The Cold War in the Coffeehouse: Hans Weigel and His Circle of Writers in the Café Raimund

The Viennese critic and author Hans Weigel is well known for his forays into Cold War politics after 1947, such as the Brecht boycott he helped organize in Viennese theaters in the early 1950s. He is also known as a mentor to aspiring young authors of the early postwar period, such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, and many others. That these two aspects of Weigel’s activity on the Viennese cultural scene after 1945 were essentially inseparable is, however, less well known. This article examines how the political vagaries of the Cold War informed and influenced Weigel’s work with younger authors.