Austrias affair with Kurt Waldheim is a little like the affair betwen the French diplomat and the Chinese tenor who have just been sent to prison in Paris for spying. The tenor, Shi Peipu, was a secret agent who liked to dress up in his couretsan's robes from the Peking Opera. He put them on one day for a party at the French Embassy, seduced the diplomat, whose name was Bernard Boursicot, and began a romance that went on for twent years - providing China with a lof interesting information from the Embassy's diplomatic pouch. The odd thing about Shi Peipu is not that he spied but that for twenty years he kept his lover convinced he was a woman (only "very modest"), and that M. Boursicot went to prison refusing, really, to change his mind. The odd thing about Kurt Waldheim is not his war file or the Nazi clubs he joined as a student but the fact that for forty years he dressed up in patriot's clothes, invented a past for decoration, and seduced Austria, and now Austria would rather defend those inventions than discuss its own interest in maintaining them.

A diplomat here with a clearer head than M. Boursicot's said the other day that postwar Austria is like an opera sung by the understudies, and there is some truth to the observation. There have not been many people stature in Austria since the war. There have been people like Kurt Waldheim, pretending to stature, and there has been a public anxious to believe in them. Vienna is probably the only iEuropean capital where it is considered normal, among the intelligentsia, o be a monarchist. It is not that the Viennese miss the Hapsburgs - though there are certainly people here who do miss the Hapsburgs. The Viennese miss the city they had when the Hapsburgs were around. They miss what they call the thickness of culture. They may not know it, but they miss the Czecjs and the Hungarians and the Jews who lived there. They miss the "joyous apocalypse" of art and design and thought which produced the work that is making the museum rounds - the Wien Künstlerhaus, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art - in various versions of the fin de siécle Vienna show at the last Venice Biennale. Vienna itself has been returned to the natives, and it is a provincial place, a kind of imperial ghost town. It is beautiful and full of charm, but the nostaIgia here is so desperate, and so deep, that it seems to have exhausted the Viennese. They long for prominence . Kurt Waldheim lied about a past that inciuded three years of devoted service to a Nazi general who was hanged for war crimes when the war was over, but the Austrians elected him President this month, and the reason they did may have less to do with Nazi stirrings or anti-Semitism, or even stubbornness, than with the indisputable fact that Waldheim is prominent - by which they mean that people who are not Austrians recognize his name. Waldheim was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 until 1982, and Austrians - nearly fifty-four per cent of them, anyway - do not much care that he was a terrible Secretary-General for every one of those years, that he was greedy and cowardly and vain and laughably ambitious, or that he wanted to stay and was defeated, or that he tried to leave New York with the residence furniture and did, in fact, manage to leave with the silver. At home, he has let it be known that he ran the world from his United nations suite, and by and large the people at home believe him. How he ran the world is not important. What is important is that the world was run by an Austrian.

The irony, of course, is that the rhetoric has been so xenophobic. Waldheim's posters said things like "We Austrians Will Vote For Whom We Want!" (Originally, the posters said "Jetzt Erst Recht!" and had a yellow stripe, but they were taken down when somebody pointed out that Hitler had used the same stripe and the same slogan on his posters.) Waldheim's managers talked about a conspiracy of Americans and Israelis and the World Jewish Congress, despite the fact that research into Waldheim's past had aready been going on for months in Austria, and by Austrians, by the time the World Jewish Congress got involved. Voting fol Waldheim, people said, was "voting for Austria". All the same, the poster everybody liked, the poster Waldheim always signed for the children, was not the one with the Alps in the background or the one with Frau Waldheim in a dirndl - it was the poster of Kurt Waldheim and the Manhattan skyline, the one signifying his celebrity. Austrians feel about Kurt Waldheim the way they feel about Gerhard Berger, who races in the Grand Prix in Monaco and talks to Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie. He is an Austrian who made good away from home.

