by Cheryl Benard, President of ARCH International
The Wien Museum (Museum of the City of Vienna) is currently hosting a special exhibit called "Controlled Freedom – The Allies in Vienna" – about the period of occupation following the end of WWII.
The exhibit includes many original items from those years, including such things as ration cards and food items from CARE packages; maps, photos and a film showing the destruction experienced by the city; political posters touting the respective ideologies of the Allies, Communism vs. Western democracy; and journals and photos from private collections.
I had a personal reaction and an ARCH reaction. My mother experienced the Nazi era and the war as a child/teenager and often spoke about those times – the fervor of the initial Nazi years, then the war and nights spent in the basement as bombs fell, getting dressed under the blankets in a frigid, unheated apartment, realizing with shock that even the last scraps of food in the larder were gone and there was absolutely nothing to eat, then the terrifying days when the Russians ruled Vienna alone, the relief when the Americans, British and French troops arrived and rule of law was established.
My father was one of the occupation troops, they met and fell in love and got married in the ninth district. The exhibit hit me harder than I would have expected, a total immersion into my mother’s stories and life and into the fates of those who, unlike her, had no romantic happy ending. (I’m in the process of preparing her journals for publication, a gripping day by day journey through the war years from a young woman’s perspective. On Amazon soon under the title “Charlotte’s War”).
Fortunately, my ARCH persona was also present, and from that perspective it is a happier and very thought-provoking exhibit. I had not realized how emphatically all of the occupation forces concentrated on directing the thoughts and activities of the defeated and depressed Austrians towards the topic of culture.
As the museum brochure explains, the many activities and programs sponsored and launched by the four militaries and their respective governments “were intended not only to support economic and political rebuilding but also to create an emotional basis for the emergence of an Austrian identity – that is, a self-image independent from Germany.”
As the war approached its inevitable conclusion, the Allies had agreed that whichever army reached Vienna first would wait on the outskirts for the others to arrive and take that capital together. But the Russians, arriving first, decided not to honor that agreement. A group of Wehrmacht officers, realizing that the war was lost and the only remaining goal was to minimize civilian suffering, intended to surrender the city. Their hardline colleagues got wind of this and executed them for treason, preferring a bitter and bloody street by street battle that achieved nothing and cost 35,000 lives.
An assessment of the Russian part of the occupation must necessarily be bifurcated. On the one hand, Russian military engineers focused on rebuilding desperately needed infrastructure such as bridges and roads. And as a matter of policy they prioritized culture, ordering theater and opera performances to resume almost immediately and making alternative venues available, since the Opera House was badly damaged. They neglected, however, to enforce discipline on their soldiers, who were free to plunder, raid, rob and rape at will. As a placard in the exhibit notes,
“Without the great support of all four Allied, it would not have been possible to improve the catastrophic supply shortage or swiftly rebuild Vienna. The Soviet authorities supported the restoration of the damaged infrastructure, the rebuilding of cultural venues, and rapid political rebirth. The looting and acts of violence by Soviet soldiers made a bigger impact on the Viennese collective memory, however. This stands in sharp contrast to the American occupying forces. Contemporary witness reports focus on CARE donations and Marshall aid. Leisure and sporting opportunities also play a large role in such memories to this day-the popular American soapbox races or the Christmas parties and school meals organized by the Allies being prime examples.”
My mother and others of her generation remembered the Russian soldiers as uncouth barbarians who terrorized the city’s civilians and especially the women until the other armies finally arrived and some sort of security, law and order were put in place. All of them told the same stories. The soldiers would rampage through apartment buildings, searching for items of value and for women. Backward, uneducated predators, they would rip off the brass doorknobs, taking them for gold. They stole watches, strapping as many onto their wrists as they could fit. When they entered a house, one of the residents would try to delay them in the entrance to give the women and girls a chance to hide; my mother spent hours folded into the linen drawer under the bed, while her mother sat on the bed with a dirty scarf tied around her head, trying to look as old as possible. They carried their victims off in military trucks and you could hear the women screaming for help, which no one was in a position to give them. Oh, and their generals restarted the theater performances…Which set of actions do you suppose has etched into the collective memory of Austria?
But back to culture as an instrument of national recovery. The premise was that the mistakes of the post WWI era had to be avoided, because humiliating Germany and imposing on it such crippling economic punishments that they had no chance to get back on their feet, was now seen to have been one of the key causes of the country’s ideological radicalization and vulnerability to fascism. Austrians needed a non-political foundation for its post-war identity, and that was going to be: their culture, music, theatre and art. This would also allow them to reconnect with the rest of the world on the neutral ground of culture. The Allies helped repair and reopen cinemas, theatres, and print media.
They also very expansively shared their own cultural products: Russian primaballerinas came to dance, military orchestras offered classical music concerts, Russian, French and American movies were shown, all for free or nearly so. All four opened libraries. The French organized art exhibits. According to the museum, and in line with what I have always heard from contemporaries, America won the unspoken popularity contest. People were exhausted and still struggling, and Hollywood films, jazz and Christmas parties complete with Santa Claus, made them happier than earnest discussions of workers’ rights and films about Ivan the Terrible.
The exhibit is on until September 7. Highly recommended.
Cheryl Benard, ARCH International