THE ELECTION OF Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria in 1986 functioned as a political and cultural Wende (turning point) in the country's history. The developments that followed Waldheim's election transformed Austrian society, which had refused to confront its own past and believed itself to have been Hitler's first victim for forty years, into a society ready to critically examine its own history. A number of Austrian texts and films have since examined the phenomenon of Waldheim's election and the public debate that ensued. Today these texts, whether on film or on the page, are especially important in light of the rise of the far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ) under Jörg Haider. The success of the FPÖ began in parallel to Waldheim's election in the late 1980s, and continued with the coalition between the FPÖ and Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People's Party, ÖVP) from 2000 to 2006, and then with the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition that governed Austria from 2017 until its demise following the so-called Ibiza scandal in May 2019. Under its new leader Sebastian Kurz, the ÖVP co-opted many of the FPÖ's extreme right-wing ideas on migration and Islam, thus vying for FPÖ voters and bringing these ideas into the political mainstream. These recent political developments are in part the reactions of Austrians who were displeased by the unraveling of the post-war founding myth in the 1980s and who, despite generational shifts, have come to embrace extreme right-wing nationalist ideas currently circulating in Austria, as elsewhere in Europe. Thus, a further consequence of the 1986 Wende in Austria was the stratification of political divisions in the country between the right and the left, which began with the radicalization of the FPÖ under Jörg Haider in that same year.

The Historical Lie of the Second Republic of Austria in Ruth Beckermann's Oeuvre

In her 2018 documentary film Waldheims Walzer (The Waldheim Waltz), Ruth Beckermann refers to the “österreichische Lebenslüge” (Austrian life lie), which I shall refer to as Austria's historical lie—the founding myth of the Second Republic that turned Austria into a nation of victims rather than a nation of perpetrators.