Travel diary entry of my mother, Herta Tautz, on 20 September 1977 in Krakov, Poland. On their 25^th wedding anniversary my parents, Herta and Werner Tautz, the creators of travel slide shows to the East Bloc countries, clinked glasses with Russian champagne at the Holiday Inn hotel

“Austria island of the blessed”?

The writer Jörg Mauthe ironically called Austria the “island of the blessed”, because many Austrians considered the country as a kind of “special case” since the early Cold War, which could be kept out of any political and military crisis or conflict and some still believe this today. Unfortunately, this concept has always been imaginary and never realistic and it is just as illusionary today. Since 1945 Austria has always been an “object” in the international arena rather than a “subject”, an actor. Local knowledge about the early incidents of infringement of Austrian territory by foreign conflicts is rare. There were Ukrainian partisans crossing Austria in the spring of 1945, terrorist attacks in the late 1940s, military emergency plans of the Western Allies in case of a Soviet aggression during the early Cold War years and intensified secret service and spy activities of all four Allied occupation armies, the Soviets, the Americans, the British and the French. Furthermore, the Soviets secretly supported the October strikes in Austria in 1950, they militarily suppressed the Hungarian anti-Communist revolution in 1956, when a wave of refugees swept across Austria and there was the Lebanon crisis in 1958 with Western military jets violating the Austrian airspace – to name just a few incidents. In all these and the following foreign conflicts, which affected Austria, the country never played an active part on the international stage that could influence its destiny; except during the 13-year chancellorship of Bruno Kreisky from 1970 until 1983. The State Treaty of 1955 marked the resurgence of Austria as an independent state and the withdrawal of all occupying armies on the condition of Austria’s neutrality. The first test of this neutrality was the crisis in Hungary on the eastern Austrian border in 1956 and the threat of a Soviet invasion, imagined or real. Austria had to be aware that in this East – West confrontation it was well-advised to establish a fair balance between and a safe distance from the Soviets as well as the Americans. While Austria started out with a pronounced pro-American policy, yet in the face of multiple international crises Austria approached the Soviet Union as well and tried to style itself as a hub in the Cold War and a crossroads between East and West. Bruno Kreisky, first as foreign minister and then as chancellor, developed a form of “active neutrality”, different from the Swiss one, and put it into practice as a “policy of the possible”. With the end of the Cold War in 1989 Austria had to re-define its neutral position in Europe, which led to Austria joining the European Union in 1995. The concept of the “island of the blessed”, which had always been just fiction, was consequently obsolete.

Until the coming down of the Iron Curtain, Austria bordered Communist dictatorships along more than 1,000 km. The frontier to Hungary and Czechoslovakia was hermetically sealed off with electric fences, trenches, and guard posts, a true “Iron Curtain”, as the British prime minister Winston Churchill had called it in a speech in 1946 already before the start of the Cold War. Due to the many Cold War crises, such as the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, the Cuban crisis in 1962, the uprising in Prague 1968, the Polish upheavals in 1980/81, Austria had to re-define its neutrality progressively. In 1955 the British predicted that Austria would act “neutralistically” – this negative term was used because Moscow had insisted on Austria’s neutrality, although the Western Allies had been against it – and that Austria would be a “double agent between East and West”.

 

Werner’s contemporary photo impressions of everyday life in Vienna during the early Cold War

The start of the Cold War

After the end of World War II, the process of a formation of two fiercely competitive blocks – East and West – started the Cold War in 1947 in Austria. This was the beginning of the establishment of a bi-polar world and a new international order after the break-down of a European system of states which had been created by the National-Socialist expansion of the “Third Reich”. This culminated in a military power struggle and an ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two contrasting poles developed their own unique social, political, and economic orders, which they tried to impose on the rest of the world in a competitive manner. The atmosphere between the two power centres was characterised by a constant fear that the opposing side could infringe on the influence sphere they claimed for themselves and by that threaten their security interests. This led to the political division of Germany and Europe and a mentality of permanent siege and fierce competition for spheres of interest and military presence world-wide. In this so-called “Cold War” there was no clearly defined aggressor and no clearly defined defender. The ideological confrontation was characterised by a constantly changing situation that was dictated by the actions and reactions of the other side. Objectively it cannot be stated without doubt who started the Cold War. While immediately after the end of the war, the USA acted in a rather circumspect way towards its former ally, the Soviet Union, Stalin already exercised an aggressive expansionary policy in Eastern Europe. After a phase of permanent mutual mistrust, the United States reacted much more aggressively to the new post-war Soviet “security policy” at the beginning of 1946. Both world powers progressively stepped up their willingness to go into a geopolitical confrontation between 1945 and 1947. Despite its own military and economic capacities, the USA progressively perceived the Soviet Union as a threat to Europe and the rest of the world.

Towards the end of World War II, the British Foreign Office had expressed ideas for a post-war resurrection of the state of Austria as independent from Germany and the British found that this independence could best be guaranteed by an “ultimate association of Austria with some form of Central or South-East European Confederation”. Yet the Soviets were strictly against any confederation of Austria with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which would in their eyes create a Catholic conservative alliance that could threaten the Soviet Union. When Winston Churchill launched his idea of an independent Central European block of states, Stalin rejected this concept categorically, because he feared a resurrection of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a “Danube Confederation” of Austria, Bavaria and other neighbouring Catholic states under Otto Habsburg, the successor to the throne of the abolished Habsburg Empire, which could as a result form a block with other Catholic European states, such as Spain, Italy, France, and Poland.

The Soviets wanted to exploit the Austrian economic capacities as a compensation for the massive war damage, which had been caused by the German “Wehrmacht” in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Austrians had served in the German “Wehrmacht”. At the conference of the ministers for foreign affairs in Moscow in April 1947, US General Mark W. Clark blocked an agreement for a State Treaty for Austria, because he feared that the huge Soviet reparations demand would politically destabilise Austria. Earlier in spring 1945 the US had shown very little interest in the future political development in Austria and had concentrated on their projects for post-war Germany, but when in October 1945 the Soviets tried to take over the two biggest financial institutions in Austria, the “Creditanstalt-Bankverein” and the “Länderbank”, the US started to be alarmed. The US had already promoted an “Austrification” of the media and had launched the radio broadcasting station “Rot-Weiß-Rot” (RWR) and the newspaper “Wiener Kurier”, both with a rather pronounced anti-Communist tendency. When the first post-war elections in Austria in November 1945 resulted in a devastating defeat of the KPÖ (Austrian Communist Party) with only 5.41 per cent, the Soviet political officers were not amazed because they had never believed in the predicted 20 per cent for the KPÖ, as the Communist party had not achieved more than 10 per cent in the works council elections despite excessive Soviet election campaigning. From now on the Soviet policy in Austria became much more rigid. The Soviets demanded from the newly elected Austrian government a strict persecution of Nazis and the dismissal of all NSDAP members and former Austro-Fascists from official positions. Before the start of the Cold War in Austria the Soviets were prepared to forego the seizure of “German property”, if it had been Jewish business property that had been robbed by the Nazis and if it was economically not too important for Soviet Union. They either tried to return it to the original owners or put it under provisional administration. After the election in November 1945 the Soviets confirmed the importance of the continued stationing of Soviet troops in Austria and blamed the Western Allies for the failure to come to an agreement on the Austrian State Treaty. They hoped that the KPÖ would profit from the negotiations concerning Austrian sovereignty and independence, but to the contrary. The Austrians put the sole blame on the Soviets for the continuing presence of Allied occupational troops in Austria in the end. Access to Russian archives after the coming down of the Iron Curtain in 1989 proved the strong dependence of the KPÖ on the Soviets, but these researches also showed that the Soviets recognised the special geographical position of Austria as a “country between the two blocks”, Surprisingly, the data showed that they did neither favour a Communist coup d’état in Austria nor a separation of the country into an eastern and a western part like Germany.

Political propaganda in Vienna during the Cold War

With the onset of the Cold War the strong economic, scientific, and technological competition between the two super powers was further emphasised by a propaganda war via modern information technology in Austria, most of all in Vienna. While in 1946 the media sector was still characterised by mutual tolerance, especially because the US chief editor of the “Wiener Kurier”, Hendric J. Burns, was in personal contact with some Soviet journalists of the TASS, the Soviet news agency, such as Alexander Nowogruskij, the following open propaganda war prohibited any friendly relationships between media representatives of the two blocks. Surprisingly, the start of the Soviet-American confrontation in Austria was not triggered by Soviet economic policies in their occupational zone, but by a minor incident, namely an article in the Austrian newspaper “Österreichische Zeitung” on 12 May 1946, an official medium of the Soviet occupation army. There the Soviets reacted to a German article in the US army medium “Stars and Stripes”, where a headline and an article in early May 1946 reported Russian fighter planes “buzzing around” the plane of US General Clark. The circumstances of the incident could never be clarified, but the “Wiener Kurier” published the protest of Clark and an excuse of Ivan S. Konjev, the Soviet High Commissioner in Austria. That’s when the “war of words” started to get gradually more aggressive. Via this open media confrontation between the Soviet and the US occupational armies the war coalition, which had been forged to put down the Nazi regime, was virtually dissolved under the very eyes of the Austrian public and both super powers started to mercilessly pursue their respective interest-driven politics.

The reason why the anti-Communist propaganda was much more effective in Austria than its Soviet counterpart was the efficiency of the American propaganda, which carefully selected and measured the topics they launched to the Austrian public. Whereas the Soviet and Communist media bombarded the Austrian public with permanent anti-American propaganda, which in the end destroyed its efficacy, even if some of the accusations were valid, such as the race discrimination in the US army. On the other hand, the Americans continually varied their tactics and switched to different topics. They deliberately abstained from direct attacks on the Soviet occupational army in order not to endanger the Marshall Plan aid in Austria. As soon as the threat of a Soviet intervention lessened, the US stepped up its short-term propaganda against the USSR.

Nevertheless, in the end Austria managed to profit from this Cold War rivalry. When in 1953 Stalin died and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a four-star general and former NATO commander-in-chief, took over, Austria presented itself as the ideal “barter object”. At that time the Western Allies had already removed the largest part of their troops from Austria and the only remaining significant military presence was that of the Soviet Union. Immediately after taking office Eisenhower signalled to the Soviets that he was prepared to ease the tensions. The Americans were aware of the domestic politics in this small state. After the last elections the Austrian Communist Party only held four seats despite – or because of – the Soviet occupation; it was a stable pro-Western anti-Communist country with a Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and trade unions, which were strictly anti-Communist. Austria had formed a coalition government, led by the Conservatives, the ÖVP, under chancellor Julius Raab, who was not very pro-American, but very anti-Communist, and the SPÖ. Joining the NATO was never an option in Austria that was seriously discussed. Since 1949 the “B-Gendarmerie”, a pro-Western military core group, which had been set up and financed by the USA, was intended to act as a national army, as soon as all Allied forces had withdrawn their troops from Austria. That’s why Eisenhower favoured a neutral status of Austria along the lines of Swiss neutrality with a small Austrian pro-American army of up to 65,000 men, which could compensate the military vacuum of the already removed Western forces. Despite these favourable circumstances it took until May 1955 that an agreement on the Austrian State Treaty could be achieved. This was due to the power struggle that took place in the Kremlin after the death of Stalin and lasted until Khruschev won this battle. Khruschev was in favour of easing the tensions between the two super powers, as he was trying to focus on boosting the Soviet economy. The Austrian chancellor Julius Raab had travelled to Moscow several times to improve the relationship with the Soviets, much to the displeasure of the Americans. The USA could rely on the unwavering support of the pro-Western vice chancellor, the Social Democrat Adolf Schärf, and the state secretary, the Social Democrat Bruno Kreisky. The neutrality of Austria was not considered the best option by the Americans and the Austrian Social Democrats, because the term was polluted by the propaganda of Communist parties all over Europe, which demanded “neutral zones” to combat the “Western atomic predominance” of the NATO. Schärf and Kreisky were in favour of “freedom of alliance” rather than “neutrality”, but they had to give in to Raab and the Soviets. The Austrian Social Democrats, the SPÖ, were stoutly pro-American and anti-Soviet, contrary to the Austrian Conservatives, the ÖVP, which were pronouncedly anti-American and anti-Communist, too, but prepared and willing to make compromises with the Soviets. The anti-Americanism of the ÖVP was a legacy of their Austro-Fascist times. Finally, the Austrian neutrality was a multi-layered compromise rather than a clearly defined solution, but it corresponded with the wide-spread wish of the population to no longer be an object in military confrontations of two super powers.

 

Everyday life in Vienna at the time as photographed by Werner

Soviet and American lifestyles in Vienna

One of the most important successes of the United States in the Cold War confrontation was the pervasion of American mass culture after World War II. The rise of the USA to a super power was accompanied by the diffusion of the “American Way of life”, which was characterised by modernity and a consumer-oriented life style, combined with individual freedom, technical progress and prosperity. The American soldiers lived that kind of life in Austria and consequently were a model for the local population. Furthermore, the Marshall Plan aid contributed to the appeal of the US way of life. Viennese children drew American soldiers as “Father Christmas” at school, they loved Coca-Cola and learned English as a foreign language. Only after Stalin’s death, his successor in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev, perceived that the Cold War was not won on the battle field and not via massive crude industrialisation, but in the super markets, fashion shops, window displays, on the radio and in films. In the USSR a modern urban mass culture was developing now, too. The Soviet successes in space travel were driven by a new Communist self-confidence as a super power and by a touch of glamour. Juri Gagarin, the first man in space in 1961- even before a successful first American space mission – and Valentina Tereskova, the first female cosmonaut, became Communist icons. Tereskova figured as a fashion model among young Russians. So, the “Cold War of Consumerism” started with a cultural polarisation; the “Coca-Colarisation” in the West and the “Sovietisation” in the East. The importance of consumption in the Cold War was linked to the tensions between American and Soviet realities and utopias and the competition between the two ideological systems and their spheres of influence.

The change in consumption led to a differentiation between basic consumption and additional consumption, the first of which was indispensable for running a household, while the second was not strictly necessary. Social distinction was no longer only characterised by the type of goods one possessed, such as a house or a car, but by forms of cultural capital and popular brands for example. Consumerism took on various forms of social, political, and cultural elements and by that was transformed to “symbolic consumption”. In North America characteristics of the modern consumer society were already visible at the end of the 19^th century, but in Western Europe the first signs appeared in the 1920s only. The reason for the headstart of the USA was the higher potential for innovation of a young immigration society. The further development towards a mass consumer society took place in the US in the 1920s and in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Central elements were household technology, the growth of suburbs and the triumph of the automobile.

