Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

During the inter-war years of the First Austrian Republic, most of the rest of the country—rural, Alpine and deeply Catholic—voted for the Christian Socials, a provincial and conservative party suspicious of change and outsiders. Unlike the Social Democrats, the Christian Socials had no pan-German urge to be absorbed into an urban and mostly Protestant Germany. But nor did they have any sympathy for the Social Democratic policies of the Viennese workers’ movement; in 1934 a coup engineered by the Right destroyed the Social Democrats’ bastion in ‘Red Vienna’ and with it Austrian democracy. From 1934 until the Nazi invasion Austria was ruled by an authoritarian clericalist regime in which the Catholic party exercised a monopoly of power. The legacy of Austria’s first, unhappy experience with democracy lay heavily on the post-war Republic. The Christian Socials, reborn as the Austrian People’s Party, boasted proudly of their opposition in 1938 to the German takeover; but they were conspicuously silent on their singular contribution to the destruction of Austrian democracy just four years earlier. The Socialists, as the Social Democrats were now known, could reasonably claim to have been the victims twice over: first of the civil war in 1934 and then at the hands of the Nazis. What this obscured, however, was their erstwhile enthusiasm for the Anschluss. Dr Karl Renner, the Socialist leader and first president of the independent Republic established by the Austrian State Treat...