Ghosts of Imperial Vienna
3. The Persistence of Mitteleuropa in Memory: The Ghosts of Central Europe
The Ghosts of Central Europe
The fall of the Berlin Wall helped both to restore Austria to Europe (as it was able to renegotiate its post-World-War-II neutrality, imposed with the 1955 Staatsvertrag) and again to obscure it as central to that Europe. Its 1996 millennium, its celebration of its thousand years’ existence, fell out of visibility—an anniversary celebrating 1000 years after a country name, Ostarrici, referring to a land with unknown borders, appeared in a legal document.1 It is particularly fitting that Austria’s millennium was to be celebrated with reference to a document about a lost geographic entity, a “falsification,” given that its last incarnation, Austro-Hungary, never did have a legal country name.
Within post-Cold-War Europe, the map of that Austria-as-Europe remains as curiously devoid of specifics as ever. Remedies for that situation are few, if any. Many of the post-Wall histories of the nation-states liberated from the East Bloc are written by voices from the Second World War (or their children; see for example Norman Davies’ God’s Playground, on Poland). Another scholar notes that the French, British, and US historians who write the history of Europe are “Atlantic” historians (Kuehnelt-Leddihn 20), many of whom don’t even read German, let alone the other languages of the Europe that could include the land beyond Vienna’s Gürtel. The Nazi era, countered by the Cold War, remains the point of reference for “restoring” Europe, rather than the imperial histories ← 39 | 40 → whose last acts are remembered as...
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