Bischof Relationships/Beziehungsgeschichten. Austria and the United States in the Twentieth Century

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-3-7065-5727-6
Verlag: Studien Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 274 Seiten

Reihe: Transatlantica, Volume 4

After the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Austrian-American relationship was characterized by a dwarf confronting a giant. America continued to be a heaven for a better life for many Austrian emigrants. For the growing American preponderant position in the world after World War I, the small Austrian Republic was insignificant. And yet there were times when Austria mattered geopolitically. During the post-World War II occupation of Austria, the U.S. helped reconstruct Austria economically and was the biggest champion of its independence. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently used Austria as a mediator site of summit meetings. American mass production models, consumerism, and popular culture were adopted by Austrian youth. Americanization and American preponderance also produced anti-Americanism. With the end of the Cold War and Austria's accession to the European Union it once again lost significance for Washington's geopolitics.

Günter Bischof is the Marshall Plan Professor of History and Director of CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bischof, Günter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface by Thomas A. Schwartz

Introduction

I. Longue Durée, Anschluss and World War II
Two Sides of the Coin: The Americanization of Austria and Austrian Anti-Americanism

Austria's Loss-America's Gain: Finis Austriae-The "Anschluss" and the Expulsion/Migration of Jewish Austrians to the U.S.

Lives behind Barbed Wire: Austrian Prisoners of War during and after World War II in American Captivity

II. Cold War
The Marshall Plan and Austria

American Public Opinion about Austria during the Early Years of the Cold War

Cold War Miracle: The Austrian State Treaty at 50

III. Post-Cold War
Of Dwarfs and Giants. From Cold War Mediator to Bad Boy of Europe-Austria and the U.S. in the Transatlantic Arena (1990-2013)

"Experiencing a Nasty Fall from Grace …"? Austria's Image in the U.S. after the Formation of the New ÖVP/FPÖ Government

Empire Discourses: The "American Empire" in Decline?

