Austria commemorated three anniversaries of major importance in 2005: the liberation from National Socialism in April 1945, the signing of the state treaty in May 1955, and the proclamation of perpetual neutrality in October the same year. Exhibitions, television documentaries and plays, public commemorations, and reenactments marked these anniversaries, sometimes controversially. (For example, in the first draft of the official program, the play 25 Pieces proposed simulations of nightly air raids on the city of Vienna, a proposal that the local government rejected resolutely.) These commemorations served to shape Austrian historical identity as a remarkable success story, according to which the country emerged from social disasters, economic destruction, and political obedience to become a modern, wealthy, and internationally respected state.

In the last two decades, this success story, informed by the ideology of reconstruction policies itself, has found a counternarrative, which focuses on political opportunism in dealing with the Holocaust and specifically on Austrian crimes under National Socialism. The recently published sourcebook Wiederaufbau in Österreich, though focusing on the early period of the Second Republic from 1945–55, refers to those controversial hegemonic tendencies in Austrian public memory. As the editor, Ernst Bruckmüller, claims in his introduction, the aim of the conference preceding the book was to avoid—and thereby modify—stereotypes of “heroic” national reconstruction as well as clichés of ongoing anti-Semitic and authoritarian attitudes in politics and society. While the articles collected here do follow this tendency, they unfortunately present traditional chronological narratives, thereby obscuring the contested frameworks they might refer to.

While the book's subtitle “Rekonstruktion oder Neubeginn?” points to a totalizing approach, the majority of the contributions deal with international affairs. Wolfgang Mueller presents an instructive survey on the Soviet political plans for postwar Austria, based on rare Russian documents, while Siegfried Beer—returning to the kind of broad archival studies that he has previously published—offers important insights into Great Britain's evolutionary concepts for a postfascist, Western-oriented Austria adapted to the changing contexts within Cold War politics. Oliver Rathkolb demonstrates how neutrality, emerging from the country's unique position in a divided Europe after 1945, became a cornerstone of Austrian foreign policy, although one that conservative politicians frequently challenged in discrete negotiations with Social Democrats, who highly esteemed neutrality as a means of a realistic small-state policy. To some extent, even Dieter Stiefel's article on the Marshall Plan strengthens the book's foreign policy outlook. Stiefel sees the European Recovery Program as the final punch to a long-disintegrating Central European common market.

Austrian ambassador Ludwig Steiner's vivid memory of the dramatic turns in negotiating the state treaty frames the book's dominant focus. The arguments offered in this book—according to which Austria's newfound sovereignty emerged through the conflicts among the great powers and their superior strategic planning during the Cold War—do not contradict the mainstream scholarship. Rather, they reinforce the notion that Austrian politicians—as opposed to their German counterparts—could make use of a “window of opportunity,” one produced not least of all by the Soviet Union's self-restraint in an effort to stabilize the borders of its empire. While not wishing to undervalue the paradigms of diplomatic history that inform these studies, one would also like to see descriptions of how reconstruction, or “Neubeginn,” as the books title suggests, affected foreign policy. Is it possible to integrate the analysis of the struggle for a state treaty and that of an inner “normalization”—including the problematic reintegration of National Socialists, authoritarian corporatism, etc.—into one conceptual framework, for example, through political theories of sovereignty? And if so, what are the consequences for today's political debates with their conflicting tendencies of patriotism and diversity? This is particularly relevant in light of the significant appeal to patriotism observed in recent controversies, such as the sanctions of the European Union (EU) in 2000 following the entry of the populist Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs into government.

Unusual objects of investigations often serve for a broader understanding of historical processes. This is the case with Gernot Heiss's article on the film 1. April 2000, a science fiction travesty subsidized by the Austrian government in 1952 in support of state treaty negotiations. In this film, a future United Nations tribunal judges Austria's alleged criminal past to (finally) acknowledge the country's harmless and pastoral character. While Austria's entanglement in National Socialist aggression forms the discreet background of the story, the film ultimately presents postwar Austria as an imagined community of universal human values and high culture. Together with Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner's and Gabriele Kaiser's critical depictions of cultural policy in their respective essays on public theaters and city planning, Heiss's article points to the constraints of the reconstruction period and beyond, when the new national identity strictly opposed all modernist developments. These contributions show how both conservatives and Social Democratic elites sought to maintain control over social and cultural developments toward diversity. But here, too, one would like to see broader theoretical approaches that might relate analyses of power structures, mentalities, and decision making in the postwar and postfascist period. Such theoretical approaches include Göran Therborn's thesis of a long-term European civil war between gnosticism and Enlightenment, Dan Diner's idea of a passing era of “Weltbürgerkrieg,” or, closer to the topic of “reconstruction/re-start,” David Harvey's concept of Fordism and contested space. Such perspectives, of course, cannot be ascribed to single authors but are bound to the efforts of whole communities of researchers.