In 1940 the Viennese historian Reinhold Lorenz published his book Der Staat wider Willen (The Reluctant State) on the time after the end of the monarchy. In his own words he wrote it ‘after the magnificent completion of union’ following a call to depict ‘the experience of almost unbelievable aberrations, which ‘fortunately’ had come to an end, as he had witnessed them himself.
