[1] Despite his involvement in liberation activism and subsequent imprisonment following the country's incorporation into Hitler's Germany, Riemann found himself identified as a controversialist, or on occasion more simply as an embarrassment, by representatives of the consensual centrist Austrian political mainstream during the postwar decades.
This should be accompanied by the extraction of the Danube and Alpine provinces from the recently enlarged German state, and the re-establishment of an independent Austria, which should also incorporate Bavaria, thereby extending in a northerly direction all the way to the River Main.
By the end of 1945 the Soviet occupiers had acquiesced in the creation of a provisional government under Karl Renner which immediately came into line with the tide of history by endorsing the 1943 Moscow Declarations and repudiating the 1938 annexation.
When he was released from prison Viktor Riemann was already relatively close to home and in July 1945 he became a contributing editor on the newly launched Salzburger Nachrichten (daily newspaper).
"), Reimann wrote that "giving Bertolt Brecht Austrian citizenship [in 1950] shows that our country is still undermined by communism and the Americans are continuing to fund the spiritual Bolshevisation of Austria, exploiting the eager collaboration of certain socialist intellectuals along with the uncertainties and weaknesses of the cultural power-brokers of the [governing (in coalition)] ÖVP ("centre-right Austrian People's Party"),[14][15][a] Throughout his time as an opposition member of parliament, Reimann's increasing public profile seems to have owed more to his continuing work as a journalist than to any contributions he made with his parliamentary work.
He was editor-in-chief of the party's daily newspaper, Österreichische Allgemeine Zeitung, from its launch on 1 December 1949 till April 1950 when publication came to an end for reasons of cost.
The post-1945 Austrian People's Courts were condemned and, some felt, defamed by "Neue Front" over their continuing attention to denunciations received concerning alleged "Nazi-era crimes".
[18] Those who saw Neue Front, its editor in chief, and indeed the VdU itself, as apologists for former National Socialist members and collaborators could be sharply critical, not simply within Austria, but also across the frontier in West Germany where some of the same concerns still resonated.
[3] One source describes his departure from that position a few years later as "noisy" ("geräuschvoll"), possibly because he followed it up with a sensationalist book about the widely revered Vienna State Opera.
[3] In 1972 he became editor-in-chief for the paper's Upper Austria edition, and in 1974 he moved across from Linz to Vienna in order to take charge of the arts and culture section, retaining this position till 1987.
There were findings along the lines that neither the intent nor the spirit of the content were as crudely or overtly antisemitic as some of the material appearing in the gutter press at the same time: that fell far short of a complete exoneration.