The Permanent Exhibition in the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance and Its Role in Austria’s Dealing with the Nazi Past and the Holocaust

Abstract

Austria is often viewed as a country that has come to terms with the National Socialist past only arduously concealed behind the myth of being the first victim of Hitler’s Germany. One of the participants that contributed to a shift in the memory has been the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, established in 1963. Even though its name suggests that it focuses mainly on the resistance between 1938 and 1945, it also encompasses the documentation of Nazi crimes. This essay analyzes the permanent exhibition of the center existing in its current form since 2005 and claims that it is deeply anchored in the Austrian memory culture of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, its authors take a stand on some controversies that had dominated the public history discourse. On the other hand, the exhibition omits or relativizes many relevant facts concerning the coresponsibility of Austria and ordinary Austrians for Nazi crimes and appears not to avail itself of extensive historical research.