The Discursive Construction of History

The general public and academic historians do not always agree on what counts as an accurate rendering of the past. This conclusion is not exactly astonishing, but it is documented with enormous care and with a range of different sources—from analyses of documentary films to newspaper accounts, from public policy debates to historical exhibitions—in this collection of essays which examines how Austrians viewed the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. A collaborative effort of Hannes Heer, one of the key organisers of the 1995 travelling exhibition of the ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’, which toured Germany and Austria, Walter Manoschek of the University of Vienna, Alexander Pollak of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, and Ruth Wodak of Lancaster University, the essays collected in this volume identify a number of key themes. Even before the end of the Second World War, most Austrians believed that their country was ‘Hitler's first victim’, and its citizens had reluctantly entered the ranks of the army that aggressively expanded the Third Reich's control over Europe. Accounts of the Second World War after 1945 remained silent on the extent of the participation of Austrian soldiers in the Wehrmacht in committing ‘crimes against humanity’, particularly on the eastern front, murdering Jews and other civilians suspected of being partisans. Instead, they focused on the victim status of returning veterans. The Battle of Stalingrad assumed iconic significance as a symbol of the sacrifice of unwilling soldiers sent on an impossible mission by fanatical Nazis. And in post-war debates over compensation for victims, Wehrmacht soldiers were lumped together with the victims of Nazi persecution, including Jews. These themes were conveyed in policy debates to determine post-war compensation to veterans, school textbooks, and the popular history which appeared in newspaper accounts that, at regular intervals, revisited the experience of soldiers in the Second World War

Ancient history · Art history · Battle · Exhibition · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · World War II · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

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