The study of the post-World War II Austrian occupation had seen its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, but has not been blessed with major scholarly contributions since. Christian Stifter's ambitious study of American reeducation policies in postwar Austria is a signal contribution to the field. This vast study is structured roughly into three main sections: (1) American World War II discourses about reeducating/reorienting Germans after the war, rooted in a long history of European and American stereotypes of one another; (2) the denazification of Austrian universities after the war, with a focus on the University of Vienna; and (3) the paradigm switch from military to civilian U.S. reorientation programs after 1947, resulting in Cold War psychological warfare and the formation of U.S.-friendly elites through exchange programs.

Stifter summarizes the study of the long-standing European stereotypes of “material” and “uncultured” America and the “mirroring” of these images in the United States. Austrians were usually considered Germans. Hitler's drastic biases of America as “halb verjudet, halb vernegert und alles auf dem Dollar beruhend” built on these older negative stereotypes (88), which in turn fed into the World War II debates in the United States about reconstructing postwar Germany. Because planning for Austria emerged very late in the war, Stifter assumes that discourses on Germany subsume Austria.

Stifter recounts the complex institutional history of American postwar planning that started during World War II. He deftly summarizes two broad strains of American discourses about reorienting the Germans. There were the civilian education discourses based on reeducating the world toward democracy and freedom. This liberal, “soft” approach aimed at teaching the Germans democracy; here, Stifter pulls together an enormous amount of material, some from obscure personal papers. Then there were the “psychiatric-psychological” approaches that aimed at rehabilitating the “mentally sick German people” (158). Such discourses often assumed German collective guilt (ending in the “Morgenthau Plan”). The emigré Frankfurt School's “authoritarian personality” study constituted a crucial starting point for the latter. The Germans needed to learn that they were not the master race (164).

These often sophisticated scholarly discourses conducted in the civilian arena were largely ignored by military planners for postwar Germany. Austria emerged late as a separate field in American military planning, once Allied policy makers determined with the Moscow Declaration of 1943 that Austria would be reconstituted as a separate state. These well-informed civilian discourses were also ignored because of the “helter-skelter” nature of the Roosevelt administration (215). In Stifter's estimation, American military planning for the postwar world was “highly inefficient” (227). For example, JCS 1067, the basic planning document on Germany, did not include any specifics on reeducation. Stifter further asserts that the Pentagon's experiment to reeducate a select group of German prisoners was a “failed experiment” (237). This reviewer disagrees. The basic planning document on Austria, the Military Handbook on Austria, emerged within the context of planning for postwar Germany and ignored reeducation policies. It did envision “inculcating democratic and humanitarian principles” in postwar Austria and eradicating “Nazi influence and doctrine” in the postwar education system (258). Yet, the officials in the Education Division of the American occupation element left the purge of the Nazis from Austrian institutions (denazification) in the hands of Austrian officials from the very beginning. This U.S. doctrine of “non-interference” was a fateful mistake. “Rooting out Nazism and pan-Germanism from the Austrian system” (initially also including “Austrofascism”) was something that university and Ministry of Education officials tried to obstruct every step of the way (280).

“Fundamental reorientation” by way of terminating the tainted personnel in the universities was not the goal of Austrian officials (297). At the University of Vienna, only 12 percent of the Nazi professors were fired—but 77 percent of the denazified professors of the liberal arts faculty made a comeback after a short while (300f). “Homemade provincialism” was the inevitable outcome (658). Little effort was made to bring back professors and emigré intellectuals expelled after the Anschluss in 1938. The highlight of Stifter's study includes the three case studies of Ernst Karl Winter, Hans Kelsen, and Felix Ehrenhaft—all prominent emigrés who would have liked to return to Vienna through permanent or guest appointments. Sektionschef Otto Skrbensky, the reactionary evil genius in the Ministry of Education, blocked all attempts to give these Austrian patriots at least some moral restitution.

With the outbreak of the Cold War and the failure of denazification in 1948, civilians in the State Department took over reorientation policies in Austria and now pushed the American model of democratization, especially through visitors' programs, thus beginning the process of “Americanization” (661) and placing a new premium on psychological warfare.

This book is Stifter's University of Vienna dissertation, seemingly published unrevised. It would have strengthened the book had the prolix prose and the numerous long citations been tamed and shortened.