The politics of memory in the Austrian province of Carinthia : how distinctive are the collective memories of the three main political parties of Carinthia?

This thesis investigates the politics of memory in the Austrian province of Carinthia between 1945 and 2002. The thesis seeks to determine the extent to which a common collective memory was articulated in the political sphere in Carinthia and attempts to identify whether and in what ways this collective memory was distinctively Carinthian as opposed to generically Austrian. Drawing on sources including party newspapers, parliamentary speeches and speeches given at war veterans’ meetings, a series of chapters detail each of the three main Carinthian parties’ discourses on the Nazi era, the 1920 Volksabstimmung and the Austrian Civil War, and consider the extent to which the parties’ discourses differ from one another. Each chapter looks at the ways in which memory can be thought of as having been instrumentalised by Carinthia’s political parties, focuses on the impact of generational change on memory in Carinthia, analyses the interaction between the parties’ discourses and considers the prominent role the province’s history of border conflict played in each party’s narrative of the past.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo