During her first official visit to the United States in early September, Austria's Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Plassnik's visit was designed to ensure that optimum preparations were made for Austria's European Union (EU) Presidency during the first six months of 2006.

As I write this, my wife, Alice Cary, and I are preparing to leave Vienna sometime this fall, and our time representing the United States in this wonderful and vibrant country will come to an end.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, it left behind devastation of an area the size of England. International aid offers from all over the world began to reach the United States. Austria was one of the first countries to help.

James W. Fulbright and William B. Bader were separated by one generation but united by their fascination for Austria. Fulbright was inspired by the complexity of Europe and created an international student exchange program adapted to the cultural challenges of our multiethnic continent. Bader was one of the first Americans to profit from the Fulbright exchange and has ever since been researching the intricacies of Austria's post-war reconstruction. Both men understood the importance of soft power.

While preparing the draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson searched for those democratic principles and ideas that would best serve the young American nation. There were only few examples of living democracy at hand that helped him in this important undertaking, and the scholar and bibliophile Jefferson consulted all of them.

Elsa Hilger was born in 1904 in Trauenau in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and grew up as the youngest of eighteen children, of which only four survived.

One of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the Balkans took place in the 1990s when major violence erupted in the Serbian province of Kosovo. What started as a guerrilla conflict between Albanian separatists and the Serbian and Yugoslav security forces in 1996, developed into an international conflict between Yugoslavia and NATO. It came to be remembered as the Kosovo war.