BERLIN & BEYOND Mar. 2019

[Chris Knipp]

RUTH BECKERMANN: THE WALDHEIM WALTZ/WALDHEIMS WALZER (2018



Portrait of a post-war whitewash

The Waldheim Waltz is a somewhat pedestrian documentary about the revelations of the UN diplomat, later Austrian chief executive Kurt Waldheim's concealed earlier complicity in Nazi war crimes. They came after he had served - not very effectively, some would argue - as Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1972 to 1982 - at the time when he ran successfully for president of Austria in 1986. The film is concerned with a slow dance, accusations and denials, further accusations and more denials, leading up to demonstrations and an eventual nationalist backlash of Austrian citizens who identified with Waldheim enough so that he won 53% of the vote. They felt his life reflected their own, as citizens of a country taken over by Nazi Germany in the March 1938 Anschluss, and they had to tow the line. The director, Ruth Beckermann, narrates the film. She explains that she herself was involved in demonstrations against Waldheim in Austria and she shows shaky films of them she made with an amateur-level videotape camera.

Waldheim, as we see in many film clips of him in his fifties, the focus period of the doc, was a tall, thin, impeccably dressed diplomat with a cold, blank face occasionally brightened by a forced-looking smile. He admitted that he served in the SA, but said he had no choice; "thousands" were doing it, and he was no different from those thousands, did nothing morally questionable, and was not in any way comparable to Nazi war criminals.

He had further claimed that his service in the SA was limited because he was wounded early in his service. But during his campaign for president of Austria, the World Jewish Congress, a consulting body with the UN, aided by Robert Edwin Herzstein, a historian and professor at the University of South Carolina, reported in several press conferences that Waldheim in fact not only joined the National Socialist German Students League - a Nazi youth organization - at the age of 19, but in wartime service was active as a lieutenant in army intelligence, attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. With his back to the wall about this, unable to whitewash it any longer, Waldheim asserted that as a junior lieutenant he'd known nothing about the activities of the unites he was attached to. But in fact as an intelligence officer he prepared daily reports and was quite aware of them.

With its mix of archival footage The Waldheim Waltz tells an important story. But it is less than invigorating, and, like the younger Beckermann's early video footage, it is a somewhat amateurish effort and occasionally has a plodding feel, with its repetitions structure. This is a time when talking heads might actually helped with experts providing perspective on Waldheim's story in relation to others. Sharper editing would have added a more revealing contrasts between denial and accusation. Final footage of Waldheim being made up in preparation for his televised acceptance speech as Austrian president makes an effective symbolic ending.

Viewers would do well to read the admirable obituary of Kurt Waldheim by <A HREF="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/world/europe/14iht-waldheim.3.6141106.html">Jonathan Kandell in the June 14, 2007 New York Times</A>. This article provides perspective by quoting Professor Herzstein: "Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime. But this nonguilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes." Later, it concludes again with the words of the professor: ". . .if history teaches us anything, it is that the Hitlers and the Mengeles could never have accomplished their atrocious deeds by themselves. It took hundreds of thousands of ordinary men - well-meaning but ambitious men like Kurt Waldheim - to make the Third Reich possible." There is another story to tell about the Austria that elected Waldheim president in 1986, knowing of the accusations against him.

The Waldheim Waltz/Waldheims Walzer, 93 mins., in German with English subtitles, debuted at the Berlinale in the Forum section. Over a dozen other international fests including NYFF and the July 2018 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Austria's official entry to the 2019 Academy Awards. Winner of the Glashütte Original - Documentary Award at the 2018 Berlinale. German theatrical release was 4 Oct. 2018. Screened for this review as part of San Francisco's Berlin & Beyond, March 2019.