization that nationalism tends to be one of several mutually competing and contesting positions in a wider, heterogeneous political field. Viewed from this perspective, the case guiding this book for examining nationalisms contextually and with close attention to their discursive particularities acquires yet greater urgency. When applied to interwar Austria, this Bourdieu-ian framework reveals its contextual relevance and a key particularity of the First Republic. Facing, as has just been sketched, profound and prolonged economic crises, and with a citizenry that lacked, in large part, conviction in the viability (or even legitimacy) of their state, interwar Austria arguably also fell somewhat short of a defining structural feature of a nation-state: its functioning as a “bordered power container” with “unified administrative reach” and the ability to exercise a “formalized monopoly over the means of violence” within its territory (Giddens 1985: 119–121). The First Republic’s internal division into competing ideological camps (Lager) that both predated and long outlived it—pitting “Red Vienna” and her municipal socialism (Beller 2006: 207) against the Christian Socials’ political Catholicism and, only initially less significant, the National Socialists, whose national loyalties lay unambiguously beyond Austria—is of course well known (see Boyer 2013). Such acute political fragmentation and confrontation in periods of crises is precisely what Bourdieu’s doxa-crisis-political schema predicts. Less “usual,” however, was the Austrian state’s inability, during the tumultuous interwar period, to consolidate its “monopoly of force.” The country’s “three-way battle between Socialist, Christian Social and German nationalist political cultures” (Beller 2006: 208, 218) transcended the ordinary political domain of discursive competition and extended to its chief protagonists’ competing “private armies,” most notably the Social Democrats’ Republikanischer Schutzbund and the Right’s Frontkämpfer (and in due course the Heimwehr). The first major violent escalation of their mutual hatred occurred in 1927 following the acquittal of three right-wing paramilitaries tried for the fatal shooting of a man and a child in the context of confrontations between the Schutzbund and Frontkämpfer in Schattendorf (Burgenland); the ensuing working-class outrage and demonstrations on the streets of Vienna escalated, leading to the Palace of Justice being set alight, to clashes between the police and demonstrators, the death of eighty-nine demonstrators, and the wounding of some six hundred others (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 259–261; Beller 2006: 211–212). Concurrently, other ideological boundaries were being re-entrenched ever more firmly. Reflecting on his student days at the University of Vienna from 1929 on, Bruno Kreisky (quoted in Rathkolb 2007: 121)—later chancellor of the Second Republic and icon of Austrian Social Democracy—described university life at the time as “sheer hell . . . Students known to be of Jewish descent, or considered to look Jewish, were frequently beaten out of the universities by crowds of Nazi students. On the long corridors, the Nazis used to form so-called

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‘Salzergassen,’ through which we were beaten until one struggled towards the exit, usually injured.” Kreisky’s recollections corroborate that Austrian universities between the two world wars had become “highly reactionary,” reflecting the wider and growing prominence of political Catholicism and National Socialism and their anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist politics (Stadler 1995: 14; also see Fritz, Rossoliński-Liebe, and Starek 2016). Anti-Semitic social closure was indeed becoming ever more firmly established, not only discursively but also in its organized, institutional manifestations. More generally, according to Tony Judt (2010: 195, 198), the interwar decades revealed a dramatic narrowing and polarization of Central European life-worlds: cosmopolitanism, which had only ever been celebrated by a minority, had truly “died” by 1918/1919; the “new states hatched at Versailles” found themselves in a condition of chronic uncertainty, in an “interregnum [of ] neither peace nor war,” which lent widening appeal to fascists “preoccupied with nation, degeneration, sacrifice and death.” Most fundamentally, for our purposes, the interwar period confirmed nation-states, or nationalizing states, as an effective “form of social closure,” in which “equal treatment before the law” could indeed be a “privilege reserved for nationals” and “discrimination between citizens and aliens . . . replaced the enlightened universalism of human rights” (Wimmer 2002: 58). In my geographically more narrowly defined parameters, we now turn to the beginnings of the next and darkest chapter in Austrian history.

Successive Steps toward the Abyss . . . Signs of a relative economic upturn by 1929 notwithstanding, the First Austrian Republic was about to be overtaken again by profound economic-cum-political crises. Their origins were only in part the local effects of the stock market crash in the autumn of 1929 and the ensuing worldwide depression. As Ernst Hanisch has shown, in Austria three distinctive crises coincided: an agricultural crisis of declining prices, an industrial crisis of contracting production, and a financial/ banking crisis triggered by the collapse of the Credit-Anstalt in 1931, which at the time controlled more than 40 percent of Austrian industrial shares. A dramatic decline in external trade and a huge increase in unemployment followed. Against the backdrop of the lingering trauma of recent inflation, the political response—also strongly encouraged by economic orthodoxy and the League of Nations’ financial committee—emphasized the need for a stable currency and discouraged state spending.4 Additionally, however, the state soon had to help rescue the Credit-Anstalt, thereby increasing public debt by a third (Hanisch 1994: 296–297). The context to Austria’s descent into authoritarianism was set. Unemployment, which very often meant joblessness without state benefits, reached 20

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percent in 1931 and “levelled off” just below 40 percent in 1934 (Beller 2006: 221). In May 1932, Engelbert Dollfuß, “peasant politician” and his era’s arguably “most remarkable political figure,” formed a new Christian Social–led government; Dollfuß’s chancellorship would last a mere twenty-six months, but those would be some of the most tumultuous and consequential in Austrian history; they would see far-reaching authoritarian transformations and end with Dollfuß’s assassination as “Hitler’s first foreign victim,” marking the “beginning of Europe’s [more than] ten-year struggle against Nazi-domination” (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 263). Facing the profound financial difficulties just mentioned, Dollfuß obtained a large League of Nations loan in May 1932, the agreement for which extended the Anschluss-prohibition further to also preclude a potential customs union with Germany. This further fragmented Austrian politics, incurring protests by the Social Democrats, the electorally declining German Nationalists, and the growing National Socialists alike (Beller 2006: 221). Both domestically and across the ever more ideologically charged border to Germany, the situation was to escalate the following year. Hitler’s and the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in early 1933 was soon followed by an economic upturn there (see Hanisch 1994: 295). On the Austrian side of the border, meanwhile, continuing economic hardship saw capital flight, the ever-widening appeal of an Anschluss to Germany, and a growing Nazi threat to the Austrian state. Dollfuß’s response entailed a “radicalization of ChristianSocial policies” that, within the year, turned Austria into an “authoritarian, corporatist state” (Beller 2006: 222–223). The crucial step toward Austro-fascism (see Tálos and Neugebauer 2012) occurred, inadvertently, with the resignation of all three Speakers of the Parliament on 4 March, leading to institutional paralysis (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 268) subsequently perpetuated by Dollfuß. The next decisive events included the outlawing of the Schutzbund; the creation of a purportedly “supra-partisan” organization, the Vaterländische Front, for all citizens professing government loyalty; a halt to local elections after enormous gains for the National Socialists at municipal elections in Innsbruck; Hitler’s infamous “1000-mark tax” on prospective German tourists to Austria in response to what he saw as “anti-Nazi measures” there; a papal concordat that added to the Church’s power in Austria; the outline of Dollfuß’s authoritarian Ständestaat (or “state of estates”) and the setting up of a concentration camp for political prisoners in September 1933; four days of Austrian civil war in February 1934, which—having started in Linz—resulted in the deaths, just in Vienna, of more than one thousand Schutzbund fighters, some one hundred casualties among government troops, the abolition of the Social Democratic Party, and its leadership’s exiling to Czechoslovakia. The following May, a new constitution set out a hierarchically “Christian and corporate” state, in which the Austrian president was to be elected by the country’s mayors, and the parliament by seven “functionally based councils” rather than by the electorate (Beller 2006: 222–224).

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Austro-fascism and Nazism clashed in the most dramatic fashion when, after a series of Nazi terrorist “dynamite attacks” on infrastructure across Austria’s provinces (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 285), an attempted Nazi coup d’état resulted in Dollfuß’s assassination in his office in central Vienna on 25 July 1934. Initially assured of Mussolini’s support, which lasted until the establishment of the “Rome-Berlin axis” in October 1936, Kurt Schuschnigg—previous minister of justice and education and Dollfuß’s successor—continued to battle the National Socialist threat emanating both from the outside and domestically. Aiming for the wholesale destruction of the Austrian state and its absorption into Hitler’s dictatorship, Austria’s homegrown, illegal Nazis at the time presented themselves as fighting “the system” purportedly on behalf of “the oppressed people” (Hanisch 1994: 318). They thereby reproduced nationalist topoi of an “unjust present” and a “glorious future,” as well as the juxtaposition of an ethnonationally defined Volk in opposition to the powers that be, which we have already seen evidence of in previous eras and which we will encounter again in later chapters. Eventually, in July 1936, Schuschnigg was coerced into an Austro-German agreement: this made major concessions to Hitler, including the release of some seventeen thousand Austrian Nazi political prisoners, Schuschnigg’s admission of two members of the “national camp” into his cabinet, and a commitment that Austria would “act as a German state,” in return for which Hitler lifted the “1000-mark” tourist tax and made an empty promise to recognize Austrian sovereignty (Beller 2006: 226). All of this unfolded against the backdrop of continuing economic difficulties in Austria. The authoritarian Ständestaat never stemmed Austrian economic woes; in 1937, the country’s economy still lagged behind the productivity levels enjoyed in 1913 (Hanisch 1994: 295). Before turning to the fateful events of March 1938, Austro-fascism’s record with regard to ethno-linguistic and anti-Semitic closure, and their continuities and differences compared to the previous and subsequent periods, also need to be mentioned. With the German völkisch movement gaining further strength throughout the early 1930s, also particularly in some of the earlier-mentioned “frontier regions” such as the German-speaking Bohemian borderlands of Czechoslovakia (e.g., Čapková 2005: 252), important questions about its discursive and institutional characteristics arise. It is here instructive to consider the Carinthian case once more. In the interwar years, the region was already “heavily tinged with fascism,” prominent manifestations of which included a downplaying of Slovene language rights and growing “pressure from German nationalists” to work toward “Germanizing the minority” (Priestly 1996: 384–385). Although this “assimilatory pressure” was less pronounced in the 1930s than in the decades preceding and following them, it nonetheless confirms that nationalism in the context in question also operated with a broader discursive arsenal than a simple binary exclusion (see Herzog 2013), which it complemented with an assimilationist identity grammar.

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In terms of pre-Anschluss Austrian anti-Semitism, Boyer (2013: 161) detects a “resurrection of the political radicalism of the 1880s” evident in the antiSocialism and the anti-Semitism of Dollfuß’s politics. While anti-Semitic social closure did not assume its extreme, fully institutionalized forms of the subsequent Nazi era, its discursive prominence was undeniable in the period prior to it (e.g., Beller 2006: 224). Given the ferociousness of local anti-Semitism in the years ahead (see below), the question arises—arguably especially in Vienna— “to what extent” residents of the (former) “red” capital “whose political sympathies did not lie with the Christian Social Party internalize[d] stereotypes about Jews, pass[ed] them on to their children and thus prepare[d] the way for the [imminent] catastrophe” (Vyleta 2012: 6). What Friedrich Stadler (1995: 14) has observed of Austrian universities resonated more widely—namely that after 1934 “antidemocratic pressures” were exacerbated by the Schuschnigg regime’s “attempt to ward off German-nationalis[m] by propagating an ‘Austria-ideology’ which . . . further strengthened militant anti-Semitism.” Subsequent events, however, confirmed that pan-Germanism had won the ideological battle for hegemony (also see Bukey 2000). Reacting against the “trauma of defeat in the First World War” and the allies’ prohibition of an Anschluss to Germany, Austrian pan-Germanism had grown steadily during the interwar years, being eventually largely “absorbed” by the National Socialists, “seizing control of the students’ movement,” and garnering about a quarter of the electorate by 1933; most importantly, in addition to advocating union with Germany, Austrian pan-Germanism—particularly in its Nazi variant—was defined by its anti-Slav and especially anti-Semitic racism (Wistrich 1994: 88). As we have seen, anti-Semitism had a long (local) tradition, from the religious anti-Judaism of the Middle Ages, via late-nineteenth-century “scientific racism,” to a widespread, “economically motivated fear of Jewish competition” and context-specific manifestations such as opposition to the Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) who had fled to Vienna during World War I (Wistrich 1994: 89). Yet, in both its discursive and institutional workings, anti-Semitic closure was about to enter entirely new dimensions. Thus, we turn to momentous events in (early) 1938. Their contours are quickly sketched. Having been “invited” to Berchtesgaden on 12 February, Schuschnigg found himself cornered by Adolf Hitler into an ultimatum: Arthur Seyss-Inquart was to be made interior minister; National Socialism in Austria was to be legalized; and all remaining Nazi prisoners to be released. Austria was to become a “quasi-Nazi satellite” (Beller 2006: 229). A crushed Schuschnigg returned to Vienna and Hitler’s demands were duly met following a last-ditch attempt at defiance—Schuschnigg announced a referendum on Austrian independence, but this was prevented by Hitler’s decision to invade Austria on 11 March; the following evening Hitler received a “rapturous” welcome in Linz; his bill for Austria’s “full union” with Germany was quickly enacted by the cabinet in Vienna—Austria had “‘legally’ ceased to exist” (Beller 2006: 228–230).

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. . . And into Its Depths Nazi Germany’s “takeover” of Austria on 11 and 12 March occurred “without a single shot being fired”—Schuschnigg, in a broadcast resignation speech, pleaded that “no German blood” be spilled—and with only Spain, Mexico, Chile, the Soviet Union, and the World Jewish Congress protesting this violation of international law; internally the remarkably speedy and unresisted annexation presupposed its active endorsement, or passive acceptance, by the large majority of Austrians; within weeks “hundreds of thousands of Austrians” applied for NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) membership, leading to a party moratorium on accepting new members and to a very substantial proportion of applications never being processed (Rathkolb 2009: 8, 13). Widespread support for the Anschluss was also reflected in Hitler’s infamously enthusiastic welcome on Vienna’s Heldenplatz on 15 March and the overwhelming “yes” vote, at a staggering 99.75 percent, in favor of “reunification” at a plebiscite held on 10 April. As Beller rightly emphasizes (2006: 197, 232ff.), motivations for such support—the origins for which lay in a prolonged “spiritual, economic and political crisis,” in the failure to create a “new Austrian identity” after 1918, in the pan-Germanic insistence on the (ethnolinguistically defined) “nation” as the “primary political unit,” all leading Austrians to “so easily became ‘Germans’ in 1938 because they already saw themselves as part of the German nation”—still varied and were complex; and there were immediate victims to Austria’s annexation, including political opponents, many of whom were quickly “packed off” to the Bavarian concentration camp of Dachau, and Austria’s Jewish population.5 In this chapter’s final section, I do not retrace the chronological details of World War II, a task that is more than comprehensively performed by one of the largest and fastest growing bodies of historical scholarship available and which would exceed the scope of the present discussion. Yet, the broader historical context must of course be born in mind here. The period between Hitler’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and Germany’s surrender in May 1945 saw a “total war” of “occupation, repression, exploitation and extermination,” in which for the first time the “full force of the modern European state” was employed for the “primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans”: in its European dimensions alone the war’s scale and death toll were utterly unprecedented, “dwarfing” the already “obscene” mortality figures of the world war that had preceded it; in the most deadly conflict in recorded history, some thirty-sixand-a-half million Europeans, among them at least nineteen million civilians, lost their lives between 1939 and 1945, including some six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust (Judt 2010: 13–18). More narrowly, the diversity of Austrian experiences of this total war have been summarized thusly: turning from “street terror” to “state terror,” Nazism comprised hunger, torture, the camps, forced

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sterilization and euthanasia, forced labor, deportations, ghettos, mass murder, and the gas chambers, turning humans into “cowards, bystanders, resisters, victims and perpetrators;” the last category poses enduring questions concerning Nazism’s seduction by what it regarded as Hitler’s “charisma,” the effectiveness of its propaganda and its early military and economic “successes,” its promises of “national unity” and of “restoration of lost glory,” and its radical anti-Semitism (Hanisch 2012: 7). While we here re-encounter some of nationalism’s master topoi, particularly those of collective unity and reawakening, as well as its binary identity grammar, those discursive features were now taken to ideological and institutional extremes in the service of radical closure-cum-destruction. I thus turn to a contextualized discussion of a very small sample of published autobiographical accounts by some of those most immediately affected by genocidal closure—that is, some of its Austrian Jewish targets and victims. In doing so, I do not discuss the available (auto)biographies of some of the best-known members of Viennese Jewry and their experiences of Nazism and the Holocaust (e.g., Cohen 2012; Frankl 2004; Klüger 2005; Zweig 1985). Instead, I focus on very few, lesser-known life-historical accounts centered on Vienna and other parts of Austria to capture the extreme, ultimately genocidal social closure inflicted upon Jews after 1938, and in an attempt to help amplify Holocaust survivors’ voices (see Strutz 2009). In so doing, we encounter glimpses of how individual Austrian Jews endured a historically unparalleled genocidal “spiral” turning from “classification” to “dehumanization” (Lichtblau 2012), through which a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism radicalized further and acquired utterly unprecedented institutionalized forms. The following biographical glimpses thereby also capture how, in the particular context(s) in question, discursive closure hardened and crystallized into increasingly violent, ultimately murderous political closure and extermination. The collective “mood” on the streets of Vienna in March 1938, and its manifestation in extreme forms of social closure and a full arsenal of discursive and institutional dehumanization, is captured in the following account: 12 March 1938 . . . Children are forced to write “Don’t buy from Jews” on their parents’ shop windows. Jewish shop-owners’ Aryan wives are dragged from their beds . . . a sign reading “Lives in blood-shame [Blutschande] with a Jew” around their necks . . . Jews have to clean pavements and public toilets . . . Women are forced to spit at one another while shouting “We are Jewish pigs” . . . it is announced that Jews are forbidden to use public transport and public phones, they are not permitted inside train stations and pubs, in forests or parks, they are not allowed to keep pets, have newspaper or magazine subscriptions, electric or optical equipment, bicycles, typewriters, furs . . . Within ten days of the annexation 1,700 Jews commit suicide. (Horowitz 2008: 30–33)

This graphically illustrates how in its early stages Hitler’s invasion very quickly turned the “deeply rooted indigenous Austrian anti-Semitism into a veritable

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stampede” of “depersonalization” (Wistrich 1994: 88, 75), in which spontaneous acts of degrading cruelty were followed by state-organized discrimination, persecution, pillaging, and, in due course, the “industrialized murder” of the Jews— the largest crime in history (Vranitzky 2008: 7–8). The beginnings of a “destruction process” (Hilberg 1996)—which also led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, political and religious opponents, gay people, and other groups constructed as “un-German” (Vranitzky 2008: 8), while primarily aiming for the complete annihilation of the Jewish people (Bauer 2001)—are further revealed in the following recollections of how extreme anti-Semitic closure quickly manifested in institutional segregation, dispossession, and dehumanization: Neither I nor my sister ever forgot the naked joy and glee exhibited by our classmates and . . . teachers when we were told to leave. The authorities in Germany proper waited until the fall of 1938 with the expulsion of Jewish students from their classes, but all over Austria the same degrading scene that we experienced was played out in every elementary or secondary school as early as May. (Schneider 1995: 21) We are all Viennese, the whole family . . . my father a craftsman . . . we were often short of money and food . . . Then, suddenly, everything changed with the German invasion . . . we were no longer Austrian . . . Overnight, we were told we were Jewish. Previously, anti-Semitism had affected orthodox Jews, not us . . .One day, the HJ and the SA entered my vocational school with a list containing my name . . . They beat us out of the school . . . In April, I was also sacked as an apprentice . . . We were no longer allowed to enter parks or sit on a bench . . . nor to go to the football or the cinema . . . Worst of all, my father was no longer allowed to work. (Kleinmann 1988: 43–44)

The late Ari Rath, who managed to escape to Palestine where he would subsequently become the Jerusalem Post’s editor-in-chief, similarly reflects: On the Friday, 11 March, on the way to school we already saw Nazi functionaries on nearly every corner square off against Socialists . . . Around 7:30 I heard Schuschnigg’s enforced resignation on the radio . . . I had tears in my eyes . . . We were particularly shocked to see that all policemen were already wearing the swastika on the Saturday morning. Soon we saw young and old Jews forced to clean slogans against the Anschluss off pavements with toothbrushes . . . My Jewish teachers did not return. My “Jewish class” grew by another 34 Jewish pupils from other secondary schools, which were “free of Jews” now. (Rath 2012: 31–34)

An internally always highly diverse group (e.g., see Rozenblit 2005; RaggamBlesch 2008), Austria’s approximately two hundred thousand Jews, their enormous contribution to the country’s cultural modernism notwithstanding, had never been regarded by the majority as bodenständig (Beller 2006: 217), as “belonging to the soil.” While there were thus ideological continuities with the long-established exclusionary “logic” of the romantic equation of nation, language, and territory, this had now acquired novel dimensions.6 Wistrich sum-

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marizes these as the removal of the “escape clause” (i.e., conversion, assimilation) from the anti-Jewish, Christian stereotypes of old and the now dominant biological racism. Discursive and organizational continuities between Nazism and some of the political figures discussed earlier played a decisive role and underscore the relevance of the longue durée approach adopted here: for Hitler derived his biological racism, in part, from (Austrian) pan-Germanism, and he had “learned” from Lueger that anti-Semitism possessed considerable mobilizing power. Most importantly, Hitler saw “racial characteristics [as] eternal and unchanging” and postulated a “cosmic,” “either-or struggle” pitting “Aryans” against Jews (Wistrich 1994: xxii, 65ff.). In our analytical terms, this meant that Jews were closed off from the assimilationist grammar, which Nazism still employed in the service of its incorporation of the sympathetic (or merely opportunistic) among those it constructed as “Slavic,” “Nordic,” or otherwise “non-Semitic” in its occupied territories (e.g., Promitzer 2003: 199ff.; Priestly 1996: 392ff.; King 2002: 179ff.). For Jews, by contrast, Nazism’s only interpretative and organizational response was an extreme binary grammar of absolute and permanent exclusion.7 Its sudden hegemony and all-encompassing consequences turned 1938 into a lifedefining rupture: I was twenty-and-a-half when my youth and future collapsed. I had had a very happy childhood and adolescence, having grown up in the mountains, surrounded by beautiful scenery. And then, in 1938, my world disintegrated . . . I had two days to leave twenty years behind, to leave everything that was happiness and Heimat behind, forever, only taking tears and grief with me. (Reich 2014: 17)

Herta Reich’s early biography was thus cruelly, inhumanely split into a before and after by the Anschluss. Having grown up in the Styrian town of Mürzzuschlag, she managed to survive dispossession and the Holocaust as a member of the socalled “Kladovo-transport” (Anderl and Manoschek 2014), which took her along the Danube through Hungary and into Yugoslavia, from where she escaped to Italy and, in due course, to Tel Aviv. Memories of being discursively othered and concurrently excluded by ever-more-dehumanizing means of social closure also lie at the heart of Gerda Eisler’s early family history, much of which she spent in Austria’s second city before fleeing to Haifa and Tel Aviv: I played with all kids, whether they were Jewish or not I did not even know. Before 1938 I never felt as an outsider . . . The day Hitler came to Graz my mother told me not to leave the house . . . there were no children on the street that day, instead many people were heading for the city center . . . The open car passed us by, they all stretched their arms out toward him . . . The atmosphere in Graz had already been extremely anti-Semitic before the Anschluss . . . Hitler later declared Graz to be the “city of the people’s uprising” . . . My new teacher defined me as an enemy of the people . . . During the November pogrom the Nazis destroyed the synagogue and the ritual hall on the Jewish cemetery. They also came to us . . . In February 1939 we had to leave

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our life behind . . . On the platform I saw my grandfather, all alone . . . an old, broken man, he had lost nearly all his children and grandchildren on the same day. (Eisler 2017: 35–51)

Herb Fantle, a distant relative of Gustav Mahler’s, grew up on Vienna’s outskirts, in the city’s nineteenth district: We had a decent life . . . my father had a well-paid job at the Länderbank. I had a wonderful childhood . . . all this came to an end with the German occupation of Austria . . . [W]hen Chancellor Schuschnigg held his famous speech on the radio . . . my father fainted. He knew that it was over then . . . There were these trucks with SA and SS troops in the streets, the sky was darkened by all the German Messerschmidt planes . . . Many Jews were . . . publicly humiliated in front of cheering bystanders . . . The Nazis already knew who was Jewish . . . We had to carry the additional names which distinguished Jews from Gentiles . . . I had to change to another school together with other Jewish classmates. In August my father lost his job . . . we were forced to move to the second district . . . My father was arrested and deported to Dachau . . . he was tortured and lost about 40 pounds. (In Falter 2013)

Norbert Lopper had grown up in the city’s second district, playing football for the Jewish club Hakoah, yet counting mainly non-Jews among his closest friends; he experienced the night of the Anschluss in a cinema, from which he had to escape through a side door upon the Nazis’ arrival; his family first escaped to Belgium, from where they were deported to Auschwitz in August 1942; Norbert Lopper survived Auschwitz, his father, younger sister, his wife, sister-in-law, and parents-in-law were all murdered there (Horowitz and Horowitz 2008). These are of course only a very few examples from among the eventually millions across Europe targeted by the spiral of “classification, symbolization, stereotyping, segregation, pauperization and dehumanization,” which Albert Lichtblau (2012: 73) has traced in the experiences of Jews living in Salzburg in 1938/39. This spiral turned ever more violent by the time of the 1938 November pogroms, whose intensity in Austrian cities has often been remarked upon (e.g., Bukey 2000: 131, 152). Wistrich (1994: 90) summarizes the terror inflicted on Austrian Jews in the night from 9 to 10 November 1938: twentyone synagogues set alight, dozens of prayer rooms destroyed, the plundering of 4,083 Jewish shops and 1,950 homes, ninety-one murders, 7,800 arrests, and 680 suicides. Writing more recently, Michael Horowitz (2008: 59) corroborates that this “orgy of violence” was nowhere as systematic as in Vienna, where forty-two synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed in a single night. Concurrently, anti-Semitic closure was reaching new extremes and was formalized through a succession of “Aryanization” measures. Their purpose was to eliminate Jews from public and professional life, to impose occupational bans and confiscate Jewish property; what had started in April 1938 with laws requiring Jews to register their property and blocking access to their bank accounts culmi-

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nated in due course in the compulsory closure of Jewish businesses, a practically wholesale prohibition to work, the stripping of rights to public welfare, the compulsory handing over or “sale” of valuables—at hugely deflated “prices”—to the state, and the “Aryanization” of Jewish patents and real estate (Halbrainer 2014: 114–118). Turning again to one among near countless relevant examples, Susan Soyinka’s family history illustrates how the Nazi seizure of Jewish assets, the humiliations, stripping of citizenship, and absurd bureaucratic hurdles for those wanting to flee into exile (also see Schwarz 1999) were part of an “ever-tightening and vicious grip” that ultimately led to the extermination of millions and, more immediately in May 1938, to her grandfather’s suicide; he was the second-generation owner of the family business, a dry cleaning factory in Vienna (Soyinka 2012). The genocidal spiral of the “destruction process” followed a “logic of development,” in which earlier “measures were always the administrative prerequisite for later, more harmful ones” (Hilberg 1996: 64).8 While there may indeed be “no single explanatory key” for the Holocaust (LaCapra 1998: 190), the two central phenomena emphasized throughout this chapter—particular discursive characteristics combined with, or underpinning, the institutionalization of extreme social closure—played decisive parts. A strongly binary grammar of identity, or what Zygmunt Bauman (2003: 81) terms “heterophobia and boundary-contest anxiety” resulting in the definition of a “segregated category,” was clearly necessary, though equally clearly not sufficient for the Holocaust. Other, distinctly modern preconditions included bureaucracy, which according to Bauman is “intrinsically capable of genocidal action” due to its authoritarian “unanchoring” of ethical responsibility, and a “bold design”—a totalizing blueprint for a new “social order” (Bauman 2003: 105–106, 163). The murderous coming together of the discursive and the institutional eventually manifested in ghettoization, mass deportations, mass murder, and, following the Wannsee conference in January 1942, the extermination camps of the “final solution.” The bureaucratic work involved in state-organized dehumanization is revealed in Gertrude Schneider’s recollections of events immediately preceding her deportation to Riga: One was commissioned . . . an interesting euphemism for ceasing to be a . . . citizen and being turned into an expendable commodity. In charge of this judgment was Anton Brunner. Identity cards, birth certificates, marriage certificates, diplomas and citizenship papers were all taken away . . . One had ceased to be a person . . . On February 4, 1942, Anton Brunner . . . tore up our ID cards and passports, and told my father that he could now do some real work in the East. As of this moment, we had ceased to be Austrian [sic] citizens. (Schneider 1995: 66, 81)

The Holocaust’s Austrian dimensions can be summarized thus: more than 125,000 Jews had managed to escape into exile by late 1939, before mass ex-

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termination replaced mass emigration (at huge financial costs and losses to those forced out by the regime) as the Nazis’ strategy for “dealing with”—in their atrocious terminology—“the Jewish question;” in Vienna alone there had been some 170,000 Jewish residents—or more than 200,000 “if defined ‘by race’”—prior to March 1938; by May 1945 only 5,700 Jews were left there (it is estimated that some 1,500 had been hidden by non-Jews); among prominent perpetrators of the Holocaust, Austrians were overrepresented when measured against Austrians’ proportion of the total population of Hitler’s Reich (also see next chapter); in excess of 65,000 Viennese Jews died in the Holocaust; 2,142 others survived the death camps (Beller 2006: 234–236). Many Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust professed a strong Austrian identity, in contrast to the majority of their former co-nationals whose self-definitions were, as we have seen, overwhelmingly pan-Germanic (deutschnational) at this point in time. Thus, for example, the earlier-quoted Fritz Kleinmann (1988: 47–55) recalls “sharing” a barrack in Buchenwald concentration camp with well-known Austrians, including the comedian Fritz Grünbaum (who was murdered in Dachau soon thereafter), and notes their shared belief in Austria’s future reconstruction, as well as their mutual solidarity and use of Austrian dialect. Maximilian Reich, who remembers how his “beloved Austria had perished” in 1938, has a similar recollection: I thought at the time running away would have amounted to the admission of some guilt . . . The only crime, of which I could be accused, was that I had always felt myself to be an Austrian. I had been an officer during the war . . . [T]he magical word “Austria”—a dirty word in the mouths of our tormentors—restored pride and even the will to live to those scared, humiliated and tormented human beings while facing this mob. (Quoted in Mandl 2007: 17, 32, 41)

Similarly, Hans Thalberg, the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust and later a diplomat, describes his childhood celebrations of Austrian Christian holidays, his family’s strong self-identification with Austria, family members who had served in World War I and others who had “lost a fortune through war bonds like other Austrians;” the family had rarely even thought about their Jewish heritage prior to 1938 (quoted in Vansant 2001: 118). In confronting the Holocaust, Marla Morris (2002: 2) argues, we “must avoid becoming clever” insofar as there can be no intellectual, pedagogical or mnemonic “closure.” Having traced the spiral of extreme social closure and genocidal anti-Semitism, there shall thus be, unusually but deliberately, no argumentative summing up, no concluding sentences that bring an analysis full circle, at the end of this chapter. Indeed, there can be no such intellectual closure, given the nature of the experiences just reflected upon.

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Notes 1. Yet a national organizational logic was also at work concurrently, as—for example—in the “national philanthropic organizations” that undertook much welfare and care for internally displaced people during World War I (Stergar 2017: 12). 2. All translations from German are the author’s. 3. Constraints of space do not allow for the fuller discussion that each of the regional contexts briefly mentioned here warrants. It is worth re-emphasizing, however, that widespread sentiments in Vorarlberg in favor of union with Switzerland as well as the earlier-mentioned Slovenian vote at the Carinthian plebiscite in October 1920 demonstrated that pan-Germanic and other (romanticist) ethnolinguistic nationalisms could evidently still be overridden by context-specific considerations and alternative loyalties. 4. Incidentally, this was a response similar to the “handling” of another banking and debt crisis decades later that we will encounter in later chapters. 5. The immediate aftermath of the annexation saw the arrest of some twenty thousand people (Beller 2006: 233), a number that quickly rose to some seventy-six thousand over the following days (Horowitz 2008: 48). 6. Also relevant here, illustrating another palimpsestic and clearly distorting rewriting of ideas and historical references over time, is Laura Morowitz’s (2016: 123–124) excellent analysis of a 1943 exhibition of Klimt paintings organized by the Nazi Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor) in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach: in an act of “cultural erasure,” Nazi propaganda stripped Gustav Klimt of his central place in Vienna’s fin-de-siècle, of his close connections to the city’s Jewish bourgeoisie, and— twenty-five years after the artist’s death—reframed him as purportedly a heir of “German metaphysical painting” and a “völkisch hero.” 7. Laura Morowitz (2018) has similarly argued that “the hybrid” or “liminal” was to the Nazis “at best deeply problematic” and, if involving Jews, “destined for destruction.” 8. Winfried Garscha (2017: 242) has shown, with reference to the deportation of Viennese Jews to Poland, that this spiral of genocidal actions intensified not as a continuous process but in “waves.”

Chapter 4

FROM POLITICAL AND DISCURSIVE RECONSTRUCTION TO SELECTIVE MEMORIES AND “BANAL NATIONALISM”

d T

his chapter continues with my now more narrowly defined geographical focus on the territories of present-day Austria. The enduring importance of the country’s World War II history cannot be stressed enough. The end of war in Austria, like previous and similarly defining historical transitions discussed earlier, unfolded through a succession of events: from the intensification of Allied bombing raids in late 1944 and early 1945; the last-ditch mobilizations of the murderous, ever more desperate Nazi regime; the arrival of Soviet troops in easterly Burgenland at the end of March 1945; fierce, week-long fighting in and around Vienna, followed by the city’s liberation on 13 April; the formation (already prior to the German Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender of 8 May) of a provisional Austrian government under Karl Renner—the “man for all seasons” who arguably saw himself destined to be not only among the First but now also among the Second Republic’s founders—initially comprising eleven Socialists, seven Communists, and nine representatives of the Catholic conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), and issuing its proclamation of Austrian independence on 27 April; to the arrival of French, American, and British troops, followed by the subdivision of both Austria and Vienna into separate Soviet, American, British, and French occupation zones through the Allied Council (Hanisch 1994: 400–404). Thus ended Austria’s more-than-seven-year period as an integral part of Nazi Germany. The Nazi era has been described as “the crucial period in modern Austrian history,” a period of far-reaching economic and social transformations, during which individual Austrians had occupied a disproportionately large share of important positions in the Holocaust’s “com-

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mand structure” and some 247,000 Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers had died in Hitler’s “total war” (Beller 2006: 198, 232, 237, 243). This chapter examines the war’s mid- and long-term aftermath, an era of political reconstruction and, subsequently, stability and prosperity. As we shall see, the framing in Austrian public memory of what had happened between 1938 and 1945, and in some cases between 1933 and 1945, played a significant role throughout the postwar decades. Conceptually, this chapter probes crucial questions about nationalism’s reappropriation—in discursively altered fashion, as we shall discover—after the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. As we saw earlier, nationalism’s binary identity grammar and its master-topoi of national unity and (promised) national revival had been established long before World War I. As we have also seen, the central question addressed in the previous chapter is related to radicalization and to extreme forms of nationalist closure, ultimately leading to “massive and minutely organized mass murder, involving active participation or silent complicity” by millions, and aiming for the complete annihilation of European Jewry, in the course of a state-run crime for which “there was—and is—no analogy” (Stern 2008: 25). In historically broader terms, nationalism has been interpreted as a secular, modern (/post-traditional) source of meaning, an enormously potent “identity anchor” in an era of mass politics, and as a tool for protecting or expanding (one’s own) group rights or advantages (Haring 2013: 328). While this strongly echoes basic premises of social closure theory, thereby re-emphasizing the relevance of the theoretical position adopted and refined throughout this book, the enormity, singularity, and horror of the Holocaust also demand more fine-grained analyses of this “destruction process” (Hilberg 1996) underpinned by the coming together of structural crises, long-established anti-Semitism (Bauer 2001), bureaucratic power, and the availability of a pervasive ideological blueprint for a radical social-political “renewal” and “re-ordering” (Bauman 2003). As we turn to the subsequent historical chapter, one widely referred to as the “postwar period,” we encounter nationalism of a different kind, one that operated largely in a different affective and discursive register. This requires additional theoretical tools and categories, which have been variously developed under the rubric of (interdisciplinary) memory studies or described as “banal nationalism.” Our analytical apparatus will thus here be enriched by two additional conceptual strands. The first is captured by Duncan Bell’s (2003: 66) notion of a “national mythscape,” which he defines as the “temporally and spatially extended discursive realm wherein the struggle for control of people’s memories and the formation of nationalist myths is debated, contested and subverted incessantly . . . the page upon which . . . often conflicting nationalist narratives are (re)written; it is the perpetually mutating repository for the representation of the past for the purposes of the present.” As we discover, mythscapes are not

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only internally contested, as Bell emphasizes, across the political boundaries and hierarchies separating “dominant” from “subaltern” (counter)memories, but are also characterized by their selectivity. This contains a core insight provided by memory studies—namely, that publicly circulating “representations of the past depend on a frame of reference informed by present needs, concerns and values” (Ludi 2006: 213, italics added). Forgetting and remembering have therefore been shown to be equally significant, similarly selective, and intrinsically collective and hence political processes (Fogu and Kansteiner 2006: 285). The second conceptual strand is rooted in Michael Billig’s (1995) seminal study of Banal Nationalism,1 which captures a multiplicity of widely unnoticed discursive and semiotic practices through which nation-states acquire and reproduce their legitimacy and apparent “taken-for-granted-ness” in the realm of the everyday. Although criticized for purportedly paying insufficient attention to the “dynamic processes” of nationalisms “cooling” or “heating” over time (Skey 2009: 331, 340–341), Billig’s (1995: 6, 43ff.) central concept—“banal nationalism”—achieves its definitional clarity and analytical utility, in part, through its very contrast to “hot nationalism.” Building on this, the present chapter starts to weave another analytical thread, which accompanies us for much of the remainder of this book: this further dimension traces “hot” and “banal” forms of nationalism as qualitatively different yet closely intertwined and alternating phenomena over recent decades. What separates them, and often triggers a switch from banal to hot nationalisms, are experiences (or perceptions) of crises. Previously “naturalized” (Barthes 1972) and taken-for-granted self-understandings and markers of identity are then turned into consciously celebrated or anxiously defended symbols of belonging. Before we later turn to subsequent, further crisis-induced moments of heightened collective consciousness, this chapter focuses predominantly on a post-crisis context, in which atrocities and deep ruptures of the preceding historical era were selectively (mis)remembered in particular ways and in the service of thenpredominant concerns. As was already anticipated in the introductory chapter, from here on the discussion will gradually shift its emphasis toward a more systematic focus on a wide range of pertinent primary materials. And as I argue throughout this book, two types of rhetorical-argumentative statements are central to my analyses: first, key formulations that reflect discursive shifts or important political positions; second, typical formulations that exemplify recurring claims and mobilizing patterns. While earlier chapters of course already contained some such materials, from the present and particularly the next chapter on my discussion will increasingly foreground relevant primary data. Secondary literature will continue to provide the necessary contextualization, and cross-references to key insights generated in the earlier chapters will enable the diachronic analysis offered by this book in its entirety.

