The Use and Abuse of Memory

This chapter presents a brief theoretical outline and contextualization in Austria's postwar history. It reveals several dimensions that structure, or divide, the country's mythscape: top-down and bottom-up historical analogies; invocations—for very different purposes—of World War II by far-right extremists and some on or near the political left respectively; transnational debates with Austrian contributors or audiences. Returning to the prom controversy, the chapter then formulates analytical key-questions to be put to contemporary, analogical invocations of the history of World War II. The country-specific relevance of World War II to national debates and self-understandings is also invoked in a recent collection of reflections by Germans living in Austria. The context to top-down and bottom-up invocations of the same historical reference, albeit for mutually opposed purposes, was the Euro-debt-crisis. There are prominent external voices commenting— from the outside in—on some contemporary analogies drawn within Austria's mythscape.

Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Psychology

• Memorial culture of modern Hungarian monarchism

  Open Access•Maksym W Kyrchanoff•Vestnik of Samara University…•2025

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