The restart in Austrian academia and the postwar-reality

The study discusses the origins and the formation of U.S. reorientation strategies for post-war democratization and its implementation in the aftermath of World War II, exemplified by case studies of university and academic reconstruction in Austria in the years from 1945 to 1955. Based on extensive primary sources, the study illustrates and analyzes both the changes and the specific implementations of U.S. reorientation strategies, starting with the war years and continuing up to U.S. propaganda strategies at the outbreak of the Cold War and its subsequent ramifications of post-war-democratization. After the end of World War II, the initial civil intent of U.S. reorientation was to foster a sustainable peacebuilding process by means of intellectual disarmament and a set of long-term democratization measures. Due to the pragmatic approach of the military occupation, the focus of reorientation narrowed first to the limited repertoire of educational and academic policy before ultimately becoming a propaganda instrument of the Cold War. Even in its core area, complete denazification, the educational experiment of mentally reorienting society had only a very limited effect. In the wake of the U.S. military authority`s policy of "non-interference" in academic policy in Austria from 1945-1955, the university and the academic system was to a great extent restored rather than reconstructed with hardly any control or supervision by the Allied Forces. A general shift of US reorientation politics took place concurrently to the outbreak of the Cold War; underpined with elements of psychological warfare and propaganda, this turnaround` did not act as an open change of direction but as a successivly strengthening of ideological core elements of reorientation, which had been previously drafted with focus on the democratic role model of the United States of America. The original concepts on reorientation or reeducation, which worked as a blueprint, date back to an internal American debate, successive evolving ideas for a democratic reeducation after the end of WW II. The shift in US reorientation reduced cultural exchange to nothing more than an ideological-propagandistic "struggle for minds", therefore marginalizing denazification. However, the USFA Education Division somehow still managed to find itself in pole position in regard to the new paradigm. Practicing an Austrified position of total "non-interference" to their Austrian `colleagues`, the US authorities on site anticipated what then became the silver bullet in the "Struggle for Austrian Minds" with their friendly support, which, with its moral as well as material benefits, mostly propagated the American Way of Life.