ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, these words of Figl, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Second Austrian Republic, have proven to be untrue in at least two senses. Apart from the fact that they play down the extent of antisemitic acclamation by Austrians during the Nazi period by mitigating quantifiers like ‘some’ and adjectives like ‘certain’ (see chapter 2, p. 84) – these words have been falsified by the fact that even after ‘Auschwitz’, after 1945, antisemitism in various discursive forms continued to be virulent in Austria, in all public and private domains and political spheres (see Knight 1988, Mitten 1992, 1997, Mitten and Wodak 1993, Wodak et al. 1990, Wodak 1990a, 1990b, 1991a, 1996a, 1997a, 1997b, Pelinka
and Mayr 1998). But, in contrast to the First Austrian Republic that lasted from 1918 to 1934, when antisemitic utterances were explicit and permitted in all political parties, the situation in postwar Austria was different. Antisemitism was officially taboo, but paradoxically still visible. A coded discourse of antisemitism evolved, specifically in the public domains where the traditional antisemitic content and stereotypes (like the stereotype of the Jewish world conspiracy, see chapter 2, p. 56) could be uttered in new and subtle discursive ways. On the other hand, in private conversations, even in political meetings, the antisemitic discourse was and is still very open and explicit. Thus, we can observe a context-dependence of the form of antisemitism. While much of the content has stayed the same, some new variations have been created, like the stereotype of the ‘rich Jew who could emigrate anyway and did not suffer’.
