I was once asked—not all that long ago—whether I’d rather ride out the apocalypse in Austria or in Germany. It’s an oddly practical question these days, isn’t it? Once upon a time, we Austrians were known as the poorer cousins of Germany: the quaint, alpine backwater you passed through on your way to somewhere more important. That era is over. Not only has the gap closed, but Austria is, in many respects, in a vastly better position than its hulking northern neighbour.
This isn’t to say we’ll be spared the pain on the way down. Collapse is an equal-opportunity destroyer. But Austria happens to have some solid fundamentals that make it a more comfortable lifeboat than the German industrial Titanic. For starters, we’re theoretically food independent. We can produce all the calories we need within our borders—no container ships or Ukrainian wheat convoys required. That’s a trick Germany can’t pull off so easily.
Then there’s the matter of energy. Austria is blessed with an abundance of hydropower, courtesy of the Alps and a generation of politicians from more than half a century ago who went gloriously overboard building dams and power stations. Hydropower alone won’t keep everything humming, but it provides a steady baseload that acts like a spine in an otherwise wobbly energy system. The rest can be improvised.
And finally, there’s the question of industrial dependency. Germany, for all its might, is built on an industrial model that’s currently being dismantled brick by brick. Deindustrialisation hits them like a sledgehammer to the chest. Austria, by contrast, isn’t nearly as heavily industrialised. When the industrial machine starts sputtering, we’re simply less exposed.So yes, in the coming storm, I’ll pick the lesser evil. And in this case, the lesser evil looks rather pleasant: alpine valleys, hydro dams, and enough potatoes to survive the end of the world.