As a counter-model the Soviet Union propagated a guaranteed basic consumption for everyone on the principle of a just distribution of goods. The 1920s were characterised by the image of the ascetic Communist revolutionary, who renounced all individual comfort during the fight for the “world revolution” in all corners of the world. Yet, in the same way as there had always existed markets in the Soviet Union, there had always existed symbolic consumerism. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) offered the appropriate opportunities, while in the mid-1930s Stalin used the attractions of a consumer society as an incentive to increase productivity. When the Communists had taken over in 1917, Russia was hardly industrialised with an urban population of less than 20 per cent. That’s why industrialisation, electrification and education were of the highest priority, but the first pluralistic trial phase ended with Lenin’s death in 1924. His successor Stalin commanded the collectivisation of all agricultural production and a rough industrialisation with fixed targets according to 5-year plans since 1928. With intensive propaganda the masses were mobilised and forced to renounce consumerism. The media hailed models of patriotism and heroism, whereby work and production were of highest value, while consumption and trade were seen as unproductive and even criminal due to “speculation” and the involvement of morally despicable “money”. Prices for basic goods, such as bread, were kept artificially low. The command economy banked on coercion rather than incentives.

Consequently, the Soviet economy could not overcome its low productivity rates. The forced collectivisation of agriculture resulted in wide-spread famine and decades of shortages of bread grain, leather, and shoes, because the farmers rather slaughtered their animals than handing them over to the farm cooperatives, called kolkhoz. The country had to serve the city, that’s why the collective farmers, the kolkhozniki, were not paid money wages, but were paid in kind to exclude them from the consumer society. Only in 1934 the rationing of bread could be lifted and in contrast to the hardships of an economy of scarcity, the Soviet visual propaganda praised the abundance of sparkling wine and caviar. Between 1935 and 1938 consumer privileges were used as incentives to boost productivity. “Heroes of work”, who continually surpassed their targets were offered fur coats, holidays in Black Sea resorts or even a car. But this type of consumerism was only available for the selected few in Moscow, the “high achievers” and party functionaries. As part of this newly established system of privileges, so-called “closed shops” were set up, where only the workers of certain state enterprises and employees of certain government agencies could purchase goods that were much in demand, in some even for foreign currency only. For the Soviet workers goods such as caviar, sparkling wine, chocolate, cognac, and perfume were the pinnacles of luxury. These products were specially produced for festive days and were part of the Soviet propaganda for the masses. Except for chocolate, they were all produced with domestically available ingredients and were cheap imitations of products that were formerly unaffordable for workers and condemned as “excesses of capitalism”.

With the start of World War II, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia and its dependent republics and abstention from consumption was a matter of course. As the winner of the war together with the Western Allies, the Soviet Union was in a tight spot in 1945 and the following years. The Soviet soldiers had seen that the workers in the West lived much better lives and these eight million soldiers were now expecting the higher living standard they had been fighting for. The continued scarcity of consumer goods triggered dissatisfaction and the common consensus on abstention of consumption was disrupted. Soldiers and officers carried booty, “war trophies”, home, which were then traded on the black market or in special shops. The urban Soviet youth of the post-war years wore these Western clothes and accessories and included English words in their jargon; they listened and danced to Western music. The foreign experiences of the returning soldiers started a process in the Soviet Union that brought the citizens in contact with Western music, literature, fashion, and consumer goods. The government tried to suppress this trend by patrolling the cities with “Komsomol Patrols” and by launching publicity campaigns against any “Westernisation”, but to no avail.

On the other hand, the Americans had launched a specially targeted cultural diplomacy abroad since 1938 and programmes, such as the “US Cultural Mission” between 1945 and 1955 in Austria were extremely efficient in bringing American mass culture to Europe. In Austria the Americans set up their own news agencies, launched newspapers and radio stations, trained Austrian journalists, and spread their American lifestyle via advertisements, comics, music, literature, and consumer goods. The newly established “America Houses” offered libraries, which were accessible free of charge to all Austrians together with a wide range of cultural events. The American cultural policy specially targeted children and youth. The US Education Division promoted exchange programmes and the spread of the English language. US school experts were sent over to reform the Austrian school system according to the latest empirical findings. Austrian school books included American topics and US youth officers organised school lunches, Christmas parties, youth clubs, holiday camps and sports events. The Austrian youngsters admired the US soldiers, especially because they offered Coca-Cola for free, a magical drink, that was not yet available in Austria. In response to these US efforts, the Soviets set up youth clubs for the country youth, too. But they could not match the enthusiasm of the Austrian youth for the USA. This can be explained by profound social changes in Austria as a late result of industrialisation and the delayed development of mass consumerism. These innovations replaced traditional lifestyles in Austria; families were smaller, women started to earn their own money, mobility was higher. As these trends had set in in the United States earlier, they were perceived as the American way of life and they represented the future, whereas the Soviet way of life rather represented the past.

The West and America attracted the Austrian post-war youth because they were different; different from the harsh day-to-day reality of scarcity and hunger. That’s why the US aid programmes, such as the Marshall Plan, played such an important role. The US had offered support to the Soviet Union as well, because the Soviets had suffered the most severe damage, but the Soviets refused American aid. The Soviet citizens did not live like victors of the war, on the contrary. There was famine, terror, repressions under Stalin, but also promises of consumption in future. Between 1947 and 1953 a host of price reductions on basic goods were supposed to appease the Soviet citizens. These cut prices triggered a huge demand that caused severe delivery problems. The people got used to the continuous price reductions and viewed them as their social right despite very low productivity. Another wave of terror in 1953, which mostly targeted central and local élites and was supposed to discipline the party, the state and science, paralysed the Soviet Union until Stalin’s death. All this was known in Austria and did not make the Soviet Union in any way attractive for most Austrians. When Nikita Khruschev took over, he negotiated a new social contract with the Russian population; The government would still have the monopoly on political power, have control over the media and the freedom to travel, but the population would get new flats, consumer goods, full employment, and a functioning social network in exchange. His turn away from terror opened new rifts in Russian society with millions of ex-prisoners from labour camps in Siberia returning home and encountering the supporters of Stalin, who had denounced them and were responsible for their plight.

Lifestyle turned out to be a crucial factor in East-West relationships and in the mounting tensions of the Cold War situation. Both super powers tried to line up the countries in their respective spheres of interest behind them, not just politically, but culturally, too. Cultural exchange was part of national security politics. The USA attempted to destabilise the predominance of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe during President Eisenhower’s years from 1953 until 1961 by psychological warfare and an in the end much more effective long-term programme of cultural infiltration that aimed at welfare, consumption, and American-style mass culture. The US even managed to infiltrate the Soviet Union via radio stations, broadcasting American Jazz and Swing and images of American mass culture and to top it all Western tourists in the heartland of Communism. So, the Soviets had to launch a counter-attack. They promised their citizens a better living standard and opened 40,000 new shops and a hundred new department stores. Moscow’s delicatessen, the new showcases of state trade organisations, were now accessible to more Soviet citizens and the big department store on the Red Square, the GUM, was renovated and reopened in 1953, followed by several other new department stores. Soviet citizens from far away regions travelled to Moscow to shop for goods, which were not available outside Moscow. This illustrated the predominant hierarchy in the Soviet consumer society; cities were supplied according to their position in the Soviet ranking of importance. First came Moscow and Saint Petersburgh, followed by the provincial capitals, so that many industrial goods never reached the countryside. Most of all, under Khruschev the rural workers received wages in money terms for the first time, so they could go on organised shopping trips to cities. The network of science cities, which were “closed cities” to guarantee secrecy and prevent industrial espionage, were very well provided for. There scientists and engineers, most of all physicists and cosmonauts, led luxurious lives by Communist standards, because they guaranteed the success of Khruschev’s “scientific and technological revolution with the successful conquest of space: Sputnik 1957, Gagarin 1961 and three Nobel prizes for physics in 1958, 1962 and 1964. But they were not allowed to leave these gated communities without permission.

Standardisation and mass production were supposed to increase productivity in the Soviet Union as in the West, and that was applied to the building of new flats to alleviate the pressing shortage of housing, too. The new small flats for core families initiated a socio-cultural revolution in the country, as for the first-time people were allowed a retreat into privacy, which strictly ran against the Communist model of “collective living”. In 1957 Khruschev suggested an intensification of Soviet cultural exchange with the United States. This programme of “peaceful co-existence” was intended to allow the Soviets access to Western technology and research. Yet in the long run the cultural accord of 1958 between the Soviet Union and the United States turned out to be an excellent diplomatic tool in favour of the Americans in the Cold War. Radio stations such as Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, or RIAS Berlin, broadcasting American music as a symbol of American lifestyle, were much more effective than anti-Communist propaganda. Via this official cultural exchange programme, the Soviet Union and the USA swapped films, for example. Consequently, not only Hollywood films but long-winded bleak, but artistically ambitious Russian films were shown in Vienna and other Western European cities. The Viennese audience of Soviet films was an intellectual minority and could not match the masses that thronged into the cinemas for American blockbuster films. Western artists were invited to the Soviet Union for performances; the US pianist Van Cliburn even won the international Tschaikovsky competition in Moscow and the ice-skating show that originated in Vienna, the “Wiener Eisrevue”, which was later renamed “Holiday on Ice”, was invited to show its programme in the Soviet Union. During this period of cultural easing of tensions academic exchanges took place, too. In Viennese grammar schools Russian was offered as a second foreign language to pupils and students of the Russian language at the University of Vienna were offered generous scholarships in Moskow or Saint Petersburgh. International contacts and exhibitions acted as springboards for academic and artistic exchanges and comparisons. At the World Trade Fair in Brussels 1957 the Soviet pavilion focussed on Sputnik and space technology, while the US pavilion highlighted the American consumer world. The World Youth Festival, which took place in Moskow in August 1957, was a key moment in the brief cultural opening up of the Soviet society to the rest of the world. 30,000 young people from all over the world, Communists, as well as curious Westerners, converged on the Soviet capital city and brought their fashions and their music with them. It was intended as a Soviet propaganda coup to polish up the Communist image after having put down the Hungarian uprising in 1956 in a bloody military demonstration of power.

Consumption took on a proxy role in the Cold War dealings. In 1959 Khruschev travelled to the USA to an exhibition of Soviet science and technology in New York and President Nixon visited the American National Exhibition in Moscow, which illustrated the American way of life. The US aim was to infiltrate the Soviet Union with consumer goods, for example nylon stockings, which were much in demand, and by that put pressure on the Soviet regime to rather produce for mass consumption than invest in weapons and space travel. It was called the “Nylon War”. The Soviets reacted with strict censorship on US literature, which was permitted to be presented in Moscow, and the ban on cosmetics samples which the Americans were not allowed to distribute to Soviet visitors of the exhibition. Although the US books were not in the stalls for sale, they rapidly disappeared and were secretly replaced by the US personnel. Soviet agitators tried to interfere with the US guides who answered questions of the Soviet visitors. On the day of the opening the Soviet leader Khruschev and the US President Nixon visited the American exhibition together and in the American model kitchen they had an argument about central elements of modernisation and housework, which was later termed the “kitchen debate”. For the Americans the modern US kitchen with its electric gadgets, such as washing machine or dishwasher, was the epitome of comfort of a suburban family home and it made housework for women much easier. The Communists saw housework theoretically as slave labour, which embodied a backward concept of female exploitation as sole housekeeper and therefore had to be done by the community. But in reality there were longer any community kitchens in the new housing complexes. So, eventually the “Cold War argument” was about which society could offer their women the best kitchen, whereby the Communists banked on cheap, practical hygienic and durable materials and design that in no way smelled of luxury or irrational yearning for Western consumerism.

Despite ideological propaganda to the contrary, Soviet citizens longed for Western durable consumer goods and in 1960 the waiting time for refrigerators, washing machines, TV sets and cars was around ten years. On the other hand, Soviet media showed shops and department stores which were bursting with an abundance of wares, while in fact, the retail outlets were bursting with customers and the shelves were nearly empty. Daily Soviet citizens had to deal with grumpy sales personnel, long queues, and a scarcity of products. The system of privileges and waiting lists with respect to the provision of goods fostered wide-spread corruption in the Soviet Union. Khruschev’s intended reforms to battle the abuse threatened the privileges of the political elites, which finally led to his downfall in 1964. The low productivity and the low quality of the products due to the “ton ideology”, which measured the meeting of targets in the Soviet planned economy in volume and not in quality, led to continued long queues, long waiting lists, supply bottlenecks and an overall dreary consumer situation and more corruption and nepotism in the following Brezhnev years. The shortage of consumer goods was never overcome, which led to the situation that products that were scarce gained an outsized importance.  Because in Communism, too, consumption was to a large degree symbolic. Soviet youngsters loved Western fashion because it was different from drab and unattractive Soviet clothes. The problem for them was not money, the problem was supply. They had money, but could not buy the things they wanted for it. Soviet society and culture were viewed in shades of grey, frozen in an economy of scarcity of the past. In Austria, on the other hand, the “Economic Miracle Years” of the 1950s, 60s and 70s were a success story of economic growth and consumerism, assisted and largely financed by the USA. The experience of a collective social advancement was realised with ideological and material US aid. This extrovert consumerism of the West stood in stark contrast to the introvert niche model of the Soviet Union.

