In important respects Italy’s condition after the war stood comparison with that of Austria. Both countries had fought alongside Germany and had suffered accordingly after the war (Italy paid a total of $360 million in reparations to the Soviet Union, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and Ethiopia). Like Italy, Austria was a poor and unstable country whose post-war renaissance could hardly have been predicted from her recent past. The country’s two dominant political groupings had spent the inter-war years in bitter conflict. Most Austrian Social Democrats had regarded the emergence in 1918 of a truncated Austrian state out of the ruins of the Habsburg Empire as an economic and political nonsense. In their view the German-speaking remnant of the old Dual Monarchy ought logically to have joined its fellow Germans in an Anschluss (union), and would have done so had the self-determination clauses of the Versailles agreements been applied consistently.

There is no question of ever accepting Nazi representatives in the Austrian cabinet. An absolute abyss separates Austria from Nazism. We do not like arbitrary power, we want law to rule our freedom. We reject uniformity and centralization. . . . Christendom is anchored in our very soil, and we know but one God: and that is not the State, or the Nation, or that elusive thing, Race. Our children are God’s children, not to be abused by the State. We abhor terror; Austria has always been a humanitarian state. As a people, we are tolerant by predisposition. Any change now, in our "status quo", could only be for the worse.

Austria had become the second German state in fact, because there German culture, now homeless in its old home, found a new country. The more violent the opposition to German National-Socialism, the more justified became the Austrian claim to be the representatives of the now homeless German culture and of the higher values of Germanism. To all intents and purposes Weimar had been exiled from the Third Reich and had found its home in Vienna.

Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were "rehabilitated" in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period. ...Anton Pelinka ...has called this phenomenon the "great Austrian taboo." It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not Germany.

‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945; Austria had become the ‘first victim’, rather than an agent in the war.

The economics of Planning drew directly upon the lessons of the 1930s—a successful strategy for post-war recovery must preclude any return to economic stagnation, depression, protectionism and above all unemployment. The same considerations lay behind the creation of the modern European welfare state. In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social costs.

The economic history of post-war western Europe is best understood as an inversion of the story of the immediately preceding decades. The 1930s Malthusian emphasis on protection and retrenchment was abandoned in favor of liberalized trade. Instead of cutting their expenditure and budgets, governments increased them. Almost everywhere there was a sustained commitment to long-term public and private investment in infrastructure and machinery; older factories and equipment were updated or replaced, with attendant gains in efficiency and productivity; there was a marked increase in international trade; and an employed and youthful population demanded and could afford an expanding range of goods.
The post-war economic ‘boom’ differed slightly in its timing from place to place, coming first to Germany and Britain and only a little later to France and Italy; and it was experienced differently according to national variations in taxation, public expenditure or investment emphasis. The initial outlays of most post-war governments went above all on infrastructure modernization—the building or upgrading of roads, railways, houses and factories. Consumer spending in some countries was deliberately held back, with the result—as we have seen—that many people experienced the first post-war years as a time of continuing, if modified, penury. The degree of relative change also depended, of course, on the point of departure: the wealthier the country, the less immediate and dramatic it seemed.

The institutional settlement of post-war West Germany has endured because it generated value. They retained pre-modern artisan organisations and turned them into the foundation of their contemporary economic success. They entangled and constrained capital in a myriad form of national, sectoral and localised arrangements and they emerge from the crash, virtually alone, with a productive economy and a functioning democracy, with greater equality than us and more meaningful work.

This distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism—for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims—was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe. In its positive form it facilitated national recovery by allowing men like Marshall Tito, Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer to offer their fellow countrymen a plausible and even prideful account of themselves. Even East Germany claimed a noble point of origin, an invented tradition: the fabled and largely fabricated Communist 'uprising' in Buchenwald in April 1945. Such accounts allowed countries that had suffered war passively, like the Netherlands, to set aside the record of their compromises, and those whose activism had proven misguided, like Croatia, to bury it in a blurred story of competing heroisms.
Without such collective amnesia, Europe's astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible. To be sure, much was put out of mind that would subsequently return in discomforting ways. But only much later would it become clear just how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years. In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.

My hope is that the difference in the three generations' attitudes may signal a lessening of anti-Semitism in Austria.

Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses. Instead of first devoting all possible resources and effort to remedying this, she chose to load this economy with the vast and potentially limitless cost of the welfare state; current expenditure before capital investment; the patterns of the next thirty years.

The National Socialist Party in Austria never tried to hide its inclination for a greater Germany. That Austria would one day return to the Reich was a matter of course for all National Socialists and for true Germans in Austria.

Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.

The events of 1931 had struck a formidable blow to the hopes of a return to the pre-1914 "normalcy". Of course we had all known that there must be great changes resulting from the war: changes in economic and financial methods; still more, changes in concepts of social justice. But up to 1931 there was no reason to suppose that these would not, or could not, follow the same evolutionary pattern which had resulted from the increased creation and distribution of wealth throughout the nineteenth century. We had only to remove the hindrances to trade artificially created by the war and its aftermath. The rest would follow. Now, after 1931, many of us felt that the disease was more deep-rooted. It had become evident that the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down, not only in Britain but all over Europe and even in the United States. The whole system, therefore, had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all; it certainly could not survive without radical change... [I]n the thirties, something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home but overseas.