Jews and Queers: Symptoms of Modernity in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna

Abstract

“We have all suffered,” remarked the Austrian chancellor Leopold Figl in 1946, looking back at Austria during the Nazi period (p. 34). This blanket affirmation of Austrian victimhood became the ideological basis of the postwar Austrian state and mandated an inability or refusal to recognize that some Austrians had suffered rather more than others, while some Austrians had actively contributed to the suffering of others by their participation in the Nazi regime. This Austrian victim myth was left largely intact for forty years until the controversy that erupted around the election to the presidency in 1986 of Kurt Waldheim, whose convenient suppression of his own Nazi past was emblematic of Austria's more general national amnesia.