ABSTRACT
Austria occupies an important place in the history of the European radical Right. For most of the period up to 1938 the Catholic-conservative component was the numerically stronger and the politically more influential, whereas the pan-German-racist was the more extreme and more inclined to resort to violence. The difficulties in assimilating the concept of the extreme Right to the question of the Freedom Party's (FPO) success emerges most clearly in Willibald Holzer’s essay, nearly a hundred pages long, on the definition and explanation of the extreme Right phenomenon. A significant part of the FPO’s appeal is to “achievement-oriented persons, who simply want to be left in peace by the state” and Holzer himself confirms that “modern Right extremists are meanwhile as good as totally absorbed by the modern economic and property constitution”.
