Word: vienna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Vienna, the tram conductors are cheerful. They are among the few people who know where they are going these days, and they proudly wear the Social-Democratic party flower on their caps-red tin carnations. The trolleys, which are just as red, again rattle through the streets with people hanging like bunches of grapes from the jammed cars. Lilacs and hyacinths are in bloom, white & rose candles stand high and firm in the chestnut trees. You don't have to remember the bodies still buried under the ruins to realize that all the flowers amid Vienna's dead...
...Vienna's most magnificent squares-the Heldenplatz (Square of Heroes), with its huge statues-is now the front yard of the Russian headquarters. Russian soldiers perch like drab birds on the base of Prinz Eugen's statue and little Russian boys in dark blue school uniforms fire slingshots at passersby. When Vienna's bluish-green dusk settles over the square and forms a backdrop for the lighted clock in the Rathaus tower, and the lilac smells especially sweet, a few moments of real peace descend. Then the Russians turn on their loudspeakers, which blare hit tunes...
...Russians. Vienna is still plastered with red stars and pictures of Lenin and Stalin looking like stuffed dolls; but Viennese hopefully note that fading Russian street signs are not being repainted. Relations with the Russians have changed. Vienna boasts that it has civilized the Russians, has made them wash and pull up their pants, has taught them how to walk like Europeans (some Russians from the steppes had a curious gait, left arm and left foot swinging forward at the same time). Now, whenever shots are heard from Russian barracks, Viennese whisper: "Aha, a Russian who likes the West...
Into all these domains of hunger, into the squares of Vienna and Paris, into the courtyards of Athens and the collective farms of Russia, the picture of the potatoes would find its way. The Communists would see to that. It would help to convince people that the U.S. is unfit for world leadership...
Millions of people, from the Kreuz-Kino in Vienna to the Nya Bio in Reykjavik, know the U.S. only as it is reflected in U.S. movies. Last week, two articulate moviegoers reported how that reflection looked to them...