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The Immediate Aftermath In spite of growing hardships and disillusionment with war (particularly after the 1942–43 battle of Stalingrad), widening anti-Prussian sentiments, and—in the later stages—isolated resistance groups of both communist (i.e., the ÖFF, or Österreichische Freiheitsfront) and bourgeois (i.e., the group O5) orientation (Pirker 2017: 334–335, 348; Bukey 2000: 219; Rathkolb 2009: 13), many Austrians continued to identify with “the Führer” until late in the war and the vast majority of those drafted into the Wehrmacht served, saw themselves and were seen by the Nazi regime as “fully German” (Beller 2006: 240ff.). This having been said, a full historical account must draw attention to both ends of a continuum, while recognizing that Austrians’ statistical distribution along it was highly asymmetrical. On one of its “ends,” there was the majority that variously included the silently complicit, the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the extreme social closure pursued by Nazi Aryanization policies, and the politically committed, as well as Austrian Nazi enthusiasts. A subsection of the latter, some of whom had been “displaced” from potential positions of power on their Austrian “home turf ” by Nazis from—in their terminology—the Altreich, or Germany pre-1938, in turn accounted for Austrians’ overrepresentation in the genocidal machinery enabling the Holocaust (Beller 2006: 239ff.).2 On the other end of the ideological spectrum, to be mentioned separately from the more than sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, some thirty-five thousand other Austrians—including “Sinti, and Romanies, handicapped people, political and religious opponents, victims of military courts, gays and lesbians” (Rathkolb 2009: 14)—were also killed by the Nazis. In terms of opposition, some one hundred thousand Austrians were arrested “on political grounds” and 2,700 executed for “resistance related activities” (Beller 2006: 242) during more than seven years of terror. More organized resistance against National Socialism, and in fact the only effective military opposition in the heartlands of Hitler’s Reich, had been left to Slovene militia units, which were—for a period of time—supported by the British Special Operations Executive; the latter had recognized early that, despite its long-term political commitment to supporting Austrian independence and ideational nation-building, during the war there was only little appetite for anti-Nazi separatism among German-speaking Austrians (Pirker 2017: 328–342). With the end of war, whose main constitutive events in Austria were sketched earlier, and the reconfiguring geopolitical realities to which it gave rise, the dominant political mood in the newly constituting Second Republic reflected the severe challenges Austrians faced at this next crucial juncture, as well as an already-forming partial amnesia and selective remembering concerning that which had just occurred. Taking a statement by Chancellor Karl Renner from 30 April 1945 as paradigmatic of a lack of collective responsibility, Oliver Rathkolb

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(2009: 13) describes this dominant mood as one of “self-absorption”: amid public emphasis on Austrians’ “plight as victims, as prisoners of war, as the victims of the bombing raids and the target of Nazi repression,” the 65,000 Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the 130,800 others driven into exile, and the mere 5,263 Jewish survivors left in Vienna3 received practically no attention, let alone critical soul-searching on part of the ethnonational majority. The experiences that came to serve as focal points for the dominant narrative were of course real enough. What was more, Austrian hardship and suffering at the end of the war had further painful dimensions, with 87,000 Viennese women alone officially reporting having been raped by Soviet soldiers in April 1945 (and the real incidence of rape much higher), with the city’s population in 1945 being reduced to an average daily food intake of 800 calories, which in May even sank as low as 350 calories, and with infant mortality rates that summer soaring to levels four times higher than in 1938 (Judt 2010: 22–22; Hanisch 1994: 407). Suffering was widespread, palpable, and serious, and its subsequently enduring legacy in public consciousness entirely understandable. The partial destruction of iconic sites of local and national artistic and cultural life, including Vienna’s Stephansdom, the Albertina, and the state opera, not to mention the scale of wider infrastructural destruction, including 10 percent of urban apartments (Hanisch 1994: 401–407), served as scarring reminders of a deep loss. What was ethically and, in the long-run, politically deeply problematic, however, was the selectivity and lack of contextualization provided by the dominant cultural frames for, and memories of, the recent past. Opinion polls shortly after the end of the war suggested that a solid majority of 71 percent of Austrians saw Austria exclusively as a “victim” of recent history, recognizing “no shared guilt at all” (Rathkolb 2009: 14). Put simply: the ingroup’s hardship was emphasized, others’ historically unprecedented and unparalleled suffering—including crucial questions about its local perpetrators and conditions of possibility—were overlooked, setting a pattern that would endure for decades (e.g., Heer and Wodak 2008). A lack of honest contextualization as well as a similarly problematic selectivity also manifested in an informal “hierarchy of empathy” applied to different groups within the estimated 1,632,000 Displaced Persons and Refugees on Austrian territory in the summer of 1945:4 discursive and institutional responses to German expellees (Volksdeutsche) were consistently more positive and generous than those applied to Slavic or Jewish refugees (Knight 2014: 496–502). The postwar period in Austria was defined, from the outset, by the confluence of Allied occupation, soon-to-stall “denazification measures” (e.g., Hanisch 1994: 420ff.), initially severe material hardship, later followed by rapid economic growth, and the gradual sedimentation of a new national self-understanding premised on a historically novel delineation of a self-consciously Austrian national ingroup from a now German “other.” An understanding of the development of

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Austria’s new, post-1945 national consciousness and her subsequently (for some time) banal nationalism requires a discussion of each of these dimensions.

The Postwar Foundations—Political, Economic, Cultural Austria’s provisional government was initially only endorsed by the Soviets, a reflection of wider geopolitics and the growing distrust between Britain (and then the United States) and the Soviet Union, and only obtained recognition by the full Allied Council in October 1945. On 25 November 1945, the first elections of the postwar period took place, with the ÖVP receiving 49.8 percent of the vote, the Socialists (SPÖ) 44.6, and the Communists 5.4 (Hanisch 1994: 403–404; Portisch 1986: 18). Austria’s postwar reconstruction eventually had to entail much more than economic recovery and infrastructural rebuilding. The additional, similarly crucial challenge entailed not a reconstruction but the construction of a new politics that would avoid a recurrence of the polarization and eventual disintegration of democracy that had defined the First Republic. While this partly echoed broader Western European trends away from conflictual and toward consensual politics in the postwar era (Judt 2010: 241–277), the Austrian case was also distinctive. In a topos associated with some of the Second Republic’s early and key statesmen (the patriarchal term reflects historical realities in this case), Austrian politicians previously imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps have often been credited with having acquired a Geist der Lagerstraße (loosely translated as “spirit of the camps”) there: old ideological schisms, so this foundational narrative of Austria’s Second Republic goes (e.g., Uhl 2003), had been overcome by those jointly imprisoned by the Nazis. A still widely circulating interpretation (e.g., Horowitz 2008: 52–53) thereby postulates that Austria’s successful and consensual model of post-1945 politics was rooted in the most painful experience—the shared suffering by former political opponents in Nazi concentration camps. A more compelling, longue durée account of the ultimately successful transition from the profound ideological schisms of the interwar period to postwar consensus politics has been proposed by John Boyer (2013). Locating the roots of the former in the “powerful social-ideological networks unleashed” by both Social Democrats and Christian Socials (and to an initially lesser extent by the German nationalist “third camp”) between the election reform of 1907 and the interwar period, Boyer shows how it was only in the Second Republic that this “dangerous polarization” traceable from the late imperial period to the destructive 1930s was eventually overcome. The keys to this later success included the following: the wider context of “Cold War Proporz politics” (see below), in which the “two nonnationalist hegemons . . . who once fought to control a huge empire were now forced to share a small house”; second, the “recuperation” of the “contaminated

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nationalist voter groups” and the keeping of their organized representatives—in the shape of the Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU), founded in 1949, and as of 1955/56 its successor party, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ)5—from power (Boyer 2013: 156, 174, 167). Of course, such novel, consensual politics, to which I return in due course, do not single-handedly explain the course of Austrian post-1945 history. Economic recovery played a vital role, significant regional disparities notwithstanding. Those were largely a reflection of the different approaches taken by the Allies in their respective “zones.” In addition to systematic sexual violence already mentioned, the Soviet Union essentially treated “its” sections (i.e., Upper Austria’s Mühlviertel north of the Danube, Lower Austria, Burgenland, and Viennese districts in the northeast and south of the city) as “conquered country”: this manifested in the Soviets’ confiscation of “large swathes of eastern Austria’s economy, including Lower Austria’s oilfields” and “exacting . . . reparations by other means,” including the transport of machinery to Russia, estimated at some $2–2.5 billion between 1945 and 1955 (Beller 2006: 251; Hanisch 1994: 412; also Petrov 2009). For reasons shaped by the now-dawning Cold War, and given Austria’s strategically important position on the emerging boundary between the capitalist West and the communist East, the Western Allies’ approach differed significantly. Reflecting U.S. initiatives in particular, emergency humanitarian relief played a vital role during a dire year for the Austrian economy in 1946 and a harsh subsequent winter; this was followed by the Marshall Plan, first set out in 1947, which saw—over several years and under the Economic Recovery Program—some $1 billion channeled into the Austrian economy (at a per capita rate more than seven times that enjoyed in West Germany), where it helped make infrastructural and industrial investments and lay the foundations for Austria’s subsequent and “spectacular economic take-off” (Beller 2006: 252–253; Bischof and Petschar 20176). Bearing in mind that the Marshall Plan aimed to enable economic recovery and to stem a feared communist tide (Hanisch 1994: 413), its additional cultural dimensions, though rarely remembered, were neither surprising nor insignificant. They entailed, for instance, a film campaign across seventeen European countries (Fritsche 2018) and the distribution of some 134 million copies of English-language books in Austria (Judt 2010: 224). As bleak as the outlook was in 1945/46, and as urgent as the Austrian economy’s need for external support and stimulus was then, as rapid was the subsequent upturn. Between 1946 and 1950, economic growth reached unlikely levels of 17 percent, with the GNP surpassing both pre–World War I and pre-Anschluss figures (Hanisch 1994: 408–409). While the protracted economic crisis of much of the previous three decades had passed, there were lingering structural problems and threats, such as inflation. Countermeasures, including a currency reform in 1947, both reduced the money in circulation and depleted, for the second time in living memory, Austrians’ savings (Hanisch 1994: 408–409). In addition to

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further, subsequently hugely consequential, structural changes, such as the beginnings of Austria’s postwar system of social partnership (e.g., see Fitzmaurice 1991; Kindley 1997),7 to which I return in due course, the decade between the end of World War II and the re-achievement of full Austrian sovereignty in 1955 also saw important cultural and discursive developments. Among the former, the popularity and functions of Austrian cinema in the first postwar decade is particularly noteworthy. As Maria Fritsche (2013: 2–4) has shown, its different genres displayed recurring, mutually intertwined preoccupations with masculinity—in the context of social change, recent military defeat, and Allied occupation—and with the construction of a distinctly Austrian national identity, now to be delineated from Germany and “glossing over the traumatic past” by focusing on a more distant, purportedly “glorious imperial history or showcasing a rural idyll”; there is indeed a compelling case that popular cinema played an important role in enabling “a society that was so deeply unsettled by the war and by its involvement in terrible crimes . . . [to] (ostensibly) recover so quickly from its wounds and the wounds it had inflicted on others” (Fritsche 2013: ix). This having been said, such cultural phenomena, their content and, as importantly, the silences and absences in their representations were part of wider, enormously consequential discursive shifts.

The Postwar Mythscape and Closure in yet Another Form In ideological terms—understanding ideology as ideas, language, and cultural practices that play a role in bolstering or subverting (institutional) power relations (Augoustinos 1998)—the (immediate) postwar era saw the articulation and dissemination of a new, distinctly Austrian discourse of national self-definition. Austrian identities certainly had long existed (see Heer 2001), often particularly among Austrian Jews (see above or Roth 2001), Communists, and former Habsburg monarchists (e.g., Thaler 2001: 72–74). As we have seen, however, already embattled in the interwar era by widespread pan-Germanic self-understandings that covered much of the rest of the political spectrum, Austrian particularism had become a not merely subversive but positively dangerous position during the Nazi reign. Now, in the postwar setting, Austrian particularism of a new kind was to become hegemonic. Its key premises—or, translated into our theoretical terms, its identity grammars and central topoi—were twofold and interrelated: first, a clear separation and, as such, a novel and in historical terms uniquely categorical delineation from what was now constructed as the “German other” (Thaler 2001: 121; Karner 2005a). Among the first manifestations of this post-1945, initially often largely top-down, redefinition of “Austrian-ness” as politically and culturally distinctive were the publication of a separate Austrian dictionary and the renaming of the school subject “German” into “language of instruction” (Unterrichtssprache)

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(Auinger 2017: 99).8 In other words, the new Austrian particularism would often apply a binary identity grammar also, and sometimes especially, in the service of rigidly delineating Austria from a newly “othered” German outgroup. As we shall discover, however, such binarism continued to sit alongside another grammar of identity, variously based on segmentation (i.e., sliding, context-dependent scales of inclusion/exclusion) or encompassment of purportedly relative cultural proximity (see Baumann and Gingrich 2004) vis-à-vis Germany, which was also still at Austrians’ disposal and, indeed, can be traced through the postwar period and up until the present. The second key premise underpinning Austrians’ new identity particularism was as significant: drawing a clear dividing line between oneself and the German “other,” responsibility for the recent and unparalleled crimes committed by German-speakers (and others) could conveniently be projected onto what had now become an outgroup. Given the realities of the Anschluss, of World War II, and of the aforementioned prominence of Austrian Nazis among chief perpetrators in the apparatus of the Holocaust, this projection was historiographically as untenable as it was ethically deeply problematic. However, it was politically effective and would endure for decades (e.g., Bischof 2004). As the Second Republic’s Lebenslüge (Beller 2006: 250), or official self-deception, it derived momentum from a highly selective reading and appropriation of the Moscow Declaration of 1943 (e.g., Thaler 2001: 75–90; Uhl 2011: 186–187; Karner and Tschubarjan 2015), which had defined Austria as Hitler’s “first victim” while also stressing that future Austrian governments would have to bear part of the responsibility for the horrors of Nazism. However, in light of geopolitical concerns and shifts—the dawning of a new global confrontation pitting the “communist East” against the capitalist “West” in the now-to-unfold Cold War—the postwar era saw hardly any acknowledgement of the “co-responsibility” strand (see Uhl 2006: 63) of the Moscow Declaration. Austria’s geographical location made it strategically important for the Allies. For Austrian politics seeking a new start, a clear cut with the recent past, and external support for reconstruction, this was a symbiotic “deal” premised on this highly selective and self-interested reading of the country’s recent and darkest historical chapter (Beller 2006: 250). Thus, the “victim thesis” as the “foundational” myth of the Second Republic in its early decades was born (e.g., Uhl 2006: 40–54; Wodak and de Cillia 2007). The manifestations of the “myths of innocence and victimhood” included the long-lasting sidestepping of responsibility (i.e., compensation and restitution) for the Holocaust, as perhaps most infamously expressed in 1948 by socialist interior minister Oskar Helmer: in response to an American call for the funding of some Austrian Jews’ return, Helmer argued for “dragging the issue out” (Beller 2006: 257; Pick 2000a: 206). In addition to Austrian Nazis’ aforementioned statistical overrepresentation in the machinery of the Holocaust, it must also be remembered that some key sites for its perpetration had been located on Austrian territory, as perhaps most en-

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duringly conveyed by the accounts and images provided by Allied soldiers liberating the concentration camps in Mauthausen (where some eighteen thousand people had managed to survive until the spring of 1945), Ebensee, Gusen, and Gunskirchen (e.g., Portisch 1985: 208–209). Decades later, Günter Bischof (2014: 58) rightly re-emphasized that with the persecution, expulsion, and murder of its Jewish population—including the loss of entrepreneurial capital, of “innovative potential,” of artistic genius, and of many of the “best minds” at the country’s universities—Austria “would never fully recover from this self-inflicted loss of people and talent” (see also Stadler and Weibel 1995). But instead of recognition and mourning of this loss, which would have called for sustained attempts that never materialized to bring surviving Austrian Jews back from exile (Herzog 2011: 6; Pelinka 1990a: 39; Schwarz 1999: 105), anti-Semitism continued after the Holocaust, both in its discursive (though now altered) presence and in institutional forms (i.e., mechanisms of social closure that, though fundamentally different from those of the previous era, continued to effect exclusion, discrimination, and injustice). While initial denazification and punishment of war criminals—including the registration of some 537,000 Austrian Nazi Party members, the setting up of people’s courts and Allied military courts, and a range of sanctions against former Nazis found guilty or responsible—were relatively wide-ranging, yet “disorganized and ineffective” (as well as decisively driven by the Allies), this process soon lost momentum: 1948 saw an amnesty for “the lesser incriminated,” followed by a sharp reduction in the number of war crime trials, the dissolution of the people’s courts in 1955, and a 1957 “National Socialist Amnesty Law” benefitting the more substantially incriminated (Beller 2006: 258–259; also Portisch 1986: 66–79). On a wider, discursive level, a post-Holocaust, “secondary antiSemitism” (e.g., Wassermann 2002)—that is, an often overlooked, encoded form of anti-Semitism “without Jews” and without self-declaring anti-Semites (Silverman 2017: 214)—manifested in the continued circulation of stereotypical topoi and, in our other analytical terms, of a binary identity grammar; while the latter at times even assumed philo-Semitic forms, alongside continuing and more commonly negative portrayals of Jews, common to both was an absolute separation of the (ethnonationally defined) categories of “self ” and “other” (Silverman 2017: 221–222, 227). Given many Austrian Jews’ deep identification with Austria, their continued ideological and practical exclusion from the Austrian ingroup was nothing short of a further profound historical insult added to the utterly unparalleled collective “injury”—dispossession, dehumanization, forced exile, and genocide—inflicted on (Austrian) Jewry over the preceding years. Moreover, institutional social closure quickly assumed new forms in the period immediately following the Holocaust. Lisa Silverman reports (2017: 226) one source documenting that “80 percent of the 1,200 Jews who returned to Vienna in 1947 found their former apartments . . . occupied by Nazis and Aryanizers who,

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according to Austrian law, could not be ousted” from their recently “acquired” properties “unless it could be proved that they had joined the Nazi party before 1938 or held a key position in the party”; most attempts to regain recently stolen and Aryanized property were thus unsuccessful, while Jews’ mere return “aroused anti-Semitic sentiment.” Discursively and institutionally, the “early postwar years [thereby] set the tone” for later decades, when Austria would face “political turmoil and shifts to the right, [with many] continuing all the while to deny its complicity in anti-Jewish prejudices and actions” (Silverman 2017: 227). The late Leon Zelman (2005: 171–172, 175),9 survivor of Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ebensee, later cofounder of the journal Das Jüdische Echo and founder of an organization (Jewish Welcome Service) enabling Viennese Holocaust survivors in exile to visit the city of their birth, summarized a dominant strand in Austria’s post-1945 mythscape and new forms of anti-Semitic closure as follows: [At the time] I did not connect explicit anti-Semitism to its latent, silent but more widespread variant. Not seeing this was a form of self-defense, I had to be able to live here . . . So I did not yet see that much of Austria’s postwar politics was tactically motivated, such as the self-stylization as Nazi Germany’s first victim . . . Austria succeeded in passing guilt on to West Germany as the Third Reich’s legal successor . . . A second round of humiliations and thefts was now, after 1945, added to those already endured. No one asked the expelled to return . . . From the mid-1970s on, Nazi-criminals in Austria were not being taken to court any more at all . . . Austria avoided restitutions of what had been stolen for as long as possible . . . By contrast, the state took much care to integrate former Nazis.10

The interplay of nationalism’s discursive and institutional facets, which I approach through a synthesis of critical discourse analysis and (neo-)Weberian social closure theory, are at the heart of this entire book. Leon Zelman’s autobiographical reflections, as well as some of the Austrian Jewish life histories mentioned in the previous chapter (Schneider 1995: 159–165; Gruber 2014: 166–186; Halbrainer 2014: 135–142), powerfully illustrate how this interplay unfolded in postwar Austria, how it perpetuated—in new forms—anti-Semitic closure, and how it interfaced with prominent, highly selective, and self-serving Austrian narratives about the recent past. The wider context to this (emerging) mythscape, both in the periods leading up to and following the signing of the State Treaty in 1955, included several other important dimensions, to which we turn next.

Proporz, Social Partnership, and Neutrality As mentioned, the political focus in the first post-1945 decade rested on institutional reconstruction and economic recovery. This period also saw the crys-

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tallization of new organizational structures that would shape Austria during the postwar era in its entirety. The Second Republic would henceforth dedicate much of its raison d’être and collective energies toward neutralizing the centrifugal political forces that had ultimately destroyed the First Republic from within. Politically and administratively, this manifested in a “new, co-operative” system, in which the socialists (SPÖ) and the conservatives (ÖVP) came to govern by dividing “power at the centre, in the provinces and the municipalities . . . on the principle of Proporz, proportionality reflecting party strength” (Beller 2006: 255). Arguably tantamount to a form of modern political moiety, this system of “government-by-coalition and administration-by-Proporz” entailed the inter-party subdivision of “all public services, most of the media and much of the economy, from banking to logging”: as Tony Judt (2010: 262) has gone on to observe, Proporz saw appointments, “at almost every level . . . by agreement, with candidates proposed by one of the two dominant parties. Over time, this system of ‘jobs for the boys’ reached deep into Austrian life, forming a chain of interlocking patrons and clients who settled virtually every argument either by negotiation or else through the exchange of favors and appointments” (Judt 2010: 262). The corollaries were threefold. First, such paternalistic “dividing up” of the public sector (and more) between right and left (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 122) made party membership in either the ÖVP or the SPÖ a rational choice. Indeed, membership in the two dominant parties expanded quickly, each reaching more than five hundred thousand members by 1955 (Beller 2006: 255). Second, while the consensual subdivision of power and opportunities has at times been credited with helping to facilitate Austria’s unforeseen and, by international comparison, unusually high levels of “social peace” throughout the postwar period (Fitzmaurice 1991: 122), the country’s—by Western standards—unusually high levels of party membership arguably also contributed at the time to a delaying in the development or expansion of a fully-fledged, critical civil society (e.g., Bruckmüller 1996: 42–43; Pelinka 1990b: 24; Karner 2007a: 86). Third, Proporz was not all-encompassing. Certain groups “were inevitably left out—small shopkeepers, independent artisans, isolated farmers, anyone whose work or awkward opinions placed them outside the grid of allocated benefits and positions” (Judt 2010: 262), thereby revealing social closure of yet another kind: in this case within the self-defined or reconstituted nation and along the lines of class/ occupational grouping and party membership. As we shall discover, each of these dimensions of Austrian public life would also resurface and help shape political changes awaiting the country toward the end of the twentieth century. The severity of economic hardship in 1945, the need for humanitarian relief, and, in due course, for Marshall Plan support under the Economic Recovery Program, as well as the pace of the subsequent economic upturn, have already been stressed. A related domestic, structural change that would shape ensuing developments and become one of the Second Republic’s defining features was

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the beginning of Austria’s postwar system of social partnership. This was designed as a “neo-corporatist system” (Beller 2006: 255) intended to mediate between capital, labor, and the state as part of the broader project of diffusing the polarizing centrifugal forces that had plagued the interwar era (e.g., Sully 1990). More generally, seen as a key part of the “postwar settlement,” particularly in some of the smaller European states, neo-corporatist systems aimed for “often redistributive and protective modes of economic management” that involved “peaklevel policy bargaining among encompassing producer groups and the state”; at their most effective, such neo-corporatist arrangements could strike a balance between “competitive trade and social welfare” and could see representatives of labor, business, and the state “work in relative unison” (Kindley 1997: 3, 6–7). In practical terms, Austrian social partnership has entailed a system of extraparliamentary negotiations and “institutionalized cooperation between economic interest groups . . . [i.e.,] mandatory associations entrusted with negotiating fundamental economic issues” (Thaler 2001: 31). The associations in question are Austria’s four chambers: the Chamber of Agriculture and the Federal Chamber of Commerce (both broadly aligned with the ÖVP), the Austrian Chamber of Labor, and the Austrian Trade Union Association (with the latter two historically close to the SPÖ). Although widely credited for its role in Austria’s achievement of a “remarkable level of industrial peace and . . . prosperity” (Beller 2006: 255), the system has also been taken to task for lacking democratic legitimacy and transparency (Menasse 2005: 356). For much of the postwar era, social partnership meant that economic policies were “decided behind closed doors” and then “rubber-stamped by parliament”; given the historically close ties between the two dominant parties and the social partners, it is perhaps not surprising to see the latter also described as a “parallel economic complement to the political Grand Coalition,” which arguably made the Second Republic, in matters of economic policy, “resemble more a corporation, Austria Inc., than a parliamentary democracy” (Beller 2006: 255–256). The period leading up to the signing of Austria’s State Treaty also overlapped with the beginning of les trentes glorieuses (the glorious thirty), during which—in geographically broader terms—Western European governments increased budgets and expenditure, showing “a sustained commitment to long-term public and private investment in infrastructure and machinery” and setting the tracks for a development that would see “historically poor countries . . . improve their economic performance spectacularly”; this included Austria, whose per capita GDP would rise “from $3,731 to $11,308 (in 1990 dollars) . . . between 1950 and 1973” (Judt 2010: 324–325). Importantly, this must be seen in parallel to comparable rates of recovery and growth in many parts of Western Europe between 1950 and 1970 (Piketty 2014: 96ff.). The Austrian particularity, one shared with postwar Germany (Judt 2010: 55) and already stressed earlier, was that the early phases in her economic recovery coincided with the continuing

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presence of the Allies, divergent experiences across the four sectors of occupation, and the local impacts of the now unfolding Cold War (e.g., Portisch 1986: 336ff.). In Austria, this state of affairs continued until 1955, the year of the signing of the State Treaty and the subsequent passing of a constitutional law enshrining the country’s permanent neutrality (Bundesverfassungsgesetz zur immerwährenden Neutralität) (e.g., Portisch 1986: 526). What is revealing for a longue durée examination of nationalist discourses is that in some public discourse particularly or only the period of 1945 until 1955 continues to be described as a period of occupation (Besatzungszeit), rather than as a period of liberation-cum-reconstruction (Beller 2006: 250). All evidence of the growth of Austrian patriotism—at the expense of the previously hegemonic pan-Germanism—notwithstanding (Reiterer 1988; Thaler 2001: 121; Karner 2005a: 419), such “everyday” terminology inadvertently reveals something significant about postwar Austria: namely, the still widely continuing “taken-for-grantedness” of shared cultural and historical roots with Germany, as a consequence of which the period between 1945 and 1955—and not the period from 1938 until 1945, or 1938 until 1955—has often been framed as a time of foreign occupation (Beller 2006: 250). Therein we encounter another form of what Michael Billig (1995: 11) terms national deixis, or the “rhetorical pointing” toward, and delineation of, a national ingroup vis-à-vis “others.” While Billig pays particular attention to the use of personal pronouns (i.e., we, they) and to topographical/spatial references to “here” as opposed to “there” for such deictic nationalism, Austrian references to particularly the period from 1945 until 1955 as a time of foreign occupation illustrates a temporal dimension to a new and banal nationalism that still bore the imprint of tacitly pan-Germanic assumptions (i.e., reflected in its focus on 1945, and not 1938, as the start of occupation). Time and prominent cultural memories can likewise perform important rhetorical and interpretative functions for banal—in the sense of widely taken-for-granted and nonreflexive, though by no means politically trivial or inconsequential—boundary and identity “work.” Against the geopolitical backdrop of the Cold War, and completing nine years of negotiations, the Austrian State Treaty was signed by the foreign ministers of Austria, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France, in Vienna’s Schloss Belvedere on 15 May 1955, restoring Austria’s full sovereignty, prohibiting any future Anschluss to Germany, protecting Slovenian and Croatian minority rights on Austrian territory, and obliging Austria to “compensate” the Soviets with money and goods for the formerly “German property” they had confiscated (Portisch 1986: 492ff.). In this context, the famous words uttered by Austria’s then foreign minister Leopold Figl, who had survived years as a political prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, are worth repeating, for they contained—at closer inspection—a reading of then-recent history different from the one mentioned above

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and transported by depictions of only the first post-1945 decade as a period of occupation: the State Treaty marked, Figl pointed out, the end not of a ten- but of “a 17-year-long thorny path,” on which “the Austrian people” had made sacrifices, so that it would regain its freedom; this now having been accomplished, Figl continued, Austria was now “dutifully” going to “work” at the dawn of “a new era for Austria” (e.g., Portisch 1986: 493–494). Discursively, we here encounter a historical topos partly comparable to, yet also significantly different from, the master-topos of national revival that we have encountered numerous times already and that had decisively shaped Central European nationalisms throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latter, as we have seen, worked (and works) with the notion of a distant “golden” national age, contrasted to a present deemed unjust and corrupt, in juxtaposition to which an imminent “national regeneration” is promised as the required antidote (also Hutchinson 1987). By some contrast, Figl’s famous statement, while sharing the broad temporal trajectory of contrasting “a new era” to a recent, dark past, made no explicit mention of “a golden era” in more distant history; yet, the “thorny” seventeen years of “bondage” (Unfreiheit) now past were implicitly and more subtly (than in nationalist discourses previously encountered) also contrasted to something more positive preceding them. The most decisive difference, however, is to be found on the level of nationalist deixis: Figl’s obvious intended audience and frame of reference—obvious both in the context of the occasion and given Leopold Figl’s biography—were “the Austrian people.” Clearly, we here come face to face with a key moment in Austria’s recent history, both institutionally (i.e., the State Treaty restoring full national sovereignty) and discursively (i.e., the new hegemony of an Austrian particularism at the expense of all pan-Germanisms). To recap the discussion presented in this chapter thus far, while tying it to subsequent developments: during the (early) postwar period, “Catholic” and “socialist” Austria had managed to “avoid a re-run” of the polarization of earlier periods; thus aided by a newly developing political stability and growing economic prosperity, and to the backdrop of the Cold War’s geopolitical constellations, Austria was “assigned an identity by association—as Western, free, democratic”; and while the “new-found neutrality . . . was enthusiastically adopted as the country’s identity tag,” this also masked a process of “national forgetting” or, more accurately, of highly selective remembering well underway by the beginning of the post–State Treaty era (Judt 2010: 261ff.). While a necessary, more widespread critical rethinking of Austria’s postwar mythscape would occur only toward the end of the twentieth century (see chapters 5 and 6), the period between 1955 and 1970, to which we turn next, already provided occasional glimpses of a discursive struggle between competing cultural memories and moments when a newly banal nationalism found itself transformed into its “hot” variant.

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Banal Nationalism in Context An analysis of sociopolitical changes and key events from the time of the State Treaty until the end of the much-discussed 1960s benefits from a conceptual synthesis of two theoretical strands introduced at different points in our earlier discussions. The first of these strands is provided by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977: 166–171) understanding of moments of crisis as conducive to a transformation of a previously widely taken-for-granted cultural common-sense into a discursive terrain of competing politics. The second strand is anchored in Michael Billig’s (1995: 6, 43ff.) distinction between banal (i.e., ubiquitous, quotidian, but largely unnoticed) and hot (i.e., self-conscious and collectively mobilizing) nationalisms. Building on previous work (Karner 2005b; 2011), I here begin to weave an additional analytical thread that explores the question as to whether crisis moments can transform “merely” lived (national) identifications and everyday life-worlds into heightened collective consciousness and internally contested realms of clashing memories and political positions. We discover in the remainder of this chapter and particularly in the ones to follow that what is experienced as “crisis” can vary with context. Yet, more importantly for the overall conceptual apparatus applied and developed in the present book, this synthesis of arguments derived from Bourdieu and Billig enables the following: it further sharpens the discourse analytical contextualization of all language by connecting empirically documented discursive events and shifts to the particular conditions encountered in moments of (perceived or structural) crises. Second, by exploring the discursive effects of crises we can respond constructively to Michael Skey’s (2009: 331, 340) criticism of Billig’s distinction and to Skey’s concurrent call for “a more dynamic model” capable of making sense of nationalism’s “cooling” or “heating” over time. At first glance, from an internal Austrian perspective, connecting the period between 1955 and 1970 to the experience of crises may appear surprising. This was, after all, an epoch of intact “social contracts,” “full employment,” widening prosperity, political consensus, and a growing public sector, revealing state structures that had come to “lubricate the wheels of commerce, politics and society in numerous ways,” providing “employment and remuneration” for very substantial proportions of their citizens who therefore “had a vested interest in it”; in conjunction with expanding welfare systems, this garnered “near universal appreciation,” revealing that “almost everyone had something to gain from the opportunities” and the protection “the state afforded them” (Judt 2010: 329–332, 361–362). What applied across much of Western Europe certainly also captured key characteristics of Austrian society from the mid-1950s onward, even though living standards and infrastructure in the former Soviet sector took a while and major investments to catch up with the rest of the country (Portisch 1996: 13). Overall, Austria’s version of the postwar economic miracle came to fruition in the period in question: in 1955 the economy grew by 11.5 percent, continuing

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at an average annual growth rate of 6.4 percent until 1962, with the country’s GDP per capita doubling 1937 levels by 1959 (Beller 2006: 263). While the post-1955 era was not, then, an obvious time of domestic crises, the wider international context was of course an entirely different matter. Given Austria’s geographical location, that much wider and intrinsically crisis-prone geopolitical context was always very close “to home”—with the Iron Curtain marking the country’s borders with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Austria was soon drawn even closer to one of the epicenters and key events during the Cold War, when the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led to a mass influx of some 150,000 refugees across Austria’s easternmost border (e.g., BrookShepherd 1997: 417). To this day, in some Austrian public discourse (e.g., Portisch 1996: 50–51) 1956 is remembered as a time of spontaneous neighborly solidarity extended by Austrians to their former Habsburg “brethren”-cumrefugees from the Communist bloc. In Bourdieu-ian terms, it is worth pointing out that, in contrast to later external conflicts triggering refugee flows to Austria (see chapters 5 to 7), the dominant responses to the crisis of 1956 did not include nationalist defensiveness and exclusion. Other key developments during the period in question require an analytical category larger than the unavoidably negatively connoted concept of “crisis.” A full understanding of the scale of social change afoot during the 1950s and 1960s requires a discussion of wider social transformations that would form an important context to concurrent and later (re)negotiations of national and other identities. Central among those (certainly not distinctly Austrian) structural transformations was further urbanization. While in 1950 one in three “employed Austrians” had worked on a farm, only some 12 percent did so by the 1970s (Judt 2010: 327). The agricultural sector’s contribution to the GDP fell from 18 percent in 1950 to 4.8 percent in the 1980s. As elsewhere, farming was also transforming from being significantly subsistence-oriented toward efficient and more or less exclusively market-oriented agricultural businesses; across Austria, some 650,000 agricultural laborers left the sector between 1951 and 1976, while production levels increased by 65 percent (Hanisch 1994: 95, 100; also Girtler 2002). Agricultural production underwent far-reaching changes including specialization, a shift toward medium-sized farms, and their industrialization (e.g., Krausmann et al. 2003). For our analytical purposes, these were important contextual changes that formed part of the backdrop to the concurrent sedimentation of a new, Austrian national habitus. Borrowing another one of Bourdieu’s central concepts, De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak (1999: 153) have defined a national habitus as “a complex of common ideas, concepts or perception schemes, of related emotional attitudes intersubjectively shared . . . as well as of similar behavioral dispositions, all of which are internalized through ‘national’ socialization.” Closely tied to Bourdieu’s related concept of doxa, or “the universe of the undiscussed . . . and

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undisputed” (Bourdieu 1977: 164–173; also Karner 2005b), such a (national) habitus operates largely on a preconscious level and plays a vital role in the ongoing reproduction of the (national) social structures that generate the habitus in the first place. Projected onto Michael Billig’s conceptualization, the habitus manifests in the realm of banal (rather than hot) nationalism. Highly pertinent, in this context, was research conducted since the mid1950s, which revealed both the widening public availability and growing takenfor-grantedness of a distinctly Austrian habitus and hence a departure and distancing from previously dominant pan-Germanic sentiments. In periodically conducted surveys, the proportion of Austrians self-defining as “a separate people” (ein eigenes Volk), rather than as part of a larger and German ethnocultural ingroup, increased steadily from 49 percent in 1956, to 66 percent in 1970, and subsequently to 75 percent in 1987 (Bruckmüller 1992: 262). This growing domain of an Austrian banal nationalism comprised considerably more than deictic references to Austria. Manifesting as a new national habitus (i.e., through, as mentioned above, ideas, perceptions, shared emotions, and “behavioral dispositions”), Austria’s banal nationalism had been acquiring very specific symbolic content. Already valorized in some of the popular Austrian cinema of the first postwar decade (Fritsche 2013), rural space was beginning to play an important role therein. By the mid-1980s, in a study on “objects of national pride,” 80 percent of the participants would rank the country’s “scenic beauty” foremost on their list, while 67 percent also emphasized its “historical treasures”—thereby reflecting a dominant strand in the (nicknamed) Alpine Republic’s national mythscape—and 64 percent further included Austria’s skiing achievements (Reiterer 1988: 118–119). Similarly, in 1980, in another relevant survey, 97 percent of participants expressed “great pride” in Austria’s “scenic beauty,” 96 percent also celebrated the country’s political stability and social peace (see above), 93 percent also stressed their attachment to “their common language,”11 87 percent valued political neutrality, 79 percent underlined the country’s artistic history as well, and 74 percent expressed their parallel affinity to Austrian food (Bruckmüller 1996: 70). Even though these findings date from a slightly later period, the shared ideas, perceptions, and emotional dispositions they capture, thereby testifying to the symbolic content of Austria’s banal nationalism, had already come to constitute core components of Austria’s postwar habitus by the 1960s; and the “national” countryside, as well as what people did (e.g., ski) and produced (i.e., Austrian food) there, featured prominently within it (and, as we shall see in later chapters, still do today). While similar semiotic/discursive processes of “nationalizing nature” and “naturalizing the nation” are well-documented elsewhere (Kaufmann and Zimmer 1998), landscapes do not usually exhaust the symbolic repertoire of a national habitus. In Austria, as elsewhere (e.g., Edensor 2002), particular national industries and related commodities had also begun to symbolically furnish the country’s postwar banal nationalism: the founding of

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Austrian Airlines in 1957 and the initially celebrated production of a small fleet of deep-sea vessels by the then-nationalized VOEST steelworks during the late 1950s and 1960s were cases in point (Portisch 1996: 104–109). Given that the realm of the national habitus and of banal nationalism is widely left uninterrogated or operates on a preconscious level, the methodological challenge arises as to how it can be accessed and captured by social scientists and historians. One possibility, which I begin to trace here and to which I shall also return later, is to turn to available counterdiscourses that deliberately draw attention to, and criticize, their wider cultural “universe” of the problematically undiscussed from within. One of the most famous examples of postwar Austrian cultural production illustrates the value of such an approach and reflects how certain cultural registers and genres critically threw core components of the national mythscape and of Austria’s postwar habitus into sharp relief already at the time. The particular cultural text in question was the 1961 broadcast on Austrian television of Der Herr Karl, arguably the most important postwar contribution to Austria’s tradition of political Kabarett, or satirical revue. Der Herr Karl saw Austrian actor Helmut Qualtinger in his most famous role; the piece’s only character was subsequently recognized as the “prototype” of the purportedly “apolitical and opportunistic Austrian” (Hanisch 1994: 479). As a prime example of a counterdiscourse that exposes cultural commonsense and dominant memories to critical scrutiny, rather than leaving them undiscussed and unproblematized, Der Herr Karl reflects on the successive traumas of Austrian history between 1918 and 1955 and thereby reveals highly selective misconstructions of the recent past. More accurately, we here encounter a dramaturgical deconstruction of the tensions between only half-acknowledged historical realities and their self-interested depictions by those wishing to absolve themselves of responsibility. Having insisted that “Austria took a long time to recover from the wounds inflicted on her by the First World War,” Der Herr Karl described the 1920s and 1930s as a “terrible time,” people as “angry, fanatical, seduced,” and his own successive ideological U-turns as flexible adaptations in the course of a “struggle for survival”: Until 1934 I was a Socialist . . . you don’t know what it was like, those are things we do not want to touch, nobody in Austria likes remembering them. Later, I joined the rallies for the Christian Socials, the Heimwehr, I got 5 schillings for that . . . I then went across to the Nazis, where I also got 5 schillings. Austria was always apolitical, we are not political people. But I scraped together a little bit of money. (Merz and Qualtinger 1987)

Passages like this skillfully reflect on the “vagueness” and euphemisms that have been recognized as hallmarks of rightwing discourse and totalitarian politics (e.g., Wodak 2015: 28). Focused on Austria’s darkest historical chapter, Der Herr Karl then reveals additional discursive strategies of “trivialization” (Wodak 2002: 33):

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But then Hitler came anyway, what enthusiasm, unimaginable, after all those terrible years, finally the Viennese could rejoice . . . I remember it, there we were, on the Ring, at the Heldenplatz, unmissable, we felt we were among ourselves . . . The Germans marched in, the police were wearing the swastika, good-looking . . . terrible how these gullible people were led astray. The Führer led, but he was a personality, perhaps a demon, but one felt his stature. (Merz and Qualtinger 1987)

A “topos of the people” (Wodak 2015: 36)—conveyed by deictic references to “us” being “among ourselves”—features here in conjunction with an agencydenying (mis)reading of 1938 (i.e., ordinary people, having endured “those terrible years,” being allegedly “led astray” by the “demonic,” yet purportedly charismatic Führer) and with an inadvertent slip that gives away Herr Karl’s continuing seduction (i.e., “good-looking”) by memories of the Anschluss. The simultaneity of a partial, if unintentional, admission of involvement and a denial of responsibility also surfaces when Herr Karl admits to having been an illegal Nazi before March 1938, only to then insist that “everyone was an illegal in Austria” at the time, and that everything people were “subsequently accused of ” was “wrongly” premised on “misunderstandings.” In his most revealing passage, Der Herr Karl discloses more than the character intends and realizes about Austria’s postwar “myth of victimhood”: In our council estate, there lived a Jew, Tennenbaum, otherwise a nice man. People had scribbled anti-Nazi things on the pavements, and Tennenbaum had to scrape it off— not by himself, with the other Jews. So I took him there . . . After the war, Mister Tennenbaum returned, I ran into him and said, “Hello Mister Tennenbaum!,” nothing, I repeated my greeting, “Hello Mister Tennenbaum!” Again, nothing, so I thought to myself, “now he is upset.” But someone had to clean away those scribbles . . . Everything people say about that time today is wrong, it was a beautiful . . . I would not want to miss those memories. Even though I never benefitted, others became rich, businesses and houses were Aryanized, I only escorted a Jew, I was a victim. Others became rich, I was an idealist. (Merz and Qualtinger 1987)

Herr Karl’s opportunism then continues well into the years of “occupation” between 1945 and 1955: Then the Russians arrived, I got on well with them . . . Since I spoke a little Czech, I always was able to access the mentality of the Slavs, the Asians, the Russians. I did well. A few months later, guess who arrived! The Americans! What relief! . . . They employed me as a civilian guard . . . It was a tough time, they let a liberated people starve . . . I was happy the day we finally got the State Treaty. We went to the Belvedere, there we were, unmissable, all Austrians, like in 1938, a big family, though a little smaller now . . . When I heard the words, “Austria is free!,” I knew, “I have accomplished this, too, now.” (Merz and Qualtinger 1987)

Arguably the postwar era’s most effective counterdiscourse,12 Der Herr Karl was more than a satirical critique of hypocrisy, opportunism, selective remembering,

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and cruelty; indeed, it amounted to an “evisceration” of Austria’s new consensus that “outraged” many among the viewing public (Beller 2006: 267). In our analytical terms, it drew attention to the dominant, highly selective memories enshrined in Austria’s postwar mythscape, thereby subjecting core components of a new national “commonsense” to much-needed critical scrutiny. As already suggested, banal and hot nationalism may be best thought of as alternating moments or discursive states. We discover in the next section that a period generally remembered for its political stability and growing prosperity also included moments and phenomena in which a newly sedimenting national habitus was “interrupted” by crisis, alternative memories, or competing politics.

