Günter Bischof

Fritz Plasser

Eva Maltschnig

We also suggest that the intellectual biographies of thinkers and professionals are fertile soil for biographical study. Moreover, the prosopographical study of common folks in the Austrian population lifts these lives from the dark matter of anonymous masses and gives rich insight into the lives that ordinary Austrians have been leading. We present an array of political lives, including that of Ignaz Seipel and Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, as well as "Lives of the Mind" which capture the lives of fascinating intellectual figures in pre- and post-World War II Vienna such as Viktor Frankl and Eugenie Schwarzwald. The approaches to writing biography taken in this volume also suggest that much work needs to be done to shed light on the lives of ordinary Austrians. In this volume we have biographical accounts detailing the lives of soldiers, prisoners of war, and farming families.

Austrian Lives

Robert L. Dupont

Ulrich Leitner

Christina Antenhofer

Im Zentrum dieses Buches stehen Geschichte, Materialität, Mikrolandschaften und Atmosphären der Partnerstädte Innsbruck und New Orleans. Dabei stützen sich die Autorinnen und Autoren auf das Konzept der "multiplen Landschaften".

Investigating the Sister Cities Innsbruck and New Orleans

Cities as Multiple Landscapes

Christian Karner

Marc Landry

Austria's post-WWII 'victim-myth' both shaped the country post-war history and, since its deconstruction in the aftermath of the Waldheim affair, is now a central trope in the scholarly literature. This volume aims at extending the discussion of different myths throughout Austria's 20th century-history and some of their continuing impact on the present. We consider 'myths' to be socially, culturally and politically consequential - though always also contestable - narratives of particular pasts and their purported meanings. Such narratives are, at best, selective in what is being remembered. At worst, they contain outright distortions that are arguably particularly topical at our present historical juncture with its concerns about the 'post-factual'. Distinctly inter-disciplinary and focused on different realms of 'myth-making', this volume casts its analytical net unusually wide. The various myths critically examined here thus include: artistic representations of 'Austrian'/'German landscapes' both before and after the Anschluss; Austrian narratives surrounding World War II, the Holocaust and the much-discussed Stunde Null; re-construction and the Marshall Plan; neutrality; the trope of post-war Austria as an Insel der Seligen; collective self-portrayals as an Umweltvorzeigeland; Viennese narratives about the city's Jewish history; Mitteleuropa-Nostalgie and its (transnational) manifestations in policy-making. Importantly, this volume offers different critical responses to such myths, searching assessments about their political impact or usefulness, and thought-provoking discussions of the role and responsibilities of scholarship vis-a-vis such highly selective or positively distorting narratives.

Construction and Deconstruction

Myths in Austrian History (Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 29)

Saki Dockrill

At the midpoint of the “high” cold war, when most people in North America and Europe thought catastrophic nuclear onslaught was almost inevitable, an unprecedented and unrepeated event took place in Geneva in July 1955. The heads of state from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France came together in an attempt at diplomatic dialogue, primarily over the questions of German unification, European security, and nuclear disarmament. Although the summit ended with no tangible results, its ramifications were extensive, and it provided the world with a brief repose from escalating East-West tension. In Cold War Respite twelve scholars writing from several national perspectives investigate in riveting detail how that event—examined only in passing until now—came about, why its “spirit” was so short-lived, and what its subsequent impact was on the development of the cold war. Making use of newly -declassified archives in the United States, France, Britain, and Russia, the authors provide some of the latest research and insights into early cold-war history as they track the crucial period from Stalin’s death in 1953 until the summit. They consider John Foster Dulles’s policy at Geneva and the meeting of the four foreign ministers that followed the summit. As the essayists attest, the psychological effects of the summit were of immense significance to the history of international relations and reveal the complexity and dynamism of foreign affairs during the decades following World War II. While some argue that the series of international crises beginning in 1958 and culminating in 1962 might have been averted if the Geneva conference had been pursued more eagerly, others argue that it is a credit to the summit that those events are studied today as examples of crisis management and not of nuclear war.

The Geneva Summit of 1955

Cold War Respite

Barbara Stelzl-Marx

Stefan Karner

At the beginning of June 1961, the tensions of the Cold War were supposed to abate as both sides sought a resolution. The two most important men in the world, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, met for a summit in Vienna. Yet the high hopes were disappointed. Within months the Cold War had become very hot: Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall and a year later he sent missiles to Cuba to threaten the United States directly. Despite the fact that the Vienna Summit yielded barely any tangible results, it did lead to some very important developments. The superpowers came to see for the first time that there was only one way to escape from the atomic hell of their respective arsenals: dialogue. The "peace through fear" and the "hotline" between Washington and Moscow prevented an atomic confrontation. Austria successfully demonstrated its new role as neutral state and host when Vienna became a meeting place in the Cold War. In The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History international experts use new Russian and Western sources to analyze what really happened during this critical time and why the parties had a close shave with catastrophe.

