Anschluss

Anschluss was the subject of inconclusive debate prior to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, whose loss, by Austria, allowed Otto von Bismarck to build the Prussian-dominated German Empire of 1871. Bismarck deliberately excluded Austria because he perceived that the power of the Austrian elite would be a harmful counter-balance to that of the Prussian Junkers in the reunified Germany.

Austria, excluded from the new Germany, charted a new course within the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, attempting to reconcile multiple nationalities within one state. When the multinational empire broke up in 1918 many German Austrians hoped to join with Germany in the realignment of Europe in order to avoid persecution in the new nation states of central Europe. However, after World War I, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 explicitly vetoed the inclusion of Austria in Germany — largely because France and Britain feared the power of a larger Germany. The fears of many German Austrians were assuaged though because the majority of them remained within the new Austria.
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Note: Until the German spelling reform of 1996, Anschluss was written Anschluß. (See also the article on "ess-tzett (ß)".)

Anschluss of 1938

In the early 1930s, popular support for union with Germany remained overwhelming, and the Austrian government looked to a possible customs union with Germany in 1931. Hitler's rise to power in Germany and the plain hostility of Austrian Nazis left the Austrian government with little enthusiasm for such formal ties. Hitler, originally from Austria, was in favour of Anschluss, and had stated he would attempt a union, by force if necessary.

Austria's First Republic, dominated from the latter 1920s by the Catholic nationalist Christian Socialist Party, was dissolved in 1934 in favour a fascist, corporatist model of one-party government which joined the Christian Socialists and paramilitary Heimwehr with absolute state domination of labour relations and no freedom of the press (see Austrofascism). Power was centralized in the offices of the President and Chancellor, empowered to rule by decree as had been practise since the dissolution of parliament in 1933. Christian Socialist Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by the illegal, competing, and Hitlerian Austrian Nazi party on July 25, 1934 in an attempted coup.

Christian Socialism was an Austrian phenomenon in that Austria's national identity has strong Catholic elements which were incorporated into the movement by way of clerical authoritarian tendencies which are certainly not to be found in Nazism. Both Dollfuss and his unelected successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, turned to Austria's other fascist neighbour, Italy, for inspiration and support. The statist corporatism which emerged in 1933-1934 bore more resemblance to Italian fascism than German national socialism. Mussolini was able to support the independent aspirations of the Austrian dictatorship until his need for German support in Ethiopia forced him into a client relationship with Berlin that began with the 1937 Berlin-Rome Axis.

After a lengthy 1938 standoff over the status of the Austrian Nazis and continuing demands for union (not just from the Nazis) which escalated through direct meetings between Hitler and Schuschnigg, to a German war ultimatum, a Nazi lawyer, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was appointed Interior Minister and another Nazi, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, Foreign Minister. On March 9, Kurt von Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite on the independence of Austria. Seyss-Inquart soon replaced von Schuschnigg as Chancellor. The radio broadcast by von Schuschnigg, in which he announced his resignation, argued that the government accepted the changes only to avoid bloodshed. The new Chancellor requested German troops be sent to restore order before the plebiscite was held. On March 12, Germany sent the troops into Austria and accepted the Anschluss with Austria, which became the province of Ostmark. The Anschluss was given immediate effect by decree, subject to ratification by the plebiscite under secret ballot thirty days later in which it was overwhelmingly approved. Immediately thereafter and still before the referendum, the Vienna where he had failed as a painter greeted Hitler with a crowd of several hundred thousand in the Heldenplatz (whose name means roughly "Plaza of Heroes"). Hitler later commented thus:

Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier (into Austria) there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.

Understanding the Word: Historical and Literary Legacy of the 1938 Anschluss

The Anschluss can be misunderstood as a military annexation of an unwilling Austria, but this lends itself to confusion with other German military occupations of European countries and to perpetrate after the fact the crime against history that was to result from the Shoah: the culpability of Austria in that event threatens to disappear as not only the Jews of Europe but any evidence of their existence would have in the Final Solution. Despite subversions of Austrian political process by Hitler's affiliates in Austria, Austrian acceptance of direct government by Hitler's Berlin is a very different phenomenon from the management of collaborationist and Axis countries by distinct nationalist and fascist movements, which achieved varying degrees of popular acceptance before German military occupation. Austria had already purged its democratic institutions and instituted fascist government before the Anschluss, making Austrian democracy the victim of both the Nazis and its dictators. Antisemitic elements had emerged as a force in Austrian politics in the late nineteenth century. The Christian Socialists were complicit in the murder of large numbers of Socialists by the police in the late 1920s.

