Austrian historians are ridiculing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a ”socialist” country when he moved away in 1968.
Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger told the convention on Tuesday: ”I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes.”
No way, historians say, challenging Schwarzenegger’s knowledge of post-war history — if not his enduring popularity among Austrians, who admire him for rising from a penniless immigrant to the highest official in the United States’s second-largest state.
”It’s a fact — as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria [the south-eastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised],” historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Schwarzenegger, now a naturalised US citizen, was born on July 30 1947, when Styria and the neighbouring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, post-war Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the US, the Soviet Union and France.
The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.
In his convention address, Schwarzenegger also said: ”As a kid, I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left” in 1955 and Austria regained its independence.
But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice-rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, and all the nation’s chancellors were conservatives — not socialists.
What’s more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative government headed by People’s Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the socialists as well as the communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.
Schwarzenegger ”confuses a free country with a socialist one”, said Polaschek, referring to East European communist officials’ routine descriptions of their countries as socialist.
Polaschek saw the moderate Republican governor’s recollections at the convention as a tactical move. Schwarzenegger, he said, was ”using the old communist enemy image for Bush’s election campaign”.
”He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician,” Polaschek said.
Norbert Darabos, a ranking official of Austria’s opposition Social Democratic Party, sharply criticised Schwarzenegger’s ”disdain for his former homeland”.
”The Terminator is constructing a rather bizarre Austria image,” he said. — Sapa-AP