In January 1954, the French embassy in Vienna reported to Paris a conversation between Chancellor Julius Raab and a politician from western Austria concerning the State Treaty. Raab is reported to have said: “I'll swallow everything.”—“Ich fresse alles.”

Two questions arise immediately. First: Why was Raab ready to “swallow everything” in order to get the State Treaty? Second: What was this “everything” that Raab was ready to swallow?

To the fi rst question. Th e principal aim of Austria's eff orts to obtain the State Treaty was the termination of four-power control and the withdrawal of the occupation troops from Austria— especially, it needs to be stressed, the withdrawal of Soviet forces. We are used to referring to the “allied” occupation of Austria, yet the “Allies” of World War II had not been allies for some time, at least since 1947–48, and certainly not in 1954 or 1955—even if they cooperated correctly in the “Allied Council.” In terms of military strategy, I deem it useful to speak of the “East-West occupation” of Austria because, de facto, the occupation forces had become part of the two military power agglomerations that had come into being in the course of the Cold War. A secret instruction from the British Foreign Office in 1951 noted that, in peace time, the forces of the Western allies in Austria were not under NATO command; in case of war, however, they would be part of the NATO forces. Since military planning in times of peace obviously prepares for the case of war, it is easy to see that the independence from NATO of the Western occupation forces in Austria has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Robert kann's first book, The Multinational Empire, published in two large volumes in 1950, has become a classic in its field. As Stanley Winters has well said, “It is rare when a scholar's first book establishes its author in the front rank of his field, and it is rarer still when the book remains a standard work for the balance of his lifetime”. In 1964, a considerably enlarged German edition was published.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

From 1950—when Robert Kann first revisited Vienna twelve years after having been driven away from Austria—to the time of his death in Vienna on August 30, 1981, Kann was a man of two countries. For three decades his work spanned America and Austria; he taught, lectured and published on two continents. Kann's influence on historical scholarship both in America and Austria (and beyond) is evidenced by the fact that more of Kann's books were publised both in English and in German translations than those of any other scholar in the field. Let us recall these titles: The Multinational Empire (1950), The Habsburg Empire (1957), A Study in Austrian Intellectual History (1960), The Problem of Restoration (1968), and A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (1974). All of them subsequently appeared in German translation in Austria; thus their impact was doubled.

Perhaps no period of modern history has been more a victim of generalization than the Age of Enlightenment. The worship of reason and progress and belief in the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature are most commonly associated with the 18th century climate of opinion. Many of the stereotypes which have been applied to it have automatically been transferred to Benjamin Franklin. Already to contemporaries of his old age, Franklin seemed the very personification of the Age of Reason. Condorcet, who had known Franklin personally, summed up his description of Franklin's political career as follows: “In a word, his politics were those of a man who believed in the power of reason and the reality of virtue.” In Germany, an admirer was even more enthusiastic: “Reason and virtue, made possible through reason alone, consequently again reason and nothing but reason, is the magic with which Benjamin Franklin conquered heaven and earth.” This is also the judgment of posterity. F. L. Mott and Chester E. Jorgensen, who have so far presented the most acute analysis of Franklin's thought and its relationship to the intellectual history of his time, do not hesitate to call him “the completest colonial representative” of the Age of Enlightenment. Unanimous agreement seems to exist that Franklin was “in tune with his time.”