This book is about the Austrofascist state that was established the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and collapsed the day Hitler annexed his homeland to the German Reich in 1938. It argues that Austria matters to this period of European history, not because Hitler was Austrian, but because the processes and events occurring in Austria between 1933 and 1938 intersected with processes and events occurring elsewhere in Europe. The rationale for this book was to place the Austrian case against a wider backdrop of nationalism and fascism in Europe. I contend that the question of...

Whiteside’s 1975 study of pan-Germanism’s origins and fluctuating fortunes under the Habsburg monarchy is striking for what it reveals about the absence of a pan-German movement in Austria. Divided by class, regional, ethnic, religious and generational differences, Whiteside’s ‘Pan-Germans’ were neither a camp nor a movement. However, his definition of pan-Germanism as a belief or ‘desire’ for German unity and a common mission is more useful for assessing the breadth of pan-Germanism in Austria both before and after the monarchy’s collapse in 1918. This chapter presents a survey of the contested and shifting nature of pan-Germanism from 1848 to 1938...

In the ‘Newspaper Reader’s Prayer’, the German left-wing journalist, Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935), satirized his generation’s insatiable appetite for news, gossip and rumour.¹ The reader’s hysteria at not being able to cram all the world’s news into one breakfast sitting may have struck Tucholsky in 1927 as the social and moral disorder of Weimar Germany, but Austrian politicians reached a similar diagnosis of mass hysteria among newspaper readers in Austria’s First Republic. This chapter shows the responses of Austrofascist press officials to the apparent moral apathy, apolitical tendencies and sensationalism they perceived were the result of representative democracy in post-war...

In May 1938 the owner of Salzburg’s German-nationalist newspaper, Hans Glaser, received a visit from the sister of Salzburg’s former governor, Franz Rehrl, asking him to intervene on her brother’s behalf after he had been arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo.¹ Rehrl’s sister was a former employee of Glaser’s rival, the CatholicSalzburger Chronik, and she knew Glaser had connections with local Nazi figures, although he himself was not a party member. She also knew that Glaser and her brother had been on friendly terms prior to the Nazi takeover, even if politically they had not seen eye to eye....

‘Long Live the Greater German Empire’, the editors of theWiener Neueste Nachrichtenheralded theAnschlusson 12 March 1938. The next day Hitler’s rallying cry to his homeland, ‘Long Live National Socialist German Austria’, took up half the newspaper’s front page.¹ The variation in headlines may have gone unnoticed by the newspaper’s jubilant readers, but it is significant for our assessment of pan-Germanism in the 1930s. Was the union of Reich Germans and Austrian Germans in 1938 the fulfilment of German-nationalist aspirations for pan-German unity since 1848, or did it signify a departure from the Austrian imperial idea of...

Just as minority politics drew activists and politicians into a common league on behalf of Austrian ‘Germandom’, anti-Semitism united German-nationalists and Austrofascists into a common pan-German front. We saw in the previous two chapters that while German-nationalists and Austrofascists sometimes differed in where they drew the boundaries of a universal pan-German community – notably over the question of religion – they found a common footing when it came to constructing a pan-German identity within the Austrian state. Austria was a German state with German-language institutions and a German cultural heritage and minorities had to dissimilate from their non-German identities and...

Debates on citizenship, immigration and refugees in the Austrofascist state showed the boundaries of pan-German identity more clearly than any other identity discourse between the world wars. Austrofascists and German-nationalists had different views about who the true refugees were, but both sought to curb immigration of Jews and reduce Jews already living in Austria (both citizens and non-citizens) to the status of a legal minority with few political and social rights, as we saw in Chapter 5. This chapter shows how the German-nationalist press and government organs responded to different groups of refugees and immigrants, terms that were ideologically construed...

This book has shown that Austria was already a fascist state before the Nazi takeover in 1938. It has demonstrated that the achievements of the Austrofascists and their visions for a new state and a new citizenry were entangled with the fascist visions and achievements in Italy and Germany. At the same time, I have argued that the creation of a fascist state in Austria was also entangled with the construction of a pan-German identity in the aftermath of empire. Austrofascists drew on past tropes and practices of nationalism in Austria-Hungary and repackaged them for a new era of state...