David Art's book begins with a central premise, that public deliberation and debate normatively frame and shape politics. Furthermore, his argument regarding how postwar Austrian and German elites dealt with their Nazi past differently, with profound consequences for their respective political cultures and systems of party competition, reveals an intuitive and well-argued Hegelian assumption, that ideas matter deeply in politics. This is not a simple case study that balances the impact of ideas against structures or institutions. Rather, Art builds his analysis methodically, with careful attention paid to historical detail and specificity and with an interdisciplinary swath that cuts across comparative political science, explanations regarding historical memory, theories of public policymaking and media studies. In essence, Art seeks to provide a multi-layered chain of reasoning as to why right-wing extremism has been a successful feature in post-Cold War Austria yet all-but-aborted in post-unification Germany, rooted in how each state's elites have dealt with their pasts very differently, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.
Challenging what Art calls “assumption of fixed interest” (14, n. 3), rationalist theories of politics that downplay the role of public debates, he chronicles how the “culture of contrition” developed in Germany over the course of key events and their contested meanings, such as May 8 as a “day of liberation,” Ronald Reagan's controversial visit to Bitburg, the famous “historians debate” and the Goldhagen phenomenon. The roles of public intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas and political statesman, such as former German president Richard Von Weizsäcker, are detailed—particularly so because they are powerful elite voices influential in the convergence of public opinion toward a politically correct and somewhat ritualized discourse of contrition regarding the Holocaust.
Similarly, Art recounts the development of a “victim culture” in Austria, stemming first from its initial postwar exercise in identity construction as “Hitler's first victim” and continuing with, and perhaps most well-represented by the debate over, the past of former UN Secretary-General and former Austrian president Karl Waldheim. Whereas debate converged in Germany and a broad consensus developed on the Nazi past and how it ought to be usefully and respectfully articulated in the public realm, debate in Austria became increasingly polarized. As a result, Jörg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) exploited this opportunity with spectacular electoral success (measured by the standards of the European extreme right), eventually landing themselves into the corridors of power in coalition with the more traditional centre-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) in 1994.
Whereas Germans have had considerable public and elite reinforcement of the ideas of ordinary German complicity in the Holocaust, Austrians were continually deluded into believing The Sound of Music version of Austrian history, a myth predicated on the (non)existence of a generation of Captain Von Trapps patriotically and heroically resisting the Anschluss in 1938.
If methodologically this sounds rather trite and suspect, careful attention ought to be paid to the nested logic of Art's approach. He not only argues that public debates create and consolidate frames of reference for the population as a whole, but that these debates produce shifts in public opinion that can be measured and have considerable impact in shaping subsequent debates, actions, and events. Measuring such changes or “critical junctures” in discursive space is a tricky enterprise; however, it is one that Art tackles with perhaps the best available precision. To quantify the scope and intensity of the debates he covered, he examined the most widely circulating and influential tabloids in Germany and Austria—Bild, Die Zeit and Krone Zeitung. He further interviewed more than 170 politicians, intellectuals, civic activists, and journalists in both countries and liberally weaves his findings into the overall narrative. Finally, he carefully critiques and finds wanting existing alternative hypotheses on the emergence of the far right, drawing from scholarly literature in political science and history, particularly over the last ten years—an area of focus that will be of particular interest to comparativists who study extreme and populist politics across Europe.
If anything, Art's analysis can be extended further. Although his conclusion surveys electoral results in the last twenty years in other EU states such as the Netherlands, Sweden and France, he might also consider applying his methodology to the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, one can analyze a similar “contrition frame” developing in Poland, particularly measured by the elite response to Jan Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Such a widely accepted discourse of responsibility is noticeably absent in many public debates in both Hungary and Romania.
Significantly, Art sees his work—in keeping with his “ideas matter” thesis—as making a contribution to the analytical and political tool-kit still under construction on how to “tame” or at least effectively marginalize the far right. Insofar as latent and indeed blatant anti-Semitism, anti-immigration sentiment and racism more generally are corrosive of the democratic body politic in Europe and elsewhere, his contribution is both timely and welcome. He convincingly illustrates how debates do affect decisions and outcomes. After all, as Art notes in his conclusion, the Nazi Party was dramatically assisted in its rise to power by the support of the German Communist Party (KPD) whose mistaken calculus saw a hastened revolution and united front against fascism; a conservative print media that made Hitler an avuncular and familiar figure; and key sectors of civil society whose recruitment into the networks of National Socialism embedded the party within German communities and provided an aura of historical continuity and respectability. But one can also learn from the past, as demonstrated by the swift and marked pan-EU reaction to the ÖVP-FPÖ government in Austria, which delegitimated and undermined the coalition at the outset.
