It is with regret that one notes the formal announcement that President Kurt Waldheim of Austria will not be running for re-election next year. Pity. For five years now, he has been a living-well, a kind of stuffed-reminder of a past that Austrians, Europeans and the world must never forget. Hard as Kurt Waldheim himself has tried.
The man can`t help but conjure up the past because, wherever Herr Dr. President Waldheim went, a previous incarnation-Lt. Waldheim of the Wehrmacht- was sure to follow. Somehow putting on lederhosen and one of those Tyrolean hats with a little feather only made his aura more grotesque.
Throughout his presidency and ordeal, Waldheim remained as oblivious to present slights as Lt. Waldheim had been to past atrocities. He signed state papers as efficiently as he had once initialed orders that resulted in the massacre of Serbian peasants and the transportation of Greek Jews to Auschwitz. Evil doesn`t always come striding on the scene in jackboots;
sometimes it comes mincing on stage in the wan form of an undistinguished careerist who only does the paperwork. Hannah Arendt had a phrase for it: the banality of evil.
During the last five years, President/Lt. Waldheim`s eerie double presence and the attempts to ignore it have clarified Austria`s history with merciless accuracy. Only because of his presidency did it become clear that Austria was not only Hitler`s first victim but his first accomplice. As that realization spread, Austria found itself increasingly isolated. Almost no head of state wanted to be seen with this uncomfortable reminder of a past that had been successfully hidden for so long-just as Kurt Waldheim`s had been.
Slow but exceeding fine, the attention of the world bore down on Waldheim and his countrymen. When he visited Iraq`s Saddam Hussein last year and returned with some Austrian hostages, he was greeted by one sign that said:
”We Want To Be Freed Too-Of Waldheim.” When his popularity increased at home, Austria`s went down abroad.
Saddam Hussein was one of the few leaders who would meet with the Austrian president, much as Waldheim loved to travel. Yes, some other heads of state-like Jordan`s King Hussein-received him, and so did the Pope at the Vatican. But with only a few exceptions, Waldheim had to be content with his own company-a harsh fate.
The few European leaders who met with Kurt Waldheim in Austria, like Germany`s Richard Weizsacker and Czechoslovakia`s Vaclav Havel, pretended that they weren`t meeting with him but attending a music festival. The diplomatic doublethink might have come from an absurdist play by Vaclav Havel himself, a playwright and political prisoner before he stepped down to the presidency of his country.
Meeting up with Kurt Waldheim at the Salzburg festival, the Czech leader said he was traveling only ”as a private person,” and in his remarks was careful to make some unmistakable references to his host:
”Let us finally look calmly at our own faces and at our past. . . . In this corner of the world fear of one lie only gives birth to another lie. . . . The assumption that one can tack through history with impunity and rewrite one`s own biography is a traditional Central European delusion. Anyone trying to do that harms himself and his fellow citizens.”
Simple, eloquent words. Almost as simple and eloquent as Vaclav Havel`s having canceled his appearance would have been. But now he is a president-playwright, clearly in that order, and the politic must take precedence over the truthful.
Naturally, Herr Dr. President Waldheim pretended that the words could not have been addressed to him, just as he has pretended so much over the past half century. His whole career has been an exercise in the prevention of history-and now his very presence brings it all back.
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Kurt Waldheim didn`t suppress any mention of his time in the Balkans, he now explains, but only passed over those years in his memoirs because they were of so little interest. To quote one interviewer, ”he makes serving in the Balkans in 1942-45 sound like spending a vacation in the Bahamas.”
On the strength of that ”service,” Kurt Waldheim made this country`s watch list of suspected Nazi war criminals-which probably rules out a state visit to Washington before he retires. Pity. It would be quite a sight to see a head of state arrested on the tarmac. Barring that, he might at least stay on as Austria`s president and haunt. Lest we forget.