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.

In our project "The Construction of the Austrian Trümmerfrau," we were able to demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of manual rubble clearance in Vienna after the end of the Second World War was carried out not by voluntary female helpers, but by former National Socialists. Owing to the acute shortage of other workers, these individuals had been compelled to perform this labor by constitutional law. At the beginning of the 1950s, they succeeded in obtaining a favorable ruling from the Austrian Supreme Court, which subsequently entitled them to compensation payments. Former National Socialists were thus compensated by the Austrian state and the City of Vienna ahead of numerous victim groups persecuted under National Socialism. By employing collective-biographical methods, we were able to reconstruct the biographies of these former National Socialists and show that they consisted primarily of so-called "ordinary" party members, party applicants, low-ranking officials within the NSDAP and other organizations of the Nazi state, or, in exceptional cases, their family members. In their applications for compensation, they willingly provided information about the nature of their activities and largely portrayed themselves as victims of what they perceived to be "victors' justice" or retaliatory justice. In a second step, our project analyzed how this forced labor performed by former National Socialists subsequently gave rise to a specifically Austrian "Trümmerfrauen" myth. In contrast to the GDR, which may be regarded as the origin of this myth, the Austrian version emerged relatively late, namely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, the term "Trümmerfrauen" was used for the first time in the Austrian parliament only in 1989. Key impulses came from West Germany, where a comparable myth had emerged in the course of debates concerning the disadvantages women faced under pension legislation. Only with the erosion of the Austrian "victim thesis" did space emerge for the Austrian Trümmerfrauen as a new narrative of victimhood. The genuine hardships of the postwar years were woven into a mystifying narrative of heroism and self-sacrifice in which the Nazi era could once again be obscured. In this context, one may also situate the "Trümmerfrauen" memorial inaugurated in Vienna in 2018 by the then Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party of Austria.