Die Zeitschrift “PLAN” is one of those rare volumes that exceeds the promise of its title. Originating in a 2015 University of Vienna dissertation, this in-depth study focuses on the short-lived literature and culture magazine Plan, edited by Otto Basil, which was central to Austrian culture’s reemergence after World War II. The magazine had had a brief prewar run of three issues in 1938, but then resumed publication between October 1945 and 1948, for a total of eighteen issues.

In Desiree Hebenstreit’s account, Plan emerged out of the rubble to reassemble important voices from three generations of intellectuals. It was an important voice in the (re)emergence of “Austrian” culture, identity politics, and the careers of three generations of writers. Her work tracks how Germanists have conceived of the era’s national culture, politics, and collective identity while leading her readers into new visions about the historical evidence and cultural archives produced in an era during which the nation was trying to bridge the space between its pasts and future identity as a culture-producing site. Plan represented an editorial team trying to reassemble their culture by setting a wide range of voices into dialogue, rather than proclaiming a “new” era of literature and culture.

Hebenstreit charts courses through these discussions about Austria’s status as a nation and a cultural space, first by tracking inherited ideas about “Austrian” culture as part of the materials used in these discussions. Thereafter, she compares these discussions as they reappeared after 1945 to scholars’ accounts, using Plan as an archive to sketch the actual historical and aesthetic networks that these scholars have canonized—and to open new questions and expose largely unconsidered nuances of vibrant debates that have been obscured (willfully, as cultural politics, or unwittingly, because of information that only became public after canonical accounts arose). Hebenstreit thereby offers a treasure trove for future researchers, showing the stakes for producing culture in this fraught historical space and setting into context a combination of historical documentation about initiatives (government, artistic, popular), source materials (especially benchmark publications), biographical snapshots of significant voices and agents (within various debates), and critiques of our historical memory.

Hebenstreit’s chapters each address “identity discourses” wherein core players in the culture industries assessed the politics of their projects. Each throws light on lacunae in historical narratives and suggests new ways of understanding the legacies of Central Europe’s financial and national collapse and how Nazi-era cultural politics still resonated in the debates surrounding its emerging nation-states. Each chapter is also copiously footnoted to highlight both familiar and rarely cited documentation, especially archival and multimedia sources beyond the more familiar published records.

After an introduction setting up important theories about identity and memory, chapter 2 offers Hebenstreit’s Begriffliche und theoretische Überlegungen about theories and practice of identity studies, including national identity, collective memory, and the role of institutions such as literary groups. Chapter 3 continues this setup by reviewing the scholarly research literature on Österreichische Identität und österreichische Nation, divided between one section about pre-1945 debates reaching back into Austria-Hungary and then a second for the 1945–1948 era of Plan’s brief revival when Austria’s survival was most at risk and most challenged as an option. Particularly successful is her decision to break the latter into sections representing different archives and varying professional communities conceived as interest groups: “historical-political,” “sociological-empirical,” and “literary studies.”

Subsequent chapters pursue a content analysis of Plan to unfold how these cultural-identity and political discussions actually played out. Chapter 4 historicizes these cultural debates as they emerged in various public spheres: in politics (taking up major political actors from Austria’s communist party [KPÖ]), in the press (including reviews of Plan), and in individual memories about Austrian identity debates. She projects these debates onto the era’s political discourses (guided by work by scholars like Ruth Wodak [see 78]) to sketch a political field quite different from that in the Federal Republic of Germany. These debates addressed existing problems of victims and perpetrators as political actors (TäterInnenshaft, not Mitläufer, and Mitschuld rather than metaphysical guilt). Chapter 5 amplifies this approach by addressing Plan through the decisions made by the editorial staff, using their biographical situations to uncover the ideologies associated with terms like inner emigration (including Otto Basil’s own case), remigration (returning to Austria), and “äussere Emigration,” as issues about balance and Belastung (culpability for action, not metaphysical guilt).

Noteworthy is chapter 6’s account of the Austrian government’s 1946 celebration of the “750-year anniversary” of “Austria’s” founding, as an attempt to connect with older identity constellations (114 and passim). In several issues, Plan dedicated space to current cultural and political issues, as Austriaca. Thus Hans Weigel addressed “federalism” in culture (supporting theaters in each Land), Wilhelm Fürtwangler’s tenure at the Vienna Opera, and the government’s decision to allot scarce paper resources to publishing Josef Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte (118). In the literary sphere, Hebenstreit details the cases of Josef Nadler, Hans Carossa, Heimito von Doderer, Josef Weinheber, Karl Heinrigh Waggerl, and Arnolt Bronnen, and then introduces younger writers and texts that did not get published during the war. Importantly, Plan questioned the positions of refugee writers by addressing the cases of Thomas Mann and Karl Kraus (72 ff.), thus challenging Friedrich Torberg’s belief about what constituted resistance. Even more critically, Hebenstreit addresses the various situations of Jewish writers, including Hermann Hakel, a refugee writer who returned to Vienna in 1947, others who did not return (or want to), and important voices of the era (Theodor Kramer, and Hans Weigel). Plan confirms that scholars need to acknowledge the nuance of the complicated situation of Austria’s cultural re-emergence.

Hebenstreit concludes her tour de force with an extensive bibliography and an index of names that will allow readers to track these issues beyond Plan. This volume needs to be on the shelf of everyone working on Germanophone literature as a model of how to recapture the role of “culture” in the politics of post-1945 European reconstruction.