| Abstract | The article examines several writings on the history of Austria. The election of Kurt Waldheim in 1986 as president of the Austrian Republic provoked a protracted and acrimonious debate. In addition to hundreds of articles on his alleged complicity in war crimes during World War II, there has been a spate of books on the subject. The majority Waldheim secured in the presidential elections can be seen as a public endorsement of the right to forget the past, especially the embarrassing truth about Austrian complicity with National Socialism. For the historian, however, the problem is not simply to retrieve those inconvenient facts omitted from the public record. It is to understand the processes of social memory. Writers of the Enlightenment were concerned less with historical precedents than with rational principles. German national identity, as it emerged during the nineteenth century, was based on a series of interlocking historical fictions which disregarded actual political institutions and cherished the myth of a unified German Reich. Nineteenth-century German theories of history were dominated by such myths, above all the myth of national destiny, based on the unity of the Volk.
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