The study of early 20th Century Austria has predominantly hitherto focused on the events which precipitated the disintegration of the Monarchy in 1918 and the polemic debate on the subsequent attributable guilt of everyday Austrians in facilitating National Socialist terror. What is too often overlooked in the historiography of Austria is the many ways in which the lands of the former Habsburg Monarchy were a microcosm of greater Europe. Nonetheless, these concurrent secular, and Catholic, grassroots, and diplomatic, efforts at fostering a new reconciliation rooted in a common Habsburg and European identity were not merely a precursor to more successful post-WW2 Franco-German reconciliation efforts and should be evaluated in their own right.
The experience of war was pivotal in the formation of the next generation of Austrian political leaders such as the successors of Ignaz Seipel; Ernst Streeruwitz, Engelbert Dollfuss, and Kurt Schuschnigg, shaping Interwar politics via the need for peace and simultaneous paradoxical acceptance of increasingly militarized political rhetoric. This paper primarily addresses how various Pan-European Congress meetings in Vienna and the state-sponsored 250th-anniversary celebrations of the 1683 liberation of Vienna were utilized to proclaim Austria, by virtue of her Alpine-Danubian geography, Catholic faith, and historical Habsburg legacy, as a true embodiment of the German spirit, and defender of Christendom, which was now charged once more with the spiritual unification of Central- and wider Europe against the dual emerging threats of National and International Socialism.
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