"The Austrian boss was so rigid, and the American so casual..."

"At the first place where I worked in Austria after the war, the boss was a tyrant. It seemed to me that he was some old relic left over from the Monarchy. We had to stand up when he entered the office and say `Guten Morgen, Herr Direktor.' I was 19 years old at the time, and this kind of thing made a deep impression on me, even though I didn't like it at all. And then, one time in the USA in the hospital in which I later worked, the boss called me into his office: `Why do you behave so funny?' He, for example, would always let the others go first into the elevator. For me, that was embarrassing. For me, he was the boss and deserved precedence and I was just a simple employee. `Here, you're the lady, and I'm the man,' he said. This is something I've never forgotten: The Austrian boss was so rigid, and the American so casual."

Elisabeth C., born 1931. Experienced the end of the war in Salzburg, married an American soldier in 1954 and moved to the USA with him. (Boltzmann-Institut/Steinocher-Fonds Interview Archive, Salzburg)