Wiederaufbau in Österreich 1945–1955: Rekonstruktion oder Neubeginn? (review)

The query in the subtitle of this book, "reconstruction or fresh start," is a key question about Austria's first post–World War II decade, when the country was under four-power occupation. Austria was invaded and incorporated into the Third Reich after the Anschluss of March 1938. Did it rise like a phoenix out of the ashes of World War II, or did it continue its troubled prewar politics? Ernst Bruckmüller fails to set the context by summarizing the rich historical debate about the postwar "zero hour." A better starting point is Gerald Stourzh's subtle essay on "Stunde Null" in 1945 und 1955: Schlüsseljahre der Zweiten Republik (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005). Stourzh, from a personal perspective, makes a strong argument for Austrian Neubeginn after the horrors of World War II. Some authors in Bruckmüller's collection make the case just as strongly for the resumption of hidebound prewar patterns, particularly in the cultural arena. Apart from the Graz-based scholars Siegfried Beer and Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, all the contributors to the book work in Viennese institutions and mistake their Vienna-centered perspective for "Austrian" history.

Bruckmüller himself contributes the first essay. He discusses the reemergence of Austrian statehood after Karl Renner established a provisional government on 27 April 1945, but he does not touch on crucial issues of constitutional and partisan political continuity with the prewar period. Apart from his summary (based on the reading of one book) of the very difficult Austrian economic situation in 1945, his essay is anemic. Dieter Stiefel rightly attributes a crucial role to the Marshall Plan in the reconstruction of the Austrian economy. He stresses the "intelligent" (p. 91) approach of the European Recovery Program and notes that Austrian trade was cut off from its prewar partners in Eastern Europe as a result of the Cold War, but he fails to explain how the Marshall Plan made Austria economically viable compared to the prewar perception that it was not "lebensfähig."

The most solid essays come from the young Wolfgang Mueller and Beer. Both are familiar with the Soviet and British occupation records. Mueller tries to answer one of the most enduring questions in the scholarship on the early Cold War in Austria—did the Soviet Union plan to establish a "people's republic"? Although Soviet wartime planning was geared toward neutralizing rather than Communizing postwar Austria, the success of the Red Army's early arrival in Austria prompted Soviet leaders to change their tune. Renner's provisional government was set up along the lines of the Romanian and Hungarian model. With the Red Army firmly emplaced in Austria, the Soviet Union shifted toward favoring a "national front" government in Vienna, from which the Communists over the long term would push out the bourgeois parties. Moscow, as Mueller demonstrates, did not change these long-term plans even after the Austrian Communist Party suffered a devastating loss at the polls in November 1945. Beer, in discussing the British role, shows that Britain was the country best prepared in 1945 for the occupation of Austria. A thorough planning effort allowed the British to administer their zone firmly and subtly. By the late 1940s they reduced their presence to a "symbolic" level (pp. 76 ff). These two analyses deserve a wide readership among Cold War scholars (and Pentagon planners) on postwar occupations.

The chapters on culture are a pleasant surprise. Gabriele Kaiser analyzes the discourses on the rebuilding of bombed-out Vienna. With some 86,000 destroyed or uninhabitable flats, Viennese planners faced a monumental job. The city, with its grand prewar tradition of social engineering and public housing, embarked on an enormous planning effort in 1945 for the reconstruction of individual neighborhoods. Vienna had been a hotbed of modernism before the war. Most of the modernist architects fled the country during the Nazi period and did not return after the war. Architecturally, modernism did not revive in Austria before the 1960s. Austrian...