Austria is built on a myth. Let us first briefly recapitulate the hist­or­ical background of this myth:

It is a myth of disaster—completely parallel to the Untergang des Abendlandes of the (German) Oswald Spengler, from 1918—and the disaster in question is naturally the decline and fall of the empire under Franz Joseph I, from the re­vo­lu­tion in 1848, through the royal and imperial double monarchy in 1867 until the dissolution of the empire by the end of the first world war in 1918.