Hot Nationalism’s “Interruptions” National mythscapes are, per definition, internally contested between “dominant” and alternative, including “subaltern,”13 memories (Bell 2003 and above). Postwar Austria was no exception. Alongside its official “myth of victimhood,” the country—starting in the late 1940s and gathering considerable local momentum in numerous towns and villages throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s— also saw a pervasive “populist countermyth”: centered on the “heroism” of (fallen) World War II soldiers portrayed as “dutiful” defenders of the Heimat, this alternative “narrative of war memorials and the ceremonies connected with them” constructed Austrians “not [as] victims of Nazism, but rather [as] victims of the war against Nazism” (Uhl 2011: 185ff., original italics). The implications of these alternative, “bottom-up,” but nonetheless (especially regionally) prominent cultural memories were far-reaching. Discursively, if “only” on the level of another banal nationalism of implicitly pan-Germanic orientation, such “counternarratives of heroism ascribed to Austrians who fought in the Wehrmacht” (Uhl 2011: 190) inadvertently challenged the identity grammar underpinning the Second Republic’s official self-understanding at the time: if local Austrians were seen and portrayed as having fought “dutifully” between 1939 and 1945, then their still widely assumed “German-ness” resonated, however implicitly, in such depictions and cultural practices of remembering. The Austrian particularism accomplished, in part, through the official narrative of “victimhood was thus here,” in what Heidemarie Uhl (2011: 192) captures as a “competing culture of remembrance,” challenged by alternative self-definitions that, if not explicitly pan-Germanic, at least presupposed an enduring ethnocultural proximity between Austria and Germany.14 As we shall see in due course, these “rival memorial cultures” (Uhl 2011: 195) would resurface rather dramatically in later decades’ moments of hot nationalist politics. However, it would not take very much longer for the first indications that the recent past was dealt with by contrasting ways of remembering and by clash-

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ing political positions, and still contained more than merely the potential for violence. As early as 1959 a “torchlight procession” crossing Vienna’s Ring “on the occasion of the Schiller anniversary” was interpreted by many as a “warning symptom of returning German nationalism” (Uhl 2011: 195). In 1963, against the backdrop provided by the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the by-now shockingly forgiving approach to Nazi war criminals taken by Austrian juries led to both domestic (i.e., particularly among some of the younger generation) and international protests. The most infamous trigger for this was the case of Franz Murer, former high-ranking SS officer who had been involved in the mass murder of Jews in Vilnius, who was later temporarily imprisoned in the Soviet Union and then transferred to Austria in 1955; eight years later, and despite further evidence against Murer made available by Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian jury passed a verdict of acquittal (Portisch 1996: 246ff.). Two years later, in 1965, polarization of parts of the Austrian public over the Nazi past became yet more apparent. This occurred in the context of street clashes—culminating in the Second Republic’s first violent political death—between sympathizers with, and critics of, Taras Borodajkewycz, a professor at what was then Vienna’s University for World Trade. Notorious for his anti-Semitic and pan-Germanic insinuations, statements, and outbursts, Borodajkewycz was initially institutionally backed and able to win successive court cases. However, the tide turned at the end of March 1965 when former anti-Nazi resistance fighters, together with some critical students, protested against Borodajkewycz, calling for his dismissal. The protesters were met by a group of student counterdemonstrators and supporters of Borodajkewycz. The clashes escalated near Vienna’s state opera and famous Hotel Sacher: assaulted by a Borodajkewycz-sympathizer, concentration camp survivor Ernst Kirchweger died of head injuries three days later. Subsequently, Kirchweger’s funeral was accompanied by a march of silence, organized by the “anti-fascist student committee” and the “Austrian resistance movement,” that was attended by some twenty to twenty-five thousand people and served as a public statement against neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism (Portisch 1996: 238–242; Adunka 2002: 17–19, 29–33). The Borodajkewycz case corroborated a point already made several times, namely that (hot) nationalism tends to become most clearly discernible—both in its discursive and its institutional workings—in moments of confrontation with its political opponents and competitors. A version of this also manifested in the context of the beginnings of postwar labor migration and the different local reactions to it. Given a buoyant economy and full employment, Austria started its version of “guest worker” schemes15—attracting migrants from a number of countries including Yugoslavia, Turkey, Italy, Greece, and Spain—in earnest in 1962. While welcomed with open arms by industries in need of cheap labor, some among the newly arrived workers and their families who joined them in due course would also come face-to-face with xenophobic resentments and every-

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day conflicts (Portisch 1996: 184–186). As shown by a longitudinal and internationally comparative study of relevant media discourse, parts of the Austrian press played their part in the circulation of xenophobic discourses and the clear “othering” of foreigners (Kempf 2002: 13). One here detects another binary identity grammar that reified cultural difference as absolute, which historically resonated with older essentialisms (e.g., Promitzer 2003), prefigured xenophobic reactions to more substantial migratory flows and demographic changes in later decades (i.e., see subsequent chapters), and provided new instances of the articulation of a politics of social closure with (and through) nationalist discourse. Interestingly, this early period of inward labor migration and growing multicultural diversity in some of Austria’s urban centers also saw a well-known example of an official, topdown counterdiscourse aimed at critically deconstructing xenophobic exclusions: reminding many Austrians of their own Slavic, Hungarian, Italian, or ethnoculturally hybrid family histories, a poster campaign subverted the binary opposition of “us” against “them” that had come to underpin everyday racist reactions against labor migrants from the Balkans. The posters depicted a child looking at a worker and asking, in Austrian dialect and in reference to a highly derogatory term for Yugoslavs, “My name is Kolaric, your name is Kolaric, why do they call you Tschusch?”16 (Portisch 1996: 186–187). The fact that periods of prosperity and stability can be accompanied by (context-specific) nationalist strife was also illustrated by the continuing tensions over South Tyrol / Alto Adige, which had become part of Italy as part of the post–World War I settlement (see chapter 3). Now, decades later, the protection and degree of autonomy to be afforded to German-speakers in the very northern Alpine parts of Italy continued to be a major concern to parts of Austria’s political spectrum, in particular to the country’s far-right (pan-Germanic) student fraternities, throughout the post-1945 era (Weidinger 2014).17 The conflict had been reignited following the 1946 “Gruber-De Gasperi agreement,” which had merged South Tyrol with Trentino, thereby undermining German-speaking South Tyroleans’ autonomy (Beller 2006: 272). The violent nationalist fallout between extremist groupings on both sides of the border culminated in a series of terrorist attacks in Italy—in 1966 alone twenty-six Italian police officers were killed in such attacks—and retaliatory bombings on Austrian soil. A proposed settlement envisaging a transfer of some ninety “competences” from Rome to the province of Bolzano and first negotiated by Austria’s then foreign minister Bruno Kreisky in 1964/65 (i.e., the Kreisky/Saragat proposal) was rejected as inadequate by German-speaking South Tyroleans. In 1969, however, an agreement conceding autonomy to South Tyrol within Italy, and now consisting of 137 provincial competences, was reached and signed (Portisch 1996: 164–169). This was also a precondition for Italy’s lifting of its veto on Austria commencing negotiations with the then European Economic Community, which in 1972 resulted in Austria being granted “associate” status and a free trade agreement with

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the EEC (Beller 2006: 272). The resolution of the South Tyrol conflict should therefore also be read against the backdrop of new economic realities and necessities: already by 1971, and hence twenty-four years “before it joined the future European Union, Austria was taking more than 50 percent of its imports from the original six EEC member states” (Judt 2010: 326). The times had indeed been changing, culturally as well as economically, in and far beyond the Alpine Republic. In 1970, Austria faced her next parliamentary elections and hence another choice between the center-right ÖVP—the traditionally conservative Catholic camp had governed without a coalition partner and pursued a moderately modernizing agenda since 1966—and the SPÖ under its new leader Bruno Kreisky. The ÖVP campaign for the 1970 elections used an infamous example of an essentializing topos of authentic “Austrianness,” underpinned by a binary identity grammar juxtaposing the national ingroup to a particular ethnonational outsider. In subtle but undeniable (and undeniably negative) reference to Kreisky’s Jewish background, ÖVP election posters described their own candidate, Josef Klaus, in purported contrast to Kreisky as an “authentic Austrian” (ein echter Österreicher) (Beller 2006: 273; Hanisch 1994: 464). Yet, perceived as the more credible modernizer, Kreisky and the SPÖ won the 1970 election, but initially relied on tacit FPÖ support in parliament. This arrangement collapsed in 1971, leading to early elections, from which the SPÖ emerged—for the first time—with an absolute majority. On the face of it, a new age had dawned. At closer inspection, “older” ideological and subcultural currents continued, sometimes underneath the political surface, at other times penetrating it.

The 1970s: An (Austro-Keynesian) “Island of the Blessed”? Although the countercultural revolution of the late 1960s arguably never reached quite as far, wide, and deep in Austria as it did in other parts of the Western world, new and critical cultural representations—across a diversity of literary, artistic, and (popular) musical fields—certainly did reflect considerable shifts in Austrian society. Some such cultural critique was aimed at a “rebellion against the father, against authority, including the state, school and the family” (Hanisch 1994: 479; also Portisch 1996: 288ff., 366ff.). As we shall see in due course, such cultural subversion of the political status quo would also come to play an important counter-hegemonic role in later periods of neo-nationalist revival. At the same time, social change starting in the 1960s also entailed an embrace of the “West’s new consumerism and permissiveness” (Beller 2006: 271). What is more, modernization at the time included economic policies best described as “Austro-Keynesian,” which came to full fruition during Bruno Kreisky’s chancellorship: Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies, a further expansion of the

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public sector, infrastructural investments, and a commitment to keeping unemployment low were part and parcel of the prolonged economic upturn from 1968 until 1974 and of a general climate of optimism during the early 1970s; Austro-Keynesianism has often been credited with the fact that, measured by Austria’s comparatively low unemployment figures and in terms of her economic growth rates compared to West Germany and the European OECD average, Austria weathered the oil crisis of 1973 and the ensuing period of global economic contraction with relative success and resilience, at least until 1979 (Hanisch 1994: 472–474). In 1971, Pope Paul VI famously described Austria, during a state visit by Austrian president Franz Jonas, as an “island of the blessed,” acknowledging the country’s relative “social peace” and continuing commitment to “social partnership . . . collaboration and consensus” (Beller 2006: 272). This papal assessment subsequently became a prominent topos (Liessmann 2005), to which we shall return; it was to become deeply embedded in Austrian political discourse, as a nostalgic trope for the (early) 1970s, against which later cohorts of politicians and “ordinary citizens” would contrast their allegedly more disappointing present. Overall, the period generally remembered as the “Kreisky era” (i.e., 1970–1983) was a period of “social liberalization and democratization” (Beller 2006, 272), seeing far-reaching social, penal, and educational reforms. Yet, alongside the optimism and (moderate) modernizing verve of the 1970s, there were also periodical reminders of the continuing presence of Austria’s darkest historical chapter and of the fact that attempts to face that past properly, honestly, and self-critically would still have to wait for a later period. One deeply worrying illustration of anti-Semitism’s continuing traction was provided in 1972. Intent on implementing the commitment Austria had undertaken in the State Treaty to guarantee the language rights of her Slovenian and Croatian minority communities, the government had bilingual (German and Slovenian) topographical signs erected in parts of southern Carinthia.18 When Kreisky attempted to quell the ensuing local outcry by parts of the ethnic majority who had demolished the new road signs, he was accosted in Klagenfurt by radical “German-Carinthians” calling him—in terminology clearly reminiscent of the worst of times—a “Saujude” (Jewish pig) (Hanisch 1994: 467). Eventually, in 1976/77, Kreisky pushed through a “compromise” requiring towns and villages whose Slovenian-speaking residents amounted to 25 percent or more of the local population to provide bilingual village and road signs (Portisch 1996: 385). As we shall see, this would not settle the issue once and for all. On the contrary, the language divide, the issue of road signs, and their political usefulness to a later generation of nationalists would, in due course, reappear. More immediately, the unresolved or, worse, in many cases never fully acknowledged Nazi past and its long tentacles reaching deep into the present19 also manifested even closer to Kreisky, Austria’s socialist chancellor of secular

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Jewish background. Already in Kreisky’s 1970 cabinet there had been individual members with Nazi pasts (e.g., Beller 2006: 279; Portisch 1996: 413), a reflection of the “reincorporation” policy postwar Austria had ultimately adopted with regard to former (lower-ranking and “lesser implicated”) Nazi party members.20 When in 1975 Kreisky was predicted to include the FPÖ in a coalition, and the FPÖ’s head Friedrich Peter, a former officer in the Waffen-SS, might thus become vice-chancellor (neither of these scenarios subsequently unfolded), wellknown Holocaust survivor and “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal entered the debate with the suggestion that there might be evidence forthcoming implicating Friedrich Peter in war crimes. The “Kreisky-Wiesenthal affair” escalated, with the former—Kreisky had been a refugee in Sweden during the war—even arguably insinuating that Wiesenthal may have survived the Holocaust thanks to (in actual fact of course nonexistent) connections to the Gestapo (Portisch 1996: 413–414; Stögner 2008: 73–74; Gottschlich 2012: 97). Also reflecting a clash between members of secularized/assimilated and conservative Jewry in addition to the protagonists’ opposing political leanings (Wiesenthal was close to the ÖVP), this infamous episode showed one thing above all else: the deep, persisting, though at the time still largely unproblematized entanglements of Austrian politics with the country’s dark recent history (Beller 2006: 279; Hanisch 1994: 465). Aside from such “intrusions” of aspects of the past that were conveniently overlooked by many, and the hot nationalism such “interruptions” could evoke, the later Kreisky years also provided arguably less remarkable, though nonetheless significant, illustrations of nationalism in its banal varieties. Taken together, and significantly, such illustrations showed once again that (banal) nationalism in Austria now entailed two variants: though they coexisted (more or less) easily, their points of self-other reference differed crucially. This was shown by sporting events that took place at the two consecutive football (soccer) World Cups in 1978 and 1982. At stake, on both occasions, was the much-debated relationship (e.g., Bauer 2016)—whether one of radical otherness or relative closeness—between Austrians and Germans. Argentina 1978, and particularly the “showdown” between West Germany and Austria in Cordoba, has since been enshrined as a key event in Austrian sporting history (see Ingrao 2001). Hans Krankl’s two spectacular goals ensured a rare win for the Austrian team; its television coverage—with a well-known sports reporter screaming himself into celebratory frenzy—still featured regularly on Austrian TV many years later. This was postwar Austrian particularism, with its binary identity grammar and in rejection of pan-Germanic identifications, at work; as a form of “banal” (though not trivial) Austrianism. Less frequently remembered in Austria itself is the much less spectacular West German–Austrian encounter that took place in Gijón (Spain) four years later. The two national sides met in their final group game, and West Germany took an early lead, a score that would—as both teams knew at the time—suffice for them both to progress further in the tournament. In an un-

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sportsmanlike embarrassment, the two teams played the rest of the game without any real attempt to make this a competitive contest, at Algeria’s expense. On this occasion, a different “logic” had arguably manifested: one that still seemingly took a cultural relatedness, affinity, or proximity between the two countries for granted, arguably echoing the Austrian trope of Germany as a “big brother.” The romantic equation of languages with ethnonational groupings, which we have encountered repeatedly, had not entirely run out of steam. Thus, we reach our next point of transition. The later Kreisky era, as we are about to discover, also saw other social shifts and a widening of the political spectrum that reflected a certain decoupling of occupational/structural and political positions. Most significantly, the period that was about to start would be defined by multiple and successive crises, domestically and internationally, in the face of which the relative stability and consensus of the postwar era would become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Notes 1. Some recent contributions that critically build on this opt instead for the terms “grounded nationalism” (Malešević 2019) or “everyday nationhood” to capture “how ideas about the nation are reproduced by ordinary people doing ordinary things in their ordinary lives” (Fox 2018: 862). 2. For a diverging, more cautious reading of the evidence concerning the roles and prominence of Austrians within Nazism’s genocidal machinery, see Rathkolb 2005: 377–380. 3. Tony Judt corroborates these statistics but captures some of the biographical trajectories behind them somewhat more exactly. He summarizes that of the 189,000 Jews who had lived in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, “fewer than 1,000” were still there when the city was liberated in 1945; and of the 126,000 driven into exile, “4,500 returned after the war” (Judt 2010: 263, 804). 4. Other estimates of the number of people who were “not from here” but found themselves on Austrian territory at the end of the war—including German and Allied soldiers, prisoners of war, forced laborers, just-liberated concentration camp survivors, refugees, and expellees—have been as high as some three million (Portisch 1985: 358). 5. As we will see in chapters 5 to 7, with some delay this development—and particularly the FPÖ as the VdU’s successor party—would come to significantly reshape Austrian society and politics from the mid-1980s on (e.g., Pelinka 2002: 214ff.). 6. Reflecting the cultural turn in historiography, Bischof and Petschar (2017) present an impressive “visual history” of the Marshall Plan. 7. Social partnership also features prominently in journalist Hugo Portisch’s (1986: 336ff.) popular history of postwar Austria. For a more critical discussion, see public intellectual Robert Menasse’s (2000b: 35, my translation) portrayal of social partnership as “nonconstitutional, disempowering of parliament, and undemocratic.” 8. Also relevant here are Frank Trommler’s (2005: 8–11, 20) observations concerning Austria’s “self-isolating historiography” after 1945, which he identifies as part and parcel of the political project of establishing a categorically non-German national identity.

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9. All translations from German are the author’s. 10. For a summary and illustration of how the political parties sought to integrate former Nazi members see, for example, Portisch 1986: 390ff.. 11. Given the phonetic and semantic particularities of Austrian German, very considerable regional variations between different Austrian dialects notwithstanding, and an often indeed very wide linguistic “gulf ” experienced by many Austrians vis-à-vis Germans, it seems much more plausible to interpret such linguistic pride as a sign of Austrian particularism rather than as a neo-romantic return to pan-Germanism. 12. Seen in its entirety, the postwar era certainly also saw other cultural genres capable of leveling powerful, often controversial critique at dominant self-understandings and selfserving narratives of the (national) past and present. Other such countercultural currents have included, particularly since the 1970s, the Anti-Heimatroman (e.g., Innerhofer 2006 [1974]), a new Austrian literary genre highly critical of romanticizing portrayals of rural life and, instead, focused on violence and oppression in the countryside (see Bischof 2004: 22; Daffner 2014). 13. As the following example illustrates, alternative or “populist” countermemories must not be conflated with “subaltern” memories: while the former can be, and usually are, articulated by members of a dominant majority, albeit in everyday “grassroots settings” and outside the channels and institutions of official historiography, “subaltern” voices and their memories are articulated by historically oppressed and silenced minorities (see Fraser 1992). 14. Whether such assumed cultural proximity is more accurately captured by Baumann and Gingrich’s (2004) grammar of sedimentation or their grammar of encompassment is an empirical question to be answered in particular (local and historical) contexts. 15. For a comparative and longitudinal study of the German and the Austrian systems, and the enduring exclusions written into the latter, see Bauer 2016. 16. For a brief discussion of the history and different meanings of this ethnic slur, see Priestly 1996: 375. 17. For a more recent example of a very high-profile FPÖ politician attempting to move the South Tyrol issue back onto the political agenda, see Karner 2011: 32–33. 18. The area had been strongly contested not only after World War I (as discussed in the previous chapter) but again in the aftermath of World War II (see Portisch 1996: 378ff.). 19. Conceptually, we are once again reminded that the competing memories constituting a national mythscape are selective and oriented to present purposes in their treatment of the past. 20. More accurately, “four ministers of Kreisky’s first cabinet and five of his second cabinet [had been] card-carrying members of the National Socialist Party” (Markovits 2002: 110).

Chapter 5

MULTIPLE CRISES TURNING BANAL NATIONALISM(S) “HOT”

d T

he previous chapter traced the gradual sedimentation and the discursiveideational content of a new postwar Austrian national habitus (also Karner 2005b). The latter came to comprise “intersubjectively shared” ideas, schemata and “emotional attitudes” centered around the “imagination of the ‘homo austriacus,’” of a “common national culture, history, present and future” as well as of a “‘national body’ or . . . territory” (De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak 1999: 153). Importantly, this national habitus must be understood in the context of the political priorities and socioeconomic particularities of the postwar era. As importantly, our discussion emphasized that such a habitus operates (or operated) largely in the domain of banal—in the quotidian sense of the widely taken-for-granted and hence commonly unnoticed—nationalism. This having been said, our discussion added two significant caveats. First, it was shown that despite postwar Austria’s very well documented construction of a new, increasingly hegemonic form of Austrian particularism (e.g., Thaler 2001; Karner 2005a), which defined itself in historically novel ways also—often especially—in clear delineation from Germany, the country’s banal nationalism and postwar habitus were never entirely uniform in terms of the self-other distinctions they transported. We saw this, for example, in our extrapolation of the different, in some cases competing, cultural memories constitutive of Austria’s postwar national mythscape. Alongside the official, gradually widely embraced narratives of a distinctly Austrian history, which now included the highly problematic myth of purported World War II victimhood (e.g., Botz 1996), there were also bottom-up “counternarratives” furnishing alternative (or coexisting) “cultures of remembrance,” for instance through local discursive constructions and commemorations of Wehrmacht soldiers as heroes

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(Uhl 2011), and some of these reflected the residual, sometimes equally banal workings of pan-Germanic self-identifications. Second, the previous chapter highlighted that banal and hot nationalisms were best understood, already in the course of the postwar era, as alternating states or variants of the same ideological phenomenon.1 Put differently, we encountered episodes and phenomena capable of instilling heightened collective consciousness and of driving a (divisive) politicization of previously taken-for-granted symbols and relatively undiscussed boundaries. As we turn to the next historical chapter, to the period of the 1980s and 1990s, we will discover that such episodic “interruptions” of banal nationalism and its transformation into its “hot” variants (Billig 1995: 43ff.) were becoming ever more frequent and eventually, arguably, chronic. In conceptual terms, in order to capture the gradual rise of what has been termed “neo-nationalism” (Gingrich and Banks 2006), the analysis to be developed in the present chapter will have to invert the vector of a recent discussion by Jon Fox. Starting from the premise that many nationalisms have “gone underground,” Fox (2017: 26) presents a (breaching) methodology for locating “everyday nationhood” in “the realm of the unselfconscious.” By contrast, we shall discover here that the Austrian example during the final two decades of the twentieth century demands the opposite: an approach capable of capturing nationalism’s re-emergence from underground. For the longue durée take on nationalist discourse and institutionalized closure to bear the analytical dividends promised, the discussion from now on thus turns to the neo-nationalist shifts that have shaped Austrian politics over recent decades. The emerging diachronic insights will require both the deeper historical contextualization already provided and the specific insights into nationalist topoi, identity grammars and palimpsests already generated. Furthermore, such an approach then requires a partial synthesis of the different conceptual strands that constitute the overall theoretical apparatus developed throughout this book. Central to this chapter is an argument already sketched both theoretically and in different historical contexts across previous discussions: Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977: 167ff.) proposition that periods of crisis transform a habitus and the domain of “undiscussed” cultural commonsense (doxa)—in our present terms broadly equivalent to the realm of banal nationalism—into a discursive field of heightened (collective) consciousness, competing memories, and politics (see also Karner 2005b; 2011). In this chapter, we begin to trace successive crises that have had similar politicizing effects in Austria over recent decades, and in keeping with Bourdieu-ian theory, we will discover that neo-nationalism has been a prominent reaction, but also just one of several competing political responses, to a period of endemic, multiple crises. This calls for methodological sensitivity to both nationalist discourses and to its ideological competitors. Consequently, I here examine prominent neo-nationalist positions from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as counterdiscourses that indirectly throw nationalism’s discursive and ideational

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characteristics into sharp relief and, simultaneously, help capture the wider and internally contested political field that has shaped contemporary Austria. In an additional analytical step, and to continue our focus on nationalism’s argumentative and interpretative workings, I will once again pay close attention to the particular topoi and identity grammars underpinning nationalist politics in the particular historical context (i.e., the 1980s and 1990s) in question. Finally, and crucially, neo-nationalism will be shown to strive for social closure under novel historical conditions. I therefore start, yet again, with vital contextualization.

Into the 1980s By the 1970s, in addition to the national particularities examined above, Western European societies had come to experience a further defining shift, namely in what Tony Judt (2010: 484ff.) has described as the “political sociology of European voters”: this was the beginning of a development that has continued since, entailing new “fissures and fragmentations,” the rise of identity and single-issue politics, and the gradual displacement of “traditional voters” (i.e., those from whose class positions particular party allegiances could once be deduced straightforwardly) who would be less and less able to form majorities from here on. In the Austrian context, given the country’s particularly high rates of party membership and the dominant parties’ associative extensions deep into civil society (e.g., Bruckmüller 1996: 42–43; Pelinka 1990b: 24), it is—in hindsight—perhaps unsurprising that such gradual disarticulation of structural positions from political dispositions would have far-reaching consequences. When further exacerbated by domestic and international crises and their widely perceived or merely feared impact on Austria, those consequences would create new political opportunities that neo-nationalism has proved particularly adept at exploiting. But, importantly, it would not be alone in doing so. Already during the peak of the Kreisky era there were clear signs of a new and growing politicization that now transcended traditional party allegiances and postwar concerns with economic growth and political stability. In what may be described as the first wave of environmental politics to sweep Austria, Chancellor Kreisky suffered a defeat at a referendum held in November 1978: following public protests, this was held to decide whether Austria’s first nuclear power station, constructed in Zwentendorf (Lower Austria) in 1976, would actually come into use (e.g., Beller 2006: 284). A very narrow majority of 50.47 percent of voters supporting the anti-nuclear position kept Austria “nuclear-free”—a decision that has continued to shape prominent national self-understandings and environmental discourses since.2 Austrian environmentalism has, by and large, been a phenomenon allied to the political Left rather than the Right. Yet, more recently, this has not stopped the FPÖ, particularly in its later European Union

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skepticism, from also selectively instrumentalizing growing environmental concerns. At the same time, a closer look at left-leaning environmentalism reveals, rather than an invariably cosmopolitan and universalist outlook, that national or regional frames of references matter(ed) there, too. Tony Judt has explained this through the “deep roots . . . traceable to the Romantics”3 underpinning a “longing for a more ‘natural’ world” and detectable on “both sides of the ideological divide”; the Austrian anti-nuclear protesters who decided the 1978 referendum in their favor, and who “would never have identified themselves as nationalists or even patriots,” nonetheless articulated public “anger against the pollution of the local environment above all (and their relative indifference to similar havoc being wreaked elsewhere)” (Judt 2010: 491). Arguably, what the Zwentendorf decision thereby also revealed was a form of banal nationalism focused very specifically on environmental concerns—that is, with its characteristic deictic references to “our” environment and health—that cut across large sections of the ideological spectrum. With the dawn of a new decade came more frequent, seemingly structural and “overlapping” crises that variously affected the state budget, social welfare, nationalized industries, and the political system itself—as manifest in a series of corruption scandals (Hanisch 1994: 474–475). The latter damaged the socialists—now widely seen (and portrayed in parts of the popular press) as a “selfserving state elite”—profoundly. In 1983, after Kreisky had attempted to stem the most recent financial crisis with an “austerity package,” the SPÖ lost its absolute majority. Kreisky resigned, and his successor Fred Sinowatz formed a “small coalition” with the FPÖ. The latter, as we have seen, was the successor party of the Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU), which had absorbed ex-Nazis in the first postwar decade. In the early 1980s, though, the FPÖ was for a relatively brief period dominated by its other, liberal constituents under Norbert Steger (Beller 2006: 285; also Fitzmaurice 1991: 109). The SPÖ-FPÖ coalition, in power from 1983 until 1986, continued to battle multiple crises. Struggling to accomplish necessary economic reforms, with both unemployment and the budget deficit growing, Sinowatz’s popularity quickly waned. As significantly, in 1984 popular and eventually successful protests against a planned hydroelectric power station in the dense woodlands near Hainburg east of Vienna, and the ensuing confrontations, led to the Green movement’s “political breakthrough” and, concomitantly, to considerable disillusionment with the socialists among intellectuals and liberals (Rathkolb 2005: 142, 197; Judt 2010: 494). Additionally, high-profile corruption scandals continued to beset the SPÖ in particular (Beller 2006: 285). All this having been said, the real watersheds of the 1980s, those that would most enduringly shape the country’s future trajectory, would revolve around questions of national identity (and hence around questions of boundaries and exclusions), around the past and Austrian responses to it. The Austrian public was about to come dramatically face to face with its own national mythscape

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and the omissions and selective memories that had long dominated among large proportions of the population.

The “Waldheim Affair” The events leading up to and following Austria’s presidential elections in 1986 would have far-reaching international and domestic consequences. In terms of the former, the Alpine Republic’s carefully choreographed postwar reputation as an idyllic tourist destination, as a Kulturnation steeped in a proud musical and artistic legacy, and as a Keynesian and neutral “island of the blessed” would all be fundamentally questioned or at least complemented by another, far less flattering dimension. Internally, what has come to be known as the “Waldheim Affair” revealed a continuing anti-Semitism after the Holocaust,4 a widespread reluctance to remember Austria’s role in World War II self-critically, but also a counterposition that would eventually succeed in transforming Austrian public debate and, with it, its engagement with the country’s darkest historical chapter (e.g., see Botz and Sprengnagel 2008; Gottschlich 2012: 111). At the risk of pushing the Freudian trope of the “return of the repressed” (Freud 2010) too far, signs of many Austrians’ hitherto largely unproblematized and hence deeply problematic relationship to their collective past “intruding” upon the present predated Kurt Waldheim’s presidential candidacy. In January 1985, days before the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress was due to meet in Vienna for the first time since the Holocaust, Austria’s minister of defense, Friedhelm Frischenschlager (FPÖ), had personally welcomed Walter Reder, a war criminal, upon the latter’s release and return from an Italian prison (Beller 2006: 286). The “Reder case,” as Oliver Rathkolb (2009: 20–21) has shown, was “strange as well as significant”: this was a self-defining pan-Germanist who had left Austria and been expatriated before 1938, only to be subsequently officially “Austrianized”; thanks to his lawyer and extensive political networks, Reder was later turned “into the last Austrian prisoner of war,” awarded Austrian citizenship in 1955, represented by a lawyer whose expenses were paid for by Austrian taxpayers, while Archbishop Kardinal König and Chancellor Bruno Kreisky—among others—had intervened on his behalf. While neither Reder’s pan-Germanism nor his conviction as a war criminal (Rathkolb 2005: 48, 197– 198) stood in the way of his “homecoming” welcome by the Austrian defense minister in 1985, internationally this caused outrage and constituted the “first of a string of crises” that would, with considerable delay, bring Austria’s darkest past to the surface (Beller 2006: 286). Central to this era-defining process was the Waldheim Affair of 1986, which has been described as the uncovering of the political opportunism of “homo austriacus” and as leading to an at least partial dismantling of the postwar “state

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myth” of victimhood (Hanisch 1994: 460). This prolonged, high-profile controversy—involving the “Waldheim camp” and, with it, large sections of the Austrian media, the weekly news magazine Profil, the ÖVP and SPÖ as the country’s dominant and competing parties, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and international media, including the New York Times, and eventually an international historians’ commission as well as a British Ministry of Defense investigation (Mitten 1992)—revolved around previously undiscussed facets of the presidential candidate and former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past. Waldheim had been Austria’s foreign minister from 1968 until 1970 and had served as Austria’s permanent representative at the United Nations, whose secretary general he had subsequently become in 1972 (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 429). Then Waldheim was nominated as the ÖVP’s candidate for the office of federal president, and his 1986 campaign—and, with it, Austria’s recent history—hit its decisive turning point with the publication of hitherto undisclosed details of Waldheim’s student days and wartime service by Profil in March 1986. While Waldheim had previously had little to say about his war years and had, in his published memoirs, only euphemistically and in the vaguest terms mentioned that “shortly before the end of the war I was in the area of Trieste” (quoted in BrookShepherd 1997: 433), allegations of much more substantial entanglements with the Nazi war machinery now began to circulate. The allegations revolved around several central issues: first, his now documented enrollment, in 1938, in the Nazi student union and in a “horseback riding unit” associated with the SA (Sturmabteilung) (Mitten 1992: 50, 63–69); second, his different postings and roles as staff officer, intelligence officer, interpreter, and lieutenant in various Wehrmacht units, some of which had perpetrated “gross war atrocities” against (suspected) Yugoslav partisans in the Balkans (Beller 1992: 291); third, and most damagingly (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 434), the extent of Waldheim’s knowledge of mass deportations of Greek Jews during several (interrupted) postings with Army Group E in Greece; fourth, there was also a once postulated and subsequently refuted role in the murder of imprisoned Allied commandos (Mitten 1992: 62; 101ff.). The exact historical verdicts on Waldheim’s entanglements with the Nazi machinery, on what those meant, and consequently on the extent of his knowledge of crimes committed in the Balkans and in Greece were still a matter of contention years later. For many Austrians, and some academic commentators, the historical case against Waldheim had been (largely) refuted, showing him to have been no more than a first lieutenant confined to “desk jobs” (Brook-Shepherd 1997: 432), or at most an opportunistic “fellow traveler” (Mitläufer) whose lowly position would have precluded any responsibility (Dusek 2002: 265). Others saw in the findings of the 1988 international historians’ commission a “damning” verdict: although this had “confirmed” that Waldheim was not “a war criminal as such,” it had also shown that he “must have known” about crimes committed in his close vicinity in the Balkans and in

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Greece and that he “had done nothing to prevent them”; Waldheim’s previously sanitized life history had thereby taken a “crushing blow” and been “revealed to be based on lies” (Beller 2006: 291). The arguably most nuanced and analytically most useful verdict has been offered by Richard Mitten. Distinguishing criminal from moral responsibility, Mitten (1992: 81) confirms that “Waldheim’s complicity was not of a criminal kind” and that—his membership in the above-mentioned organizations notwithstanding—he “arguably [was] not ‘Nazi’ in the ideological sense” either. Crucially, however, Mitten (1992: 69, 81) rightly insists that “fellow travelers,” to whom Waldheim undeniably belonged, were also “indispensable” for Nazism; and that, morally as problematically, in his later, high-profile political career Waldheim had refused “to address . . . his own minor part in the Nazi horror,” thereby becoming a “symbol of postwar unwillingness or inability to adequately come to terms with . . . the National Socialist abomination.” It is thus the wider significance of the Waldheim controversy, as well as its discursive unfolding, that requires further commentary. The key developments during and beyond Waldheim’s presidential campaign are recalled easily. Once the debate had assumed international dimensions, the “Waldheim camp”—portraying itself, and with it all of Austria, to be under undue external pressure— mobilized around a slogan of “now-more-than-ever” (jetzt erst recht) (Rathkolb 2005: 390). This was epitomized by the campaign’s infamous poster, declaring in self-confidently nationalist deixis that “We Austrians elect whom we want. Waldheim now more than ever!” (quoted in Beller 2006: 288). This stubborn reaction against Waldheim’s past, and by assumed implication that of much of his generation’s, being opened to long overdue critical scrutiny proved electorally successful. Receiving a majority of nearly 54 percent5 at the second round of polling, Waldheim was elected federal president in June 1986. While this amounted to a “de-facto confirmation” of Austria’s doctrine of victimhood by the majority of voters, it also marked the beginning of a period of diplomatic isolation, with the United States and the rest of the Western, democratic world “shunning” Waldheim (Rathkolb 2005: 48; Rathkolb 2009: 21). As for what the controversy revealed about its deeper cultural conditions of possibility, Robert Wistrich (1994: 95) has pointed out that ultimately the “revelation that Waldheim had served . . . with a unit that supervised mass deportations of Jews . . . scarcely seemed to disturb most Austrians, especially of the older generation”; what was more, public debate and much media coverage at the time revealed an “unprecedented backlash” of public anti-Semitism: a “reservoir of hostility and prejudice toward Jews . . . consistently demonstrated by public opinion surveys but held in check by official taboos now found an unexpectedly vehement outlet.” Thus, for example, a “Gallup poll of 1980 had shown that nearly 50 percent of Austrians either agreed or ‘tended to agree’ that ‘the Jews rule world politics.’ After 1986 it became . . . respectable to claim that international Jews, based on the East Coast

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of America, had through their control of the world’s media deliberately instigated the . . . defamation of Waldheim” (Wistrich 1994: 95). For our discussion, a yet closer look at the details of the discursive fallout of the Waldheim controversy, as enabled by Richard Mitten’s (1992) analysis, offers important additional insights. Translated into our theoretical terms (i.e., those of critical discourse analysis), Mitten highlights several interrelated master-topoi (plus several related sub-topoi), which jointly shaped prominent Austrian interpretative and political responses to the Waldheim Affair, evident not merely in the “Waldheim camp” but across large sections of the public and across diverse media. Mitten (1992: 51) demonstrates that, domestically, the sudden discussion of Waldheim’s wartime record was widely interpreted through a “discursive framework” that constructed the mere questions being posed as a “campaign of mud-slinging and lies.” Part and parcel of this master-topos of conspiracy was the trope of an external Diktat (imposition), whose longer discursive history can be traced to the time of the First Republic, and the advocating of national unity6 and self-assertion in defensive response to purported “forces from abroad” (Mitten 1992: 15, 233). Further, this framework of interpretation, as utilized by commentators in Austria’s most widely read papers (particularly the Neue Kronen Zeitung) and as articulated by prominent politicians (including the ÖVP party secretary at the time, Michael Graff), tied this alleged outside threat to the claim that the conspiracy was also enabled or driven internally by the SPÖ (Mitten 1992: 203–205). Crucially, as mentioned already, this overarching framework of interpretation was suffused with old and new “variations of the ‘Feindbild Jud,’” as projected onto the World Jewish Congress and, by an ideologically motivated and highly problematic extension, to the New York Times. This anti-Semitism7 displayed several discursive characteristics. First, the topos of an “international Jewish conspiracy” and its alleged control of “the international press” was central. Second, political synecdoche—constructing the actions “of one single Jew” as allegedly representative of Jewry “as a whole”— was rife. Third, there were instances of “victim-blaming,” reviving the “old idea” that “Jews themselves were responsible for antisemitism.” Finally, anti-Semitic discourse at times also contrasted “international Jewry” to purported individual exceptions, or “various ‘good Jews’”—most notably Simon Wiesenthal (and for a time also his old foe Bruno Kreisky8)—who “were not criticizing Waldheim or who were attacking the WJC” (Mitten 1992: 199–200, 202, 219ff., 233 ). Both political synecdoche and the very notion of a conspiracy against the national ingroup worked, in the terms of our analysis, as manifestations of a binary identity grammar that unambiguously and diametrically juxtaposed “them” against “us.” Concurrently, one here also detects an anti-Semitic variant of what André Gingrich (2005: 515; also see chapter 2) describes as “frontier Orientalism”: rather than being applied to Muslims, however, the imagined distinction within the “other” here pertained to the threat of an allegedly all-powerful, interna-

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tional Jewish conspiracy, on the one hand, and “loyal” individuals Jews closer to home, on the other. Central to Waldheim’s own discursive position, and reproduced by large sections of the Austrian public, was a frame defining the controversy as a whole, namely a topos of (purported) soldierly duty. Waldheim articulated this, paradigmatically, when insisting that “during the war” he had done “nothing other than what hundreds of thousands of other Austrians did,” which was to perform his “duty as a soldier” (Zuckermann quoted in Pohn-Lauggas 2017: 1096). This tied Waldheim metonymically to the rest of his generation and hence to a significant part of the electorate (as well as to those identifying with their parents’ generation). The alleged conspiracy by the WJC was thus assumed to have a collective target: at stake, it was claimed, was “the reputation of a whole generation . . . We were not doing anything but our duty as decent soldiers. We were not criminals but decent men who faced a terrible fate” (Waldheim/Markham quoted in Mitten 1992: 164). Such claims left no space for the victims of Nazism, the millions who had faced a far worse “fate,” nor did such argumentative positions even begin to acknowledge the core question as to “whether one can speak of duty in the service of a criminal regime”9 (Wodak et al. quoted in Pohn-Lauggas 2017: 1096). Richard Mitten’s analysis of the argumentative positions employed by Waldheim and his supporters also reveals other important rhetorical features. Among those were refutations of allegations that had not even been made, at least not in the form imagined by those coming to Waldheim’s defense. Thus, when questions being posed by the WJC concerned Waldheim’s organizational memberships and the extent of his knowledge of war crimes, some of his defenders wrongly attributed allegations that Waldheim may have participated in war crimes to the WJC (Mitten 1992: 209, 223). With “knowledge of ” and direct “participation in” historical events thus wrongly conflated, untoward motives were ascribed to those calling for a critical discussion of Waldheim’s past, their position was undermined, and the necessary debates they called for—concerning, for example, the workings of totalitarianism, the effects of opportunism under such conditions, or the need for responsible and accurate memories of the Holocaust—were thereby sidestepped. As Mitten (1992: 226–227) also shows, such peculiar and problematic pseudo-refutations of allegations different from the ones actually being made were also offered by a group of Austrian historians. Finally, and completing the picture of a dominant Austrian discourse that interpreted the Waldheim controversy through a lens of binary identity grammars (i.e., the national ingroup versus a monolithically conceived “outside”) and simplistic claims, Mitten also demonstrates that relevant U.S. media coverage was more nuanced and heterogeneous at the time than was acknowledged in Austria (Mitten 1992: 188ff.). In an invocation of Erving Goffman’s (1990) seminal dramaturgical metaphors, it has been shown that Austrian anti-Semitism after the Holocaust has

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existed in “numerous variations on both the front- and the backstage” of social life (Fleck and Müller quoted in Wassermann 2002: 8, my italics).10 As part of the discursive fallout of the Waldheim controversy and the breaking of the aforementioned “official taboos” (Wistrich 1994: 95), the events of 1986 thus saw anti-Semitism (temporarily) return from the back to the front stage of public discourse. As we shall discover, this unfolded partly in parallel to broader transformations that engulfed Austria in the years to come and that would see the politicization of a by now firmly embedded, though previously largely banal, (Austrian) nationalism. In the terminology of a recent conceptual discussion (Todorova 2015: 681, 696), this can be captured through the notion of nationalism’s different “scales of intensity” and “operational modes”; or more accurately, as a shift toward “the hot mode of operation of a strong nationalism” that was indeed “triggered” by a series of developments of considerable “mobilizing power.” The Waldheim Affair was certainly a key event, but it was not the only one. As we shall discover, this controversy’s long-term discursive and cultural effects were more varied than the immediate reactions traced above. The capacity of crises to politicize the previously taken-for-granted or seemingly “commonsensical” and to thereby lead to internal debate and disagreement, as predicted by the Bourdieuian paradigm, would be confirmed repeatedly in the years ahead.

