Austria's new resistance

Protesters make their way to the Heldenplatz

By Frederick Baker in Vienna

Heldenplatz is a word that reverberates through Austrian history like a clap of thunder, rolling deep into the furthest recesses of the nation's collective consciousness.

The Heldenplatz lies at the very heart of the Austrian capital. The neuralgic point in the national psyche, it is surrounded by the spectacular architecture of the key institutions of state.

It is the place Hitler chose to celebrate the annexation of his homeland when German troops marched into Vienna in 1938. That year Austria died, and the nightmare that was Nazi rule began.

Last weekend, 62 years on, the square of heroes - to give it its literal name - became a place of rebirth and spawned 300,000 new heroes demonstrating for a new Austria.

Joerg Haider's Freedom Party shares power with the People's Party

One of the event's organisers, the writer Doron Rabinovici, made the historical stakes crystal clear.

"Whoever doesn't come to Heldenplatz, on the 19th, doesn't need to ask themselves where they would have been in the 1930s."

The French actor, Michel Picolli, shouted to the crowd: "I was a resistance fighter in the past, let us be the resistance fighters of the future".

Picolli's final words were drowned out by the crowd's chants of the local word of resistance of "Widerstand, Widerstand".

In the Vienna of today "Widerstand" blares defiance from loud speakers, newspapers, graffitied walls and a huge 50 metre long banner on the side of the National Academy of Art.

Anger and incredulity

The demonstration on the Heldenplatz was a dizzying climax to the 19 days of non-stop protests, that have turned the country inside out.

I will never forget the pent-up feeling of anger and simple incredulity at the first big demo that took place on the night of 2 February outside the People's Party's headquarters.

Inside, the pact was being approved that would bring Joerg Haider's party a share of power. Outside the crowd was confused. The situation was so new, the demonstrators so mixed and the last demos so long ago that no-one quite knew what to shout.

Ramble demo

Vienna is not Berlin or Paris where protesters take to the streets at the drop of a hat - the decades of consensus and grand coalition government have made Austrian politics something more for the coffee house than the street.

But as the crowd moved off to protest outside the president's office, it found its voice and the simple word "Widerstand". It was what everyone felt and was taken to the streets, night after night.

"We got tired of just shouting at empty buildings, so we started for the suburbs, where the people are," one old hand told me.

The demonstrators who are mostly young and well-educated, have invented a particularly Viennese form of protest culture - the ramble demo.

Demonstrators brandish the slogan "Resistance"

You don't march, but stroll, banging a drum blowing whistles and waving at the people as they peer out of their windows to watch. Some appear in dressing gowns and quickly change to come down and join in. A few fling buckets of water out of the window, to show their displeasure, but on the whole it's peaceful and good humoured, the police are seen as allies, the route isn't planned, and the walk has no leader - it just happens.

Patriotism has been a key part of the new resistance movement. Haider raised particular hackles in Austria, when he once echoed the Nazis in calling the country a "miscarriage".

It was one of the great successes of post-war politics to develop a strong sense of Austrian pride and self confidence. A stark contrast to the chronic self doubt that plagued pre-war Austria, and weakened its resistance to the advances of the Nazis in 1938.

Outside the president's palace on the day the new government was sworn in one placard said it all: "Haider's Austria is not my Austria."

The demonstrators had been banished to the adjacent Volks garden, and had to look on through the railings.

Haider is not a true Austrian, Haider has vandalised his homeland

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy

It is an image I shall never forget, for it summed up perfectly the situation of the 73% who did not vote for Haider. Unwilling to desert their homeland they are caged in, hostages to Haider's use and abuse of their country's name and symbols.

They reminded me of stranded seabirds that have been caught out in an oil slick, tarred with the consequences of a disaster not of their doing, caught by the journalistic shorthand that equates a government with a nation, the ruling parties, with a people.

But the star of Saturday was not so much an Austrian but a Frenchman - the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. The crowd roared its approval, as in full Gallic flow and broken German, Levy boomed out: "Haider is not a true Austrian, Haider has vandalised his homeland. You are not the other Austria, you are the only true Austria."

Which in the mouth of an Austrian may have sounded nationalistic, but coming from a Jewish Parisian left-wing intellectual, felt and meant the opposite.

Bernard Henri-Levy: "Europe is about values"

It was actually the hour of Austria's true emotional entry into the European Union. As the banners from Greece, England, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Italy flew with those from the European Federation of Jewish students, to greet the heads of five European Jewish communities, for once the word "European" felt more than just a phrase.

As Levy later made it clear later in the packed national theatre: "We have come to prove that Europe is more than the Euro, iron and steel, it is about values.

"We haven't come to lecture you, we've come to give you tips that we've learnt from our defeat of Le Pen. And I hope, should, one day, Le Pen ever get into government in Paris you will come and support us."

'Auf Widerstand'

In Vienna, Haider's party may be sharing the levers of government, but the opposition have captured Austria's heart, the Heldenplatz.

The fight will go on. In the grand finale last Saturday, the compere invited the whole of Europe to make a note in its diary - Thursday night is demo night in Vienna as long as Haider's party shares power. Rendevous 7pm outside the president's office, on - where else? - the Heldenplatz.

As the new resistance movement in Vienna says these days, it's not so much "Auf Widersehen, but Auf Widerstand!"