Post-1945 Austria was known as a country with an extraordinarily stable political system, a system characterized by power-sharing arrangements between the two major parties—the center-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ)—and augmented by “social partnership” and a network of organized labor and business that was interested more in economic growth than in the redistribution of wealth.

This remarkable arrangement was based on the widely accepted prioritization of stability orientation over innovation. But this stability had its price: it became self-evident for the younger Austrians who were less grateful that the dreadful past of civil war, authoritarian rule, Nazi occupation, and involvement in world war had become history. The younger Austrians, more secular and better educated than the older generation, started to leave the political patterns of the past: political loyalty as transgenerational heritage, electoral predictability, and the perception of Austria as an island of the blessed. And it was the younger generation that opened Pandora's box concerning the role Nazism played in Austria before—and the policy of amnesia after—1945.

In her book, Allyson Fiddler describes and analyzes the impact of this transformation that was at least as much cultural as political. Rightfully, her approach is interdisciplinary, combining the analysis of a traditional historian with elements of sociology and political science. For that reason, her work is best described as a cultural study. She emphasizes the “Waldheim Affair” of the 1980s as a (and perhaps the decisive) starting point for a new kind of a culture of conflict—at least new for Austria, where all (including the bloody internal conflicts of the 1930s) were defined and designed by political parties, expressing the deep ideological and social cleavages separating political Catholicism, Austro-Marxism, and Pan-German nationalism.

The newness of the cultural conflicts at the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century indicated the emancipation from the traditional pattern of “red” (left) versus “black” (right). The old pattern was more and more replaced—though not fully—by the pattern of “young” versus “old.” This is not contradicting that the focus of the protests at the center of Allyson's study has been—and still is—the protest of young leftists against the far right: the young leftists are not controlled by the SPÖ, and the far right has little to do with the ÖVP.

Of course, this protest has been and is political: it is against the acceptance of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), a party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis for former Nazis, and against the coalitions the ÖVP formed with the FPÖ in 2000 and again in 2017. Fiddler shows that the protests combined a more traditional style (street demonstrations) with nontraditional forms of political articulation, such as literature and cinema. She uses Elfriede Jelinek and Antonio Fian, among others, as examples of the end of the established barriers between culture and politics: all culture is political, all politics is cultural.

It is a fascinating book that demonstrates the extent to which the distinction between culture and politics has become blurred—in Austria as elsewhere. In many respects, those who articulate the protest against the far right are “bourgeois”—highly educated, internationally connected, much like Stefan Zweig a century ago—and those who feel threatened by the protest, the voters of the FPÖ for example, are defined by their blue-collar working-class background and are afraid of the trans- and internationalism that young leftist intellectuals represent.

Fiddler sees Austria as part of a European, of a Western society, and the rise of the far right that provokes new forms of leftist protest is not specific to Austria: she refers to similar conflicts, such as those in France or in the Netherlands, as well as those in the United States. These conflicts have a common denominator. Behind them is a cultural as well as a political antagonism, with a specific socioeconomic undercurrent. It is the antagonism between those who are afraid of the opening of the nation-state toward Europe, toward the world, afraid of loosening the (comparatively) cozy welfare state privileges that Austria—perhaps more than other European societies—was able to establish after 1945, and those who are afraid of the xenophobic, nationalistic, even racist nature that the “patriots” of the far right represent. It is a conflict, in the words of a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, between the (culturally) globalized “no-wheres” and the antiglobalization “some-wheres.”

In the twenty-first century, Austria probably differs more from post-1945 Austria than it does from rest of Europe today. Allyson Fiddler's book helps us to understand the complexity of factors behind the new culture of protest.