Aftermath and Overture The Waldheim controversy and the wider reactions it triggered can be described as a watershed in recent Austrian history, as a liminal moment that—certainly with hindsight—marked the threshold between successive historical periods. In several era-defining ways, this is what the second half of the 1980s would more generally become: a caesura both domestically and geopolitically. As we have seen, well-documented anti-Semitic reactions to the Waldheim Affair were widespread, and they inadvertently revealed the pitfalls and self-serving silences of the dominant narratives in Austria’s postwar mythscape. Yet, the controversy is best seen as a key part, rather than a singular cause, of a longer process that brought Austrian society at long last into a more critical, albeit still widely reluctant engagement with its World War II history. This process did not start with Waldheim. For example, in 1978 the Federal Ministry of Education had begun an initiative enabling schools to invite concentration camp survivors as part of their pupils’ learning about the history of National Socialism; in 1986, against the backdrop of the presidential elections, these school visits and the debates they enabled acquired additional salience and importance (Horsky 1988: 7). Similarly important were countercultural artistic representations that had begun to formulate their criticisms of Austrian society and anti-authoritarian rebellion, often to considerable public controversy, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s

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(e.g., Hanisch 1994: 476, 479; Portisch 1996: 289). The arguably clearest example of such politicizing, controversy-generating cultural production was Thomas Bernhard’s 1988 play Heldenplatz, which—fifty years after the Anschluss—reflected not only on the history but also on the enduring legacy of Nazism. Premiered at Vienna’s Burgtheater in November 1988, almost exactly half a century after the November 1938 pogroms, and directed by German Claus Peymann, the play became an “immense succés de scandal, with mass booing as Bernhard dissected the hypocrisies of Austrians’ view of their past” (Beller 2006: 292).11 Against the backdrop of the still recent Waldheim controversy, the play triggered another vitriolically nationalist reflex: Bernhard found himself attacked in the press and on the street; he received menacing letters, and symbolic protest against his play culminated in the dumping of horse dung in front of the Burgtheater (Hanisch 1994: 478). Thomas Bernhard’s will, after his death only a few months later, would ban future productions of his plays in Austria (Beller 2006: 292). On the level of party and electoral politics, major shifts were by now afoot, which would in turn variously reflect and effect societal changes. Franz Vranitzky, Fred Sinowatz’s successor at the helm of the SPÖ, had opted for snap elections in the autumn of 1986, in spite of unfavorable opinion polls. While the elections led the SPÖ to lose ten parliamentary seats, with 43.12 percent of the vote it had remained the largest party and now formed a grand coalition with the second-placed ÖVP; importantly, in a first indication of a trend that would gather much more pace in the years ahead, the FPÖ had doubled its share, with an “openly radicalized” approach, to 9.73 percent of the vote (Rathkolb 2005: 204). From this juncture on, the respective and often directly competing positions represented by the SPÖ and the FPÖ—for example, on the national past or the politics of immigration and multiculturalism—would play defining parts in the trajectory of Austria’s shifting political field. Born in 1950 to parents with a Nazi past and socialized into Austria’s panGermanic, nationalist “third camp” (Sickinger 2008: 120–126), the young Jörg Haider was elected the FPÖ’s new head by nearly 60 percent of delegates at the 1986 party conference in Innsbruck. This represented “more than a change of personnel” but a decisive turning point for the FPÖ, namely the internal defeat of the party’s liberal strand—represented by Norbert Steger who found himself verbally attacked and threatened by Haider supporters at the party conference— at the hands of its nationalist Far Right (Bailer, Neugebauer, and Schiedel 2000: 115). By contrast, Franz Vranitzky—whose anti-fascist roots would at long last enable a different, discernibly more critical, engagement with Austria’s World War II history (Rathkolb 2009: 23)—came to assume a dual role as both chancellor and as the country’s de facto international representative; in this second function, Vranitzky would represent a “different Austria,” as the Alpine Republic’s internationally “presentable face” (Mitten 2002: 199) standing in for her pariah president (e.g., Rathkolb 2005: 204). A strong indication that under Vranitzky a

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far more searching and honest process of collective self-examination vis-à-vis the country’s darkest historical chapter was becoming possible also emerged in 1988, during that symbolically charged year marking fifty years since Austria’s annexation by Hitler’s Germany. This was particularly clearly reflected in an exhibition, organized by the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (Documentary archive of Austrian resistance)12, examining the national socialist terror from 1938 on. As Rathkolb (2009: 23ff.) has shown, while public debate was often quicker to shift than were (semi-)private reluctances to critically reexamine family histories, the beginnings of a noticeable “erosion of the unqualified ‘victim’ perception of the Anschluss” can be traced to this period. Importantly, however, this must be seen in the context of the then still very recent anti-Semitic backlash to the international scrutiny of Waldheim’s past in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the 1986 presidential elections. Seen in its entirety, Austria’s politics of memory had entered a discursive state, in the Bourdieu-ian sense, where the onset of a crisis had led to a crystallization of competing political positions and a transformation of the previously doxic (/“banal”) into hotly contested and collectively scrutinized dispositions and memories. In one “corner” of the political field, the Waldheim Affair had triggered critical responses to contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism and the beginnings of a process, on the Left, of critically examining the SPÖ’s previous mistakes, entanglements with former national socialists, and Kreisky’s attacks against Simon Wiesenthal (Reiter 2002: 104). By contrast, Jörg Haider—who would formulate a very different position on the “war generation” in future years (see below)—infamously referred to the Austrian nation as an “ideological deformation” (ideologische Missgeburt) in a television debate in August 1988 (e.g., Beller 2006: 291). At this stage in his political career, Haider was still clearly committed to the pan-Germanism of the “third camp,” or Lager (e.g., Sickinger 2008: 118–119, 150). In the midst of all this, it was again also in some domains of cultural production that critical voices could be heard most clearly. For example, in reflection on a rapidly shifting and reconfiguring political field, the Styrian band STS—among the best-known representatives of the musical genre “Austro-Pop” (see Karner 2002)—articulated their following assessment of Austria in 1988: I like this country, and much is OK, There are lots of good people . . . Yet, every day there are more embarrassing scenes, I can’t laugh, it just hurts now. . . . We have this young “political genius,” With success unknown elsewhere, And a federal president who can’t remember a thing, This is getting frightening, hopefully not just for me. (From “I Like This Country,” STS 1988)

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As in previous eras, critical counterdiscourse here helps both recognize and challenge a prominent political mood. The “young political genius” to which STS here refer with embarrassment and trepidation was of course Jörg Haider. The Waldheim Affair had thus already led to a politicization of Austria’s postwar mythscape and a resulting contest among mutually exclusive “memory strands” (Rathkolb 2005: 365) pertaining to the country’s World War II history. With Haider, arguably the key protagonist to shape the country’s trajectory from the 1980s onward, a particular politics of memory (see below) coincided with an agenda committed to pursuing social closure along the fault lines of citizenship or ethnonationality and able to mobilize ever larger sections of the Austrian electorate. Over a period of more than two decades, and operating on both national and regional (Carinthian) levels, Haider synthesized populist critique of the political establishment—that is, the postwar system of grand coalitions and Proporz—with highly problematic narratives of World War II, and with a politics of nationalist exclusion that found receptive and steadily growing audiences (e.g., Scharsach 2000; Bauböck 2002: 232), including some of those most perturbed by the perceived pace of social, economic, and cultural change. Perceptions or mere assertions of crises were also core components of Haider’s—and with him the FPÖ’s (later the BZÖ’s, or the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich’s)—discursive repertoire. Here again political discourse and the (attempted) monopolization of privileges through exclusion need to be understood and analyzed in relation to their contexts.

Social Closure in Times of Change To appreciate how the era-defining events across Central and Eastern Europe from 1989 on impacted neighboring Austria in the short and long term, basic geographical and historical facts need to be born in mind. For several decades, the Iron Curtain had followed Austria’s entire eastern border and much of her northern and southern borders. Clearly, the transformations and upheavals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and, further afield, across the entire, soonto-be former communist “block” would also have impacts beyond their borders, including in Austria—her political neutrality and close economic integration (e.g., Harrod 2012) in Western (European) markets notwithstanding. Those historic changes began in earnest in May 1989 with “partially liberalized Hungary” beginning to dismantle “its” part of the Iron Curtain along the border with Austria (Beller 2006: 292). The significance of this became apparent the following summer. By July more than twenty-five thousand East Germans had “swarmed” to Hungary, officially for “vacations,” with many then seeking asylum in West German embassies in both Budapest and Prague; most stayed in Hungary for the time being, with others crossing the “still closed Austro-

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Hungarian frontier without being stopped” (Judt 2010: 612). The momentous events of 1989 thus continued, and, with the Berlin Wall coming down in November, with Prague’s Velvet Revolution, and revolution in Rumania, communist Eastern Europe had indeed “imploded” (Beller 2006: 292). Tony Judt’s introductory remarks to his seminal overview of the European Postwar (2010) include two observations highly pertinent here that he recorded at Vienna’s western railway station in 1989 and 1999. In December 1989, Judt recalls, Vienna was an ideal place “from which to ‘think’ Europe.” A gateway between East and West at the dawn of a new era, the city—and, more generally, Austria—“embodied all the . . . self-satisfied attributes of post-war western Europe: capitalist prosperity underpinned by a richly endowed welfare state; social peace . . . thanks to jobs and perks . . . distributed through . . . political parties; external security assured by the implicit protection of the Western nuclear umbrella—while Austria itself remained smugly ‘neutral’” (Judt 2010: 2). Ten crucial years on, Judt returned to Vienna to find the Westbahnhof (western train station) “covered in posters for the Freedom Party of Jörg Haider who, despite his open admiration for the ‘honorable men’ of the Nazi armies who ‘did their duty’ on the eastern front, won 27 percent of the vote [in 1999] by mobilizing his fellow Austrians’ anxiety . . . at the changes that had taken place . . . over the past decade” (Judt 2010: 3). From the present book’s perspective, the 1990s provided a further crucial context in which the articulation of social closure and nationalist discourse could be observed with particular clarity. This begins to summarize Haider’s success in employing a populism against long-established elites coupled to a politics of social closure vis-à-vis recently arrived or further-anticipated migrants. Put differently, the relevance of my central theoretical borrowing—that is, neo-Weberian closure theory—to the most significant political shift in Austria over recent decades emerges already from this most concise of overviews. It is the purpose of the remainder of this chapter to analyze this era-defining development in more depth, employing social closure theory and interweaving it with the discourse analytical strands that have also guided our discussions thus far. The first phase in Haider’s time at the helm of the FPÖ—this first period has been traced to his election as the party’s head in Innsbruck in 1986—was characterized by Haider’s explicit “return to the pan-German tradition” (Pelinka 2002a: 222). Part of the context to this was a series of scandals that had begun to further erode public trust in the two dominant parties’ (Proporz) system of (arguably semi-paternalistic) governance (e.g., Sickinger 2008: 150; also Mitten 2002a: 200). During this period, Haider’s socialization into a pan-Germanic subculture (Sickinger 2008: 119–120) still played a prominent role. Nothing reflected this more than his already mentioned 1988 reference to Austria as an “ideological deformation”; to give what became one of Haider’s most controversial statements more of its original enunciatory context, Haider then clearly separated “ethnona-

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tional belonging,” or Volkszugehörigkeit, from political citizenship, or Staatszugehörigkeit (e.g., Rathkolb 2005: 30). The fact that this was more than an isolated “slip-up,” and undeniably intended to address one of his core audiences, was reflected in the following pronouncement, with which Haider articulated a very similar position in the first of his two books in 1993: If Austria has also now developed a national consciousness in line with the French or American model of a Staatsnation, then this is to be welcomed as it helps strengthen people’s consciousness of their homeland. However, no one must be prevented from adhering to a different national consciousness, one not orientated toward [today’s] political boundaries but toward a different historical and cultural plane. (Haider quoted in Auinger 2000: 53)

We here encounter another example of a discursive phenomenon already discussed: the palimpsest-like, contextual “rewriting” of older ideas, identifications, and interpretative-conceptual categories for presentist purposes (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). More accurately, the discursive categories being recontextualized and reappropriated here are those of romantic nationalism (Gellner 1998: 17ff.): they equate ethnolinguistic with national categories of belonging and exclusion and thereby, in this particular case, act as discursive vehicles for a pan-Germanic self-understanding. This reworking of (Herderian) romantic propositions (see chapter 1) was yet clearer in the FPÖ’s program, which—under Haider—postulated that “language is the most important channel of cultural expression,” and that one’s mother tongue (i.e., “German for the vast majority of Austrians”)—in which “one thinks, feels and dreams”—reflects biographical and family histories and determines collective, cultural belonging (quoted in Auinger 2000: 32). Importantly, the palimpsestic rewriting of ideational influences and leanings over time can also entail significant changes in political direction. Marking an important point of public reorientation, and the beginning of a later “phase” in Haider’s tenure and thinking (e.g., Plasser and Ulram 2000: 131) that was to be marked by an “austro-nationalist discourse” (Bauböck 2002: 232), Haider later—in 1995—redirected his party away from the pan-Germanic sentiments that had previously dominated in the FPÖ: A stronger Austrian patriotism will become necessary for the FPÖ . . . I don’t want to force this on the party, but I believe that any German obsession [Deutschtümelei] must become a thing of the past. The changing European context makes a strong Austrian identity most important. (Haider quoted in Auinger 2000: 5)

To critical commentators, this new-found “Austrian patriotism” was still underpinned by a (more implicit) German ethnolinguistic self-understanding and hence amounted to little more than impression management intended to appeal to larger segments of the electorate (Sickinger and Stögner 2008: 223;

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Bunzl 2002: 65). After all, pan-Germanism, as traced in the previous chapter, had been in decline as a source of public self-understanding for more than four decades (Bruckmüller 1992: 262). This dissonance between the FPÖ’s traditional pan-Germanism and the wider and growing taken-for-granted-ness of Austrian distinctiveness notwithstanding, the FPÖ’s electoral performances had seen a continuous and impressive upturn since the mid-1980s: the party had increased its share of the votes to 9.73 percent at the 1986 parliamentary elections (Rathkolb 2005: 204), to nearly 17 percent in 1990 (e.g., Beller 2006: 295), and then to 22.5 percent in 1994 (e.g., Sickinger 2008: 161). Even more staggering had been the shift among working-class voters: the FPÖ’s share of blue-collar votes had increased from a mere 4 percent in 1979 to 34 percent at the snap elections in 1995 (Gärtner 2002: 28), and it would increase even further to 47 percent in 1999, which was to mark the first time that the FPÖ would overtake the SPÖ among working-class voters (Pelinka 2002a: 218). This can be read through our main theoretical lens—that is, social closure. Under Haider, the FPÖ had developed a strong “anti-foreigner policy,” which by 1990 had come to resonate with growing segments of the population: one indication of this was a series of articles published in the spring of 1990 in the country’s most widely read newspaper, the Neue Kronen Zeitung, on the alleged “threats by foreigners”; and in a survey conducted in the summer of the same year, 71 percent of Austrian respondents voiced opposition to immigration from Eastern Europe and 67 percent associated growing numbers of foreigners with “insecurity, disorder and crime” (Gärtner 2002: 19). Against this backdrop and coupled to the party’s anti-immigration stance, Haider’s ideological reorientation toward an Austrian nationalism, despite its affront to the party’s traditional core supporters in deutschnationale fraternities (e.g., Sickinger 2008: 129, 150, 179), can be seen as a next strategic step toward mobilizing a large enough proportion of Austrians to further “dislodge” what Haider portrayed as a stranglehold over the country purportedly exercised by the two dominant parties and “their” (Proporz) system. The following statements illustrate this: The old parties’ domination . . . was founded before Austria’s liberation, when those parties were licensed by the occupational powers13 to “take care” of the country . . . To this day, Austria has been booty to those parties. . . . Postwar Austria has had authoritarian characteristics leading to citizens’ structural lack of freedom. Its dominant parties’ representatives compensate for their lack of political success with an abuse of power . . . Sometimes it almost feels as though we’ve lived in the last socialist state, aside from North Korea and China. (Haider quoted in Auinger 2000: 158–159)

Revealing populism’s central topoi, Jörg Haider consistently claimed to speak on behalf of “ordinary Austrians” and in opposition to “those up there,” the longestablished political elite of SPÖ and ÖVP, which over many years he construed

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as being self-interested and out of touch with “the population” (e.g., Bailer, Neugebauer, and Schiedel 2000: 118). Haider also—and most infamously—advocated an approach to the Austrian past that differed from both the traditional “victim myth” and from a more recent, critical re-examination of the country’s World War II history (e.g., Bunzl 2002: 62). In separate visits to Israel during 1993 and 1994 (e.g., Beller 2006: 297; Haslinger 1995: 12), Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, Waldheim’s presidential successor Thomas Klestil, and Erhard Busek (ÖVP) each contributed to a long-overdue paradigm shift toward a “co-responsibility thesis” that, at long last, began to acknowledge Austria’s share of “collective responsibility” for the crimes of Nazism (Uhl 2006: 63). By contrast, Haider’s take on the Nazi past included some of his most infamous statements, one of which he articulated in the Carinthian regional assembly in 1991 when he described the Third Reich’s “employment policy” as “orderly” (e.g., Beller 2006: 295; Sickinger 2008: 145). Amounting to a form of historical revisionism (e.g., Wodak and Pelinka 2002: xxiii), Haider’s narrative on the Nazi past did not entirely gloss over its crimes. What mattered was their framing and interpretation, essentially constructing them as “crimes without perpetrators” (Auinger 2000: 119), and the “war generation” as “the actual victims of Austrian history” (Pelinka 2008: 20) and as mere idealists engulfed in an era-defining battle against Communism that allegedly had left them without choice and knowledge of the Holocaust; concurrently, Haider opposed the conventional Austrian victim myth since it had helped “sever cultural ties with Germany” (Haider quoted in Auinger 2000: 119, 128). Haider’s infamous statement about the Third Reich’s “employment policy” played a significant role in the trajectory of his political life. He found himself forced to resign as Carinthian governor. From this point on, his relationship to the SPÖ in particular became ever-more antagonistic, moving him into a yet more radically populist opposition (Plasser and Ulram 2000: 131). There is strong evidence that Haider’s appeal to growing sections of the electorate was due to a “cluster of motives,” including—in this order—political disillusionment, opposition to Proporz, immigration, and fear of downward social mobility or loss of (cultural) identity (Mitten 2002a: 195). Other research on FPÖ voters’ motives showed opposition to immigration to be the fourth-most prominent, behind approval of the party’s claims of uncovering political “scandals” and rejuvenating politics, and behind the perception that it represented voters’ interests (Pelinka 2000: 56–57).14 In early 1993, the FPÖ had run an “antiimmigration” petition, which underlined the party’s xenophobic stance while also unintentionally revealing the limits of its anti-foreigner agenda at the time. Consisting of twelve points—ranging from issues of border control to social welfare, education, and crime and declaring Austria not to be a “country of immigration”—the petition received what to its initiators were a disappointing 417,000 signatures (Gärtner 2002: 23–24). In addition to not meeting the FPÖ’s expec-

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tations, this “Austria first” (Österreich zuerst) petition inadvertently corroborated the Bourdieu-ian postulate of the polarizing effects of (perceived) crises by also triggering a powerful counterinitiative. The latter manifested in the Lichtermeer (or “sea of lights”) organized by the NGO SOS Mitmensch, which saw some 250,000 people gathering in central Vienna in a sign of solidarity and opposition against xenophobia (Sickinger 2008: 159).15 At this juncture, there was therefore reason to conclude that although immigration had been moved to the center of the discursive stage—under SPÖ interior ministers, including Franz Löschnak, restrictive immigration legislation had come into force (Mitten 2002a: 199), and the mass media, including the aforementioned Kronen Zeitung, had contributed to growing anxieties surrounding the issue (Rathkolb 2005: 41)—it also divided the populace. In terms of electoral tactics, the FPÖ could thus not afford to be or become a single-issue party if it was to increase its share of the vote further. It discovered another core agenda in a new-found anti-Europeanism, which required a more radical rewriting of the party’s previous position on the issue. Although the FPÖ had long had a European orientation, Haider performed this second major ideological U-turn in the context of Austria’s EC/EU accession negotiations (e.g., Bauböck 2002: 246; Sickinger 2008: 160). From here on, an anti-EU position, or at least a very strong EU-skepticism would become a hallmark of FPÖ politics, manifesting in opposition to what it has since consistently portrayed as Brussels’s “meddling” in state sovereignty, or its advocacy, at most, of a Europe of ethnonational pluralism (Europa der Vaterländer) in opposition to European integration (e.g., Karner 2010; 2013b). It is also worth noting, however, that the FPÖ has not been alone in rewriting its position on Europe. In the course of the accession negotiations, some in the SPÖ had still professed concern about the Austrian “labor market being swamped by cheap labor” and a resulting deflation of wages (Bushell 2013: 231). Ultimately, however, the SPÖ under Vranitzky strongly endorsed EU accession.16 Not dissimilarly, Austria’s Greens have changed from articulating considerable skepticism concerning the environmental implications of EC/EU membership prior to accession to becoming strong pro-Europeans (Karner 2017, 2018). Austria had submitted an EC membership application in 1989. After the settling of the “south Tyrol question,” entry negotiations concluded in March 1994 following the removal of “stumbling blocks” concerning agriculture and a dispute over lorry transit-traffic (Beller 2006: 294, 297). The June 1994 referendum saw 66.6 percent of voters opt for accession to the European Union, which materialized on 1 January 1995. The grand coalition collapsed soon thereafter, leading to snap elections in December 1995, at which the FPÖ, with 21.9 percent of the vote, for the first time since Haider’s rise to prominence experienced a very slight setback (Sickinger 2008: 162). However, and while SPÖ and ÖVP negotiated another coalition government, the FPÖ’s several-issues approach had proven

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successful. Over time, the party had considerably expanded its traditional social base at “the universities and [in the] intelligentsia” or, more accurately, in those segments organized in pan-Germanic fraternities (Markovits 2002: 113). Such widening of its support base and intended audiences showed most of all in the enormous and already-summarized inroads the Freedom Party was continuing to make among (particularly male) working-class voters—that is, among the SPÖ’s historical core supporters. However, it would be an underestimation of the FPÖ’s reach to reduce its successes to its winning over of ever-larger numbers of young, male, working-class voters, very important though these swings in workingclass voting patterns have been in Austria’s recent history (e.g., Markovits 2002: 116ff.). A fuller picture emerges from Plasser and Ulram’s (2000: 139) findings concerning voters’ motivations and political dispositions, revealing disillusionment with “the system” among 27 percent of the FPÖ’s supporters, “welfare chauvinism” among 21 percent, and widespread ethnocentrism as well as “law-and-order-orientations” among both these categories. A broadening of its bases also manifested in the fact that despite and alongside the FPÖ’s “historic roots” and “linkage” to (via the VdU as its predecessor) the pan-Germanic camp and, more narrowly within it, former Nazis (Pelinka 2002a: 215, 221; Markovits 2002: 109), the party had now come to embrace a “postmodern politics”: “sound-bites,” entertainment, and a “mixed bag of messages” held together by the articulation of protest and the demanded exclusion of outgroups played central parts here (Pelinka 2002a: 220). Its ability to subsume different constituencies, albeit of varying sizes and prominence, was also significantly helped by the FPÖ’s wider semiotic strategies and cultural presence during the 1990s. As shown by anthropologist André Gingrich (2002: 70ff.), Haider had come to command a spectrum of symbolic registers (i.e., often portraying a nonconformist, “lone wolf image” and “glamour virility,” engaging in popular sports or switching from traditional lederhosen to Armani suits) and to occupy a range of cultural locations (from ski slopes and alpine lakes to “open air discos” and rural Bierzelte, or “beer tents”); some of Haider’s appeal had therefore derived less from “explicit verbal statements” than from his ability to choreograph himself as “fashionable, trendy and entertaining”; speaking, as he often did, in Austrian dialect augmented this self-styled identity of an unusual politician speaking “the common people’s language” (Gingrich 2002: 68, 75) and understanding their concerns. This having been said, opposition to immigration—articulating a binary identity grammar that manifested in “Manichean” constructions of a “positive in-group and negative out-groups” (Wodak 2002: 35)—continued to occupy central discursive space for the FPÖ. In 1992, Andreas Mölzer, publicist and pan-Germanic ideologue, had infamously warned of a purported Umvolkung (i.e., a deeply problematic term alleging a change in a population’s ethnic makeup) due to immigration (Sickinger 2008: 206–207). Haider himself, again

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in his 1993 book Die Freiheit, die ich meine (quoted in Auinger 2000: 63, 67, 69), had presented the purportedly negative workings of multiculturalism as follows: Immigration, on whichever scale, demands integration. Territorial conquest through immigration is out of the question. Austria is not a country of immigration. . . . [A] multicultural society without shared consensus about fundamental values inevitably leads to the dissolution of law and order.17 . . . Immigrants are not integrating into the culture they encounter here. Instead, they expect locals to adjusts to their customs. Integration and assimilation are precisely not what a multicultural society fosters.

In our analytical terms, such accounts work with topoi of various threats (also see Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 83), with exclusionary deixis (e.g., “they” versus “locals”), and with grammars of both assimilation and apostasy that demand migrants’ integration but strongly oppose any accommodation by the national majority to the deeply reified category of “foreigners” or “immigrants.” “Multiculturalism” is thereby given a series of negative connotations. The politics of social closure, of ring-fencing status and privileges for the (national) ingroup at the expense of outsiders—manifest in promises to protect “against foreigners and against unemployment” (Wodak and Pelinka 2002: xiii)—had come to appeal to many, particularly, though not only, among working-class voters. To (re)turn to wider contexts, another, extreme, form of (attempted) closure had manifested in a series of terrorist attacks starting in 1993. Targeting ethnic minorities (i.e., killing four members of Austria’s Roma community in the town of Oberwart in Burgenland), Vienna’s mayor Helmut Zilk, and civil society organizations committed to multicultural inclusion, its perpetrator’s (Franz Fuchs’s) chilling statements included the following: “In the service of pan-Slavic and similarly obscure ethnic ideologies our own culture has been abandoned and overrun. Our own people who hit on hard times are neglected, in the interest of foreign tumors [Ausländergeschwür] who unashamedly use taxes and donations provided by the autochthonous, German population” (quoted in Auinger 2000: 82). Topoi of threats and majority disadvantage, and a binary identity grammar pitting “Germans” against “Slavic” others, were here taken to their most radical, violent extreme. While Fuchs’s terrorist violence of course cannot be conflated with legitimate politics, it is nonetheless important to draw attention to partial discursive overlaps (i.e., on the level of argumentative topoi and identity grammars) and in terms of a political “logic” of working toward nationalist closure. The latter can assume very different forms, ranging from “socially protectionist” or discriminatory policies (depending on one’s political-ethical position) and rhetoric on one end of the spectrum (see Fraser 2012; Karner 2016), to violent extremism on the other.

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Demographic changes in Austria during the 1990s were far-reaching. Between 1985 and 1996, 425,000 migrants had settled in the country (Rathkolb 2005: 49); the proportion of foreigners in relation to the total population rose from 6.6 percent in 1991 to 10 percent in 1994 (Beller 2006: 298).18 Experiences of profound, rapid change and (widely perceived) crises were compounded by the geographical proximity of the war in former Yugoslavia, the local “fallout” of which included the “admission of about 90,000 Bosnian refugees” (Bauböck 2002: 248). Add, in the perceptions of many, the economic system change that came with EU membership, and the conditions of possibility for a successful politics of (ethnonational) closure were in place. Pioneering rhetorical-political strategies that would, in due course, be reappropriated across Europe (e.g., Gingrich and Banks 2006; Wodak 201619), Jörg Haider skillfully appealed to an electorate, many of whom perceived domestic and wider changes to be anxietyinducing if not positively threatening. Combining “cultural pessimism” with “welfare chauvinism” (Gingrich 2006; see also Hainsworth 2000: 10), or crisisanxiety with a “social protectionist” agenda (Fraser 2012) of preserving socialpolitical entitlements for citizens only, Haider’s (quoted in Auinger 2000: 72) early assessments, in 1990, had included the following: “It is not the best who escape from their home . . . which now leads to huge crime-rates for us . . . What was said to our parents and grandparents in 1945 should be repeated there: don’t run off, work hard, rebuild your country! They did an excellent job rebuilding Austria. But the same applies to Eastern Europeans today.” The workings of a “topos of history” (Wodak 2016: 71) can here be dissected further: what Haider offered was a political position (i.e., social closure vis-à-vis actual or potential Eastern European migrants) premised on an analogy he drew between post1989, post-Communist Eastern Europe (in the present) and post-1945 Austria (in the past). As established in the literature, historical analogies in the political realm call for analytical rigor, for they tend to “short-circuit reasoning” and carve out self-interested, highly selective readings of a particular past in the service of a particular politics in the present (Müller 2002: 27; Karner and Mertens 2013). In this case, Haider singularly credited Austria’s (post)war generations with the country’s rebuilding after 1945, thereby detaching his reading from crucial wider factors and external support at the time (see previous chapter). What is more, this was anything but an innocent construction of the past: its very purpose, in the context at hand, was to argue for social closure by preventing inward migration from Eastern Europe. In 1998, in a parliamentary debate of the EU’s (then) anticipated eastern expansion, Haider argued for a more muted, relative closure premised on a purported cost-benefit analysis that left Austria’s own economic benefits from EU enlargement curiously excluded from the “calculation”: “I cannot agree with the Vice-Chancellor’s prediction that it will cost us 1000 billion schillings to bring neighboring countries up to EU standards . . . If they can participate in a larger market, then this should

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be enough of an advantage, we should not have to finance this for them, with money needed in Austria” (quoted in Auinger 2000: 217). The wider resonance of such assessments was in due course reflected in survey findings suggesting that by 2002 some 60 percent of Austrians were convinced that they would be disadvantaged by the EU’s eastward enlargement (Rathkolb 2005: 43).20 Some assessments of the sentiments Haider’s FPÖ was exploiting ever more successfully as the 1990s wore on have been damning. Josef Haslinger (1995: 51), for example, in an influential essay argued that Haider had established, and was able to capitalize on, a “politics of emotions” no longer directed by “principles or truth” but simply by the instrumentalization of widespread sentiments in the pursuit of power.

Varied Constructions of National Identity at the Turn of the Millennium Lest the impression arises that nationalist discourse is straightforwardly a top-down imposition by key figures and facilitated by structural conditions (i.e., anxietygenerating crises, whether “real”/structural or perceived), making electorates susceptible to a politics of (ethnonational) closure, I conclude this chapter with a more nuanced corrective. This is provided by a seminal study by Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart (1999), which offered pertinent glimpses not only of public, but also of what they termed “semi-public” and “semi-private,” Austrian national identity discourses—captured in formal political language, through focus groups and qualitative interviews respectively—in the final years of the twentieth century. Wodak et al. (1999: 4, 33) demonstrate that there is “no such thing as one national identity”; instead, national identities vary “according to audience, setting and substantive content,” with their malleability manifesting in different discursive-argumentative strategies. Wodak et al. describe those, with reference to their ideological intentions and effects, as strategies of “construction, perpetuation or justification, transformation and demontage or dismantling” in turn. Mapped onto the arguments developed in the present book, Wodak et al. provide further empirical corroboration of the ongoing discursive work invested in, and of the political contestations surrounding, national identities. What is more, their data and analysis should of course be read against the particular historical backdrop (i.e., Austria in the 1990s) discussed in this chapter. Further, as already mentioned, Wodak et al. underscore the need to capture the discursive negotiations of different understandings of national identity as articulated across a range of social domains, both in top-down direction (i.e., by politicians of competing ideological orientations) and on the grassroots level of everyday discussion and interaction involving so-called “ordinary actors” or citizens.

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To be read in the wider contexts discussed in this and the previous chapters, including the by then firmly established Austrian particularism and high levels of reported “national pride” (Wodak et al. 1999: 53–54; Rathkolb 2005: 25ff.), Wodak and her coauthors (1999) show the prominence of a range of recurring topoi, concerns, and tropes. These include discussions about Austrian neutrality;21 constructions of a “common political past, present and future”; concerns for small Austrian farmers in wider EU markets; perceptions of successful “multicultural co-existence [as] utopian” and assertions of the “differences between Austria and Germany”; self-stereotyping (e.g., a purported “homo austriacus” and selfascriptions such as the “cliché of the famed Austrian Gemütlichkeit,” or conviviality); and a recurring emphasis on “the common national territory,” reconfirming the central importance of particular (rural, Alpine) landscapes to Austria’s postwar identity constructions and self-understandings. Moreover, Wodak et al.’s (1999: 83, 97, 114, 116, 123, 131, 150, 170, 195) data also reveal attitudes toward the European Union that showed “little enthusiasm” for, but at most “critical approval of,” EU membership, as well as opposition to “the National Aid Fund, established in 1995, to aid surviving victims of Nazi persecution.” Wodak et al.’s seminal study also reveals discursive features of particular relevance to the analytical framework employed in the present book. First, they show the importance of the “metonymic deictic ‘we’” (Wodak et al. 1999: 139) to national identity constructions. Second, they capture views whose underlying discursive logic can be translated into our notion of identity grammars as follows. Reported claims that “anybody can become Austrian” and demands that “immigrants . . . must be culturally integrated” (Wodak et al. 1999: 178, 191) reveal an assimilationist grammar. Other views of the purported “problems raised by culturally or religiously mixed partnerships” (Wodak et al. 1999: 179), meanwhile, show a binary, essentialist grammar at work, which allows for no movement or ambivalent overlaps between discursively constructed in- and out-groups. Moreover, asserted “hierarchies of ‘foreignness’”—with Western EU countries being constructed relatively most positively and, in this order, “ahead” of the “EU as a whole,” of the “former Eastern bloc,” and of “non-European states” (Wodak et al. 1999: 198)—show an additional, stratified identity grammar being discursively projected onto various “others.” Thus, we reach another major juncture in recent Austrian history, namely the events of 1999 and 2000, to which we turn next. Austrians were to come face to face with their collective past once again. Arguably even more importantly, the now-to-unfold events would seriously strain and test Austria’s relationship with her then fourteen EU partners. As the new millennium dawned, questions about national and European identities—and about nationalism’s impact on their interrelationship—were coming to the fore. Arguably underpinning these questions there were other issues to do with what we have since grown accustomed to subsuming under the rubric of “globalization” and its (presumed) consequences. It is

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on this juncture, its era-defining questions, and the deeper issues underpinning them that we focus next.

Notes 1. Although methodologically very different—that is, premised on quantitative analyses of public opinion surveys in the United States—Bonikowski and DiMaggio’s (2016) recent findings point toward similar insights. Particularly noteworthy is their conclusion that “nationalism is not fixed over time” but that “its multiple variants”—including, but not exhausted by civic and ethnocultural forms—“shift in prevalence in response to nationally relevant events” (Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016: 972). 2. In the early 2000s, this anti-nuclear-energy discourse came to interface with anti-Czech sentiments in particular: the dangers of nuclear energy were thus projected, rather selectively, onto “Eastern European” energy production, and especially onto a nuclear power station in the Czech town of Temelin near the Austrian border (e.g., see Karner 2005a: 422). 3. We here encounter another example of a phenomenon that has been mentioned previously and to which I shall return in due course: the “palimpsestic” rewriting of ideationaldiscursive fragments, particularly including some of the assumptions and topoi associated with political romanticism, over lengthy periods of time, in new contexts, and—frequently—in the service of nationalist politics (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017). 4. It is here that the literature on “secondary anti-Semitism”—an often but not necessarily or always unconscious response to the Holocaust by its perpetrators, bystanders, and their descendants focused on “defense” against, or disavowal of, guilt and the repression of related memories (e.g., Schiedel and Neugebauer 2002: 17)—is particularly relevant and illuminating. 5. This also powerfully illustrated a phenomenon that I shall return to in later chapters: nationalist rhetoric and mobilization are certainly not monopolized by the FPÖ (or any one party, for that matter) but they recur considerably more widely, albeit with varying degrees of prominence, across large sections of the political spectrum. 6. Attentive readers will undoubtedly have noticed the recurrence of such and similar topoi of national unity across geographical and historical contexts. Tentatively, we may thus here speak of one of nationalism’s master-topoi. 7. Also worth remembering is that the first round of the elections was contested between Waldheim, the SPÖ’s candidate Kurt Steyrer, the Green candidate Freda Meissner-Blau, and the FPÖ’s candidate Otto Scrinzi, who has been described as the “recognized representative” of “Nazi nostalgia” (Mitten 1992: 44). Scrinzi, a former SA-Sturmführer and NSDAP member, was also a neuropsychiatrist known for his controversial political views (including on racial eugenics); he received 1.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the 1986 presidential elections (Adunka 2002: 47). In other words, the 55,000 votes cast for Scrinzi suggested strongly that anti-Semitism—arguably of a more explicit and selfconscious kind—could appeal to yet another support base that had not been mobilized for Waldheim in the first round. 8. Also see Stögner 2008: 56 and 66 for a discussion of how Kreisky was more generally constructed—in the service of a “secondary anti-Semitism”—as a “rare good Jew,” whose

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10. 11.

12. 13.

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alleged exceptionalism was taken as purported confirmation of an anti-Jewish, “Manichean” division of the world into “good and bad,” and who was simultaneously used to legitimize a “defense against remembering and responsibility.” Stögner (2008: 100) also shows that, the Waldheim Affair aside, and in particular in the context of the aforementioned “Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal” controversy, Simon Wiesenthal had been widely constructed as a “revengeful Jew” and as a threat to Austria’s postwar identity. Another crucial issue, which did not receive the critical attention it warranted at the time and which again reflects the longer history of “banal” and explicit pan-Germanism in Austria, pertained to the very fact of Austrians—including the then president of the Second Republic—defining their service in the German Wehrmacht as their “duty” (also Haslinger 1995: 27). All translations from German are the author’s. In the run-up to and aftermath of the 2017 parliamentary elections, critical journalists in both Austria (Löw 2017) and Germany (Das Gupta and Al-Serori 2017) reminded the public that the angry protesters against Bernhard’s Heldenplatz in November 1988 had included the young Heinz-Christian Strache, who would later become head of the FPÖ and was at the time of writing (2018) Austria’s vice-chancellor. Since the 1960s (e.g., Dusek 2002: 262), the DÖW has worked toward archiving and supporting research in the thematic areas of national socialist crimes, resistance, exile, postwar justice, rightwing extremism, and restitution. This narrative of postwar Austria partly relates back to my comments in the previous chapter on how—rather than 1945 being seen as the moment of liberation (from totalitarianism)—the Besatzungszeit and Allied presence have been widely viewed and remembered as having delayed (national) liberation until (at least) 1955. While Pelinka (2000: 57) plausibly infers from this that the party’s supporters vote for the FPÖ “also but not primarily” for xenophobic motivations, it should be pointed out that at least two of these other motives can certainly also transport nationalist-xenophobic messages: as seen from the perspective of social closure theory, the question as to how people understand political “rejuvenation” and define “their interests” (i.e., at least potentially in opposition to whom, or at the price of whose exclusion) certainly warrants further discussion. The staging of this countermovement, and hence of resistance against nationalist closure, in Vienna also prefigured a tendency to be observed more recently and to be mentioned again in chapter 7: namely, that anti-immigration discourse has come to be relatively more appealing and electorally successful in rural areas and hence in contexts less immediately affected by migration than urban settings have been. More than twenty years on, as was clear in the 2017 national elections (SPÖ 2017), Austria’s Social Democrats embrace a clear, though not uncritical, pro-European agenda. We here see an early example of the community cohesion discourse (e.g., Cantle 2008) that would in the post-9/11 context reshape debates about ethnic pluralism across Europe by demanding that diversity be accompanied by values shared across boundaries. Using a slightly less clearly delineated temporal frame of reference, Hans Rauscher (2000: 31) records a “doubling” of the foreign population in Austria in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Ruth Wodak (2016: 18; also Martin 2000: 17) describes this as Europe’s subsequent “Haiderization” (Haiderisierung).

