The First World War in the Collective Memory

For a long time the memory discourse in Austria on National Socialism and World War II "overwrote" the remembrance of the first of the global wars in the 20th century. Two aspects were neglected in this constellation: the transfer of the First World War from "functional memory" to "storage memory" (Aleida Assmann) after 1945 in a European perspective took place in nationally and regionally diverging grades (see Anniversaire de l`Armistice, Armistice / Remembrance Day in France in France and Great Britain). The second aspect is the fact that political culture in Austria between 1918 and the "Anschluss" was dominated by the memory of the First World War. It played a central role for the patterns of interpretation and the creation of meaning in political and scholarly discourses before it became overwritten like a palimpsest after 1945. The topic of World War One as an element in collective memory in Austria has so far been of little importance in historical or cultural studies. The project therefore intends to combine the approaches of memory studies and political culture studies and to reconstruct and recontex-tualize the remembrance of the Great War in the communicative and cultural memory in the interwar period. The research focuses on its discoursive construction and its symbolical forms of expression in the political culture of the Republic and (from 1934 on) in the Federal State of Austria respectively. A central question is how in public representations - for example tributes to soldiers, commemorations, or memorial performances on the occasion of anniversaries or holidays relating to the war - in the First Republic and the authoritarian "Ständestaat" ("Corporate State") narratives that provided interpretations and meaning and their counter-narratives were expressed. Political discourses referring to the struggle for the power of interpretation concerning identity and the socio-political system take centre stage. A second focus is the collection and analysis of symbols in the public space that point to the remembrance of World War One in the years after 1918. It refers to the erection of memo-rials, the naming of streets and places, and the establishment of particular areas in gra-veyards for war victims. A third focus of the project is intended to investigate the memory of the Great War as argument in the political debates and to analyze the interpretations of the war and its repercussions with respect to their contents and their relevance in the political field.

The collective remembrance of the First World War and its politico-cultural interpretation in interwar Austria have been so far apart from singular studies scarcely and above all not systematically explored. The project made possible to investigate for the first time the question how the Great War was interpreted in Austria in the years 1918 to 1938 without the experience of a second world war. The differentiation between the level of the federal state and the regional and local levels as well as the political and sociocultural camps was of central relevance. The interdiscursive connection to other sociopolitical issues like the construction of masculinity and the attitude to modernity and modernization was of high importance. One focus was the investigation of sites of memory and of political debates and discourses. In the course of the work on the project the observation of the interpretation and their public resonance in arts film, photography, visual arts, architecture and literature got increasing importance. One essential result was the lack of a consensual Austrian narrative of the First World War in the interwar period. The interpretations of the Social Democratic, the Christian- conservative and the German-national camp differed considerably. In particular the Social Democratic Party with its anti-Habsburg No more war attitude adopted a position opposing to the one of the other camps. This difference gets obvious with respect to the war memorials who show characteristic features in Red Vienna and in industrial municipalities dominated by the Social Democrats. Finally, between 1933 and 1938 the austrofascist dictatorship formulated an official and authoritative narration of the First World War. Another striking feature is the importance of regional conditions for the specification of the discourses and the representation of the collective memory. Especially Carinthia and Tyrol develop characteristic narrations of the world war, closely connected with their afterwar histories. The struggle for the interpretation of the war between the political camps, however, can be observed even in small municipalities. With increasing temporal distance affirmative interpretations of the war assert themselves, above all due to the emphatically Habsburg-friendly attitude of the authoritarian Ständestaat. Another striking feature is the comparably extensive absence of the First World War in the arts and the media representations in Austria`s interwar period. Unlike, for example, Great Britain the experience of the war, above all the specific front experience with its effect on the subject is widely blinded out in the arts and in literature. Evidence like this one show that research, among other questions, on Austria`s contextualization in an international comparative level is an urgent desideratum.