Secondary Antisemitism, the Economic Crisis and the Construction of National Identity in the Austrian Print Media

This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of 'secondary antisemitism', as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity.