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Austria had a catastrophic 20th century. It began as the 600-year-old, multi-ethnic Hapsburg Empire, run by a decrepit Kaiser and covering a territory that included most of what we now call Eastern Europe. One hundred years later, it ended up a prosperous but insignificant modern republic smaller than Maine and populated largely by Catholic German speakers. The metamorphosis explains some of the country's current woes. To this day, Austrians haven't quite let go of their Hapsburg pretensions, a superiority complex steeped in parochialism.

Other parts of the past haven't been as readily embraced: Hitler, for instance. The future leader of the Third Reich was born in the crown lands and spent his formative years as an aspiring artist in Linz and Vienna, watching the erosion of Germanic culture and political authority by the empire's bric-a-brac of ethnic populations, by its Slavs, Jews and Gypsies.

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and Viennese crowds cheered Hitler's arrival. But after World War II, Austrians painted the happy union as a hostile invasion. Hitler (the Austrian par excellence) and his cronies became de facto Germans. Austrians became their victims, the civilized, deeply horrified heirs of Beethoven (who was in fact German) attacked by ugly Teutons.

Pop culture lent a hand to cleaning up Austria's image in the 1960s. The Broadway musical "The Sound of Music" transformed Austria into a land of musically gifted, politically persecuted children, nuns and admirals. In a coup de grâce, at the end of the 1965 movie version, a crowd of Austrians sings the country's national anthem under the hostile glare of a Nazi official outraged by this show of national defiance.

In 1986, the truth about Austria's past began to emerge. The country's president, a former chief of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, had served with the SS, and he was castigated for this record internationally. The United States banned him from entering the country.

Under siege, the country made efforts to correct the record. "There has been some movement," Edward Serotta, a well-respected chronicler of Jewish life in East Central Europe and a Vienna resident, told me. "Not enough, but there is some." School textbooks now include the Holocaust, and, as in Germany, documentaries on the subject run frequently on national television. Austrian chancellors have visited Israel and admitted their country's guilt; a Holocaust memorial is under construction.

But the past as an explanation for Haider only goes so far. His rise to power is more easily explained by popular discontent with the country's ruling class than it is by an appeal to right-wing extremism. Ever since the end of World War II, Austria has been a fiefdom of two parties: the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party. For most of the Cold War, when the country was officially neutral, the system worked well. Tourism boomed; the country's inhabitants had one of the best-financed welfare states in Europe. Flush with cash, the two parties usually forged a coalition, dividing the spoils of government between them.

A recession in the 1980s tarnished their records and opened the way to Haider's small third party, the FPÖ, which typically garnered about 7 percent of the vote with its attacks on immigrants and the money that they cost the average Austrian in social security and crime prevention. "Vienna must not become Chicago," ran one of their more famous slogans.

In October, after years of rising fortunes, the party won 27 percent of the vote and placed second in national elections. At first, the two old ruling parties attempted to form the usual coalition, but in January talks broke down, and Austria, for better or worse, has entered a new phase of its history.

So has Europe. Whether or not Haider turns out to be as dangerous as his countryman -- a distinct improbability -- he does present a real challenge to the values of tolerance and free trade that the European Union has cultivated over the last half century. Haider doesn't have to be Hitler to cause trouble.

The EU may have overreacted; it may have shown more nervousness than was strictly necessary. On the other hand, the counterfeit links on the FPÖ site may be more of a warning than a joke. If so, the warning has been heeded.
salon.com | Feb. 7, 2000

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