Werner’s Viennese photo impressions

 

Cold War literature set in Vienna: “The Third Man” & “The Children of Vienna”

Post-war Vienna was just another of the cities devastated by war, like Berlin or Warsaw, but the British writer, Graham Greene set his famous film script and short story “The Third Man” in Vienna and not in London, as he had originally planned. Why? Because the film producer Alexander Korda had money frozen in Austria, which had to be spent and he convinced Greene of the better Viennese setting. So, in February 1948 Greene, who was a journalist and secret service man, travelled to Vienna to research the situation on-site and get inspirations for designing the plot. When he arrived, he had just a vague idea of the story line and when he left, he had created a unique plot that illustrated the social, economic, and political atmosphere of the time in Vienna and is a valuable contemporary document of post-war Viennese living conditions; the dissolution of the social order, displaced persons, rivalling occupation armies, scarcity of everything, corruption, black markets, criminal machinations, espionage, and greed for profit. “The Third Man” starring Orson Welles was filmed in the destroyed city and won the “Palme d’Or” at the film festival in Cannes in 1949. Greene described a devastated world that had come apart. In that world no one spoke about the past and not about who they were and what they did for a living; there were NS victims just returned from concentration camps, there were homecoming exiles, there were NS collaborators and NS functionaries, there were illegal profiteers, black marketeers and lots of amateur spies and denouncers selling shady information for profit or to harm an unwanted neighbour. In his story Greene highlighted the workings of and the background to all types of contraband trade. In post-war Vienna the inhabitants lacked practically everything, from food to petrol, coal, tires, and medication. The black market was a consequence of this scarcity, but later contributed to the continuation of shortages of all kinds. Agriculture and industry were forced to deliver the largest part of their production to rationing centres for distribution to somehow meet the basic needs of the urban population. In this process one to three quarters of the production reached the black market. It was very easy to make an illegal profit from scarcity in such an extremely regulated shortage economy by illegally diverting rationed goods to the black market and selling them there at exorbitant prices. In this emergency the black market supplied the Viennese with urgently needed foodstuff and everyday objects, even if at inflated prices. Nevertheless, medication was an even more dramatic issue. During those years the Viennese population was continually confronted with epidemics; typhus in 1946 or tuberculosis in 1948, when Greene was in Vienna, and the relatively new medication, penicillin, was very effective in battling these and many other diseases, such as meningitis, diphtheria, puerperal fever, and venereal diseases, which were widespread in Vienna, too. But penicillin was rare or practically unavailable. It was considered a “magic potion” in Vienna and was used to treat a wide spectrum of infectious diseases. In 1946 it was first applied in Vienna, but it reached Vienna in tiny potions only via US military personnel. The UNRRA, the United Nations aid organisation, delivered the first small quantities to Austria in the summer of 1946. Only hospitals could treat patients with penicillin, even when an Austrian production had been launched in the Tyrol, the US zone of occupation. In doctors’ surgeries penicillin had to be procured on the black market. Penicillin therefore was the ideal product for illicit trade, as illustrated in Greene’s story; it was very precious, easy to transport and offered exorbitant profits. Research has shown that one vial of penicillin was sold for around 70 British pounds and in “The Third Man” the greedy protagonist Harry Lime dilutes the precious medication and by that makes it ineffective.

The economic pressure and the threat of criminal activity eroded the security of civilians. In the occupied city a legal vacuum developed, or even worse, there were many areas where it was unclear which was the rule of law and who executed it; the Austrian government, the US army, the Soviet army, the French or British army. These five authorities fought against each other about who was in charge, and these controversies escalated to the detriment of the local population. It was practically impossible to uphold a regime of law and order under such conditions. In 1946 Robert Neumann wrote the book “Die Kinder von Wien“, first published in English with the title “The Children of Vienna”, where he described the shocking existence of a couple of children, who had no families and had found refuge in a bombed cellar in Vienna. They were feral kids from different parts of Central and Eastern Europe, who had been freed from concentration camps or had run away from displaced person camps or borstals or had been bombed out. They spoke a garbled language that was often incomprehensible to outsiders. They made their living with illicit trade of cigarettes and other goods, rummaged through bomb rubble, stole, traded found and stolen wares to other criminals, soldiers, and inhabitants. They were victims of violence and perpetrators at the same time; a disturbing contemporary picture of a community that had disintegrated.

The mounting Cold War tensions between the Soviets and the Western armed forces in Vienna encountered an outdated and dysfunctional Austrian administration. This overlap of authorities to exert power between the security forces of occupiers and the occupied led to a dangerous security vacuum that made life for the common people very difficult and often hazardous. Depending on which zone a person was in at one moment, the British, the American, the Soviet or the British, they were subject to different rules of law and different security regulations. This situation opened a lot of possibilities for criminal activity. Constantly the Soviets kidnapped persons from other zones of occupation or had them kidnapped by criminals and dragged them into the Soviet sector; these people were either executed or transferred to the Soviet Union where they disappeared in labour camps in Siberia for many years or forever. Greene called it a “false peace”, where all kinds of spy activities were ubiquitous. The criminal profiteers often hid behind a respectable façade and were totally indifferent to the destiny of their victims. This unconditional moral indifference was a relic of the war which brought to the surface archaic sentiments, according to Sigmund Freud. The underworld of the Viennese canal system in Greene’s book and the bombed cellar in Neumann’s story represent strong symbols of the dissolution of the civil order which was taking place in post-war Vienna.

Greene was a former employee of the British secret service MI6 and in his book the question of who was the “third man” is never answered. This could already point to the emerging Cold War atmosphere, because the “third man” was a central phenomenon of the Cold War. Historically the Cold War was a unique situation, where the rivalry of two super powers led to a global formation of two blocks. Not only Europe was divided into an East Bloc and a West Bloc, but the whole world was divided up and every local conflict was dragged into this East-West confrontation. In this scenario the “interested third” was always a super power, which was highly interested in a local conflict, local rebels, partisans, fighters, or terrorists. Yet the “interested third” did not openly support these groups or fuel this local conflict, but the super power contributed information, weapons, money, and aid in any form secretly. Via this “interested third” the friend-foe relationship of the Cold War, that characterised the East-West confrontation developed into something totally untransparent and multitudinous. The “interested third” became a political ghost who haunted every conflict worldwide. Another mysterious Cold War figure was the traitor or renegade, the friend who defected to the foe. Defectors and double agents often justified their doings with the argument that it had to be possible to select a “third way” between two ideologies and between two super powers. For Greene the question of loyalty and treason was a crucial theme; under which circumstances and with which justifications may one swap loyalties? No other figure was more linked to the Cold War than the defector. Swapping loyalties was quite common at the time in Vienna and Austria. Quite a few locals hoped to profit from providing information to not just one, but two or more secret services of the occupation armies and they approached the relevant persons in an obsequious and embarrassingly servile way at times. In most cases, it was not political conviction that made an Austrian a spy or a double agent, but pompousness, greed, or a craving for recognition.

 

The Viennese as Werner photographed them

 

Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann’s Austrian Cold War thrillers of the 1950s

This tragic lack of the rule of law and security for the Viennese population was illustrated in two of the books that Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann wrote in the early 1950s in Vienna. Their thrillers were full of local detail, hungry refugees and displaced persons, “cheap” girls, small criminals, traffickers, black marketeers, and former Nazis. They further commented on the rising Cold War tension between Soviets and Americans and British in Vienna and the lawlessness and insecurity that undermined all social relationships. In the “Third Man” and in Dor and Federmann’s thrillers the excessive spy activity in Vienna since the start of the Cold War was omnipresent. These novels are contemporary documents that offer an insight into the world of espionage in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Vienna, written by journalists who had well researched the ambience.

The two young writers and journalists, Milo Dor (1923-2005) and Reinhard Federmann (1923-1976), collaborated on two thrillers, which were both set in Cold War Vienna, within a very short time: “Internationale Zone” (International Zone) and “Und einer folgt dem anderen” (And One Follows the Other). They were the first to introduce this type of literature in the German-speaking literary scene. Their setting was the contemporary bleak, grey and dangerous atmosphere of post-war Vienna. Their models were Anglo-Saxon thrillers, which they adapted to the Viennese milieu: action, lots of sarcasm, tough and cynical protagonists, shady bars and cafés, slang, sexuality and mesogenic macho behaviour together with lots of alcohol and cigarettes. These thrillers are valuable contemporary documents of the terror of the time. In the first book the kidnapping of supposed spies, defectors or double agents by the Soviets are the key theme and the capturing of the criminals who carried out the failed kidnapping by the American forces. All the details were well-researched and highlighted the horror of Stalinism; the terrible labour camps Kolyma in Siberia and Karaganda in Kazakhstan and the Soviet transit camp in Lower Austria near Baden. The two authors used reports of the Austrian newspaper “Arbeiterzeitung”, where for example on 12 January 1950 such an incident was described and on 11 January 1950 the arrest of a trafficker who had tried together with other criminals to kidnap a young girl in the American zone by order of the Soviets was reported. The Social-Democratic paper, “Arbeiterzeitung”, was strictly pro-American. Nevertheless, the reports seem authentic and truthful. In addition to this source, the two authors had themselves experiences with secret services and the black market. Dor later mentioned that he himself had been involved in the smuggling of cigarettes in the 1940s and attempted to found a literature journal with the money he had thus procured, but the project failed. He further mentioned that he and Federmann had worked as journalists for the French information service after the war, which published cultural news and their contact person, a “Monsieur Simon” was very interested in the political situation in Austria, but most of all in the Eastern neighbours of Austria, which had been incorporated into the Soviet sphere of interest. This contact person probably was a French secret service agent, who even offered to Federman a monthly salary for regular information about the region. An offer which Federmann seemed to have refused. Nevertheless, all these details were incorporated in their second thriller. In this book the smuggling of top-secret controversial military documents about rockets, originating from the fallen NS regime, which in the end are worthless, play a central role. The scenario is very plausible: the document, which all crave for and for which they kill, is a useless draft of the US secret service, which was leaked to the NS secret service during World War II in order to mislead the Germans; in fact, a forgery. Here Dor and Federmann referred in detail to a sensational crime, reported in the “Arbeiterzeitung” on 29 December 1949 and on 15 January 1950, the “bathtub murder” of the factory owner Blanche Mandler in her Viennese flat on 8 November 1949. Furthermore, the newspaper saw a connection to the murder of the agent Witt in Innsbruck on 14 November 1949, who was supposed to have been in possession of plans for a NS-developed optical aiming device for fighter jets, which he had offered to several secret services. One of these intermediaries was a “Dr. Lutz”, who was the murderer of Blanche Mandler. In addition, in January 1950 an American court in Munich accused six men, among them a former Nazi official, of having offered aiming devices for jet planes to a “foreign power”, almost certainly the Soviet Union.

 

“Arbeiterzeitung” of 7 December 1913 reporting the opening of the “Eisenbahnerheim” (Home of the Railway Workers) with its Café, where Dor and Federmann wrote their books

The exterior and the interior of the Café of the “Eisenbahnerheim” on Margaretenstrasse 166 in the 5^th district of Vienna

The “Eisenbahnerheim” today, which was bombed in 1944 and rebuilt soon after the war

 

Left: the symbol of the railways,a winged wheel; right: the modernised café today

 

The thrillers of Dor and Federmann were no success in the 1950s, probably because they relentlessly portrayed the contemporary social, political, and economic situation in Austria, while the Viennese preferred to dream of a better and rosy world. Another factor might have been that the literary category of the thriller was yet unknown in German-speaking regions. In 1994 and 1995 after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union the two books were re-published by the “Picus Verlag” and Milo Dor explained the history and background of this writers’ cooperation with Federmann, who had meanwhile died, in his epilogue. Franz Kreuzer, who was a journalist at the “Arbeiterzeitung” during the post-war years, was a friend of theirs and fed them with an abundance of information and his background research. So, Dor and Federmann were well-informed about profiteering on the black market and the dubious practices of the Allied forces, which fought their Cold War on Viennese territory.

Both Dor and Federmann were married and had young children, but lived in very small flats, always trying to make ends meet. It was impossible for them to write at home, so the two friends met at the “Café Eisenbahnerheim” at Margaretenstrasse 166, a working-class area, and drank lots of coffee and wine to get inspired. The owner and the personnel were friendly and understanding, but it would have been impossible to bring a typewriter, as this would have disturbed the other guests. That’s why Federmann had to write it all by hand because he had the nicer handwriting, but most of all, because Milo Dor, who had been born in Budapest of Serbian parents as Milutin Doroslovac and had spent his childhood and youth in Serbia, still needed some time to get his German grammar right. Dor had been in the resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II and had been caught and deported to a forced labour camp in Vienna in 1943. After the war he decided to remain in Vienna, where he became an important Austrian author and a warning voice against fascism and racism. Federmann was born in Vienna in the same year as Dor, 1923. He had lost his parents early and had to take on any odd job to survive after his A-levels in 1941. He was drafted by the German “Wehrmacht” and was taken prisoner by the Soviets, but managed to return to Vienna in 1945. He was always in need of money. That’s why he had to quit his law studies and make a living as a writer. He worked as a journalist, translator, wrote scripts for the radio, essays, and non-fiction. In his novels he expressed social and political criticism and spoke out against Austro-Fascism, National-Socialism and Stalinism, but without financial success.

The two friends formulated every dialogue, every scene in the books, which they collaborated on, together and they derived a lot of fun from this collaboration. Dor mentioned that it had been so much better than sitting alone in front of a white sheet of paper. Consequently, they continued writing novels together, some of which were quite successful, such as their Shakespeare adaptations “Romeo und Julia in Wien” (Romeo and Juliet in Vienna), which was filmed, and “Othello von Salerno” (Othello of Salerno). Unfortunately, the first thriller, “Internationale Zone”, was no great financial success at the time of its publication, but they and their families managed to survive. They had difficulties in finding a publisher because their thriller was considered “too literary”. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet had been models for them, but this Anglo-Saxon literary category was unknown or unappreciated in Austria and Germany, even by publishers and literary critics. In the 1960s they were asked to write a frame story for “Internationale Zone” and to update it, which they did, but in order to save pages – there was an enormous lack of paper in Austria at the time – the publisher printed the original shorter version, Yet, foreign publishers liked the new version of the thriller and it came out in Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Finnish. To their great regret, they had sent four copies of the updated version with the chapters of the frame-story to the foreign publishers and the original hand-written document to the German publisher, who did not print it. In the 1990s this publisher did not exist anymore and the original version was lost. So, a friend of Dor, who as a child had spent some time in Holland on a recreational holiday,

See article: http://centraleuropeaneconomicandsocialhistory.com/viennese-famished-and-war-traumatised-children-after-world-war-i-world-war-ii-their-post-war-recreational-holidays-in-austria-and-abroad-e-g-the-children-relief-programmes-i-bambini-di

volunteered to translate the first three and the final chapter from Dutch back into German for the new publication in 1994. Dor stressed that the new version was very important for him because the whole book contained fragments of their much-endangered lives in those post-war years.

Dor and Federmann had written “Internationale Zone” in 1951 and when finally, two years later, this sad ballad about the breaking-up of a friendship, which had developed in the last years of the war and could not survive the precarious situation of post-war Vienna, occupied by four different armies, they decided to write a follow-up thriller. Again it was a novelty in the German-speaking world to create a plot, where it was not so important to identify the criminal with elaborate detective methods and to hand him or her over to judicial authorities, but rather the description of social and political circumstances under which ordinary citizens could become criminals, just as Chandler or Hammett’s thrillers told more about the living conditions and the atmosphere of the USA in the 1920, 30s and 40s than any political or social academic study. Dor and Federmann’s intentions were to convey the atmosphere in Vienna in the 1950s. Because they knew this world so well, they in a playful way sketched plots and invented characters, which resembled existing persons. The two writers were at home in the small world of racketeers, old Nazis, shady fortune hunters, Allied army soldiers and officers, true spies and would-be spies and the many young girls who were attracted to the seemingly carefree lives they were offered by such characters. All this took place in the context of the Cold War situation evolving in Vienna. In “Und einer folgt dem anderen”, Dor and Federmann again used real events to build their storyline. They themselves had been offered forged English pound notes by a small trafficker, although at that time it was common knowledge that in a concentration camp such forged British pound notes had been fabricated in large amounts on behalf of the Nazis, supervised by the SS, in order to flood Great Britain with them and by that bring down the British economy. After the war bundles of such forged pound notes appeared in Vienna and elsewhere from secret hideouts. The two writers looked at the paper and the watermarks of the pound notes offered and laughed at the little trafficker, who took the badly forged bundle of banknotes and left sulkily. They were very amused, according to Milo Dor, when writing this scene into their book. At that time, they felt that life was so wrong, phoney, and hypocritical that you could only laugh about it. When a German publisher agreed to bring out the second thriller, he offered them a small advance payment only because it was very difficult, he said, to place a thriller in the German-speaking area, as crime stories and thrillers were considered inferior literary quality. They were looked down upon and were only read in secret. But Dor and Federmann did not mind; they were so happy to finally find their books on the shelves of bookshops next to Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett and at publication they threw a party in Munich and gave away all their author’s copies to friends, who seemed to enjoy reading their thrillers.

