Romsics Gergely: The Memory of the Habsburg Empire in German, Austrian and Hungarian Right-Wing Historiography and Political Thinking 1918 - 1941 - East European Monographs 773. Atlantic Studies on Society Change 137. (New York, 2010)
III. The Memory of the Habsburgs in Austria - 1. The Dilemmas of Austrian Idengity and the Austrian Past in Political Discourse - The State that No One Wanted: German Austria and the Question of Identity Following 1918
197 The Dilemmas of Austrian Identity The proximity to Germany, in other words one of the aspects of the great identity dilemma, brought further ambivalence for Austria. In 1915 writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal noted that Austria “is so close to Germany that one hardly notices it.” In general it was true that the proximity of Germany had never meant only refuge. The possibility that neighboring Germany might “swallow” distinctive Austrian culture always loomed on the horizon of public discourse.6 On the other hand, after 1918 political plans for the incorporation of Austria into Germany were part of the daily agenda, and there is no doubt that such plans enjoyed widespread mass and political support beyond the results of the two regional referenda in western Austria held in the wake of the First World War, as has been demonstrated with increasing frequency by Austrian historiography since the 1980s.7 If one were to attempt to arrive at an acceptable summary describing the opinions of elite circles and the public concerning the possibility of Anschluss, the most that could be said is that most citizens felt that while the Anschluss was desirable in principle, Austrian society had never wished to be amalgamated into Germany, and that only a federalist vision, perhaps a sort of “tribal regionalism,” would have been compatible with the legacy of separate statehood, bringing to life a new, decentralized, imperial German state.8 The other significant dimension of the identity dilemma was (to borrow Klemens von Klemperer’s apt metaphor for the workings of political memory) “the long shadow... of the dead eagle,” which “lived on, even after the eagle itself had fallen.”9 Again, this shadow fell across the broadest layers of society, as did the shadow of the contemporary eagle, that of the Weimar Republic. It is not strictly necessary, nor would it be feasible to try, to determine precisely the layers on which it fell or the precise percentage of the society that identified with it. The modern critical literature on collective identity is essentially unanimous in its observation that identities and the ideologies that give them form are rarely if ever exclusive or monolithic. In the case of Austria, one should imagine an eternally changing social arena in which innumerable conceptions of the past, notions of political identity, and elements of identity existed together, sometimes symbiotically, sometimes in conflict with one