John Carroll University Carroll Collected History 1-2008 Commemoration versus coping with the past: contextualising Austria's commemorative year 2005 Matthew .P Berg John Carroll University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/hist-facpub Part of the European History Commons Recommended Citation Berg, Matthew P., "Commemoration versus coping with the past: contextualising Austria's commemorative year 2005" (2008). History. 19. http://collected.jcu.edu/hist-facpub/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in History by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Contextualizing Austria’s Gedenkjahr 2005* Abstract This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrian political culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienced a particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifested in communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand, the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed through active or passive complicity—threatened to link Austria with the perpetrator status reserved for German society. On the other, the Allies’ Moscow Declaration (1943) created a myth of victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoid confronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently, discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism became a taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic. The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significant break with this taboo.