Document Type
Article
Abstract
First paragraph
It is now well documented that Germany and Austria have struggled to come to terms with their catastrophic recent pasts and to recast their national identities from the tarnished faces with which they emerged from the Second World War. What now needs to be considered is the conundrum currently faced in these countries as extreme right groups become increasingly popular (Minority Rights Group International) [1] and those carefully considered and re-examined collective memories of the past and reconstructed national identities are brought into question. The Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party or NPD), one of Germany’s most stridently extreme right parties, and Austria’s Freiheitlichen Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria or FPÖ) which is occupying an increasingly extreme right position on the political spectrum, have presented precisely this challenge. In the case of the NPD, the historical significance and horrific nature of the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry has been downplayed, while the Allied firebombing of Dresden has been labeled to be just as much of a ‘Holocaust’; similarly the FPÖ is led by a man with neo-Nazi associations in his past and a present habit of repeatedly revising Austria’s wartime history in favour of the Axis side.
Repository Citation
Turner-Graham, Emily. "Trauermarsch: German History as Remembered by the Extreme Right." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–28. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss4/10