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20. This appears to be one of the reasons Oliver Rathkolb (2005: 22) has referred to an Austrian “national solipsism.” 21. Austrian neutrality had by then become both a symbolic pillar of national self-identification and a relatively open signifier “filled” with various political content and subject to a “process of transformation” (Wodak et al. 1999: 65; also see De Cillia and Wodak 2009; Weber 1999). The issue continues to polarize at the time of finalizing the present book (i.e., March 2019). The run-up to the 2019 EU-elections thus saw diverging positions even among Austria’s pro-European parties, with (parts of ) the SPÖ strongly opposing a potential EU military on the grounds of its alleged incompatibility with Austrian neutrality; meanwhile, the country’s most committed pro-Europeans, i.e., NEOS (Das Neue Österreich und Liberales Forum), took the diametrically opposed view in arguing for an EU army (Staudinger 2019).

Chapter 6

LOCALIZING STRATEGIES AGAINST GLOBAL FLOWS

d I

n the remainder of this book, the workings of nationalist discourses in Austria since the turn of the millennium take center stage. Concurrently, the value of the longue durée1 perspective developed across this book emerges with greater clarity in the final two chapters. The discursive and institutional (i.e., socialclosure-related) characteristics of nationalist politics in earlier periods, as revealed thus far, will be shown to have been reappropriated over recent years. First, a theoretical recap is required. Topoi constitute often circular argumentative structures; with greater definitional elaboration, they comprise “parts of argumentation” that constitute “obligatory, either explicit or inferable premises” providing “content-related warrants” or “conclusion rules” connecting the postulated argument(s) with “the claim” (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 75).2 The analyses developed here share Krzyżanowski and Wodak’s (2009: 75) primary interests in “content-dependent topoi”—posing the question as to which claims, often despite available counterevidence, are formulated in particular arguments and through specific discursive positions—as well as in “strategies of self- and other-presentation.” With regard to the former, diachronically recurring nationalist (master-)topoi traced throughout the previous chapters have included topoi of (alleged) national unity, of an anticipated, promised, and purportedly imminent national revival, and of various (usually, though not exclusively) external threats and dangers. Questions pertaining to the construction and perpetuation of (national) in- and out-groups, meanwhile, have here been conceptualized with more empirical nuance: through close attention to the “rhetorical pointing” (Billig 1995: 106), or deixis, employed in nationalist discourses, and through the concept of various—in nation-

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alist discourses often co-existing—“grammars of identity” (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). Foregrounding the question as to how the interrelationship between discursively constructed in- and out-groups is defined in texts and arguments, the nationalist grammars documented in previous chapters have included those of (orientalist) binarism, of assimilationism, of apostasy, and of hierarchy. Similarly important have been discursive processes of rewriting, selective borrowing, and context-specific reappropriation of older symbols, tropes, and ideational strands. I have captured these processes through the concept of ideological palimpsests (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017), which describes how social actors intertextually hark back to older thinkers and historical points of reference. While we will encounter further examples of the palimpsestic, diachronic reappropriation of older ideas and tropes in the service of present agendas, one illustration of this already discernible in some of Jörg Haider’s rhetoric of the 1990s was his “claiming” of the revolutions of 1848 for the “third camp” (Sickinger 2008: 165). For the institutional levels, this book derives analytical momentum from (neo-Weberian) closure theory. According to Raymond Murphy (1988: 50–51), social closure refers to the following: first, the rules of “exclusion and monopolization” that “govern [a] structured system of differential opportunity” in a given context; second, the “historical process of the accumulation of power, resources [e.g., capital of various kinds, property] and rewards,” as well as of “skills and credentials”; and third, a “dynamic process” unfolding around competing interest/ status groups pushing for “maintenance or change” of the existent “structure of positions.” As we have seen, struggles over social closure have assumed historically highly varied forms: from the nationalist attempts to usurp the late Habsburg Empire to the extreme racism and spiral of genocide in the 1930s and 1940s, to postwar politics of “reconstruction” that still left Holocaust survivors deprived of rights and property of which they had previously been stripped with unparalleled cruelty, to increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the post–Cold War period. What is more, and also illustrated across all these contexts, social closure is a collective process, in which the nationalist ascription of communal “identities” on an ethnolinguistic basis has proven enduring and effective.3 This book’s theoretical contribution is its attempt to combine these conceptual resources in order to account for both the rhetorical-argumentative-interpretative and the political-institutional dimensions of different nationalisms, as well as their context-specific interconnections, in the geographical and historical settings in question. The central claim that a sociologically compelling approach to nationalism needs to account for the discursive and the institutional recurs throughout this book. As in previous chapters, this approach here again benefits from consideration not only of nationalist discourses but also of their ideological competitors (i.e., various counterdiscourses). In the present chapter, this entails a brief mention of select examples of what has been described as our era’s most profound “cultural revolution”— namely, the long-overdue phenomenon of the

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historically silenced “coming into [self-] representation” through various cultural/ artistic means (Hall 1997: 183). A focus on nationalist discourses emanating from a dominant majority can be productively interspersed by select instances of “the othered” articulating their previously overlooked ideas, interests, and histories (Fraser 1992). Taken together, what follows analyzes competing or at least uneasily coexisting “localizing strategies” as typical (counter)reactions to our “global information society,” its multiple “flows,” and era-defining process of the economy’s “disembedding from territory” (Eriksen 2015: 371–386). By way of a methodological note for this and the subsequent chapters, I here draw also on a very large corpus of data comprising political positions, statements, and ideologically diverse media coverage spanning the last decade and a half of Austrian history and revealing the discursive work performed by “primary and secondary definers” (Hall et al. 1978)—for example, politicians and the media; this is complemented by consideration of some everyday “receptions” and negotiations—as encountered in readers’ letters, for instance—of such prominent discursive positions. From a very sizable corpus of data, which includes Austria’s broadcasting network and broadsheet as well as tabloid press,4 my focus—in line with what was anticipated in the introduction to this book—is again twofold: on key formulations (e.g., those epitomizing discursive shifts) and on typical or recurring formulations (representative of frequently applied, widely reappropriated claims and argumentative positions).

Ruptures in the New Millennium It has been justifiably claimed that Austria “was forever changed in the course of the last few months of 1999 and the beginning of 2000,” when a previously predictable electorate—whose proportion of party members had been “the highest of any modern country”—arguably voted for a seismic, era-defining shift that also revealed the “ugly underbelly of Austrian life” (Markovits 2002: 118; also see Weiss 2004). Yet the final years of the twentieth century had seen a number of noteworthy developments that suggested a different trajectory. Economic growth figures were encouraging. With regard to Austria’s politics of memory, significant changes were afoot. In 1997, 5 May had become a Day of Remembrance for the victims of Nazism. A Holocaust Memorial had been constructed on the Judenplatz of Vienna’s first district; recent legislation had made Austrian exiles’ regaining of their citizenship more straightforward; and a 1998 exhibition of the (criminal) actions by the German Wehrmacht added further momentum to critical engagement with World War II.5 An international commission was to look into restitution questions; culture minister Elisabeth Gehrer—following the confiscation of two Schiele paintings on loan in the United States and suspected of having been stolen from their Jewish owners decades earlier—was adopting a

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new, much less obstructionist approach toward restitution6 claims, notwithstanding the continuing obstacles faced by some, for instance by Maria Altmann in her long struggle to regain ownership of Klimt’s Golden Portrait of Adele BlochBauer (Beller 2006: 300–302). Concurrently, previously reported high rates of national pride—including chauvinistic attitudes vis-à-vis others—had continued to increase, in 1998 Austria even surpassed U.S. rates in this regard, as had the pervasiveness of discontent: by October 2000 only 27 percent of surveyed Austrians would report being “satisfied” with the political status quo (Rathkolb 2005: 25–26). In another example of the palimpsestic cross-referencing to, and selective rewriting of, older ideas or, in this case, slogans, the FPÖ’s electoral campaign in 1999 included depictions of Jörg Haider and Thomas Prinzhorn—the party’s formal chief candidate—under the caption of “two true Austrians,” thereby echoing the ÖVP’s description in 1970 of Josef Klaus as a “true Austrian.” Notably, anticipating the FPÖ’s current ideational claiming of former SPÖ Chancellor Bruno Kreisky for itself (e.g., see Der Standard 2018), Kreisky also served as a model for Haider (Sickinger 2008: 186-187). Such palimpsestic claims accomplished several things at once. First, Haider’s and Prinzhorn’s self-interpellation as “true Austrians” postulated, in typically populist fashion, a purported proximity to “ordinary citizens”—in implicit contrast to their political competitors who were thereby constructed as being distant and out-of-touch with other “true Austrians.” Second, in invoking both Klaus and Kreisky—a somewhat ironic rhetorical ploy that of course omitted reminding voters that the ÖVP had formerly contrasted Klaus as a purportedly “true Austrian” to the secular Jew Bruno Kreisky— the FPÖ was able to speak to both (former) ÖVP and SPÖ voters. Contextually, it should also be remembered that, since the late 1980s, the proportion of foreign residents relative to Austria’s population had grown considerably above and beyond the Western European average; legislative reactions to these demographic developments combined attempts to prevent further immigration with a politics of “deliberate integration” (Weigl 2009: 47, 51). Thereby synthesizing, in our analytical terms, social closure (i.e., curtailing immigration) and an assimilationist identity grammar, these policy shifts were to gather further momentum in the years to come. The FPÖ’s xenophobic campaign was “rewarded”7 by 27 percent of the vote on 3 October 1999, an increase of 5 percent, eclipsing the ÖVP by a few hundred votes and putting the “third camp” into second position behind the SPÖ (Sickinger 2008: 189). The tabloid Kronen Zeitung, relative to population size the most widely read paper worldwide and able to reach some 43 percent of the population at the time (Rathkolb 2005: 241), had already predicted, and arguably “celebrated,” Haider’s victory a few days prior to the elections (Wodak 2016: 198). Following a period of political wrangling, it was eventually Wolfgang Schüssel, leader of the third-placed ÖVP, who in February 2000 formed a coalition government with the FPÖ. With the latter now part

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of the federal government, “a radical-right party that had frequently expressed coded praise for [at least select facets] of Nazi fascism had come to power in an EU member state for the first time” (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 39). The new millennium had thus started with a political caesura, and one— especially given Austria’s status as an EU member—of transnational relevance. Domestically, Federal President Thomas Klestil made his swearing in of the two coalition partners subject to them signing an “unprecedented document,” the much-discussed Präambel, in which the new government committed to “respect[ing] human rights” and to “remain[ing] cognizant . . . of Austria’s heinous Nazi past and its continued responsibilities” with regard to it (Markovits 2002: 101).8 On EU-level, meanwhile, Austria entered into a period of isolation among her then fourteen EU partners, some of whose governments were challenged by “xenophobic rightist movements” akin to the FPÖ and responded by “freezing” their bilateral relations with Austria (Sickinger 2008: 191; Beller 2006: 303). The legal basis of these actions was debatable (Sickinger 2008: 191), but their political logic—in the context of the other EU member states “exercis[ing] their own sovereignty” by opposing the inclusion of a “party whose democratic bona fides were questionable” in a government with veto powers over EU policy (Beller 2006: 304) and the EU’s general concern over the breaking of an important postwar taboo (Wodak 2016: 198)—was certainly intelligible. Reactions to, and interpretations of, these “sanctions,” have differed widely among commentators and the public. Critics of the sanctions considered them to be “misguided, hypocritical,” and “woefully disingenuous” (also since a year previously Haider had been elected to serve on the EU’s committee on regions), and predicted, with some accuracy, that many Austrians would “resent the short-circuiting of their country’s democratic procedures” while “handing the ÖVP-FPÖ government an unearned, but ruthlessly exploited, patriotic bonus” (Mitten 2002a: 182, 203– 205). Others predicted that the measures by the EU-fourteen could “change the traditions of aggressive exclusion inherent in Austrian society” (Pelinka 2002a: 228). Yet others detected a “glaring discrepancy between the domestic and the European assessment” (Bauböck 2002: 234) of the new government and the sanctions. The latter offers too monolithic a portrayal of the situation created in the wake of the formation of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition. It was much more accurate to also detect a “domestic polarization” (Sickinger 2008: 191) and a boost to a “critical public . . . never before experienced in Austria and quite rare anywhere . . . [involving] twice-weekly demonstrations” in Vienna and “regular public discussions among actors and audiences after theatre performances” (Markovits 2002: 102). So while in 2000 there could be no doubt that the FPÖ had become the most successful political force within Europe’s extreme Right, marking the latter’s first participation in a government on the national level (Aftenberger 2007: 60), civil society opposition and counterdiscourses were also prominent and helping to reshape Austria. Once again, we here encounter evidence of the Bourdieu-ian

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postulate of crises transforming a previously largely taken-for-granted realm of cultural commonsense (doxa) into a discursive domain of competing political blueprints. Nothing epitomized this more clearly than the protests on Vienna’s Heldenplatz on 19 February 2000, when some three hundred thousand people gathered to voice their protest against the new government (e.g., Wodak 2016: 200). It has been part of my analytical ambition to locate nationalist discourse—in its various historical contexts and articulations—as usually one among several competing frameworks of interpretation and mobilization. In keeping with this, it is worth here returning to some of the counterdiscourses formulated in opposition to the new government in early 2000. Not for the first time we thereby discover that counterdiscourses, while themselves not internally homogeneous or necessarily consistent, can help throw the discursive characteristics and “logic” of nationalism into sharp relief. One of the most prominent spokespeople against the ÖVP-FPÖ government took stock soon after the protests of 19 February 2000 by observing that many who had previously remained silent had now decided to join the struggle “against racism” (Rabinovici 2000a: 7). In another contribution to the same collection of essays reflecting on the protests, the very same Doron Rabinovici—a well-known Austro-Israeli historian—described himself as living through a “schizoid situation,” in which the world around him demanded ethnic singularity entirely out of step with multiple identities and cultural hybridity; such situations, the author continued, demanded an active civil society opposing chauvinistic rigidities and the Ungeist (demon) of nationalist exclusion (Rabinovici 2000b: 54–57). Both nationalism’s binary/orientalist identity grammar of absolute oppositions and its enabling of social closure were here revealed and criticized in one of the strongest counterdiscourses. Armin Thurnher, editor of the weekly Viennese paper Falter, offered contextualization: 19 February 2000. It’s drizzling, I am on the Heldenplatz, glad to be one of a quarter of a million demonstrators . . . Pensioners alongside anarchists, bank employees alongside artists, workers and pupils—they peacefully reclaim the street . . . It is paradoxical that the parties now in government are the least likely to be liberated by this political caesura. The FPÖ gets trapped in its past, stumbling over its weak personnel and its leader’s narcissism. Instead, the Social Democrats are seemingly liberated, the Greens more popular than ever, there is a new potential for disobedience and a European dimension to Austria’s political game . . . Protest against this new Austro-Thatcherism is necessary, its many losers, those ordinary people who voted for Haider, will soon regret their choice. For now, they still believe in their leader. (Thurnher 2000: 40–44)9

All joint opposition to the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition notwithstanding, such counterdiscourses were not uniform in their assessments of the new political status quo, nor of what it signaled. The Austrian writer and public intellectual Robert Menasse, for example, (rightly) declared then widely drawn comparisons of Haider

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to Hitler to be “irresponsible” and corrosive of, rather than conducive to, historical and political consciousness.10 Haider’s program, Menasse argued, might appeal to collective emotions shaped by a certain “everyday fascism” but it was not itself fascist; it was exclusionary but certainly not genocidal; and historically— in our analytical terms, this points toward some of the ideational palimpsests (re)written by or under Haider—it was shaped by the spirit of Austro-fascism rather than by Nazism. Finally, Menasse also detected hope in the upheavals of the year 2000, namely the hope for Austria’s still “necessary democratization” (Menasse 2000a: 9–17). Commentators on the FPÖ’s inclusion in the new coalition government and on the politics of protest it unleashed similarly differed in their diagnoses and assessments. For some, the events of 1999 and 2000 marked Austria’s transition “from a democracy of concord to one of conflict” (Manoschek 2002: 3) and thereby the “de-Austrianization of Austrian politics” (Pelinka quoted in Markovits 2002: 96). Others formulated a somewhat more skeptical assessment of the anti-governmental protests of February 2000 (and beyond): Konrad Paul Liessmann (2005: 43) thus suggested that what appeared as cosmopolitan protest actually also revealed a “shortage of democratic maturity,” for its “democratic rebellion” was directed against a government that, although unpopular, was “entirely legal.” Ambivalences continued to define events in (and around) Austria long after February 2000. This manifested perhaps most prominently in the findings by former Finnish prime minister Martti Ahtisaari, Spanish prime minister at the time Marcelino Oreja, and German political scientist Jochen Frowein, jointly known as the “three wise men,” whose report in September 2000 brought the “sanctions” by the EU-fourteen to an end. While the “three wise men” concluded that Austria had continued to adhere to EU treaties and to respect human (and minority) rights, their assessment of the FPÖ—as a “right-wing populist party with radical elements” and at times “extremist rhetoric”—called for continuing caution (Sickinger 2008: 191; Wodak 2016: 200–201). With hindsight, the sanctions have been described as a reflection of both domestic concerns by other European politicians and of a shared commitment to EU norms (Merlingen, Mudde, and Sedelmeier 2001). What is more, it is possible to detect in the sanctions and the polarization of positions they spurred, both domestically and on European levels, a conversation at cross-purposes. As has been shown, the sanctions did not pit Austrians monolithically against their European partners, for there were both supporters and critics of these diplomatic steps in Austria and abroad. Instead, these conflicting positions arguably offered entirely incommensurate assessments. The supporters of the sanctions saw in the FPÖ’s inclusion in Austria’s new coalition government a direct affront to central values and taboos of Europe’s postwar order. Conversely, opponents of the sanctions chose not to engage in such a discourse about values and the continent’s recent history on the

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same terms, opting instead to make formal, structural arguments, insisting that the new government was a sign of a functioning democracy and the expression of a national majority’s purported “will” (see Karner 2013a). The next, at first sight arguably surprising, turn of events concerned the signing of an international agreement for compensation for victims of the Nazis’ system of forced labor and “Aryanization” (Wodak and Pelinka 2002: xix). On one level, it was of course true that the new government had thus become the first to, at long last, commit to such restitution payments, thereby reflecting once again Austria’s serious, previous reluctance in this regard and suggesting that “international pressure does pay off” (Wodak and Pelinka 2002: xix; Wodak 2002: 51). At the same time, it is also important to recognize certain continuities here, most notably with regard to the “erosion” of Austria’s “victim-doctrine,” which had been started by Franz Vranitzky (and hence the SPÖ) and which, arguably at least partly also due to the new external scrutiny the country was now under, was now taken one important step further by the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition; as pointed out soon thereafter, the question as to how widely embraced such new-found acceptance of historical responsibility had become across Austrian society had yet to be answered conclusively (Rathkolb 2005: 392). In early 2001, another “rupture” occurred that also provided an opportunity to examine this question further. Against the backdrop of the long history of anti-Semitism in (and far beyond) Austria, the latter had throughout the postwar period predominantly assumed the form of an “encoded” or “secondary antiSemitism” aimed at denial, projection, or even inversion of guilt and relativizing of the Holocaust (Gottschlich 2012: 37–39, 181). In February 2001, in the context of successive speeches Jörg Haider delivered in Vienna and in the Upper Austrian city of Ried—and particularly in the latter, in what has come to be known as Haider’s “Ash Wednesday address”—anti-Semitism reemerged from being “encoded” to a more explicit phase, whose “aggressive exclusion of Jews” and their rhetorical juxtaposition to the non-Jewish ingroup (Pelinka 2002b: 71) bore all the hallmarks of a binary identity grammar and the social closure it enables. Most notable about Haider’s speech(es) was the use of synecdoche (e.g., the rhetorical construction of an individual as purportedly standing for a much larger collective, or pars pro toto) and the use of “metonymical associative chains” (Mitten 2002b: 97–98, 131–132), other examples of which we shall yet discover and which here tapped into much older, stereotypical, and derogatory images of “the Jew” as the allegedly perennial, cosmopolitan/unpatriotic, and hostile “other” (Wodak and Reisigl 2002: 147; Rosenberger and Stöger 2002: 78, 90). In the context(s) in question, this manifested in Haider’s geographical allusion to the “east coast” of the United States, an encoded symbol of world Jewry to which, characteristic of many anti-Semitisms, conspiratorial intentions were ascribed and which Haider also claimed were directly connected to Vienna’s Social Democrats. Further, Haider infamously offered a “word play” with the first

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name of the president of Vienna’s Jewish Community (IKG), Ariel Muzicant, through which Haider activated the stereotypes of Jews as “unpatriotic,” corrupt, and hostile (Pelinka 2002b: 61). Haider’s much-discussed speech in Ried also provided, in its particular staging, another example of a palimpsestic referencing of particular historical-symbolic points. As shown by Wodak and Reisigl (2002: 138), the venue for Haider’s “Ash Wednesday address” was the city’s “Jahn gymnasium” (Jahnturnhalle): named after Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (see chapter 1), “the Turnvater” or founding-father of the German nationalist gymnastic movement, this provided another discursive layer or framing for those in Haider’s (diverse) audience welded in the history of ethnic nationalism and anti-Semitic pan-Germanism. I have emphasized throughout that the discursive and institutional (i.e., social closure-related) workings of nationalism require carefully contextualized analyses. The latter, in turn, can implicate multiple layers of context, from the local to the transnational. This also manifested with particular clarity in the early years of the new millennium. Among the much wider events that would in due course also impact Austrian (identity) politics, several stand out. These included the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which—as elsewhere—would come to reshape Austrian debates about multiculturalism, migration, and the relationship between the (thus imagined) “Western” and “Islamic worlds.” Similarly significant for events and debates in the years ahead was the introduction of the euro on 1 January 2002 as the new official currency across the Eurozone of then twelve countries. Structurally, and again transnationally, the early 2000s also continued developments traceable to Anglo-American-led shifts since the 1970s and often subsumed under “neoliberalism”: an economic-political “regime marked by privatization and commodification of public assets” and hence geared toward, in contrast to its Keynesian predecessors, the widening “financialization” of potentially all “spheres of human activity,” including education and health systems and the domain of cultural representations (Harvey quoted in Mazierska 2014: 15). Frequently opposed by many who otherwise find themselves on very different points along the traditional political spectrum, neoliberalism has arguably become too vague a term of derision and object of critique. Instead, I prefer to orient what follows toward Nancy Fraser’s to my mind considerably more nuanced and searching neo-Polanyian framework. Fraser (2012) depicts the contemporary world as experiencing a “triple movement”: between marketization (i.e., the commodification of ever widening parts of our social and natural environments), social protectionisms (i.e., various political movements attempting a “re-embedding” of economic processes in social and political structures that will include some social actors while excluding others), and attempted emancipations of those excluded either by market mechanisms or by the politics of social protectionism and closure. The tensions defining such a “triple movement” between mutually conflicting political-ideological blueprints and ever-expanding market forces can indeed be

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observed to have framed Austrian politics and public debate over the last two decades (see Karner 2016).

Ethnoscapes, (Persisting) Closure, and Self-Representations In chapter 1, I argued that Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) conceptualization of contemporary globalization as entailing the (conflict-generating) global “flow” of people, capital, technologies, ideas, and mediated information also possesses some applicability to earlier historical eras. With regard to present circumstances, and hence the particular epoch on which Appadurai focuses his assessment of global flows as also spurring powerful counterreactions, his concept of ethnoscapes—i.e., the transnational flows of people and webs of diasporic connections—is particularly pertinent to our discussion. Key demographic developments in Austria between the 1990s and the early 2000s can be summarized thusly: the eradefining increase in immigration, and one considerably above the Western European average (Weigl 2009: 47), between 1989 and 1993 has been calculated as a net growth of Austria’s population by 340,000 people; after immigration quotas introduced in 1992/93 had reduced the demographic growth-rate to some ten thousand people per year, starting in 2001 and predominantly due to innerEuropean migration-flows and family reunions, this increased very significantly again. For the period 2002–2005, annual population growth due to migration rose to 42,000 people per year,11 which then decreased significantly (i.e., by some 45 percent) in 2006 (Lebhart and Marik-Lebeck 2007a: 146-148). Such recent peaks and (relative) troughs in rates of migration of course reflect changes in policy and legislative frameworks. Translated into our central analytical terms, they reflect alternating dynamics and intensities of social closure over time. Andreas Weigl (2009: 51), for example, describes the policy changes of the 1990s as a “mix of migration prevention and a more deliberate politics of integration.” Mapped onto parts of our analytical apparatus, this showed the cooccurrence or co-application of binary/exclusivist and assimilationist identity grammars, with the former maintaining a clear separation between insiders/ citizens and outsiders/would-be-migrants and the latter pushing in the anthropophagic direction (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 388) of demanding “the stranger’s” societal absorption. In the first years of the new millennium, the ÖVP-FPÖ/BZÖ coalitions (see below) effected stricter legislation pertaining to asylum, for asylum applications had steadily increased and led to considerable backlogs in their processing, in 2003 and again in 2005 (Vogl 2007). A legislative change to the criteria for acquiring citizenship that had passed in 2005, meanwhile, had made, by international comparisons, an already strict system yet more exclusivist, leading critics to query whether this could be conducive to migrants’ integration (Çinar

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2007: 46). Two particular dimensions to such moves toward more stringent social closure vis-à-vis asylum-seekers and would-be-citizens are worth noting. First, there is arguably a logical inconsistency between, on the one hand, a system favoring “integration over new immigration” (Nowotny 2007: 68) and, on the other, a further tightening of citizenship criteria for those already settled and seeking greater societal integration. Second, particularly the stricter asylum legislation introduced in 2005 garnered a broader parliamentary consensus. Arguably, this was an indication of a new political hegemony that would come to regard certain migrations as intrinsically problematic. As much was suggested by the fact that several years on, by which time the FPÖ found itself in opposition again, the next SPÖ-ÖVP coalition program for 2007-2010 would characterize the earlier 2005 legislative changes as “a timely reaction to immigration as a global challenge” (Vogl 2007: 40). Before then, however, Austrian politics during the early 2000s had continued to generate twists and turns relevant to this discussion. In slight divergence from the most vocal critics of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition, and two years after its formation, Richard Mitten offered wider, more subtle contextualization. He argued that a majority of Haider’s voters had been motivated by opposition to “corruption and unearned party patronage” and that, while the new government represented both a “radical departure from the previous ‘Austro-Keynesian’ consensus” and a “significant shift to the right of the current European norm,” many of its policies had remained “to the left of the Clinton administration” (Mitten 2002a: 200–201). Haider had continued to draw international attention due to his contacts both with Iraq (i.e., in the post-9/11 era) and with Muammar Gaddafi, as well as for his attempts to forge a common European platform with fellow Far Right populists such as the Vlaams Blok and Lega Nord (Sickinger 2008: 196– 197, 145). Domestically, Haider had remained Carinthia’s provincial governor rather than assuming a federal ministerial post. By 2002, against the backdrop of successive regional electoral setbacks for the FPÖ, including in Vienna, the party was faced with a deep internal rift. This manifested in the so-called Knittelfeld coup, which involved party delegates making demands of their party leadership that ultimately led to the resignations of then Vice-Chancellor Susanne RiessPasser (FPÖ) and finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser (then FPÖ), the collapse of the coalition, and early elections. The latter, in November 2002, were won by the ÖVP with 42.3 percent of the vote, with the SPÖ landing 36.5 percent, and the FPÖ’s share declining by 17 percent to now only 10 percent. This was followed by a new ÖVP-FPÖ coalition, another disappointment for the FPÖ (i.e., 6.4 percent of the Austrian vote) at the 2004 European Parliament elections, and the party’s internal split. In April 2005, Haider and the FPÖ’s federal leadership at the time founded a new party, the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ), which continued as the junior coalition partner to the ÖVP in government. The remaining “old” FPÖ, meanwhile, returned to an oppositional role, with a stronger

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“national(ist) course” including “anti-foreigner agitation and fundamental criticism of the EU” (Sickinger 2008: 202–219; Beller 2006: 304–306). Concurrently, Austrian EU–approval rates had declined considerably, reaching a low point early in 2004 and leading Oliver Rathkolb (2005: 58) to conclude that Austrian identifications had “narrowed” since the 1994 referendum and that in no other EU member-state were “exclusively national identities” as prominent at the time. In May 2004, the European Union had grown by an additional ten member-states, including Austria’s four (south)easterly neighbors (i.e., the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia), with which Austrian history had been so tightly interwoven but from which the country had been separated by the Iron Curtain for most of the postwar era. In 2005, the FPÖ’s new program articulated a topos of multiple purported dangers, foremost among them the specter of “radical Islam,” but also allegedly including “hedonistic consumerism” and “aggressive capitalism” (quoted in Gärtner 2009: 135). Starting in 2004, the FPÖ had begun to campaign with slogans that revealed a rigidly binary identity grammar juxtaposing the interpellated Austrian ingroup to various Islamic threats and encroachments. Prior to the 2004 EU elections, the FPÖ thus declared that “Vienna must not become Istanbul”; the following year the party went into local Viennese elections with a slogan extolling the famous bell in the city’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral—allegedly “instead of muezzins”; a similar either-or logic reappeared the following year, prior to Austria’s 2006 parliamentary elections, in the FPÖ’s slogan calling for “home instead of Islam” (quoted in Hafez 2009a: 106). The same period also saw a noteworthy legislative decision pertaining to Austrian memory politics. A 2005 Act entitled Austrian women who had contributed to the country’s postwar reconstruction (Trümmerfrauen) to a 300euro, one-off recognition payment. As shown by Maria Pohn-Lauggas (2017: 1103), this has to be seen in the context of the post-Waldheim “entrenchment of the co-responsibility thesis”: with the (public) portrayal of “the men” as “victims” no longer possible, women had come to “replace ‘men’ in the ‘victim’ subject position,” while other wartime experiences by Austrian women, as bystanders or perpetrators, still remained undiscussed in this discourse. Collective self-understandings and cultural-religious boundaries in a period of far-reaching change and growing transnational interconnectedness had clearly become major issues of public concern and debate. The above-mentioned interplay of exclusivist and assimilationist policy logics also resurfaces when the 2005 Settlement and Residence Act, which aimed for an “exceptionally strict immigration control system,” was considered alongside the “clearly assimilatory” Integration Agreement of 2002 (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 47, 44). Yet, in times of EU membership and, hence, the freedom of movement, settlement, and employment for EU citizens, (nationalist) closure can at most be partial.12 In the Austrian context, the European Union’s southeastern expansions—their undeniable benefits to the Austrian economy notwithstanding (e.g., Rathkolb 2005:

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415)—have from the start been accompanied by concerns about their predicted effects and by attempts to curtail some of the feared or actual consequences of now potentially unrestricted migration from Eastern Europe. Following successive enlargements, Austria thus opted to apply the possible seven-year transition periods, during which citizens of the EU’s new, southeastern accession states still require(d) work permits for the Austrian labor market (e.g., Nowotny 2007: 69). Such continued attempts to regulate labor-migration in line with the “demands of the Austrian labor market” (Nowotny 2007: 73) are examples of social protectionist measures (Fraser 2012) that have historically constituted core domains of the nation-state. In the Austrian context, this can be traced at least to the 1925 Inländerprimat (citizen priority) intended to prioritize Austrians’ employment over noncitizens and the later perpetuation of an “ethnically segmented labour market” (Herzog-Punzenberger 2009: 20). What has been novel about the contemporary context, however, has been that historical restrictions previously applied to practically all subgroups within the larger category of “noncitizens” now acquired an “expiration date” for some—that is, for those from new EU accession states; with that, social closure in the area of employment became more partial (i.e., eventually enforceable only on non-EU citizens), and the (neo-Polanyian) “pendulum” was swinging somewhat from social protectionism toward widening marketization. This having been said, widespread perceptions of these major political and policy changes of the early twenty-first century came to focus not only on expanding markets and employment competition; other topoi of perceived threats as pertaining to everyday life-worlds had also come to feature prominently. The following readers’ letters published in Austria’s (by-far) most widely read newspaper13 epitomize, as typical formulations, how anxieties about EU enlargements and about the “open borders” of the Schengen zone are rhetorically invoked as supposed “explanations” of a range of (negative) contemporary experiences: I have already been mugged three times in [Vienna’s] sixteenth district . . . And I have been burgled, too . . . [O]pen borders in all directions. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 1 June 2008: 30) Sixty Turkish and Albanian Muslims beat up 25 Austrian youths; a drug-dealing, Nigerian asylum-seeker stabs a young Austrian because he does not want to buy drugs . . . All this one gets to read nearly daily in the Krone, yet the government ignores it. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 5 June 2008: 32) Growing crime rates show that Austria has become a “self-service shop” for criminals. In Vienna 96 percent of burglaries and 99 percent of thefts go unpunished . . . Open borders make things easier than ever for professional criminals. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 5 June 2008: 32) We have often shown our humanism, but we cannot host any more refugees. Moreover, there is a rising tide of crime, mostly committed by gangs from the east, which is

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tormenting our population and police. Austria’s “boat is full.” Other European countries now need to take in refugees, as Austria has done for long. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 25 September 2009: 29)

Several discursive features are worth noting about recurring formulations such as these. First, they argue for firmer social closure (e.g., against open Schengen borders, for less immigration) along national lines. Second, they formulate their demands through a rigidly national deixis that enables “positive self- and negative other-presentation[s]” (Wodak 2007: 662) in line with a binary identity grammar. Third, such accounts articulate real fears and often connect with actual incidents. This having been said, such statements frame particular incidents in a fashion that is characteristic of much (nationalist) arguing: namely by decontextualizing and drawing vastly generalizing inferences from them. One may term this nationalism’s inductive trap: building on Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov’s (2004) observations of a “cognitive turn” in the study of ethnicity, i.e., one cognizant of psychological insights into humans’ classificatory propensities and schematic interpretations of their surroundings and experiences, nationalist discourse can be observed to often select very particular episodes or examples and to formulate unjustly general(izing) propositions pertinent to the larger category to which the incident or individual in question (supposedly) belongs, on their basis. Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2009: 93) describe this as the “pars pro toto fallacy.” According to Heribert Schiedel (2011: 40), today’s extreme Right across Europe applies such inductive thinking in its Islamophobia, whereby select experiences or the actions of individual Muslims become the basis for totalizing statements about “all Muslims” and “Islam” in its imagined and ideologically homogenized entirety.14 Peter Stiegnitz (2011: 20) goes one step further in arguing that generalizations enable the construction of a pariah “other,” which in turn can enable “fascist mindsets.” Against the different backdrops sketched above (i.e., significant demographic changes, equally important policy shifts, the defining political events—both domestically and internationally—since the start of the new millennium), certain social domains have (re)acquired particular prominence in public Austrian perceptions and debates concerning migration and ethnic pluralism. Among those domains, schools and urban spaces assume especially prominent places. The role of schools in late nineteenth-century nationalist imaginations and mobilizing strategies is well researched (e.g., Judson 2006; King 2002) and was emphasized in chapter 2. In a further instance of the palimpsestic, though not necessarily historically accurate or self-conscious referencing and partial reusing of older ideas and concerns, nationalist criticism of what are portrayed as signs of an allegedly “failing multiculturalism” have come to focus on classrooms once again. In a topos of the multilingual-and-hence-dysfunctional-school, multiculturalism is constructed as a “failed experiment,” and demographic fears and projections are formulated. This now frequently recurring topos has been especially prominent

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in Austria’s most widely read newspaper. In February 2010, for instance, the regional Styrian supplement to the Kronen Zeitung reported that the proportion of “foreign children” in local schools was larger than ever before, amounting to 90 percent in some schools in Graz, Austria’s second largest city, and causing allegedly inevitable problems of different “worlds clashing” (Schwaiger 2010). Several weeks earlier, a reader’s letter had pleaded that Austria should follow Italian plans to introduce an upper limit of 30 percent “foreign children” per classroom, arguing that German language competence was a prerequisite for integration, and that classrooms comprising a majority of non-German speaking children were a “veritable catastrophe,” both educationally and societally (Kronen Zeitung reader, 12 January 2010: 22). Another “metonymical associative chain” (Mitten 2002b: 125)15 that claims supposed connections between factually disparate phenomena in the service of a purportedly comprehensive “explanation” (see Karner 2011: 93) simplistically connects educational matters to demographic change and political positions (or even conspiracies). The following reader’s letter, published a few months later, provides a typical formulation of this: Things keep getting worse in Vienna. Now a separate Islamic quarter including a Quranic school, nursery and supermarket will be built in the Viennese district of Floridsdorf. Desperate local residents are ignored . . . The Left’s calculations are working out, their multicultural program is materializing. The Viennese will soon be a minority, Turkish and other immigrants are assuming power in Vienna’s districts. Goodbye, old, beautiful Vienna! (Kronen Zeitung reader, 10 May 2010: 18)

Such topoi qualify as nationalist, irrespective of their enunciators’ consciously articulated political preferences, because their implicit premises include the following: first, and in a neo-romantic vein, the assumption that identities are singular and determined by one’s mother tongue, thereby treating bi- or multilingualism or more complex, “hyphenated” identifications as problematic; second, implicit in such arguments is what Ernest Gellner (1983: 49) defined as nationalism’s essence—the attempted “fusion of will, culture and polity.” This here reappears in a politics of the classroom or the neighborhood that, irrespective of what educational science or urban sociology may have to say about both the challenges and potential benefits of inter-linguistic learning (e.g., Herzog-Punzenberger 2009: 15) and ethnic pluralism, wants the nation-state’s dominant, official language to be more than the main medium of instruction, namely a reflection of the ethnolinguistic background of the recipients of pedagogical instruction or of an area’s residents. It is only in light of these implicit premises that the a priori assumption that multilinguistic classrooms or religiously diverse neighborhoods are inevitably problematic can make sense.16 A similar discursive logic is at play in the FPÖ’s definition of language as a, or arguably the, central marker of a person’s belonging to a larger, historically grounded collective:

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We reject multicultural, parallel societies and the mixing of religious and philosophical worldviews . . . Language is culture’s most important medium. Our mother-tongue is the result of our being shaped by our biographies and families. It is the language, in which one thinks, feels and dreams . . . [and] the determining criterion for one’s ascription to a cultural community. It is not just a communicative medium, but a reservoir of inter-generational, cultural transmission . . . Thus, the preservation of the German language is a central educational task, in homes, nurseries, schools and universities. (FPÖ Handbuch 2013, quoted in Auinger 2017: 42–43)

In addition to operating with a binary identity grammar of mutually exclusive in- and out-groups, this is a clear example of the palimpsestic rewriting of older, romantic postulates (Gellner 1998: 6) of the “organic,” ascribed, and hence nonnegotiable ties that purportedly anchor individuals in “their” ethnolinguistic community. This is part of nationalism’s very ontological essence, arguably its core assumption about the world, reality, and individuals’ place within it: it is what has been called a “national imperative” (Aftenberger 2007: 75, 121); its master-topos or central premise directs all resulting (and often circular) arguments about, and demands of, “the world.” Concurrently, in the early years of the new millennium, a growing field of migration studies had begun to record the structural conditions and lived experiences confronting migrants in Austria. The country’s second Migration and Integration Report documented further demographic developments and shifts to the main migratory routes to Austria. It was thus recorded that by 2007 the proportion of non-nationals and of residents born outside of Austria amounted to some 10 and 16 percent of the total population respectively (Lebhart and Marik-Lebeck 2007b: 168, 181); that Austria continued to attract some of the highest proportions of asylum-seekers not only in Europe but across the industrialized world (Kohlbacher 2007: 163); and also that, in structural terms, entirely differently positioned German nationals (i.e., as EU citizens) had come to constitute the largest group of new migrants between 2002 and 2005 (Lebhart and Marik-Lebeck 2007a: 149). In a more critical vein, there were acknowledgements of the structural disadvantages experienced by many migrants (Fassmann and Reeger 2007: 200); of the growing prominence of self-employment among migrants who had suffered discrimination in the labor market and unemployment (Biffl 2007: 282); that although “immigrant ghettoes” were largely absent in Austria, the living situations faced by former “guest workers” (i.e., especially from Turkey) had improved only relatively little (Kohlbacher and Reeger 2007: 327); that educational disadvantages—compared to the majority population— had been passed on by former “guest workers” to the next generation(s), despite widening participation in educational institutions (Weiss and Unterwurzacher 2007: 240–241). Moreover, it was also recorded that material disadvantages often persisted following the acquisition of citizenship (Heitzmann and Förster 2007: 301). Translated into our analytical terms, the latter two sets of findings

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warrant additional commentary. Evidence of a persisting gap in educational attainment levels suggests that social closure, which of course is by no means in all cases necessarily or consciously intended by policy makers or majority populations, also implicates—in Bourdieu-ian terminology—unequally distributed social and cultural capital that can play a role in perpetuating structural disadvantages. Second, Heitzmann and Förster’s findings (inadvertently) suggest that ethnicity, rather than citizenship, here operates as the basis for social closure (also see Hinsch 2009: 37). Conceptually, Austria’s second Migration and Integration Report also pointed out that the precise meaning and workings of “integration” were anything but clear or universally agreed upon (Thienel 2007: 83; Fassmann and Reeger 2007: 183). The report’s main conclusions were that Austria had, involuntarily, become a “country of immigration,” with one of the highest proportions of non-national and “foreign-born” residents across the EU; that male unemployment rates and the risk of impoverishment among non-EU nationals gave cause for concern; and that occupational segregation17 correlated with residential segregation (Fassmann 2007b: 394ff.). It is against these backdrops that a phenomenon anticipated in the introduction to this chapter needs to be read: the growing prominence of migrants’ voices and artistic-cultural self-representations in Austria’s public sphere (see Karner 2011: 205–229). This has been particularly significant in a context in which, as captured in a 2008 report by Austria’s Interior Ministry, (former) migrants still found themselves marginalized as political actors, participating in larger city councils but at the time still absent from the Austrian parliament (Hutter and Perchinig 2008). Second, the field of cultural-discursive representations was beginning to be recognized as a force impacting interethnic relations. Thus, media depictions of migrants as “objects” (rather than subjects) of representation and, in invocation of long-established topoi, as threats associated with criminality— sometimes in contradiction to available statistics (e.g., Lang and Lohlker 2008: 83)—were now receiving critical scrutiny (e.g., Sandrisser and Winkler 2008: 196–198). Here again, the widely debated “Islamic other” had come to occupy central discursive space.18 It has been estimated that between 1981 and 2009, the Muslim proportion of Austria’s population had grown from 1 percent to 6.2 percent (or some 516,000 people); while this is clearly above the European average, significant sections of the public have yet to acknowledge, let alone embrace, this significant and internally heterogeneous Islamic presence (Heine et al. 2012: 12–19). More productively, Austria’s formal recognition of the Islamic community, historically traceable to the Habsburgs’ Islamgesetz of 1912 (see chapter 2), is sometimes considered exemplary and conducive to interreligious dialogue (Sandrisser and Winkler 2008: 188). Rather than also supporting closer integration, however, significant parts of the political spectrum have moved toward further polarization. In January 2008, the (now former) Styrian FPÖ politician Susanne Winter drew international attention with highly offen-

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sive, Islamophobic statements, for which she was subsequently found guilty of incitement to hatred. A year later, the FPÖ’s slogan for the European elections declared that the Occident was to remain in “Christian hands” (Schiedel 2011: 40-41). Meanwhile, such discursive demands also began to crystallize institutionally. This was shown by local and regional political developments, including a residents’ initiative against the proposed expansion of a cultural center run by a Turkish-Islamic association in Vienna’s twentieth district (Kübel 2009), and Carinthia’s and Vorarlberg’s regional assemblies’ use of legislation pertaining to public space to prevent the (possible) construction of minarets (Hafez and Potz 2009). Such variously attempted closure has concurrently been challenged by “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser 1992), in which the (historically) marginalized acquire and utilize discursive and cultural means of self-representation. Illustrative contributions to such subaltern counterdiscourses have included regional Islamic communities, such as in Styria and Carinthia, organizing public events to reflect—across religious boundaries—on “Islam in Europe and Austria” (Benedek and Mahmoud 2011). There have also been attempts to reveal and deconstruct persisting negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in the public domain in general (Bunzl and Hafez 2009; Lohlker 2009), and in school textbooks in particular (Heine 2009; Pratl 2009; Markom and Weinhäupl 2009). Arguably, few stereotypes are now more prominent than negative views of veiled Muslim women as the “metonym of the postmodern stranger” (Wodak 2016: 171). To counter this, there have been research initiatives to speak “with” rather than “about” Muslim women wearing the hijab, to provide them with a voice and thereby challenge prejudices by revealing Muslim women’s agency and heterogeneity (Stuiber 2014: 28). Perhaps most powerfully, publications have emerged from within Austria’s Turkish community that have pointed at unjustified generalizations—or what I earlier termed the inductive trap—that often characterize perceptions among the dominant majority: once again, internal Turkish and Islamic diversities are here presented as much-needed correctives to highly simplistic clichés that capture, at most, a subsection of the communities in question (Özkan 2011: 96-111). The following snippet, from another contribution to this genre of subaltern self-representations, reveals a discursive interplay of an identity grammar of hybridity (i.e., “both-x-and-yidentifications”), concurrent ethnonational deixis, and essentialist topoi: We are younger . . . Turkish culture will influence Central Europe more and more. It won’t hurt. Neither Cologne Cathedral nor St. Stephan’s Cathedral will be turned into minarets . . . Your numbers keep shrinking . . . I am Austrian-Turkish, Turkish-Austrian, Kurdish-Turkish, Kurdish-Austrian and Austrian-Kurdish. We no longer think in yesterday’s categories . . . We are hungrier. While the young are here spoilt by the welfare state, young Turks learn to struggle. We are a people that gets stuck in. (Türkmen 2012: 27, 35, 53, 55–56)

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This particular subaltern counternarrative shares the much more widely circulating perception of far-reaching demographic changes afoot; alongside its articulation of multidimensional, complex self-identifications, there is also an essentialist logic at work here that monolithically ascribes singular qualities to ethnonational groups (i.e., “we are a people that. . .”). But, in contrast to nationalist discourses that constitute my focus in this book, the changes in question are here not interpreted through a (master-)topos of anxieties and threats. Social closure entails the “naturalization of asymmetrical power-relations” (Aftenberger 2007: 17); its workings involve “hierarchization, exclusion, [coercive] inclusion, as well as a normalization of racist practices” (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2008: 7). Translated into my analytical terms, the latter observation reemphasizes that different identity grammars (e.g., hierarchical, binary, assimilationist) can be drawn upon concurrently in the service of the “monopolization” of advantages (Murphy 1988) by a (dominant) ingroup, thereby also pointing toward some of the interconnections between the discursive and the institutional serving a politics of social closure. This discussion has also documented both the malleability and the contestability of social closure as effected discursively and institutionally. We next return to further contextual factors to the various manifestations of early twenty-first century politics of closure.

