A study of Nazism and the working class in Austria is compelled to engage with a number of historical debates at once, all of them rendered more or less controversial by the politics of the present. Discussion of Austria's recent history has proved problematic for Austrians and foreigners alike, not least in the wake of the Waldheim affair and in the context of the continuing electoral success of the far right Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). Discussion of the historical relationship between fascism and the working class is similarly bound up with controversy: the focus of the discussion has shifted from the ‘discovery’ of widespread working-class resistance and opposition after two decades dominated by cold war historiography back to assertions of the central importance of workers – the ‘little people’, ‘das einfache Volk’ – in bringing the Nazis to power and sustaining the regime. A national study of working-class opposition to fascism in one country raises both general historical questions about relationships between societies and their rulers, and historiographical questions about post-war hierarchies of ‘national’ culpability and their validity. The more general relationship between Nazism as a political movement and Austrian society in particular is an especially vexed one, which raises further questions about ‘national’ resistance and, indeed, national identity.

The following discussion will outline some of the historiographical issues, and conclude with an examination of society and economy in the First Austrian Republic, before setting out the aims of the book, and the methods and sources on which it is based.