From the Editors

Austria’s geographical and cultural position between the European East and West has been an essential component of its identity from earliest times. After World War II, however, its standing in the international community was increasingly defined by the Cold War divide between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers (England, France, and the United States), which was formalized in the Staatsvertrag of 1955 with its commitment to “immerwährende Neutralität.” From the very onset of the Cold War, Austria’s efforts to navigate the ever-widening political divide in Europe and the world after 1947 also shaped its cultural landscape in myriad and often unforeseen ways. Therefore the period between 1947 and the early 1970s in Austria was particularly rich in political and cultural ambiguities, competing myths of national identity, and diverse cultural discourses whose interaction with one another have been only sparingly dissected within Austrian cultural historiography. So the intersections of Austria’s literary culture with the social and political vagaries of the Cold War have been largely overlooked—with the exception of the role of the Austrian writers and Cold Warriors Friedrich Torberg and Hans Weigel, which often led to a kind of demonization of these two—admittedly important—public figures in postwar Austria. And often these intersections have been subsumed under investigations of Austria’s National-Socialist past and its relationship to Germany between 1938 and 1945. Recent research has started to reexamine this field with first, promising results.

This special issue of the Journal of Austrian Studies represents an attempt to examine even more of these intersections of impulses from the cultural, political, and social arenas of that time from a variety of perspectives not commonly in the fore of Austrian literary studies. Underlying the individual contributions to this issue is a mélange of different approaches and methodologies representing some of the new perspectives on Cold War culture in Austria and its impact in shaping the nation’s cultural profile since World War II. Günther Stocker’s article, for example, reexamines the prevailing emphasis on the polarization of the Cold War years with his study of the “gemeinsamen Tisch” in the literature of this period at which disparate political views could coexist and intersect with interesting results. Helga Schreckenberger’s contribution to this volume, on Reinhard Federmann’s novel Das Himmelreich der Lügner (1959), aptly demonstrates how the political identity of postwar Austria cannot be explained only as a consequence of World War II and even the Cold War itself but also has its roots in officially suppressed national history, especially the short civil war from February 1934 and the dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg from 1933 to 1938.

The connections between the material context of the early Cold War and the political fragmentation of the Austrian literary scene are the focus of the article by Christoph Kepplinger and Elizabeth Prinz, who examine how the distribution of paper supplies during the Occupation contributed to the rise of political polemics. Joseph McVeigh looks at the efforts of one of the Cold War’s leading polemicists, Hans Weigel, to mobilize his young protégés in the Café Raimund with an eye to the ambivalence and inconsistencies in Weigel’s image as Austria’s Cold Warrior par excellence. Heide Kunzelmann looks in turn at certain intersections between political and cultural instability in Cold War Austria and the resulting subversion of prevailing patriotic narratives of Austrian identity politics in those years by avant-garde writers, while Berthold Molden examines the question of whether Austria’s truncated history of self-determination in the first half of the twentieth century, together with its proclamation of permanent neutrality, helped to create a unique identity for the nation that straddled the First and Third Worlds during the decolonization period of the Cold War era.

The potential for new perspectives in and approaches to Austrian Cold War culture are by no means exhausted in this special issue; rather, they offer a brief look at some possible directions for the field. In this, our special issue represents an appeal to scholars of Austrian literature and literary culture for a broader...