"Oh, thou my Austria", Part Three: Cold War-Era Leoben, Styria
Another set of vintage postcards in both b/w and full colour!
To conclude this mini-series about Leoben, Austria, we’ll check out some of the town’s main features as they existed during the Cold War. In case you missed the first two instalments, I’m linking them here:
With these below images, we’ll conclude, for the time being, our foray into Styria in Austria, and we’ll soon travel elsewhere.
Cold War-Era Leoben, in Black and White
In terms of the town’s pictorial canon, the top spot certainly goes to the Schwammerlturm, the ancient main gate tower near the Mur bridge.
We’ve already seen a few images, and there’s a bunch more in the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection:
Neither of these postcards is dated, but I think they provide a few more glimpses into that particular feature of Leoben.
Above, Leoben’s Main Square (Hauptplatz), mailed in 1957; below, if one follows the trolley bus line to Leoben’s “suburb”, Donawitz, this is what it looked like in 1960.
Leoben In Full Colour
Above, Leoben’s Baroque Hacklhaus with the Miners’ Fountain (Bergmannsbrunnen) in front of it; below, Leoben’s parish church St Mary’s, founded in 1149. Both postcards were mailed in the 1960s.
Above, an aerial view mailed in 1980; below, Leoben’s main square, c. 1964. Note the Miners’ Fountain in the forefront, with the Baroque Hacklhaus to its left (but it is not shown on the below postcard).
Below, as a concluding homage, a composite postcard showing a few of Leoben’s sights:
Mailed in 1977, the top left image is a total view; the bottom left shows the “new city hall” (which is not as pretty as the old one). On the right-hand side, the VOEST Alpine’s “innovation hub” (Forschungszentrum)—which points to Leoben’s long history as a mining town (hence the Miners’ Fountain) and one of the two towns in Austria that revolutionised steel production worldwide: in English, it’s known as the “basic oxygen steelmaking” process while in German it is referred to as “Linz-Donawitz-Verfahren”. According to Wikipedia, almost three quarters of all steel worldwide (as of 2013) are produced like this.
As an aside, VOEST, a short version of the Vereinigte Österreichische Eisen- und Stahlwerke, was the Third Reich’s “gift” to Austria. Begun as the Heinrich Göring-Werke in Linz, Upper Austria, after 1945 the iron works were hotly contested (demanded by the USSR that considered it “German property” and demanded it in lieu of reparations). This paragraph cannot do justice to the long, twisted, and sad history. The linked Wikipedia piece is as good an overview as any; VOEST still employs close to 50K workers, it’s one of Europe’s few remaining profitable steel works, and, courtesy of this history, it’s also clear that its workforce made Linz a strong socialist/social-democratic bastion after the Second World War.
That’s it for now—we’ll leave Leoben now and travel on.
Reminds me so much of Berchtesgaden. I went on a walking tour and they showed us all the 'good stuff' lol.
Such a beautiful country and yet I see that if I became a citizen and lived there I'd be joining a people who have not only no shame about the 1930's and '40's, I'd be "sleeping with the enemy". The current Left nuttiness seems like a defense mechanism against the reality of Nazism in their ancestors. In America, Nazis are a far far right fringe. What a strange world this is where freedom loving Americans must tolerate the trashing of our cities and public transportation and gun violence. I thought I could ESCAPE the violence apparent everywhere all the time by becoming a part-time ex-pat, but there seems to be no escaping the terrible things wrought by national governments on their people.