100 Years of the Republic of Austria

The Pallas Athene statue in front of Austria's Greek-revival Parliament building in Vienna. To the left: the year "2018" and below it the inscription "100 JAHRE" and the country name "REPUBLIK ÖSTERREICH".

On 12 November 1918, just days after the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the Provisional National Assembly in Vienna proclaimed the Republic of German-Austria. Overnight, the multi-ethnic state of some 50 million inhabitants had become a small Alpine country of around 6.5 million people, whose economic viability many contemporaries doubted. The First Republic, marked by severe social tensions and a deep divide between "Red Vienna" and the conservative provinces, ended with the authoritarian corporate state of 1934 and the Anschluss to the German Reich in 1938. Only the State Treaty of 1955 restored the country's full sovereignty and established the permanently neutral Second Republic.

The Austrian Parliament building on Vienna's Ringstrasse, completed in 1883 to designs by architect Theophil Hansen in the style of Greek classicism, embodies the country's turbulent constitutional history like no other building. Hansen deliberately chose the visual language of ancient Greece as a symbol of democracy; the bronze statue of Athena in front of the main portal, erected in 1902, represents wisdom and justice. In autumn 2018, Austria marked the centenary of the proclamation of the Republic, an occasion the state also honoured with a 2-euro commemorative coin.