How Austria managed to elect neo-Nazis

When a country doesn’t face its past, it’s easier for thugs to control its future

It is alarming enough that neo-Nazis may rule the Fatherland once more, but all the more disturbing that the Fatherland they hope to govern is not exactly the one the world learned to fear.

This autumn, a neo-Nazi party won 13 per cent of the seats in Germany’s Bundestag. It is in Austria, though, where another such party came in second, and may become a coalition partner in government, alongside the more mainstream conservative party that itself had to mimic anti-immigrant slogans to win this week’s national elections.

Nazis are back, then; they’re just not back to the roots by which they’re typically identified. But then, the failure to fully identify their roots partly explains their return.

They are usually introduced by a more polite name, but “far-right extremists” doesn’t capture the depravity of their politics or reflect the straight historical line that may be drawn from the Third Reich to today. These people are Nazis indeed, give or take a “neo” prefix. In Germany, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party believes that Nazi history is nothing for which the country should continuously express shame.

In Austria, where Nazis created the Freedom Party after the Second World War, Nazi lineage is starker: Its first leader was a former Nazi official and SS officer.

And in Austria, certainly after the elections, neo-Nazi heritage is strongest. There is something jarring about this fact. Of the two countries, Germany is most closely associated with totalitarian racism. Austria may have given the world its premier Nazi, but it was Germany that gave this Nazi the chancellorship.

It was Germany, not Austria, that murdered six million Jews; Germany that gassed them in trucks and camps; and Germany that called genocide a solution. It was of course Germany, not Austria, that made a pan-German fever dream a nightmare. So who but Germany would bring Nazis so close to power?

Any surprise one may feel about resurgent Nazism in Austria partly accounts for the fact that it is indeed resurgent. Germany has not denied its own sordid history of white-race fetishization (though this was not for lack of trying in its darkest quarters). There were too many mass graves and too many occupied territories. Germans have had to reckon with their past.

They have built their memories into their cities, forcing themselves to walk by reminders of book-burning in shelves left purposely empty underground; reminders of persecuted disabled and ill people in long sheets of blue glass; reminders of murdered Jews in towering concrete block sculptures and little brass stones in sidewalks inscribed with the names of exterminated families who once lived in the houses the stones now lay beside. And they have paid for everyone’s memories by compensating Holocaust victims.

Not exactly so for Austria. The country was complicit in Nazi crimes, but with the help of the Allies it managed to largely obscure this fact, ensuring that perpetrators had good reason to trust they wouldn’t be held to account. Instead, many took power. Following the Second World War, Austria reintegrated Nazis into society; so successful were they in this compassion project that these Nazis promptly formed the very political party that neo-Nazis lead today.

No single factor can explain why neo-Nazis threaten Germany less than some other Western democracies. It has economic confidence, for one; a brilliant and thoughtful leader, for another.

But one must never underestimate the power of self-examination, particularly when it isn’t expressed solely as forced confession. Germany can only vow not to repeat its mistakes because it understands how it made them. There is quiet dignity in letting go of pride; this is as true for nations as it is for us all.

Germany may not be safe from the violence of white supremacy — for what AngloSaxon country is? — but more than most liberal democracies, and certainly more than Austria, Germany is at the vanguard of the centre.

I suspect that this is not in spite of having an ugly past, but because its past is so conspicuously hideous that it could not be ignored. Shannon Gormley is an Ottawa Citizen global affairs columnist and freelance journalist.