This much is known about Kurt Waldheim's career. He was always adaptable in his own interests. It was said to be a family virtue (the family name Watzlawik, became a properly Ger 'an "WaIdheim" when German names got to be more desirable than Slavic ones), although Waldheim's father, Walter, was notably unadaptable. He was an admirer of Engelbert Dollfuss, the catholic fascist Who ran the country for two years in the nineteen-thirties, abolished Austrian democracy, and was assassinated by Nazis. When the Nazis took over, Walter Waldheim lost his job. There is a report on young Kurt Waldheim from the Nazi leader in his home town, Tulln, about fifteen miles from Vienna, which says that before the Anschluss Waldheim was a diligent Catholic who opposed National Socialismin in a "disgusting" way - he had stood on street corners handing out leaflets that said "Vote Austria, Not Nazi" - but that after the Anschluss he was a diligent soldier of the Reich and "served us well". In fact, two weeks after the Anschluss Waldheim joined the Nazi Student Union. One week after Kristallnacht, he joined a cavalry unit of the Storm Troopers - in German, the Sturmabteilung, or S.A. The Storm Troopers had made a name for themselves in Vienna on Kristallnacht, burning synagogues, but Waldheim seems to have joined because their riding club was a place where a young Austrian starting out on a law career could make the best contacts. He lived his whole life in the same spirit. When it was time to marry, he chose a girl, Elisabeth Ritschel, who held the right new National Socialist views, and had joined the Nazi Party as soon as she was eighteen. When it was time to write his law-school thesis, he chose for a subject a German nationalist named Konstantin Frantz, whose concept of the Reich, Waldheim said, had finally been realized in the "current great conflict ... with the non-European world." Two years into the war, he got himself attached to the staff of the German High Command for the Balkans, under General Alexander Löhr, and that was a job with so many contacts that Waldheim ended up with a King Zvonimir medal from the Croatian puppet state. He also ended up as Case No. R/N/684 in the United Nations War Crimes Commission file, charged with "murder" and with "putting hostages to death " Officially, he was a translator, an interpreter, and a "special missions staff officer." His job involved verifying and transmitting special orders, and, eventually, recommending on those orders and making sugiestions of his own. He was in Greece for the High Command when forty eight thousand jews from Salonika and Corfu were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Bueplse. He was there, after the Italian surrender, when a hundred thousand Italian soldiers who were left in the country were seized and deported to German camps. He was in Yugoslavia for the High Command when massacres of thousands of partisans and their families took place. As far as the record goes, Waldheim never murdered anyone himelf or personally "put to death" any hostage. "I only did my duty," he says now. He initialled the orders that crossed his desk and the reports that those orders had been carried out, and sometimes he wrote the reports himself and kept the staff logbook. When the war was over, he walked into the Foreign Office in occupied Vienna and asked for a job. He carried three letters in his pocket - one from Tulln's leading Socialist, one from Tulln's leading Catholic, and one from the mayor. All the letters said what a good patriot Kurt Waldheim was.

+++

No one knows when Waldheim actually began to reinvent his war - when he started saying that he was medically discharged from the Wehrmacht in December of 1941, after a grenade splintered in his ankle (the wound is real) on the Russian front, and spent the rest of the war with his law books in Vienna. Every Austrian with a connection to the Nazi Party had to fill out a "de-Nazification" questionnaire by the end of january, 1946. Waldheim, answering his, listed his membership in a National Socialist "riding club" (but not the S.A. Reiterei) and not much else. He was never formally "de-Nazified". His file went to the Justice Ministry and then the Foreign Ministry, and in the confusion it was never closed.

There were half a million Austrian Nazis - more Nazis, proportionally, than in Germany - and a million Austrians in the German Army, and many of them had records worse than Kurt Waldheims. What makes Kurt Waldheim exceptional is not his record but the trouble he took to erase it. There was no shame here in having been a soldier. In 1943, in Moscow, the Allies had signed a declaration to the effect that Austria was not a Nazi state but Nazism's first victim, and after the war this was how Austria chose to see itself. So many Austrians had joined the Nazi Party for cover or protection that it was easy for people who had joined in weakness or terror, or even out of enthusiasm or ideology, to begin to believe the same of themselves. Of course, the real victims of Nazism were not around to contradict them. A hundred and ten thousand Austrians (sixty thousand of them Jews) died in the course of the war in concentration camps. As for the Jews here - there were a hundred and eighty-nine thousand Jews in Vienna in 1938; when the war ended, there were six hundred.

