Guenter Bischof (ed)

The essays in this book argue that the United States served as a great attraction for economic betterment to Austrian migrants before and during World War I; yet a third of these migrants actually remigrated. Remigration was less likely after World War I as the economic situa-tion deteriorated in Europe and the political situation landscape became  desperate for Jews and the opponents of the Hitler regime. 

The book describes the transatlantic experience of migrants from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary who arrived in the US from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of WWI. Traditional assumptions of mass migration - such as the rapid and easy Americanization of newly arriving Europeans, as well as their strong desire of retaining as much of native culture as possible - have been challenged by recent historical studies.

Günther Anders (1902, Breslau – 1992, Vienna) studied philosophy with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the 1920s. Married to Hannah Arendt he worked in Berlin as a journalist and also wrote antifascist literature.

During the Austrian Presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2006, Latin America was one of the foreign policy foci. All Latin American heads of state gathered in Vienna in April 2006. This is reason enough to draw a summary of the state of research in Austrian – Latin American relations and the various historical, political and cultural interactions, as well as migration movements.