Cold War Vienna and the Great Disentanglement of Central and Eastern Europe

• In Event: New Approaches to Displacement, Citizenship, and Statelessness in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe and the Balkans

Abstract

At the Second World War’s end, Vienna became a crossroads for former Ostarbeiter returning home, Jewish survivors, German expellees, Soviet POWs, and individuals fleeing the new communist regimes in Eastern Europe. All this movement unfolded in a city divided into four occupation zones, where Cold War tensions played out at the level of high diplomacy and in the streets and urban culture. This paper examines the former Habsburg capital as a critical transit hub for multiple waves of displaced persons in the aftermath of World War II, revealing how individuals who had often been on opposing sides during the war now found themselves living side by side while being swept up in a new political conflict: the Cold War. Tracing their movements and encounters within Vienna’s shifting geopolitical landscape, I explore how displaced persons leveraged the city's occupied status to forge new identities, navigate shifting legal and economic landscapes, and negotiate their place in a reconfigured Europe. I argue Vienna was not just a waystation for thousands of migrants. It was also where East-Central Europe was remade into an ethnically homogeneous region, as migration and displacement became tools of postwar nation-building.

Author

• Cristina Florea, Cornell U