ABSTRACT
In the present, Austria in its relation to Germany is an autonomous and selfconscious nation. Accordingly, the predominant propensity in the social, political and to some extent also historical sciences has been to project the Austrian nation as a primordial entity into the past (e.g. Bluhm 1973, Katzenstein 1976). This projection, however, presents an objectivist fallacy (Bruckmiiller 1996). In early modem Europe, Austria had ascended to the double political center of the German Roman Empire as well as the Habsburg Empire and, despite the expansion and relocation of the Habsburg Empire to the East, remained so until the dissolution of the German Roman Empire under the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic European wars. Under those circumstances, the emerging modem nationalism in Austria since the early 19th century oscillated between an Empireoriented, regional Austrian as well as pan-German nationalism. In the 1848 revolution, the German Austrians, though with tensions, were an integral part of the pan-German Frankfurt Parliament. After the defeat of the Habsburg army against Prussia in 1866, the ground was prepared for the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony and the closer unity between Austria and Hungary as the double centre of the Habsburg Empire. At the same time, the growing GermanAustrian nationalism developed still in the triadic form of an Empire-preserving, regional Austrian as well as pan-German nationalism. When after World War I the Habsburg Empire collapsed, the First Austrian Republic defmed itself as an Austrian nation, but at the same time as an integral part of the German Reich (though hindered by the victorious Allies to join it). And when the Nazi Third Reich annexed Austria in 1938, about two thirds of the Austrian population saw this as a fulfillment of national aspirations. Only with the experience of Nazi totalitarian dictatorship and its collapse in World War II was the ground prepared for a separate formation of an Austrian nation and national identity.
