The history of Austria

Austria lies across the eastern Alps and the Danube valley, where the mountains open onto the plains of central Europe. Celtic salt miners, Roman frontier provinces and early medieval Bavarian settlers came before the eastern march that the Babenberg family turned into a duchy. From 1278 the Habsburgs ruled from Vienna, and over six centuries they built a dynastic empire that held off the Ottomans, dominated the Holy Roman Empire and became Austria-Hungary. Its collapse in 1918 left a small German-speaking republic that was torn by civil strife, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, occupied by the Allies after 1945 and restored as a neutral, prosperous state in 1955.

People were living in the Danube valley during the last Ice Age. The figurine known as the Venus of Willendorf, carved about 30,000 years ago, was found near Krems, and the mummified body of Ötzi, a man who died around 3300 BCE, was found in 1991 in the Alps on today's Austrian-Italian border. Farming spread from the Neolithic onward, and copper and then bronze working took hold in the mountains.

The salt mines at Hallstatt, worked from the second millennium BCE, made the area wealthy, and the rich graves found there gave their name to the Hallstatt culture, the early Iron Age culture of central Europe from about 800 BCE. In the last centuries BCE the Celts of the region formed the kingdom of Noricum, famous for its iron, which traded closely with Rome. Around 15 BCE Noricum was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and the lands east of the Vienna Woods became part of the province of Pannonia. The Danube was the frontier, guarded by legionary fortresses at Vindobona, the future Vienna, and Carnuntum. The emperor Marcus Aurelius spent years campaigning against the Marcomanni across the river, and Christianity spread through the towns in late antiquity.

As Roman power collapsed in the fifth century, Germanic peoples crossed the region, and the Roman population withdrew or dwindled. By the late sixth century Bavarians had settled the west and Slavs, under the overlordship of the Avars, much of the east and south, where the Slavic principality of Carantania emerged. Charlemagne destroyed the Avar realm in the 790s and set up a frontier march on the Danube, but Magyar raids in the early tenth century overran it.

After Otto I defeated the Magyars at the Lechfeld in 955, the frontier was re-established. In 976 the emperor gave the eastern march of Bavaria to Leopold of Babenberg, and a document of 996 records the name Ostarrichi, the origin of the German Österreich. The Babenbergs pushed the march eastward and moved their seat to Vienna in the twelfth century. In 1156 Frederick Barbarossa raised Austria to a duchy through the Privilegium Minus, separating it from Bavaria. The Babenbergs gained Styria in 1192, and Vienna grew rich on Danube trade, partly financed by the ransom paid for Richard the Lionheart, who was held captive in Austria in 1192 and 1193.

When the last Babenberg duke died in 1246, King Ottokar II of Bohemia took the Austrian lands. The newly elected German king, Rudolf of Habsburg, a count from what is now Switzerland, challenged him and defeated and killed him at the battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. In 1282 Rudolf granted Austria and Styria to his sons, and the Habsburgs ruled from Vienna for the next 636 years. They added Carinthia, Carniola and Tyrol in the fourteenth century, and Duke Rudolf IV founded the University of Vienna in 1365.

From 1438 the Habsburgs were almost continuously elected heads of the Holy Roman Empire. Marriage, more than war, made them a great power: Maximilian I's marriage brought the Burgundian Netherlands, and his grandson Charles V inherited Spain and its empire as well. In 1521 and 1522 the dynasty divided into Spanish and Austrian branches, with Charles's brother Ferdinand taking the Austrian lands. In 1526, after the Hungarian king died fighting the Ottomans at Mohács, Ferdinand was elected king of Bohemia and claimed the crown of Hungary, joining the three realms that would form the core of the Habsburg Monarchy.

The union with Hungary put Austria on the front line against the Ottoman Empire. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna but withdrew as winter approached, and for a century and a half most of Hungary remained in Ottoman hands. Meanwhile the Protestant Reformation won over much of the Austrian nobility and towns. The Habsburgs responded with a forceful Counter-Reformation, and the attempt to impose Catholicism in Bohemia helped trigger the Thirty Years' War in 1618. The war ended in 1648 with the dynasty's hold on its own lands, and on Catholic uniformity there, strengthened, while its authority over the wider empire was weakened.

In 1683 an Ottoman army laid siege to Vienna a second time. A relief force of imperial and German troops and a Polish army under King John III Sobieski routed it on 13 September. In the wars that followed, generals including Prince Eugene of Savoy reconquered Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia, confirmed by the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, and made Austria a great power. Vienna filled with Baroque palaces such as the Belvedere and the expanded Schönbrunn.

Charles VI had no sons, and his Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 aimed to keep the Habsburg lands undivided under his daughter. When Maria Theresa succeeded in 1740, Frederick the Great of Prussia seized the rich province of Silesia, starting the War of the Austrian Succession. She kept the rest of her inheritance and secured the imperial title for her husband, Francis Stephen, but never recovered Silesia. Her long reign brought sweeping reforms: a centralised administration, a standing army, compulsory primary schooling from 1774 and limits on the labour burdens of peasants. Her son Joseph II went further in the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, abolishing serfdom in its harshest form, granting toleration to Protestants and Jews and closing hundreds of monasteries. Vienna became the centre of European music, the city of Haydn, Mozart and later Beethoven and Schubert.

Maria Theresa's daughter Marie Antoinette was executed in Paris in 1793, and Austria fought revolutionary France for more than two decades. Napoleon defeated Austrian armies repeatedly and occupied Vienna in 1805 and 1809. In 1804 Francis II proclaimed himself emperor of Austria, and in 1806 he dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. After Napoleon's fall the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, steered by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, restored a conservative order in Europe, with Austria presiding over the new German Confederation.

