Innocent Austrians

In a commemorative speech held in 2005, the Austrian chancellor, Schüssel, with reference to the foundation of the Second Republic in 1945, spoke of Austria’s birth or rebirth after the war, using a natural, biological metaphor. A political entity becomes  a child, suggesting that the state is innocent like a new-born child. The founders are referred to as the founding fathers of the Second Republic. The founders are said to have come back from the concentration camps, thus suggesting that only victims of the Nazi regime and not its collaborators were involved in the founding of the state. The political actors who really made independence possible, the Allied forces who defeated the Nazi regime, are not mentioned at all. The years before are referred to as a nightmare, thus making the event appear fateful and unavoidable like a natural disaster. All this constructs a historical view which makes commemoration possible and includes the perpetrators and their families. (Wodak, Ruth: “Language and Politics”, in: Culpeper, Jonathan, Katamba, Francis, et. al. (eds): English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 588-91)

 

 

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