Postwar Austrian Identity & Folk Culture Reconstruction

The post-war European integration project binding contemporary member regions across borders.

1 chapter

1938 - 1945

The National Socialist regime co-opted folk traditions for Blut und Boden ideology—Perchtenläufe, Trachtenumzüge, and harvest festivals were instrumentalized as expressions of völkisch racial identity. Simultaneously, the Mauthausen concentration camp (established 1938) became a centre of the NS camp system: approximately 200,000 prisoners from across Europe passed through it and its subcamps. Nearby quarries used camp labour; local businesses interacted with the SS. The region's Jewish communities—those that had re-established after centuries of restriction—were destroyed entirely. After 1945, communities resumed festival practice within the national memory framework of the Opferthese (the 'victim myth' treating Austria as Hitler's first victim), which allowed 'harmless' customs to continue while suppressing the history of their NS-era co-option and local co-responsibility for the camp system. The Mauthausen Memorial (opened 1949, museum since 1970) and the LINZ ERINNERT project (installing permanent brass steles for murdered Jews of Linz) represent the later critical reckoning with this suppressed memory.

From 1995

Today you can read this region's layered history through living practices that coexist with heritage-tourism framing. The Danube Limes inscription (UNESCO 2021) added a Roman frontier layer to the existing UNESCO portfolio. Bad Ischl and the Salzkammergut held the European Capital of Culture title in 2024—the first inner-Alpine region to do so—which reinforced the Salzkammergut as a cross-border cultural unit (spanning Upper Austria, Salzburg, and Styria) but also risked shifting festival narratives toward 'heritage branding.' The Wachau Sonnenwende fires, documented from the early 17th century, follow the solar calendar (June 21) rather than Johannistag (June 24), suggesting possible calendar-continuity with pre-Christian solstice practice—though the earliest documented form is 1604, and the current spectacle form is inseparable from tourism. The Goiserer Gamsjagatage in Bad Goisern (August) celebrates Salzkammergut hunting craft and Brauchtum, connecting to a working-class community identity distinct from the imperial Bad Ischl narrative. Laa an der Thaya's Zwiebelfest reflects the agricultural economy of the Weinviertel-Moravian borderland, where Czech/German cultural exchange predates the modern nation-state boundary. The Memory of Mankind archive (founded 2012 by Martin Kunze, deep in the Hallstatt salt mine) stores ceramic data plates for a million-year future—an uncanny mirror of the salt mine's role as a preserver of deep past. Perchtenläufe and Krampusläufe, while currently experiencing a massive 21st-century revival, should not be narrated as 'prehistoric survivals' without documentation: the current form is shaped by romantic nationalism, tourism, and commercial revival, though its calendar position on Epiphany may preserve older winter-solstice logic.

1781 - 1938

The Toleranzpatent of 1781 opened the door to Protestant public worship and to a dual-calendar festival reality. Simultaneously, early industrialization transformed the region: Josef Werndl founded the Steyr Waffenfabrik in 1864, making the city an armaments centre whose working-class community developed festival traditions distinct from Alpine-romantic norms. The Semmering Railway (built 1848–1854, UNESCO 1998) connected the Danube corridor to the Adriatic, shrinking distances and enabling tourism. Bad Ischl became the Habsburg imperial summer resort—its spa culture and Kaiservilla framing local customs as byproducts of imperial leisure rather than of older communal or liturgical roots. The discipline of Volkskunde constructed 'Volkskultur' as a timeless, ethnically homogenous rural essence, presenting customs like Perchtenlauf and Krampuslauf as 'echt' survivals from an unchanging past while erasing their 19th-century romantic reconstruction and excluding urban, proletarian, and minority traditions. The Wachaubahn (since 1909) turned the Sonnenwende solstice fires into a tourism spectacle—though the fires themselves are documented from the early 17th century (1604 Rosenburg, 1609 Klosterneuburg), their current vineyard-torch and Danube-boat form is inseparable from the tourism era.

1500 - 1781

The Habsburg Counter-Reformation reshaped the festival calendar by force. Protestant worship and festival practice were suppressed across Upper Austria—Geheimprotestanten (crypto-Protestants) maintained secret devotional practices that diverged from the Catholic calendar, avoiding processions and observing a different liturgical year. This erased an entire layer of community festival life. At the same time, Baroque Catholic festival culture was both imposed and locally adopted: monasteries were rebuilt in Baroque splendour (Melk under Abbot Dietmayr, Göttweig), and new ritual forms emerged. The Traunkirchen Corpus Christi Seeprozession (boat procession on Lake Traunsee) has been held since 1632, when the land-based procession route was blocked by fire—the water-borne form became a permanent feature. The Jewish community of Krems—one of Austria's oldest, with a documented Judenrichter in the 13th century—was destroyed in the expulsion of 1420/21, removing a festival and market dimension that would never be restored. The 1781 Toleranzpatent finally permitted Protestant Toleranzgemeinden, creating a dual-calendar reality.