Österreich und die DDR 1949–1990

This book not only traces the history of relations between two countries that were occupied by the Allied powers at the end of World War II but also sheds much broader light on the history of the Cold War.After years of meticulous archival research, the young Austrian historian Maximilian Graf from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna has produced a first-rate book (based on his award-winning Ph.D. dissertation) that deserves international recognition. The book makes a major contribution to the history of the two Germanys during the Cold War and provides fascinating evidence about the complex network of relations involving Austria and the other neutral European states.From the time the German Democratic Republic (GDR, the Communist state in the east) was founded in 1949, it was keenly interested in being diplomatically recognized by Austria. However, these hopes went unfulfilled even after Austria regained its full sovereignty under the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. Austrian officials had no interest in risking a break of relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The FRG's Hallstein Doctrine formed the framework for Austria's relations with the GDR. Still inexperienced in the policy of neutrality and not wanting to provoke Moscow, “Austria from now on had to perform a balancing act between the protection of its own interests and the required solidarity with the FRG” (p. 111). The Austrian government was interested in developing economic relations with the GDR, but at the outset its main focus was on the Austrians who lived in the GDR and who were increasingly used as a bargaining chip by the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED).Because the East German archives provide little information about the early years, Graf is not able to present new findings on the debate about the so-called Stalin Note of March 1952 that is still frequently discussed in German historiography. When discussing the Austrian State Treaty, Graf, like others before him, highlights the SED's lavish public praise of the Soviet Union's “peace policy” but offers no new insights behind the scenes. On other levels, however, Graf provides important evidence that Soviet leaders did not regard neutrality based on the Austrian model as an option for solving the German question.Graf's most revealing and enlightening findings come in the second part of the book. He contends that the GDR would have been insolvent as early as 1982 if the Austrian government had not agreed to provide further loans worth billions (before the GDR received “Strauss loans” from the FRG). By the end of 1981, private Western creditors had stopped lending to the GDR because of the Polish crisis (p. 499). Poland, Romania, and Cuba were sliding toward insolvency, and the West regarded the GDR as the next candidate for bankruptcy. As a result, Austrian banks took a reserved position toward the GDR as well. Secret talks between diplomats from the GDR and Austria in Vienna followed. Subsequently, Kreisky instructed the banks to “change their stance toward the GDR.” He assumed the United States was exerting influence on Austrian banks to torpedo Austrian “Ostpolitik” (pp. 501–502). In October 1982, urgent requests from East Berlin to Vienna had made very clear that the GDR's ability to pay was in great danger if Austria would not grant a major loan. “Austria's problem was,” says Graf, “that money was taken up in the West, loan-financed goods and financial credits were given to the East, which means that western money was actually transferred to the East” (p. 512). Kreisky stuck to his belief that it would have been a mistake if they “believed that the East could now be brought to its knees financially.” He was convinced that the East Germans would “receive the support they needed from the Soviet Union” (p. 512). Finally, Kreisky needed large-scale orders from the GDR for the Austrian state-owned industry.Graf presents the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border in 1989 and the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, which became possible not only because of Mikhail Gorbachev's “new political thinking” but also because of the improvements in relations between Budapest and Vienna that had been under way since the 1960s. The increasingly close cooperation between the two countries (including visa-free travel from 1979 on) was viewed suspiciously in the GDR. However, the East German authorities did not criticize Vienna for this trend—not even after the border had been opened in the spring of 1989—and instead directed their anger exclusively at Budapest. The pictures of the open border between Hungary and Austria marked the beginning of the end of the GDR, although this was clearly not the intention of the Austrian government, as Graf demonstrates using economic evidence. Numerous Austrian politicians, especially within the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs), believed in the continued existence of the GDR even after the Berlin Wall had opened, not least because of the “economic relations they had grown fond of” (p. 624). Chancellor Franz Vranitzky was the first Western head of government to visit East Berlin after the opening of the Berlin Wall. He continued to adhere to a strict interpretation of Austria's neutrality policy, unlike Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, who early on declared himself in favor of German reunification, conspicuously supported the opposition in Communist countries, and talked about the future of an undivided Europe in a quite visionary manner.Graf's book is a major contribution to Cold War studies. It is highly recommended for all scholars in the field, especially those interested in Ostpolitik and East-West détente, neutrality, and the end of the Cold War. The publication of a slightly shortened English version focusing on the second half of the Cold War would bring Graf's important findings to a wider audience

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