The Victim Culture

Abstract

Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the Nazi past has become a salient and divisive issue in Austrian politics. In May 2002, political parties debated the meaning of May 8th and proponents of diverging historical interpretations clashed in the streets of Vienna. Several weeks earlier, members of the Austrian People's Party (OVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) had condemned the revised edition of the Wehrmachtsausstellung , while Green and Social Democratic (SPO) politicians delivered opening speeches praising it. In November 2000, Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel (OVP) and the head of the Green Party, Alexander Van der Bellen, publicly sparred over whether Austria was primarily a victim, as Schussel claimed, or a perpetrator during the Second World War. Since the formation of the OVP-FPO coalition in February 2000, the battle lines in these and other historical debates have been clearly drawn, pitting the right (the FPO, the OVP, and the conservative press) against the left (the Greens, the SPO, and the liberal press), and members of all parties regularly accuse their opponents of using history for partisan political gain. The current polarization of Austrian historical consciousness is surprising given the elite consensus, which held for over four decades, that Austria was Hitler's first victim. To paraphrase an old joke, “the Austrians succeeded in convincing themselves and the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.” The Holocaust was Germany's problem.