California Dreaming: Arnold the Quintessential American Immigrant

Leseproben

Thomas A. Schwartz Günter Bischof:
Historian, Analyst and Critic of the U.S.–Austrian Relationship
The essays in this volume chronicle the history of a relationship which is not widely known or understood by most Americans, including many who study international affairs and consider themselves otherwise well-informed in the history of U.S. foreign relations. As these writings make clear, the relationship between the United States and Austria has a multitude of fascinating dimensions, and it offers important lessons in understanding the contours of 20th century international history, the role of the United States in Europe, and the significance of immigration and emigration in American and European history. Yet the Austrian-American relationship resides in the long shadow of the torturous, bloody, and yet more intimate, relationship between the United States and Germany. It is almost as if the U.S.–German relationship has sucked all the oxygen out of the scholarly and popular environment, preventing Americans from fully considering their ties to other European countries in the vicinity of the Teutonic giant. Indeed, about a decade ago the German Historical Institute sponsored a two-volume, more than a thousand page scholarly “Handbuch” dealing with the all aspects of the relationship between the United States and Germany during the Cold War. This project involved more than a hundred authors on both sides of the Atlantic. As one of those contributors, and as a historian who has written on the U.S.–German alliance, I can testify as to how it has tended to dominate the scholarly discourse on America’s relations with the German-speaking world. This may also be another reason that many Austrian historians have tended to ignore and neglect the important role of the United States in their recent history. Against this scholarly tendency on both sides of the Atlantic stands the prolific and profound work of Günter Bischof. I have had the privilege of knowing Günter for more than thirty years, having met him in graduate school. We became friends quickly, sharing both advisers and many academic interests. Over the years I have admired, and at times marveled at, Bischof’s extraordinary productivity and scholarly energy, watching him sponsoring conferences, editing volumes, training students, and stimulating research through his writings. In many respects Bischof seemed to me to fuse aspects of our two Harvard academic advisers. In the fashion of Charles Maier, the famous historian of modern Europe, Bischof’s preferred form of expression was the essay rather than monograph, allowing him to address a multitude of diverse subjects. Like Ernest May, one of the leading historians of American diplomatic history, Bischof was also an extraordinary academic entrepreneur, with a remarkable ability to collaborate with other scholars, organize international academic conferences, and elevate his university’s public profile. I was honored when he asked me to contribute this introduction to his collection of essays relating to the United States–Austrian relationship, some of which were published before in less prominent venues, like the time-honored German Festschrift, and will through this volume become more easily accessible to readers. These essays take us on a remarkable journey through American and Austrian history in the 20th and even early 21st century. They are tied together by an interest in both how the two countries as nation states have dealt with each other, but also how Americans and Austrians have related to, interacted with, and thought about each other. The first section of this volume is particularly striking in its historical sensibility and understanding. In “Two Sides of the Coin,” Bischof explores both the concept of the Americanization of Austria, a process he himself has lived, as well as the existence of anti-Americanism in Austria, something which he experienced in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion of 2003. Although the upsurge of this sentiment after 2003 was noteworthy, Bischof recognizes that anti-Americanism in Austria has a much longer history, reaching back to the beginning of the 20th century. “Finis Austriae” movingly depicts the impact of the Anschluss—the disappearance of Austria as a country—and the harsh persecution of Austrian Jews, seen through the eyes of the American Ministers to Austria during this period. Bischof makes a powerful case for the degree to which Austria suffered an extraordinary human loss from its descent into Nazism, highlighting those Austrian Jews like the scholar Paul Lazarsfeld, who were forced to flee the vicious anti-Semitism unleashed after the Anschluss. That men like Lazarsfeld, representing the immigrant experience, would have such a profound impact on American life is an underlying theme of other essays as well, one which concerned our doctoral adviser, Ernest May, and the influence of an Austrian intellectual upon his work. This human dimension to the relationship between the two countries comes through as well in the third essay which discusses the experience of an Austrian POW in the United States. That this particular prisoner of war was Bischof’s father is an especially poignant aspect detail, but his narrative of the experience offers, in its revealing “microhistory,” a sense of the complex emotions with which Austrians of that wartime generation came to perceive the United States. The second part of this volume brings together some of Bischof’s essays on Austria during the Cold War, a topic about which he has written extensively and definitively. In his book Austria in the First Cold War, Bischof’s reminded American diplomatic historians of the importance of understanding conditions and cultures “on the ground,” in the specific country being acted upon by American policy. He also used the phrase “the leverage of the weak” to show the significant impact smaller countries like Austria can have on international affairs. If there is any lesson that Americans need to learn and re-learn in their understanding foreign policy, it is that even the most enlightened and well-intentioned policy is subject to change and mutation when it comes into contact with the people and nation that it seeks to influence. Bischof makes this point crystal clear in his extraordinary multiarchival research and assessment of U.S. and Austrian relations during the Cold War, and his essay on the impact of the Marshall Plan is a classic in this regard. His exploration of American public opinion toward Austria in the early Cold War further enriches our understanding of this complex era. Austria’s “neutrality” during the Cold War affords historians an unusual but unfortunately largely neglected perspective from which to study the conflict. Bischof’s treatment of the Austrian State treaty, one of the first real signs that détente was possible between the United States and the Soviet Union, is particularly significant for this reason. In the last part of this volume Bischof’s role as the preeminent public intellectual and commentator on the U.S.–Austrian relationship comes to the forefront. In his essays dealing with the U.S. relationship with Austria since the end of the Cold War and the problems which Austria’s public image faced from such personalities as Jörg Haider and Kurt Waldheim, Bischof uses his historian’s sensibility to provide perspective on more recent events. These reflections on Austria’s image in the United States also remind me of another aspect of his scholarly career that is only alluded to in this volume. Bischof has been forthright and outspoken in his insistence, through his writings and lectures, on the necessity for Austrians of confronting the Nazi past. At the 2003 German Studies Association conference in New Orleans, he gave an impassioned lecture on the subject, one of the most balanced and yet hard-hitting assessments of Austria’s involvement in the Nazi era and the need to come to terms with it. This is not a popular subject in Austria, but it has had an impact on the U.S.–Austrian relationship which, Bischof’s work makes clear, should not be overlooked. The final two essays turn the tables a bit, with Bischof focused more on the American side of the relationship. In “American empire discourses” he examines the historical discussion concerning American empire and sharply criticizes the turn in American foreign policy which came after the September 11th attacks. Finally, in the last essay in the volume, he turns his attention to the “Quiet Invader,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, probably the most famous Austrian immigrant of recent times. His treatment of Schwarzenegger’s rather creative “autobiography,” allows Bischof to muse about some aspects of contemporary American celebrity culture as well as the continuing appeal of the “American dream” in myth and reality. Although Schwarzenegger’s political star faded rapidly, it is worth recalling that some Republican lawmakers wanted to change the Constitution to allow the famous bodybuilder to run for President. Bischof’s essay demonstrates that the United States may have once again dodged a bullet. At the beginning of this essay I referred to the project which I was involved with that dealt with the United States and Germany during the Cold War, and which required hundreds of scholars to participate in order to detail the myriad interactions between those two...

Über Autor(innen)

Günter Bischof is the Marshall Plan Professor of History and Director of CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans.