Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War

823 Pages·1994·3.3 MB·English

by  Reinhold Wagnleitner

Coca-Colonization and the Cold War
The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after
the Second World War
REINHOLD WAGNLEITNER
Translated by Diana M. Wolf
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill & London

Coca-colonization and the Cold War : The
title: Cultural Mission of the United States in
Austria After the Second World War
author: Wagnleitner, Reinhold.
publisher: University of North Carolina Press
isbn10 | asin: 0807821497
print isbn13: 9780807821497
ebook isbn13: 9780807866139
language: English
Austria--Civilization--American influences,
Austria--Intellectual life--20th century,
subject United States--Relations--Austria,
Propaganda, American--Austria, Austria--
Relations--United States.
publication date: 1994
lcc: DB91.2.W3413 1994eb
ddc: 303.48//2436073
Austria--Civilization--American influences,
Austria--Intellectual life--20th century,
subject: United States--Relations--Austria,
Propaganda, American--Austria, Austria--
Relations--United States.
© 1994 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in theUnited States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Publication of this book has been supported by a generous grant from
the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, and its translation
was underwritten by generous grants from the Stiftungs-und
Förderungsgesellschaft der Paris-Lodron- Universität Salzburg and
the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.
Reinhold Wagnleitner is associate professor of history at the
University of Salzburg.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wagnleitner, Reinhold, 1949
[Coca-colonisation und Kalter Krieg.
English]
Coca-colonization and the Cold War: the
cultural mission of the United States in
Austria after the Second World War / by
Reinhold Wagnleitner; translated by Diana
M. Wolf.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.)
and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2149-7 (cloth: alk. paper).
ISBN 0-8078-4455-1 (pbk.)
1. AustriaCivilizationAmerican
influence. 2. AustriaIntellectual life20th
century. 3. United StatesRelations
Austria. 4. Propaganda, AmericanAustria.
5. AustriaRelationsUnited States. I. Title.
91.2.W3413 1994
DB
303.48' 2436073dc20 93-38431
CIP
98 97 96 95 94 5 4 3 2 1
FOR DIANA
Contents
Foreword to the American Edition ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
1 The Problem of America as Artifact of European 8
Expansion
2 The Development of United States Cultural Foreign 46
Policy
3 United States Press Politics in Austria 84
4 "Howling and Noise": United States Radio Politics in 108
Austria
5 The U.S. Information Centers, the U.S. Publications 128
Section, and U.S. Literature in Austria
6 Psychology instead of a Teacher's Pedestal: The U.S. 150
Education Division, Exchange Programs, and the
Propagation of the English Language
7 Drama and Music from the United States 166
8 The Influence of Hollywood 222
9 The Result: The Children of Schmal(t)z and Coca-Cola 275
Notes 297
Bibliography 331
Index 363
A section of illustrations begins on page 173
Page ix
Foreword to the American Edition
We only have to teach German kids how to play baseball
then they'll understand the meaning of democracy.
An American general in Berlin, autumn 1945
When I was born in Upper Austria in 1949, Mauerkirchen was a
small, sleepy market townbut it was also situated in the American
occupation zone of Austria. Although during the period of occupation,
194555, the U.S. Army was barely visible in our part of the woods,
we children religiously waited for the best action of the year: the
annual U.S. Army maneuvers and our rations of chewing gum.
For us, the horrors of the Second World War were in the distant past,
but still they were everywhere. Our everyday experience included
quite a few mutilated men, and for the nicer ones we picked up
cigarette butts from the streets. It seemed absolutely normal that most
men and many women looked old and tiredand not only because we
were children and they wore dark clothes. But what a contrast when
we saw pictures of GIs or, even better, met "the real thing." Somehow,
they clashed with our images of soldiers. They looked young and
healthy. Contrasted to our poverty, they seemed incredibly rich, and
many were generous to us kids. Of course, their casualness and
loudness were proverbialbut we admired them precisely for that.
Although most families with a Nazi past repressed and hid this past
from the children, the war remained everywhereand we did not need a
war memorial to be reminded of the many ghosts roaming our streets.
Unspoken Nazi-past or not, it was clear that most adults objected to
those crass boys from across the Atlantic. "We" had indeed lost the
war, but look at those uncultured American guys who chewed gum
and put their feet on the table. (This, it seemed, was the utmost
crime!) How could an army manned by such unmilitaristic, childish,
and undisciplined boys (even blacks!) win a war, especially one
against Germany! A few of us children, however, secretly suspected
that an army advancing to the rhythm of swing music deserved to win
the war. It did not help our elders to warn us that if we chewed gum
we would look like Americans: that was exactly what we wanted to
look like!
In my family, I was spared this routine of Austrian cultural superiority
versus American cultural inferiority mostly for two reasons. First, my
parents and grandparents had not been Nazis, and my mother loved
American music,
Page x
while my father enjoyed American action movies, which had returned
to Mauerkirchen's little cinema in the wake of the U.S. Army. Second,
a traumatic incident in my father's childhoodhe had lost one foot in a
car accident at age thirteenspared him the fate of having to fight in the
Second World War. It was rather rare, indeed, to grow up in Austria
during the 1950s with parents like that. (Of course, for most of my
teenage friends, American pop culture became the major vehicle of
protest against their parents.)
While our household was uncharacteristically open to what parents of
my friends despised as "American trash," I was far from being the
vanguard of American popular culture in our family. It is my only
brother, Günter, born in 1940, who has to take the main responsibility
for my un-Austrian behavior. Günter is extremely musical. He started
to take piano lessons at age four and passed the entrance exam to the
Vienna Boys Choir at age sixwe still possess a 78 shellac recording of
Günter's voice, which my father had ordered for this occasion. But in
the end, my parents decided against sending him to Vienna. They did
not want to hand over their six-year-old boy to a boarding school,
especially to a boarding school in Vienna, which was surrounded by
the Soviet occupation zone. (After all, we lived in the Goldenen
Westen of Austria.)
Yet, my parents had no idea that they built the perfect stage for
American music for their still-unborn second child. Günter, who had a
voracious appetite for any kind of good music, did more than simply
improve his playing of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Brahms,
Schubert and Strauss; he also discovered Frank Sinatra and Ray
Charles, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. And when he discovered
rock 'n' roll in the middle of the 1950s, nothing remained the same.
While he worked the piano and made our living room rock like a
jailhouse, I would work the matchboxes and pretend I was something
like a rock 'n' roll drum machine. Many were the sighs of my poor