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The Arc of History Lecture Series: Austria 1900 - 2020
We are excited to continue our series of lectures launched in 2024, reflecting on Austrian history, identity and creativity over a turbulent 120 year span.
The lectures will be of particular interest to those who have recently acquired Austrian citizenship, or are considering applying.
For new Austrian citizens: In case the event is sold out, please write an email to office@acflondon.org to join the waiting list.
Lecture 6: The Hidden Impact of Allied Cultural Policies and the Austrian Exile Community on Austrian Culture After 1945
By Oliver Rathkolb
Between 1945 and 1955, the four Allied powers (the U.S., U.K., France, and the Soviet Union) took different approaches to cultural policy in Austria. These had a major impact on the art scene, but this influence has largely been overlooked or forgotten. Now, 80 years later, this history is being revisited using an “archaeological” approach to recent history. After Vienna was liberated in April 1945, its people were exposed to more international cultural influences than ever before.
Even before 1945, the Allies had identified culture and the media as important tools for shaping postwar society. In this lecture, Oliver Rathkolb focuses on how these plans affected music, theater, and the media (newspapers, publishing, and radio) in Vienna—especially since the Western Allies only began operating there from September 1945. He explores how Austria’s cultural elites and the public responded to these efforts, and what role this played in removing Nazi ideology and reducing German cultural dominance, while expanding Austria’s cultural identity.
In the second part of the lecture, Rathkolb looks at Austrians who went into exile in Britain during the war. He will highlight how they helped rebuild and internationalise Austrian culture after they returned home, using specific case studies to illustrate their impact.
Oliver Rathkolb, born in 1955, is a former long-standing head and professor at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. He is the author of numerous publications on Austrian and international contemporary and cultural history, editor of the journal zeitgeschichte, as well as chairman of the Vienna Institute for Cultural and Contemporary History and Arts (VICCA) and the academic advisory board of the House of European History in Brussels. His recent publications (Molden publishing house) include Brigitte Hamann's “Hitler's Vienna: The Formative Years of a Dictator,” reissued together with Johannes Sachslehner, and previously “Schirach: A Generation Between Goethe and Hitler". He also co-edited the publication "Controlled Freedom - Allied Cultural Policy in Vienna 1945-1955", published in 2025.
Katherine Klinger is the initiator of the lecture series The Arc of History. Previously, she was director of Second Generation Trust, a UK-based charity specialising in post-Holocaust generational consequences. She organised a number of ground-breaking conferences in London, Berlin and Vienna in the nineties, aimed at bringing together descendants of both victims and perpetrators. Katherine ran the Education Department of the Wiener Holocaust Library for a decade. She has recently acquired Austrian citizenship.
About the Arc of History Lecture Series:
The series commences with the last decades and the onset of Modernity from 1900. This was a profoundly significant period both artistically and intellectually, with far-reaching influence and importance, both nationally and internationally. Against this backdrop, the lectures consider significant Jewish contributions to the period, alongside the darker forces gathering momentum, culminating in the tragic fate of Austrian Jewry and other victims.
Austrian complicity, together with a postwar victim narrative, led many to shun a country that formally had nurtured some of the greatest achievements and minds of the early 20th century. With a growing recognition of the need to reassess its history, Austria finally commenced, in the mid-nineties, its own unique process to repair some of the mid-century rupture. The announcement in 2020, enshrined in law, that all Austrian descendants of NS persecution have the right of citizenship, is an important and significant contribution to this process. To date, over 35,000 people from across the world have acquired Austrian citizenship and it is estimated that the numbers will rise considerably in the next decade.
The final lecture in the series will reflect on the implications and meaning of citizenship in a country where connection has often been associated with tragedy and ambivalence, and many have rarely, if ever, even visited. As a new chapter opens, perhaps a new sense of purpose, opportunity and responsibility emerges.
