[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Agrippa

Even the Social Democrats wanted a union with Germany after WWI and Dollfuss spoke about "Austrians being the better Germans", just to make clear about what Austrian identity we speak about before WW2. Mainly the Communists had an idea of a "non-German Austria".

This sentiment of germanness is not clearly a national one, but more like that of different peoples belonging to an imperial idea.

The question of Austria is never one of being "Austrian or German", but being either, like Bavarians and the like. However, the identity after WW2 was a different and if talking about many people of today in Austria, they have a complex if dealing with "Germans", first because they no longer belong to that "big brother" officially and secondly because they wanted not being associated with Germans after WW2 for obvious reasons ("first victim" etc.).

But before WW2 most Austrians which were against a union with Germany were simply against the current system and policy of Germany of that time, but it was no principal question. That it became just after WW2 and the following re-education and propaganda, which was not just "anti-Ns." in Austria, like in Germany, but also "anti-German", with a particular emphasis of an own independent identity and "not being German".

One detail that has not been mentioned yet, is that Austrians welcomed the Anschluss amidst a climate of a strong economic crisis and high unemployment. Around 600,000 unemployed out of a population that, 75 years later, is of 8.2 million.

So it looks like there is a pattern in the Austrians calling the Anschluss an annexation to portray themselves as the first victim of Nazism, after WWII, and in welcoming unification with Germany under the name of reunification at a time of a strong crisis, before WWII.

The only pre-re-education base for this was the antipathy of Austrians and Southern Germans against the Prussians, the "Piefke". But then again this never applied to the same degree for Bavarians.

It must surely be more than "anthipathy", as if it was a mere child's game. Don't you think so?

Rather not actually. It was all about the post WW order, which was a question of power (the allies had it) and goals.

I'm sure that they did, but we are talking of an unrelated issue here. It can be even convenient, but you cannot blame it everything to the same evil, as if automatically.

The reason Austrians had no big problem with "being no longer German" was that they had too much problems while being part of Germany, namely the war, the destruction, the bombs, the hunger, the dead soldiers and civilians - high losses, and of course the stigma of "being German" which was nothing to be proud about in the Allied propaganda. So they were not alienated because of the Ns. "racial standards", but because of the reality and policy of post WW2 Europe.

You are wrong if you think that I meant that in such a simplicized way. Nazis did embrace theories of Nordic supremacism, and they subsequently started to develop more pseudo-scientific theories to excuse the "un-nordicness" (thus "un-germanness", according to such definition, or at least "less germanness") in Germany, as they defined German nationhood in terms of nordicness. Which is insane.

The tragedy is that Nazism did not stopped there, but it also came to virtually replace nationalism for Germany.

Draw your own conclusions, if you are able to see it from a non burdened point of view.