No Memories of the Marshall Plan in Austria?
By Constanze Jeitler
July 20, 2017
Constanze Jeitler is one of the ten 2017 Milton Wolf Emerging Scholar Fellows, an accomplished group of law, doctoral and advanced MA candidates selected to attend the 2017 Milton Wolf Seminar. Their posts highlight the critical themes and on-going debates raised during the 2017 Seminar discussions.
Austria received one of the highest per capita funding from the Marshall Plan, officially called the European Recovery Program (ERP). Today, the Marshall Plan looms by and large forgotten in Austrian collective memory. But why is that so? And what could be the lesson learned for future “grand visions” from this forgetfulness?
Before applying as an Emerging Scholar to the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy, the Marshall Plan and its legacies rarely crossed my mind. In Austria, my home country, it is rarely debated or even mentioned when it comes to the history of the post-war period. The ERP laid the groundwork for the grand project of European integration and for the United States served as the basis for a “new national image of America as a power that could successfully blend military, political, and economic leadership on an international scale.” (Ellwood, 2006: 22) Thus, in Western Europe and across the Atlantic, George C. Marshall’s vision is still present in the minds of politicians and people. In Austria meanwhile, the Marshall Plan is discussed as a footnote in the high school history curriculum, but other than that it seems to have faded from collective memory. Already in the year 2000, the historian Günter Bischof has raised the issue in his introduction to the edited volume The Marshall Plan in Austria: “In Austria the historical memory of the significance of the Marshall Plan for the country’s postwar economic reconstruction as a basis for broad prosperity seems to be largely ignored by the political class and forgotten among the younger generation.” (Bischof, 2000: 1)
If it is any consolation, the Marshall Plan is not the only topic largely forgotten by collective memory in Austria. In order to claim the status as Hitler’s first victim promised by the Moscow Declaration from 1943, Austrians by 1945 had already forgotten that they had welcomed Hitler in thousands on the streets all over the country in March 1938. They had also forgotten that the Moscow Declaration actually would have demanded Austria to face responsibility for National Socialism.
After the liberation and the end of the war, Austria, similar to Germany, was divided into four occupation zones. In the West, France occupied Vorarlberg and Tyrol, and the United States Salzburg and large party of Upper Austria. In the South, Great Britain took Carinthia and Styria; and in Eastern Austria, the Soviet Union occupied the Burgenland, Lower Austria and a small part of Upper Austria. Vienna as the capital, situated in the center of Lower Austria, was again divided into four zones, with the innermost district under international administration. Unlike Germany, however, Austria from the end of April 1945 on had a provisional government led by Chancellor Karl Renner, who immediately demanded a seat at the table in the negotiations with the Allies about the uncertain future of the country. The provisional government could ensure that Austria as a whole could participate in the ERP. Thus, Austria became the only country partially occupied by the Soviet Union to receive Marshall Plan funding. Austria was one of the countries with the highest per capita funding, only Iceland and the Netherlands received more.
In Austria then the Marshall Plan provided the basis for the reconstruction of the economy and for the ensuing prosperity in the sixties and seventies, and prevented that the sector occupied from the Soviet Union drifted apart from the rest of the country. Ultimately, this prevented Austria from ending up as a divided country like Germany. Like everywhere else in Europe, one of the effects of the Marshall plan in Austria was to minimize Soviet influence in the chilling political climate of the Cold War. The small Central European country found itself in an increasingly special but also precarious position on the crossroads of Europe, entrenched in a battle of ideologies between East and West. Austria was one of the fronts of this battle, but it was still not as important as Germany. Thus, the US intelligence service had realized already by 1947 “switched their ‘enemy image’ from containing Nazis to getting rid of communists” in Austria (Bischof, 1999: 111). Austria seized the opportunity in this ideological battle between East and West and quickly swept under the carpet the issues of sustained denazification and facing responsibility for deeds done by Austrians in the war. Meanwhile, the population was in need for relief due to its weak industry and the economic exploitation by the Soviet Union. Unlike the United States, Soviet administration in Austria (USIA) continued to extract spoils of war from the Austrian economy and industry, thus becoming increasingly unpopular. When Austria as a whole managed to participate the ERP, the United States needed to make sure that the people did not only receive aid, but also inform and educate the people about where this aid came from. The Marshall Plan as a message of hope had to be carried into each and every household in Austria.
When the first Marshall Plan goods arrived in Austria, the photographers of the US army were ready to capture this historic moment and to spread them across the country and even beyond all over Western Europe. In return, the ERP traveling exhibition in the so-called Europe Train came to Vienna, bringing the message of European economic progress and cooperation under the aegis of the ERP to Austria. The over 25,000 images created by the American photographers who documented the Marshall Plan today are in possession of the Austrian National Library. A small insight into this forgotten treasure can be gained in the online database of the “Bildarchiv Austria.”
