Austria Travel Guide

Austria is a land-locked alpine country in Central Europe bordering Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west, Germany and Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east and Slovenia and Italy to the south. Austria, along with neighboring Switzerland, is the winter sports capital of Europe. However, it is just as popular for summer tourists who visit its historic cities and villages and hike in the magnificent scenery of the alps.

Today’s Austria is what was once the German speaking core and center of power for the large multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. This empire stretched eastwards from present-day Austria through much of east-central and south-central Europe. While Prussia united the German states to the north into one “Germany” in the latter part of the 19th Century, Austria remained oriented eastwards towards its empire. However, from the start of the 20th century, the political history of Austria has been closely linked to the misfortunes and disasters of modern German history, mainly the First and Second World Wars and their aftermath.

The modern republic of Austria came into being in 1918 as a result of its defeat in World War I. In its wake, the empire split into Austria’s current borders, Hungary, southern Poland (which also came from the Russian and German empires), Czechoslovakia and most of Yugoslavia. Following an unresisted invasion and annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Austria more or less functioned as a part of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Thus the majority of the population initially supported Hitler and their incorporation into Germany. Austrian soldiers also fought in the Wehrmacht, cities were bombed heavily by the Allies and concentration camps existed on Austrian soil (e.g. Mauthausen near Linz). 

In 1945, Austria was divided into zones of occupation like Germany. However unlike Germany, Austria was not subject to any further territorial loses. A State Treaty signed in 1955 ended the Allied and Soviet occupation, recognized Austria’s independence, and forbade future unification with Germany. A constitutional law of that same year declared the country’s “perpetual neutrality”, which was a condition for Soviet military withdrawal, and saved Austria from Germany’s fate of a divided nation with a divided capital. This neutrality, once ingrained as part of the Austrian cultural identity, has been called into question since the Soviet Union’s collapse of 1991 and Austria’s entry into the European Union in 1995. A prosperous country, Austria entered the European Monetary Union in 1999, and the Euro currency replaced the Schilling in 2002.

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