The beautiful flower with an ugly past

It looks simple - a pretty blue cornflower - but this plant is causing controversy in Austria. It's the chosen flower of the far-right Freedom Party, even though it was once associated with the Nazis.

Dieter Dorner takes a long sip of his Gemischtes, a mix of dark beer and lager, and smiles.

We are sitting in an inn in Untersiebenbrunn, a little town east of Vienna, where he is a councillor for the far-right Freedom Party. Over a meal of sausage, chips and locally grown white asparagus, he tells me about a planned dance.

In true Austrian fashion, it's to be a ball - the local Freedom party's first Cornflower Ball, Der Kornblumenball.

"We've never had a Freedom Party Ball in Untersiebenbrunn before," he explains. "So we said to ourselves, let's do something, let's have a ball. The band will play dance music. My favourite is the slow waltz."

The ball was arranged last September, but the timing is felicitous, because these days the Freedom Party in Untersiebenbrunn has a lot to celebrate. In the first round of voting in Austria's presidential election in April, 53% of people here voted for the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer.

Dotted through the town's leafy streets are the blue Freedom Party campaign placards and posters for the Kornblumenball, featuring a silhouette of a dancing couple in evening dress.

"Hasn't there been some controversy about the blue cornflower?" I ask. "Something to do with the Nazis?" Dieter shakes his head. "The cornflower is simply the Freedom Party flower and we like it," he says.

"To discuss what happened 80 years ago, or what didn't happen or perhaps happened doesn't bring us forward. There is certainly nothing deliberately nasty about it."

But other Austrians are not so sure.

"The cornflower is a complicated symbol," Vienna historian, Bernhard Weidinger, tells me. "It was the German Kaiser Wilhelm's favourite flower, and was used by pan-German nationalists in the 19th Century.

"Then between 1934 and 1938, when the Nazis were a banned party in Austria, it was the secret symbol they used to wear in order to recognise each other."

Nowadays, it's traditional for Austrian MPs to wear a flower in their buttonholes at the opening of parliament, he explains. The colour of the Freedom Party is blue, so they wear a cornflower.

"You are not a neo-Nazi if you wear a cornflower," he continues. "But it is fair to say that the Freedom Party cultivates a certain ambivalence when it comes to the past."

Their presidential hopeful, Norbert Hofer, continues to face sharp criticism about his occasional choice of floral decoration. In response to a question last week, he declared that he wanted nothing to do with the Nazis, and wouldn't let them take away things like the cornflower.