Relationships/Beziehungsgeschichten: Austria and the United States in the Twentieth Century by Günter Bischof (review)

In this collection of essays, historian Günter Bischof offers a multifaceted look at Austrian-American relations in the twentieth century. Bischof argues for a more expansive understanding of foreign relations between Austria and the United States, incorporating not just diplomatic history but also cultural and personal history, political science and reportage, and migration and transnational studies. Perhaps unsurprising given his respective roles as the director of Center Austria and the editor of the Contemporary Austrian Studies book series and his pioneering historical research on the Cold War, Bischof’s volume evinces an impressive breadth of knowledge and engagement with contemporary scholarship. This volume provides a valuable primer on Bischof’s current research, the state of the field of late twentieth-century Austrian-American relations and contemporary Austrian history, and new trends in foreign relations.

In the introduction, Bischof lays out his goal of presenting Austrian-American foreign relations on both the individual and state levels. He argues that “these diverse impressions make up the perceptions and cognitive frameworks nations form of each other” (italics in original). He recognizes that not only politicians but also journalists, businessmen, émigrés, students, and tourists contribute to these Beziehungen. Bischof contends that Austrian-American relations require greater attention on both sides of the Atlantic as part of larger trends in transnational and transatlantic history.

Bischof divides the book into three parts based on chronology—the period before 1945, the Cold War era, and the post–Cold War years. The first section looks at the longue durée of Austrian-American relations before 1945. The opening essay, which serves as a fitting introduction to the entire book, analyzes the evolution of Austrian anti-Americanism and the Americanization of Austrian society since the late nineteenth century. He argues that concerns about Americanization represent one of the key features in contemporary Austrian history. The essay investigates the attitudes of famous Austrians such as Franz Ferdinand and Sigmund Freud as well as business leaders, pows, and soldiers. Ostensibly about the entire twentieth century, the essay focuses on the post-1945 period and the organizations created to foster Austrian-American relations. The second essay looks at the dispatches of American diplomats around the time of the Anschluss, which Bischof calls “the low point of the bilateral relationship” (19). Responding to recent scholarship on Franklin Roosevelt and the Jews, Bischof argues that Austrian-American relations from this era require greater attention. While evocative, the essay needed further development in order to demonstrate the significance of this diplomatic episode to the scholarship on the Anschluss and the Nazi persecution of Jews. The third essay is the volume’s most poignant. Bischof examines the experiences of two Austrian pows in captivity in the United States. One of the subjects is Bischof’s father. The piece combines personal and national history and argues persuasively for new research on Austrian pows and Austrian identity formation.

The second—and strongest—section begins with the book’s best article, examining the consequences of the Marshall Plan for Austria’s development in the 1950s and 1960s. He argues that without the European Recovery Program (erp), Austria’s growth into a prosperous nation would have taken much longer. Bischof offers a comprehensive survey of economic and social conditions in occupied Austria and a detailed reconstruction of the origins of the erp. He shows how Austria represented a crucial site of early Cold War contestation. Lastly, he demonstrates how Austrian memoires of the Marshall Plan have shifted alongside their attitudes toward America. The ensuing article suggests how Austrian diplomats shaped American public opinion through interactions with American opinion leaders. The piece, which centers on the Austrian “victim myth,” would have benefited from more engagement with the scholarship on Austrian memory, to which Bischof has contributed elsewhere. The final article in the section offers a concise discussion of the Austrian State Treaty, based on Gerald Stourzh’s seminal work.

The third section wrestles...