AS ELABORATED IN THE INTRODUCTION to this study, the Waldheim affair of 1986–88 was a turning point in Austrian society, sparking the beginning of a belated process of coming to terms with the country's National Socialist past. The debates that the exposure of the presidential candidate Dr. Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past provoked, signaled the end of the postwar era in Austria and led to “eine massive Umwertung zentraler Werte” (a wide-ranging reassessment of central values), as Robert Schindel has asserted in an interview. Robert Schindel's Der Kalte offers a literary treatment of the Waldheim affair, which, nearly three decades on, has become historical. While it is certainly not the first literary treatment of the Waldheim affair, as some critics have asserted, it is the first novel to offer such a sustained literary exploration of the political scandal. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, by drawing attention to the events of the late 1980s in Austria and the disturbance of the past that they provoked, Schindel's fictional narrative in turn disturbs and challenges our interpretation of this period in Austrian history, refusing to lay the ghosts awakened during that time to rest. Ultimately, Schindel's performative interventions, reinscribing aspects of the Waldheim affair, serve to draw attention to the work that remains to be done in order for Austria to fully confront its past.

Der Kalte is Robert Schindel's second novel in his planned trilogy focusing on the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Austria, entitled Die Vorläufigen (The Provisional Ones), reflecting the provisory, transitional nature of societal models in the twentieth century, and also the characters’ ultimate mortality.