+++

The first accusations of any importance against Kurt Waldheim were made in 1947, in Yugoslavia, by a Wehrmacht captain named Karl-Heinz Egberts-Hilker, who was on trial for his life and was later hanged as a war criminal. Egberts-Hilker tried to implicate Waldheim as the responsible officer in a series of reprisal murders in Macedonia in October of 1944 (three villages were burned, a hundred and fourteen villagers were killed), and those murders were the basis of the dossier the Yugoslavs passed on to the United Nations War Crimes Commission that year, with testimony from a German Army clerk and a recommendation that Waldheim be placed on an "search list", arrested and extradited to Yugoslavia for trial. The recommendation was disregarded - either intentionally or for lack of evidence or because there were more than thirty-six thousand warcrimes dossiers on file at the United Nations then, and no way they could all be processed. When the commission disbanded, in 1948, every member state got an index of those thirty-six thousand dossiers, but Austria was not a member in 1948. Austria joined the United Nations in 1955, after the occupation ended, and by then Kurt Waldheim was well along in his career in the Foreign Service. He served under four Foreign Ministers before he got the job himself, in 1968. The first was Karl Gruber, who had led the Austrian resistance. Gruber had brought bis friends from the resistance into the Ministry with him, and one of them, his secretary, wad a young man named Fritz Molden, who had been the liaison between the Austrian underground and the Allies - and who spoke in Waldheim's defense during the campaign this spring. Molden still remembers the day in November of 1945 that Waldheim walked into his office in the Foreign Ministry, looking, Waldheim said, for personnel. The two men started talking, and Molden says that it seemed to him that Wadheim, with his law degree and bis "clean" war, would make a good diplomat. That day, he recommended the young lawyer with the bad ankle to Karl Gruber. Gruber hired him - conditionally. There were rumors about Waldheim in Vienna, and Gruber had Molden check those rumos with the political police and then with the Interior Minister, an old Socialist named Oskar Helmer, and finally with the Allied Counter Intelligence Corps and the Office of Srategic Services. In ten days, he had clearance from them all.

Waldheim was twenty-seven and useful, and, whatever the rumors were, most people figured that he was at worst an accomplice, the way so many Austrians had been accomplices. "He was no hero," Molden says now. It is easy to understand why Austria did not pursue him. The politicians of the Great Coalition, as the postwar government was called, were Socialists, Communists, and Catholics from the Volkspartei - the People's Party - and they had either been in the resistance together or in Dachau together. But he peopie who did the voti were mostly former Wehrmacht soldiers and their families, and by the end of 1949 five hundred thousand ex-Nazis (nearly a tenth of Austria) were eligible to vote, too. The official story was that every old Nazi was a potential democrat, the way every soldier of the Third Reich was an Austrian patriot liberated by Hitler's defeat. Just about every young man in Austria who was not demonstrably a war hero or a war criminal had doctored his record in some way and arranged his protection, was arranging it. Some people think that Waldheim may have arranged his by informing. He was, by all accounts, as pliant at the Foreign Ministry as he was at the United Nations - doing favors, currying favor, careful never to take a moral stand or, indeed, any stand that could isolate him or make him unpopular. Certainly the Yugoslavs never pursued their charges against him. None of the Allies seem to have looked him up officially until he was elected Secretary-General, in 1971, and then they either ignored the reports they got or used them for the Secretar General's friendship. There are stories that he was an agent of influence, early on, for Yugoslavia. There are als stories hat he was an agent for Russia and its allies, because the Russians backed him at the United Nations right off, vetoing the Finnish delegate Max Jakobson and campaigning against other candidates who were more impressive than Waldheim. He was the Foreign Minister here when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in August of 1968, and it obviously suited the Russians that he ordered the Embassy in Prague closed to everyone except Austrian citizens. (Waldheim's ambassador in Prague, who happens to have been Rudolf Kirchschläger, the President, he is succeeding now, ignored him and kept the Embassy open anyway.) But if Waldheim was an agent of influence for the Yugoslavs and the Russans, the chances are that he was also an agent for the Americans and the British and the French and just about everybody else with access to bis file, including, in time, the Austrians. The curriculum vitae he gave to Fritz Molden late in 1945 lists his military service in the Balkans. Supposedly, no one outside the Foreign Ministry ever saw it until it turned up a couple of months ago -to great fanfare at Waldheim headquarters - as proof that he had always been an honest (if not an honorable) man. The fact is, though, that people in the Ministry saw it, or could have seen it, and not only did they give him a job - they never corrected his public story. There is no mention of the war at all in the vita that Austria sent to the United Nations in 1971 to support his candidacy.

