IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING the Second World War widespread Austrian support for Austro-fascism and National Socialism as well as Austrian participation in the Nazi military and the actual degree to which Austrians had taken part in the Holocaust gradually came to light. It also became obvious that authoritarian attitudes, intolerance, racism, and chauvinism — the syndrome referred to in the 1970s as “everyday fascism” and described by Ingeborg Bachmann in Der Fall Franza (The Franza Case, published posthumously in 1981) and thematized by Elfriede Jelinek in Die Ausgesperrten (The Excluded, 1980) — had outlasted the Nazi system. The survival of old attitudes had been obvious since anti-Semitic demonstrations in 1947 in Austrian cities and the founding in 1948 of the Verband für Rückstellungsbetroffene protecting those who had benefited from the deportations that began soon after the Nazi takeover by acquiring under-priced property owned by Jews. In the 1970s and 1980s writers and critics explored lingering proto-fascist and anti-Semitic attitudes among the contemporaries of the Nazi era and realized that these patterns were perpetuated in the following generations in the absence of a legitimate public forum to express them. Latent anti-Semitism also persisted, though Vienna's small postwar Jewish community, consisting primarily of Displaced Persons, was considered only temporary, even by its members. In 1986, in the heat of the Waldheim election campaign, anti-Semitism in conjunction with anti-US sentiments regained a semblance of legitimacy. It was fostered by the invectives directed against the World Jewish Congress by the Austrian media, particularly the Kronen-Zeitung and the Kurier. Articles in these and other papers alleged or suggested that American Jews were engaging in an anti-Austrian conspiracy to topple the conservative presidential candidate and meddle in internal Austrian affairs.

Even at the end of the twentieth century the trauma of the 1930s and 1940s was impossible to overcome, as the conservative People's Party (ÖVP) formed a coalition government with a successful extreme rightwing movement, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Along with the victory of populism, concerned critics continued the process of unraveling the events of the Nazi era. During that time of heightened uncertainty and polemics Austrian intellectuals were still — or once again — struggling to reach conclusive assessments of the cataclysmic social and political changes of the years between 1938 and 1945.