The dark side of Austrian social democracy

...Then, as a special protégé of Christian Broda, Austria's distinguished minister of justice from 1960 to1983, he was accorded every accolade, honor, and privilege that the Austrian Republic could bestow...

...Though a few wellknown figures like Kautsky and the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Oskar Pollak, did return to Vienna, the new Party chair, Adolf Scharf, made it clear that he regarded a flood of returning Jewish émigrés as a potential problem for the Socialists in a country with a long anti-Semitic tradition...

...The Social Democrats had granted the FPO its first access to state power...

...Of course, the OVP, just like the SPO, had its own Nazi problems...

...The active pursuit of this Swedish strategy coincided quite conveniently with Kreisky's apparent personal dislike of Jews...

...Particularly in Austria's southern province of Carinthia (Haider's home-base and his current bailiwick POLITICS ABROAD as governor) the SPO openly wooed ex-Nazis to join its ranks and start a new life in a party whose pedigree, though far from innocent, was by far the cleanest the new republic could offer...

...He was also welcomed by many blue-collar workers who hoped that the "socialist" dimension of the Nazis' policies would mean better jobs for them in the newly constituted "Ostmark...

...Among them was Renner, who exchanged his freedom for a public statement calling the Anschluss a historical advance...

...Moreover, it admitted that the Party's leader and the first president of the Second Republic, Karl Renner, had "for reasons that have not yet been fully explained," welcomed the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938...

...Its leader, Friedrich Peter, a former high-ranking member of the SS, worked out a secret arrangement with Kreisky...

...During the period of reconstruction, and, especially during the early cold war, when Austria (until 1955) was still under allied rule (the West and the USSR), the pursuit of legal justice, reparations, or the return of confiscated property succumbed to a "collective repression...

...The trial was suspended due to Gross's illhealth...

...The only thing that matters is the present," declared Kreisky, "not the past...

...Kreisky rescued Peter's career by vehemently attacking Wiesenthal and preventing any further investigation of Peter...

...When Simon Wiesenthal revealed in 1975 that Peter's unit had participated in the systematic shooting of Russian Jews in the summer of 1941, Peter admitted to having belonged to the unit but denied participating in the executions...

...Conferring Legitimacy In 1983, the Austrian Socialists entered into an official coalition government with the FPO, conferring political legitimacy on the party and forming for the first time in the Second Republic's history a so-called "small coalition...

...Though it praised Kreisky as a "creator of modern Austria," it did not mince words in condemning his attacks on Simon Wiesenthal—who at the time vehemently denounced Kreisky's willingness to take former Nazis into the cabinet—as "unfair and therefore unacceptable...

...But this was not only 18 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 because of Jorg Haider's 27 percent electoral showing last October...

...Though the SPO-FPO coalition lasted only until 1986, the taboo was broken...

...At the Socialist Party Congress in 1952, Scharf declared, "No one can tell me that socialism or the party can ignore this person or that person because he had a particular past or once was our enemy...

...Kreisky's victory in 1970 allowed the SPO to come to power alone for the first time, breaking the traditional political consociationalism in which Socialists shared power as the OVP's junior partner...

...Now the Socialists formed a minority government, which meant that they had to rely on tacit parliamentary approval of the political "Third Man," the FPO...

...It concludes with the excellent suggestion that all Austrian parties make their internal party protocols available for public scrutiny...

...0 N APRIL 7, just two months after the formation of a coalition government that includes members of Jorg Haider's farright Freedom Party (FPO), Alfred Gusenbauer, newly designated chief of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPO), a former youth leader not known for bold pronouncements, issued an extraordinary document...

...Before 1933, many Austrian Socialists wanted an Anschluss with Germany, but for different reasons: they hoped that by Austria's joining Germany, the two jewels of the Second International might in fact create a social democratic hegemony that neither one of them could attain in their respective countries...

...In 1965 there were pitched battles in Vienna between right-wing students and trade unionists over government efforts to retire Taras Borodajkewyz, a business professor who made repeated and openly pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic remarks in his lectures...

...In this situation, both parties competed for the votes of the "used-to-be's" while the active pursuit of justice for victims of Nazi crimes was quietly allowed to lapse...

...It soon became clear that many of the exiles would not return to Austria...

...The VdU, it noted, was greeted with a "positive attitude" by SPO leaders and was brought into existence as a consequence of the "tactical interests of the coalition partners at that time...

...His most recent book is In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment...

...His newest book, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism in Sports, will be published by Princeton University Press this year...

...Studies by the Austrian linguist Ruth Wodak and other social scientists demonstrate that in the wake of Kreisky's attacks on Wiesenthal, anti-Semitic discourse grew and became more legitimate in Austrian public life...

...ANSON RABINBACH is professor of history at Princeton University and director of the program in European Cultural Studies...

...As Wiesenthal recalled, when Broda received information about Nazi criminals, he routinely replied, 'We will study the matter" and took no further action...

