In her most recent film, renowned Austrian documentary
filmmaker Ruth Beckermann engaged with an episode from Austria’s history dating
back more than 30 years ago. In 1986, former Austrian Foreign Minister and UNSecretary General Kurt Waldheim line up for becoming Austria’s Federal
President. During his election campaign, which was based on the slogan “The
Austrian who is trusted by the world”, a journalist from the Austrian magazine
“Profil” revealed information and documents that challenged Waldheim’s own
version of his role during the Second World War. Waldheim had repeatedly stated
that he was on duty at the Eastern Front in 1941 but soon returned to Vienna
for finishing his legal studies after being wounded. The controversy soon began
involving not only young Austrian activists and Holocaust survivors who
fiercely criticized Waldheim’s ambivalent attitudes towards his personal as
well as Austria’s past. Soon, US-American Jewish organizations began also digging
further into Waldheim’s biography and made his case an issue of domestic
US-American as well as international politics. In response, Waldheim’s party,
the Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP), today governing in a coalition with the far
and extremist right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), began utilizing
antisemitic and nationalist resentments for the presidential campaign. Finally,
Waldheim was elected Federal President, however – despite a visit at the
Vatican – no Western government officially invited him. Nevertheless, he
remained Austrian Federal President until 1991. In retrospect the Waldheim
affair significantly cracked the persisting Austrian collective self-perception
of being National Socialism’s first victim. However, the years of the affair also
witnessed the rise of the FPÖ as a very successful nationalist, revisionist,
antisemitic and racist party.
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© Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion |
As an activist, Ruth Beckermann was personally
involved in the protests against Waldheim’s presidency. During these months she
documented the election campaign and their own activities on video. Her
reencounter with these recordings from 1986 some years ago became the initial
point for her new film “The Waldheim Waltz”, which reconstructs the months
after the revelation of Waldheim’s involvement with Nazi organization solely on
the basis of her own as well as other archival film footage, mainly preserved
in broadcasting archives around the world. This movie became Beckermann’s first
“compilation film”. By reconstructing the events from different perspectives of
various parties involved in the controversy (Waldheim, his family, the Austrian
Peoples Party, the Austrian media and public, political activists in Austria,
international Jewish organizations, US-American politicians) she succeeds in creating
a complex mosaic of the past events. Even more so, by focussing on the
chronological course of the controversy, Waldheim’s constant attempts of
twisting the facts and reframing his own biography as well as his and his
party’s strategy to present himself as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy, which
lead to an increasingly populist and nationalist campaign of the ÖVP,
“Waldheim’s Waltz” resonates in an uncanny way with Austria’s contemporary
political landscape. Recently, an FPÖ candidate who successfully utilized
populist strategies of political framing was almost elected as new Federal
President of Austria. During the last federal election campaign not only the
FPÖ candidate but also today’s chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) as well as a
candidate from the left-wing alternative party “Liste Pilz” adopted antisemitic codes in public speeches, and thus utilized “calculated ambivalence” (Ruth
Wodak) for fostering their success at the election ballots.
Ruth Beckermann’s film, thus, has the right timing. By
dwelling into the past, it offers the audience not only a historical lesson but
intends to actively engaging its viewers in analysing the Waldheim affair and
its protagonist as a prototypical event in Austria’s recent history, which
still affects the present. Therefore, Beckermann explored different Austrian
and international archives and excavated footage from 1986 in order to let the
archive speak.
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© Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion |
Her film opens with a sequence of Waldheim speaking at a
campaign rally. Beckermann who is herself commenting most of the footage and
explaining the events in the voice-over, directs our interest towards
Waldheim’s hands. Those are constantly moving, conjuring, concealing and
enclosing. These hands symbolize restlessness, defence and also latent
aggression. They resonate with a later sequence that shows the candidate
conducting a rural marching band, hence putting himself in the position of controlling
command. Besides his hands, the archival footage, mostly broadcasted in
television, repeatedly reveals Waldheim smiling, which expresses ambivalence
and falsehood. The film ends with a sequence that coincidentally survived in a
non-official film collection. It shows Waldheim after his victory, preparing
for his first televised speech, twitching at his shirt and moving on his chair.
The montage of the archival footage in correlation
with Beckermann’s comments and in constellation and confrontation with other
images presents the archive as a witness that provides us not only with
historical knowledge about the historical events but also gives us an
impression of the psychological and political dynamics as well as the broader
context, in which this controversy emerged. Hence, most disturbing are those parts
of the film, which Beckermann recovered from her own personal archive. These
sequences document the outburst of antisemitic resentments on the streets of
Vienna during the controversy. Thereby, “Waldheim’s Waltz” is also a way of
unarchiving what is buried in the archives, of making visible and
reencountering what some might see as chapter of distant history, but which is
actually very relevant for our current age.
