Abstract
"Is it at all possible to predict when the traces and consequences of this fascist system will be erased from the hearts, brains and minds of our youth?" asked the Austrian politician Franz Kittel after the collapse of the Third Reich (Kittel 1946: 119). This problem moved both the education experts of the Allied powers and those of the newly installed Austrian government. It was clear that children and young people needed special support to find their way in hitherto unknown democratic conditions. Those born after 1930 had consciously experienced only authoritarian regimes with the Ständestaat and the Third Reich. Children were of the opinion that they were German citizens of a "Greater German Reich", as Christine Nöstlinger, born in 1936 and later a writer, makes clear:
