AUSTRIA: PAWN OF POWER POLITICS?
Hargrove, Elizabeth
Austria: Pawn Of Power Politics? By ELIZABETH HARGROVE POOR LITTLE AUSTRIA! Now we start juggling with, that unfortunate country again. The Great Powers decreed at the Moscow Conference that she...
...Later, the city provided milk...
...There were no jobs and no food...
...Thousands of us have studied music and medicine there, and each one leaves a large segment of his heart behind him...
...But what about all the forests in those days before the Nazis...
...He promptly started a Nazi harangue and was escorted to the German frontier by the Austrian police...
...All three had a harder life when the trio had to get along each by itself...
...Fine ladies, wives of officers, went on the streets at night to earn bread for their husbands and children...
...Once, on returning from Switzerland, I conversed with a Swiss gentleman, as we descended from the Arlberg pass...
...After the Anschluss came the "secret" voting for the Nazi Party...
...Such a daring demonstration of Austrian independence acted as a complete blight on the sacred "Blutbruederschaft" emotion...
...There were a lot of factions, all wanting something different...
...Machine-guns were fired at all the model workmen's dwellings, the excuse being that they were built as disguised fortresses by the Socialists...
...An emperor without an empire is an anachronism...
...It is an Alpine country, and it was left little agricultural land by the Treaty of Versailles...
...No amount of manipulation could make exports balance imports...
...So they built, all over the city, those famous model workmen's dwellings that architects from all over the world came to study and to imitate...
...Great things come out of great suffering...
...What do six million poverty-stricken people want of a court and pageantry...
...Austria got the worst of the Versailles dismemberment, with its huge head and little body, too top-heavy to stand on its poor feet, and much of the rest of Europe helping to topple it over...
...It must import flour...
...At one time, England and France, thoughtful for their investments, put in the famous mayor of a Dutch city who had worked a miracle of order and tax reform in his home town...
...In return for agreeing to pcotect Austria from Hitler, Mussolini demanded that they get rid of the Vienna Socialist Government...
...They are more like Americans than any other Europeans...
...Those two temperaments do not hit it off so well...
...The large circle, they said, was for the near-sighted, and the small circle for the far-sighted voter...
...Some of those Austrian architects are now at work helping to plan the rebuilding of postwar London...
...That little impoverished land was the only European nation to create a truly constructive postwar program after World War I. They argued that to have people living in slums and dark, underground basements, in unsanitary quarters, caused sickness and fostered criminals, and filled insane asylums, and they believed that institutions to care for and correct all such sick and unbalanced humans cost more money to the state than to get rid of the causes...
...Unless we have a federation of all states, perhaps hitching Austria to Switzerland would be kindest...
...The Prince of Wales, asked on a subsequent visit what he would like to see, embarrassed the Socialist Government's successors by asking to see the "Marxerhof," the most interesting of the workers' buildings...
...Can't the "statesmen" remember that dismembered Austria, as it was before the Anschluss with Germany, was not, and could never hope to be, self-supporting...
...So they trumped up their little revolution and the Socialists were not ready...
...A prominent educator told me that his "secret" ballot was made on a table directly under the eyes of the Nazi official...
...On the ballots the voter had to put an X in a large circle "for," or in a small circle an X "against...
...He drew a kingly salary but nothing happened except another lump sum for Austria to shoulder, and a lot of resentment...
...Where in this world was there such a musical atmosphere as Vienna and Salzburg...
...Liquidating The Socialists Austrians are a highly cultured, friendly, and lovable people...
...Many received the dole—another burden to meet...
...There were only the Government monopolies of the railroads and salt mines to fall back on, besides certain luxury export industries and the tourist traffic, attracted by mountains and music...
...Vienna, formerly the capital of a huge empire, Was left by the Treaty of Versailles, saddled with an army, navy, and government pension list that no country of six million people could hope to finance...
...That nation understands living peaceably with its four races under one family roof...
...Yes, and don't forget the flags—swastikas plastered everywhere, awaiting the rejoicings after the '"secret" voting...
...t A Job For The Swiss No Austrian wanted to be under Fascist Italy that I knew of...
...This "Declaration on Austria" that we have now concocted for them in Moscow sounds like another starvation scheme...
...but not before they had all the ma-chihe-guns and tanks in position, and had cracked people's nerves with unbroken airplane buzzing over Vienna...
...The reason for this drastic measure...
...So if England and America want to give independence to Austria, they will have to pay for Austrian bread for as long as they intend to force the isolation...
...Austria Cannot Live Alone England and France, most solicitous (lest Germany come to the rescue), made Austria a huge loan, at an exhorbitant rate of interest...
...So what to do with Austria, that cannot raise its own bread from mountain forest-clad slopes...
...And at least half of them did not want to be bossed by Germans either...
...Even a friend who knew the whole family intimately and had carried him about as a baby, told me she did not think a Hapsburg suitable for a reduced Austria...
...University students threatened to kill him, if he were put on the throne...
...The world has need of Austrian kindness and culture...
...Russia ruined Austria's forestry trade, at home and abroad, by dumping wood into Austria, worked by convict labor at seven copecks a day (less than seven cents...
...And I never met anyone who wanted Otto of Hapsburg, if it is he we have up our sleeve for them...
...Whole families lay down on the kitchen floor at night and turned on the gas...
...Impoverishment penetrated all classes...
...It became infectious...
...The hard, simple fact is that Austria cannot live alone without support...
...It took a lot of courage to X the far-sighted circle...
...After a lot of mouthing by Germany before annexation about "Blood Brotherhood" with Austria, this tender relationship took the form of closing the German frontier to the 72,000 Germans who annually took their holidays in the Austrian Alps...
...Further, there were threats in the papers to any who dared to vote against the Nazis...
...The Great Powers decreed at the Moscow Conference that she was to be "free and independent...
...The suicide epidemic became so great that the papers had orders to cease printing the number...
...A colossal amount sucked out of that reduced little country, was paid into the pockets of French and English investors...
...Postwar governments repudiated a large part of most pensions...
...This ruined Austrian railways and bankrupted almost every hotel and pension in the mountains...
...Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslavakla were a natural federation of states so far as economic interdependence was concerned, whatever minority groups may have felt about the political side of it...
...Austrian labor could not compete with that, nor was she strong enough to stop the dumping...
...A Nazi Party member was allowed to visit Austria and to make speeches on condition he indulged in no Nazi propaganda, to which condition he agreed...
...Prior to the Anschluss, Austria had a population of about six and a half million...
...Healthy young men sang and played accordians on literally every street corner, yet everything possible was devised to create work...
...He kept exclaiming at the bad quality of the land, saying how much poorer than Switzerland it was...
...As always, Austrians had their little joke...
...Many children went to school without breakfast, and teachers bought them milk, as otherwise they were" too dulled by hunger to learn...
...Understanding Americans called it the "cultural heart of the world...
...The Government, in order to bolster up the ruined wood industry, made each purchaser of a new type of wood-burning stove, a gift of 100 schillings per stove...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 10
