Unterbrochene Beschleunigung. Österreichs Wirtschaft im Nationalsozialismus aus sozialökologischer Perspektive

Abstract

The article examines Austria’s economy under National Socialism from a socioecological perspective that combines materialist and culturalist approaches. Questioning the caesuras of the ‘backbreak’ in 1945 and the ‘Great Acceleration’ around 1950, the article emphasizes the comparatively strong acceleration of the appropriation of key resources for the autarky and armament economy – mineral fertilizer, crude oil, aluminium and rayon – already during the Nazi period. The productivist resource mobilization pursued by the Nazi regime and German corporations met with loud but rather ineffective protest from conservationist activists who defended their image of the landscape as a ‘garden’. In the long run, the acceleration of resource flows in the Nazi period was embedded in Austria’s petro-industrial transition from the 1930s to the 1950s: as the forerunner (‘Little Acceleration’) or even the onset of the ‘Great Acceleration’ of material and energy flows that came into full effect in the postwar period, interrupted by the economic shock of the change of the political regime in 1945.