Little documented in 1967
Vienna had relatively little student protest in 1967, and the record is thin enough that a confident narrative would be inventing material. Austrian universities were comparatively quiet until 1968, and the most famous Viennese event of that period, the Kunst und Revolution evening, took place on 7 June 1968. This article says what is known, and flags what is not.
Austria in the mid-1960s
Austria was a neutral republic, occupied by the Allies until 1955, and its politics after the war were dominated by cooperation between the conservative People’s Party and the Socialist Party in a grand coalition. In 1966 the People’s Party won an absolute majority and formed a government on its own, with Josef Klaus as chancellor, ending that long arrangement. The change did not by itself produce a student movement, but it altered the political picture.
The country had also been shaped by its recent past: the memory of Nazism, the Anschluss and the question of how openly to discuss them. This remained uncomfortable in public life, and it helps explain one earlier episode that is sometimes cited as the nearest thing to a protest tradition in the Austrian universities.
The Borodajkewycz affair, 1965
In 1965, students and others protested against Taras Borodajkewycz, a professor at a Vienna university whose lectures were criticised for nationalist and apologetic remarks about the Nazi period. Demonstrations for and against him led to clashes. In one of them, Ernst Kirchweger, an elderly man who had been persecuted under the Nazis, died after a confrontation with a right-wing demonstrator, which is generally described as the first political death of the Second Republic. The episode shows that university politics could become serious in Vienna, but it came two years before the year in the title and was largely about the legacy of the past.
Why 1967 looks quiet
Several factors probably contributed, though they are partly interpretation. Austrian universities were smaller and less overcrowded than some of their Italian or French counterparts. The country was relatively prosperous, and the political system had channels, such as party-linked student groups, for expression. There was also the weight of caution in a neutral country on the border of the Eastern bloc.
Austrian students did read and discuss the same ideas as others: the New Left, Marxist theory, critiques of consumer society. Some followed the Vietnam War. But there is no strong evidence of a large 1967 demonstration comparable with Berlin on 2 June or the Italian occupations. Where individual smaller meetings or protests occurred, they are not well recorded in sources that could support specific claims here.
The Viennese Actionists
Vienna was nonetheless an important place for radical art. The Viennese Actionists, including Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, staged performances in the 1960s that shocked audiences with their use of the body, blood, food and ritual. Their work belonged to the broader international interest in happenings and performance, and it could be compared with conceptual art elsewhere or with the experiments of the underground film movement. Some of it was also intended as an attack on Austrian respectability and repression.
This was a movement of artists rather than students, and it should not be treated as a student protest. But it prepared the ground for the event in June 1968 in which the two worlds overlapped.
Kunst und Revolution, 7 June 1968
On 7 June 1968, a gathering called Kunst und Revolution was held at the University of Vienna, organised by the Socialist Students’ Association and featuring Actionists and associated writers and artists, including Oswald Wiener. Among the actions, Brus performed an act of self-harm and public nudity, and an action involving a national symbol was described by the press as an outrage. The press called it the “Uni-Ferkelei”, roughly “university filth”. Brus was later prosecuted and received a prison sentence for denigrating state symbols, and left Austria for Berlin in 1969.
The event is a 1968 episode. It became widely known as Austria’s closest counterpart to the student upheavals elsewhere, though it was far more an art scandal than a political rising, and the reaction was as significant as the event: an angry press, criminal charges and a conservative public. It shows how thin the Austrian student movement was compared with those in Paris or Rome, even as it revealed real tensions in Austrian society. Several accounts suggest that part of the general reaction came from the fact that the event took place inside a university, which many people regarded as a protected institution.
What can be said with confidence
In short: Vienna’s universities were calm in 1967; the nearest earlier landmark was the 1965 Borodajkewycz protest; the Actionists were active as artists; and the event that made Austrian students and artists briefly notorious took place in June 1968. For the wider crisis that followed that year, including the arrival of refugees after the Prague Spring in August, readers should look to other articles. Anyone offering a detailed list of Vienna’s 1967 demonstrations is likely guessing.