General AAS history
The history of the Austro-American Society is intertwined the histories of various cooperative cultural, academic, business and friendship organizations on both sides of the Atlantic since the beginning of diplomatic relations between Austria and the United States in 1838 under U.S. President Andrew Jackson and Austrian Emperor Franz I. However, the Austro-American Society of today is distinctly traceable to post-WWII Vienna and strategic foreign policies of the U.S.
Within just a few months after the end of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945, the Austro-American Society was founded in Vienna on Sunday, 6 January 1946 under the leadership of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Otto Kauders as its first President and celebrated in a festive ceremony featuring symphonies of Mozart and Brahms. Dr. Kauders was from a prominent family of physicians.
Otto Kauders
There were Jewish ancestors in his family and his wife was Jewish, so after the Anschluß of 1938 he was barred from his position as a psychiatrist and neurologist. He went to the United States and taught for a year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., but returned to Vienna, where he managed to work without a license and survived until the end of the war. Under his leadership and with the intent to promote goodwill and understanding between Austria and the U.S., the newly formed Austro-American Society was a private, non-government initiative praised by the commander of the U.S. occupying forces in Austria, General Mark Clark, who himself later co-founded in the U.S. the American-Austrian Society following the end of Allied occupation in Austria.
Abschied von General Mark W. Clark
In the beginning, the Austro-American Society served to coordinate distribution of much-needed CARE packages to the war-weary and hungry citizens who had lost much of their means of food production. Dr. Kauders led the Austro-American Society only for about eight months before his death, but what he began was already beginning to grow and expand. The main seat of the Austro-American Society remains in Vienna, but today there are regional chapters in Upper Austria, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria and, of course, ours in Tirol.