The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria

A Reassessment

Anton Pelinka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351483452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The years of Chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg's authoritarian governments (1933/34-1938) have been denounced as "Austrofascism" from the left, or defended as a Christian corporate state (" Stondestaat ") from the right. During this period, Austria was in a desperate struggle to maintain its national independence vis-o-vis Hitler's Germany, a struggle that ultimately failed. In the end, the Nazis invaded and annexed Austria (Anschluss").

Volume 11 of the Contemporary Austrian Studies series stays away from these heated historiographical debates and looks at economic, domestic, and international politics sine ira et studio. Timothy Kirk opens with an assessment of "Austrofascism" in light of recent discourse on interwar European fascism. Three scholars from the Economics University of Vienna analyze the macroeconomic climate of the 1930s: Hansjrg Klausinger the "Vienna School's" theoretical contributions to end the "Great Depression"; Gerhard Senft the economic policies of the Stondestaat; and Peter Berger the financial aid from the League of Nations. Jens Wessels delves into the microeconomic arena and presents case studies of leading Austrian businesses and their performance during the depression. Jim Miller looks at Dollfuss, the agrarian reformer. Alexander Lassner and Erwin Schmidl deal with the context of the international arena and Austria's desperate search for protection against Nazi Anschluss-pressure and military preparedness against foreign aggression.

In a comparativist essay Megan Greene compares the policies of Austria's Haider and Italy's Berlusconi and recent EU responses to threats from the Right. The "FORUM" looks at various recent historical commissions in Austria dealing with Holocaust-era assets and their efforts to provide restitution to victims of Nazism. Two review essays, by Evan Burr Bukey and Hermann Freudenberger, survey recent scholarly literature on Austria(ns) during World War II. This addition to the

TOPICAL ESSAYS

Fascism and Austrofascism

Tim Kirk

Fascism determined the political agenda in Europe for a quarter of a century, from its origins in the right-wing political violence that followed the First World War to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. The transformation of Europe from a continent of new parliamentary democracies in 1919 to one of radical right-wing dictatorships in 1939 is unthinkable without fascism, however one defines it, and whatever role indigenous fascist movements came to play in the new authoritarian regimes that sprang up everywhere. Every country in interwar Europe had a fascist movement of one kind or another, however insignificant in terms of numbers or real political clout;¹ and fascism was, more often than not, a common ingredient in the broader political offensive mounted by a dispossessed political class attempting to regain the initiative from a broadly democratic Left.² Although only Italy proclaimed itself fascist, the populist rhetoric, authoritarian policies, and above all the monumental symbolism and militaristic rituals of fascism came to define the new political style of continental Europe during the 1930s.

Yet few political movements have been as difficult as fascism for historians and political scientists to pin down. Few of the fascist movements and none of the other right-wing dictatorships of the interwar years adopted the term fascist to describe themselves, and Mussolini’s “fascist international” of 1934 failed to take off. Contemporary observers in Italy and abroad were nevertheless in no doubt about the affinities between the Italian Fascist party and its foreign imitators;³ and admiration for fascism was expressed often and openly.⁴ The situation was transformed by the war, the defeat of the Axis, and the revelation of war crimes and atrocities: All forms of generic fascism came to be associated, directly or indirectly, with the Nazis and the Holocaust. Moreover, the postwar order in Europe was explicitly anti-fascist, both in its constitutional arrangements and in its political rhetoric, and the memory of earlier sympathy for fascist movements was repressed. Most postwar European governments claimed some degree of association with anti-fascist forces, and active anti-fascists served in many of them.⁵

The desire to forget the recent past in the interests of present and future political stability was initially compounded by new distractions, above all the immediate and widespread necessity for domestic consensus as a basis for reconstruction and the changing political priorities that came with the cold war. But although there were powerful incentives in postwar Europe to let sleeping dogs lie, fascism has proved to be a “past that will not pass away,” and this is because it has always been difficult for Europeans to account for the fascist past satisfactorily without undermining the compromises on which the postwar order was founded. In short, then, the overriding reason for the complexities and ambiguities in the interpretation of fascism is relatively straightforward: After sixty years in which no public figure, political party, or significant organization in the public sphere has been able to espouse fascism openly, it still matters who is accounted a fascist and why.

