Volume IV: Bewegte Zeiten

Peter Moser. Bewegte Zeiten: 40 Jahre im auswärtigen Dienst. Studienverlag ISBN-10: 3706550911
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Peter Moser recapitulates 40 years of his diplomatic career though dramatic times and diplomatic postings. After a law degree from the University of Vienna and a diploma from the Austrian Diplomatic Academy, he joined the foreign service.

During his storied career he was a historical witness to many great events and developments in world politics: as a young embassy secretary in India he saw the ascendancy of Indira Ghandi during the war with Pakistan and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971; he experienced communism from the inside as chief of mission in Bulgaria; as ambassador to Korea the change of regimes and turn towards democracy of South Korea in the 1980s; as Ambassador to the United States (1999-2003) – the pinnacle of any career in the Austrian diplomatic service -- he had to deal with the 9/11 tragedy and its after effects (including the war in Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as the EU “sanctions” against Austria after the formation of the Schűssel ÖVP/FPÖ coalition government.

During his years in Washington he also confronted the restitution issues regarding forced labor in the Nazi era and art such as the famous Klimt paintings from the Bloc-Bauer collection; his final posting abroad came as Austrian ambassador in Japan. He also served in important Foreign Ministry functions back home in Vienna. As chief of administration and personnel he confronted the changeover to computers and digital correspondence and eased many female candidates into the Austrian diplomatic service.

Vol. III: Images of the Marshall Plan In Europe

Günter Bischof/Dieter Stiefel
Images of the Marshall Plan in Europe: Films, Photographs, Exhibits, Posters
Studienverlag. ISBN: 978-3-7065-4826-7

The European Recovery Program (ERP = Marshall Plan) is considered the most successful foreign aid program in American history. It played a crucial role in helping to rebuild Western Europe after World War II, reintegrate West Germany into the West, maintain American interest in Europe’s future, contain communism, and launch American consumer democracy and improving the standard of living in Europe. It also finalized the progressing division of Europe into a democratic/capitalist West and communist East.

This volume focuses on “selling the Marshall Plan” both to skeptical Americans and Europeans in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Economic Cooperation Administration in Paris administered the distribution of American Marshall aid. It also directed the propaganda effort: 250 films were produced (newsreels, documentaries, feature and productivity films); traveling exhibits were organized that by train were shown all over Europe and by ship on Greek islands; and busses traveled to the remotest Austrian Alpine valleys to show films about how ERP-aid increased Austrian economic productivity.

Every project financed by Marshall aid was documented in photos and films. In West Germany, Marshall Plan films and exhibits also aimed at reeducating and re-orienting the population after Nazism towards democracy and material plenty. In Oslo, the largest department store featured a display of desirable American consumer products. All American goods shipped to Europe came with the logo “For European Recovery – Supplied by the United States of America.” The American wanted the European public to know that it was American help that improved their material well-being. These essays by an international group of scholars make it clear that the Marshall Plan’s top-of-the-art multi-media campaign can also be seen as one of the most successful PR-campaigns in history. Marshall Plan propaganda created the myth of the Marshall Plan as the model economic reconstruction program.

A richly documented and finely textured study of how soft power sold the Marshall Plan, in both post-war Europe and the U.S., at the time and later, in historical memory.

Hugh Wilford, California State University

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Vol. II: Satchmo Meets Amadeus

Reinhold Wagnleitner (Editor)
Satchmo Meets Amadeus

Satchmo Meets Amadeus examines the close encounters between classical music, the soundtrack of the Europeanization of the world, and jazz, the classical music of globalization. This collection of essays by renowned experts in the history of European and American music, African American culture, international cultural encounters, the political, economic, and cultural histories of New Orleans and Salzburg, the political exploitation of music during the eras of National Socialism and the Cold War, the economic utilization of art by music and tourism industries, bypasses the artificial crevice between classical music and jazz, the new world and the old. Satchmo Meets Amadeus analyzes the cultural, economic, social, and political structures shaping or hindering the creation of music as well as the construction of popular images and myths about (and against) these seminal musical figures - in short, the creation of Satchmo™ and Amadeus™ - from the 18th to the beginning of the 21st century.

The collection is enhanced by the insights of noted musicians Joe Muranyi (the last surviving member of the Louis Armstrong All Stars), Tom McDermott, Wolfgang Pillinger, Abi von Reininghaus, and S. Frederick Starr. Other authors include Connie Atkinson, (University of New Orleans), John H. Baron (Tulane University, New Orleans); Erwin Giedenbacher (University of Salzburg), Hubert Giesinger (Salzburg), Christian Gruber (University of Salzburg), Rainer Gstrein (University of Innsbruck), Robert Hoffmann (University of Salzburg), Tad Jones (New Orleans), Kurt Luger (University of Salzburg), David Nelson (University of North Carolina at Greensboros School of Music), Berndt Ostendorf (Ludwig Maximilians University Munich), Clemens Panagl (Salzburg), Gilda Pasetzky (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon), Lawrence N. Powell (Tulane University, New Orleans), Oliver Rathkolb (University of Vienna), Jack Stewart (New Orleans), Penny Von Eschen (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and Reinhold Wagnleitner (University of Salzburg). Studienverlag

Vol. I: Transatlantic Relations

During the Austrian Presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2006, Latin America was  one of the foreign policy foci. All Latin American heads of state  gathered in Vienna in April 2006. This is reason enough to draw a summary of the state of research in Austrian – Latin American relations and the various historical, political and cultural interactions, as well as migration movements.

For this purpose an interdisciplinary scholarly conference was organized by the Universities of Innsbruck and New Orleans. In June 2005 historians, diplomats, theologians, as well literary and film scholars met in the Innsbruck.

This volume contains the conference papers. Diplomatic relations, migration movements and the politics of exile (especially the diverging refugee flows during and after World War II) constitute the heart of this book, next to scientific relations and the mutual reception of film and literature. Moreover, the strong Austrian solidarity movements with refugees from Chile after the military coup against Allende (1973) and with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the late 1970s/early 1980s are also part of this volume.

Never before have such a broad overview of the trans-Atlantic relationship with South America from an Austrian vantage point been covered in one volume.

Each essay in this volume is also abstracted in Spanish and German.