The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History

Writing biographies (life stories) for a long time had been a male hegemonic project-writing the lives of great (white) men. Ever since Plutarch and Sueton composed their vitae of the greats of classical antiquity, to the medieval obsession with the hagiographies of holy men (and a few women) and saints, Vasari's lives of great Renaissance artists, down to the French encyclopedists, Dr. Johnson and Lytton Strachey, as well as Ranke and Droysen the genre of biographical writing (“the representation of self ” or “the reconstruction of a human life”) has become increasingly more refined. In the twentieth century male predominance has become contested and the (collective) lives of women, minorities and ordinary people are now the focus of biographical writing. This volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies offers a cross section of Austrian lives and biographical approaches to recent Austrian history. Here are what may be called traditional biographies of leading political figures through the twentieth century. We also suggest that the intellectual biographies (lives of the mind) of thinkers and professionals are fertile soil for biographical study. Moreover, the prosopographic study of common folks in the Austrian population lifts these lives from the dark matter of anonymous masses and gives rich insights into the lives ordinary Austrians have been leading.

Alexandra Kofler

Im Dezember 2005 wurde der Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich per Bundesgesetz mit einem Etat von 20 Millionen Euro errichtet. In den zehn Jahren seines Bestehens förderte der ÖZF rund 1.370 Projekte, die sich vor allem auch der Erforschung totalitärer Systeme im 20. Jahrhundert widmen. Mit dem expliziten Ziel des „Niemals wieder!“ avancierte der Zukunftsfonds zu einer nationalen Institution, deren zentrale Aufgabe in der Förderung einer nachhaltigen und zukunftsorientierten Erinnerungskultur sowie des demokratiepolitischen und menschenrechtlichen Engagements liegt. Das Buch präsentiert die wichtigsten Etappen der Entstehung und Tätigkeit des Zukunftsfonds. Neben einer Dokumentation seiner Wirkungsweisen analysiert es die Bedeutung des ÖZF für Forschung und Gesellschaft. Auf der Grundlage von Interviews kommen Persönlichkeiten zu Wort, die an der Entwicklung des Zukunftsfonds maßgeblich beteiligt waren. Exemplarisch dargestellte Projekte und deren vollständige Liste geben einen Einblick in die Vielfalt seiner Fördertätigkeit.

Entstehung, Entwicklung und Bedeutung

Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich

Dirk Rupnow

Migration in Austria

Gunter Bischof

Peter Ruggenthaler

The essays of a dozen leading European and American Cold War historians analyze the 'Prague Spring' and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in light of new documentary evidence from the archives of two dozen countries and explain what happened behind the scenes. They also reassess the weak response of the United States and consider whether Washington might have given a 'green light,' if only inadvertently, to the Soviet Union prior to the invasion.

The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Wolfgang Schüssel was a dominating actor in the Austrian political arena over a period of twenty years. He served as minister of economics (1989-1995), and vice chancellor and foreign minister (1995-2000) in ÖVP/SPÖ grand coalition governments. As chairman of the ÖVP (1995-2007), he brought his conservative party out of the political wilderness of opposition and playing junior partner in coalitions with the SPÖ. He dominated Austrian politics as chancellor (2000-2007) in a small coalition with Jörg Haider's controversial aggressively nationalist FPÖ. Schüssel tried to domesticate the Freedomites by holding them on a tight leash in his coalition government. He needed the FPÖ to accomplish his neoliberal economic and social reform agenda, while at the same time the FPÖ undermined Schüssel's EU policies. The essays in this volume argue that Schüssel's political record and legacy are ambiguous. With a confrontational style of governance he unleashed big reforms such as trimming the hidebound pension system and giving more autonomy to higher education. In the process he undermined Austria's consensual social partnership. His record of supporting the European Union agenda is ambivalent. Austrian public opinion in support of the EU declined precipitously. He was a superb tactician and negotiator yet failed to achieve broad popular acceptance for his ambitious reforms. His imprint on Austrian history is so significant that many of the authors of the essays in this volume call it “the Schüssel era.”

The Schüssel Era in Austria

Cities are composed of a combination of urban and rural spaces, buildings and boundaries, and human bodies engaged in political, social, and cultural discourses. Together, these combine to create what the contributors to this volume call multiple landscapes. Developing a new theoretical conceptualization of cities, this book unites American and European approaches to comparative urban studies by investigating the concept of multiple landscapes in two sister cities: New Orleans and Innsbruck. As the essays reveal, both New Orleans and Innsbruck have long been centers of multicultural exchange, have strong senses of historical heritage, and profit from the spectacular geographies in which they are situated. Geography, in particular, links both cities to environmental, technological, and security challenges that must be considered in connection with aesthetic, cultural, and ecological debates. Exploring the many connections between New Orleans and Innsbruck, the interdisciplinary essays in this book will change the way we think about cities both local and abroad.

Günter Bischof

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