The particular difficulties encountered by Austrian historians (and historians of Austria) in dealing with the recent past have been well documented elsewhere.⁶ Austrians, no less than other Europeans, have been deterred by the political constraints of the present from accounting adequately for painful episodes in the recent past, and historians of “Austrofascism” have found it difficult to break free form the carefully agreed compromises that characterized the “coalition historiography” of the 1950s. The problem is not entirely Austrian: It arises from the lack of an agreed definition of fascism, and this deficiency has been compounded by a failure, for similar reasons, to define the “residual category” of neighboring authoritarian regimes in east central Europe to which the “corporate state” is otherwise ascribed.⁷ The following discussion is an attempt to locate, within the broader context of the changing historiographical perspectives of postwar Europe, accounts of Austrofascism from its ideological and political gestation, through its passage to power, to the nature of the regime itself. It will raise the question of whether the origins and development of the dictatorship in Austria did not rest on the same uneasy coalition building between authoritarian conservatives and fascists that brought fascism to power in Italy and Germany.

Postwar Politics and the Historiography of Fascism

Interpretations of fascism have tended to reflect the political orientation of the commentator and changes in the international political climate. This was already the case before the Second World War, when two schools of thought were already emerging. Marxist observers—including, but not only, those directed by the Comintern—categorized both Italian Fascism and Nazism as examples of the same generic fascism that also found expression in the countless other radical right-wing movements across Europe. At the same time, liberals were beginning to equate first Italian Fascism and then Nazism with Soviet Communism, categorizing both the right-wing authoritarian regimes and that of the Left as examples of totalitarianism.⁸ It was this second kind of interpretation that gained currency in the west during the early years of the cold war, when it was mobilized as a “device ... to link the present enemy, communism, with that of the recent past, Nazi-fascism.”⁹ This is not to say that the term “totalitarian” was no more than a crude propaganda slogan (although it was that too), but it was one that proved, in the first instance at least, to be of limited usefulness. Consequently, the first attempts to describe structural similarities in Stalinism and Nazism proved only superficially convincing to a subsequent generation drawing on more detailed research on each of the two systems.¹⁰ Similarly, rigid interpretations emanating from the Soviet bloc—interpretations which insisted on the indivisibility of a fascism that was essentially the puppet of “capitalism in crisis”—bore the stamp of an official ideology and found little resonance even among western Marxists.

During the later 1960s, however, the conservative orthodoxy was challenged in West Germany, and among western historians generally, by new theories of generic fascism. The revival of interest was led by Ernst Nolte’s Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche and gathered pace with the general liberalization of the political climate.¹¹ The challenge was mounted both within the universities and outside, largely by the Left, and often by members of small, marginal (and as it proved, mostly ephemeral) radical groups. In practice, it was often difficult to make clear distinctions between the intellectual posturing of the revolutionaries and the political posturing of many academics, and in these circumstances conservative intellectuals objected to what they interpreted as the undue “politicization” of the universities (while reasserting their own positions from positions of relative strength within the academy). But the new general explanations of fascism, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, came to supplant theories of totalitarianism during the 1970s. They also implicitly challenged other assumptions about fascism, those which limited it to the interwar years and to the two “core” fascist states (Italy and Germany) or reduced it simply to “Hitlerism” or “Mussolini-ism.”

