Controlled Freedom

This book presents the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cultural influence of the four Allies on the development of art and media in Vienna after 1945. Never before had the population of Vienna been confronted with international cultural influences so intensively and in such a short space of time as after liberation in 1945. Controlled Freedom: Allied Cultural Policy in Vienna 1945–1955 shines a light on the impact of Allied cultural policy on the visual arts, film, literature and libraries, music and theatre, press photography, print media, radio, and sport. Young artists had their first contact with the international, critical modernism that had been banned under National Socialism. The political aims of the Allied cultural offensive ranged from denazification and constructing a non-German identity to the fight for Austria’s ideological stance in the Cold War.