It seems now that Tito may have known about Waldheim, and chose to use him. (Tito's old vice-president, Mitja Ribicic, thinks so.) The dossier that left Belgrade for the United Nations War Crimes Commission in February of 1947 said that Waldheim was a fugitive, but not that he was a fugitive in Vienna, or that he was working, as he was by then, as a special assistant to the Austrian Foreign Minister - although the Yugoslavs knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. They told their ambassador in London in a cover letter that left Belgrade at the same time. The point is that since the war there have been people in high places who knew or could have known that Kurt Waldheim was an intelligence officer for a war criminal, charged with transmitting requests and permissions involving reprisals and deportations and civilian murders, and that every one of them ignored or suppressed the information he had, figuring either that it was harmless or hurtful or useful or even profitable to himself. Waldheim was obviously not a spy, a Shi Peipu in a three-piece suit, any more than he was, technically speaking, a murderer. It was simply that his secret made him obliging. Israel Singer, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, says that Kurt Waldheim is like the girl who takes a quarter here, a quarter there, and builds a clientele hat way - with two-bit favors that add up to a lot of time in bed.

+++

All of Austria knows there is a World Jewish Congress. Ever since February, when the congress hired a historian from the University of South Carolina named Robert Herzstein, to trace Kurt Waldheim's war by going to the National Archives and looking for every piece of paper that Waldheim signed or initialled as a "special missions staff officer" for General Löhr, the World Jewish Congress has had the peculiar status of a great enemy power. Quite few other people have been tracing Waldheim's war - most notably a`young reporter named Hubertus Czernin, who works for the Vienna newsweekly Profil and who started to investigate Waldheim, and the charges against him, late last winter. But the congress is, so to speak, the enemy of choice. It is not that Austrians have any idea of what the World Jewish Congress is or whom it represents or who supports it. (It is a kind of umbrella organization, with headquarters in New York, which looks after the interests of Jewish communities in seventy countries. A lot of its support came from the Zionist Nahum Goldmann, who helped to found it in 1936,and, recently, from Edgar Bronfman, the Seagram's heir.) The problem, as one Vienna psychoanalyst put it, is that World Jewish Congress "sounds Jewish."

Waldheim himself is not known as an anti-Semite. He seems to have initialled away the lives of Serbin partisans as easily as he initialled the transit orders for Greek Jews on their way to Auschwitz. The only prejudice that might have seriously interfered with his career was a dislike of short people: Wiener magazin says that when he was Foreign Minister he tried to introduce a heigt requirement for the Foreign Service, so that only tall people could join the diplomat corps. But Austria has what could be called an antl- Semitic "vocabulary of explanation", and Waldheim - apart from one speech about Jewish suffering, very late in his campaign - did nothing really to discourage that vocabulary. Occasionally, he used it himself. He let it be known that the World Jewish Congress controlled the foreign press. He lingered over Jewish names. He stood by, smiling benignly, at provincial rallies while the local Bürgermeister went on and on about the foreign conspiracy against Austria's most famous citizen. He stood by, here in Vienna, while "patriots" in Trachten beat up people demonstrating against him and the police looked on. Waldheim is not a clever man. He is single-minded and implacably insensitive, and nothing - certainly not the prejudices of his admirers - seems to embarrass him. He was not embarrassed to have been caught lying about where he was and what he was doing from 1942 to 1945 any more than he was embarrassed to have been caught using the United Nations diplomatic pouch to send soft American toilet paper to his family here. He learned one gesture for his campaign: whenever he was at a loss for something to say or something to do, he would open his arms in a kind of big, empty welcome. The gesture was automatic, like the movement of a windup toy. He learned his lines the same way - automatically. (He always did - Once, when he was on a United Nations famine-inspection tour in Africa, he greeted a mother with a dying baby in her arms by telling her what a lovely child she had.) It was clear, once the rumours about him started, that a man with a murky past could easily become President of Austria if he was a victim of Jewish conspiracies, just as a country with a murky past could easily become a democratic republic if it was a victim of Nazism. It was clear to the people in the Volkspartei, who had already put him up for President in 1971 and lost, and it was clear to the people at Young and Rubicam, who were planning his campaign this time around, and who took a leave of absence to continue with Waldheim after the scandal broke and the agency cancelled its contract. "We were looking for impact - you know, a strong color and a strong slogan," one of the advertising men said when he was asked about the poster borrowed from the National Socialists. "We'll as a client if the product is in line with the strategy, but it's not our business to ask if the product is really washing whiter."

