Spoken silence - bridging breaks. The discursive construction of historical continuities and turning points in Austrian commemorative speeches by rhetorical tropes

In the first decades after 1945, political orators commemorating the proclamation of the Austrian Republic in November 1918 scarcely refer to the National Socialist crimes and even less to Austro-fascist cruelties. If they mention National Socialism, they represent it as a a sort of natural catastrophe suffered by the Austrians