AUSTRIA: Dangerous Flirtation

Though Viennese thought it a bit odd that handsome Karl Gruber should decide to publish his memoirs when he was only 44, and while he was still Austria’s Foreign Minister, they put it down to his widely mown penchant for remarking on the talents of Karl Gruber. But they were really startled by what the ordinarily suave and discreet Dr. Gruber chose to remember. In the independent Die Presse, which published the Gruber memoirs, there appeared one day a chapter relating how Austrian Communists sat down with leaders of Gruber’s own Catholic People’s Party in 1947 to negotiate a partnership. People’s Party leaders—including, implied Gruber, ex-Chancellor Leopold Figl and the present Chancellor Julius Raab—agreed to force the militantly anti-Red Socialists out of the coalition government and to make a Communist stooge Chancellor, in return for concessions from Moscow. “Such a catastrophe and criminal nonsense must be prevented,” Gruber recalls himself as saying then. He credited himself with telling the Socialists of the plot in time for them to thwart it.

Gruber’s disclosures were greeted with Socialist cheers, but he seemed surprised and hurt when his own party summoned him on the carpet. “I had by no means the intention,” he recanted, “of accusing political persons of the People’s Party . . . of uncertain or unpatriotic attitudes.” But it was too late. The party made Gruber resign the Foreign Ministry, which he has held since war’s end. His probable successor: former Chancellor Figl, Austria’s most beloved politician.

Still undenied, however, are the embarrassing indications that the solidly conservative. Catholic-dominated People’s Party—the favorite of the Western occupiers in Austria—was trying to play house with the Communists. Chancellor Raab, who has been able to make some political capital out of Russia’s recent small concessions to the Austrians, has reportedly planned a trip to Moscow in hopes of “buying” a removal of Soviet occupation forces from the country. According to British Socialist M.P. Richard Grossman, reporting last week from Vienna to London’s left-wing New Statesman and Nation, Raab recently sounded out Russia via New Delhi, to inquire whether the Russians would be prepared to sign the Austrian peace treaty “if Austria pledged itself to complete neutrality.” The reply, through India’s Nehru: “Neutrality not sufficient. Molotov.”