Further Crises Recent history has seen competing “localizing strategies” (Eriksen 2015) that variously respond to the social shifts and flows of contemporary globalization. This manifested with particular clarity in the 2006 Austrian parliamentary elections that led to a new grand coalition of SPÖ and ÖVP.19 An analysis (Karner 2008) of press coverage at the time and of the main parties’ electoral programs revealed several context-defining debates: focused on the environment, food production (e.g., the popularity of local, organic food), migration, unemployment, and higher education (i.e., concerning tuition fees or national quotas for medical students), they all reflected concerns about the local impact of global market forces. For instance, there was an implicit consensus spanning the political spectrum that water should remain a public national good and not become a commodity for the international market; there was similarly widespread opposition to “factory farming” and genetically modified crops, both of which were associated with international “agribusiness” and contrasted to Austria’s smaller-scale, purportedly ethically and environmentally more responsible farming practices (Karner 2008: 165, 167). The common denominator, then, underpinning a range of debates were profound anxieties about the commodification—in Polanyian terminology—of previously locally “embedded” goods, production processes, and asso-

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ciated social relationships. Further, the different 2006 party manifestos offered diverse visions of how to run, or return to, a more “moral” (and often nationally focused) economy. The questions as to who was to be included, on whose terms, and how the perceived excesses of global capitalism were to be held in check took center stage in these competing blueprints for socioeconomic alternatives. The emerging situation corroborated, yet again, that nationalism often acts as one of several competing forces in strongly contested political fields. This crystallized particularly over issues of migration, a topic very differently addressed, but in all cases included, in the social visions proposed by the competing parties. More accurately, it was especially in relation to migration and multiculturalism that inter-party polarization occurred: the FPÖ’s and BZÖ’s exclusivist, socialclosure-oriented demands to curtail further immigration and their opposition to “radical Islam” thus stood in sharp contrast to the Greens’ pluralism, their calls for migrants’ rights, and definition of Austria as an “immigration country” (Karner 2008: 171–172). Key events over the ensuing years showed, time and again, that perceptions or experiences of crises—increasingly transnational and often emanating elsewhere—galvanize political consciousness, polarize, and add to the appeal of nationalist claims and argumentative positions. This became apparent in the context and aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008 and, particularly, throughout the far-reaching crises of sovereign debt and austerity and Eurozone “bailout programs” from 2009/2010 onward. Ever since, and connected both to the global economic downturn and the eurozone’s structural weaknesses, the protracted “euro-crisis” has been at the forefront of public debate not only in Europe’s most acutely crisis-stricken countries, most notably Greece, but also in other eurozone member-states, including Austria, whose dominant public self-conceptions include that of a purportedly reliable, resilient Nettozahler (net contributor) now tied to southern European economies seen as fiscally irresponsible liabilities. Prominent Austrian interpretations of the “euro-crisis” have thus included the FPÖ’s “moral condemnation” of Greece combined with the party’s self-understanding as a solitary political force pursuing a “national rescuemission” (Auinger 2017: 135, 154). Similar topoi have appeared with great regularity outside of party politics in the realm of everyday political discussions, as evidenced by the following paradigmatic formulations encountered on the readers’ letters pages of Austria’s most widely-read newspaper: Greece’s bankruptcy has shown that the EU is a pack of lies . . . other Mediterranean countries will also receive Austrian tax-money . . . We should either get out of the EU immediately or Greece should be removed from it. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 3 May 2010: 23) The Greek and Irish bailouts are causing the EU to hemorrhage . . . Blood-donors only give as much as they comfortably can. The European donor-countries, by contrast, are

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now incurring unmanageable debts themselves. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 2 December 2010: 28)

With the crisis unabated, the trope of Greece as a “bottomless pit” became ever more prominent (e.g., Schumi 2012) and some everyday assessments on offer clearer in their stereotypical topoi and binary identity grammar: Greece joined the Eurozone through fraud, by faking financial figures . . . The Greek state is largely premised on mismanagement, using the Eurozone to accumulate further debt that is also serviced by Austrian taxpayers . . . And it is not just Greece . . . Greece symbolizes more than a Euro without a future. It is unacceptable for a few countries, like Austria, to permanently have to pay for other countries’ “bailout.” (Kronen Zeitung reader, 26 June 2012: 29)

Many such arguments share one of nationalism’s central topoi: its constructions of a deeply troubled present, juxtaposed to positive views of the past, and at least implicit calls for far-reaching, nation-focused changes that allegedly offer a better future. When the 2008 ratification of the EU-Lisbon Treaty, which aimed for a more efficiently functioning European Union, was opposed by a campaign titled “Rescue Austria,”20 this discursive pattern was most apparent (Karner 2010). In some typical formulations, nostalgia was combined with the projection of a range of perceived present ills onto the outside and onto current political elites: Austria has changed radically over recent decades: arrogant politicians are merely led by the EU . . . [T]he finance minister wastes millions on European projects while 400,000 Austrians live in poverty . . . The health system is misused . . . most media only report what the government and the EU want them to. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 6 June 2008: 25) People in our country were considerably better off in the 1960s than today . . . [N]ews about our politicians were largely positive . . . whereas today they just make up the numbers at EU-summits. There were no concerns about UV-light, HIV . . . genetically modified food, nuclear accidents or rising crime. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 31 May 2008: 31)

The national(ist) deixis is as clear in these examples as is their view of EU accession as the historical turning point marking the start of a period of perceived decline. More generally, however, positions vis-à-vis the EU and Austria’s continued membership are varied, hotly contested, and considerably more nuanced than their conceptualization as either “pro-” or “anti-EU” acknowledges (Karner 2017; 2018). Such discussions are part and parcel of wider debates about markets, contemporary anxieties, and the question as to how closely perceived political realities and preferred societal blueprints are seen to align or diverge. Instrumentalist cost-benefit calculations (i.e., of EU membership and claims about the potential [non]viability of the national economy outside of the European

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market) are part of such debates, as are characteristic narratives of Austria’s recent past (Karner 2013b). In the run-up to the 2009 European elections, the latter were again regularly discernible: Our beautiful Austria is being trampled on . . . by the EU’s greedy bureaucrats . . . and by foreigners overrunning our country, many of whom do not integrate . . . We were happy, with seven million inhabitants, now we are more than eight million . . . jobs and resources are getting scarcer . . . in the evenings one is scared to leave one’s home . . . Let us therefore quit the EU and close our border again. Multiculturalism is dead! Back in our monarchy, national pluralism worked because those were people from the same cultural area. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 7 May 2009: 37) Since our EU-accession . . . the decline of Austria’s identity has unfolded . . . Rising crime . . . the opening of borders and gangs of burglars from more recent EU memberstates . . . Our small- and medium-sized companies are disappearing, so are jobs . . . the financial crisis cannot be handled . . . With the EU-elections approaching, all parties should declare if they will represent Austria or the EU’s financial interests. Better yet, we might consider exiting this so far merely damaging union. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 29 April 2009: 25)

By creating discursive chains (Karner 2011) or “metonymical associations” (Mitten 2002b: 125), arguments such as these connect disparate phenomena (e.g., EU membership, immigration, unemployment, rising crime) as though they were causally connected, rather than, at most, partly co-occurring or being unrelated. Concurrently, such arguments articulate political visions—in the cases above, those included advocating an exit from the EU. As we see in the next and final chapter, the nationalist view of time and recent history—as purportedly having witnessed a steep decline since a happier postwar period (i.e., the trope of the island of the blessed), accompanied by calls for far-reaching changes including a return to national concerns and citizens’ entitlements (at others’ exclusion)—has continued to play a prominent, arguably decisive, role over the last few years. What has come to be described as today’s “renationalization” (Hartleb 2012), to which we turn next, requires further discussion, in terms both of its institutional logic and its argumentative structures.

Notes 1. It is important to (re)clarify my definition of the longue durée, which is a shorthand for the present book’s unusually wide historical coverage stretching from the end of the eighteenth until the early twenty-first centuries. This differs from the even longer longue durée encountered in the (meta)theoretical debates that continue to shape nationalism studies: there, longue durée is typically associated with theoretical positions, most notably with Anthony Smith’s (1986; 2008) ethnosymbolist approach, that insist that the prominence of “nationhood and nationalisms” cannot be sufficiently explained exclusively by moder-

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

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nity’s defining characteristics, including “industrialisation, secularization or urbanisation” (Malešević 2018: 292–293). Ruth Wodak (2017: 19) has elaborated by defining topoi as “semiotically manifested figures of thought” applied to political topics and as “conclusion rules,” typical of a “speech community,” that can be “either sound or fallacious.” It is stating the obvious to point out that in all the contexts examined here, nationalist closure has operated in parallel to other systems of exclusion and monopolization (e.g., those of class, gender, etc.). In this and the following chapters, Austria’s most widely read newspaper, the Kronen Zeitung, and its readers’ letters pages occupy a prominent place. The Kronen Zeitung has acquired a reputation for being the “world champion in circulation” relative to population size, consistently reaching just over 40 percent of Austria’s population (Rathkolb 2005: 241); its political orientations have been described as increasingly populist, rightwing, and at times xenophobic over recent decades (Rittberger 2009), and it tends to be strongly EU-skeptic (Karner 2010, 2013b). The paper’s daily readers’ letters show “ordinary social actors” partaking in public debate on “sensitive topics” (see Lynn and Lea 2003: 430). At the same time, the exhibition, as well as a subsequent one that started in Vienna in April 2002, saw polarized receptions, juxtaposing what may be termed a critical historical consciousness to a highly defensive one (see Karner 2005a: 415). Recent research has shown that delays to, and a reluctance concerning, restitution had formed part of a “political architecture” in postwar Austria that had continued to reflect enduring and widespread anti-Semitism (Serloth 2018). On the issue of restitution, also see Jabloner et al. 2003; and Pawlowsky and Wendelin 2005. It should be noted, though, that FPÖ voters’ various motivations continued to matter, with 47 percent indicating that they had been convinced by the party’s immigration policies, but with 66 percent declaring its “campaign against entrenched power” (Mitten 2002a: 185) even more important. Reinhold Gärtner (2009: 34) has underlined how perturbing the very need for such “distancing” by an Austrian coalition fifty-five years after the end of Nazism was, reflecting a continuing “sloppiness” in sections of Austrian society in their treatment of national socialism. All translations from German are the author’s. Hella Pick (2000b) also argued that more plausible historical comparisons may be drawn between Haider and Karl Lueger, in terms of their respective rhetorics and mobilizing strategies. The year 2003 was soon thereafter identified as the start to a “record period” that saw the largest annual numbers of migrants settle in Austria in the entire postwar era (Fassmann 2007a: 13). This is not for lack of trying: most recently, in late May 2018, Austria’s then new vice-chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, suggested—to some international consternation—that the EU’s fundamental freedoms also had “negative consequences” and could be rediscussed (ORF News 2018a). All translations of media materials, including readers’ letters, are mine. Schiedel contrasts this with anti-Semitism, whose discursive workings he describes as “deductive” whereby individual Jews are “pressed” into historically long-established, highly negative stereotypes of Judaism (2011: 73).

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15. Also conceptually relevant here is Krzyżanowski and Wodak’s invocation (2009: 19) of the Duisburg studies of “thematically interrelated . . . discourse strands,” especially in crime reporting, and their articulation of “collective symbols” and “cultural stereotypes”; also see Amesberger and Halbmayr (2008: 64) on how select ethnic groups are ascribed considerable “associative potential” by and among (powerful) outsiders. 16. As with all topoi, (seemingly) corroborating “evidence” for such arguments is liberally cited, while (inconvenient) counterevidence gets ignored. 17. Also see Weigl (2009: 68, 99) for more details on Austria’s “ethnically segmented labour market.” 18. Other, non-Muslim self-representations also drew more public attention in the same period. These included Carinthian-Slovenian reflections on bilingualism (e.g., Kramer 2004), particularly significant in light of the region’s long-standing reluctance to comply with the Slovenian minority’s constitutionally guaranteed language rights (Vouk 2004), and Jörg Haider’s politics as regional governor (Obid, Messner, and Leben 2002); a series of exhibitions in 2006 tracing the history of the African diaspora in Austria (JohnstonArthur and Sternfeld 2006); and, though these do not qualify as subaltern representations, reflections by prominent Germans—now part of the second largest migrant community—on their “third space” in Austria (Steffen 2009; Fenderl 2009; Hartnack 2009). 19. The results of the 2006 elections were as follows: SPÖ, 35.3 percent; ÖVP, 34.3 percent; Greens, 11.1 percent; FPÖ, 11 percent; BZÖ, 4.1 percent. 20. This can be read as another palimpsestically rewritten topos: i.e., of the much older notion of an ethnonational ingroup allegedly requiring protection against “outside forces,” which has a long genealogy that included Christian Social calls to “rescue Vienna” in the 1920s as well as the FPÖ’s “Austria first” petition in 1993 (Karner 2010: 391).

Chapter 7

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his final chapter brings the discussion up to the time of writing (i.e., summer 2018). The present historical juncture is being described, plausibly and with growing frequency, as a moment or era of renationalization (e.g., see Hosking 2016). The momentous political shifts of recent years witnessed across the world that derive their appeal to a significant extent from their opposition to the “flows” (Appadurai 1990) of contemporary globalization are too many and too obvious to require listing. In keeping with this book’s empirical focus, I here continue my examination of the Austrian versions of such politics. Concurrently, the remainder of this book also maintains the conceptual trajectory sketched in previous chapters, insofar as the combined insights enabled by my major theoretical borrowings and propositions are further illustrated in what follows. The politics of social closure, articulated through various topoi and identity grammars at work in nationalist discourse, and the latter’s palimpsestlike, partial, and selective rewritings of older ideational strands and historical references, will all be shown to have helped shape Austria in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Once again, the additional insights offered by the longue durée perspective developed in this book are significant: interpretative/ argumentative patterns and mobilizing logics already familiar from earlier historical eras and examined in previous chapters here reappear, albeit in new contexts and guises. In methodological terms, this chapter makes more extensive and systematic use of the very large corpus of data already drawn upon in chapter 6. This corpus comprises Austria’s public broadcast and main print media (i.e., daily and weekly, broadsheet and tabloid) since the turn of the millennium. Within such a wealth of materials, I here focus more narrowly on how, at key points during the last decade (i.e., since 2009), questions of national identity—and hence in-

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evitably issues of both inclusion and exclusion—and of collective memory have been written about, and which political responses to contemporary changes and crises have been proposed and debated. With my focus thus firmly on political and wider public debate in Austria during the last decade, the particular sources of data underpinning this chapter include the following: news provided by the aforementioned public broadcasting network ORF in its national and regional “branches,” which those on the (Far) Right often accuse of being “too far to the left”; the quality dailies Der Standard (i.e., left-leaning, liberal), Die Presse (liberalbourgeois and conservative in its historical self-understanding and general positioning), and the (liberal) Kurier; the weekly newsmagazine Profil; the Viennese, left-leaning weekly Falter; and—arguably most centrally, and continuing with one of the previous chapter’s foci—the tabloid daily Kronen Zeitung. This selection of sources again reflects one of my central premises: the insistence that nationalist discourse is most comprehensively captured by examining the wider political fields within which nationalisms constitute merely one among several competing ideological currents. As in previous chapters, I here again select particular key and recurring formulations for closer discussion; while the former have contributed to or reflect important discursive shifts, the latter are typical of frequently encountered argumentative patterns. Among the above-listed media sources underpinning the following discussion, Austria’s most widely circulating newspaper, the daily Kronen Zeitung (or Krone) needs additional commentary. The paper has acquired the dubious status of the “world champion in circulation” relative to population size, given that it has over time consistently reached some 40 percent of Austria’s population, and even 43.3 percent in 2000 with a print run of 1.08 million copies a day at the time (Rathkolb 2005: 241). The paper’s political influence has led to conclusions that Jörg Haider’s rise to political prominence would have been “hard to imagine” without the Krone’s implicit ideological support (Rittberger 2009: 50–52). Given not only Austria’s but indeed Europe’s subsequent Haiderization (Wodak 2016: 18), which describes a neo-nationalist shift toward right-wing populism, the paper’s wider significance is difficult to overstate. Critical commentators tend to summarize the Kronen Zeitung’s ideological leanings as being neoliberal, EU-skeptical, and (at times) xenophobic. Reinhold Gärtner (2009: 62), for example, has detected this, paradigmatically, in a caricature published in the paper in the early 1990s, which juxtaposed a “small Austrian” (wearing traditional costume) with two rats displaying the words “foreigner” and “criminality.” Michael Rittberger traces the origins of a xenophobic “style” in the Krone to the period after 1986 (i.e., the year of both the Waldheim controversy and Haider’s rise to the top of the FPÖ’s ranks). Thereafter, according to Rittberger (2009: 46–56), the Kronen Zeitung began to synthesize populist criticism of political elites, endorsement of “the new neoliberal paradigm,” and—against the backdrop of rising unemployment figures—increasingly exclusivist discourses vis-à-vis “foreigners.” All this

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having been said, it would be wrong to assume absolute discursive consistency here. Instead, the Kronen Zeitung has also shown occasional ideological switches and ambivalences. For instance, Falter editor Armin Thurnher (2000: 40), reflecting on the events of 2000, detected a “paradox” in the fact that the Kronen Zeitung, having helped the FPÖ’s rise to prominence and power, eventually warned against the party’s inclusion in a coalition. More recently, with regard to the paper’s position on the European Union, close analyses of the Krone’s coverage, commentaries, and readers’ letters have shown them to be overwhelmingly EU-skeptical and sometimes positively EU-phobic, but to also allow space for occasional (more pro-European) counterdiscourses (Karner 2010; 2013b).1 At the same time, as we turn to the present, what may be termed the domain of “traditional” media clearly no longer suffices, if it ever did, to fully capture the discursive workings of nationalist or any kind of politics. Consequently, and to record some particularities of our digital age, which the neo-nationalist (Far) Right has been particularly adept at utilizing, this chapter also begins to direct its analytical attention, in part, toward some of nationalism’s manifestations in the social media realm. Thus, we turn to a discussion of a number of discursive shifts and further crystallizations that have occurred over recent years. While closely and inexorably tied to the (transnational) crises that are shaping our present in the early twenty-first century, the materials examined below also reveal some remarkable (if partial) discursive and political continuities with earlier eras.

(Residual) Pan-Germanism: Identity Grammars and Palimpsests The year 2008 was yet another tumultuous one in Austria’s recent history. Against the wider backdrop of the global financial crisis that had started the previous summer, domestic and European politics were also shaped by the already mentioned Lisbon Treaty, designed to enable the enlarged EU’s more efficient functioning, and widespread opposition in and beyond Austria—often articulated through a nostalgic glorification of the recent past2—against further European integration (Karner 2010). In June 2008, then SPÖ Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and his later successor, and minister of infrastructure and transport at the time, Werner Faymann published a letter in the Kronen Zeitung announcing that any further amendments to the European Union’s reform treaty likely to affect Austria would require a national referendum. This was part of the circumstances precipitating the collapse of the conflict-ridden SPÖ-ÖVP coalition in July, followed by snap elections in late September 2008. Seeing heavy losses for both SPÖ (29.26 percent of the vote) and ÖVP (25.98 percent), the elections also resulted in 17.54 percent of votes being cast for the FPÖ, 10.7 percent for the BZÖ, and 10.43 percent for the Greens. Another grand coalition government of

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SPÖ and ÖVP, with Werner Faymann assuming the chancellorship, was formed in early December. In October 2008, only a few days after leading the BZÖ to a strong electoral showing (i.e., an increase from 4.1 percent of the popular vote in 2006 to 10.7 percent in 2008), Jörg Haider died in a car crash on the outskirts of Klagenfurt. As we have seen, Haider’s formation of the BZÖ in 2005 had split Austria’s drittes Lager (third camp, i.e., the country’s third ideological “camp” historically steeped in pan-Germanism). In this context, a key difference in the BZÖ’s and the “old” FPÖ’s respective discursive emphases and trajectories is worth noting and highly pertinent to the longue durée perspective developed in this book. Starting in the 1990s, Haider had, as we saw in chapter 5, begun to reorient the FPÖ away from its traditional pan-Germanism and toward an “austro-nationalist discourse” (Bauböck 2002: 232). Parallel to the party’s split into the Haider-led BZÖ and the remaining FPÖ in 2005, the latter also began to reaffirm a “German-völkisch” self-understanding (Schiedel 2017). The FPÖ’s (implicit) return to, or palimpsestic rewriting of, its pan-Germanic roots has since been reflected in its repeatedly stressed commitment to the Austrian Republic, which it concurrently defines as “tied into the German cultural community” (quoted in Auinger 2017: 96).3 Translated into some of the conceptual terms that have guided my analyses in this book, we here detect another grammar of identity, namely what Baumann and Gingrich (2004) have described as encompassment. In such a discursive logic, an overarching category is assumed to subsume, or, in some cases—paradigmatically in the steeply hierarchical Indian caste system—to potentially subjugate, internal subgroups that are constructed as part and parcel of an encompassing ingroup. Emphasizing the topos of ethnolinguistic unity, rather than social hierarchies and subjugation, encompassment manifests in the FPÖ’s now recurring definition of Austria as culturally embedded in a larger, German(-speaking) “community” and its history.4 The last decade has seen various moments when this grammar of encompassment manifested in the FPÖ’s discursive universe. A revealing example involved Martin Graf (FPÖ), a deputy speaker of the Austrian parliament from 2008 until 2013 and member of the Far Right fraternity Olympia (Gärtner 2009: 32), who in an interview in 2009 had the following reflections on South Tyrol / Alto Adige to offer: South Tyrol has a German-speaking majority population . . . and is currently Italian territory . . . I am still a firm believer in national self-determination. The South Tyroleans have been deprived of that . . . since the end of World War I . . . for political considerations the German population of Europe seems to get fewer rights granted than other peoples . . . Austria’s role as a protector of the German majority of South Tyrol should be strengthened . . . the reason why the South Tyroleans are well off . . . is because they are a hard-working people . . . I support the peaceful right to national self-determination. If this results in shifting borders, because the population decides that way, I don’t see a problem . . . The same thing happened during the collapse of

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Yugoslavia. And the rights of Slovenes, the Croats and other peoples were granted, why are the South Tyroleans deprived of those? . . . Unless one believes that these rights apply to all but the Germans. (In Nowak 2009, italics added)

Several discursive features are noteworthy: first, the undeniably pan-Germanic frame of reference—German-speaking South Tyroleans here continue to be defined, or encompassed, in (neo-)romantic and essentializing fashion as part and parcel of a “German” ethnolinguistic community, not as descendants of former Austrians. Second, the historical references being palimpsestically reappropriated here are varied, including not only, though centrally, 1918/19, Saint-Germain, and South Tyrol itself but also former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, with Graf probing beyond them and alluding to (Wilsonian) national self-determination as, purportedly, politics’ most fundamental principle. Third, Graf ’s account also contains echoes of nationalism’s historical master-topos with its construction of an unjust present in juxtaposition to a potentially better future as well as, here only implicitly, a past also apparently preferable to the status quo. Another surfacing of the FPÖ’s (pan-Germanic) grammar of encompassment occurred in the context of the Austrian presidential elections in 2010. The FPÖ’s candidate was Barbara Rosenkranz. Married to one of the party’s more extreme Right representatives, Rosenkranz had previously been elected to Lower Austria’s regional parliament, served as the FPÖ’s secretary general and chair, and been a member of the Austrian Parliament. Rosenkranz’s campaign became highly controversial5 in light of her—in Ruth Wodak’s terminology—“calculated ambivalence” and encoded relativization of the Holocaust. Rosenkranz had suggested that the questioning of the existence of gas chambers, a criminal offence in Austria and several other European countries, should fall under the “freedom of expression.” Only when pressed by the Kronen Zeitung’s editor-in-chief at the time, who had previously expressed his support for Rosenkranz, did she sign a (legally toothless) “declaration” distancing herself categorically from Nazism (Wodak 2017: 22–28). Yet more immediately relevant to our present analytical purposes was the following answer Rosenkranz gave when asked in an interview with Die Presse if she believed that there was an Austrian nation: “Of course there is an Austrian political nation [Staatsnation].” However, she then immediately emphasized a “German cultural nation [Kulturnation]”: “I am an enthusiastic Austrian aware of the great role the Austrian monarchy played historically, for 600 years heading the Holy Roman Empire. But I am also happy to be able to include Friedrich Hölderlin and Johann Sebastian Bach in our culture.” (Quoted in Wodak 2016: 126)

Austrian statehood and her imperial history are here affirmed, albeit clearly in conjunction with a concurrent emphasis on the purportedly wider, encompassing German cultural community. The deictic references to Hölderlin and Bach as

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part of “our” culture reveal such tacit pan-Germanism alongside an explicit commitment to Austria. Other instances of such reasoning and arguing have been traced by Herbert Auinger (2017: 105), who shows that recent FPÖ publications postulate a quasi (historical/social) “law of nature” that regards the individual as inexorably part of a “national collective” and the Austrian Republic as “tied into”—in our terminology, encompassed by—the allegedly “pre-political German cultural community.” Therein we encounter another palimpsestic rewriting of political romanticism (e.g., Safranski 2013: 346ff.), with its ascription of individuals to supposedly primordial national units, and a formulation of what I will later elaborate on as part of the nationalist ontology—its fundamental premises about “nature” and “reality.” In terms of the FPÖ’s ideological palimpsests (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017), its selective reappropriation of particular historical, cultural, and ideational strands and references, the party’s campaign for the 2010 local elections in Vienna was particularly revealing. Its slogan—“More courage for our Viennese blood, too much foreignness is no good to anyone” (Mehr Mut für unser Wiener Blut, zu viel Fremdes tut niemandem gut)—was complemented by an FPÖ comic book sent to all Viennese households and showing H.-C. Strache (as “HC-Mann”) fighting off Turkish armies threatening to ransack the city (Schiedel 2011: 55). The slogan was remarkable for its essentialist binary identity grammar—articulated deictically (i.e., “our Viennese blood”) and through its juxtaposition to a purportedly overbearing, damaging foreign “other.” What was more, the mention of “Viennese blood” was also a rhetorically clever allusion to two significant cultural “texts” known to many among its intended audience, namely Johann Strauss’s operetta of 1899 and the pop-icon Falco’s album of 1988, each named Wiener Blut. The slogan recycled not only the long-established topos of a foreign threat but also the populist critique of Austria’s other main parties: the (subtle) subtext here was that only the FPÖ had the courage to protect “the [essentialized] Viennese.” This message emerged yet more clearly from the comic book. Symptomatic of right-wing populism in general, and the FPÖ in particular, this exemplified the use of varied media and pop-cultural formats to convey a (self-)portrayal of Heinz-Christian Strache as a “Robin Hood–like figure”: in this particular instance the FPÖ’s head was presented, in historical-analogical cross-reference, as akin to Prince Eugene of Savoy fighting the Ottomans from 1683 on (Wodak 2016: 41, 105, 154, 157).6 Related to the palimpsest-like rewriting of textual, ideational, cultural, and memory strands can be the use of (questionable) historical analogies. “Analogical reasoning” that interprets present circumstances through comparison with select and more distant historical contexts has been criticized, and shown to be highly problematic, for “reducing complexity,” “short-circuit[ing] critical reflection,” and subordinating historical accuracy to political self-interest and the

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creation of “instant legitimacy” (Müller 2002: 27). Ruth Wodak (2016: 39) has further shown that right-wing populist rhetoric and mobilization derives additional momentum by at first provoking and then denying scandals through the use of “analogies and metaphors,” and by claiming the status of victimhood for itself. All these discursive features appeared to coalesce, for instance, in a highly controversial event reported in January 2012. On 27 January, importantly the international day commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, a network of twenty-one (Far) Right, often pan-Germanic fraternities (Zöchling 2012) known as the Wiener Korporationsring also celebrated its annual prom in Vienna’s Hofburg. This had been preceded by a week of protests, involving some sixty organizations, against the prom and the politics it represents (ORF Wien 2012). On the night of the controversial event, there were demonstrations and scuffles, nine reported injuries, and some twenty arrests (ORF News 2012). In this context, an undercover journalist attending the prom subsequently reported Heinz-Christian Strache, then the head of the FPÖ and prominent prom attendee, comparing the protests against the event to the Nazi pogroms of November 1938, and, incredibly, stating that “we are the new Jews” (Der Standard 2012). As shown elsewhere (Karner 2013a: 204–207), the incident led to condemnations across much of the political spectrum of Strache’s reported comparison of today’s Far Right with the victims of the Nazi genocide, as well as Strache’s claim that he had been misquoted, and defensive voices from within the FPÖ that added further impetus to the party’s self-portrayal as purportedly being subjected to “violent demagoguery” and to a “witch-hunt by left-wing extremists” (ORF News 2012). In other words, the controversy saw the public circulation of hugely problematic leveling analogies that did nothing to remember or illuminate the past but, instead, were all about political actors claiming legitimacy and reasonableness for themselves while attributing “extremism” to their political opponents. Irrespective of whether Strache was quoted accurately or misquoted that night, Jewish victims of the 1938 pogroms, and by extension of the Holocaust, were here reduced to rhetorical pawns in a political game and in a “binary structure of friends-versus-foes” (Terpotitz 2002: 130). What is more, the controversy also reflected another key tactic employed by the populist (Far) Right and alluded to earlier: what Wodak (2016: 38–39) describes as a “perpetuum mobile” whereby scandals are at first provoked, then denied; conspiracies are postulated; a victim status is claimed by the politicians and parties in question; and encoded, ambivalent messages are being justified with reference to the “freedom of expression.” Another example of such argumentation and mobilization that Wodak (2016: 31–38) elaborates on involved HeinzChristian Strache’s posting, in August 2012, of a caricature on Facebook that initially appeared to tie its criticisms of the eurozone’s financial and banking crisis to age-old anti-Semitic clichés and prejudices, which the head of the FPÖ then very quickly denied.

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With this we now return to a dimension that has been key both to the analyses developed in previous chapters and to defining developments in Austria over recent years. This is the dimension of crises and their repeatedly observed galvanizing and mobilizing potential. It is in moments of crisis, as we have repeatedly seen, that competing political positions are formulated with particular vehemence. Nationalism, as we have also witnessed yet again in recent years, assumes discursive prominence and acquires its most pronounced mobilizing appeal in such moments.

Crises, Another Closure, and “Turning Points” At least since Michael Billig’s (1995) seminal theses on Banal Nationalism7 has it become commonplace to acknowledge that nationalism is not monopolized by the (Far) Right (although its discursive features and mobilizing potential are most pronounced and most systematically utilized there). Instead, and as particularly chapters 4 and 5 in this book have corroborated, nationalist frameworks of interpretation and self-definition, and the politics of closure they enable, are far more endemic, indeed structural, to social and political life. As such, it should come as little surprise to see evidence of nationalist argumentative patterns (also see Hafez 2009b) on other points along the ideological continuum. In the contemporary Austrian context, this becomes particularly manifest in some of the varied politics of (attempted) social closure over recent years. Many, though by no means all of those manifestations have revolved around the FPÖ. Sociological analysis of these different strategies of attempted closure requires more than their contextualization in recent periods of crisis. Also analytically useful is an approach to closure politics cognizant of recent work on social protectionism (Fraser 2012), and an approach sensitive to the discursive appeal and significance of particular—by now familiar—constructions of the past, present, and future. As we have seen, a politics of social closure has long been among the FPÖ’s defining characteristics. Already under Haider the party had articulated anxieties about EU enlargement, promising to “protect jobs” in a wider economic climate of “flexibility and competitiveness,” while “proclaim[ing] the need for a Wende [i.e., “turn” or “change”]” (Wodak and Pelinka 2002: xv). The “neo-liberal, rightward shift” (Beller 2006: 305) under the successive Schüssel coalition governments notwithstanding, what may be described as the FPÖ’s version of social protectionism—one squarely focused on national belonging and citizenship— subsequently gained further momentum. Ines Aftenberger (2007: 77–81) has described this as a nationalist Wirtschaftspolitik that is not free of ambivalence: spanning neoliberalism and anti-capitalist resentments and calls for protectionism, the New Right’s discourse on the economy thus portrays a contemporary “turbo-capitalism” as a threat to the organically conceived nation, postulating—

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at times thereby reactivating old anti-Semitic stereotypes—the specter of a likely “uprooting” of local cultures by a globalizing wave of “McWorld” (also see Schiedel 2011: 24). Therein we detect a palimpsestic recycling of the opposition of romantic, ethnonational “rootedness” to a negatively connoted cosmopolitanism that was already prominent, and consequential, during the final decades of the Habsburg Empire (see Gellner 1998). This ambivalence between a nationally defined social protectionism and concurrent support for free-market (neo-)liberalism has become yet more pronounced since 2005, when the FPÖ’s self-stylization as the soziale Heimatpartei (social homeland-party) began in earnest (e.g., Schiedel 2017). As such, the FPÖ calls for—through the long-established topos of (purported) national unity—a solidarity transcending class divisions and based on alleged ethnic homogeneity (Auinger 2017: 50). Calls for a regaining of national sovereignty over intra-EU migration are as much part of this discourse as are claims that poverty-stricken foreigners are taking advantage, and ultimately threatening the future, of the Austrian welfare state (Auinger 2017: 52–57). It is here that André Gingrich’s (2006) depiction of neo-nationalism as comprising “cultural pessimism” and “economic chauvinism”—and hence also the entanglements of the discursive and the institutional dimensions of its politics of social closure—become most relevant and apparent. To pick up an analytical thread already introduced in the previous chapter, such attempted political closure shows a form of social protectionism at work. Following Nancy Fraser (2012), the latter comprises diverse defensive reactions against the forces of contemporary marketization. This also emerges from Aftenberger’s (2007: 201) observations that on questions of globalization and the environment there are occasional situational overlaps between positions articulated from the Left and the Right of the political spectrum. This raises the obvious question as to how to differentiate various forms of social protectionism from one another, or, in Nancy Fraser’s (2012) (normative) terminology, how to disentangle the less from the more “unsavory” forms of social protectionism. One answer to this is provided by the very discursive and institutional characteristics uncovered throughout this book. A social protectionism is nationalist, one will likely conclude, if it displays at least some of the topoi and identity grammars we have repeatedly encountered. In other words, social protectionisms may seek to hold the commodification of ever larger domains of life and the widening “disembedding,” in Polanyian terminology, of economic roles and relationships at bay, without necessarily speaking through the topoi of national unity and of external threats (also see Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 99) articulated by many nationalisms. Neither do social protectionisms necessarily utilize the “positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation” (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009: 23), or binary identity grammar, that facilitates the discursive/institutional exclusions the populist (Far) Right typically argues for.