Metternich's system of censorship and police control collapsed in the revolutions of March 1848, when uprisings broke out in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and the Italian provinces. Metternich fled, the emperor Ferdinand abdicated, and the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph I came to the throne in December. With Russian help against Hungary, the revolutions were crushed, but serfdom was abolished for good. In the following years Austria lost its Italian lands in wars in 1859 and 1866, and defeat by Prussia at Königgrätz in 1866 ended its role in Germany, which Otto von Bismarck then united without it.

Weakened, Franz Joseph reached the Compromise of 1867 with Hungary, creating Austria-Hungary, a dual monarchy with a shared ruler, army and foreign policy but separate governments. The Austrian half gained a constitution and, from 1907, universal male suffrage. Vienna became one of the great cities of Europe, home to the Ringstrasse, the painting of Klimt, the music of Mahler and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, but also to mass politics: Christian Socialists, Social Democrats, German nationalists and the antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger. Conflicts between the empire's many nationalities paralysed the Austrian parliament.

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia drew in the alliance systems and started the First World War. The war brought defeat, hunger and disintegration. Franz Joseph died in 1916, and by late 1918 the peoples of the monarchy were declaring independent states.

On 12 November 1918 the provisional assembly in Vienna proclaimed the Republic of German-Austria and declared it part of Germany. The Treaty of Saint-Germain of 1919 forbade union with Germany, fixed the country's name as Austria and confirmed the loss of South Tyrol to Italy and of the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, while a plebiscite in 1920 kept southern Carinthia in Austria. The small republic of about six and a half million people, a third of them in Vienna, struggled economically, and many doubted it could survive. Politics polarised between the Social Democrats, who ran "Red Vienna" with ambitious public housing, and the Christian Socials of the provinces, each with its own paramilitary force.

The Great Depression deepened the crisis. In 1933 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss suspended parliament, and in February 1934 a brief civil war ended with the suppression of the Social Democrats and the creation of an authoritarian, corporatist Catholic state. Austrian Nazis murdered Dollfuss in a failed coup in July 1934. His successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, tried to preserve independence, but in March 1938 Adolf Hitler, himself Austrian-born, forced his resignation, and German troops crossed the border on 12 March to cheering crowds. The Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany, and a controlled plebiscite in April recorded more than 99 per cent approval.

Persecution of Austria's Jews, most of them living in Vienna, began at once with public humiliation, plunder and the pogrom of November 1938. About two-thirds of the roughly 200,000 Jews managed to emigrate, and about 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Roma, disabled people and political opponents were also killed, and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp near Linz held prisoners from across Europe, at least 90,000 of whom died there. Many Austrians served in the Nazi apparatus and in the camps, while others resisted. Allied bombing hit Vienna, which the Soviet army took in April 1945.

A provisional government under the Social Democrat Karl Renner declared Austria's independence restored in April 1945. Like Germany, the country and Vienna were divided into four zones of occupation by the Americans, British, French and Soviets. Unlike Germany, Austria had a single government from the start, and the Allies' Moscow Declaration of 1943 had described it as the first victim of Nazi aggression, a view that for decades allowed Austrians to avoid confronting their role in Nazi crimes. Marshall Plan aid helped rebuild the economy, and a grand coalition of the conservative People's Party and the Social Democrats governed from 1945 to 1966.

As the Cold War hardened, negotiations over a treaty dragged on for a decade. After Joseph Stalin died, the new Soviet leadership agreed to withdraw on condition that Austria stay neutral. The State Treaty was signed at the Belvedere palace in Vienna on 15 May 1955, and once the last occupation troops had left, parliament passed a constitutional law of permanent neutrality on 26 October 1955, now the national holiday. Austria joined the United Nations that year.

Neutral Austria became a meeting place between East and West, taking in refugees from Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and hosting United Nations agencies in Vienna. Its economy grew rapidly under the system of social partnership between employers and unions. The Social Democrat Bruno Kreisky was chancellor from 1970 to 1983, a period of welfare expansion and an active foreign policy. The election of Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986, amid revelations about his wartime service in the German army in the Balkans, opened a long national debate about Austrian complicity in Nazism, and in the early 1990s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky publicly acknowledged that Austrians shared responsibility for its crimes.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the revolutions of 1989 ended Austria's position on the edge of the Western world. The country joined the European Union in 1995 and adopted the euro in 1999, while remaining outside NATO. In 2000 the People's Party formed a coalition with Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party, prompting temporary diplomatic sanctions by other EU members. Neighbours such as Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia became partners within the union.

Sebastian Kurz of the People's Party became chancellor in 2017 in coalition with the Freedom Party. That government collapsed in 2019 after the Ibiza affair, a secretly filmed video in which the Freedom Party leader appeared to offer state contracts in return for support. Kurz then governed with the Greens from January 2020, the first time they had joined a national government, but resigned in October 2021 under a corruption investigation, and Karl Nehammer became chancellor in December.

In the election of 29 September 2024, the Freedom Party under Herbert Kickl came first with 28.8 per cent of the vote, the first time a far-right party had won a national election in Austria since the Second World War. Other parties refused to serve under Kickl, and after months of failed talks the People's Party, the Social Democrats and the liberal NEOS formed a three-party coalition. Christian Stocker of the People's Party was sworn in as chancellor on 3 March 2025. Austria today has more than nine million people, about a quarter of them in Vienna, and remains a neutral member of the European Union.