Parliamentarism in Austria in the Interwar Period
Parliamentarism in Austria in the Interwar Period

Summary/Abstract: With an image shaped by the antics of rabid nationalists before 1914, and by machine-politics after 1945, Austrian parliamentarism has not had a good press. Or rather, historiographically speaking, it has suffered a fate worse than death. No news is bad news. Until recently, the standard work of reference for the Old Austrian Parliament was the eightvolume compendium of an eye-witness, the Neue Freie Presse’s lobby correspondent, published around the turn of the century.1 When the present author attended a seminar on the First Republic in the mid-1970s, the textbook on our list of recommended reading consisted of a Swedish Ph.D. thesis, published in 1940.2 There is certainly no Austrian equivalent to the Berlin Commission on the History of Parliamentarism and its impressive list of studies and editions. True, Bruno Kreisky – always eager to highlight the sins of his conservative opponents who had jailed him during the 1930s – helped to found a Commission on the History of the First Republic in 1971 but their series of conferences were discontinued soon after his fall from power in 1986. One of its fruits was the publication of the Cabinet minutes that has since slowed down due to lack of funds.3 Much of the information available about interwar politics is still hidden away in mostly unpublished dissertations of the 1960s and 1970s.

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