In1996,Austriawill celebrate its millennium. As in many other cases, the chronological justifications for the anniversary are open to question. Austria has never been “founded,” and certainly not one thousand years ago; its independence is the result of a process that took centuries and cannot be symbolized by a date like July 4 in the United States. Austria's national holiday, October 26, marks the date in 1955 when the Austrian parliament voted permanent neutrality and the last of the Allied occupation troops left the country. Nobody, it is true, would doubt that Austria's history stretches back considerably before 1955, 1945 (the foundation of the Second Republic), 1918 (the birth of the First), or even 1804 (when the Habsburg emperor Francis I declared himself emperor of Austria after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire). Nothing comparable happened in 996. In a charter dated November 1, 996, Emperor Otto III granted some land at Neuhofen, in the west of the modern province of Lower Austria, to the bishop of Freising. Even the exact date of the charter—whose original has survived—has not always been accepted, for the seal it carries was Henry II's, whose reign began in 1002. Recently, some scholars have even tried to prove, although not very successfully, that it was a forgery.
