Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)
L'udovit Hallon - Miroslav Londák: Sources and Possibilities of Research on Slovak-Austrian Economic Relations after the Second World War
Cudovit Hallon - Miroslav Londàk Bank the authority of the privileged companies for Slovakia were passed to the statewide privileged companies seated in Prague. By this plan independent developments of foreign-trade relationships of Slovakia were discontinued. Archive materials of the privileged companies for Slovakia offer a special possibility to monitor the foreign trade of Slovakia but only during the short period from 1948 to 1950. They are placed in the files of the Slovak Tatra Bank in ANBS. However, the discarding of archive materials essentially narrowed the volume of sources for research. The character of trade relationships between Austria and Slovakia 1945-1950 The end of the war and the postwar economic decline resulted in a deep fall in foreign trade on an international scale, as well as between the renewed Austria and Slovakia in the new Czechoslovakia. Difficulties in mutual trade relationships were deepened by specific problems in Austria, which was in the early postwar period financially insolvent and the power of its governmental institutions was limited. Trade contacts of Austria with foreign countries had to be approved by representatives of all four occupation powers. In both renewed states product exchange was also limited by other red-tape barriers. The volume of the specific trade between Austria and the whole Czechoslovakia reached only 35 million crowns in exports to Austria and 46 million crowns in imports from May to December 1945.7 During the following two years the volume of product exchange grew rapidly. However, mutual trade relationships gradually decreased under the influence of new negative economic-political factors. In Slovak-Austrian trade after 1945 supplies for the army were stopped but the exchange of traditional commodities continued. Probes into the archive files from the postwar period, which we have at disposal in Slovakia, suggest that the traditional structure of mutual trade from the beginning of the 20th century was kept until the end of the 1940s. Archive materials of contemporary public financial institutions, foreign departments of commercial banks and foreign trade companies confirm that starving Austria during 1945-1947 needed especially food from Slovakia, for which it supplied some raw materials and finished products in exchange. We have a concrete example of the Frutex Company at disposal, which arranged the bulk of Slovak foreign trade with food. At the end of 1945 this company managed to sign agreements about the export of great volumes of vegetables to Austria. Since the trade groups in Austria were insolvent it included mainly compensational product exchange and exports on the basis of state guarantees. In the economic report of Frutex for the year 1946 the company 7 Czechoslovak foreign trade 1945. In: Statistickà priruCka Slovenska (Statistical Handbook of Slovakia) (1947), p. 230. 296
