Ein Staat stirbt: Österreich 1934–38 by Georg Wieser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ein Staat stirbt: Österreich 1934–38 by Georg Wieser Britta McEwen Georg Wieser, Ein Staat stirbt: Österreich 1934–38. Vienna: New Academic Press, 2018. 260 pp. Ein Staat Stirbt has a fascinating backstory. The book was written on the eve of the Munich crisis by an Austrian living in exile named Otto Leichter, writing as Georg Wieser. It is cinematic, punchy, and fast-paced as it narrates the demise of independent Austria in a partisan tone—the author was no fan of the Ständestaat. But the book itself was forgotten for years, languishing in the Augustinerlesesaal of the Austrian National Library until scholar Béla Rásky, managing director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, found it there and began reading. He has now brought it to light again, offering a helpful introduction to the text and ensuring that it would be reprinted. It deserves to be read by a wide audience, both in Austria and America. The era of the Ständestaat is receiving more attention as of late, although it remains a very politically charged topic to write about. Wieser's account, [End Page 103] written so close to the source, is of particular interest. It was accessible to exiles, not Austrians, at the time of publication and was intended as a plea for international intervention against fascism in all its forms. Yet it captures the concerns of Austrians, and particularly the Viennese, during the 1930s in a way that few accounts can claim to. As Rásky so rightly describes it in his introduction, the book is written in a style similar to a crime novel, tight and breathless, yet here the crime is the annexation of Austria. Wieser spreads the blame around: on those who crushed the workers in 1934, on Dollfuss and Schuschnigg for setting up a dictatorial regime, on the Catholic Church for abetting them, on Mussolini for inventing fascism and then getting so diverted in Abyssinia that he failed to protect Austria, and on Hitler for his unending greed. Wieser's thesis is that independent Austria died with the workers' freedoms in 1934; the ensuing four years were a farce that played out according to the whims of dictators. The tension between international politics and internal rule in Austria was too great for Dollfuss or Schuschnigg to overcome, according to the author, and thus they dug themselves deeper into authoritarianism and were blind to the "brown threat" of Nazism. Along the way, the reader gets fascinating sketches of daily life in the Ständestaat, including a chapter that opens with the drop in butter and veal consumption in the latter part of the 1930s as an illustration of the dip in quality of life that authoritarianism brought to the Viennese. Terror and fear are the watchwords of this slim book. Wieser opens with the Nazis marching into Vienna and the mobs attacking Jewish citizens and closes with the Aryanization of businesses and economic misery of the summer of 1938. In between, he explores how Fascism and authoritarianism behave in all sorts of situations: how dictators treat each other, how regimes crush resistance, how resignation creeps into the population, how governments gloss over the loss of democracy. Readers also learn that the Social Democratic Workers Party of Austria did not give up in 1934 but rather continued to organize, smuggle in copies of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and work for a return of labor power. Yet terror and fear remain the overwhelming motifs of the book, leavened only by the disdain the author uses to sketch the personalities of people like Dollfuss, Schuschnigg, and Starhemberg, who so misunderstood the stakes of their posturing. In one of the most trenchant chapters for scholars of this period, Wieser outlines just how few people supported Schuschnigg in 1936. Group by group, he shows that the Ständestaat simply was seen as a lesser evil, rather [End Page 104] than a supported entity, in the waning days of independent Austria. Perhaps 30 percent of the population backed the government, in his estimation; surely not enough to make it a viable alternative given the "red" and "brown" undercurrents it was suppressing. This sobering assessment of...