ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the debate on Austria's Anschluss 1938 has evolved in that country and focuses on the reasons for shifts within the domains of cultural memory and Geschichtspolitik. Austria's ambivalent position about its war experience manifested itself in the Chancellor Karl Renner's very first statement and was to remain a regular feature of Austrian self-interpretation for a long time to come. Neither the Jewish emigre Robert A. Kann nor Bruno Kreisky wanted to hold a mirror to the face of the Austrians; together they succeeded in cementing the victim doctrine. Ideologically quite close to the Schuschnigg regime, Eugene Lennhoff described the Anschluss primarily as a rape of Austria to the exclusion of Austrian collaboration. The chapter also analyzes the political function of interpretations and creations concerned with history, for they are important components in the concept of memory culture that bear on the political dimension of historical argumentation and representation in the public arena.