In the second half of the 1950s Dor and Federmann wrote a third thriller “Und wenn sie nicht gestoben sind…” (And They All Lived Happily ever after…) together, after they had brought out the two successful Shakespeare adaptations. Each of them wrote a lot at the time to survive and when they were tired and discouraged, Milo Dor remarked, they got down in their favourite café ”Eisenbahnerheim” and cooperated on a new project, which usually earned them much-needed income. It was an easy and enjoyable task for them and the ideas “flew to and fro between them just like ping-pong balls”. But again, the problem was to convince publishers, which was impossible in Austria. So, they travelled across Germany, living mostly on fees for radio documentaries on great Austrian writers of the past, which they wrote while travelling. They stayed in cheap bed-and-breakfasts and drove a very old battered Fiat convertible with a broken roof, so they had to hold up an umbrella when it was raining. In Munich they usually went to a small bar with a jukebox, which was run by an Armenian, called Erwant Rafaeljan. According to Dor, he was a small amiable man who cooked very well and shared his meals with them for a small sum of money. That’s why they made him the hero of their third thriller, in which he was a journalist from Paris returning to his former home country and trying to write about the social and political situation in this south-eastern European country, torn apart by Cold War scheming. They named many of the other characters in the book after friends and acquaintances, too. Their intention was to write a satire about the Cold War and how fraudulent politicians acted within this framework. Their models were again Anglo-Saxon writers, namely Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. They managed to have “Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind…“ published in instalments in an Austrian newspaper, the “Grazer Zeitung”, under a different title and when it finally came out in paper back it was called “Die Abenteuer des Herrn Rafaeljan” (The Adventures of Mr. Rafaeljan). Dor and Federmann wanted the title to be “And They All Lived Happily ever after…”, but that was only possible 20 years after the death of Federmann, when the new edition appeared in 1996 and Milo Dor commented that this title was much more fitting because sleazy politicians in many countries world-wide still continued to execute their deadly trade.

The Cold War “media battle”

The Cold War was fought via radio broadcasting stations in post-war Austria, too. The US occupation army radio broadcasting station “Rot-Weiß-Rot” (RWR) operated from 1945 until 1955 and played an important role in the US information policy in Austria, but contrary to RIAS Berlin the atmosphere in Austria was much less aggressive, whereas the US German radio station was attacking the Soviet policies relentlessly from the start. Even before the end of the war, a tool of psychological warfare of the USA was the establishment of the Information Services Branch (ISB), which was responsible for culture and propaganda in their occupied territory in Austria. Its main task was the control over all media in the future US zone of occupation, namely newspapers, magazine, radio, libraries, book shops, publishers, and all forms of entertainment such as film, theatre, opera, and music. In the first two years of occupation the US supervision of the radio broadcasting stations in Austria was very relaxed. The Americans even offered to shut down their station “Rot-Weiß-Rot” (RWR), if the Austrian national broadcasting station RAVAG guaranteed the US 60 to 90 minutes broadcasting time daily, even risking Soviet censorship of the RAVAG. But in 1947 the Cold War set in and the situation changed completely. Suddenly RWR was of highest priority for the US army. In November 1947 the Americans detected an intensified propaganda effort of the Soviets in Austria and planned a counter attack. First, they carried out surveys among the Viennese population on political and cultural topics. The results were worrying because they showed that the Austrians had withdrawn from politics altogether; meaning that they were not interested in political information and did not want to be bothered with politics and governmental issues, which could have serious consequences for a future democratic state. In January 1948 another survey carried out in Austria showed that still 51 per cent of those interviewed thought that National Socialism had been “a good idea” and among them 68 per cent were youngsters between 18 and 29 years of age. So, the enormous lack of democratic understanding among the Austrian population was a very serious issue. But not only the Americans were worried, also the Viennese education board diagnosed an emergency after eight years of NS indoctrination and saw the need of instilling new values and aims and boosting democratic understanding among the young. The youth had to learn democratic attitudes and a strong belief in the new democratic state of Austria, which would hopefully be established soon. This new programme for schools was characterised by a strong moral element; not only should democratic values be promoted, also everything that pointed to authoritarian ideologies had to be strictly forbidden. The Americans, on the contrary, were convinced that culture and democracy form a synergy and should not be imposed from above, because they were values that relied on the consensus of the people. That’s why the Americans were convinced that the Austrians had to model their new state on the most successful democracy in the world, namely their own. As a result, the US cultural policy met with quite a lot of resentments in Austria.

Consequently, the US propaganda campaigns had to face multiple hostile fronts in 1947; first of all, the Soviets, then the reorientation policies of the Austrian government, and finally, many Austrians, Social Democrats and Conservatives alike. The new Austrian state broadcasting station RAVAG had been launched in spring 1945 and had more listeners than RWR. The RAVAG was closely connected to the Austrian government, but under Soviet influence and therefore demanded to be free of foreign influence. The Americans, on the other hand, stressed that a truly free broadcasting station had to be free of governmental influence as well. Consequently, the Americans started their offensive against the RAVAG in 1947. Anyway, in Vienna the very traditional programme of the RAVAG, which focussed on musical tastes of the 1920s and 1930s, was considered out-dated and rural by most Viennese who connected the RAVAG with the obligatory “Russian hour”, run by the Soviets. RWR, which was housed in the 7^th district in Seidengasse, offered a much more modern programme. A survey in 1949 proved that a vast majority, namely 62 per cent of Viennese, listened to RWR and only 17 per cent to RAVAG broadcasts. The Americans relied on the free market with respect to broadcasting stations, as in the USA. The offer of a much more attractive and up-to date RWR programme lured the listeners away from the Austrian National Broadcasting Station RAVAG, which was more and more subject to Soviet censorship. Even Austrian politicians no longer spoke on RAVAG broadcasts and turned to RWR, which for them was a censorship-free alternative. It turned out that the RAVAG was no reliable means of communication for the Austrian government. When in the crisis year of 1950 the Soviets secretly supported a general strike in Austria, the Austrian foreign minister Karl Gruber negotiated with the US broadcaster RWR the possibility to speak to the Austrians in case of an emergency via RWR and by that avoid foreign interference and censorship. The newly acquired prestige of RWR as the most popular broadcaster of the 1950s turned it into a successful propaganda vehicle of the Americans.

In 1951 in the midst of the Cold War propaganda battle between Soviets and Americans, RWR was searching for a new entertainment format that would successfully compete with the weekly “Russischen Stunde” (Russian hour) at the RAVAG, which was the main propaganda broadcast of the Soviets in Austria. “1000 Worte Österreichisch” (1,000 words Austrian) was a mixture of entertainment, music, literary texts, and radio plays. It built on a very popular reading of Giovannino Guareschi’s “Don Camillo and Peppone” in instalments in 1950, where political issues were discussed humorously in the context of a small Italian village. This format was later developed into a hugely successful soap opera-like radio play, “Die Radiofamilie Floriani” (The Radio Family Floriani). Another important innovation of RWR in the field of entertainment with a political touch was “Wie geht’s, wie steht’s?” (How are you – in Viennese dialect), which was launched in spring 1951. RWR hired two Austrian authors, Peter Weiser and Jörg Mauthe, who created political dialogues between two persons, a clever and a stupid one, “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Stockinger”; very humorous and sarcastic. The programme was intended to be listened to behind the Iron Curtain as well to prove the kind of freedom of speech which was characteristic of the West. As early as 1948 RWR considered humour as a core element in transporting new democratic values via their programmes to the Austrian population. Gradually humorous political programmes became more sarcastic and more aggressive and by that surpassed traditional frontiers of public criticism: the RWR programme “Watschenmann” (whipping boy), a mixture of information and entertainment, created a sensation and made obvious the huge difference between the traditional, Soviet-censored RAVAG and the modern free US-sponsored RWR. The RAVAG director, Rudolf Henz, protested vehemently against this form of public criticism. When in 1955, after the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Austria, the Austrian National Broadcasting Station, now called ORF, took over the studios of RWR, director Henz cancelled the “Watschenmann” programme in 1960. This programme directly and indirectly exposed all kinds of deficiencies in the state of Austria and was probably the greatest propaganda success of the Americans in the Cold War media battle, because the Viennese audience saw it as an immensely funny humorous broadcast rather than a political one. It was an educational programme, but the listeners did not identify it as such. The authors managed to select current every-day situations and wove them into a familiar context. In this satirical format issues such as coeducation at school, the plight of Eastern European refugees could be discussed in a humorous way.

Café Raimund opposite the “Volkstheater”, the place where the young Austrian authors around Hans Weigl met in post-war Vienna

RWR was not just an efficient propaganda tool of the Americans to re-educate Austrian listeners without them noticing it, it acted as a kind of friends’ association for young anti-Communist writers, journalists, and artists, too. Austrian writers, such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Milo Dor, Reinhard Federmann, Herbert Eisenreich and Jörg Mauthe were all employed by RWR. They were part the circle of young Austrian artists who gathered around the writer Hans Weigl and met in the Café Raimund, opposite the “Volkstheater”. After 1945 Weigl was one of the most important promoters of Austrian talents and had been working for RWR since 1951. He created popular political and cultural formats there, such as “In den Wind gesprochen” (Spoken into the Wind), “Apropos Musik” (Apropos Music) and “Im Scheinwerferlicht” (In the Limelight). When in 1951 the CIA financed the founding of the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” with the aim of immunising European leftists against the Soviet regime, Hans Weigl together with Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann set up the Viennese branch and Federmann was appointed president. As a result, they were all, together with Ingeborg Bachmann, attacked by the “Volksstimme”, the party paper of the KPÖ, of being CIA agents. The ultimate success of the US propaganda initiative was the “Austrification” of the radio programmes and the personnel. In this way the population did not feel dominated by a foreign culture, but could identify with the topics and how they were presented. The “Austrification” alarmed the US McCarthy-Commission, which arrived in Vienna in 1952 to look for Soviet spies among the “free-wheeling Austrian personnel”.  Collaborators of McCarthy, Roy Cohn and David Shine, arrived in Vienna to identify books of “leftist authors” in the local “America Houses” and remove them, books from Thomas Paine to Ernest Hemingway.

The CIA financed the intellectual and cultural Cold War in the Austrian media landscape, especially via the anti-Communist magazine “FORVM. Österreichische Monatshefte für kulturelle Freiheit” (FORVM. Austrian monthly magazine for cultural freedom), published by the Austrian writer Friedrich Torberg. The CIA continued to finance this magazine even after the proclamation of Austrian independence in 1955 and the Austrian Secretary for Foreign Affairs and later Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky regularly published contributions there. Friedrich Torberg and the monthly magazine “FORVM”, which he published with US financial support from 1954 until 1966, were the loudest anti-Communist voices in Austria. Torberg, of Jewish descent, had fled National Socialism and Nazi persecution in Austria and had survived in the USA. He detested all totalitarian regimes with all his heart and his magazine became the most important intellectual anti-Communist platform in the Cold War “media battle” in Austria. France and the other Western allies secretly financed the “FORVM” and other anti-Communist papers and magazines in Austria, but Vienna was a “mine field in the Cold War” and Torberg complained that he did not get enough support from Paris. Torberg was famous for his fervent anti-Communism and his sarcastic and scathing reviews of theatre performances. He boycotted all performances of the writer Berthold Brecht in Austria, which resulted in a de facto ban of the Communist author. With American aid the basis for a democratic and patriotic Austrian identity was laid and undoubtedly, the winner in the Cold War media battle was the United States and not the Soviet Union in Austria.

The “Culture Battle” during the Cold War

All four Allied nations occupying Austria were competing with cultural programmes to win the “hearts and heads” of the Austrians; the three Western allies were vying for Austrian sympathies as a kind of “substitution politics”. The US engagement in Europe via the NATO and the Marshall Plan was much appreciated in Austria and the newly set up “Amerikahäuser” (America Houses) were well-received. The British set up outposts of the “British Council” in their zones of occupation and the French opened French cultural institutes in Vienna, Graz, and Innsbruck. Cultural events, especially musical events, were staged to enthuse the Austrians for the respective culture. All four Allied forces, including the Soviet Union, were trying to strengthen their political and economic power in Austria via cultural mission campaigns.

In this building the Viennese “Amerikahaus” was located next to the Vienna Town Hall, 1^st district, Friedrich Schmidtplatz 2. The entrance can be seen on the left

 

The Americans had established 197 America Houses worldwide by 1955, 69 in Europe, which offered heated lending libraries, concert halls, cinemas, galleries, magazines, newspapers, books, LPs and films, which represented American culture and books by Austrian writers, which had been banned during the NS regime, such as for example Stefan Zweig. At peak times around 100,000 people visited the America Houses monthly, which also provided information about the USA. For the rural population “book suitcases” and “book mobiles” were offered. Theodore Streibert, a collaborator of President Eisenhower, stated that “books were the most important weapons to win the hearts and heads of people”. Therefore, Vienna became the hub for smuggling Western books behind the Iron Curtain. American operas, musicals and the theatre from George Gershwin, Leonhard Bernstein to Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams arrived in Austria, as well as American literary classics from Mark Twain, to Faulkner and Hemingway, which finally reached Austrian readers. Especially US jazz and popular music and Hollywood films delighted the Austrian youth. This modern influence was rejected by the older generations and rural Austrians, yet took the urban youngsters’ hearts by storm. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and many other jazz musicians toured Austria and Eastern Europe and were part of the American musical diplomacy “to contain Communism”. In the Cold War US jazz musicians were considered ambassadors of a free and democratic world. Furthermore, the USA promoted future Austrian “young leaders” and offered training programmes to young journalists and politicians. The Fulbright and the “American Field Service” programmes invited 3,200 Austrians to study in the USA, starting in 1951. 2,300 Austrian pupils attended American schools, staying with local families. They all brought back American culture and values to Austria and most of them remained lifelong fans of the USA.

