Waldheim Waltz The scandal that changed Austria
IT WAS appropriate, if perhaps only in a rather ghoulish sense, that the celebrated documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann meets me to discuss her magnificent must-see new movie, The Waldheim Waltz, in a Viennese coffee house situated on a square named for a worldfamous antisemite: the former mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger.
Whether in films like 1987’s The Paper Bridge, inspired by her family’s migration during the 1930s, or 1996’s East of War about atrocities committed by the German army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, the ghosts of Austria’s past and Jewish history stalk much of her work.
Now, with The Waldheim Waltz set to play the UK Jewish Film Festival, the spectre of Nazism looms large once more.
The Waldheim affair—the subject of Beckermann’s lucid and thoughtprovoking new film—was a hinge moment in Austrian history. It was while campaigning for Austria’s presidency in March 1986 that the World Jewish Congress (WJC) revealed former United Nations secretary general Kurt Waldheim had lied about his wartime service.
Though Waldheim said in his autobiography and elsewhere that his military career ended in 1942 after he was wounded on the eastern front, the WJC found that between 1942 and 1944, Waldheim had served as a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and sent thousands of Greek
Jews to their deaths.
Though Waldheim never personally committed a war crime, historians believe he was at the very least morally complicit in them and as Beckermann’s film shows these revelations, which Waldheim continued to deny all the way to his final election victory in June 1986, split
Austrian society. The Waldheim affair brought to the surface a great deal of antisemitism that had hitherto lain dormant. With time, though, the shame of the affair allowed for the first real and true discussion of Austria’s Nazi past. In 1991, then-chancellor Franz Vranitsky first acknowledged the culpability of Austrian people in the crimes of the Holocaust. “Thanks to Waldheim, Austria changed for the better,” Beckermann tells me.
The Waldheim affair also gave birth to a new generation of political activists, which at the time included Beckermann, who was part of the anti-Waldheim New Austria movement. Their symbol was a four-metre tall wooden horse, designed by the sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka. It represented not only Waldheim’s lies about his service — Fred Sinowatz, chancellor at the time of the Waldheim affair, ironically quipped that Waldheim wasn’t a member of the SA, just his horse — but the widespread suppression of Austria’s Nazi past. Armed with her camera, Beckermann captured not only the nascent anti-Waldheim movement but also the tense atmosphere in the country at-large. Her contemporaneous footage forms a critical part of the movie’s narrative and the origins of The Waldheim Waltz.
“I found this VHS cassette in my library, sitting on a shelf, and watched it with some young people and I must say I was quite shocked when I saw my own material,” she tells me. “At the time, we were used to this kind of language”— seemingly ordinary people indulging in the worst kind of anti-Semitism to people’s faces —“but today people wouldn’t speak that way in the streets.”
It was shocking, too, as the young people whom Beckermann showed her footage were simply too young to remember the Waldheim affair. Their interest in her material was the spur she needed to dig into the past anew, marrying her own archival footage — a very specific Austrian perspective on the Waldheim affair — with international clips from British, American, and French television, reminding the viewer how important outside voices such as the WJC were to airing Waldheim’s lies.
Beckermann says that she became part of the anti-Waldheim movement in 1986 “because I grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and I suffered a lot, not only from antisemitism, but from living in this bubble of taboos and lies about Austria.” Having convinced themselves that they were the first victims of National Socialism, Austrians simply didn’t talk about “the real victims — there was no place for Jews, for Roma, for homosexuals. Nobody dared to use the word ‘Jew’— only in a negative or antisemitic way. To speak normally about Jews was impossible,” Beckermann adds. “More than unpleasant, it was painful.”
Born in Vienna in 1952, Beckermann said that Jews of her generation “criticised our parents a lot for the fact that they lived here, that they stayed here, that they didn’t go to another country, and that they brought us up here.” Beckermann — whose early work through a trilogy of films including 1983’s Return to Vienna explored Jewish identity —believes that most of those firstgeneration Holocaust survivors in fact didn’t want to stay in Austria. Rather, it was a living situation they, in a manner of speaking, fell into. They saw Austria as an in-between place, she said, but never made the final decision to leave. Postwar Vienna was, therefore, “a very ambivalent place to live.”
As well as cracking open the country, bringing forth a more honest debate about the country’s Nazi past, for Austrian Jews the Waldheim affair meant that suddenly the Jewish experience in Austria interested people, and it was acceptable to talk about it again. It became a topic for academic research and public discussion, of course, but more than that, Beckermann says, Austria postWaldheim was a country in which Jews could speak publicly as Jews.
“There was a famous cabaret artist, Gerhard Bronner. Everyone knew he was Jewish but nobody would pronounce it and he wouldn’t call himself a Jew in public. During the Waldheim affair, he spoke about his experiences as a Jew in 1938 and why he had to leave the country. This was completely new.”
Beckermann began work on The Waldheim Waltz in 2013 and yet the movie has a haunting timeliness. More than simply lying about his service before, during, and after the 1986 presidential campaign, Waldheim and the conservative Austrian People’s Party more-or-less fought against the WJC, alleging them (with antisemitic undertones) of being part of a coordinated campaign against Waldheim. The Waldheim affair presaged the era of flagrant lying, of fake news allegations, and campaigning against the media and public institutions in which we now find ourselves. “It’s quite strange and a bit sad that the film became so timely,” Beckermann says.
Still, to revisit her film footage from and her experiences of a most tumultuous year in modern Austrian history was, in fact, a rather gratifying experience for her.
“I was proud of my camerawork. It was the first time I’d had a camera in my hands. I’m proud of this particular pan I made: in the beginning of the film, when people shout, ‘Waldheim, no! Waldheim, no!’ I stand there and pan to the left and there’s a man who says into the camera, ‘Waldheim, yes.’ Good. Good move,” she thought. But also, Beckermann reflects, the Waldheim affair and the birth of the anti-Waldheim movement was “a very good moment in my life.”
“As I say at the end of the film, in a strange way, I felt more at home during and after the Waldheim affair because I met so many people whom I didn’t know before who were also against him — all these people whom you see at the end of the film,” Beckermann concluded.
“I got to know them and I felt less alone in this country.”
Thanks to Waldheim, Austria changed for the better
The Waldheim Waltz is on at the Regent Street Cinema, London on November 17, and HOME Manchester on November 19. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Ruth Beckermann. www.ukjewishfilm.org