ABSTRACT
Gunther Nenning begins his commemorative volume with fanfare, calling Forum not only “the most significant cultural journal of Austria,” but also the country’s only intellectual periodical which has had “a significant long-term impact in the entire German-speaking lands”. More than that, “until today and probably also tomorrow and the day after tomorrow Forum remains unsurpassed in the variety of its topics, intellectual weight of its authors, and elegance as well as originality of its offerings.” For, as Nenning, stresses in his Introduction, “anti-communism was the hardcore of the good old Forum. Nenning knew better, even when he wrote his piece: the Central Intelligence Agency did indeed finance the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), although he claims that Forum became independent of this source as early as 1962, when he found alternative support “in the deep Austrian well of red-black subsidies and advertisements.”
