Austria, Germany, and the Cold War. From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938-1955

Abstract

As all devotees of British comedy know, one does not mention the war in polite society. The equivalent in Austrian historiography is not to mention the Germans. The reemergence of a restored Austrian Republic, forcibly detached from the Reich in late April 1945 but not sovereign again under international law until 1955, has been portrayed within Austria as the patient assertion of Austria's will to self-determination after the injustices of the Treaty of Saint Germain and the irreconcilable circumstances foisted upon the reluctant First Republic. The failure of the Anschluss project meant that after 1945 Austrians were only too happy to forget about the German connection and to begin afresh, consoled by the knowledge and the accolade that they had survived the experience of being Hitler's first victim. When Austria regained independence there was much reason for self-congratulation. Austrians had finally achieved the state they now desired. Such an interpretation, however, assumes the causes of modern Austria's resurrection are located in Austria's history. Rolf Steininger challenges this perspective in a short study that attempts both to narrate the course of events leading to the signing of the State Treaty—and the surprising willingness of the Soviet Union to withdraw from territory it had occupied—and also to account for the context in which Austria's sovereignty was eventually granted after ten years of Allied military presence. The title of the book, and a starting point of 1938, makes Steininger's thesis unmistakable, and even more so in the original German title of the book of which this is a translation: Der Staatsvertrag. Österreich im Schatten von deutscher Frage und Kaltem Krieg 1938–1955. Steininger has little time for the victim hypothesis and brushes aside the attempts of the early postwar Austrian state to detach its history, and that of its citizens, from that of Germany’s: Austria's history ‘was inextricably intertwined with that of Germany in the years 1938–1945’ and so it would be after 1945, ‘but under completely different auspices’ (p. 25). Steininger gives a brisk account of the various approaches to the Austrian question by the Allies in the closing years of the war, inasmuch as Austria was of concern in the overall war strategy. It is clear that the Allies had no clear view of the nature of an independent Austria, and Steininger quickly demonstrates how Cold War politics negated any pre-peace consensus. The Austrians themselves were soon to discover their modest status in the new postwar order by their bitter disappointment over the issue of South Tyrol. They had entertained genuine hopes that the territory would be restored to an independent Austria, but Cold War politics meant the Americans could not afford to provoke the Italian state and the militant Italian Communist Party by readjusting Italy's borders. Much of Steininger's account of the difficulties facing Austria in achieving a State Treaty and being rid of the occupying forces is focused on often dramatic external events: German repatriations, Marshall Aid, the Prague Putsch of 1948, the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, the first Soviet atom bomb, the victory of the Communists in China, the Korean War, the East German uprising in 1953 and the death of Stalin. With each external twist and turn Steininger demonstrates through diplomatic records and notes how the pressure to achieve or delay a resolution of the Austrian issue would switch between the various Allies, leaving only one certainty: ‘Austria had once and for all become a hostage for the German question’ (p. 100). Only when the Soviets had accepted that Adenauer and the Americans were resolved to pursue their course of a West Germany firmly integrated and armed within the Western Alliance did they move suddenly towards a State Treaty. Initially the Allies had misgivings at Raab and Figl's ability to conduct Austria's bilateral negotiations with the Russians, fearing they would make too many concessions. Raab was from Lower Austria, the zone occupied by the Red Army, and he eagerly wished to see the occupation over and Austria united. The price of permanent neutrality, on which the State Treaty eventually came to rest, was well worth it for him. (By contrast, the Rhinelander Adenauer, temperamentally and geographically located firmly in his Western zone, read the European situation very differently from the Austrians, with whom he was furious.) In Steininger's account the focus is very much on external rather than internal issues. We do not learn, for instance, if there were the Austrian KP equivalents to Ulbricht or Pieck or hear of any dealings between the Soviet leaders and indigenous Austrian Communists.