Writing the Region after Nazism: Völkisch Legacies, Historiographical Networks, and Regional Identity in Postwar Vorarlberg

This article examines the historiography of Vorarlberg after 1945 as a networked field of regional knowledge production, political identity formation, and selective memory. It argues that older völkisch, volksgeschichtlich, and folklore-based patterns of interpretation did not simply disappear after National Socialism. They were transformed into a more acceptable postwar vocabulary of homeland, Alemannic distinctiveness, federalism, peasant freedom, and provincial self-assertion. The article reconstructs the academic, institutional, textual, and political connections through which this transformation became effective. Its focus lies on the Innsbruck formation of key actors, the role of the Vorarlberg State Archive and the journal Montfort, the canonizing work of Karl Ilg and Benedikt Bilgeri, the cultural-administrative activities of Meinrad Tiefenthaler, Arnulf Benzer, and Elmar Grabherr, and the broader amplification of Alemannic identity through publicists, demographic arguments, honors, and young citizens’ books. Rather than equating postwar regional historiography with National Socialist scholarship, the article proposes the more precise concept of semantic and institutional translation. Biographical continuities, citation practices, symbolic recognition, and pedagogical media helped preserve older repertoires while adapting them to the democratic and Catholic-conservative environment of the Second Austrian Republic. The analysis is based on published regional histories, civic books, commemorative texts, newspapers, and archival material. The case of Vorarlberg shows that regional historiography can function as a site of subnational identity politics and as a medium through which ethnicized historical language survives political rupture. The article thus contributes to the study of nationalism, memory, and language politics by shifting attention from the nation-state to the provincial scale of postwar cultural legitimation.