Mer om Haider og kumpaner fra Sunday Telegraph.
Karsten Johansen
Haunted by history By Julian Coman
BY the time Jörg Haider signed the pact last week that took his far-right
Freedom Party into national government, Wolfgang Mitschke was drunk. A
dedicated Viennese activist for the party, he had disappeared from work
early to celebrate the greatest moment in the political career of his hero.
To the horror and anger of the rest of Europe, Mr Haider had just cut a deal
with Wolfgang Schüssel, the leader of Austria's conservative ÖVP party, to
take a role in national government, where the neo-Nazi Freedom Party will
control six ministries. Mr Schüssel will be chancellor. Mr Haider will be
the power behind his throne.
Europe threatened diplomatic boycotts. Vienna was in ferment. All through
Friday, Left-wing protesters battled with Austrian riot police, surrounding
the Freedom party headquarters in opulent Kaerntner Strasse. Fruit and eggs
were thrown. Viennese police used water cannon for the first time in
decades. The capital's streets rang to the cry of "Von Wien nach Brussels,
Keiner will Haider-Schüssel" ("From Vienna to Brussels, no one wants Haider
and Schüssel"). Earlier in the day, Mr Haider had been forced to dodge
flying eggs and secretly change cars before meeting the Austrian president.
None of this worried Mr Mitschke. Fortified by schnapps and wearing
traditional Löden jacket, he proudly brandished his Freedom Party membership
card and a set of Freedom Party office keys. A civil servant at Vienna's
town hall, he wanted to explain what the future now held for "Jörg Haider's
Austria". His vision was not attractive. He shouted: "There will be no more
niggers coming to this city or the rest of Austria. Haider will see to that.
Zero immigration. We have so many Turks, Serbs and niggers here and all they
do is cause trouble. Everyone's had enough."
As well as sorting out the foreigners, Mr Haider will restore pride in
Austria's past, Mr Mitschke says. "My grandfather was an SS man and a Nazi,
just like Haider's parents. And he was like a God to me. Jörg Haider will
make us proud of ourselves again. Why should we always hang our heads in
shame? There were atrocities on both sides."
Mr Mitschke is the kind of Freedom Party member that Jörg Haider likes to
pretend does not exist, now that his movement is in government. As his
ardent supporter says, Mr Haider is the son of a stormtrooper who joined the
Nazi Party while it was still illegal in Austria. The Freedom Party leader
is on record as admiring the employment policies of Adolf Hitler, and
praising the bravery of Austrian SS troops such as Mr Mitschke's grandfather.
In its successful autumn election campaign, the Freedom Party shocked even
its own hardline supporters by using Nazi terminology in anti-immigration
election posters. But Mr Haider still denied to The Telegraph that it could
even be described as a party of the Right, let alone one with neo-Nazi
sympathies.
He said: "The terms Left and Right have no real meaning any more. As for
what I have said in the past, it's true I may have played the
crocodile-in-chief a bit, making some controversial statements about the
past. But that's all part of the game of being in opposition. You have to
stir things up a bit."
Last week, as the Freedom Party prepared to take its share of power in
Austria's new coalition government, the cheeky crocodile-in-chief was
attempting to calm things down in a statesmanlike manner. Soberly dressed in
a black suit and tie, Mr Haider gave his name to an extraordinary
"declaration", written on the insistence of the Austrian president, Thomas
Klestil. The president, who feared the "international damage to Austria's
reputation" resulting from a Haider-dominated administration, made Mr
Haider's signature a condition for reluctantly allowing his party into
government.
The three-page document was an act of penitence for Austria's past. It
stated that: "Austria accepts her responsibility arising out of the tragic
history of the 20th century and the horrendous crimes of the National
Socialist regime." The new government, it added, was committed to "a
self-critical scrutiny of the National Socialist past", and abhorred
"xenophobia and demagoguery". Staring steadily at television cameras from
around a concerned world, Mr Haider challenged anyone to question his
sincerity.
But out of the earshot of President Klestil, his crocodile teeth had been
flashing. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit published the
same day, Mr Haider said: "All this business of apologising for the Nazi
past will only lead to emotions flaring up. People will ask: 'What is the
meaning of all this after so many decades?' Sooner or later one has to make
a break out of one's past."
The world has to listen to him now. Mr Haider's rise to political power has
taken place at a vertiginous speed. In 1986, when he became its leader, the
Freedom Party could muster only 6 per cent of the national vote. In last
October's elections, it gained 27 per cent and second place. According to
reliable polls, if another election were held tomorrow, Mr Haider would win
outright.
Marianne Enigel, a Holocaust specialist at the political magazine Profil,
believes that this could probably have happened only in Austria. She said:
"There was no clean-up here after the war, and the rise of Haider is the
ultimate consequence of that." For 50 years, successive generations of
Austrians buried the memory of their country's enthusiastic collaboration
with Hitler under deep layers of hypocrisy, selective amnesia and
self-delusion.
George Clare, the author of a study of Thirties Vienna, said: "Austria lived
for three decades believing that it was the first country occupied by the
Nazis. That is the basic lie of Austria's post-war existence. Of course, the
overwhelming majority of Austrians had in fact welcomed the Anschluss."
Madeleine Petrovic, an Austrian Green MP, has spent years attempting to
awaken a sense of guilt for the past in the Viennese establishment. Two
years ago she presented 241 parliamentary questions concerning artworks that
were stolen from Jewish owners after 1938 but still hang in Austrian
museums. "I asked why they were still there, who they really belonged to and
so on. I was told by the chairman of the Conservatives, Andreas Khol, that I
had been guilty of a 'colossal waste of paper'. What does that say about our
country?"
Her despair was reinforced by a poll published late last year by a Jerusalem
newspaper, which found that more than one in four Austrians still believed
that Jews "have too much power and influence in the world". Old habits of
thought die hard in Austria.
Scandals related to the Nazi era, when they have arisen, have been brushed
aside by Austrian public opinion. When Kurt Waldheim, the former UN
secretary-general and Austrian president, was accused of war crimes while
serving with the German army in the Balkans, his domestic popularity rose
among defiant voters as quickly as his reputation declined abroad.
A grisly doctor named Heinrich Gross was briefly imprisoned after the war
when found guilty of complicity in mass murder of mentally and physically
disabled children, judged by the Nazis to be "unworthy of life". He was
later presented with Austria's top medical award for subsequent research,
although in two months' time he is set once again to stand trial.
According to Wolfgang Neugebauer, the director of the Documentation Centre
for the Austrian Resistance, the culture of silence regarding the Nazi era
in post-war Austria has been both comprehensive and self-interested. Mr
Neugebauer said: "We have today in Austria perhaps 700,000 former members of
the Nazi party. They returned from the war to positions of influence in
science, economics and politics. It is accurate to say that this large group
has no interest in revisiting the Nazi era."
As most of Austria has stayed in denial, Mr Haider and his colleagues have
been allowed to plot a surreptitious rehabilitation of the aggressive
Teutonic nationalism of their parents' generation. The Freedom Party was
founded in 1956 as a successor party to the brazenly pro-Nazi VDU (Verband
der Unabhängingen, or Independent Alliance), and retained an explicit
commitment to promote the "German cultural community".
As a young member Mr Haider described the very existence of an Austria
separate from greater Germany as an "ideological miscarriage". Speaking to
an audience of former SS men in Krumpendorf in the Eighties, he told his
father's former comrades: "Anyone who chips in today and says that the
members of the war generation were all criminals is besmirching their own
parents, their own family and their fathers!" But since becoming the party's
leader, Haider has successfully widened the base of its support, appealing
to the insecure as well as those nostalgic for the Third Reich.
Ruth Wodak, the author of a book on racism and the Freedom Party, said:
"Haider has created a new populist politics that is anti-foreigner and
anti-immigrant. He also plays upon fears of a new flood of foreigners once
European Union expansion to the east takes place. This is a platform that
has attracted yuppies, the young and most of the working class as well as
the neo-Nazi far-Right. And the success of his strategy has created a
climate in Austria that is unique in Europe for its violent hostility
towards foreigners."
Mr Haider's rise to power on the back of Austrian indifference to the past
is not yet complete. Two of his choices for ministers were rejected by
President Klestil. And, for the moment, he will run the Freedom Party's
strategy in government from his power-base in Carinthia. But party sources
confirm that he will run for the chancellorship at the next elections.
Meanwhile, the hard times are already beginning for Austria's immigrant
community. Issa Mdiath is a 30-year-old student from Senegal studying at the
University of Vienna. As Mr Haider's party was formally sworn into
government, he told me: "Things here are getting worse and worse. I have
been beaten up twice since the October elections and foreigners are now
afraid to travel on the tube, afraid to go on buses and afraid to go into
bars. Vienna is a frightening place to live in now."
He walked away warily, keeping an eye out for Freedom Party members who,
like Wolfgang Mitschke, had spent the afternoon drinking too much schnapps.
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