France regarded itself as a cultural super power, yet had a high esteem for Austrian culture, too, especially the fin-de-siècle Vienna around 1900. Starting in the autumn of 1945 concerts, exhibitions, readings, theatre, and films were offered to acquaint the local population with French culture. Le Corbusier and Jean Cocteau were invited to Austria to lecture there and exhibitions of French traditional and modern art were organised since 1946. The French further promoted the learning of French as a foreign language to compete with English as the first foreign language taught in Austria. In the 1950s Austrian young artists, for example Arnulf Rainer, Maria Lassnig and Aric Brauer were lured to Paris rather than New York to encounter Western modern art. After the enormous damages of World War II, the French could not compete with the USA and Great Britain in the field of politics and economy, so culture was the only area left, where they felt they could outperform the other Western Allies.

 

The former French Cultural Institute in Vienna in the 9^th district, Währingerstrasse 30, the Palais Clam-Gallas

 

The British opened the Viennese branch of the “British Council” in Vienna in November 1945 and they continued the promotion of British culture and the English language in Austria, which they had started in the 1930s, but was interrupted by the Nazis. They staged book fairs and exhibitions in Vienna, for example by the London Tate Gallery in 1946. Lectures, concerts, and theatre performances completed the British cultural offensive. In the summer of 1946, they tried to establish the “Graz Festival” as a counter-programme to the “Salzburg Festival”, which was promoted and financed by the USA. Since 1947 the British Council concentrated on promoting English language learning and teacher training, but the British had to realise that they could not compete with the US programmes, as they had to face the loss of their political and economic dominance in the world with the crumbling of the British Empire. Consequently, British cultural policy was just a substitution for past grandeur.

The “British Council” was housed in this building in the 1^st district of Vienna behind the “Burgtheater”, Schenkenstrasse 4, today a university institute

 

On the other hand, the Soviets did not promote any special Soviet cultural policy in Austria, they just concentrated on bluntly using culture as a propaganda tool. Their aim was to export a positive image of the Soviet Union in Austria, most of all to keep up the morale of the Red Army stationed there. Already in the last days of the war the Soviets re-opened traditional Viennese cultural institutions, such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera and staged performances in Vienna despite the NS past of most of the artists involved. Stalin ordered famous Russian artists to travel to Vienna for performances from one day to the next, so that the Russian prima ballerina Ulanova of the famous Bolshoi Theatre forgot her dancing shoes at home in the rush. Except for the classical musical diplomacy with concerts of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, the Viennese were not impressed by the Soviet cultural propaganda. Popular Russian musical initiatives were not much appreciated by the Austrians. The Soviet cultural propaganda tried to stress that the Soviet Union was the “guardian of the great European culture”, in contrast to the “cultureless Americans”, which they tried to prove in the “Russian Hour” radio broadcasts via the RAVAG and via Russian films and libraries. In 1950 Soviet information centres were established in Austria. The Soviet propaganda branch of the occupation army employed 115 Soviet employees in the 1950s together with 4,171 Austrian volunteers, mostly from the KPÖ, the Austrian Communist party, and the USIA enterprises, the Austrian industries under Soviet control. The Soviet propaganda offices made up 30 per cent of the overall civilian staff of the Soviet occupying forces and aimed at eradicating “anti-Soviet and anti-democratic´” tendencies in Austria. Unfortunately, the Russian stereotypes, which the Nazis had indoctrinated the Austrian population with, were not extinguished in post-war Austria, on the contrary. Pillaging, rapes, and kidnapping by the Red Army undermined the efforts of the propaganda department and rather reinforced negative clichés. Such incidents definitely did not improve the image of the Soviet Union as a cultural nation in Austria.

With the start of the Cold War, the American cultural policy showed an increasingly aggressive anti-Communist tendency. The US attacked the Soviet policy in Austria, especially as more and more Eastern-European states were turned into Soviet satellites by Communist coups d’état. They feared that Austria would act as a springboard for the Soviet expansion to Western Europe. On the other hand, Moscow and the KPÖ attacked the Americans as “agents of US capitalism” and denounced their economic influence in Austria via the Marshall Plan. Since 1948 the US secret services assessed the” Communist danger” in Austria as much more threatening than the “Nazi danger”.  Consequently, the traditional Austrian anti-Communism was reinforced by the new American anti-Communism, especially since the supposed failed Communist putsch in Austria in 1950. This constituted an essential element of the Austrian post-war society.

In the field of architecture, the “culture battle” between the Allied forces was fought as well. The Soviets sent their most prestigious architects to Vienna soon after the end of the war and during the summer of 1945 they erected in just three months the “Heroes’ Memorial of the Red Army” at the Schwarzenbergplatz, next to the Belvedere Castle, which can still be seen there:

The British tried to influence town planning in Vienna with their ideas of “new towns” to combat the shortage of housing after the war, whereas the French betted on elitist modernism à la Le Corbusier, but both initiatives met with little enthusiasm in post-war Vienna. At the Vienna Trade Fair of 1957, the American pavilion tried to surpass the architecture of the Soviet pavilion of 1952; Soviet representative style versus US reduced structural modernism. Again, the Austrian press preferred the modern colourful steel construction of the Americans to the old-fashioned decorative “Soviet Baroque”.

Legal insecurity, black markets, and kidnappings

In Dor and Federmann’s thrillers a characteristic of the Cold War in Vienna was made evident: the hysteria of secret services that had spun out of control, the speculations about the enemy, his goals, his knowledge, and his lack of knowledge. It was a “secret war” without any real substance that was fought instead of a “real war”, which would have involved atomic weapons. The two thrillers draw a sharp and true picture of occupied post-war Austria. It was a country pervaded by insecurity, where crossing the border of the zones of occupation could be a dangerous act, not just for criminals, but for ordinary Austrians, too. It was common practice of Soviet authorities to arrest people at the zone frontiers for flimsy reasons. The Social-Democratic Austrian minister of the interior, Oskar Helmer, frequently protested the seizing of Austrian citizens by the Soviets at zone frontiers, when no one was informed of the arrests, not even the Austrian police, which was banned from Allied areas. This legal insecurity was exacerbated by the fact that all occupying armies had their own special interests and were not subject to Austrian law. This situation paved the way for lots of criminal activities, such as illegal trafficking of cigarettes, alcohol, or gold. The highest profit could be gained in Vienna, where food on the black-market cost 264 timers the official price and drink and tobacco 124 times the regular price. The Austrian police was not allowed to check on Allied soldiers, who sometimes acted as suppliers of goods which were hard to come by. Under these circumstances Vienna was the ideal ground for agents and traffickers of all nationalities. It was the “last open door between East and West”. Especially the Soviets hid their dirty secret businesses cleverly behind the facades of bourgeoise stooges and bogus companies. The trafficking only eased up with the start of the Marshall Plan aid and the improvement of the supply situation in Vienna since 1948.

Yet with the start of the Cold War Austria became a hub for international espionage, where the West and the Soviets tried to acquire information about the other block at all costs, even if it involved committing crimes. The frontier between the West and the East ran through occupied Austria and its capital city Vienna, which led to intensified secret service activities, especially because the border was still open, which resulted in hundreds of civil and military defectors annually, who fled from the Soviet zone to the Western zones. Additionally, thousands of refugees from countries which were occupied by the Red Army tried to make it to the West via Austria. For the Western Allies, on the other hand, occupied Austria was the ideal place for spying on the Soviets and its Eastern European satellites. Since 1948 the CIA Austria was a hub for US secret service operations. They exploited the precarious situation of the Austrian population, be it from the point of view of the scarcity of supplies or the Austrian involvement in the NS regime, and recruited Austrian citizens for the acquisition of all types of information in exchange for rare goods or for refraining from persecution of former NS supporters. These informers who were hired to spy on the Soviet Union were mostly not aware of the risks they were facing. Between 1945 and 1955 2,200 Austrians were arrested by the Soviets and a thousand sentenced to many years in Soviet labour camps. At least 176 were sentenced to death and executed. Their relatives were either not informed or were sent false death certificates. Many were sentenced to death for mere trifles, such as talking to former prisoners-of-war, persuading Soviet soldiers to defect, observing Soviet trains at Austrian stations, looking into the rubbish near Soviet barracks. Love relationships with Red Army soldiers were severely punished, too, as this was seen as spy activity. In 1955 with the signing of the State Treaty most Austrians, who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, could return to Austria. The Russian files on the interrogation of Austrian prisoners report many attempts of Western secret services to recruit them. These files even listed the fees they received from the American secret services. Until their sentence they were interned in the Soviet transit camp in Baden near Vienna, where they were completely cut off from the rest of the world. Such seemingly arbitrary arrests in broad daylight left deep scars in the Viennese population and turned the Austrians against the Soviet regime. The population was scared, especially when they read the reports in the papers. Between 10 and 12 January 1950 the “Arbeiterzeitung” alone reported three mysterious kidnappings; all probably linked to Cold War tensions in Vienna. One of the most spectacular cases was the arrest of a senior ministerial civil servant, Margarethe Ottilinger, by the Soviets on 5 November 1948 during her return journey from a meeting in Linz to Vienna. The Soviets arrested her at the frontier between the American and the Soviet zone on the bridge over the Enns at St. Valentin. She was the head of the planning commission in the ministry of economy and by that responsible for the Marshall Plan and the registering and assessing of “German Property”. The responsible minister, Peter Krauland, was in the same car, but could continue his journey. In May 1949 she was sentenced to 25 years in a Soviet labour camp. The charge was assisting Soviet officers to defect and espionage for the US secret service. She was transferred to several labour camps in the Soviet Union, fell severely ill and was released in June 1955. She later stated that she had been denounced, but did not say by whom. So, the true political background was never uncovered.

A hotly contested battleground in the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans was the acquisition of scientists who had contributed to the successes of the German National-Socialist research and development in advanced military technology, where the Germans had had a head-start over the Soviets, but also over the Western Allies. Practically all scientists working in Germany during the “Third Reich” were NSDAP party members and often part of the NS top hierarchy. Among them were some Austrians, who had mostly studied at the technical universities of Vienna and Graz. In such cases both Cold War opponents artfully ignored the scientists’ Nazi past, as they competed to get their hands on the best heads before the Cold War enemy. The Americans moved first. Even before the end of the war they got hold of ten German scientists of the NS uranium project around Werner Heisenberg in the “Operation Manhattan”. Immediately after the end of the war in Europe they convinced 450 German rocket experts from Peenemünde headed by Werner von Braun, who the US forces captured in Reutte in the Tyrol in Austria, to move to the USA, more or less forcibly. The US operation was first called “Overcast” and later “Paperclip” and lasted until 1959. The Allied winners of the war regarded the “forced cooperation” of the NS physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and technicians as part of the reparations they could ask from Germany for starting the war.

The Soviets stepped in rather late, but when they saw that the Americans had already grabbed the most skilled German scientists and were making headway with the atomic programme, they reacted with the operation “Ossoawiachim” or “Ossawakim” on 22 October 1946 in their zone of occupation in Germany. During the night they kidnapped 2,500 scientists and engineers and their families and transferred them to the Soviet Union. Among those kidnapped were Austrian scientists, such as Josef Pointner, Anton Närr, Johannes Hoch, Josef Eitzenberger or Werner Buschbeck. The Austrian Josef Schintlmeister, who had worked on the NS uranium project, was transferred to the Soviet Union a little later. He returned to Austria in 1955, but then moved on to Communist Eastern Germany. The Austrians Eugen Sänger and Helmut Zborowski were neither kidnapped by the Soviets or recruited by the Americans, but by the French. Nearly all Austrian scientists kidnapped by the Soviets returned after 1955 to the West and worked in the German industry. They had already served their purpose for the Soviets, as soon as the Soviets had been able to catch up with the Americans in developing atomic weapons and in space travel, they had even overtaken the Americans. Eitzenberger was cross-examined after his return by the Americans and then hired by the USA to lead a large research team in Frankfurt am Main. Yet in 1967 he was suspected of spying for the Soviet Union because he had visited his lover in Vienna 63 times. She was Anna Nikolajewna Silberstein, a translator and member of the KGB, the Soviet secret service. It was assumed that Eitzenberger, a former SS member, had been trained as a spy in the Soviet Union during his stay there. He was finally arrested in Germany.

On 13 April 1949 the US secret service drew up a top-secret document with four lists of names of Austrian scientists with detailed information about them. List C is most interesting because it contained the names of scientists who were abroad and should be prevented from returning to Austria at all costs, as the Americans feared they could fall into the hands of the Soviets, among them Lise Meitner and Erwin Schrödinger. On the other hand, the British and the Americans had urged Austria to facilitate a quick return of all Austrians in exile immediately after the war. Now the Cold War competition obviously induced them to reverse their course. There were two lists with the names of 16 physicists and chemists who were in Austria and should be “denied the Russians” and the last list named two physicists (one of them a German) who were already working for the Soviets, but should be brought under Western control. Later the lists of 26 Austrian scientists who should be “denied the Russians” was extended to 150; 25 of them were abroad. These US secret service documents mention the fear the scientists in Austria had of being kidnapped by the Soviets, especially those who had contacts to the Russian occupiers. The secret US lists include the geologist Karl Friedl, who supposedly diverted millions of dollars from the Austrian state to the Soviets via the SMV (the Soviet oil company), which in 1956 became the Austrian OMV, still one of the biggest oil companies in Europe. Yet the Americans managed to hire some excellent Austrian scientists, too, during the “Operation Paperclip”; the cybernetician Heinz Foerster, the microchemist Edith Karl-Kroupa, the battery specialist Karl Kordesch and last but not least the nuclear physicist Willibald Jentschke, like most of the other Austrian scientists a devout Nazi and a collaborator in the German uranium project, who was extremely successful in the USA and was appointed head of  CERN in Geneva after his return to Europe. Another nuclear physicist, Gustav Ortner, who had been director of the Viennese “Radium Institut” during the NS period and NSDAP party member, went to Egypt, probably with the consent of the Americans. Ortner had been transported to Moscow to be cross-examined, but was sent back to Austria together with his colleague Hertha Wambacher. The reasons behind this move are still unclear. What is certain is that Ortner returned to Austria around 1955/56 and was appointed director of the Viennese Atomic Institute in 1959. Erwin Schrödiner, who was in exile in Ireland, returned to Austria after the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation army in 1956. The career of another exile is very interesting as well; the physicist and chemist Engelbert Broda, the brother of the Social-Democratic Minister of Justice Christian Broda during the era of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.  He returned to Austria from exile in London in 1947. Undetected by the British and American secret services, he had betrayed important research results to the Soviets during his time in London. So, many of the events in these Austrian thrillers of Dor and Federmann had parallels in the reality of post-war Austrian politics, society, and science during the Cold War.

