No fewer than a dozen foreign correspondents working for US American
newspapers and news agencies and many established and emerging authors
as well as hundreds of American physicians spent extended periods of
time in Vienna and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s. The study of their
published reports and the literary estates of many visitors (including
their correspondence with friends and their journals) helps to discover
extended networks of friendships. Their accounts show that most of the
American visitors continued to perceive Vienna after the collapse of the
monarchy, and despite recurrent political crises, culminating in the
tragic Civil War of 1934, in conformity with stereotype notions rooted
in the 19th century, as a Mecca of Medicine and Music, and as the city
of cafe culture. Austria was thus in the reports in newspapers and
accounts of the news agencies for a transatlantic public mostly
presented in a positive light. The close contacts of a multitude of
visitors with members of the local elite, often with Jewish backgrounds,
inspired many a roman-a-clef, fictional narratives, poems and also
plays, adapting popular local material and traditions (Thornton Wilder).
While many visitors took an interest in the theory and practice of
psychoanalysis, which they applied in their own lives (H.D.), or
benefitted from the advanced medical school of Vienna, even authors who
had not yet visited Austria (Joseph Freeman) were able to imagine plots
centered on the city and its environment by tapping the rich detailed
material provided in the media and designing a densely depicted Viennese
setting. The friendships which had developed and the networks thus
established were also of great importance for quite a few Austrians who
fled into exile after the catastrophe of the Anschluss. The experiences
of that cohort of transatlantic visitors and the predominantly positive
image of Vienna and Austria re-emerged after the end of World War Two
and continued to exert an influence until well into the 1980s.
