ABSTRACT
Ingrid Bauer’s “Welcome Ami Go Home”, a collection of critically edited oral interviews, provides a useful documentary supplement to this new group of monographs. Through the creation of a website, Bauer also reached some occupation participants and witnesses who had left the Salzburg area, among them occupation soldiers and Austrian war brides who immigrated to the United States. The US perspective on Austrians and the military mission in Salzburg surfaces only occasionally in Bauer’s study. The testimonies reveal the ambivalence with which Austrians viewed the invaders. While few of the interviewees questioned the victors’ right to take control of Austrian affairs, many laced their comments with an air of cultural superiority, perhaps as a way to compensate for the sense of military and economic inferiority. Young Austrians used the US cultural symbols to break out of the narrow confines of their parents’ tradition of folk music and provincialism.