Vienna, hub and playground of spies in the Cold War

Immediately after the end of the war espionage was probably the biggest industry in Vienna. In 1945 the Americans had hundreds of secret service agents in Vienna, especially targeting Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from Eastern Europe, prisoners-of-war returning from the Soviet Union and former NS forced labourers, Soviet prisoners-of-war and concentration camp prisoners caused serious tensions between the Soviets and the Americans. The displaced person camps (DP camps) were full of informers and spies from East and West. This situation contributed to the start of the Cold War in Austria between 1946 and 1948, when the American secret services regarded the Soviet Union and Communism as the biggest threat in and for Austria. The early attempts of cleansing Austria from National Socialism were terminated in favour of the battle against the “red threat”. The Soviet secret services did not only target suspicious Soviet citizens, but also Austrians who were suspected of being spies.

The first US secret service teams arrived soon after the end of the war in Austria and with the start of the Cold War the CIA played an important role in observing the activities of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc satellites in Austria. Already during the Second World War the Soviets had extensively spied on the Americans and infiltrated US scientific research institutions to get their hands on construction plans of an atomic bomb. The German nuclear physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who had worked in Los Alamos, had unveiled US military secrets to the Soviets. Consequently, under President Truman Senator Joseph McCarthy believed to detect Soviet spies every where and started a witch hunt under leftist or supposedly leftist scientists, intellectuals, and artists not just in the US, but also abroad.

The British secret services had already cooperated with the Austrian resistance movements during the war, when the MI6 advocated an independent democratic state of Austria as early as 1941. Together with the Americans the British concentrated on eradicating National Socialism in Austria after the end of the war and on capturing all NS leading functionaries. They saw a threat in the many Austrian youngsters who had been indoctrinated by the “Hitlerjugend” (NS obligatory youth association) and focussed on the protection of their own troops and the persecution of Nazis. For the British, interviewing the thousands of displaced persons from the East in Austrian DP camps was an important source of information about the Soviet Union. In the British zone of occupation, Styria, two famous spies worked for the MI6: David Cornwell, who later wrote espionage thrillers under the pen name John le Carré and Donald C. Watt, later an important historian. In Vienna the British succeeded in intercepting the Soviet communication by digging three tunnels. They tapped Soviet telephone and telegraph lines and acquired large amounts of secret information between 1948 and 1955 in the “Operation Conflict”. The British had approximately 350 agents stationed in Vienna, whereby they worked together with the Americans, but this cooperation was not always frictionless.

The headquarter of the French secret services in Austria was in Seefeld in the Tyrol with around 60 agents, who soon took over the surveillance of the East Bloc region. They, too, recruited former Austrian NS agents, such as the expert for the Balkan region, Wilhelm Höttl, who worked for the Americans as well and later for West Germany. He was never held accountable for his participation in the persecution and expropriation of Hungarian Jews.

In the course of the liberation of eastern Austria, together with the Red Army many civil and military Soviet secret agents arrived in Austria and remained there until 1955. They were responsible for the persecution of NS war criminals and for acquiring secret information. During the Cold War secret services of the Communist satellite states in Eastern Europe were active in Austria in cooperation with the Soviets. They concentrated on tasks, such as spying on secret services of the Western foe, preventing flights to Austria and the West, spying on emigrants in Austria and if possible, recruiting them or kidnapping them, if they were unwilling. In 1953, for example, the Czechoslovakian deputy prime minister Bohumil Lausmann disappeared from his flat in Salzburg and half a year later he was presented by the Communists in Prague as a “repatriate”. The Bulgarians sent many secret agents to Vienna, too, to surveil their compatriots. In this context the “Sofia Press” in Vienna was in no way doing any journalistic work, but was a sheer secret agent office and surprisingly the Bulgarian embassy in Vienna had three times as many employees as the embassy in London. The Polish secret agents in Vienna concentrated on industrial espionage and the infiltration of international organisations based in Vienna, such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Organisation. Furthermore, they monitored Polish expats in Austria and seemed to have infiltrated the Austrian Interior Ministry. Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann used such news as an inspiration for their third thriller, located in an imaginary South-Eastern European country.

On 9 May 1945 5.7 million Soviet civilians, forced labourers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners-of-war were counted on the territory of the former “Third Reich”, with around one million of them in Austria. In addition to those there were hundreds of thousands of German-speaking refugees who had been expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans together with many refugees of other nationalities who had fled westward to escape the approaching Red Army. The Soviet secret services’ central task was to identify all Soviet citizens in Austria and elsewhere and to repatriate them. Initially, after the agreement on the conference in Yalta 1945, the Western Allies handed over Soviet citizens in their zones of occupation to the Soviet authorities, but with the onset of the Cold War they refused to cooperate. A tragic disaster in Austria was the handing over of Kosaks by the British in the Styrian town of Judenburg. Europe-wide 40,000 Kosaks and fighters of the anti-Communist Vlasov army in the British zones of occupation were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945. Several of them committed suicide to escape the transport. In Austria they were dragged by the Soviets to a special camp near Graz by train and were deported to Siberia from there. The British also handed over 200,000 Yugoslav anti-Communist partisans, among them some war criminals, to Tito and his Communist Yugoslav regime. 25,000 Croatian soldiers were executed on the spot near Bleiburg in Carinthia by Tito troops in May 1945 and 55,000 to 75,000 were slaughtered after their “repatriation”. This was one of the largest and most atrocious genocide immediately after the end of World War II. With the start of the Cold War the Western Allies desisted from forced repatriations to Communist countries and the Soviet Union. All officers of the Soviet occupation army in Austria were consequently obliged to hand over every Soviet and foreign citizen they could get their hands on to special collection camps in Austria, where they were cross-examined and checked, including all so-called NS “Ostarbeiter” (NS slave labourers from the East), who were considered to be potential traitors. Many refugees from the Baltic States, the Ukraine and Belorussia refused to return to the Soviet Union, which had occupied their countries during World War II. In 1946 the Soviet Union insisted on the remaining 400,000 displaced persons being considered Soviet citizens, who were to be repatriated immediately. They suspected nearly all of them of being NS collaborators, most of all Vlasov soldiers – a Russian-Ukrainian army led by Vlasov, which had fought on Hitler’s side – or other anti-Communist fighters. The USSR stated that they should not be allowed to escape. The Americans refused to cooperate and assisted those persecuted by the Soviets to emigrate to the West after 1948.

The Austrian secret service which was established in 1945 after the liberation by the Red Army was dominated by the Communists until 1947. But in 1947/48 the British and the Americans began to establish an Austrian military secret service with an important reconnaissance post at the “Königswarte” in Hainburg, Lower Austria, near the Iron Curtain next to Bratislava. It was used to tap all communication of the East Bloc and the Balkans during the Cold War. Many Austrians offered their services as spies and informants to foreign agencies and sometimes worked for several secret services at the same time, often to cover up their NS past, such as Wilhelm Höttl. In 1950 the CIA estimated that in Salzburg a quarter of the population worked for one or more secret services; the “intelligence saturation” in Austria was immense, they stated. Austrian spy activity for the Americans, the British, the French, for Israel, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia was the “main visible export” of the country according to the Americans.

After 1955 and the independence of Austria the vast secret services networks of all four occupying armies continued to be in use. Because of the geographical vicinity of Vienna to the Iron Curtain and the Soviet satellite East Bloc states. In 1968 during the “Prague Spring”, the Czech uprising against the Communists, the Soviet secret service, the KGB, accused Austria of supporting the uprising with 22 radio stations, weapons and money, which was not true. Nevertheless, the KGB activity in Austria was intensified and an increasing number of Austrians were surveilled and persecuted, for example Simon Wiesenthal, who had traced several former NS war criminals in Communist East Germany, the GDR (German Democratic Republic.) The high degree of infiltration of the Austrian secret services in 1968 was alarming; 47 members of the “Staatspolizei” were suspected of working for foreign secret services and several arrests led to prison sentences. Much of this secret service information was provided by a Czech defector from the Czechoslovak embassy in Vienna, Ladislav Bittmann. Vienna was considered the last Western outpost in the East and at the same time a gateway to the West and that was the reason for the extensive spy activity there during the Cold War.

Even after the independence of Austria in 1955 the country remained at the crossroads of East-West confrontations and Cold War tensions. Yet there were some who were able to profit from the rivalry between the two super powers and their respective blocks. A very interesting example was the “Rote Fini” (Red Fini), Rudolfine Steindling, an Austrian entrepreneur, born in 1934. After the war she worked in the Viennese branch of the Hungarian “Central Wechsel-und Creditbank”. There she got to know her future husband Adolf “Dolly” Steindling, a resistance fighter, who was then still married to Vilma Steindling, another member of the Austrian resistance against the Nazis. Dolly Steindling was appointed president of the bank in 1974, when Rudolfine Steindling had already left the bank and got involved in the management of the many firms owned by the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ), a legacy of the Soviet occupation in Austria. From 1959 until 1966 the “Red Fini” was a member of the KPÖ and was very well-connected in Austrian business circles and politics and among the East German (GDR) political élite. After quitting the KPÖ she set up her exclusive business in the core of the Viennese city, at the Kohlmarkt, where she continued to act as trustee for the assets of the KPÖ and the assets of Communist East Germany in Austria. Since 1973 she was managing director of the company “Novum”, where she coordinated the GDR’s foreign trade relations with the West and established profitable contacts between important Austrian and other Western businesses with Communist East Germany. When the Communist regime in East Germany broke down in 1989 and Germany was reunited, it was unveiled that the Novum’s assets were half a billion German marks in Austrian and Swiss banks, much of it in the Austrian “Bank Austria”. A legal battle ensued, whereby the German authorities tried to get from Rudolfine Steindling the fortune of the East German Communist leaders stashed away in the Novum. Before a final legal decision, the “Red Fini” withdrew half of the Novum assets deposited in Austrian and Swiss banks. Where the second half of the assets had ended up, remained unclear. Steindling moved to Tel Aviv, where she died in 2012. The “Red Fini” was known for her luxurious lifestyle; she donated large sums to charities and cultural institutions and early on transferred the majorityof her assets, including a villa in the elegant Viennese suburb of Döbling, to her daughter. The banks she had cooperated with had to pay large fines to the Republic of Germany; for instance, the “Bank Austria” 128 million euros plus 5 per cent interest since 1994 or the Swiss bank “Julius Bär” 88 million euros plus interest.

Viennese journeys behind the “Iron Curtain”

Herta and Werner at one of their slide shows about East Bloc countries in Vienna

 

Austria was situated at the crossroads of the Cold War and after ten years of occupation knew quite a lot about the lifestyles of the West and the East. It was lucky enough to be established as an independent state again in 1955 and continued to have close ties to the West, but also formal and informal, official and secret connections to the East. Especially the Viennese, so close to the Iron Curtain, had a special interest in life in the neighbouring Soviet satellite states, partly out of curiosity, partly out of business interest or because they had their origin and / or relatives in now Communist states, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and East Germany. It was very difficult for Westerners to travel there, but several of these countries gradually relaxed restriction because of their need for foreign currency. That offered a chance for Herta and Werner Tautz, my parents, to discover the cultural treasures and lifestyles in this region behind the Iron Curtain and create their very popular slide shows with music and text, which they staged in Vienna and its vicinity at cultural gatherings, at charity meetings and club events of various associations.

Werner and Herta Tautz, the photographer and the script writer and speaker of travel slide shows portraying, among many other destinations, Soviet satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain

Poland

The first journey of Herta and Werner behind the Iron Curtain, as recorded in Herta’s travel diary, took place in September and October 1977. They wanted to create a slide show of the art, culture, and landscape of Poland for their Austrian spectators, especially so because Werner’s original home in Silesia, near Görlitz was now a part of Poland, Zgorzelec

See article: http://centraleuropeaneconomicandsocialhistory.com/the-nazi-children-evacuation-programme-erweiterte-kinderlandverschickung-in-the-vicinity-of-vienna-1940-1945-and-the-ideological-indoctrination-of-the-young

Werner’s photo impressions of Poland

Left: Herta’s travel diary 1977; right: a polite Polish guide kissing Herta’s hand

 

The Polish Communist regime was interested in promoting guided and supervised tourism to earn foreign exchange and allowed Werner and Herta to visit the country with Polish guides. Herta wrote about the crossing of the Iron Curtain, “We left Vienna (by car) at 4.30 in the morning and drove via Hainburg to the Czech border. There we had to wait for 20 minutes for the crossing. After completing all the formalities, we continued via Bratislav and Zlini into the beautiful landscape of the Oravia valley to the Polish border. The Poles, very friendly, the Czechs checked our luggage and handbags. Excellent drive to Krakov and the hotel Holiday Inn. All extremely noble and very elegant with all comfort. Our first guide Ms Jaworska was already waiting there for us. She had prepared everything: all guided tours during our stay, hotels, lunches, and dinners were booked, too. The hotel was paid and Werner received 5,000 Polish zloty for food and petrol vouchers for 263 l petrol.” Herta then described all the sights and the photos Werner took and she then mentioned that three young people in a nice coffeehouse in the city tower of Krakov asked them to send them three photos of them in the café to their address in Gdansk, which they wrote into Herta’s travel diary. She then described the dinner menu in a cheap restaurant: tomato soup, meat balls with mashed potatoes and beetroot and stewed apples for 42 zloty, plus two coffees with milk and mineral water 61 zloty. They bought a local folklore LP for 70 zloty and noted the official exchange rate: 100 Austrian shillings were worth 200 Polish zloty. The next day they ate in the elegant “Hotel Franziska” borscht, meat pâté with beetroot soup, pork cutlet with mashed potatoes, sourcrout and mineral water for 250 zloty. The new Polish guide was more talkative and asked them about the price of their car (an old Audi) and told them that you could build a house for one family for that price in Poland, but that was just a dream for an average Pole, he said. They earned around 5,000 zloty monthly. Poles often approached Herta and Werner and asked them whether they would like to exchange Western currencies for zloty. A warden of a public car park offered them 600 zloty for 100 shillings, three times the official exchange rate. If the Poles were allowed to travel to the West, they were only permitted to take very little money with them and that’s why German marks, US dollars and Austrian shillings were much in demand. Herta wrote, “Everything here is denoted in US dollars, if it is not in zloty. Generally, I believe that the Poles have more money than they can spend, because the shops are full (of people). Yesterday, Saturday, was very busy, the streets and the shops were crammed with people. There were long queues in front of the butcher’s shops, but also the fruit stalls. Currently meat is scarce and at the butcher’s just a few bones are hanging on hooks. Yesterday we were in a department store of three storeys, just like at home, but the state of the building as well as the wares displayed were wretched. Nevertheless, there was a huge hustle for everything.” Herta and Werner were told that for three weeks no small batteries had been available in Krakov, for example, and the reason was the fight the distributor for Krakov had had with the manager of the battery factory and that’s why batteries were delivered to other Polish cities, but not to Krakov.

