In a curious way Austria resembled East Germany, and not only in the rather monotonously bureaucratic quality of its civic facilities. Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested on a tacit agreement to fabricate for common consumption a flattering new identity—except that the exercise proved considerably more successful in the Austrian case. A reform-minded Christian Democrat party, a parliamentary Left, a broad consensus not to press inherited ideological or cultural divisions to the point of political polarization and destabilization, and a
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