The Credible Defense Manqué of Cold War Austria:
Manfried Rauchensteiner (ed.), Zwischen den Blöcken: NATO, Warschauer Pakt und Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau 2010), 817 pages, ISBN: 978-3-205-78469-2.
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The Credible Defense Manqué of Cold War Austria:
Manfried Rauchensteiner (ed.), Zwischen den Blöcken: NATO, Warschauer Pakt und Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau 2010), 817 pages, ISBN: 978-3-205-78469-2.
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Neville Wylie, Barbed Wire Diplomacy. Britain, Germany, and the Politics of Prisoners of War, 1939–1945. Oxford/New York/Auckland, Oxford University Press 2010. In Historische Zeitschrift Band 292 (2011).
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Stefan Karner (Herausgeber), Manfred Wilke (Herausgeber), Barbara Stelzl-Marx (Herausgeber), Natalja Tomilina (Herausgeber), Alexander Tschubarjan (Herausgeber), Günter Bischof (Herausgeber), Viktor IScenko (Herausgeber), Michail ProzumenScikov (Herausgeber), Peter Ruggenthaler (Herausgeber), Gerhard Wettig (Herausgeber).
>> Günter Bischof – Richard Williamson Berlin oder Abrüstung?
]]>Review by Günter Bischof, CenterAustria, University of New Orleans.
]]>Under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, the United States refrained from intervening during the three major Cold War crises in the Soviet bloc in 1953, 1956, and 1968. The uprisings in the German Democratic Republic and Hungary came at a contentious stage of the Cold War. In 1968 East–West relations were again groping towards détente and, the Czechoslovak Communist Party unleashed an ambitious reform agenda under Alexander Dubcek.
On 20 August, a massive military invasion by Warsaw Pact forces squashed the reform spirit. All three challenges to Soviet control on the periphery of its Cold War empire followed power struggles in the Kremlin and intimations of a slackening of the reigns of control in Moscow. Eastern Europe was terra incognita for most Americans, and the United States had never pursued an active policy in Eastern Europe. All three crisis scenarios were overshadowed by crises in other parts of the world—part of larger arcs of crises the superpowers were confronting simultaneously.
The three crises also coincided, domestically, with intense presidential election politics. Washington ultimately respected the Yalta arrangements and tolerated the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Next to grudging respect for the Yalta outcomes, the ultimate spectre of mutual destruction in a nuclear war “compelled” the superpowers towards co-existence
and, ultimately, in 1989, the satellite states had to liberate
themselves.
>> Open .pdf (in German)
]]>The historiography of National Socialist Germany in the past few years has increasingly concentrated on the self-perception of the Germans (and Austrians) as victims rather than perpetrators. The Austrians after the war most notoriously portrayed themselves as “Hitler’s first victims” for two generations—a myth deconstructed after the election of Kurt Waldheim in 1986. More recently, German civilians were portrayed as victims of the brutal bombing campaign of the Western allies (W. G. Sebald and Joerg Friedrich); German civilians were seen as victims of Red Army expulsions from eastern Europe (Guenter Grass), German prisoners of war (POWs) as victims of the western allies in the infamous Rhine meadow camps (James Bacque), as well as millions of German POWs as victims of the Red Army (Frank Biess).
]]>A German Master Narrative of the Cold War
Later this year, the end of the Cold War will be twenty years in the past. While many of the principal documentary records up to the mid-1970s are becoming available in western archives, a growing body of records is now open from former communist archives too, even though Russian opening practices and accessibility rules are not as generous and consistent as in western archives. Given the both the growing distance in time of these events and the burgeoning archival record, we should not be surprised that the Cold War continues to attract enormous interest as a central historical epoch of the twentieth century and that historians are increasingly inclined to historicize it. A number of recent Cold War histories follow this trend.[1] In his new book, German historian Bernd Stöver presents a new interpretation that breaks into the predominant phalanx of Anglo-American Cold War historiography that has established the master narratives of the Cold War.]]>