While the American photographers set out to document all aspects of the Marshall Plan—delivery of food and building materials, the reconstruction of the industry, training specialists, etc.—the Soviet administration obviously was less than pleased by the spread of the Marshall Plan’s message of hope and prosperity. The Soviets protested in every session of the Allied council against the Marshall Plan in Austria, because they feared the “Americanization of the Austrian economy,” or even worse the “covert militarization of the country.” (Stelzl-Marx, 2012: 286) Thus, they started their own counter-propaganda against the “Marshallisatsia” narrative of the West and trying to sell socialism as an alternative model. This did not make a big impact on the Austrian population. On the one hand, the Soviet propaganda office in Austria had less financial means to promote their ideas vis à vis the American narrative. On the other hand, the Soviet administration was quite unpopular with Austrians, because of the Red Army’s brutal behavior after the liberation and the exploitation of the Austrian economy in the Soviet sector. In the light of these painful experiences Austrians preferred Hollywood movies and Rock’n’Roll music to socialism. (Bischof, Pelinka & Stiefel, 2000, 174)
In 1955, the Austrian State Treaty was signed by the Foreign Ministers from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Austria. Afterwards, the Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold Figl stepped on the balcony of the Belvedere castle in Vienna to present the waiting crowd with the freshly signed treaty and declared “Austria is free!” The newly minted identities of the Austrian state and its people were based on two principles: geopolitical neutrality in a divided world and the national and international consensus that Austria had been Hitler’s first victim. The establishment of such a victim myth is not unique to Austria. After the Second World War, blaming all guilt on Germany had been the easiest way out of dealing with the issues of collaboration and responsibility for nations east and west of the Iron Curtain. These victim myths produced solidarity among people in the countries across a Europe deeply scared by war. (Judt, 2002) However, in Austria’s case this victim myth is particularly misleading since a significant part of the country’s population had been involved in the administration of the Nazi state, atrocities and genocide.
The echo of Figl’s words “Austria is free!” became deeply engrained in Austrian collective memory and created a confusion: People started to believe that it was only in 1955 that Austria was truly liberated, not that it had been liberated in 1945 by the Allies. For the coming decades, the occupation time was often mingled with the Nazi period into one historic era of oppression and suffering. Even when Austria came to terms with its past from the 1980s on, the period from 1945-55 still remained by and large untouched. While the rest of Europe and the United States celebrated the Marshall Plan as a grand vision, the most successful structural aid program of all time, it was by and large forgotten in Austria. The promotion of its success, the economic stability and prosperity it brought did not have a lasting impact on the collective memory in Austria. The vision might have been well communicated at the time, but soon faded into oblivion after the US administration left Austria.
One of the reasons why the Marshall Plan perhaps was not as present in Austria as it was in other Western European countries has to do with Austria’s neutrality throughout the Cold War. The Marshall Plan is often regarded as a testing ground for the project of European integration. Austria joined the European Union only in 1995, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another aspect is the already mentioned Austrian memory culture for a long time dominated by forgetfulness. Memory might seem a banal concern when talking about politics. But “memory matters” in politics too, Jan-Werner Müller maintained, because “it lies at the intersection of so many or our current concerns and organizes so many of our current projects” (Müller, 2002: 1).
The Marshall Plan itself was built on the memory of a Europe left devastated after the First World, a continent left in desperation and hopelessness. Together with the Great Depression, this created an explosive environment in which nationalism and fascism could thrive. Memory in Europe today is still largely dominated by national narratives not commemorating grand visions. There is no collective memory of the European Union that unites it member states. Many inherently transnational aspects of the Second World War and its aftermath, both positive and negative, still loom in the dark. In Austria, the Marshall Plan is one of those chapters. While the ERP in Austria, as everywhere else in Europe, paved the way for the later economic boom and increasing wealth in the sixties and seventies, it has been largely forgotten by collective memory despite the extensive and expensive propaganda efforts.
What does this teach us for future “grand visions” in the age of reemerging nationalism and the occurrence of populism? Memory as a key issue has emerged in various academic disciplines in the 1990s with the dawn of the digital age and new techniques for recording, memorizing and recalling. However, memory’s impact on politics and policies is hard to measure, especially if it is memory not bound to a nation state. While the Marshall Plan Propaganda in Austria might have been successful in convincing people of this grand vision at the time, it did not have a lasting effect on collective memory. Today, people even wonder whether Austrian might not have been better off without the Marshall Plan.
Future “Grand visions” aimed at reconstructing and shaping whole societies should take into account their afterlife in the collective memories of the societies they shaped. Memories or their absence created a “matrix of meaning” (Müller, 2002: 21) in the national narratives of postwar Europe. How memories can shape power relations in domestic policies and can be instrumentalized and even abused for political goals should not be underestimated when thinking about “grand visions.”
Works Cited
Bischof, Günter. Austria in the First Cold War 1945 – 55: The Leverage of the Weak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Bischof, Günter, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel. The Marshall Plan in Austria. Transaction Publishers, 2000.
Ellwood, David W. “The Marshall Plan: A Strategy That Worked.” Foreign Policy Agenda, April 2006, 17–25.
Judt, Tony. “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe.” In Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, edited by Müller, Jan-Werner, 157–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Müller, Jan-Werner. “Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power and the Power over Memory.” In Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, edited by Müller, Jan-Werner, 1–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Stelzl-Marx, Barbara. Stalins Soldaten in Österreich: die Innensicht der sowjetischen Besatzung 1945 – 1955. Wien: Böhlau, 2012.
About the Author
Constanze Jeitler is a graduate student in Comparative History at the History Department of Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. Previously, she earned a Diploma in Theater, Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna magna cum laude. Her MA thesis at CEU focuses on the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in postwar Austrian memory culture. As a historian and media scholar, her further research interests include memory and nostalgia in their social and cultural contexts and entanglements with politics and digital communications on a global level.
Before attending CEU, she interned with Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Performing Arts Festival), the French-German TV station ARTE and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw. Recently she contributed to a research project on media representation of the refugee crisis of the summer 2015 at the Center for Media Data and Society at the School of Public Policy at CEU. E-Mail: constanze.jeitler [AT] gmail.com