Stories have power

And it is up to us, and our leaders, to choose which stories we tell

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After two months of relentless Ottoman attacks, Vienna was on the verge of collapse. Under the command of Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, the Ottomans systematically weakened the city’s defenses. Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Starhemberg, leading the remaining 15,000 troops and 8,700 volunteers, issued an order to shoot any soldier found sleeping on duty. He knew there was no other option: surrender to the Ottomans, and the same fate awaited them as had befallen Perchtoldsdorf, a village south of Vienna, where residents had surrendered days earlier only to be massacred despite promises to the contrary.

It was 1683, more than a century since the first Siege of Vienna in 1529, when the Austrians had successfully repelled the Ottomans. Yet the Turkish threat had never fully disappeared. Known for their swift and devastating raids, the Ottomans often targeted small villages for torture and plunder. The fall of Vienna would have opened the gates to the riches of Europe for them.

Von Starhemberg's endurance was finally rewarded. On September 12th, Polish forces came to their rescue, including the famed ‘Winged Hussars’, Polish cavalrymen with their distinctive feathered armor and unmatched speed, which caused chaos among the Ottoman soldiers. The second Siege of Vienna was not only a tactical victory for the Austrians and their allies, but a turning point in the Ottoman campaign to invade Europe; the Turks would never attempt another invasion of the continent.

However, stories of Ottoman atrocities remain part of Austria’s collective memory. In a village that had suffered greatly under the Turkish invasion, you can still hear retellings of the events from three centuries ago:

The villagers escaped to the tower of the church. However, the last one ‘forgot’ to close the iron door, so that ‘such a carnage arose on the bell tower’, that their blood streamed over the wooden beams onto the lowest ground such that it could not be whitewashed and was visible even several years after.

Monuments across Austria still commemorate the resistance against the Turks, from church buildings left in ruins to official municipal emblems. School curricula cover the Turkish invasions in detail, and the Siege of 1683 is celebrated every century, with the 1983 commemoration receiving particularly widespread attention.

It is this collective memory of Turkish atrocities in Austria, write economists Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel in a recent article published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, that can be ‘activated’ under the right circumstances. Let me explain.

The FPÖ is a far-right political party in Austria. While it had already started making xenophobic statements in the 1980s, its focus shifted towards anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish rhetoric, particularly in 2005. FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache directly linked Turkish and Muslim stereotypes to the historical events of the Turkish invasions. For example, in his first political campaign in 2005, he declared a "Third Turkish Siege of Vienna," a term never before used in political speeches. His message was that if the Turkish minority population in Vienna continued to grow, Turks would soon dominate and turn the tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral into a minaret.

How successful was Strache's anti-Muslim campaign? Ochsner and Roesel had a hypothesis: this anti-Muslim xenophobic and populist rhetoric would be especially popular in villages that had been pillaged and destroyed by the Turks 300 years earlier, where the collective memory of those massacres could be exploited by cunning politicians.

Now, I must admit, this sounds a bit far-fetched. 1683 was a long time ago. At the Cape, the newly established Stellenbosch was little more than a few farms along a river stream. In America, William Penn had founded the city of Philadelphia the year before, as part of his new colony, Pennsylvania. And in China, the Qing Dynasty had just conquered Taiwan. Three centuries is indeed a long time to expect any form of collective memory to persist.

And yet, Ochsner and Roesel find a clear correlation between villages invaded by the Turks and the rise in support for the far-right FPÖ 300 years later. Statistically, they show that after the anti-Turkish campaigns in 2005, the proportion of votes for the far-right populist FPÖ increased by around 10 per cent in municipalities that had been pillaged by Turkish troops three centuries earlier compared to other municipalities. Interestingly, in democratic elections between 1930 and 2005, there was no difference in voter preferences between pillaged and non-pillaged municipalities. It was only after the FPÖ began its xenophobic campaigns that this difference emerged.

The rise in xenophobic rhetoric not only impacted support for the FPÖ but also affected the Turkish community in Austria. Ochsner and Roesel found that members of the Turkish minority were more likely to move away from pillaged municipalities after the populist campaigns than from non-pillaged ones. Stories don’t just affect people’s beliefs – they also influence their actions.

This fascinating research once again highlights the power of stories and how politicians and policymakers can use them to manipulate emotions and rally support for their agendas. While one would hope that policies are shaped by the rational evaluation of facts and data, narratives – the allure of a story – often have the greatest influence on voters’ decisions and, therefore, on a country’s policies.

Incidentally, there are plenty of statistics to back up my claim: I could also cite a new Quarterly Journal of Economics article that uses experiments to test whether people remember stories or statistics. They find that the average impact of statistics on people’s beliefs fades by 73% within a day, while the impact of a story declines by only 32%. But I suspect the average reader has simply glazed over these statistics and forgotten them. The emotion-laden story of the Siege of Vienna is far easier to remember.

So, what history could be ‘activated’ for South Africans today? I’d wager that the Anglo-Boer War and the accompanying concentration camps still elicit a deep emotional response from the descendants of those most affected and that this narrative could easily be recalled by leaders to garner support or further specific ideological agendas. I’d also wager that the forced removals of millions of people during apartheid remain a lasting trauma for those who experienced it and their descendants, which politicians can exploit to mobilize support and stir emotions. A third guess would be that the descendants of those who lived under the yoke of slavery at the Cape nearly two centuries after emancipation still feel the legacy of that oppression, injustice, and humiliation, making them particularly susceptible to narratives that mobilize this discontent.

Fabulas da nobis potestatem would make a fitting motto for a history department (or a digital newspaper). Stories give us power. May we tell stories that unite rather than divide, that bring wisdom rather than bitterness. Because ultimately, the power of a story holds the potential either to build or to destroy – and it is up to us, and our leaders, to choose which stories we tell.

An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 8 September 2024. The images were created using Midjourney v6.