...Kreisky's designated agricultural minister, Hans 011inger, had to resign after it was revealed that unbeknownst to Kreisky he had an "illegal" SS background...

...Reinhard Kamitz, minister of finance in the 1950s, was a Nazi Party member and the OVP was not above using subtle anti-Semitism in its electoral campaigns...

...Immediately following the war, the reconstituted SPO's emphasis on pragmatism and cooperation with former enemies in the Catholic camp led to the creation of a tightly controlled two-party form of governing that has come to be known as "neo-corporate consociationalism...

...This ended with Haider's ascension in 1986...

...Some key leaders of postwar social democracy, like Lower Austria's Heinrich Schneidmadl, had reputations as anti-Semites, and Schneidmadl's wing of the party had always been wary of what it perceived to be the inordinate presence of Jewish intellectuals in the SPO top echelons...

...Disenfranchised in the 1945 parliamentary elections by dint of its members' active cooperation with National Socialism, this group garnered 11.7 percent of the popular vote in 1949...

...In 1933, several months before the short but bloody February 1934 civil war between the Socialists and the paramilitary Heimwehr forces drove the Socialists underground and into exile, striking mineworkers in Styria already showed increasing sympathy for the Nazis...

...What will probably be Austria's last trial involving the Nazi past began this past winter...

...In fairness to Kreisky and the SPO, the FPO's debut at the helm of Austria's government occurred under the chancellorship of Fred Sinowatz, Kreisky's immediate successor...

...This system also promoted speedy accommodation with ex-Nazis, who came to be known as the "used-to-be's" (ehemalige), and whose past the parties were now willing to forget as long as they proved to be loyal voters, supporters, and eventually functionaries...

...Finally, and most important, the declaration reserved its sharpest criticism for former chancellor Bruno Kreisky's role in promoting the careers of former Nazis in the SPO...

...become supporters of the conservatives, the SPO openly advocated the creation of the Association of Independents...

...As a third force it could provide a home for German nationalist diehards who, like Jorg Haider's father, Robert, refused to accept Austrian nationhood and persisted in promoting pan-German slogans...

...Kreisky's personal prejudice happened to be superb politics in a country where well into the 1970s more than 70 percent of the population still harbored anti-Jewish sentiments...

...Banned under the Nazis, the Austrian SPO reconstituted itself in 1945 under new postwar circumstances...

...After the war he conveniently exchanged his Nazi membership for a Socialist one...

...Adopting the November 1943 Moscow declaration of the allies calling Austria "the first victim of Nazi aggression," the Socialists rebuilt the party on a very different foundation from the "Austro-Marxist" social democracy of the First Republic...

...Kreisky ostentatiously embraced Yasir Arafat and Muammar Qaddafi during their repeated meetings in Vienna and elsewhere, while regularly referring to Israeli leaders, especially Menachem Begin, as Ostjuden, the derogatory term commonly used by German (and Austrian) Jews to refer to their East European co-religionists...

...Still, the SPO took a major step to make public some of the facts that historians and many Austrians have long since known...

...Once constitutional law was abolished and Austria became a corporate state under Engelbert Dollfuss, the more conservative leaders of the outlawed Socialist Party repudiated the illegal underground movement and called on Austrian workers to join the official government trade union association...

...Gross was a Nazi of the first hour: a member of the Hitler Youth as of 1932, of the Sturmabteilung one year later, and enjoyed rapid career advancement as an active Nazi leader during the period in which the Nazi Party was illegal in Austria (1934-1938...

...At the heart of the declaration was the recognition that both major parties in postwar Austria, the socialists and the Austrian People's Party (OVP)—the heir of the prewar Christian-Social Party—were responsible for the creation of a third party designed to attract former Nazis, the "Association of Independents" (VdU), the forerunner of today's FPO...

...However, President Theodor Korner refused to allow the VdU to participate...

...For example, 16 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 Otto Leichter, who had been Otto Bauer's righthand man before the war, and whose wife, Kathe, had perished in Ravensbrack, chose to remain in New York (where his son Franz became a state senator...

...As early as 1953, Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian underground Revolutionary Socialists and husband of the American philanthropist Muriel Gardiner (whose story was the basis of Lillian Hellman's book and the film Julia), wrote in his autobiographical In the Twilight of Socialism that while prominent socialists like Robert Danneberg, Benedikt Kautsky (son of the German SPD theorist), and Otto Steinitz were sent to concentration camps, others chose to negotiate with the Nazis...

...The VdU was so influential in the early years of the Second Republic that it was invited to join a "grand coalition" to govern the country...

...He publicly expressed to the German weekly Der Spiegel that Jews were "a small but unattractive people...

...011inger's successor was a man who had been "merely" a legal member of the Nazis...

...As Adolf Sturmthal, who had been an assistant to Friedrich Adler (head of the Labor and Socialist International) in the 1930s and returned to Austria in 1945 as the chairman of "Friends of Austrian Labor" in American exile, soon learned, the new SPO was not warmly disposed toward returning émigrés...

