Kurt Waldheim’s hands, or: When the archive speaks

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.

© 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. 

© 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.

 Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann