The construction of the Austrian "Trümmerfrau"

The focus of this research project is to investigate the Austrian Trümmerfrauen-myth as the idea that the removal of debris after World War II in Vienna was mainly done by voluntary female workers. To this end, previously unprocessed holdings of the Wiener Stadt und Landesarchiv will be systematically recorded and analyzed for the first time. From these holdings it becomes clear that the work in Vienna was primarily done by former National Socialists who were compelled by law to work. In 1951, these persons forced to work obtained a ruling from the Austrian Supreme Court in their favor, according to which they were to be compensated for the work they had done. The applications for this compensation form the basis of this research project. In this research project, we will not only collect the files on the so-called emergency work and use them to create a database of the people who worked at the time, but will also analyze how this expiatory work by former NSDAP members could give rise to the Austrian Trümmerfrauen-myth decades later. The comparatively late emergence of the Trümmerfraue-myth in Austria can be explained, among other things, by the fact that the compulsory work of former Nazis in the removal of debris was very well known to the public in Austria in the first postwar decades. For example, virtually all major Austrian daily newspapers had reported on the 1945 Constitutional Law and, subsequently, on the so-called "emergency work." A reinterpretation of this actual Trümmerarbeit as expiatory work by Trümmerfrauen into a heroic saga of reconstruction would have been difficult in the first postwar decades, as long as knowledge of the high labor leadership of former National Socialists and National Socialist women was still present. Only when these denazification measures had disappeared from recent collective memory did a mystified counter-narrative of hard- working "Trümmerfrauen" become possible. More seriously, however, it may have been that the Trümmerfrauen were simply not necessary as a separate victim group in a country that defined itself as a victim in its entirety. When an entire population collectively claimed victim status, there was little need for a specific subgroup of victims. Only when the collective victim status of the Austrian population visibly eroded in the course of the remembrance-political turn of the 1980s and made room for a "co-responsibility thesis" was there room for a new form of victim narrative, this time grouped along the newly discovered category of "gender" and from which the "Trümmerfrauen" emerged to suggest once again a collective victim role of at least a large part of the Austrian population.