On the contrary, as the head of state he has given this system exactly the image it deserves-the face of the fellow traveller and supporter of the fascist dictators whose “doing his duty” in the world war was accepted by the domestic bourgeoisie as an excellent credential for his later career as a representative of democratic class rule.Īfter its one unsuccessful attempt in 1848, the Austrian bourgeoisie has never seriously fought for the realisation of a bourgeois democratic form of state. The mastermind and the accomplice in the general staff of the German Wehrmacht as the Federal President, the man who was an ex-Nazi before 1945 and an obliging democrat after, the man who tries to sell his notorious silences over his own wartime past as a genuine lapse of memory-Waldheim is certainly no “historical accident” for Austrian democracy. Certainly, in the figure of Kurt Waldheim, the Second Republic has found the personification of its own vital ideological lies and the living symbol of the political hypocrisy of its ruling class. ![]() For all its narrow focus, this is a pleasingly personal breakdown of a fascinating episode in recent European history, tightly composed and crisply edited, with an appealing undertow of dry humor and some cautionary lessons for modern voters.“Every country gets the politicians it deserves” goes the old saying. ![]() But Beckermann ignores these disputed claims, keeping her narrative firmly trained on Austrian national complicity. It later transpired that the CIA had long been aware of Waldheim’s full wartime record, for example, while subsequent memoirs muddied the waters with allegations of KGB blackmail threats and Mossad revenge plots. Some broader historical context might have given The Waldheim Waltz more dramatic weight. In 1987, after a State Department investigation concluded he had been closely involved in Nazi war crimes, he was barred from travel to the U.S. However, his reputation was fatally damaged and his political career finished. This helps explain why, in the face of worldwide scandal and criticism, Waldheim still won the presidency in 1986. Unlike Germany, Austria quietly dropped investigations into its former senior Nazis and never paid compensation to their victims. Waldheim Waltz is chiefly a film about national collective amnesia. Meanwhile, his supporters mobilized the charged language of antisemitic conspiracy: “You belong in the ground,” one proudly says to Beckermann and her camera, “you Jewish swine.” Fighting back against the allegations, Waldheim made a series of squirming half-denials, claiming to be the victim of a smear campaign. But these devastating new revelations, mostly exposed by the World Jewish Congress in New York, proved that had lied about his later wartime record, when he was a senior officer working suspiciously close to massacres of Yugoslav partisans and mass deportations of Greek Jews. Waldheim’s official biography as an “honest soldier” conscripted by the occupying German military to fight on the Eastern Front was already well known when he worked at the U.N. The director herself provides a deadpan voiceover commentary, pinpointing how the Waldheim affair destroyed “Austria’s grand delusion of having been the first victims of the Nazis.” ![]() The majority of material she uses is culled from second-hand newsreel and TV footage, with intermittent clips of self-shot video and stills from inside the homegrown protest group. ![]() In fact, the Lincoln attribution has been widely discredited, which could either be a clumsy oversight by the director or a wry meta-commentary on a film rooted in fake news and alternative facts.īesides a few flashbacks to Waldheim’s decade at the U.N., from 1972 to 1981, Beckermann keeps her focus almost entirely within the day-to-day chronology of his 1986 domestic election bid. Beckermann opens Waldheim Waltz with Abraham Lincoln’s immortal maxim about how you can fool all of the people some of time, and some of the people all of the time.
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