Posted by Philip Challinor Link: Continued
on November 1, 2009, 21:28:06
According to legend, the Austrian flag was invented during the Third Crusade by the Babenberg duke Leopold V. After a particularly gory battle outside the city of Acre, the duke found his tunic was completely drenched in blood. When he removed his belt, the cloth underneath was still white. So taken was he by this colour combination that he adopted it as his banner. In 1946, the provisional Austrian government, recognised by the Allies after the previous year's surrender, published the Red-White-Red book, an attempt to show that Austria was culturally completely separate from "Prussian" Germany, and should be treated as "the first victim" of nazism, "left in the lurch by the whole world", rather than as a perpetrator of atrocities. The book was an early step in a deliberate national policy of obscuring Austria's Nazi history, and the flag, with its connotations of violence, religious faith, purity and innocence, has played a role both in cementing the Austrian second republic as a cohesive nation state, and in burying many things the country's elite would rather forget about the Anschluss, the war and the subsequent decade of allied occupation.
After the war the allies largely bought into Austria's mythology of victimhood, and the spectre of Soviet expansion dominated western policy-making, so the denazification of Austrian society was at best half-hearted. By 1948, of the estimated half a million party members (out of a population of around seven million) only 40,000 were subject to any kind of sanctions, and most of those were pardoned by blanket amnesties at the end of the occupation in 1955. This meant that in all areas of public life there was continuity with the Nazi period. The official narrative had little to say about the country's 65,000 dead Jews, preferring a story in which Austrians of all religions and political persuasions had passively undergone a cataclysm in which all had suffered, whether in Mauthausen or at Stalingrad.
The generation of Austrian artists who grew up in the postwar years were forced either to adapt to their national climate, or confront it head-on. The Viennese Actionists staged violent and sexual provocations. Feminist film-maker Valie Export imagined the capital as a city taken over by alien bodysnatchers. Writers such as Thomas Bernhard and the Nobel prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek pushed their prose to extreme levels of brutality and bitterness, railing against a cultural establishment which was busy retailing a chocolate-box Alpine idyll to the outside world, while retaining a tight grip on dissent. Austrian PEN, the writers' organisation, was dominated by former Nazis and ultra-orthodox Catholics, who controlled prizes and state subsidy for publication well into the 1970s. Bernhard's disgust grew so powerful that he specified in his will that none of his work was to be published or performed in his native country. Until the late 80s, the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, "working through the past", the national accounting which was central to the transformation of postwar Germany, had barely begun.
It was against this background that the director Michael Haneke, who had produced a large body of theatre and television work, started to make feature films. His first, The Seventh Continent (1989), is probably the most succinct and unsparing condemnation of bourgeois consumer culture ever committed to celluloid.
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