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This can be illustrated by remembering some of the symbols of Austrian national identity and pride (e.g., landscape/the environment, food, political neutrality) entrenched in the course of the postwar era and emphasized far beyond any one political camp. Writing in 2009, a Profil columnist aptly described the Austrian attachment to political neutrality and opposition to genetically modified (GM) food and nuclear energy as the country’s “national religion” (Hoffmann-Ostenhof 2009). What is particularly significant is the connotative “othering” implicit in these (largely supra-ideological) articles of political faith, or that which Austrians here define themselves in critical opposition to: international military alliances and entanglements (i.e., as opposed to Austrian neutrality), GM food widely associated with international agribusiness (i.e., in contrast to Austria’s small-scale agricultural structures and the unusually high levels of popularity enjoyed by local, organic produce),8 and nuclear energy that, electricity imports notwithstanding, has come to be widely seen since Zwentendorf in 1978 and Chernobyl in 1986 as an “un-Austrian” external threat.9 Put more simply, implicit in this “national religion” is a rejection of some of the hallmarks and “flows” widely associated with contemporary globalization in some of their geopolitical, economic, and technological/environmental manifestations. When other such workings of our era’s transnational “flows” are considered, the multifarious forms of social protectionism in Austria today become yet more apparent. To repeat what has already been anticipated, social protectionisms constitute defensive reactions against transnational marketization and its (unintended) consequences; such social protectionisms are by no means monopolized by the FPÖ, and nationalist ways of arguing and mobilizing also shape other parties’ political strategies. A few brief and recent examples suffice to illustrate this. In 2017, prior to the subsequent parliamentary elections (see below), then Chancellor Christian Kern (SPÖ) and then Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) were advocating, and in parts of the broadsheet press being criticized for, forms of protectionism that arguably pandered to anti-European sentiments and came close to an “Austria-first” agenda themselves: Kern thus argued for a privileging on the job market of Austrian residents over those applying from abroad, and Kurz had begun to call for reduced family benefits for labor-migrants who work (and pay taxes) in Austria but whose children reside abroad (Breitegger 2017). In other words, the heads of the SPÖ and ÖVP were here arguing for forms of social closure based on residence (rather than nationality). In parallel, the SPÖ was completing its dismantling of its previous principle, in place since the Vranitzky-era of the late 1980s and 1990s, not to enter into coalitions with the FPÖ. The latter’s nationalist social protectionism, it appears, no longer a priori precludes it as a potential partner for the SPÖ, which—as we have seen—has over recent decades lost large swaths of its traditional working-class support base to the FPÖ. At the time of writing, in the summer of 2018, a partial conver-

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gence of political positions also emerged from comments made by Burgenland’s regional governor, Hans Niessl (SPÖ), head of a regional coalition with the FPÖ since 2015, who suggested that there may be some 250,000 “illegal migrants” in the country and that the then ÖVP-FPÖ government was not addressing this; this articulated anxieties that had previously been mainly addressed by the FPÖ, and it reflects a wider discursive shift in large parts of the SPÖ that now also advocate strict control of the EU’s external borders and “integration rather than additional immigration” (Böhmer 2018). Similarly relevant here was a discussion paper published by Peter Pilz, former Green politician and, subsequently, leading figure of the smallest opposition party in Austria’s parliament after 2017. Pilz subsequently explained the paper, which was titled “Austria first” and widely seen to constitute a formidable change in a former Green politician’s position, by stating that he was not prepared “to leave the terms homeland and Austria” to the FPÖ, that the refugee crisis of 2015/16 had far exceeded the dimensions and challenges of previous migratory flows, and that “political Islam” was now indeed an issue requiring discussion (ORF News 2017a). All of this suggests that nationalist discursive positions are not exclusively monopolized by any one political party but strategically adopted and claimed—albeit with variable frequencies and in different forms—by a variety of political actors across the ideological spectrum. This also helps account for the recent shift to the Right, both discursively and in policy terms, across much of Europe. This builds a bridge to arguably the single most significant series of events to have (re)shaped Austrian society and politics over recent years—the muchdiscussed “refugee crisis” of 2015 and 2016.10 In this context, a closer look at the headlines, commentaries, and readers’ letters published in Austria’s most widely read paper bears analytical dividends. Initial responses in the Kronen Zeitung to the unprecedented influx of (forced) migrants from war-torn Syria and elsewhere via Turkey, Greece, and the Western Balkans to Austria in the late summer and autumn of 2015 utilized several topoi and tropes: the assessment that an already barely manageable situation was only under some control due to Austria’s well-functioning institutions (i.e., the police) and some of her citizens’ willingness to offer voluntary help; second, the claim—already evident then—that (some) refugees’ demands and expectations were utterly unreasonable; and, third, the metaphor of a “wave” used to predict a likely unstoppable escalation of the situation (e.g., Kronen Zeitung, 21 September 2015: 10–11; 30 October 2015: 2–3). Once again, a crisis here precipitated political polarization. In this context, this pitted inclusivist civil society engagement against growing (nationalist) anxieties about the local impact refugees were predicted to have. Such polarization crystallized on the Kronen Zeitung’s readers’ letters pages shortly after a concert in solidarity with asylum-seekers had been organized in Vienna in early October. The following two contrasting assessments reflect this:

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The silent majority of some 1,700,000 in Vienna or more than 8 million across Austria certainly do not think that the message of “Refugees welcome” is the right signal. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 6 October 2015: 31) The solidarity concert “Voices for refugees” attended by more than 150,000 people shows that . . . we do not want xenophobic slogans, barbed wire along our borders, but we want to support people fleeing terror and death. (Kronen Zeitung reader, 6 October 2015: 31)

Another discursive strand that predicted far-reaching social consequences—often on the basis of a binary identity grammar and, as in the following example, of quasi-sociobiological reasoning—was illustrated in an article first printed in Die Presse and then republished in the Kronen Zeitung’s Sunday supplement (Krone Bunt, 11 October 2015) by the Middle East expert and, subsequently, minister for Europe, integration and foreign affairs, Karin Kneissl. Kneissl argued that many refugees arriving via the Balkanroute were young men escaping profound social inequalities and motivated by the “interplay of testosterone and a quest for higher status”; “age-old, evolutionary roles persist in times of globalization,” she argued, and that “angry young men make history.” Kronen Zeitung discourse shifted decisively in the aftermath of the Paris terrorattacks in November 2015. When news broke that one of the terrorists had traveled, as a would-be-asylum-seeker, across the Balkans and Austria (16 November 2015: 2), wider “explanations” and strong claims were quick to follow. Columnist Kurt Seinitz argued as follows: Paris was struck by the IS from afar. At stake are now the “welcoming culture” and the utterly uncontrolled movement across Schengen-Europe. Bad news for Angela Merkel, the CSU demands consequences . . . [Also needed] are new recipes against growing alienation, in our shared Europe, between Christians and Muslims. (Kronen Zeitung 16 November 2015: 3)

This was a rare instance of a European, rather than national deixis (i.e., “our shared Europe”) being articulated in the Kronen Zeitung. At the same time, criticisms of Europe’s dominant politicians (i.e., German chancellor Angela Merkel) and existing structures (e.g., Schengen) began to demand ever more discursive space. A reader’s letter published a few days later, arguing that “not just France but all of Europe has a huge problem with violent Islamism, which was welcomed like the famous Trojan horse” (Kronen Zeitung reader, 22 November 2015: 41) also exemplified what I described earlier as the inductive trap: the tendency to formulate highly generalized claims on the basis of very specific, sometimes singular (and often decontextualized) “cases.” While in the aftermath of the sexual attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2016, columnist Peter Gnam avoided such inductive over-generalization by stating that “the prediction that some young, single men who arrived via the Balkan-route . . . could turn into a problem has sadly

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come true” (Kronen Zeitung, 28 January 2016: 2, italics added), the generalizing association of young male asylum-seekers with sexual violence would become increasingly prominent in much public debate in the months ahead. Early 2016—following the “West Balkan Conference” in Vienna, the closure of the “Macedonian border,” and a major diplomatic row with Greece—came to be widely regarded as a necessary “turning point” in the refugee crisis. As the closure of the so-called “Balkan-route” became a fait accompli, Kronen Zeitung coverage became dominated by a (nationally self-congratulatory) “we-were-rightafter-all” topos. It was thus claimed that both “the Germans” (Kronen Zeitung, 14 April 2016: 4) and “behind closed doors even the Greeks admit that they benefit from the Balkan-route closure” (Kronen Zeitung, 12 May 2016: 6). In an interview, Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) stated that the EU had later vindicated the very “Balkan-route closure” for which he had initially been criticized (in Krone Bunt, 19 June 2016). Krone editor-in-chief Klaus Herrmann (7 August 2016: 2) even argued that “the closure of the Balkan-route” had “saved Europe from an explosion of the wave of refugees11 with all its consequences.” Eventually, after it was claimed that the EU was “bankrupt in refugee questions” and national decisions were presented as the only workable solutions (Kronen Zeitung, 18 September 2016: 5), none other than Donald Tusk was quoted as saying that European citizens had been made to wait “far too long for the Balkan-route closure and the agreement between the EU and Turkey” on how to attempt to “handle” and contain (forced) migrants’ movements across the Eastern Mediterranean (Krone Bunt, 25 September 2016). The closure of the “Balkan-route” subsequently played a prominent discursive role in the run-up to Austria’s 2017 parliamentary elections (see below).12 For our current analytical purposes, it is worth noting that the perception of such a “turning point” bears structural-discursive similarities to one of nationalism’s master-topoi, namely the construction of history as entailing a “golden past,” a present defined by profound ills, and an imminent future of national “revival” and hence, so the nationalist narrative goes, of necessary corrections. Some of the above-mentioned claims concerning the “Balkan-route closure” arguably imply a similar temporal trajectory, albeit one where the post-closure present appears as the very turning point at which “sound” decisions have purportedly turned a threatening situation “around” and a deep crisis has allegedly been averted. As we have seen, nationalisms have invested much discursive energy in such and similar versions of the past, present, and future. Literature on today’s rightwing nationalism in general, and on the FPÖ in particular, thus variously describes their quasi-messianic promises (Stiegnitz 2011: 46), “apocalyptic” ideas (Schiedel 2011: 60), a “saviour-topos” (Wodak 2016: 29), and the party’s selfconception as pursuing a “national rescue-mission” (Auinger 2017: 154). Particular interconnections and purported contrasts between past, present, and future have continued to play an important role in Austrian public debate since the “ref-

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ugee crisis” of 2015/16. The closing of borders as an allegedly necessary turning point notwithstanding, a return to further (migration-related) crises remains a constant threat in this view of the present. The wider resonance of a positive view of the past contrasted to a damning view of the present and coupled to a promise of an imminent or now unfolding (national) revival constituting a supposedly necessary correction of present injustices also manifests elsewhere. According to a survey conducted in April 2017, an astonishing 43 percent of Austrian respondents thus professed a “longing” for a “strong man” at the political helm, with a subset of 23 percent even articulating quasi-totalitarian leanings (ORF News 2017b). If considered representative of the population at large, 43 percent who deem current circumstances to require a centralization of power and strong political correctives would far exceed the FPÖ’s current electoral base. Six months previously, another survey had shown that while the country’s landscape and a high quality of life continued to rank prominently among Austrians’ sources of national pride, there were also widespread perceptions that the economy’s competitiveness and the educational system had deteriorated and that political stability, highly valued in the postwar era, had now acquired rather different connotations: those of stasis and inflexibility in the face of necessary change (ORF Upper Austria 2016). A discrepancy between external comparisons and internal (self-)perceptions, with many of the latter again reflecting negative assessments of present circumstances, subsequently emerged from findings published in the summer of 2017. On the one hand, an international study concluded that Austria offered the worldwide fourth-highest quality of life (ORF News 2017c). On the other, a Profil survey revealed high levels of dissatisfaction in Austria, with 36 percent of respondents declaring that they were now worse off than ten years previously, 31 percent detecting no change, and 28 percent reporting improvements (ORF News 2017d). It is here worth noting that the topos of a negatively evaluated present, (implicitly) contrasted to a purportedly more just (recent) past, and the asserted need for decisive structural changes paving the way toward a more positive future also resonates—much more generally—in many politics of social protectionism. As we have seen, following Nancy Fraser (2012), social protectionism challenges (further) marketization by (re-) delineating particular boundaries of political inclusion and entitlement. Put differently, many forms of social closure are driven by protectionist agendas set on countering increasingly unfettered market forces. As we saw in those recent statements emanating from the very top of the SPÖ and ÖVP and amplified by the tabloid press in particular, social protectionism is encountered across (much of ) the political spectrum. Then SPÖ chancellor Christian Kern’s above-quoted call, in February 2017, that new job-creation schemes should prioritize Austrians and preclude cheaper Eastern European workers (Kronen Zeitung, 18 February 2017) was a case in point. A month later, it was the turn of then still foreign minister Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) to seemingly suggest that some of the wider (and arguably

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unintended) implications of the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor within the European Union had become problematic: Kurz was quoted as suggesting that the EU was jeopardizing “our welfare system” and that its “imposition” of social policy had to stop for Europe to become “just” (Kronen Zeitung, 18 March 2017). Implicit in such demands is a reading of recent history and the here and now that also detects serious structural problems in the present. Arguably, such assessments are underpinned by nostalgic, more positive assessments of the state of affairs of not very long ago (i.e., when “our” welfare system was, purportedly, intact and citizens’ jobs were protected) and the promise of better future alternatives. Put more simply, the heads of SPÖ and ÖVP here inadvertently operated with a narrative structure not entirely dissimilar to what we have encountered as nationalism’s master-topos of history. Yet it is certainly the case that the latter features most prominently among the populist (Far) Right. This was particularly clear in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum. A week prior, prominent (Far) Right populists from across Europe had met in Vienna, hoping for referenda in other countries. Marine Le Pen welcomed a “new wind” breezing across the continent; HeinzChristian Strache warned of “modern mass migration” and described Greece as a “bottomless pit” that required a “course-correction” in the eurozone, while—in ideologically staggeringly flexible, intertextual terms—calling on “patriots of all European countries [to] unite”; the historical breadth of palimpsestically rewritten reference points (e.g., 1848) also manifested in the organizers’ description of their meeting as a “springtime of patriots” (ORF News 2016a). There it was again, the assertion that a “better” future is possible, to which nationalists claim to hold the key.

Nationalist Ontology and/in Social Media Corroborating Pierre Bourdieu’s observations elsewhere (1977: 166–171), the political events, both domestically and internationally, that defined 2016 provided further evidence that (perceived and structural) crises polarize populations into ideologically opposed camps. Domestically, this was demonstrated by Austria’s presidential elections. Remarkably, neither of the two traditional hegemons’ candidates were ever in serious contention for Austria’s highest political office. After the ÖVP’s Andreas Khol and the SPÖ’s candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer had polled unprecedentedly low with 11.12 and 11.28 percent of the vote in the first round respectively, the decisive second round pitted the FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer (i.e., 35.05 percent in the first round) against Alexander Van der Bellen (21.34 percent), who was supported by the Greens. With them, what in many ways are diametrical opposites on the traditional political spectrum—as manifest in Hofer’s and Van der Bellen’s mutually exclusive positions on immigration, Eu-

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ropean integration, etc.—constituted Austrians’ remaining choices in the run-off elections. Following an increasingly acrimonious second campaign period, which framed the elections as decisive for the country’s future, Van der Bellen won the second round by the narrowest of margins (i.e., 50.35 percent). This, however, turned out to be far from the end of the matter. Possessing remarkable insights into procedural irregularities in the processing of postal votes, the FPÖ appealed against the outcome, and Austria’s constitutional court in due course ruled that the second-round vote indeed had to be repeated. Following another delay, this time due to faulty envelopes for some postal voters, the second round “re-run” took place on 4 December 2016. Van der Bellen won again, having increased his share of the vote to 53.79 percent. Several things, in addition to the aforementioned ideological polarization and unprecedented collapse of support for the SPÖ’s and the ÖVP’s candidates, stood out among all of this. First, these presidential elections arguably reflected what Ruth Wodak (in Narodoslawski 2017) has described as more than “post-truth politics” (“post-truth” was the 2016 Oxford Dictionary’s “word of the year”): Wodak speaks of a “post-shame era” to capture outlandish, factually inaccurate claims (e.g., by Hofer or his supporters concerning Van der Bellen’s health or family history) that are never followed by retractions or apologies. Second, polarization mapped—to a remarkable extent—onto an urban-rural divide. While Van der Bellen comfortably won majorities in the cities, the majority of rural voters— with only a few areas constituting exceptions—backed Hofer. While this resembled voting patterns also observed at the other two, internationally much more consequential, electoral outcomes of 2016, namely the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s successful campaign in the United States, the Austrian pattern warrants further commentary. From the longue durée perspective developed in this book, it is plausible to argue that 2016 also saw a (palimpsestic) re-emergence of a much older urban-rural divide: what between World Wars I and II had been the clashing “political cultures” of metropolitan social democracy, a provincial Catholic conservatism, plus the German nationalist “third camp” (see Beller 2006: 218). What had previously been a clash between “Red Vienna” and the Christian Social dominance of the countryside reappeared under new guises. A candidate supported by and associated with the Green Party was now able to galvanize not only Viennese voters but majorities in Austria’s other main cities too. Hofer, by contrast, successfully positioned himself in the eyes of his large rural support base as a (social protectionist) “defender” of citizens’ interests against purported threats including an ongoing “refugee crisis” and further EU integration.13 With Van der Bellen’s victory, the political Left, pro-Europeans, and many in Austria’s cities considered these elections to have carried much wider significance and to have halted the populist, neo-nationalist trends that had resulted in the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory. As it would turn out less than a year later, these assessments were premature, as a further shift to

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the right had only been delayed, not prevented, in Austria. Subsequent political events in Austria can be read as a continuation or recurrence of discursiveargumentative patterns and mobilizing strategies whose longue durée this book has revealed. At the same time, new particularities—especially the (New) Right’s prolific use of our digital era’s social media—have also played important roles over recent years.14 When Norbert Hofer’s defeat at the re-run, second-round presidential elections was confirmed, the nationalist proclivity to paint the present in starkly negative colors and its juxtaposition to a possibly imminent (national) revival came to the fore once again. On the one hand, Hofer supporters declared on Facebook that Austria was “facing bad times,” “standing at an abyss,” and might “go under” (Der Standard 2016). On the other hand, Heinz-Christian Strache also used Facebook to predict, somewhat quasi-prophetically, that “our time is coming” and that 2017 would be the “FPÖ’s year” (ORF News 2016b). Other long-established topoi (and the identity grammars implicit in them) have also been recycled and rewritten (see below). Further, as in the (late) nineteenth century, particular civil society domains—though some of them novel and peculiar to our era—have again acquired a strong perceived relevance: both among the New (Far) Right (for a summary, see Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 286) and among some of its most outspoken critics (e.g., Thurnher 2017), there are prominent interpretations of our period’s defining political contests as a struggle for hegemony, seen in quasi-Gramscian terms as cultural, moral, and intellectual leadership and a resulting consensus. The defining, at times (creatively) reappropriated, assumptions at the core of nationalist discourse, which one may term nationalism’s ontology, as well as the use of social media to articulate them, warrant, indeed need, further discussion in relation to this widely postulated struggle for hegemony in the contemporary world. Arguably, nationalism’s central ontological premise is the taken-for-granted assumption that nations not only exist, and “always” have done so, but that they constitute the single most significant determinant of an individual’s sense of self—ascribed group identification—and, ideally, their sense of responsibility, station, and trajectory in life. This is what Ines Aftenberger (2007: 69, 75, 121) describes as the New Right’s reification of inequality, its “national imperative,” and its view of “communities” as “ontologized beings.” Not dissimilarly, Peter Stiegnitz (2011: 93) writes about “fanatics of the collective.” Seen in the longer historical terms that have oriented this book, these foundational assumptions contain and reappropriate core components of political romanticism (Safranski 2013), its insistence that individuals are “organically” anchored in the (ethnolinguistic) communities political romantics took as their point of departure and central reference (see Gellner 1998). The following typical statement, quoted from a publication by a local FPÖ politician from Vienna, reveals some of the characteristic rhetorical tropes (e.g., quasi-biological metaphors and analogies) of

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such organicism, its binary identity grammar, and its articulation of a topos of external threats: Whoever does not guard borders, accepts invasion. Without dams, those living by the water will be flooded. Without protection from avalanches, those living in the mountains will be crushed by snow. A state valuing its sovereignty, a culture wanting to survive, have to have borders. If they do not, they show themselves to be unprotected, a fatal mistake in a world of change, invasions and expulsions. (Howanietz quoted in Auinger 2017: 88)

Not only does such a worldview consider a successfully lived multiculturalism to be oxymoronic, or “unlivable” (Auinger 2017: 131), but it also serves as an ontological lens that is applied externally, to purport to make sense of, but effectively take sides in, political conflicts elsewhere. Recent manifestation of this included Heinz-Christian Strache’s controversial support for Serbian separatists in Republika Srpska and his questioning of the viability of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Der Standard, 20 August 2015: 7; ORF News 2018b). The nationalist quest to “fuse” “culture” (invariably singularly and monolithically conceived), “will and polity” (Gellner 1983: 48) also manifests in such statements. The world is thereby imagined as a mosaic of self-contained and clearly demarcated ethnonational units and—in rearticulation of another one of nationalism’s recurrent master-topoi—those units are themselves imagined as internally unified. Glossing over or outrightly denying internal schisms, antagonisms, and fractures, the premise of “national unity” transcending all (potential or present) sources of internal fragmentation has also again come to the argumentative fore over recent years. In the FPÖ’s discourse, this manifests in exhortations of the purported Volk, its assumed “inner homogeneity,” and the “unity of the collective will” (Auinger 2017: 168). With longue durée echoes of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (see chapter 1), such claims epitomize the nationalist attempt to construct a “comradeship” (Spillman 1997) uniting the thus-reified “national community.” This is reflected in the populist Right’s general commitment to what it portrays as “more direct democracy” (e.g., ORF News 2017e) whereby complex debates are subjected and reduced to yes-no majority decisions presumed to reflect the population’s “general will.” Another recent manifestation of the “unity-topos” involved Heinz-Christian Strache’s pre-election declaration that, in contrast to the Social Democrats, the FPÖ was opposed to any “class struggle” (ORF News 2017f ) and the internal societal fracturing this would purportedly foster—or rather, in actual fact, reveal. At the same time, the national-unity topos is anything but innocuous; instead, it is but one side of the discursive coin: Karin Stögner (2016: 484–485) has thus observed that anti-Semitic stereotypes, “counter-cosmopolitanism,” and a professed “anti-elitism” are all part and parcel of the FPÖ’s construction of an exclusive and “essentialized national community.” In my conceptual terms, the

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(master-)topos of national unity and a binary-orientalist identity grammar thus here interface. Along with its central ontological premise of (internally homogeneous) national units goes another master-topos that we have encountered numerous times in the preceding chapters and that has reappeared with force, in a contextually refashioned way, over recent years: the topos of external threats that presently are particularly widely associated with the purported dangers of (Austria’s or Europe’s) Islamization. Generalizing, in the “inductive trap mode” discussed previously, from the terrorist atrocities that have shocked the world over the past two decades to the global Muslim community at large, or projecting demographic changes experienced in urban settings since the 1990s into the future, a bleak picture of the Occident as threatened by Islam is widely painted in and beyond (neo-)nationalist circles. One may take the following statements from a publication by Austria’s (Far) Right, pan-Germanic fraternities as symptomatic of this discursive strand; its “Islamic threat topos” combines, in our theoretical terms, a binary-orientalist identity grammar of mutually exclusive “self-other categories” with the fear, premised on what I have called a grammar of apostasy, of national territory gradually being turned into space taken over by “others.” This in turn feeds the topos of a necessary national revival: The growing proportion of Muslims in Austria is most worrying. The 1971 census revealed 87.4 percent Catholics, 6 percent Protestants, 0.3 percent Muslims . . . Today, Muslims have probably already surpassed Protestants. If the parameters continue as they are . . . we have to assume that by the middle of this century Islam will constitute the largest religion in our cities . . . Europe’s Islamization continues, a hostile takeover has to be feared . . . The German people have already moved considerably toward ethnic death. The only possible remedies include a revival of our spiritual powers, our way of being and culture. Alongside low birth rates, being overwhelmed by foreigners (Überfremdung), abortion and family decay, the German people are also threatened by an attempted spiritual genocide, by concerted efforts to undermine ethnic consciousness. We are responsible for the future of the German people’s spiritual and biological substance. (Kuich 2009: 194–197)

This also returns us to the institutional level and what throughout this book has been described as nationalists’ attempts at social closure, or the “monopolization” (Murphy 1988) of privileges, advantages, or access to wealth, status, rights, and entitlements. As we saw in chapter 2, in particular, existing literature (e.g., Judson 2006; King 2002) attests to the nineteenth-century importance of civil society organizations and actors (e.g., schools, school associations, and media) in refashioning, and dividing, heterogeneous local or regional populations along ethnolinguistic-cum-national lines. More narrowly with reference to the history of Austria’s “third camp,” the significance of other civil society organizations—most notably of (pan-Germanic) student fraternities—is a similarly well-

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documented historical fact (e.g., Weidinger 2014). Over recent years, the importance of the civil society realm, or those heterogeneous social and institutional spaces between the level of the individual and their families and the apparatus of the state, and of our era’s means of (public/digital) communication to the success of nationalist politics has been thrown into sharp relief. Several phenomena have shown this particularly clearly. Following the FPÖ’s inclusion in a coalition government with the ÖVP in late 2017 (see below), a new-found prominence of high-ranking fraternity members in political offices held by the Freedom Party soon transpired. This led commentators to observe that (pan-Germanic) right-wing fraternities’ influence on the FPÖ had never previously been as pronounced (Riess and Sterkl 2017; Zöchling 2017b). Concurrently, a relatively new civil society organization ideologically anchored in the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and committed to spreading a “conservative cultural revolution” through its many (and interconnected) regional and national branches across Europe was drawing increasing attention. Combining public protests and symbolic registers of expression rooted in popular culture with a strong social media presence (geared particularly toward the millennial generation of “digital natives”), its Austrian version—known as the Identitäre Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ), or Die Identitären—can be traced to 2012. With beliefs in a sociobiologically underpinned “ethno-pluralism,” strong antiMuslim sentiments, and “anti-refugee agitation” foremost among its ontologicalideological premises and organizational priorities, the IBÖ also had reported (and later denied) links to Far Right fraternities and the FPÖ (Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 32, 68–69, 13, 103, 226–243, 107; also see ORF Steiermark 2018). As in the late nineteenth century (see chapter 2), nationalist political discourse is thereby now once again given additional momentum and visibility by the activities in particular, ideologically clearly positioned, civil society domains. A recent project examining such interfaces has thus shown that “the IBÖ and civil initiatives against mosques” claim spaces “other than,” yet complementary to, rightwing party politics (i.e., the FPÖ): the nationalist social movements in question have thus created “political niches that render them part of, and at times . . . valued partners within, [wider] right-wing [populist] networks” (Ajanovic, Mayer, and Sauer 2016: 132). Alongside such recurrences, however, there are, of course, also new features particular to our digital epoch. Not only the Identitären but also the FPÖ have long discovered the mobilizing potential and impact of social media. In the run-up to the 2017 parliamentary elections, the FPÖ far out-performed its competitors in terms of its presence on, and networking reach (i.e., “fans”) via, Facebook (Kellhofer and Wolf 2017). This confirmed what the academic literature describes as right-wing populists’ prolific use of the web and social media: from blogs via YouTube channels to Facebook and Twitter, the FPÖ uses them skillfully for the purposes of its “image and branding management” (Wodak 2016: 154–155).

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While social media use by the (Far) Right deserves far more sustained analytical attention than present space permits, the following open letter Heinz-Christian Strache published on his Facebook page in April 2017 serves as a paradigmatic illustration of how nationalist argumentative strategies are being reappropriated via social media: Dear Erdogan-supporters in Austria and Germany. Having compassionately observed for a while how unhappy and misunderstood you feel with us, I have concluded that you simply cannot be expected to stay any longer . . . Here, you are not allowed to marry your underage daughters off, nor to pursue your preference for capital punishment and press-censorship . . . your children are in danger of growing up in freedom . . . Your president will welcome you back with open arms . . . The jobs of imprisoned “terrorists” and “enemies of the state” in schools, universities and courts need to be filled, despite new candidates’ inferior qualifications . . . surely you want to be part of Turkey’s becoming what you and your president want it to. . . On departure, please do not forget to hand your Austrian or German passports back in to the authorities, after all, that passport stands for democracy, freedom of expression and the press, gender equality and therefore surely burns like a document from hell in your pockets. (Strache 2017)

Writing in ironic register on social media, Strache here offers a digital reappropriation of stereotypical topoi (i.e., the “illiberal/radicalized Turkish diaspora”) and nationalist interpellations and deixis (i.e., “us” versus “them,” “here” as opposed to “there”) we have encountered before. Stereotypes operate with what I have described as the “inductive trap” that vastly (and wrongly) overgeneralizes from isolated or prominent examples to much larger, far more heterogenous groups.15 As is also apparent, such “reasoning” here operates with a binary-Orientalist identity grammar. The categories “Austrian” and “Turkish” are thus considered to be mutually exclusive, whatever the biographical circumstances, culminating in Strache’s call for “returning” Turks to hand in their Austrian (or German) passports.16 This stands in contrast to the South Tyrolean case, in relation to which the FPÖ has been arguing for a change to Austrian citizenship legislation—thereby causing considerable uproar among some prominent South Tyroleans (see Bauer et al. 2017b)—that would grant Austrian citizenship to German-speaking Italians from South Tyrol (ORF News 2017g). At Austria’s parliamentary elections on 15 October 2017, the ÖVP, led by Sebastian Kurz, emerged victorious with 31.5 percent of the vote. The SPÖ received 26.9 percent;17 the FPÖ, 26 percent; the pro-European NEOS, 5.3 percent; the Liste Peter Pilz (led by the aforementioned former Green politician), 4.4 percent; and with a mere 3.8 percent, the Green Party would no longer be in Austria’s National Council (Nationalrat). Initial media responses included observations that Austria was moving yet “further to the Right” (Stuiber 2017) and that in rural areas the combined votes for ÖVP and FPÖ amounted to

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a two-thirds majority (Gartner and Hametner 2017). The subsequent issue of Profil led with a headline attesting to another “shift to the Right,” while some of its leading journalists posed the question as to whether something “entirely new,” amounting to “the next Republic,” may lie ahead (Bauer et al. 2017a). The Kronen Zeitung (16 October 2017: 1) declared more enthusiastically that “Austria has voted for change, Sebastian Kurz’s sensational victory heralds historical change in our country.” As the formation of an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition materialized, some international media were pointing out that this would be the Far Right’s only participation in a Western European government at that time. However, events in Italy were about to show that Austrian developments, not for the first time sketching a “pioneering path” for political shifts elsewhere, had only been a brief step ahead. During the weeks and months that followed, Austria’s critical media confirmed that the New Right’s quest for hegemony had born fruit (e.g., Thurnher 2017) and that, given a now more favorable economic climate and the Right’s firm control of the political agenda (especially with its focus on the “migration issue”), it would take considerable time for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction again (e.g., Lingens 2018). The FPÖ’s personnel, with its ever more pronounced roots in a milieu of Far Right, often still pan-Germanic, student fraternities, was drawing much attention (e.g., Riss and Sterkl 2017) and testifying to the continuing presence and reach of a subculture dominated by the “third camp.” At the same time, Heinz-Christian Strache, then the country’s vice-chancellor, appeared to be moving toward a (long overdue) critical examination of the FPÖ’s history (ORF News 2018d). While the sincerity of such efforts was questioned by some commentators (e.g., John 2018), their timeliness and relevance were brought home by several controversies revolving around the pronouncements or organizational entanglements of individual FPÖ politicians (e.g., ORF News 2018c; also see next chapter). In terms of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition’s political decision-making and agenda-setting, subsequent months saw much emphasis being placed on social closure, from the strongly advocated closure of the European Union’s external boundaries, to attempts to curtail (EU-)migrants’ welfare entitlements in Austria. Writing at the end of 2017, Profil journalist Christa Zöchling offered a number of, for our purposes, highly pertinent insights: Right-wing thought today furnishes a view of the world that justifies a preference for one’s own [group] biologically . . . that dreams about homogeneous societies . . . It detests established democratic processes,18 thrives on a state of emergency, thinks in friend-foe categories and considers liberalism to be a decaying poison19 . . . The New Right . . . analyzes pop-phenomena and invokes . . . Gramsci’s assessment that powershifts require a general change in thought . . . Since humans are naturally evil, they require an authoritarian state, Carl Schmitt argued [in the 1920s] . . . Schmitt sought to dismantle the Weimar Republic’s liberal beginnings and praised Adolf Hitler . . . With his disgust of the bourgeois “debating class,” his anti-humanism and glorifica-

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tion of the fatherland, Schmitt is now considered a spiritual patron for the right-wing intelligentsia. (Zöchling 2017a: 37–38)

Retranslated into our analytical categories, we thus come face to face yet again with the discursive and organizational core characteristics displayed by successive nationalisms that have here been traced over the longue durée: their identity grammars; some of their central topoi (i.e., such as those of a taken-for-granted ethnonational unity and the definition of pluralism or political alternatives as threats); the palimpsest-like rewriting of ideational and symbolic strands in new contexts; and the social closure that seeks to bestow privileges and advantages to the ingroup, invariably at the expense of “others.”

Notes 1. As I have shown across a number of recent publications (Karner 2010, 2013b, 2017, 2018), Austrian debates on the European Union are more multidimensional and more nuanced than an oversimplified but commonly encountered typology of “pro-” versus “anti-EU” positions acknowledges. The associated public debates revolve around various economic, political, and cultural questions and concerns and are part and parcel of the national identity negotiations discussed here. For more details on the “question of Europe” and its treatment in nationalist discourses than present space allows, please refer to the above-mentioned publications. 2. There is a discursive similarity between such nostalgic (mis)representations of the recent past or postwar period and the prominent nationalist (master-)topos, discussed in previous chapters, which evaluates the present negatively and contrasts it to a purported “golden era” located in the past and to a promised future of national “regeneration” and societal betterment (see Hutchinson 1987). 3. As in previous chapters, all translations from German are mine. 4. We here detect another subtle and palimpsest-like rewriting of the (romantic) distinction between “nations” and “states” already evident in parts of Herder’s writings (see chapter 1), which was subsequently rearticulated in numerous contexts: from Friedrich Nietzsche’s (2018 [1886]: 21) Also sprach Zarathustra, throughout the history of Austrian pan-Germanism, all the way to the young Haider’s infamous description, in 1988, of the Austrian nation as an “ideological deformation” (see chapter 5). 5. Rosenkranz eventually received 15.62 percent of votes cast, 20 percent less than the FPÖ’s Heinz-Christian Strache had initially hoped for (Wodak 2017: 28). Heinz Fischer (SPÖ) was re-elected as federal president. 6. The FPÖ electoral campaign turned out to be successful, with close to 26 percent of the vote in the 2010 local Viennese elections being cast for the party, an increase of 11 percent compared to 2005 (Wodak 2016: 167). 7. For a recent and relevant discussion of “everyday nationalism,” also see Fox and van Ginderachter 2018. 8. Also relevant here, although a more substantial discussion of this exceeds the scope of the present chapter, has been widespread Austrian opposition to the EU’s various attempted free trade agreements (e.g., TTIP, CETA). While at different stages both the FPÖ and the

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Kronen Zeitung were vocal opponents of such transnational agreements, social protectionist opposition was never articulated from only one end of the political spectrum (also see Karner 2016). As mentioned previously, some manifestations of anti-nuclear-energy discourse have overlapped with anti-Czech sentiments in projecting criticism of nuclear energy onto the Czech power station in Temelin in particular. A recent analysis of media, social media, and political responses to the “refugee crisis” considers the former to have helped “develop” the latter to “legitimize the alleged urgency” thereby constructed (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, and Wodak 2018: 2–3). To the present author, such assessments go some useful distance but are ultimately sociologically not fully satisfactory. What is more, some such assessments can appear to either border on the trivial or on the dismissive. They are in danger of becoming trivial as there are few things in life that are not, at least in some vital ways, socially constructed. Further, some such assessments fail to fully engage with the “first law of social constructivism,” through which W. I. Thomas observed long ago that if someone believes a thing to be true, the latter will impact what that person does and hence become real in its consequences (see Karner 2007b: 17). Assessments such as the above border on the dismissive insofar as all social actors—no matter how far their political sensitivities lie from their observers’—deserve to be taken more seriously than sometimes polemical dismissals of some perceptions as “social constructs” would appear to do. Counterposing perceptions to statistics, challenging views of a purported “refugee crisis” with alternative perceptions, with historical and other forms of contextualization, and with inclusive reactions are all vital political and analytical strategies. But there is no shying away from the similarly important recognition that to a large proportion of Europe’s populations, the migratory flows since 2015 have been anxiety-inducing, posing uncomfortable questions—perhaps with no simple resolution—about the scale and impact of social and demographic change or about the ability of local (infra)structures to absorb those changes. Simply (re-)classifying the “refugee crisis” as a political and media construct seems hardly conducive to meeting such challenges or, arguably, their misperception. This confusing mixing of metaphors—an “exploding wave”—is here kept on purpose in my translation of the German original. Ruth Wodak has also made the point that the “topos of change” played a decisive role in Austria’s most recent parliamentary elections (Narodoslawsky 2017: 29). This adds further weight to a point previously made, namely that anti-immigration discourse has recently been particularly successful in rural areas that are often not among those most directly affected by migratory flows and growing cultural pluralism. For a discussion of “right-wing extremism 2.0” as it manifested on Facebook in the context of Austria’s 2016 presidential election, see Fuchs 2016. While in what follows I draw further attention to nationalist discourse in social media, a more sustained analysis of this new mobilizing domain and its (electoral) impact will have to remain the object of important future work. Other (discourse analytical) literature describes this as forms of “pars pro toto synecdoche” (e.g., Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 57). Partly informed by what Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov (2004) have described as an incipient “cognitive turn” in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, I here opt for the term “inductive trap” instead: as an attempt to capture the interpretative processes at work here, whereby select examples are used (and

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frequently “cited”) by the speaker and become the basis for vastly overstated, distorting, and problematic generalizations. This also needs to be read in relation to a current FPÖ-initiated re-examination of possibly illegal “dual citizenship” held by a substantial list of Austrians of Turkish descent (e.g., see Der Standard 2017). A decisive event of the election campaign, and one that particularly damaged the SPÖ, revolved around the Social Democrats’ (temporary) international campaign consultant Tal Silberstein. In a controversy typical of our era of “dirty campaigning” and digitally disseminated fictitious misinformation, this involved Silberstein’s setting up of Facebook pages that wrongly attributed anti-Semitic and racist content to Sebastian Kurz (e.g. Thalhammer 2017). Even after the SPÖ had severed all connections with Silberstein, the issue remained hugely prominent in the media and also led, as Ruth Wodak pointed out, to encoded and problematic “play” with Jewish names by prominent politicians including Kurz and Pilz (in Weißensteiner 2017). For more recent indications of such very disconcerting positions represented in some parts, or the vicinity, of the FPÖ, see Traxler 2018. Also relevant here is another one of the New (Far) Right’s recurring tropes: the highly derogatory depiction of opponents and critics as allegedly naive Gutmenschen (also see Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 242–243), which is used to slur and dismiss anyone seen to represent liberalism, multiculturalism, and social inclusion.

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he history of the last two centuries in Austria (and Central Europe more generally) has been told countless times, and it continues to be recalled, written about, and debated. My contribution in this book has been the attempt to extrapolate nationalist discourses and politics across this arguably unusually long time frame in order to examine their patterns of argumentation and mobilization. As such, this book has covered large and complex historical terrain. This has entailed inevitable omissions and shortcuts, which many historically trained or inclined critics will point out. Such omissions, I hope, will help trigger further research and supplementary discussion rather than rejection of the insights offered here. This concession having been reiterated, the benefits of the longue durée analysis developed throughout this book warrant repeating. The research and discussions presented here offer novel insights through a dual focus on two aspects of nationalist politics that have been closely intertwined, in context-specific and variable ways, throughout the nationalist eras of modernity and postmodernity. These two interrelated, constitutive facets are the following: first, nationalism’s discursive building blocks, which I have analyzed—across successive historical epochs—through the concepts of deixis, topoi, and grammars of identity; second, nationalism’s political agenda of effecting—once again in context-specific fashion—social closure through the monopolization of status and sociopolitical privileges (for the ingroup) and at the cost of exclusion for outgroups. It is my central claim that it is precisely through a longue durée perspective—regrettable but inevitable omissions, given constraints of time and space, notwithstanding— that these constitutive characteristics of nationalist rhetoric and politics can be shown in their distinctiveness, variability, and interconnection. Put more simply: nationalism interprets the world and makes claims about it; further, it aims for a particular (re)ordering of its surroundings, in which rights, entitlements, etc. are differentially distributed. Discovering both crucial continuities and the context-specific particularities of various forms of nationalist politics requires a wide empirical or deep historical lens. In the present book I have opted for the latter, while also looking geographically relatively widely insofar as some of the

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early parts of the book have attempted to also look across different regions of the former Habsburg Empire. However, readers expecting a comparative analysis of German-speaking Austrian, Slovenian, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, and other nationalisms will, inevitably, have discovered that this is not what this book offers. Reflecting its author’s main interests and specialism, this book’s focus has, unmistakably, been on the German-speaking parts of the former Habsburg lands. The decision to also look at a variety of local/regional contexts was of course a deliberate one, and one I still consider to have been important and right. The rationale for this, as attentive readers will have gathered, has been to reflect the social constructionist premise that national categories of (self- and other-)ascription and of social action require ongoing political practice (discursively and institutionally) that calls for deconstructive analytical efforts. What is more, in locating present-day Austrian nationalism(s) in longer historical and wider geographical contexts, I hope to have at least partly avoided the pitfalls of a “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002; Storm 2015) that equates, in circular fashion, an empirical point of departure with eventually generated findings. Existing and seminal historical scholarship (e.g. King 2002; Judson 2006) on the political work required for the construction of nationally defined boundaries, identities, and politics, from the late nineteenth century on, has demonstrated the value of focusing research on nationalism on particular bi- or multi-ethnic localities or regions. Nationalist discourse is thereby “allowed” to emerge from research, rather being presupposed or even predetermined by it. If the present book is deemed to have helped develop this impressive and important body of scholarship further, then my chief purpose shall have been met. Beyond this, and in empirically narrower terms, I hope and claim to have shown that a fuller understanding of contemporary Austrian nationalism(s) requires both a long historical lens and a wider geographical focus capable of tracing nationalist discourses over lengthy stretches of time and across the localities, regions, and boundaries that those discourses have helped (re)construct. The additional challenge of illuminating particular circumstances, in which initially discursive othering and exclusion turn into fully institutionalized social closure, has also been addressed at various points in this book (e.g. particularly in chapters 3, 6, and 7). The hugely important question as to when and how rhetorical exclusions crystallize and harden into (various) institutional forms can, in all likelihood, only be conclusively answered in specific empirical settings. It is my hope and claim that parts of this book have also added to our knowledge of such always context-specific shifts from discursive toward politically institutionalized closure. Ranking among the most profound questions in the social scientific study of nationalisms and other politics of exclusion, this issue of course demands further research, both in the particular historical and geographical settings examined here, and elsewhere.

