THE RISE AND FALL OF A LOCAL HERO: MEMORY, IDENTITY AND POWER IN RURAL AUSTRIA, 1945-1960

Abstract

The article questions abstract concepts like lieux de mémoire, invented tradition and imagined communities linked to a concrete field of research. It reconstructs structures and practices of the cultural representation of mythical narrations in symbolic and social spaces. The case of a rural community in Austria after World War II shows that the encoding and decoding of a heroic saga is embedded both in the macro structures of the economic and political reconstruction of the Second Republic and the micro structures of the local festive culture. In the late 1940s, the supply of the narration, a variation of the German National myth of Herman the Cheruskian, met the demand of the majority of the villagers, above all the male inhabitants. In the 1950s, the market of cultural representations had changed: the hero of village memory became a relic of village history.