Saturday, March 17, 2018

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 

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Amateur film from Roztoky, April 1945

On 30 April 1945 a train loaded with prisoners from the Concentration Camp Leitmeritz (a sub-camp of Concentration Camp Flossenbürg in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria) stopped in the Czech town Roztoky, ten kilometres North from Prague. When the train with mostly open waggons arrived, a huge crowd of civilians had gathered at the train stations in order to help the starving prisoners with food and other supplies. Due to the total confusion at the platform 300 of them managed to escape and were hidden by the local population until the end of the war. Roztoky was not the only town, in which the train caused public attention. After entering the territory of Bohemia and Moravia the train was watched by locals and at many stops poeple tried to contact and help the inmates. Finally, all prisoners were rescued shortly before the train entered German soil.
Roztoky, however, was special due to a large number of visuals that documented the local population's attepts to help, including an eight minute long amateur film. The film depicts scenes from the train station most of them obviously filmed in a rush, some of them, however, depicting also German uniformed guards.
Train Station Roztoky, 30 April 1945, Amateur Footage
© Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
 The film was made by the local grocer of the town who owned a private film camera and lived nearby. The footage was preserved by his family and publicly screened at the opening of an exhibition about the events in the Mittelböhmische Museum at Roztoky, curated by historian Pavla Plachá and her husband military historian Jiří Plachý.
Parts of the footage was edited into the new documentary film "Todeszug in die Freiheit" (Death Train to Freedom) by Andrea Mocellin und Thomas Muggenthaler, broadcasted on 29 January 2018 on ARD. The segments included in the documentary contain rare close up shots from prisoners resting at the platform. For instance, the photographer pans two men, obviously with the intention to document this unique scenery.
Train Station Roztoky, 30 April 1945, Amateur Footage © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
The preserved shots prove the huge number of civilians gathering at the local train station and document their attempts to help the prisoners by supplying food. The following shots also demonstrate that the photographer obviously changed his position according to the scenery, which he was filming. One shot depicts the situation at the station building from bird's eye view. Another shot, depicting young men distributing bread - obviously from a truck - is filmed from a lower position, thus emphasizing the dynamic situation.
Train Station Roztoky, 30 April 1945, Amateur Footage © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
Some of the most significant shots were filmed inside the main building. The photographer is depicting the scenery on the platform through the windows of the main hall, in which locals handed over civilian clothes to some of the prisoners, thereby enabling them to secretly leave the station and hide in the town. These inside-out shots also depict uniformed guards, among them not only SS but also ordinary soldiers from the Wehrmacht, Germany's regular army.
Train Station Roztoky, 30 April 1945, Amateur Footage © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
The photographer also depicted prisoners sitting inside the hall. These panning shots document faces, looking straight into the camera. One shot also depicts a women with a Red Cross-sign at her arm.
Train Station Roztoky, 30 April 1945, Amateur Footage © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
In their documentary on the train's journey, Andrea Mocellin und Thomas Muggenthaler reconstruct also the developments following the departure of the train. In these scenes they present another series of film shots that show a train with open waggons on a bridge, while the commentary adds that, when leaving, the prisoners on the train waved their hands as a sign of new hope that they might been liberated soon.
Amateur Footage, approx. Roztoky, April 1945 © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
In one of the next scenes the filmmakers report about another unique act of humanity in Roztoky, when the dead from the train were burried in the local cemetery. The film also quotes from an original speech, blessing the memory of those 'unknown martyrs'. Though maybe not from 30 April 1945, these shots might still originate from the same footage depicted by the local grocer with his amateur film camera.
Amateur Footage, approx. Roztoky, April 1945 © Todeszug in die Freiheit, BR 2018
 Alongside other visual documents, the amateur film from Roztoky was uncovered during the reconstruction of the unique fate of this death train in January 1945. The exhibition, on which the documentary film is based, was realized in cooperation with the Concentration Camp Flossenbürg Memorial. When the first photographs appeared documenting a train from Camp Leitmeritz, it took some time before memorial director Jörg Skriebeleit and his team realized that the different visual documents from different places in Bohemia depicted the very same unique incident. "This is a total exception," Skriebeleit emphasizes the unique character of these visual depictions. "There was no similar footage preserved anywhere in the German Reich, because no other rescue mission like this happened at any other place."
The amateur film from Roztoky documents an extraordinary humanitarian action during the last weeks of the war. These moving images are rare visual documents of the death transports organized by the Germans during the last months of the war, thus extending the mass killings of the camps' prisoners up until the last minute. As such, the footage can be compared to another unique amateur film by Jindrich Kremer who secretly filmed a transport from Auschwitz at the train station of Kolin in January 1945 when the train passed through. However, documenting an act of humanity, the moving images from Roztoky can also be compared with the footage shot by US-American filmmaker Samuel Fuller at the Concentration Camp Falkenau where the local population was ordered to decently bury the slaughtered inmates of the camp.
The documentary film "Todeszug der Freiheit" makes the archive footage from April 1945 now accessible for a larger public. It does not focus on the film itself but on the reconstruction of the events. Hence the photographer remains unknown, while eywitnesses, helpers, rescuers and victims tell the story of the death train from Leitmeritz. Shots from the cotemporary stations with other trains  passing through, as well as amateur-like footage from trains and trams, are used to illustrate the historical reconstruction. Especially the latter has a confusing effect in comparison to the historical footage from Roztoky. However, in its interplay with the voices of the witnesses of these remarkable events, the unique amateur footage filmed by a Czech grocer with his private camera creates the most resonating effects while watching Mocellin's und Muggenthaler's film.

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

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...