WHY WALDHEIM WON IN AUSTRIA
Markovits, Andrei & Rabinbach, Anson
For many Americans Kurt Waldheim's resounding victory in Austria's run-off presidential election last June (he received nearly 54 percent of the vote, after finishing just shy of a first-round...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...Vienna's tabloids reveled in Waldheim's triumph over the "cannibals" in New York and Tel Aviv, describing the campaign against him as "total war," explicitly borrowing a "quotation from Propaganda Minister Goebbels...
...Unfortunately, the majority of Austrians voted for self-deception...
...Austrians could henceforth blame their involvement in the war, with all its atrocities, on the Germans...
...Other occupied nations provided Hitler with "Quisling" governments, but in Austria collaboration was far more widespread because of the popularity of Anschluss, the strength of the Austrian Nazi Party, and above all, the fact that Vienna (where Hitler received his "education") was the birthplace of modern political anti-Semitism...
...ONLY A SMALL GROUP OF Austrian intellectuals (prominent among them was the writer Peter Handke), under the banner of "New Austria," tried to make Waldheim's character and responsibility for the Nazi past a real issue...
...For many Americans Kurt Waldheim's resounding victory in Austria's run-off presidential election last June (he received nearly 54 percent of the vote, after finishing just shy of a first-round win) illuminated the dark side of a country more famous for skiing, waltzes, and pastry...
...The Socialists were further inhibited by the memory of their own recent scandal, only one year earlier...
...Small wonder that Hitler was received so warmly...
...Though former Nazis were denied the vote until 1949, denazification was largely a charade and many were soon welcomed into the ranks of all major parties...
...Even if Austrians soon began to grumble about the German occupation—they disliked the "Germanization" of Austria more than they resented 409 the ideological predilections of the new government— Austrian membership in the Nazi party was even higher than in Germany (10 percent of the Austrian population as compared to 7 percent of the German...
...For this reason Austrians are particularly sensitive to uncomfortable questions about the Nazi era...
...This situation helped create a national consensus to deny the country's complicity with the Third Reich by focusing on the separate character of Austrian nationhood...
...Waldheim's xenophobic appeal to national pride overshadowed the well-documented evasions and omissions in his efforts to portray his past as different from what it actually was...
...Given the history of postwar Austria, it is hardly surprising that such messages helped the Waldheim cause immensely...
...Austria emerged from the ruins of 1945 divided and occupied by four powers...
...In marked contrast to the European and American media, Austria's public radio and television stations (heavily influenced by the political parties) soft-pedaled the charges against him, and all of the Austrian newspapers, with the exception of the tiny Socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung, supported Waldheim...
...Even the Austrian Greens—whose candidate, Freda MeissnerBlau, refused to throw her support to the Socialists— gave him 39 percent of their vote (mostly from the ecology-oriented wing in western Austria...
...Waldheim's campaign theme in the second round, "an experience for us all," made him a symbol for an entire generation, and encouraged Austrians to feel they were victimized by a foreign cabal...
...THE EDITORS q 411...
...The Social Democratic opposition was timid to the point of passivity in combating Waldheim...
...In fact, after World War I, most of the major parties in Austria favored Anschluss as a solution to the widely shared belief that the German-speaking part of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire could not survive alone...
...Waldheim provided this movement with its moral credo—his slogans ironically called for "moral renewal"—when, after finally admitting, in light of irrefutable evidence, that he knew of his unit's reprisals against partisans, he said, "knowledge alone is not a crime...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Early in the campaign, the issue shifted from Waldheim's pattern of covering up his youthful connections to Nazi organizations and concealing his wartime record to what foreigners were saying about Austrians...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...So did German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's blatant interference, grossdeutsch style, when he supported Waldheim during a visit to Salzburg, one week before the first-round election...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Even Socialist Foreign Minister Leopold Gratz, who resigned in protest after the election, complained that "the Waldheim case serves as a pretext to condemn the entire Austrian people...
...The Austrian presidential election became a plebiscite on responsibility for the Austrian past...
...In marked contrast to its troubled predecessor during the interwar period, the second Austrian Republic is a pacific "island of the blessed" in a tumultuous world...
...The cynicism of most Waldheim supporters was summed up by Austria's most popular columnist, "Staberl," when he wrote, "Whoever is old enough to have a personal memory of the Thousand Year Reich that lasted only seven for us, knows that if Waldheim had been a full-fledged Nazi, he would never have been an insignificant Wehrmacht staff clerk but an SS man of high rank...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...The myth surrounding the German occupation quickly yielded two results: first, it made the painful process of facing the past irrelevant, since Austria, like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest of Europe, was victimized by German aggression...
...As shown in the plebiscite held a few weeks later, the occupation of Austria in March 1938 was a conquest by popular acclamation...
...Ironically, one of the consequences of Waldheim's victory is an intensification of the crisis that plagued the Socialists under the unsteady stewardship of Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, who also resigned in the aftermath of the election...
...But beneath the placid surface lies a deeper legacy of the Nazi past, now exposed for the first time by Kurt Waldheim's victory...
...The vote was interpreted locally as confirmation of the "exhaustion" of the Socialists' fifteen-year rule—even 410 Waldheim's loss in the party's bastion of Vienna (he received 43.7 percent vs...
...56.2 percent for Steyrer) was grimly received as a sign of a steep decline in Socialist popularity—making an opposition People's party victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections next spring more than likely...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Modern Austria is also renowned for its political stability and stellar social and economic performance, making it a model for other industrial democracies...
...THUS, AUSTRIANS NEVER ASSUMED responsibility for celebrating Hitler's "homecoming" with what was probably the largest and most enthusiastic crowd ever to assemble in Austrian history...
...His campaign literature effectively depicted him as the victim of an "organized" foreign slander campaign to discredit him and turn him into a war criminal...
...The World Jewish Congress was held responsible for "directing" an international campaign of "psychoterror," and, despite growing revelations that he was aware of brutal reprisals carried out against Yugoslav partisans in 1944, Waldheim persisted in his denial of any responsibility for the atrocities committed by his unit...
...A new and powerful image of an independent Austria, liberated from the predatory Prussians, could be offered to the world...
...At that time, Walter Reder, a former Nazi convicted of war crimes, received an official airport welcome after his release from an Italian prison by Friedhelm Frischenschlager, defense minister in the Socialist-dominated government and himself a member of the Free Democratic Party...
...This inflated Austrian role in the "Final Solution" led Simon Wiesenthal to conclude that Austrians could be held responsible for the death of three of the approximately six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, a fact which makes a travesty of Waldheim's persistent denial that he had heard of the deportations of Jews from Salonika and Corfu...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...But, even in the earlier campaign, the Socialists were afraid to make an issue of his past because of the sympathy many of their own followers felt for Waldheim— former members of the Wehrmacht and exNazis pursued careers in all the Austrian parties after the war, and some even served in Socialist governments...
...By adhering to the myth of victimization, postwar Austria could avoid facing its own history...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Even more striking is the disproportionately large number of Austrians prominent in Hitler's war against the Jews...
...Much of the research in this domain has been conducted by non-Austrians, and many of the Austrian archives for this period still remain closed...
...Kurt Steyrer abandoned the issue of his opponent's war record in the run-off election...
...With the help of the 1943 Moscow Declaration, in which the wartime allies declared that Austria was the "first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression," the myth was born of the "good" victimized Austrians in contrast to the "bad" German conquerors...
...For most Austrians, Waldheim's call for "an end," after 41 years, to discussion of the Austrian role in the Nazi era, was a rallying cry to end what had never really begun...
...Second, it served to crystallize Austrian pride as a neutral, autonomous, and respected member of the family of nations...
...After Hitler came to power in Germany, Austria's indigenous National Socialists (Nazis) accounted for 20 to 25 percent of the popular vote, offering him a ready-made fifth column...
...Conceding that the anti-Semitism stirred by the campaign only increased Waldheim's popularity, Dr...
...AntiSemitism was also the motif of the defiant campaign posters proclaiming that "We Austrians decide whom we will vote for...
...This welcome was a far cry from the commonly-held myth of the 1938 Anschluss as the "rape of Austria...
...This posture was adopted by virtually all political groups in postwar Austria, with the exception of some marginal left-wing intellectuals...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
