History In Practice

Here's an interesting article on Vienna from the Ottawa Citizen written a few weeks ago. It's by Andrew Cohen, who wrote a great book on Canada's international role and has a new one on Canadian identity. He has some choice observations on Vienna's institutional memory.


Andrew Cohen . Memory lapse
Andrew Cohen, Citizen Special
Published: Tuesday, January 22, 2008

VIENNA - 'History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it," said Winston Churchill. He did and it was, especially in his formidable multi-volume chronicle of the Second World War.

Sir Winston knew that history is inevitably a reflection of historians. Nations become historians when they write their histories, though not necessarily in books. They write them in museums, monuments and memorials. We call this public memory.

Nations with awful pasts have a particular responsibility to the truth. How Japan and Germany, for example, perceive and present the Second World War is a measure of their ability to face their past and move beyond it.

Germany has made an exemplary effort to remember the horrors of the Nazis, in an exercise in public remembrance that is painful and inspiring. There are so many museums and memorials in Berlin that critics complain there is no space or reason for any more of them.

Japan, for its part, is a nation in denial. It hasn't really come to terms with its treatment of the comfort women of Korea, the Rape of Nanking or the dropping of the atomic bomb. In Hiroshima, a major exhibition casts the nation as victim.

And then there is Austria. The convenient truth is that Austria did not exist after it was annexed by Germany in 1938. Maybe so, but that did not prevent some 800,000 Austrians from serving in the German army, or some 150,000 in the Waffen SS, or a disproportionate number of bureaucrats helping implement the Final Solution.

Nor does it deny the rapturous welcome the Nazis received when they entered Vienna and the subsequent enthusiasm for the Anschluss in Austria (though some historians have argued its popularity had more to do with escaping the unrest of the First Republic).

Forget, for a moment, the coded anti-Semitism here that allows the far right to enjoy enduring public support. Forget the reluctance of the government to settle war claims long after Germany had done so.

If you want to understand Austria's ambiguity about its past, look around Vienna, and see what you don't see. As any visitor knows, this old, regal capital is a hymn to a glorious past. It speaks in temples, galleries and pavilions of incandescent beauty.

But which past? Whose past?

The past here is almost exclusively imperial Austria. It is the storied rule of the Habsburgs, which ended in 1918. It is in their glittering, gilded palaces of Belvedere, Schönbrunn and Hofburg, which has recently opened the Sisi Museum exploring "the myth and reality" of the reign of Empress Elizabeth (Sisi), the brooding wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, who was assassinated in 1898.

It is the pictures of the Museum of Fine Arts and the fossils of the Museum of Natural History. It is statues of monarchs on thrones and generals on horseback. It is in the homes or the graves of Beethoven, Mozart and Strauss, whose music is played at the sumptuous balls here every winter.

You can find Republican Austria in Vienna, too, from 1918 to 1938, and Occupied Austria, from 1945 to 1955, especially in the Third Man Museum founded by the engaging post-war historian Gerhard Strassgschwandtner. The present is here, too, in the MuseumsQuartier, a complex of contemporary art, or the zany, multi-coloured Hundertwasserhaus, a quirky 1980s apartment house.

In fact, looking at some of the modern art and architecture in Vienna, you might think that the rouged, coiffed dowager has run off with a pierced, tattooed punk rocker.

But try to find Nazi Austria. There is a requisite memorial to war and fascism; it depicts, in part, a Jew scrubbing the streets, which is what many Austrians made Jews do in 1938.

There is Holocaust Memorial opened in Judenplatz in 2000, an affecting stone depiction of books without titles in a library without handles and hinges. And there is also a superb Jewish Museum, founded and financed by the city, as well the archives of the Austrian Resistance.

But it's as if the country did all this and considered its conscience salved. There isn't much public shame here. In a city of museums, there is none on national history, as there is in Berlin; in fact, the ruthless honesty exhibited in public memory in Germany is unthinkable here.

Polls show that Austrians don't want to revisit the past. Their reluctance was once how Americans saw the blacks and the South. Yet the Americans have moved beyond their history, as the Germans are trying to move beyond theirs.

As for the Austrians, they're still waving to Maria Theresa in the park, waltzing to Strauss in the palaces and whispering about Sisi, more interested in exploring the myth of an eccentric 19th-century empress than the reality of a past too horrible to speak its name.


Fun fact: this is the fiftieth post of my Europe blog. Whoopty whoop...