Exhibition Horror Patriae
Directorate of Nations
Long before nation-states existed, people were fascinated if not obsessed with the classification of national characters. Early pseudoscientific typologies were often based on false assumptions about differences in climate and geography. They were also often racist—toward Blacks and Jews, in the first place, but also toward Eastern and Southern Europeans. The so-called Völkertafel (Table of Peoples, 18th century) from Bad Aussee, Styria, is an example of such popular pseudoanthropology. It uses a bureaucratic form that implies power and considers Eastern European nations significantly underdeveloped. The table was widely copied as a conversation piece for inns, where travelers were encouraged to exchange their experiences.
In the tremendously multiethnic Habsburg monarchy, only around a quarter of the population spoke German as a native language. Some emperors did not speak German at all. Still, it became the empire’s most prestigious and eventually only official language, signaling class membership rather than ethnicity. Historically, Graz was an outpost that strongly identified with Germanness against cosmopolitan Vienna.
But Styria was larger than it is now and included substantial swathes of today’s Slovenia. German and Slovenian were spoken across classes. Even before World War I created a border between two brand-new countries, the Republic of Austria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a paranoid fear of Slavicization emerged on the Austrian side. It understood itself as a border region, a Grenzregion, a term typically used by Pan-Germans and later Nazis.
In Graz, the main monument to the local Styrian-German identity was created by Viktor Geramb (1884–1958), a tremendously influential folklorist who founded the local Folk Life Museum. One of its rooms is the so-called Trachtensaal (Hall of Folk Costumes, 1938–40), an eerie installation of life-size figures showing the Styrian population in their allegedly traditional gear over time. The research behind it was driven by an anti-modernist panic about the loss of “authenticity.”
Geramb, a controversial figure, was a vehement Catholic, which did not make him popular among the Nazis. They also did not appreciate that he continued the work of his friend Konrad Mautner (1880–1924), a Viennese folklorist of Jewish descent. Still, Geramb was a Pan-German who swore by the word Volk (people), and his ideas were compatible with Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology. The Hall of Folk Costumes propagated and imposed costumes that Geramb considered to be truly German, uncontaminated by the Slavic element. Therefore, southern Styria was underrepresented.
Geramb was just as opposed to another contamination of Tracht: the fake, urban fashion of dirndls and lederhosen, a “foul masquerade” worn by summer vacationers, including Jews, and sold by department stores. Many of these were owned by Jews at the time, like Graz’s Kastner & Öhler. The Nazis defined this popularization of folk costumes as “Jewish Trachtenkitsch.”
