Panic

From his excursion to the Paris Peace Conference, handsome Foreign Minister Dr. Karl Gruber returned to Vienna with the undimmed conviction that he was Austria's brightest young statesman. About the first thing he encountered, back in Austria, was a band of irate Tyrolese in leather shorts, who called him a traitor and spat on him (because he had agreed to South Tyrol's so-called autonomy under Italian tutelage). Gruber knocked down one of his assailants, but the homecoming was spoiled.

The disagreeable episode was only the first of several. Gruber's own party colleagues were annoyed with him for taking too much of the limelight in Paris. Parliamentary committees were mad at him for failure to report home before taking .Austria's first major foreign policy decision. When he faced Parliament last week, the delegates did not exactly spit on him, but it was a close-thing. Gruber managed to keep his job by the skin of his teeth.

Split Hopes & Fears. Handsome Karl's tribulations were typical of the mounting confusion in which Austria finds herself these days. Her precarious position between East and West is causing schizophrenic hopes and fears.

On the one hand, Austria hoped for U.S.-British aid and dreaded being left in the lurch by the West. A simple news item like General Mark Clark's confinement to Walter Reed Hospital (because of an ear infection) created a minor sensation. Jittery Chancellor Leopold Figl, formerly a model of imperturbability, inquired whether Clark's illness was not political.

On the other hand, every new U.S. move to aid Austria and check Russian encroachments provoked shivers of Austrian fear that Russia might take offense. Thus reports that Gruber planned to negotiate an Austro-Italian customs union, as a first step toward further entangling alliances with the West, caused a political panic which subsided only slightly when Gruber publicly repudiated extreme Westward orientation and came out for a middle course.

The Double Game. With exemplary skill, Communist propagandists in Austria played on every Austrian fear and vexation, made the most of every Allied slip. The Communist press rang with patriotic fervor and anti-Gruber denunciations over the Tyrol question. No mention was made of the fact that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had consistently opposed Austria's demands for South Tyrol.

Talk of the Italian customs union was immediately used by the Communists for scare stories about Western "economic expansion in central and southeastern Europe." General Clark's remark that Russian cooperation in Austria might be enforced by making a proposed U.S. loan applicable only to Austria's western zones was promptly blown up to mean a threat of "partition."

Only two months ago, the West had enjoyed clear moral and political superiority in Austria by its strong stand against Russian seizures of Austrian industry, farmlands and Zistersdorf oil. But so devastating were the effects of Communist propaganda 'and the West's own fumbling, wavering policy that now the U.S.-British advantage was all but erased. By week's end, Austrian politicians were almost afraid of getting the U.S. loan they had dreamed about since liberation.

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