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There is a further dimension, in which I hope to have successfully built on the aforementioned and seminal historiographical scholarship advancing a social constructionist understanding of nationalisms as forces attempting to reshape the world rather than as accurate depictions of it. At the level of their “deep structure,” nationalisms indeed attempt to impose a “congruence” or “convergence” (Gellner 1983) of the (allegedly) cultural, with the political being striven for or defended. In so doing, nationalisms exhibit an invariably differentialist worldview (e.g., see Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 286), in which most certainly not all human beings are considered equal. What is crucial here, not least for a political response to nationalism, is the separation of political claims from social realities. Even in their least hierarchical formulations (e.g., in those contemporary nationalisms, which propagate an ethnopluralism that insists on the separation of “units” deemed fundamentally different rather than necessarily on their hierarchical, classically racist ordering as being “better” or “worse,” more or less entitled to something, more or less inclined to think, feel, or act in certain ways), the nationalist view of the world as consisting of internally homogenous ethnic units does not reflect social and historical realities. In its heterogeneities, its many cultural crossovers, borrowings, and syncretisms, the social world simply refuses to correspond to the nationalist ontology. Nationalist notions of the world as an ethnolinguistic mosaic with clear and neat boundaries, which as we have seen can be traced at least to the romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are ideological distortions. Current versions, or palimpsestic rewritings of such a distorting view, include the notion of a Europa der Vaterländer, as if European identities, histories, and lives were contained in clearly separate and exclusively national “containers” (Beck 2000: 23). The much fuzzier edges, multiple identifications, and complex boundary negotiations that define and have defined European lives are thereby either inadvertently overlooked or deliberately forgotten. At its worst, and as the twentieth century showed more than once, nationalist ontology is capable of generating (violent) dynamics of closure and exclusion that have significantly contributed to cataclysmic wars and genocide. On the discursive level, the analyses developed in this book go significantly beyond the established academic “wisdom” concerning nationalism’s constructions of the world. Their Manichean logic of dividing the world into clearly separate in- and out-groups has frequently been observed across a range of contexts. Such observations have thus recorded various nationalisms’ “internally homogenizing, externally antagonistic” (van der Veer 1994: 105) workings, their unambiguous “differentiation of friend from foe,” demanding a strict “separation from the outside” as well as sameness on the inside (Baumann quoted in Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 220, my translation). In partial corroboration, this logic has of course also been recorded and traced here, where I have analyzed it as nationalism’s binary (or “Orientalist”) identity grammar. At the same time, however, I have also shown that nationalism’s discursive arsenal is considerably

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bigger, containing a number of recurring core topoi, or master-topoi (e.g., those of national unity, of a perceived current crisis and an imminent national reawakening, of external threats, of the purported value of historical lessons or analogies), and additional “grammars of identity” (e.g., of hierarchy, assimilationism, apostasy). Furthermore, the analytical trope or heuristic device of the palimpsestic rewritings (Karner and Kazmierczak 2017) employed repeatedly throughout this book has captured discursive processes, through which nationalists reference and (creatively) reappropriate—thereby sometimes distorting—older ideas, concepts, memories, or symbols in the service of present political agendas. It is another central claim emerging from these pages that a fuller understanding of nationalist closure requires us to recognize the varied interpretative schemas, boundary constructs, postulated self-other relations, and discursive-ideological traces at nationalists’ (and others’) disposal. At this point, the important question arises as to what else anyone wishing to counter (Central) Europe’s presently undeniable “renationalization” might take from this book. Here, my position may surprise some. A refusal to engage with the New (Far) Right, as advocated by some of its most outspoken critics (e.g., Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl 2017: 295–296), will not do. Starting from the premise that one’s own political vantage point is the only ethically sound one seems likely to merely perpetuate what is arguably the most troubling phenomenon of our time: the tendency for people to withdraw to their ideological bubbles, nowadays referred to as “echo chambers,” in which claims quickly become circular and no other view of reality is acknowledged, let alone taken seriously. It is my profound hope that this book can enable further, decidedly critical, engagement with nationalist politics. But this requires debate, self-reflection, and the crucial realization that nationalists do, as they always have done, consider their positions to be much more than the self-interested exclusion of (ethnically defined) “others.” The choice to refer to a nationalist ontology has been deliberate here: nationalist discourse, as has been shown, is underpinned by foundational assumptions about what “is,” about (social) reality, its constitutive building blocks and their interrelationships. The analyses developed here offer ample insights into the discursive and institutional workings of nationalist discourse(s) over time to enable a critical response to nationalism at a time when its renewed (mass) appeal has become impossible to deny. Rather than simply retreating to an a priori rejection of the interpretations, claims, and (mobilizing) priorities of very substantial proportions of citizens in Austria and many other countries today, critics need to be prepared and able to show what exactly is so problematic and questionable about nationalism’s ontology, and when, where, and how such ontology has historically been a necessary—though not always singularly sufficient—condition of possibility for many of the worst acts and crimes ever committed. Put differently, what is required are analyses rather than counterpolemics. The kind of critical response needed today can, I hope, derive analytical and political momentum from the

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close and longue durée reading of nationalist discourses and strategies offered in the preceding pages and chapters. The dangers of not engaging and debating with nationalists, by contrast, also manifested in another recent controversy that swept Lower Austria early in 2018. When the FPÖ’s main candidate for the regional elections was shown to be a prominent member of a fraternity with a shockingly anti-Semitic “song-book,” the candidate in question attempted to fend off criticisms by stating that he did not “measure himself ” by the (presumably left-wing) judgments of the aforementioned Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes or the Viennese weekly Falter (ORF News 2018c). While this showed someone on the Far Right attempting to retreat to their ideological “echo-chamber” (Flintham et al. 2018), it is also a failure of their political opponents when they do not insist on a more thorough debate: one simply should have asked what or whom the politician in question thus did consider to be his “measure.” This also poses the troubling question as to whether we have begun to suffer the consequences of a lack of a functioning general public, in which competing political blueprints have to engage in an honest contest over ideas and arguments. The question as to whether such a thing has ever truly existed cannot be taken on here and will be for historians to answer. But it certainly seems that, in our digital era, ideological bubbles are becoming ever more tightly sealed, with circular arguments and navel-gazing preventing proper debate across the political divides that threaten to fracture our societies. This is not only the result of nationalists preferring their own company. For instance, and as already alluded to, Bruns, Glösel, and Strobl (2017: 295–296), in their otherwise excellent research on the Identitären, argue that there should be no public discussion with the latter as this would only help legitimize the New Right (further). This strikes me as counterproductive and enormously risky. Without public debate among the not-likeminded and the (quasi-Habermasian) attempt to make democratic decisions on the basis of demonstrably better arguments, one has to fear yet deeper polarization, further fragmentation, and serious crises of legitimacy. So how might one insist on debate and critical engagement across political divides? One promising strategy that needs to be developed further is sketched by Ruth Wodak’s (2016: 38–39) revelation of some of the populist New Right’s rhetorical trickery, including its “perpetrator-victim-reversals” and the aforementioned “perpetuum mobile” of calculated scandals. Naming such strategies is a necessary precursor to then be able to publicly question, for example, why and how white, male, and often privileged members of fraternities can, worryingly with some apparent success, present themselves as being allegedly silenced, misunderstood, or even discriminated against or threatened. Further, a critical engagement with today’s neo-nationalism may build directly on this book by asking any or all of the following questions, some of which have already been mentioned: do any of the identity grammars employed in nationalist discourse

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actually reflect social and historical realities? Conversely, how or how severely are the latter misrepresented in the former? Are any of the topoi encountered across the preceding chapters ever substantiated by evidence? Or are such topoi only circular assertions? And if supported by some empirical illustration, does this become the problematic basis for unjustified and distorting generalizations (i.e., the “inductive trap”)? What is the role of nationalist deixis—the rhetorical pointing that variously constructs and reifies national boundaries—in relation to such grammars and topoi? On the discursive level, it is thus relatively straightforward to see how sociological data and historical evidence can be used to test, and more likely challenge, central claims and argumentative strategies underpinning nationalisms. On the institutional level—that is, in relation to the social closure nationalism strives for—the task is more complicated. Here, one cannot just point at the discrepancies between nationalist interpretations and available evidence. Instead, at stake here are questions of (public) resources and their distribution as well as of rights and entitlements. In this domain, discussions quickly become normative, enabling any of the protagonists to retreat to what we have discussed as ontological assumptions or, more accurately, to ideas about what human being are assumed to be like and what social reality is taken to consist of. Put differently, how might one counter (ontological) claims that take social closure to be an inevitable—and hence even justifiable—strategy of pursuing collective self-interests in a world of scarcity and competition? Counterposing one ontology with another will not suffice and will merely result in normative-ideological stalemate. More promisingly, one might opt for historical arguments that are also enabled by the present book. As we have seen, the (longterm) consequences of nationalist social closure have tended to be disastrous for all or almost all involved. Even without a normative commitment to a more inclusive, meritocratic, or just world, the last two centuries provide ample evidence that the fragmentation and antagonisms triggered by nationalist social closure have escalated much further and, in the long run, also run counter to the national ingroup’s (presumed) self-interests. Without wishing to draw overly facile analogies from history, the wider relevance of the analytical work performed here to other empirical contexts also warrants a brief mention. As an Austrian and self-defining European living for much of the period I have spent writing this book in pre-Brexit England, I have been struck on a near daily basis by the countless echoes between my research on Austria and the events surrounding me in the United Kingdom. From the period prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum to the present moment in the late summer of 2018, British politics and public debate have revolved around new forms of social closure anticipated, and in many cases argued for, in the post-Brexit period. Discursively, this has involved recurring topoi, identity grammars, and nationally deictic arguments that are not at all dissimilar to what has been shown here and that, in the contemporary British context, still urgently await sustained analysis.

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Geographical delineation (i.e., my particular focus on Austria), though necessary, thus also poses questions about the wider relevance of the findings and insights generated here. Quite apart from the much more general and already mentioned applicability of the theoretical and conceptual arguments (i.e., pertaining to identity grammars, topoi, and their palimpsestic rewriting in the service of various politics of closure) offered by the present book, the empirical themes and historical trajectories that have here been traced across modern Austrian history also resonate much more widely. Earlier chapters of this book went some way toward capturing some wider Central European resonances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this conclusion, it is worth re-emphasizing what will be obvious to many readers: namely, that the neo-nationalism analyzed across this book’s later chapters is anything but an Austrian particularity. Across much of former Habsburg Central Europe, and far beyond it, recent years have seen populist rightward shifts (e.g., see Manow 2019). While the fallout of the 2007/2008 financial crisis has played an important role in this renationalizing process now unquestionably afoot, so have local factors and pre-existing national “mythscapes” (Bell 2003). To the historian and social scientist, contextualization in specific histories and experiences therefore remains the sine qua non for any convincing analysis of today’s neo-nationalisms, be it in former Habsburg lands (whether in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or elsewhere), in other parts of Europe (e.g., Poland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France), in BrexitBritain, or in Donald Trump’s politics. Put differently, global shifts matter here, as do local, regional, and national histories. Concurrently, there are also other thematic commonalities that cut across contextual particularities. Those include the additional plausibility “hot” nationalisms tend to acquire in various crisis scenarios, the polarizing effects of such crises, and the thus ubiquitous contestability of political positions, including—of course—(neo-)nationalist ones. From Austria to Hungary, from the United Kingdom to Italy, Poland, and elsewhere, recent years have indeed seen what parts of the New Right, as well as some of its critical commentators, describe as a new populist hegemony, one that is at best skeptical about migration and other global “flows,” and at times positively hostile toward them. At the same time, however, each of those national contexts is also witnessing increasingly vocal counterdiscourses, prominent in civil societies that are themselves both local and transnational in some of their registers of expression and with some of their intended audiences. At the time of writing (i.e., now in early 2019), the European Union is bracing itself not only for Brexit but also for the next European elections. Polarization, and hence contrasting responses to widely perceived or experienced crises, are set to continue dominating politics and everyday lives for the foreseeable future. To return to the Austrian context, the just mentioned and recent anti-Semitic scandal also requires yet wider discussion, including of the equally troubling involvement of a previous—though then quickly thrown-out—SPÖ party member

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(ORF News 2018e). This in turn should have triggered a renewed, sustained, wider, and deeper critical engagement with the legacy and multiple sites of Austrian postwar, “secondary” anti-Semitism (e.g., see Serloth 2016). In analytical terms, there are further reasons justifying, indeed calling for a longue durée perspective. Recent events—like this recent anti-Semitic scandal, or debates concerning the FPÖ’s purported commitment to examine its (i.e., the “third camp’s”) history—all show that ideological currents and divisions rooted in the nineteenth century (i.e., the mutual antagonisms between the Christian Social Movement, Social Democracy, and pan-Germanism) still shape the present, though often unbeknownst to some of the social actors implicated. A historical lens that only covers the postwar period will inevitably omit those deeper discursive roots and continuities, as well as the ways in which they are selectively invoked and reappropriated, albeit often unconsciously, in today’s political contests. It is for these reasons that the extrapolation of nationalism’s discursive building blocks in the more distant past, as much as their subsequent and repeated palimpsestic rewriting, as manifestations of diachronic and selective intertextuality, has proven crucial to my analyses. It is at this final juncture that a brief detour via the present book’s cover is called for. This is not the first discussion of (contemporary) Austria that detects deeper historical meanings in Upper Austrian road signs (see Beller 2006: 307). As with banal nationalism (Billig 1995) more generally, the image displayed on this book’s cover implicitly contains histories that far transcend the apparent everyday-ness of the objects and signs in question. The photograph was taken in an area that, as we have seen, came to be constructed as one of the Habsburg Empire’s internal “language frontiers” toward the end of the nineteenth century (Judson 2006). Today, a century after the Empire’s collapse, in an era of usually unproblematic and unchecked intra-Schengen border crossings, the geographical signs displaying town and village names and depicted on this book’s cover continue to reflect this troubled, nationalizing dimension of the late imperial period. The village and city names, to which twenty-first-century drivers are here alerted, offer traces of the romantic linking of places to languages, which (early) nationalists were so successful at (re)appropriating. Space thereby became “nationalized,” ascribed to ethnolinguistic communities—that were themselves imagined in ever more rigidly delineated and strongly reified terms in the process—or contested and argued over between them. Several monumental political transformations later, the nationalism transmitted in many town names along the former Habsburg Empire’s internal “language frontiers” is now barely noticed by most, having become part of the banal nationalism that embeds biographies in the structures and histories of “our” nation-states, usually without “our” conscious awareness of it. European integration notwithstanding, recent years have shown repeatedly that despite the ease with which drivers these days routinely cross the particular border close to where the image in question was taken, a highly

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significant boundary it remains. With EU-skepticism prominent on both of its “sides,” there are no guarantees at all that this border may not become refortified in the future. As contrasting reactions in Austria and the Czech Republic in the early stages of the “refugee crisis” of 2015 and 2016 showed, the border between them had already become only semipermeable again, still crossed with ease by EU citizens (or tourists), but a formidable obstacle to (would-be) asylum-seekers. As Europe’s renationalization has continued apace, and with Austria’s coalition (ÖVP-FPÖ) government in some ways having shown more alignment with the Visegrád states, the (nationalist) histories traced and analyzed here appear to be anything but a thing of the past.

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INDEX

d absolutism, 30, 57 agribusiness, 183, 198 Allied Council, 111, 116 Altmann, Maria, 168 Alto Adige, 133, 192 amnesia, 4, 114 analogies, 29, 38, 40, 112, 159, 194, 195, 205, 219 Anderson, Benedict, 3, 7, 28 Anschluss, 92, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 117, 119, 124, 130, 137, 149, 150 anti-immigration stance, 154 anti-Semitism, 10, 37, 50, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 112, 120, 121, 132, 135, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 162, 172, 173, 187, 195, 197, 206, 213, 218, 220, 221 apostasy, 73, 81, 84, 158, 166, 207, 217 Appadurai, Arjun, 26, 27, 29, 42, 174, 189 argumentative structure, 14, 17, 24, 27, 165, 186 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 50, 52, 91 Aryanization, 107, 108, 114, 120, 121, 130, 172 assimilationism, 13, 52, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 81, 84, 92, 93, 94, 106, 161, 166, 168, 174, 176, 217 asylum-seeker, 175, 177, 180, 199, 200, 201, 222 Auschwitz, 107, 121, 195 Ausgleich, 64 Austria-first petition, 156 Austrian Airlines, 129

Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 71 Austro-Keynesianism, 135 Austro-Pop, 150 authenticity, topos, 15, 34, 39, 40, 134 Bach, Alexander, 61, 193 Badeni, Count Kazimierz, 70, 72, 84 Balkan, 86, 200, 201 banal nationalism, 4, 112, 113, 116, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 139, 140, 142, 221 Bartsch, Rudolf Hans, 70, 71 Bauer, Otto, 97, 105, 112, 136, 138, 168, 209, 210 Bauman, Zygmunt, 4, 19, 69, 83, 108, 112 Baumann, Gerd, 12, 13, 27, 28, 35, 39, 45, 87, 90, 91, 119, 138, 166, 192, 216 Beck, Ulrich, 216 Bell, Duncan, 4, 15, 19, 38, 112, 113, 131, 220 Berlin, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 76, 87, 101, 152 Bernhard, Thomas, 149, 163 Biedermeier, 51 Billig, Michael, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 20, 40, 66, 113, 124, 126, 128, 140, 165, 196, 221 binarism, 45, 46, 47, 49, 84, 119, 166 Bischof, Günter, 117, 119, 120, 137, 138 Bismarck, Otto von, 64 Bohemia, 53, 68, 70, 73, 93, 95 Borodajkewycz, Taras, 132 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 67, 85, 206 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20, 58, 60, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 140, 148, 150, 156, 169, 181, 203

248

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Boyer, John, 29, 57, 67, 71, 78, 79, 98, 102, 116, 117 Brexit, 203, 204, 219, 220 broadsheet press, 167, 189, 198 Brubaker, Roger, 3, 15, 44, 74, 178, 212 Brunner, Anton, 108 Buchenwald, 109 Budapest, 59, 79, 151 Budweis/Budějovice, 21, 68 Bukovina, 30, 89 bureaucracy, 18, 58, 108, 186 Burgenland, 96, 97, 98, 111, 117, 158, 199 Busek, Erhard, 155 BZÖ (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich), 151, 174, 175, 184, 188, 191, 192 Carinthia, 93, 95, 96, 135, 175, 182 Catholicism, 42, 46, 48, 98, 99 census, 74, 84, 207 Central Europe, 1, 3, 4, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 40, 41, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 99, 125, 182, 214, 220 Central Powers, 82, 91 CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), 211 Christian Social Movement/Party, 57, 78, 97, 98, 100, 102, 116, 129, 188, 204, 221 Cisleithania, 21, 67, 68, 69, 70, 89, 92, 95 civil service, 52, 67, 70, 71, 78 civil society, 4, 48, 51, 59, 83, 122, 141, 169, 170, 199, 205, 207, 208 civil war, 100 civilizing mission, topos, 70, 71, 73, 76, 87 closure, social, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 94, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 120, 121, 122, 133, 141, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 189, 196, 197,

198, 201, 202, 207, 210, 211, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220 Cohen, Gary, 3, 17, 24, 30, 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 83, 93, 104 Cold War, 4, 18, 26, 116, 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 166 communists, 97, 111, 116, 118, 155 community cohesion, 163 concentration camp, 100, 103, 109, 116, 120, 124, 132, 137, 148 constitutional monarchy, 18 constructivism, 4, 7, 8, 24, 212 Cordoba, 136 corruption scandal, 142 crime, 105, 109, 112, 120, 154, 155, 159, 177, 185, 186, 188 critical discourse analysis (CDA), 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 22, 121, 146 Croat movement, 57 cultural elite, 4, 83 Czech, 1, 2, 30, 31, 51, 53, 57, 58, 68, 70, 73, 74, 75, 80, 85, 87, 92, 93, 101, 130, 162, 176, 212, 215, 220, 222 Czechoslovakia, 92, 95, 100, 127, 151 Dachau, 103, 107, 109, 124 December Constitution, 64 deixis, 10, 11, 20, 29, 37, 40, 50, 56, 61, 77, 90, 124, 125, 145, 158, 165, 178, 182, 185, 200, 209, 214, 219 deportation, 104, 108, 110, 144, 145 destruction process, 108, 112 Deutscher Bund, 31 diachronic approach, 7, 24, 113, 140, 166, 221 Diets, 61 digital age, 19, 22, 26, 191, 205, 208, 209, 218 discrimination, 10, 99, 105, 120, 158, 180 Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 150, 218 Dollfuß, Engelbert, 100, 101, 102 domination, 6, 38, 40, 62, 94, 100, 154 doxa, 20, 97, 98, 127, 140, 170 Dual Monarchy, 64, 69, 72, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95 Dumont, Louis, 12, 13

Index

echo-chamber, 218 Economic Recovery Program, 117, 122 Eichmann trial, 132 Emperor, 49, 51, 86, 90 encompassment, 13, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 68, 87, 90, 92, 119, 138, 192, 193 Enlightenment, 19, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 43, 47, 52 Entente, 88, 91 environmentalism, 141, 142 essentialism, 35, 37, 70, 76, 79, 161, 182, 183, 194 ethnicity, 7, 37, 69, 74, 81, 93, 94, 178, 181 ethno-pluralism, 208 ethnoscape, 26, 42, 174 ethno-symbolism, 28, 186 Eugene, Prince of Savoy, 194 Euro-crisis, 184 Europa der Vaterländer, 156, 216 European Economic Community (EEC), 133 European Union (EU), 1, 5, 134, 141, 156, 159, 160, 161, 164, 169, 171, 176, 177, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 204, 210, 211, 220, 222 Eurozone, 173, 184, 185 EU-skepticism, 156, 222 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 12 everyday nationalism, 211 exclusion, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 55, 56, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 75, 77, 81, 83, 92, 93, 94, 101, 106, 119, 120, 127, 151, 153, 157, 163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 183, 186, 187, 190, 214, 215, 216, 217 Facebook, 195, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213 Falco, 194 Falter, 107, 170, 190, 191, 218 Far Right, 133, 149, 175, 192, 195, 208, 210, 218 fascism, 18, 83, 100, 101, 169, 171 Faymann, Werner, 191, 192 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 52, 206 Figl, Leopold, 124, 125 First Republic, 95, 97, 98, 116, 122, 146

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249

Fischer, Heinz, 211 Fischhof, Adolf, 65, 66 football, 105, 107, 136 forced labor, 104, 137, 172 foreigners, 133, 154, 155, 158, 159, 176, 186, 190, 197, 207 FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), 117, 134, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 218, 221, 222 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 82, 86 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 61, 64, 86, 88 Fraser, Nancy, 138, 158, 159, 167, 173, 177, 182, 196, 197, 202 fraternities, 77, 89, 133, 154, 157, 195, 207, 208, 210, 218 French Revolution, 18, 28, 31, 36, 42, 43, 46, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 143 Frischenschlager, Friedhelm, 143 frontier Orientalism, 72, 146 Fuchs, Franz, 158, 212 Galicia, 30, 88, 89 Gehrer, Elisabeth, 167 Gellner, Ernest, 3, 7, 15, 16, 24, 28, 32, 37, 48, 69, 80, 87, 94, 95, 153, 179, 180, 197, 205, 206, 216 genocide, 4, 82, 83, 120, 166, 195, 207, 216 German Confederation, 18, 31, 60, 63 German Customs Union, 63 German Empire, 38, 45, 52, 67, 88, 90 German National Assembly, 60 ghetto, 76, 104, 180 Giddens, Anthony, 98 Gingrich, André, 5, 12, 13, 27, 28, 35, 39, 45, 72, 87, 90, 91, 119, 138, 140, 146, 157, 159, 192, 197 globalization, 161, 174, 183, 189, 197, 198, 200

250

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Index

golden era, topos, 38, 125, 211 Graf, Martin, 192, 193 grammars of identity, 12, 13, 27, 28, 29, 35, 46, 84, 90, 91, 166, 214, 217 Grasser, Karl-Heinz, 175 Graz, 2, 106, 179 Greece, 132, 144, 145, 184, 185, 199, 201, 203 Green Party/Green movement, 142, 204, 209 Grünbaum, Fritz, 109 guest workers, 132, 180 gymnastic movement, the, 49, 52, 173 habitus, 127, 128, 129, 131, 139, 140 Habsburgs, 1, 3, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 40, 41, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 118, 127, 166, 197, 215, 220, 221 Haider, Jörg, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 187, 188, 190, 192, 196, 211 Hainburg, 142 Hakoah, 107 Haslinger, Josef, 155, 160, 163 Havlicek, Karel, 68 hegemony, 38, 44, 49, 50, 59, 62, 65, 69, 72, 73, 74, 78, 92, 102, 106, 118, 124, 125, 134, 139, 175, 205, 210, 220 Heimat, 70, 106, 131 Heimatpartei, soziale, 197 Heimwehr, 96, 98, 129 Heldenplatz, 103, 130, 149, 163, 170 Helmer, Oskar, 119 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 52, 53, 57, 211 Herr Karl, 129, 130 hierarchy, 13, 30, 45, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 78, 79, 84, 87, 90, 92, 94, 115, 166, 183, 192, 216, 217 hijab, 182 Hilberg, Raul, 105, 108, 112 history, topos, 1, 2, 6, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40,

44, 45, 49, 51, 53, 55, 63, 66, 67, 71, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 115, 117, 118, 124, 125, 128, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 167, 171, 172, 173, 176, 183, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193, 200, 201, 203, 204, 207, 210, 211, 214, 219, 220, 221 Hitler, Adolf, 76, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109, 112, 114, 119, 130, 150, 171, 210 Hofburg, 195 Hofer, Andreas, 47 Hofer, Norbert, 203, 204, 205 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 41 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 41, 193 Holocaust, the, 1, 4, 18, 23, 80, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 136, 143, 147, 155, 162, 166, 167, 172, 193, 195 Holy Roman Empire, 18, 30, 31, 48, 193 hot nationalism, 5, 113, 131, 136, 140 Hungary, 30, 32, 60, 62, 63, 64, 77, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 106, 127, 151, 176, 220 Hutchinson, John, 15, 38, 71, 79, 125, 211 hybridity, 4, 35, 55, 110, 133, 182 Identitären, die/Identitäre Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ), 208, 218 identity politics, 4, 7 ideological palimpsests, 36, 166, 194 ideology, 13, 14, 15, 60, 91, 102, 118 ideoscape, 32, 37, 41, 46, 49, 52, 53 immigration, 7, 94, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 166, 168, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 199, 203, 212 inductive trap, 178, 182, 200, 207, 209, 212, 219 industrialization, 18, 30, 52, 58, 76, 127 information society, 167 ingroup, 10, 12, 51, 68, 69, 73, 74, 90, 91, 92, 115, 120, 128, 134, 146, 147, 158,

Index

172, 176, 183, 188, 192, 211, 214, 219 Innsbruck, 100, 149, 152 Insel der Seligen/island of the blessed, topos, 135, 143, 186 integration, 18, 47, 52, 63, 91, 151, 156, 158, 168, 174, 175, 179, 181, 191, 199, 200, 204, 221 interpellation, 71, 74, 168 intertextuality, 203, 221 Iron Curtain, 1, 127, 151, 176 Iron Ring, 67 irredentism, 76, 85 Islam, 72, 176, 178, 182, 184, 199, 207 Islamgesetz, 72, 181 Islamization, topos, 207 Islamophobia, 178, 182 Isonzo, 86, 88 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 49, 52, 53, 173 Jelačić, Josip, 60 Jena, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 53 Jews, 35, 46, 65, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 89, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 162, 163, 167, 168, 172, 173, 187, 195, 213 Jonas, Franz, 135 Joseph II, 30, 46 Judaism, 75, 102, 187 Judson, Pieter, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30, 55, 66, 67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 83, 85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 178, 207, 215, 221 Judt, Tony, 88, 99, 103, 115, 116, 117, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 134, 137, 141, 142, 152 Kafka, Franz, 72 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 43 Kern, Christian, 198, 202 King, Jeremy, 16, 17, 21, 29, 30, 49, 64, 65, 68, 70, 74, 85, 86, 87, 106, 178, 207, 215 Kirchweger, Ernst, 132 Klagenfurt, 135, 192

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251

Klaus, Josef, 134, 168, 201 kleindeutsch, 60, 64 Kleist, Heinrich von, 50 Klestil, Thomas, 155, 169 Klimt, Gustav, 110, 168 Kneissl, Karin, 200 Knittelfeld, 175 Kollár, Jan, 53 Königgrätz, 63, 64 Körner, Theodor, 50, 51, 91 Kossuth, Lajos, 53, 60 Krankl, Hans, 136 Kreisky, Bruno, 98, 99, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 146, 150, 162, 163, 168 Kremsier, 60, 62, 65 Kronen Zeitung (Krone), 146, 154, 156, 168, 177, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 210, 212 Kübeck, Baron, 61 Kulturnation, 143, 193 Kurier, 190 Kurz, Sebastian, 198, 201, 202, 203, 209, 210, 213 labor, 24, 38, 95, 104, 123, 132, 133, 156, 172, 177, 180, 198, 203 landscape, 75, 128, 161, 198, 202 Le Pen, Marine, 203 Left, political, 16, 17, 141, 150, 179, 197, 204 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 69, 174 liberalism, 18, 66, 67, 68, 77, 80, 197, 210, 213 linguist, 32 Linz Program, 77, 81 Lisbon Treaty, 185, 191 longue durée, 4, 11, 21, 23, 24, 28, 33, 57, 82, 106, 116, 124, 140, 165, 186, 189, 192, 204, 205, 206, 211, 214, 218, 221 Löschnak, Franz, 156 Lower Austria, 117, 141, 193, 218 Lueger, Karl, 78, 106, 187 Magyar nationalism, 57

252

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Index

Mahler, Gustav, 107 Maria Theresia, 30, 46 marketization, 173, 177, 197, 198, 202 Marshall Plan, 117, 122, 137 Marx, Karl, 17, 41 mass politics, 68, 78, 85, 112 master-topos, 104, 125, 146, 180, 193, 203, 207 Mauthausen, 120, 121, 124 Menasse, Robert, 123, 137, 171 Merkel, Angela, 200 Metternich, Fürst Klemens Wenzel Lothar, 42, 51, 52 migration studies, 180 Mitten, Richard, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 155, 156, 162, 169, 172, 175, 179, 187 modernism/modernization, 18, 26, 63, 80, 105, 134 Mölzer, Andreas, 157 monopolization, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 56, 151, 162, 183, 187, 196, 198, 199, 214 Moravia/Moravian Compromise, 30, 68, 79, 93, 95 Moscow Declaration, 119 Motte Fouqué, Friedrich de la, 50 Mühlviertel, 117 multiculturalism, 33, 133, 149, 158, 173, 178, 179, 180, 184, 206, 213 Murer, Franz, 132 Murphy, Raymond, 4, 6, 7, 8, 56, 59, 62, 64, 70, 81, 93, 166, 183, 207 Musil, Robert, 72 Muzicant, Ariel, 173 myth of victimhood, 119, 130, 131, 144, 145 mythscape, 112, 121, 125, 129, 131, 138, 139, 142, 148, 151

neo-nationalism, 5, 18, 19, 140, 141, 197, 218, 220 network society, 19 neutrality, 124, 125, 128, 151, 164, 198 New Right, 196, 205, 208, 210, 218, 220 New York Times, 144, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41 nostalgia, 5, 15, 44, 78, 162, 185, 191, 203, 211 Nouvelle Droite, 208 Novalis, 41, 43 November pogrom, 106 NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), 103, 162 nuclear energy, 162, 198, 212

Napoleonic Wars, 18, 28, 31, 49 nationalization, 3, 4, 5, 18, 24, 55, 66, 67, 74, 82, 92 Nazism, national socialism, 18, 37, 38, 41, 75, 101, 103, 104, 106, 119, 131, 132, 137, 145, 147, 149, 155, 167, 171, 187, 193 neo-absolutism, 18, 62, 63, 64

Palacký, František, 53, 68 palimpsest, 24, 36, 65, 72, 75, 76, 79, 91, 110, 140, 153, 162, 166, 168, 171, 173, 178, 180, 189, 194, 197, 204, 211, 216, 217, 220, 221 pan-Germanism, 64, 71, 76, 77, 78, 89, 91, 96, 102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 118, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138,

O5, 114 Oberwart, 158 ÖFF (Österreichische Freiheitsfront), 114 ontology, 16, 17, 35, 194, 205, 216, 217, 219 ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk), 187, 190, 195, 199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 218, 221 organicism, 15, 16, 35, 37, 45, 65, 76, 77, 206 Orientalism/orientalization, 12, 39, 44, 45, 46, 66, 72, 146, 166, 170, 207 Österreich zuerst, 156 Ottoman Empire/Ottomans, 72, 82, 95, 194 outgroup, 12, 119 ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei), 111, 116, 122, 123, 134, 136, 144, 146, 149, 154, 155, 156, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 183, 188, 191, 192, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 208, 209, 210, 222

Index

140, 143, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157, 163, 173, 192, 193, 194, 195, 207, 208, 210, 211, 221 pan-Slavism, 57, 158 Parkin, Frank, 5, 6, 59 pars pro toto fallacy, 172, 178, 212 paternalism, 66, 72, 78, 122, 152 patriotism/Habsburg patriotism, 31, 35, 38, 45, 46, 48, 51, 87, 89, 90, 96, 124, 153 Pelinka, Anton, 48, 120, 122, 137, 141, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, 169, 171, 172, 173, 196 perpetrator, 158, 218 Peter, Friedrich, 136, 163, 199, 200, 205, 209 petite bourgeoisie, 78 Peymann, Claus, 149 Pilz, Peter, 199, 209, 213 pluriculturality, 3, 24, 69, 74, 75, 83 Polanyi, Karl, 58 political romanticism, 37, 50, 75, 162, 194, 205 political sociology, 141 politics of emotions, 160 politics of memory, 150, 151, 167 populism, 5, 25, 131, 138, 151, 152, 154, 155, 168, 171, 187, 190, 194, 195, 197, 203, 204, 206, 208, 218, 220 postmodernity/postmodern politics, 18, 19, 20, 24, 157, 214 Poznan, 1, 2 Präambel, 169 Prague, 59, 60, 75, 79, 92, 93, 151, 152 pre-March/Vormärz, 18, 53, 57, 59, 61 presidential elections, 143, 148, 150, 162, 193, 203, 204 primordialism, 37, 39 Princip, Gavrilo, 82 Prinzhorn, Thomas, 168 Proporz, 116, 121, 122, 151, 152, 154, 155 protectionism, 173, 177, 196, 197, 198, 202 Protestantism, 42, 48 proto-nationalism, 32, 46, 54 Prussia, 31, 36, 49, 50, 63 public sphere, 4, 18, 51, 70, 181

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253

qualitative data, 8 Qualtinger, Helmut, 129, 130 Rabinovici, Doron, 170 racism, 19, 75, 76, 102, 106, 166, 170 Radetzky, Field Marshall, 60 radicalism, 57, 77, 102 railway, 58, 63, 152 Rathkolb, Oliver, 98, 103, 114, 115, 137, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156, 159, 160, 161, 164, 168, 172, 176, 187 readers’ letters, 23, 167, 177, 187, 191, 199 reconstruction, 109, 112, 116, 119, 121, 124, 166, 176 Reder, Walter, 143 referendum, 102, 141, 142, 156, 176, 191, 203, 204, 219 refugees, 89, 127, 136, 199, 201, 204, 208, 212, 222 regeneration/revival (national), topos, 68, 71, 73, 79, 112, 125, 165, 207 regimental history, 90 Reisigl, Martin, 10, 14, 76, 127, 139, 160, 172, 173, 212 renationalization, 18, 186, 189, 217, 222 Renner, Karl, 92, 97, 111, 114 Republikanischer Schutzbund, 98 Rescue Austria, 185 resistance, 4, 6, 9, 19, 47, 83, 114, 132, 150, 163 restitution, 119, 163, 167, 168, 172, 187 Restoration, 42, 45, 51, 52 revisionism, 155 Riess-Passer, Susanne, 175 Roma, 58, 105, 158 Romanticism/Romantics, 22, 37, 41, 50, 52, 66, 142 Rosenkranz, Barbara, 193, 211 Roth, Joseph, 118 Safranski, Rüdiger, 27, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 75, 194, 205 Said, Edmund, 12, 72 Salzburg, 107 sanctions, 120, 169, 171 Sarajevo, 86

254

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Index

schema, 15, 39, 44, 46, 49, 50, 73, 96, 98 Schengen, 177, 178, 200, 221 Schiele, Egon, 167 Schirach, Baldau von, 110 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 45 Schlegel, Friedrich, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52 Schmerling, Anton, 60 Schmitt, Carl, 210, 211 Schönerer, Georg von, 76, 77, 78 schools, 9, 62, 70, 71, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 85, 94, 105, 148, 178, 179, 180, 207, 209 Schuschnigg, Kurt, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107 Schüssel, Wolfgang, 168, 196 Schwarzenberg, Prince Felix, 60, 61 Second Republic, 97, 98, 111, 114, 116, 119, 122, 123, 131, 163 secondary anti-Semitism, 162 segmentation, 37, 119 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 102 Simmel, Georg, 2 Sinowatz, Fred, 142, 149 Smith, Anthony D., 3, 7, 15, 28, 186 social democracy, social democrats, 204 social media, 19, 191, 205, 208, 209, 212 social partnership, 118, 123, 137 social protectionism, 173, 177, 196, 197, 198, 202 Solferino, 63 SOS Mitmensch, 156 South Tyrol, 96, 97, 133, 134, 138, 192, 193, 209 SPÖ (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs), 116, 122, 123, 134, 142, 144, 146, 149, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163, 164, 168, 172, 175, 183, 188, 191, 192, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 209, 211, 213, 220 springtime of the peoples, 28, 46, 55, 58, 59 Staatsnation, 153, 193 Stalingrad, 114 Ständestaat, 100, 101 status group, 6, 7, 8, 56, 62, 70, 81, 93, 166 Steger, Norbert, 142, 149 Strache, Heinz-Christian, 163, 187, 194, 195, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211 Strauss, Johann, 69, 174, 194

STS, 150, 151 Styria, 22, 70, 73, 95, 182 subaltern, 87, 113, 131, 138, 182, 183, 188 Sudetenland, 95 synecdoche, 146, 172, 212 tabloid press, 167, 202 terrorist attack, 133, 158, 173 third camp, 116, 149, 150, 166, 168, 192, 204, 207, 210, 221 threat, topos, 36, 72, 86, 100, 101, 146, 163, 194, 196, 198, 202, 207 three wise men, 171 Thurnher, Armin, 170, 191, 205, 210 Transleithania, 69, 92 Treaty of Saint-Germain, 95, 96 Treaty of Trianon, 96 Trentino, 22, 133 triangulation, 18 triple movement, 173 trope, 15, 36, 48, 70, 72, 73, 77, 135, 137, 143, 146, 185, 186, 217 Trump, Donald, 204, 220 Tschusch, 133 TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), 211 Tusk, Donald, 201 Tyrol, 22, 46, 47, 71, 73, 95, 97, 133, 134, 138, 156, 192, 193, 209 Uhl, Heidemarie, 116, 119, 131, 132, 140, 155 unemployment, 97, 99, 135, 142, 158, 181, 183, 186 unity, topos, 10, 14, 16, 35, 39, 40, 48, 49, 50, 53, 65, 71, 77, 79, 80, 87, 92, 104, 112, 146, 162, 165, 192, 197, 206, 207, 211, 217 Upper Austria, 172, 202, 221 urbanization, 18, 30, 127 usurpation, 6, 7, 59, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 81, 84, 93, 94 Van der Bellen, Alexander, 203, 204 Vaterländische Front, 100 VdU (Verband der Unabhängigen), 117, 137, 142, 157

Index

Vend-theory, 93 vernacular, 53, 57 Versailles, Peace of, 92, 99 victimhood/victim thesis, 119, 130, 131, 144, 145 Vienna, 18, 30, 31, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 87, 89, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 120, 124, 132, 137, 142, 143, 149, 152, 156, 158, 163, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 187, 188, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205 Vienna, Congress of, 18, 31, 42 Visegrád states, 222 VOEST, 129 Vogelsang, Karl von, 78, 79 voluntary association, 70 Vorarlberg, 96, 110, 182 Vormärz/pre-March, 18, 42, 51, 52 Vranitzky, Franz, 105, 149, 155, 156, 172, 198 Wagner, Richard, 76 Waldheim, Kurt, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 162, 163, 176, 190 Wannsee Conference, 108 Wartburgfest, 52 water, 90, 183, 206 ways of seeing, 74, 75 Weber, Max, 5, 7, 56, 62, 164 Wehrmacht, 111, 112, 114, 131, 139, 144, 163, 167 Weimar, 37, 97, 210

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255

Wiener Korporationsring, 195 Wiesenthal, Simon, 132, 136, 146, 150, 163 Wilson, Woodrow, 91, 95, 96 Wimmer, Andreas, 5, 25, 32, 37, 56, 81, 99, 215 Windisch-Graetz, Prince Alfred, 60 Winter, Susanne, 181 Wodak, Ruth, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 25, 57, 76, 115, 119, 127, 129, 130, 139, 147, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 178, 182, 187, 188, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 201, 204, 208, 211, 212, 213, 218 Wolf, Karl Hermann, 31, 78, 208 World Jewish Congress, 103, 143, 144, 146 World War I, 1, 4, 18, 56, 68, 74, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 117, 118, 119, 131, 133, 138, 139, 143, 148, 149, 151, 155, 167, 192 World War II, 4, 18, 103, 111, 118, 119, 131, 138, 139, 143, 148, 149, 151, 155, 167 xenophobia, 132, 133, 155, 156, 163, 168, 169, 187, 190, 200 Zagreb, 59, 92 Zelman, Leon, 121 Zilk, Helmut, 158 Zöchling, Christa, 195, 208, 210, 211 Zweibund, 67 Zweig, Stefan, 86, 104 Zwentendorf, 141, 142