Werner’s car in front of his birthplace near Görlitz /Zgorzelec

 

Generally, Herta wrote, the Poles were very friendly and forthcoming and nearly all of them spoke at least a few words of German. At the royal castle Wawel Herta and Werner needed a special authorisation of the director to take photos. The director, a very genteel and friendly 70-year-old gentleman, granted the permission and even offered some advice for their following stay in Zakopane. When they visited St. Mary’s Cathedral in Krakov, the 70-year-old sacristan told them that he had been opening and closing the famous altar of Veit Stoss daily for 25 years and asked them to send him the photo of himself with the altar to his home by post, because he did not have any. Later they ate in a traditional restaurant, Staropolska, “…Bigos staropolski, excellent, but too fat for dinner in the evening. The glass of Wodka cost 1 US dollar (=17 Austrian shillings)”. Their next guide Antoni Sycz wrote down his address in Herta’s booklet, too, and the director of the castle Pieskowa Skala asked them for a photo of the library. In the restaurants for tourists the waitresses were usually dressed in traditional local folklore clothes and in the country many thatched farm houses whitewashed in blue could be seen. In another restaurant Herta and Werner had one Pepsi Cola, one cup of tea and one cup of coffee for 236 zloty, whereas a bottle of Russian sparkling wine was 135 zloty only. They had a very nice guide in Zakopane, Monica Olszewska, who gave them her private address. There Herta was enthusiastic about the warm beer, a bit like mulled wine, which they drank in a “Karczma”, where the girls in traditional clothes wanted some photos sent, too, and in exchange offered them cognac, milk shakes and roast apples. It seems that photographs were still rare in Poland in the 1970s.

Drawing in Herta’s diary of the Riesengebirge /Karkonosze, which Werner had known in his childhood in Silesia

In Breslau / Wroclav they had a very nervous guide, Krystyna Denkienin; she was probably afraid of the Communist regime. In order to see the interior of the town hall, they had to meet up with Ms. Loni to get the permission. In Karpacz they stayed in a newly built hotel, “Hotel Skaln”, in the middle of the forest, “very beautiful and elegant”. Their new guide for the Riesengebirge /Karkonosze mountains, a 40-year-old very nice man, had been a member of an expedition in Afghanistan – a Communist ally of the Soviet Union then – for three months, who had just returned to Poland.

After having made a detour to the childhood home of Werner in the former German-speaking area, Bialogorze / Lichtenberg and Trojce /Troitschendorf, on 2 October 1977, they left Poland and crossed the border to Czechoslovakia in Skarsca Poreba. Then they drove via Znaim/ Znojmo across the heavily fortified Czechoslovakian border station at the Iron Curtain and entered Austria in Kleinhaugsdorf.. In conclusion Herta wrote, “We were glad that we had successfully come through the adventure Poland. Home is the best place!”

Werner’s childhood home near Görlitz (Left) and Werner in front of it on this journey to Poland (right)

 

The farm, where he and his mother had to work in the 1930s (left) and in 1977 (right)

In June and July 1979 Herta and Werner retuned to Poland to see Warsaw. It was the year of the first visit of the Polish Pope John Paul II in his home country. The Polish authorities probably wanted to have their country presented in Austria by Herta and Werner in a positive way.

Herta’s travel diary entries of their Polish journey in the summer of 1979

 

On 23 June they left Vienna at 4.00 in the morning and were surprised that this time the border crossing to Czechoslovakia in Laa /Thaya was relatively quick and friendly and the crossing to Poland in Nachod was unproblematic, too, although it took quite some time, because the Polish officers checked all documents and their luggage carefully. Their first stop was in Posen /Poznan, where they stayed at the friendly home of the mother of a colleague of Werner’s. Their guide for Poznan returned home by train after the mass Pope John Paul II had celebrated for the Catholic Youth outside Poznan. So, Herta and Werner were able to drive on to Warsaw unsupervised. It took them a long time to find the “Hotel Europejski”, where they had to wait until a peroxided and determined woman, Barbara Tobijasiewicz, welcomed them in Warsaw and told them resolutely that the hotel had been paid and that they had to buy petrol vouchers at the hotel for the 6,000 zloty, which they had received from her and which they had to convert into a Western currency first. The atmosphere was freezing and Herta hoped that they would survive the 21 days with Ms Barbara despite their mutual dislike. Their guide must have been a convinced Communist because Herta noted an interesting quote of hers, “We Poles attach no great importance to money and that’s why we are free, as free as the river Wisla, which is only regulated at some places.”

In the country the people were very friendly; they even wanted to invite them to the big wedding festivities of one of the sons of the villagers, but Herta and Werner could not return the next day for the wedding because their guide had other plans for them. Their special guide in Torun told them that he had lived under a false name during the 2^nd World War, because he had been persecuted and friends had advised him to flee abroad. But as he had his family in Poland he did not want to leave because “one lived well in Poland, at least if one knew the right people”. In Torun they stayed at the “Hotel Helios” and one evening their guide, Ms. Barbara, seemed to have relented and brought them traditional gingerbread to their room – or did she want to check on them in their hotel room?

Ther next stop was Gdansk, where they were booked into the “Novotel Hotel”. They were surprised that the city, which had been 90 per cent destroyed during the war, had already been reconstructed, at least the historical facades and the churches. With the local guide they drove to Gdynia, a harbour at the Baltic Sea, but they had to queue up for a long time at the petrol station to buy some petrol with the vouchers and 500 zloty they had been given by the Polish State Tourist Board “Orbis”. At Gdynia they saw several Russian sailors and were told that the ship yard was not to be photographed at no accounts. Here, too, Herta and Werner were constantly accosted by people in the street, who want to exchange zloty for Austrian shillings, but you had to be very careful because they often tried to cheat you before they quickly sneaked away, so that you could not count the money you had received, which was much less than the agreed 9,000 zloty for 1,000 Austrian shillings. In this region of Poland several people asked them if they could send them photos, they had made of them and gave them their addresses. In a boat on one of the lakes in the Mazur district Werner took a few photos of a group of children with his instant camera. This triggered enormous enthusiasm among the children, who followed him around on the boat and sang songs for him. Herta and Werner enjoyed this lovely and humorous break very much. The manager of the shipping company offered to let them have a motorboat with a captain, if Werner took some photos of the harbour of Gizycko, which they accepted. They enjoyed a wild ride in a small motor boat across the lakes and during a second ride the next day they could photograph black cormorants.

Back in Warsaw Ms. Barbara managed to get a permission for Werner to take photos of the interior of the Castle Wilanow, for which one normally required a special authorisation. In the castle restaurant they had a splendid meal with blinis, real caviar, and excellent red wine. Meanwhile the ice had melted and the husband of Ms. Barabara fetched Herta and Werner from the hotel and invited them to their private home, where they had coffee, cake and cognac and watched films, the couple had taken on their travels to China and Bogota. Ms. Barbara’s husband spoke German well, too, and they had a lovely evening together. Herta and Werner were finally on excellent terms with their guide, who tried hard to open all doors for them and organise everything, so that Werner could photograph everything possible. “Ms Barbara was very efficient, professional, and well-versed in art, history and all Polish wars and uprisings – a true Polish patriot”, Herta wrote.

Herta noted that the Poles could make fun of the living conditions they had to endure and reported three jokes they had been told:

• A man enters a shop and wants to hand in his coat. The sales girl asks him, “Are you mad? This is a butcher!”, and the man answers, “I saw so many empty hooks, so I thought this was a cloak room!”
• Do you know what is the best view of Warsaw? From the “Culture Palace” (a huge Soviet style building) and do you know why? Because you can’t see the Culture Palace from there!
• There is a direct telephone connection from Poland to Heaven. Carter (US President at that time) asks, “God, will there be a third World War during my term of office?”, God answers, “No, not during your term of office!”. Brezhnev (Leader of the Soviet Union) asks God, “Will the Chinese come during my term of office?”. God says, “No, not during your term of office.” Gierek (Polish Communist leader) asks, “Will the Poles enjoy better living conditions during my term of office?” God says, “No, not during MY term of office!”

At the University of Lublin, a guide told them lots of facts about the time Pope John Paul II had spent at that university and warned them that most information in books and the Polish papers was false – despite Communism the Polish population was deeply religious. On their final day in Poland, it took a long time to get rid of Ms Barbara in Krakov, but after lots of discussions and a long wait they managed to leave her at the bus station to get the bus home to Warsaw. So, they were able to continue their journey on their own. The next day at 4 o’clock in the morning, they started their return trip and had a two-hour-wait at the border to Czechoslovakia near Zakopane. It was nerve-racking, but in the end Herta and Werner were not bothered by the border officials, when it was their turn to be checked. They were relieved, when the Czech officials were friendly at the frontier to Austria near Laa/Thaya and were happy to arrive home safely.

Hungary

On their next trip behind the Iron Curtain to Budapest in Hungary in August 1980, Herta noted that the Communist tourist board there had already done a better job than in Poland, although “Ybusz” at the train station in Budapest allocated them a four-bed room in a flat of a private family on Rakocy ut, a very busy road, for two couples without any possibility of refusing the allocation other than taking the train back to Vienna. She further mentioned that Budapest was so busy, lots of traffic on the broad roads, mostly trucks, and crowds of people in the city centre, “I believe that Vienna is a provincial small town in comparison to Budapest”. She admired the beautiful historical facades and courtyards, but regretted that outside the pedestrian zone the condition of the buildings was disastrous, yet the shops offered a lot more wares than in Poland. Herta noted the exchange rate of 1,000 Austrian shillings to 2,000 Hungarian forint and they exchanged 3,000 shillings for four days, which was by far enough, because food and wine for two persons in a restaurant cost between 130 and 180 forints. The room for four people for four nights cost 1,080 forints.

 

Herta on a ferry in Hungary 1980 and her travel diary (below)

Herta’s travel diary for Prague September 1980 (right)

Czechoslovakia

The next adventure behind the Iron Curtain followed a month later to Prague in Czechoslovakia in September 1980. They were staying at the family Franzi and Rudi Winterstein, relatives of Lola Kainz, Herta’s mother, who lived in Sokolovska street in Prague. Rudi and another related family, the Mareks, Martha and her son Peter with his wife Judith, showed them around. Herta noted that the historical buildings’ state was much better than in Budapest and they admired this “Little Vienna”. They further discovered that the shops had a better supply of goods and that food was comparatively abundant in the capital city. There were many self-service restaurants, small inns, large restaurants, and coffee houses in Prague. They heard lots of German-speakers in the street, which were mostly East Germans on holidays, but also the locals were friendly and spoke some German. When Herta was looking into their guide book, a gentleman asked her what she was searching for and explained some facts and gave them useful hints. They visited Peter Marek, who was a concierge at the “Hotel Intercontinental” at his place of work and were impressed by its elegance and the international clientele. With Martha Marek they had to go to the police to get registered. When they had entered Czechoslovakia, they had had to exchange 180 Austrian shillings per day and per person at an exchange rate of 100 shillings to 70 Czech crowns. A meal for three with drinks cost around 60-70 crowns. In Prague “Tusek” shops had a rather uninteresting selection of goods. Nevertheless, you could only make purchases in Western currencies there.

 

Herta and Werner in Prague 1980

From Herta’a Prague travel diary 1980

Peter took Herta and Werner to some destinations in his car on his days off and some of the trips they made in their own car. Most roads were in quite a bad state, yet very busy, yet they went to Marienbad /Marianske Lasne, Karlsbad/ Karlovy Vary, Eger /Cheb and Pilsen/Plzen from Prague. They liked the Czech food very much and the relatives were so welcoming, even Judith’s father took them to see Konopiste. It was forbidden to take photos in the castle there, but Werner was very skilled at photographing secretly. The guide in the castle did not care, but Czech tourists warned the guide that Werner was taking photos furtively – they must have been devout Communist party members. Most evenings Herta and Werner spent at one of the two families’ flats and had wonderful talks in the very enjoyable atmosphere until late at night. With Peter and Judith, they went to see a performance in the theatre and the “Laterna Magica”. With Rudi they made a trip to Werner’s beloved Riesengebirge /Karkonosze and the town Spindlermühle /Spindleruv Mlyn and Liberec / Reichenberg. To finish off their stay in Prague in style they went to the famous restaurant “u Flecku” for excellent beer and pork roast with sourcrout and dumplings and celebrated with the family Winterstein their farewell. Herta wrote that Prague was wonderful and the whole stay was very interesting, enjoyable, and a lot of fun.

Werner at ease

Restaurant bills in Prague

Herta and Werner retuned to Czechoslovakia the next year because they had enjoyed their stay with the families Winterstein and Marek in Prague so much and there was still so much to see and document for their slide shows. It can be assumed that the private visit to the two German-speaking Jewish-born Czechoslovakian families, which were automatically suspicious to the Communist dictators, had not passed unnoticed by the police, as Herta and Werner had had to be registered by their relatives.

 

Herta’s travel diary noting her impressions of their journey to Prag and Sumava / Böhmerwald in August / September 1981

Herta and Werner crossed the Iron Curtain at Wullowitz near the Upper Austrian town Freistadt and entered Czechoslovakian territory without problems on 21 August 1981. At the border they had to exchange 7,920 Austrian shillings for 4,600 Czech crowns for 18 days. They immediately lost their way, but made the best of it and visited the once beautiful town of Cesky Krumlov / Krumau. Herta was shocked how run-down the historical centre was; squalid houses, derelict facades, broken windows, the streets unpaved and all the churches closed. Herta wrote, “I believe it is impossible to restore all that, especially as the few past attempts at renovating bits and pieces are futile and need repairs already. It looks like after a bomb attack. Yet many East Germans visit Krumau”. All sights in the region were closed and could not be visited. The family Winterstein had booked Herta and Werner into a hotel in Loncovice / Kienberg “Zur Waldschenke”. A double room cost 198 Czech crowns per day and according to Herta was listed as 1B, but had the charm and comfort of the post-war years”. The Wintersteins stayed with acquaintances nearby and they were all happy to be reunited, so they spent the next days together visiting and taking photos of the Lipno and Vltava / Moldau region. They wanted to go to the source of the river Vltava and reached the village Kwilda /Außergefild near the Iron Curtain. Herta wrote, “Here this is the end of the world, as no one is allowed to pass because this is the border region. There are soldiers everywhere carrying radio sets and guns, accompanied by dogs. We had to turn around”. They had already been moved to another room for the third time in their hotel because the Czech State Tourist Board “Cedok” seemed to be unable or unwilling to properly organise the allocation of rooms to newly arriving guests. If they were allowed to visit sights, such as Castle Frauenberg / Hluboka, which was rare, it was impossible for Werner to take photos. Yet this was essential, otherwise they could not create their slide shows. Taking photos was forbidden in all historical monuments and the guides watched out and surveilled the visitors meticulously. The Czechoslovakian state institutions did not offer the possibility of a photo license for a fee, which was common in the West, when photographing was forbidden. The guides were very strict and taking photos secretly was nearly impossible for Werner. Yet at the monastery Zlata Korma / Goldenkron he managed to photograph the cloister furtively. Generally, the rich historical architecture was completely neglected and in a terrible state and if exhibitions were accessible, they were an unattractive assembly of obscure objects. They were all in the hands of the Communist state, which was not interested in restoring any of the heritage of the Habsburg Empire’s past.