Even before the end of the cold war, however, the historiographical landscape was shifting again as the political climate changed. From the late 1970s, a revisionist “new Right” took the initiative on a number of historical questions, and established something of an intellectual hegemony, which forced its opponents to re-examine their own perspectives. Conservative historians in the Federal Republic seized the opportunity to attempt (unsuccessfully) to construct a “usable past” for Germany.¹² A different kind of revisionism was being undertaken in Italy, where Renzo de Felice, the country’s foremost scholarly expert on Mussolini, dismissed the foundational anti-fascist mythology of post-war Italy as a development which had undermined Italy’s sense of itself and made it “a country irredeemably mistaken.”¹³ De Felice’s assertion in the 1990s that the history of fascism could be read apolitically was welcomed by the resurgent Right, then organizing in a broad coalition which encompassed not only radical right-wing particularists of the Lombard League, but also the euphemistically termed “post-fascist” Alleanza Nazionale. The tentative “normalization” of fascism has taken place on two levels, the academic and the political, and new perspectives have been formed—are being formed—in a political context where “post-fascists” increasingly participate in government and decision making at both local and national levels.

The decline in the “fascist paradigm” in the 1980s was not simply the straightforward consequence of the emergence of the “new Right,” however. The attempt to construct a satisfactory theory of fascism had been frustrating in other ways, and by the early 1990s it seemed to have run out of steam altogether. It was not just that “totalitarianism” enjoyed a revival in the context of the “new cold war”—although it did (and still does), albeit in modified form.¹⁴ The main problem was that the theoretical approaches that had abounded in the 1970s were never adequately underpinned by sustained empirical work on a comparative basis.¹⁵ The irreducible minimum for a generic theory of fascism was surely a fundamental similarity between Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, yet in the new perspectives of the 1990s the Third Reich came to be defined in terms that defied meaningful comparison with Italian Fascism. Moreover, historians of the two regimes were increasingly going their own separate ways. Many of those working on Nazism had come to emphasize the singular nature of the Nazis’ biological racism and its consequences, a project which extended beyond anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to encompass such subjects as sterilization and family policy as well as the complicity of German medicine, science, and industry in the Nazis’ racial projects.¹⁶ The scale of “racial policy” in Italy on the other hand, however broadly defined, was indisputably less than that in Germany. The belatedness of anti-Semitic legislation in Italy, which, in 1938, was foisted on an apparently unwilling Italian public as a consequence of the alliance with Germany, seemed to underline the lesser importance of race in Italy; it is certainly true that the persecution of the Jews was less efficient and enthusiastic in Italy than almost anywhere else in Europe. Finally, the historiographical divergence was compounded by the increasing centrality of “cultural” approaches (in the broadest sense) to new works on Italy, a preoccupation that was seen variously as “secondary” or methodologically problematic for a comparative history of fascism.¹⁷

These interpretational differences seem less problematic than they once did. Italian historians themselves have challenged earlier, more reassuring assumptions about Italian anti-Semitism under Mussolini. They have argued that Fascist racial legislation was not a “deviation or a falsification of the true Italian spirit,” but that the application of the anti-Jewish laws of 1938 throughout Italy constituted a logical premise for the more radical measures (deportation, incarceration, and extermination) implemented in the German-controlled Salö Republic after 1943.¹⁸ Such reinterpretations have located the specific racism of 1938-1945 within a broader reappraisal of Italian attitudes to race since the Risorgimento.¹⁹ In addition, it has become clearer that the eugenic and “biologist” thinking that underpinned Nazi racism was equally well established, if less successful, in Italy (and indeed in much of the industrialized, urbanized world).²⁰

In the end it seems that reports of the death of fascism as a comparative analytical tool were premature. Certainly there was something of a retreat from the intense, and intensely polemical attempts to construct general typologies of fascism, at least on the Left, but the 1990s nevertheless saw the publication of several such general accounts of fascism, now from a liberal perspective, and with an emphasis on ideology or doctrine.²¹ There has been less progress, on the other hand, towards the satisfactory history of “real existing fascism” that eluded an earlier generation, although collections of essays and conference papers have continued to bring together the research findings of scholars with specialized national research interests.²² More recently, Robert Paxton has formulated a number of methodological proposals which provide the basis for an understanding of fascism as a developing phenomenon, changing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• TOPICAL ESSAYS
• NON-TOPICAL ESSAY
• FORUM
• REVIEW ESSAYS
• BOOK REVIEWS
• ANNUAL REVIEW
• LIST OF AUTHORS