Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945

摘要

On 4 April 1945, the Soviet Red Army began its final assault on Vienna. Five days later, after sporadic-at times fierce-fighting, Soviet troops penetrated the inner city. The battle lasted for several more days in the suburbs, until the withdrawal of the last remnants of the German forces. The Red Army saw some seventeen thousand soldiers killed in action. In the first days and weeks after the battle ended, Soviet troops committed systematic sexual violence against women and girls across the city. The Allied occupation of Austria formally commenced on 27 April 1945. Allied bombing and street-to-street fighting during the siege left large areas of Vienna in ruin. Many of Austria's other cities and much of the nation's transportation infrastructure were also partially or extensively destroyed. The occupation, however, created problems for the postwar Austrian authorities that were far more daunting than the mere need for rebuilding. Like neighboring Germany, the country was divided into four zones, each administered by one of the four victorious powers: the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Vienna, like Berlin, was similarly divided. But the occupation zones did not partition the city as neatly as was the case in Berlin. The twenty-two urban districts were carved into seven sectors: two British (which were not contiguous), two Soviet (also not contiguous), one French, one American, and an "international sector" in the inner city. Given Vienna's siting in the eastern end of Austria, in the Soviet zone, the city's outlying suburbs also came under Soviet occupation. This situation, with its attendant problems and complications, lasted for a full decade, until the signing in July 1955 of the Staatsvertrag, the Austrian State Treaty, which returned Austria once more to full sovereignty.