There is thus little to distinguish radically the institutions of at least the post-1934 Austrian government before or after March 12, 1938. (In practice, however, the Austian Christian-Socialists were a lot less anti-semitic: Jews were, e.g., not forbidden to exert any profession as they were in the Third Reich.) The dissolution of the democratic process that began in 1933 was motivated by both anxieties and calculations that the Austrian Nazi party would likely have won open elections. It is essential to emphasize that the assassination of Dollfuss was part of an attempted coup motivated by the inability of a schlerotic political order already dedicated to the Führerprinzip to transfer power not from one dictator to another but from one mode of dictatorship to another. The popular underpinning of Nazi politics as a total artform (the refinement of film propaganda exemplified by Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) and mythological aestheticism of broadly conceived national destiny of the German people over all of Western civilization (the Thousand-Year Reich) gave the Nazis a massive advantage in advancing claims to power and securing Austrian participation in military conquest and the Final Solution. The decision framed by Austrofascism was less grand in its appeal than the choice between Stalin and Hitler to which many European intellectuals of the time believed themselves reduced by the end of the decade. Austria had effectively no alternative view of its historical mission when the choice was upon it; to the extent that the Nazis succeeded in convincing Austria to accept a part in what they viewed as the historical destiny of the German people rather than continue as part of a distinct sovereign nation, the hostility of Dollfuss and von Schuschnigg to Nazi political ambitions and the authority they accumulated to resist their Nazi competitors does nothing to absolve Austria of responsibility for what followed, whatever distinctions are introduced or reintroduced in mitigation after the fact.

Lacking outside pressure at political reform (although Seyss-Inquart was tried at Nuremberg and the Nazi party promptly banned, Austria did not have the process of de-Nazification at the top of government which was imposed on Germany for a time), factions of Austrian society tried for a long time to advance the view that the Anschluss was only an annexation made at bayonet point, even if it was also that, making it another victim of the Hitler it did so much to produce. Tearing into the simplism of such an account, Thomas Bernhard's last play, Heldenplatz was massively controversial even before it appeared on stage fifty years after Hitler's visit. Bernhard's accomplishment was to make the elimination of references to Hitler's reception in Vienna emblematic of Austrian attempts to inherit their history and culture under questionable criteria. The Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) has advanced the argument that the establishment of the Dollfuss dictatorship was necessary to the reasonable cause of maintaining Austrian independence, while the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) argues that the dictatorship stripped the country of the democratic resources necessary to repel Hitler. The Austrian reply to a revelation around the 1986 election that successful candidate and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim was also previously a member of the Nazi party and an SA man (he was later absolved of direct involvement in war crimes), was that scrutiny was unwelcome intervention in internal affairs. Austrian accession into the European Union in 1995, the rise in the late 1990s of Jörg Haider and the FPÖ, and international condemnation of Austria when Haider's FPÖ was accepted into the governing coalition with the ÖVP in 2000, showed up the insufficiency of such responses, the more so given Haider's unambiguous praise for the "heroes" of the Waffen-SS. More or less autocritical pressure from writers such as Bernhard and occasional criticism from outside Austria are distinct phenomenon which have nonetheless conspired to force less-than-damning Austrian self-conceptions to contend with other, radically divergent views.

It is therefore understated to say that the burden of Austria's twentieth century hangs on the interpretation of Anschluss and that the sense given to the word in translation marks a limit of intelligibility to this history.

Anschluss in the headlines

On June 7, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 88-year-old Maria Altmann, a former Austrian citizen and the niece of Gustav Klimt model Adele Bloch-Bauer, could sue Austria in a U.S. court for the return of six Klimt paintings stolen from her uncle by the occupying Nazis in 1938. Kept by Austria after the war, the paintings are currently displayed in Vienna's Belvedere Palace. The paintings include the celebrated Adele Bloch-Bauer I and have a market value estimated at more than US $150,000,000. [1]

See Also