 

Herta and Werner with the couple Franzi and Rudi Winterstein in Czechoslovakia 1981 (Franzi in the blue dress and Rudi in the brown shirt)

On 28 August they travelled on to Prague and were glad to see Peter and Judith Marek again. On 31 August Herta and Werner met up with Martha Marek to go to the police station again to be registered. On 3 September they drove to Jicin /Gitschin and visited the historical centre. Herta reported the following events in her travel diary five days later, on 8 September 1981. When they went back to their parked car, a policeman asked to see Werner’s driving licence and their passports, which they had left at the flat of the family Marek in Prague. This caused the disaster. Two secret service men, dressed in civilian clothes, guided them to the building of the Communist “People’s Police” station, where they were both cross-examined from 10.00 in the morning until 18.00 in the evening and closely guarded. Afterwards they were led to a special hotel, where they were ordered to pay 198 crowns for the room and were not allowed to leave the hotel. At 22.00 at night, they were collected again by the People’s Police and brought to the police station. Werner was questioned for two hours by a bald secret service man who spoke excellent German and who had carefully read Herta’s travel diary. Herta had to wait in another room. Afterwards they were brought back to the hotel and collected again the next day at 13.30 and eventually released. Herta wrote, “…this was a 27-hour nerve-racking adventure, which we will never forget.” They had to pay 100 crowns each for not carrying a passport and 100 crowns for false parking, which added up to 300 crowns. As receipt they were given 30 tickets, 10 crowns each, like the one below:

On the right the receipt for the hotel bill of 198 crowns during their night under police surveillance, “a nice and clean hotel of the category B with good food”, Herta wrote

 

The bill for lunch at the police station om 3 September 1981. As they had been waiting since 10.00 in the morning the police guard brought them two rolls with sausage and mineral water together with the bill for 8,90 Czech crowns. “We were not really hungry, but ate the snack because we did not want to show how nervous we were”, Herta wrote later

They returned to Austria one day earlier than planned and their Czechoslovakian visa said, which meant they could not exchange any of the left over Czech crowns, which they had been obliged to purchase on their entry, back into Austrian shillings. They crossed the border at Hevlin, surprisingly without problems. “When we were at home, we were so glad that this journey had ended well and that we had arrived home whole and with all our luggage and the important films. I am fed up with the East Bloc, once and for all, and Werner promised me that in future we would not travel to any East Bloc country except Hungary. I perceive life here, our living conditions, and everything around it twice as beautiful!”

 

East Germany (GDR)

Despite Werner’s promise, they travelled behind the Iron Curtain again the next year, if only for two days to East Berlin, in May1982, to visit Annemarie Schneeweiss, a relative of Werner’s, and her family.

Werner in West Berlin 1982

Herta with the couple Schneeweiss and Werner in East Berlin 1982

Travelling from West Germany to Berlin at that time meant that one had to cross East Germany, the Communist “German Democratic Republic” (GDR). Herta and Werner reached the Iron Curtain on 21 May 1982 and drove along the 300 km-long “transit corridor” to Berlin. It was a very bad road which they were not permitted to leave. The GDR border officials were surprisingly friendly and after the payment of a 10-German-mark toll, they reached West Berlin within three hours. The next day they got up at 5.00 in the morning, left the car at the hotel and walked to the “S-Bahn” (a fast train) to reach East Berlin and meet Annemarie at the station “Friedrichstrasse”. Initially the border controls went smoothly. They had to exchange 25 West-German marks for 25 East-German marks for the day – a joke, because the real value of the East German currency was much lower, but they already knew about the Communist overvaluing of Eastern currencies from Poland and Czechoslovakia. During the controls and interviews, Werner tripped over his tongue and consequently his bags were checked. He said he did not know anyone in East Berlin in order not to get Annemarie into trouble, but the GDR officials did not believe him, because they had detected cognac, coffee, and salami in his luggage. Subsequently, he had to undergo a body search and Herta’s handbag was examined, too, where they found a letter of Annemarie to Werner. What followed was once more a cross-examination of Werner. After long discussions he had to pay 60 marks fine for importing two small watches, one in a locket and one in a pen. Then they could finally enter East Berlin. Herta wrote, “I am so sick of everything, but what can I do?”

At the station “Friedrichstrasse” Annemarie Schneeweiss and her husband had already been waiting for them at the platform. They went to their flat for coffee and then could finally discover East Berlin. Afterwards they had dinner at the family Schneeweiss’, who were “very kind, intelligent and likeable people”, and spent a very nice evening with them with “red sparkling wine”. The return journey by “S-Bahn” to West Berlin went smoothly. Five days later they ventured into East Berlin again for one day, sightseeing and visiting the family Schneeweiss, this time without any problems. When they left Berlin towards West Germany, they got stuck in a huge traffic jam on the “transit corridor”. The border controls were slow due to Whitsun holidays in West Germany, so they crawled along the 300-km-long corridor, paying again the 10-mark-toll, which West Germans did not have to pay because the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), West Germany, paid it to the GDR for their citizens.

Herta’s travel diary on their journey to Berlin in May 1982 and a year later, another trip to the Communist GDR in August 1983

On their way to Potsdam in August 1983 Herta and Werner did not have to endure the wide-spread harassment of Communist border officials at the Iron Curtain that time. Their hotel was clean and the food good, but Herta noted, “The whole situation here in the East is depressing. Many of the beautiful historical private villas are completely derelict and everything here is grey and bleak. In Potsdam there are many Russians billeted with their wives and children. You get the feeling that the locals are a minority”. Herta did not take her travel diary with her to East Germany to avoid any trouble at the Iron Curtain border after their adventures at the Czechoslovakian police station and in East Berlin. She wrote her impressions in a special small notebook.

Potsdam “Hotel Cecilienhof” room and parking card for Herta and Werner

State Travel agency of the GDR: left: example of the purchase of GDR currency 1: 1 East and West German marks, right: example of a food and drinks bill

Romania

In June 1988, a year before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Herta and Werner travelled to Communist Romania by car and Herta noted the following impressions, “I was against another journey to an East Bloc country, but I have to say that it was very interesting and I rather enjoyed it, especially as we encountered no troubles.” In Vienna they had received vouchers for the hotel rooms with breakfast and for petrol for eight days. One time they could not get any petrol at the petrol station because there was none left for tourists, they were told.

Herta and Werner in Romanian folk dress (left) and receipt for Romanian hotel vouchers, June 1988 (right)

Werner had exchanged Austrian shillings for Romanian lei in Vienna at the “Mexikoplatz”, which was at the time of the Cold War a popular site for all kinds of “dealings” with the East. He got 5,000 lei for 900 shillings, whereas the official exchange rate was 55 lei for 70 shillings. But it was difficult to spend the Romanian money, as a dinner for two in the hotel restaurants cost 100 to 200 lei and what you could purchase was mostly all kinds of embroidery. Breakfast in the hotels was good and abundant, but dinner or lunch menus in hotel restaurants usually consisted of one meal only, of varying quality. Usually it was grilled meat, potatoes and sometimes salad; an amazing dish was chicken with spaghetti in tomato sauce. On their whole journey they did not see one butcher. In Transylvania they were told that Romanians could get 1 kg meat every three months, but the queues were so long that normally there was no meat left, when it was your turn. If you saw crowds of people in front of a shop in the morning, they were trying to buy milk. For Catholic and Protestant Easter celebrations there was no allocation of eggs and for Orthodox Easter only two eggs per person.

The average salary was 2,000 lei, unless you worked in mining, where it was up to 4,000 lei. They met Helene in Transylvania, who was retired and received 750 lei monthly. She had to pay 200 lei rent and tried to earn a little extra with embroidery. Once there was a football match of the Romanian team on television and they could not get any dinner in the hotel restaurant because all service personnel were watching the match. When they wanted to spend some of the money and buy a bigger embroidered table cloth, not just the usually offered doilies, they were told that in Romania they did not have such big tables. One day they stopped their car in a small quiet village in Maramures, when suddenly all doors opened and more than 20 children came running towards them and all of them wanted “gum”. Herta wrote that she felt persecuted and did not dare to get out of the car, because they did not have chewing gum and anyway a whole boot-load of chewing gum would not have sufficed to meet the children’s craving. So, Werner took out his instant camera and made some photos of the kids and gave them to the begging children. That resulted in a rush from all the houses and the people came with small children nicely dressed in traditional clothes to have their photos taken. In the end everyone wanted an instant photo, but Werner did not have so much photo material and eventually, they had to flee. After this experience they did not dare to stop the car in villages, because it was everywhere the same spectacle. Where ever they passed through a village in the region of Maramures, the children were standing at the road side putting their hands into their mouths to signal they wanted chewing gum and the older boys mimicked smoking. Sometimes they were asked if they sold coffee or cigarettes and once Werne exchanged coffee and a packet of cigarettes, which they had specially brought with them for such purposes, for an embroidered doily. The hotel rooms were ok, but very run down and often the lighting did not work and warm water was only available in the morning or in the evening or not at all.

Bulgaria

 

Just before the coming down of the Iron Curtain, Herta and Werner ventured to Bulgaria in spring 1989. They returned to Vienna on 10 June 1989 and 17 days later the Cold War ended in Europe. Right:

Receipt for the vouchers for the Bulgaria trip

Herta reported from her last trip behind the Iron Curtain, “The journey was no pleasure, just work, but I think our slide show will be interesting and varied”. At the borders – they travelled via Yugoslavia – the officials were friendly and there were no delays. The conditions the towns were in were catastrophic, much worse than in Czechoslovakia. “Everything is derelict and dirty; everywhere there are tires, plastic bottles and rubbish lying around, even in the forest. The capital Sofia looks absolutely horrendous outside the small showcase centre. Everything is black and grimy, polluted by the exhaust fumes of dirty trucks and cars. One positive aspect is the fact that the Bulgarians seem to live better than people in other East bloc countries. “There was food on offer in shops, although they did not see any meat, but there was butter, fruit, and vegetables. Yet the people had to queue for cucumbers and strawberries.  At kiosks in Sofia, you could buy small snacks such as pizza, coffee and ice-cream and there was an abundance of alcoholic drinks.

The Bulgarians seemed satisfied with the supply of food and alcoholic drinks. They were quite well dressed and the women in Sofia put on a lot of make-up. Quite a few locals spoke German because they could choose German as a foreign language at school. They earned around 10 leva a day – the official exchange rate was 18 leva for 100 Austrian shillings. Werner bought 200 leva officially and 650 on the black market at “Mexikoplatz” in Vienna, which was enough for 14 days. A meal at a hotel restaurant cost around 10 leva and the restaurants were full of locals. The young had many possibilities to go dancing and drink Coca Cola. Generally, the lifestyle was closer to a Western lifestyle in the capital city Sofia. At some heritage sites the government tried to keep up local traditions and show historical costumes, but that staging did not seem authentic. Only the listed sites were worth visiting, everything else was spoilt by broken down industrial buildings. Huge national and Communist monuments could be encountered everywhere and Herta mentioned that you got fed up with hearing about the “national rebirth after 500 years of occupation”. Many Bulgarians could afford an “East Bloc car” , which was very polluting and that’s why the air in cities was unbreathable. There were lots of building sites, but no construction workers worked there and it seemed as if there had been no work done for a very long time there. This fact further intensified the impression of a “derelict, crumbling and unfinished country”. “The important thing is that we have seen it and the trip passed without difficulties and we have arrived home safely”, was Herta’s conclusion.

17 days later on 27 June 1989 the Iron Curtain was cut down on the border between Hungary and Austria by the foreign ministers of Austria, Alois Mock, and of Hungary, Gyula Horn, which signalled the end of the Cold War and the bi-polar world of two super powers

Werner and Herta were honoured in Austria for their achievements in adult education in Austria. The artistic, cultural, and international content of their slide shows was much appreciated. Their shows on East Bloc countries constituted just a small part of their works, yet they found many spectators. As photography and writing was their hobby and not their profession, they invested all their free time and their earnings in these projects.

 

Werner honoured by the President of Austria, Rudolf Kirchschläger

Left: Werner honoured by the head of the federal state of Upper Austria, Joseph Pühringer; right: with the Austrian Cardinal Franz König

Silver Badge of Honour awarded by the Mayor of Vienna, Helmut Zilk

Herta and Werner with the Viennese Mayor Helmut Zilk

Herta and Werner honoured by the Viennese adult education institute “Wiener Volkshochschulen” at one of Werner’s photo exhibitions

Werner at the opening of the Leica Academy for Amateur Photographers

 

Honour for their travel shows in Vienna

 

Literature:

Bischof, Günter & Ruggenthaler, Peter, Österreich und der Kalte Krieg. Ein Balanceakt zwischen Ost und West, Graz – Wien 2022

Dor, Milo & Federmann, Reinhard, Internationale Zone, Wien 1953

Dor, Milo & Federmann, Reinhard, Und einer folgt dem anderen, Wien 1953

Dor, Milo & Federmann, Reinhard, Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind…, Wien 1996

Green, Graham, The Third Man, London 1950

Hanisch, Ernst, Der lange Schatten des Staates. Österreichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 20.Jahrhundert, Wien 1994

Hansel, Michael & Rohrwasser, Michael (ed.), Kalter Krieg in Österreich. Literatur – Kunst – Kultur, Wien 2010

Mattl, Siegfried 8ed.), Geschichte Wiens. Das 20.Jahrhundert, Wien 2000

Neumann, Robert, Die Kinder von Wien, published 1946 in English, 1974 translated into German by the author

Sandgruber, Roman, Ökonomie und Politik. Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Wien 1995

Schmidl, Erwin A. (ed.), Österreich im frühen Kalten Krieg 1945-1958, Wien 2000

Travel diaries of Herta Tautz 1977-1989