The search for the Austrian "Trümmerfrau"

On October 3, 2018, the then Austrian Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ) unveiled a monument to the Austrian Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) in Viennas first district, triggering a debate about their status that was relatively extensive by Austrian standards. This book, which traces and deconstructs this myth, also explores this area of tension. The so-called Trümmerfrauen have become a fixed point in the politics of memory in the portrayal of the immediate post-war period: Armed with shovels, aprons, and headscarves, they cleared the streets of the federal capital Vienna of the rubble of warat least according to the popular narrative. Armed with shovels, aprons, and headscarves, they cleared the streets of the federal capital Vienna of the rubble of warat least according to the popular narrative. Pictures of them can be found in schoolbooks, and hardly any historical documentation is complete without a reference to them. However, the Trümmerfrauen are a historical-political myth. In fact, it was primarily former National Socialists who were conscripted to do the vast majority of the manual rubble work in the immediate post-war period. This book focuses on how this legally mandated penitential labor subsequently gave rise to a specifically Austrian Trümmerfrauen myth. Martin Tschiggerl traces the birth of the Austrian rubble woman to the late 1980s as a reactivation of the victim thesis under new circumstances and an adoption of German rubble women narratives: When the Austrian population lost its victim status due to the historical-political paradigm shift in dealing with the Nazi era, room was made for new victim narratives. The Trümmerfrauen myth represents just such a victim narrative.