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The Problem of the Austrian Nation after 1945

Several years ago, Karl Dietrich Erdmann incorporated the history of Austria after 1945 into his revision of the fourth volume of the Gebhardt Handbook. This prompted the Austrian historian Georg Schmid, born in 1944, to note in a review essay that there was some "uncertainty" about "whether Austria is now a part of German history"-an uncertainty that "must become a problem for precisely that generation of historians that has received the Pan-German, German-National, and National Socialist representations of history only through a filter." 1 The uncertainty of which Schmid spoke is not the result of a threat from any current political demands or national political controversies, as was the case between the world wars. Austria's relations with the German states are no less normal than its relations with other European states. The autonomy and independence of the Austrian state is selfevident to the generation born after the Second World War. What continues to trouble young Austrian historians, journalists, teachers, and cultural figures is the burden that Austria's need to overcome the past places on our view of our history-the knowledge that the state whose independent existence Austrians now unconditionally embrace is, in its present form as a minor state (Kleinstaat), a product of power politics and expedience and not the fruit of aspirations for national or social independence by the majority of the population. In an age of historical thinking, when there are even attempts to legitimate sports events historically, the historical justification of a political structure that was originally not even desired in its current form will clearly become a problem. In an age of gigantism, when size and power have become the idols of human worship, we can hardly avoid the temptation to conceal the smallness of the present through the invocation of great-