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It is a masterful scandal, Austrian style. It crosses theater and politics, and breaks out in the fall of 1988, with the creation of a new play by Thomas Bernhard. It was commissioned from the writer by the director Claus Peymann, director of the Burgtheater in Vienna – the equivalent of the Comédie-Française – which is celebrating its centenary. Only its title is known: Heroes’ Square (Heroes’ Squarein the original version), named after the square in Vienna where, on March 15, 1938, an enthusiastic crowd came to cheer Hitler after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
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Thomas Bernhard and Claus Peymann want the content of Heroes’ Square remains secret until the premiere, scheduled for October 14, the jubilee day. They ask the production team for the utmost discretion. In vain. In Vienna, the theater is part of everyday life, and the newspapers are on the lookout. They announce that four actors from the Burgtheater refuse to perform the play, excerpts of which eventually appear: “Austria is a cesspool without spirit or culture.”
The Austrians? “Six and a half million crazy morons.” The president? “A liar.” The chancellor? “A stock market speculator.” Anti-Semitism? “Hatred of Jews is the purest nature of the Austrians (…). There are now more Nazis in Vienna than in 1938. They are coming back (…). They come out of every hole. (…)They are just waiting for the signal to be able to act quite openly against the Jews.”
These excerpts set the powder alight. They revive a wound that is still raw: the Waldheim affair. Born in 1918, Kurt Waldheim led a career as a diplomat that earned him recognition at the highest level: from 1972 to 1981, he was Secretary General of the UN. In 1986, he campaigned to be elected president of his country when the press revealed his compromises with the Nazi regime. Incorporated into the Wehrmacht in 1941, Waldheim was sent to the Eastern Front where he was wounded, then he was treated in Vienna. In his autobiography, In the eye of the storm (Ed. Alain Moreau, 1985), he writes that he did not return to the front, but that he remained in Vienna where he continued his law studies until the end of the war.
Country gagged by Catholic hypocrisy
The documents produced by the newspapers contradict this. Kurt Waldheim served from 1942 to 1945, his unit was under the orders of Alexander Löhr, “the butcher of the Balkans”, who committed atrocities in Bosnia, and he witnessed the mass deportation of Jews from Cordoba and Salonika. These revelations outraged the international community and inflamed Austria. Kurt Waldheim defended himself by pleading that, like all the “good” Austrians of his generation, he had not done “than his duty.” He was finally elected on June 8, 1986, with almost 54% of the vote, but Austria had to confront its anti-Semitic past for the first time, which it had carefully buried.
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