...The Kreisky Problem The SPO's tacit tolerance and quiet courting of ex-Nazis turned open and vocal under the leadership of Bruno Kreisky beginning in 1970...

...Hitler's jubilant welcome in Austria in March 1938 was not confined to the country's middle class as socialist mythology later claimed...

...Rather than have the bulk of Austria's 680,000 registered Nazi Party members...

...The two became not only political allies but personal friends...

...It would also reveal the close connections between both major Austrian parties and the phenomenal but not all that surprising rise to prominence of Jorg Haider...

...The "declaration" revealed details of the so-called "brown-spots" in the Party's postwar history and acknowledged "the errors and omissions" for which it was responsible during the Second Republic...

...The Gusenbauer declaration was applauded by former Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitsky, but criticized by Wiesenthal as "coming too late," and by the Green Party's Peter Pilz for focusing on the "brown-spots" in Austria's past at the expense of the "blue-spots" (the FPO's color) in its more recent history...

...Most important, Kurt Waldheim was a prominent member of the OVP, and most of its members and supporters stood by him during the entire six years of his ill-fated presidency where—for the first time— an Austrian politician, indeed the country's head of state, was persona non grata in most European countries...

...If this indeed became the case, it would open a chapter in Austrian history that has for too long been shrouded in darkness and whispers...

...The collaboration between Austria's Social Democrats and the ex-Nazis only recently came into public prominence...

...It further acknowledged that after the war efforts at denazification were "incomplete" and that Austrian courts frequently ignored serious cases or handed down sentences and acquittals that today would appear "unacceptable...

...Though such coalitions were the norm in virtually all European democracies, it was taboo in Austria because of the FPO's unique connection to the Nazi past...

...Because of its origins, Anton Pelinka, Austria's leading political scientist, notes that today's FPO is not a Nazi party but "a party founded by former Nazis for former Nazis...

...In that way the Socialists promoted a parallel track designed to weaken their only political rival (and consociational partner), the People's Party...

...According to the British historian Robert Knight, when the subject of restitution of Jewish property was raised in postwar cabinet meetings SPO interior minister Oskar Helmer said, "I am for dragging out the matter...

...Kreisky, an assimilated Viennese Jew of the educated middle class, who had been driven into Swedish exile and only returned to Austria in 1951, ironically made anti-Semitism more acceptable in Austrian politics than any other postwar politician...

...This system, popularly referred to as "Proporz"—in reality, joint two-party control over government, civil service, and most of public life—was seen as the only possible way to avoid the violent and ideological confrontations between armed camps that characterized the First Republic...

...It also happened during a brief hiatus in the FPO's history, when, in the early 1980s, the party's liberal wing gained short-lived prominence...

...Not insignificantly, Josef Klaus, Kreisky's victorious opponent in the 1966 national elections campaigned under the slogan "a true Austrian," implying that Kreisky was not so...

...Fascinated by the thirty-year hegemony of Swedish social democracy (as were many continental émigrés including Willy Brandt and Rudolf Meidner), Kreisky hoped that by weakening the conservative OVP and strengthening the far-right FPO he, too, would be able to establish "Swedish" conditions in Austria...

...Gross's trial is merely an egregious example of the still unwritten but all the more ugly side of postwar Austrian social democracy...

...In fairness to Renner, he explained in an English language statement that DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 15 POLITICS ABROAD he had "taken upon myself the necessities of the whole nation" and that "it hurts me to have to submit . . . as the child of a humanist century to an incomprehensible race regime...

...Socialist Pragmatism...

...Four of the DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 17 POLITICS ABROAD eleven ministers in Kreisky's first cabinet and five in his second were former members of the Nazi Party...

...Among these, it specified that after the civil war of 1934, many rankandfile Austrian socialists, out of disappointment and bitterness, "had been driven into the hands of the National Socialists...

...Austria's two hundred thousand Jews, most of whom had voted for the Socialists because the Christian Social Party program contained a notorious Aryan paragraph, were gone, either murdered or driven abroad...

...The Socialist declaration only hints at the extent of support for the Nazis among former Social Democrats both prior to and after the Anschluss in 1938...

...After they were defeated, a few embittered Socialist leaders even turned to the Nazi Party in Germany to continue the fight against the hated Christian-Socials...

...Eighty-three-year-old psychiatrist Heinrich Gross was tried in Vienna for conducting a euthanasia program in Vienna under Nazi rule, which involved the murder of young children...

...The bourgeois parties would be splintered, thus leaving a powerful social democracy as the permanent rulers of the country...

...The declaration of responsibility and apology for the SPO's long history of "errors and omissions" makes a serious and courageous new beginning...

...In short, Gross was a Nazi by conviction not opportunism...

...ANDREI S. MARKOVITS is professor of politics in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor...