Shit Bucket Campaigns and Nestbeschmutzer

Abstract

On June 8, 1986, in the second round of elections, Kurt Waldheim was elected President of Austria. Up to that point, he could look back on a great diplomatic career: For ten years, he had held the important office of General Secretary of the United Nations and he had previously served as Foreign Minister of Austria. But after his election, nothing in Austria remained the same. His election, his person, and his conduct caused a political firestorm that changed the foundations of the Republic of Austria. The point was less the public exposure of a Nazi perpetrator than how the nation chose to remember Nazi crimes, and the kinds of obligations and responsibilities that arose from these crimes for individuals.

Waldheim was not accused of being a war criminal. Even the World Jewish Congress, which performed a thorough investigation and would not have hesitated to charge him, did not accuse him of specific crimes; he was never indicted or convicted of concrete wrongdoing. What aroused animosity was the way in which he “doctored” his career, hid his actual whereabouts during the last years of the war, and lied about his proximity to the executed war criminal General Löhr in Yugoslavia. He must have had knowledge of mass murders, even if he did not personally participate. Instead, he claimed lapses in memory, denied his membership in the Storm Troopers, and spun ever more fantastic tales, which failed to explain anything. Doron Rabinovici, a writer, historian, and member of the Republican Club, which was founded during the Waldheim Affair as the public voice of the opposition, said this about Kurt Waldheim: “How he had dealt with his past between 1945 until then was pathetic and unacceptable. He embodied everything we fought against. Waldheim's lies were important not because they were personal character flaws, but because they revealed the broader political strategy. We knew our Waldheimers. They relied on antisemitism as a dog whistle. Fiery yellow placards went up all over Vienna announcing in blazing red script: ‘We Austrians will elect the man we want’. Such slogans targeted Jews, although it was by no means only Jewish officials who wondered how it was possible that an intelligence officer serving in the Saloniki region could claim ignorance about the deportations leaving Greece.”1

I have chosen this affair for this essay on “impurity and guilt” because both sides, Waldheim opponents and Waldheim supporters, confronted each in the semantic field of filth (German: Dreck, which is closely associated with “shit”) deploying this terminology in ever more creative ways to attack opponents. I will use two examples from different media: first, Robert Schindel's grand Viennese novel, Der Kalte, which is often read as an account of the Waldheim Affair.2 There is the figure of Johann Wais, who shares many features with Waldheim. And there is an abundance of references to filth, particularly in their Viennese manifestation. More on that later.

The second example is the Austrian documentary film, Waldheim's Waltz, by Ruth Beckermann, which was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and nominated as the Austrian entry for the Oscar.3 It contains many original recordings from Waldheim's electoral campaign, the charges of the World Jewish Congress, as well as footage from the political campaign launched by Waldheim opponents, whose numbers kept growing and whose arguments gained traction.

The fictional speaker of this text is an employee of the SPÖ chancellor, who deliberately seeks to find dirt in order to smear the candidate Waldheim, but in reality it was neither the Social Democratic Party nor the Communist Party that accused Waldheim. They remained passive throughout this affair and were not its instigators, as Viennese journalist Georg Tidl, who examined the history of the Waldheim affair, has concluded.6 In the novel, Der Kalte, it is the alter ego of Simon Wiesenthal, by the name of David Lebensart, who blames the Social Democrats for exaggerating the gaps in the biography of Waldheim, saying: “The Social Democrats are fishing for filth everywhere.”7 Later, there are references to Dr. Wais’ obsessive concerns with “soiling,” while trying to maintain his “pure conscience” and his sense of humor.8 Robert Schindel rewrites the history of the Waldheim Affairs. While Waldheim remained in office for the full six years of his presidential appointment, the figure of Johann Wais resigns and concedes to the demands of the opposition.

There are not many metaphors of cleanness/uncleanness in this fictional stream of consciousness, but they appear at crucial moments: For instance, Wais [whose name resonates with weiss, meaning “white”) uses the term “cleansings,” which refer more accurately to “ethnic cleansings.” They are considered war crimes, and Wais would be considered a war criminals, if he admitted his participation. But Wais avoids this, as he articulates his surprise over the continuation of the attacks despite his soothing explanations. The president elect of the Republic of Austria is no longer invited by Western governments, and the United States has put him on a watch list. The author uses venomous words, which are intensely physical, such as the word “angeifern,” which evokes images of attack dogs straining against their leashes, their spittle spraying from aggressive barking. Wais feels “spat at.”

The figure of theater director Peymann is renamed Schönn in Schindel's novel, but otherwise it follows the historical events closely. The words of Johann Wais come true in reverse fashion: The critical theater performance is covered in shit, as the metaphorical shit bucket hit the venerable Burgtheater. Of course, this attempt to disturb or block the premiere of the theater play failed spectacularly, as Thomas Bernhard's play Heldenplatz only gained publicity and notoriety.

Ruth Beckerman uses original footage from Waldheim's candidacy in Vienna for her documentary film that was released in 2018. She was also an original member of The Republican Club around Doron Rabinovici, and she had been opposed to Waldheim's presidency and been active in the struggle to change Austria's culture of denial and forgetfulness. Beckermann dramatically assembles visual material that in many respects complements Schindler's fictional account of the Waldheim Affair. Most striking is a scene toward the end of the film, in which Waldheim prepares to deliver his first speech as President of the Republic of Austria. He is waiting to go live before the cameras, which are already rolling: The makeup artist wipes and powders his face several times, a garishly uniformed cleaning lady vacuums and cleans all of the surfaces around him, an assistant brushes fluff off his dark suit. These silent cleanup operations speak volumes. Waldheim is preoccupied, the film suggests, with the correct fit of his suit and the perfect facial mask that will hide his flaws and failings as he faces the nation. The film captures a cultural moment of intense battles over moral impurity and the overwhelming desire for cleanliness, correctness, and blamelessness.

In the field of Austrian literature, the Waldheim affair served as pivot that dislodged the Austrian legend as the first victim of Nazi Germany, which was first voiced by the Allied victors. Austria, however, was not invaded and subjugated by hostile German forces. Austrians followed Hitler into war gladly and volunteered in droves for service in the SS. Waldheim was a member of the SA and had done much more than his mere duty as a “decent” soldier. When he began to lie about his biography and cover up his actual career path during the war years, groups of activists demanded more truth and accountability in Austrian politics. There was some disagreement over the precise role of Waldheim in this cultural transformation. Some, like Robert Menasses, claimed that Waldheim was a mere speck in the morass of Austrian politics: “Every Austrian,” he said, “believes that Austria is a double victim, first at the hands of the National Socialists, and then again at the hands of the anti-fascists. But in reality, Austria is only the victim of Austrian fascism, of the Dollfuss regime [Engelbert Dollfuss, conservative Austrian Federal Chancellor, 1932-1934, who was assassinated] and its disciples and descendants. That is the only real situation of victimization in Austria. Waldheim, by contrast, is something like the dirt under my fingernail, if we measure him against the real problems of Austria.”13 Others, like Schindel and Rabinovici, give more credit to the culture shock unleashed by the Waldheim Affair, which jolted a younger generation into critical confrontation with Austrian history. I agree that the Waldheim affair produced more than a little irritating dirt stuck under one's fingernail and compelled a shift toward greater nuance in guilt discussions that took note of the “real” victims of National Socialism. These victims suffered not only at the hands of major perpetrators and the regime's mass murderers but also because mere “bystanders” and complicit enablers failed to intervene. Now, everybody wanted to forget what they had done. Waldheim became the paradigm for the desperate and pathetic desire to forget. Even if he did not actively kill another human being, he was certainly morally complicit as an officer in a regime that committed atrocities. This debate over responsibility, accountability, and guilt became unstoppable after Waldheim, no matter how strong the threats of libel and denunciation, the smear campaigns, and manure piles were.

It is important to note the moment in which metaphors of filth are invoked, and when they remain irrelevant and impotent. As soon as guilt has been confessed, when regret has been expressed and forgiveness requested or granted, guilt no longer appears as impurity; there is no need to wash it off, and one cannot befoul or tarnish such as person (Viennese: “anpatzen”). The imaginary of filth is virulent only as long as guilt remains hidden and denied. Metaphors of filth signal the presence of remainders that refuse to vanish and that cannot be forced to disappear. While it has traditionally been the political left that was tarnished as filthy and dirty, in the postwar debate over the moral and political legacy of National Socialism, both camps used the imagery of filth in creative and concrete ways. In the case of the manure pile on Heldenplatz, Austria's largest newspaper, the Kronen Zeitung, spoke of self-sullying to indicate that those who dared to ask critical questions about the “brown” Nazi past were the cause of pollution. For the newspaper, the problem originated with the Nestbeschmutzer and those who presumed to criticize Austria. Still, the actions of a few courageous activists succeeded in changing the culture of remembrance in Austria, which required confronting sometimes painful memories.

Recently, the sudden appearance of the so-called Strache-videos, which exposed shady dealings between an extreme right-wing Austrian politician and a Russian oligarch, the semantic field of filth, swung back into operation in full force. The public release of these secret videos recorded in a villa in Ibiza was called part of a dirt campaign, and they forced the resignation of Austrian vice president Heinz-Christian Strache, followed by the collapse of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's entire administration. While the right-wing, populist Freedom Party of Austria vigorously protested the release of these videos as mud-slinging, it had of course been their leader's willingness to sell access and privilege to a Russian oligarch (who turned out to be an actor) that tainted the party's reputations. Dirt flies in multiple directions, and in politics, it is not always obvious where it will stick.