Last night I was at a birthday party for an Austrian friend. I was very reluctant to go — though she is a good friend and almost family — because I know that the topic on everybody’s mind is the coming war with Iraq. She is in her twenties, and I knew that so too would everybody else be, besides my wife and I (33 and 34, respectively). It is completely natural for a group of 20-something Europeans to want to discuss the major topic of the day. The question was, how could I stay out of it? Once I start, it’s hard to stop, and, given the audience, there would be a high likelihood for bad feelings on what was supposed to be a happy birthday night.
Well, we managed to stay on the periphery and have our own small-talk conversations. Apparently my wife saved me from one potential volley, though I didn’t know about this until afterwards. Nevertheless, even the small-talk conversations revealed a lot.
Speaking with one 20-something woman about music, I commented that I really liked the song “I am from Austria” by the Austrian star, Rainhard Fendrich. She immediately reacted negatively (though not rudely) and talked about how much she disliked the song, the reason being that it is nationalistic. “You can love your country without writing a song about it.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this about the song, which generally is a huge favorite among Austrians, an unofficial anthem of sorts. Some younger Austrians are very sensitive to even the slightest hint of patriotism or nationalism. There are all sorts of reasons for this, of course, not least of which is Austria’s Hitler experience. But I pointed out to her that Austria’s biggest (non-economic) problems between the world wars were caused or exacerbated by the very fact that they had absolutely no national identity whatsoever.
After the first world war and the dissolution of the Habsburg empire, the victors drew the borders of Austria, creating a near-dwarf state that was largely isolated from its new neighbors, who had once been the primary sources of food and industry to the empire. What was this new thing called “Austria”? That was the question of the day. A chauvinistic Austrian Pan-German movement pre-dated the war, and its proponents seized on this chaotic opportunity to renew their push for union with Germany, a union that was specifically prohibited by the treaties that followed the war. To make this worse, even the Socialists sought such a union with the new German Republic (Weimar), which, in its early phases, was declared, organized and ruled by the German Social Democrats. To the Austrian Socialists, a union would be a major step forward for the Socialist International in the German-speaking countries.
You can imagine the effect all of this had on the domestic credibility of the government of the first Austrian Republic. Who really cared about an Austrian government when so many gazed longingly to the north?
To stave off both the socialists and the right-wing pan-Germanists — of whom the National Socialists were quickly becoming the most radical and dangerous after Hitler became German Chancellor early in 1933 — the first Austrian Republic was basically shut down by the Christian Socials led by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. In its place was erected a fascist dictatorship — the Fatherland Front — whose defense was guaranteed by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini. These were the days before Mussolini found common ground with Hitler.
Dollfuss hated German National Socialism, and he realized that part of the defense of Austria had to include the creation of an Austrian identity so that fewer people would gaze northwards. (Of course it didn’t help that the man in power up there in Germany was himself an Austrian!) Using parades and symbols, Dollfuss tried to emulate some of the emotional successes of National Socialism, and, most importantly, he created a new corporatist social structure modeled in large part on the ideas in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, “Quadragesimo Anno: Encyclical on Reconstruction of the Social Order”. Dollfuss was a devout Catholic, and part of this new Austrian identity was to include an emphasis on what he believed was Austria’s catholic, historical mission (hearkening back to the Holy Roman Empire), which, with its universalist message, would be opposed to any notion of a specifically German cultural or racial superiority.
Well, to bring this incredibly over-simplified version of early twentieth-century Austrian history to a close, the plan didn’t work. No convincing Austrian identity was developed. Dollfuss himself was murdered in his office by Austrian National Socialists in a near-coup in 1934. Four years later, Austrians opened the border and their country became the Ostmark of a Grossdeutschland under Adolf Hitler.
At this point, even I am wondering how this all relates to last night’s party and Rainhard Fendrich’s song, “I am from Austria.” Well, in this way: Austrians — particularly young, progressive Austrians (which means all young Austrians who are not skinheads, as far as I can tell) — are already post-national because, as the crises of the 1930’s showed, they were never “national”. They are literally in an ongoing, perpetual state of “pre-nationalism”, but because they are swept up in the intellectual ideals of the European Union movement, their condition is defined purely in terms of “post-nationalism”.
With the idea of any kind of national pride or patriotism being not only a foreign, unknown concept but also an intellectually disreputable one, they cannot even stomach the fact that an Austrian — a Viennese — has written a song in which he very proudly — and without any chauvinism whatsoever — announces (in English) that he is from Austria. This language-switch is one thing I love about the song: all of its words, except for the four words — “I am from Austria” — that repeat in the chorus, are written and sung in a deliciously difficult Viennese dialect. Fendrich is speaking to Austria herself (using the informal “du”) in a dialect that not even northern Germans would understand very well, and then switching to English to tell the rest of the world with pride that he is from Austria. Though the pride is there, the lyrics are hardly a testament to any kind of macho Austrian strength and valor. The opening words (butchered by me into English) are, in fact, critical: “Your peak time is long past, as is the glory and glitter, no one raises their hat to you except for me… I know the people, I know the rats [i.e., bad people] and the stupidity that is screamed to high-heaven…” His praises of Austria are mostly for its natural beauty. He says virtually nothing that suggests any kind of superiority of Austrian people or culture or institutions. In my opinion, the song is more a reaction to the fact that so many people know anything about Austria, and he is telling his country that no matter where he is, he thinks of his home and recalls — in addition to its shortcomings — its beauty. If ever their was a benign “patriotic” song, this is it. Yet many find it unacceptably nationalistic in this post-national age.
I believe there is a problem inherent in the complete absence of national pride among the young adults of Austria: they might assume that their brothers and sisters in the European Union are following this same principle. The intellectuals in the other countries all allege that a post-national spirit dominates their program of unity, but is it true in practice? One has to wonder if countries like Austria are giving up their sovereignty, in the name of the post-nationalist experiment, only to find that countries like France enjoy the union mostly because it gives them an opportunity to formalize their position of strength as a larger member. The current French government seems to me to be rather “Gallic”; are these young Austrians noticing and concerned about French nationalism? It goes without saying that they find American patriotism repellant. But are they even aware that other countries besides the United States might display patriotic tendencies and operate with their own unique interests in mind?