There are only about seven thousand Jews in Austria, so any anti-Semitism here is anti-Semitism in its purest form - anti-Semitism without Jews. Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, the head of the Vienna Freud Society, calls it the Austrian disease - the negation of reality in fantasy. His friend Peter Michael Lingens, the editor of ProfiI, says that once you are guilty of killing millions of Jews, you don't really need more Jews around to know you hate them. Every couple of years, somebody here takes a poll about anti-Semitism and the results never vary - seventy per cent of the Austrian people dislike Jews, and about a third of those people strongly dislike Jews, and a third of them consider Jews "foul" and are physically revolted in a Jew's presence. Bruno Kreisky, who was Chancellor for thirteen years and is a Jew himself, says the polls are nonsense - first, because Austrians elected him, and, second, bevause you can't base anti-Semitism, as some polls evidently do, on whether people enjoy telling Jewish jokes. Hitler, of course, was Austrian, and claimed to have learned his anti-Semitism in Vienna. He said that bis ideal leader was someone who could combine the radical racial doctrine of George von Schönerer, whom he heard about here as a young man, with the scapegoat politics of Karl Lueger, who got to be mayor, in 1897, by convincing Viennas workers that there would be plenty of money for everyone if only the Jews were gone. Lueger held torchlight rallies and burned the Rothschilds in effigy while Schönerer and his friends carved Jewish heads on their canes and talked in parliament about Jewish devils, and between them they managed to create a theatre of race and a myth of race which had their paradigmatic moment on Kristallnacht, when forty-two of Vienna's forty-three synagogues were destroyed.

Most Austrians alive today have never known a Jew or had a Jewish neighbor, though Kurt Waldheim certainly had Jewish neighbors when he moved to Ne York and took up residence in the Secretary-General's mansion, on Sutton Place. New York was obviously not the place for Waldheim to announce that he had spent the a better part of the Second World War working for a war criminal. His biography "washed whiter" in New York. The story in New York (it was in a book of his called "The Challenge of Peace") went: "The knowledge that I was serving in the German army was hard to bear. Deliverance from my bitter situation finally came when our unit moved into active combat on the Eastern front in 1941. I was wounded in the leg and medically discharged."

In 1980, when Waldheim was thinking about a third term as Secretary-General, the United Nations War Crimes Commission files were mysteriously closed. No one, as it happens, was looking for Waldheim's dossier at the United Nations. The French had already looked him up in the Allied War Archives in Berlin, and so had the Wes Germans, and they all, for reasons of their own, said nothing. But by 1980 the Americans had an Office of Special Investigations to look for war criminals, and had asked for access to the commission files. The American Attorney General, Benjamin Civiletti, wrote the Secretary-General, thanking him in advance for bis cooperation - and it was after that that all access lo Ihe files was cancelled. When the New York Congressman Stephen Solarz wrote to Waldheim a few months later - Solarz had been reading a little about Waldheim's past in The New Republic - Waldheim was so offended that he replied, "I have not hitherto considered it necessary to react to slanders such as the one you quote."

+++

It was Bruno Kreisky who suggested Waldheim to the United Nations in 1971. Waldheim was looking for something distinguished to do. He had already been an ambassador and a foreign minister, and once he lost the Presidential election that year there was not much point for him in staying home. It was never a question of making Waldheim Chancellor. The Chancellor runs Austria (though not the world) whereas the President has very little to do besides, as Waldheim put it this ntime around, "moral renewal". Austrians were aware that Waldheim was cut out for something much more ceremonial than life at the chancellery, something on the order of embassy receptions and official visitors. For Chancellor, they preferred Kreisky - a brilliant and irascible Socialist who was so assimilated that he could call Menachem Begin a terrorist and Muammar Qaddafi a patriot and never admit to the contradiction. Being "assimilated" has a special meaning in Austria. Once, it was a legal status. Assimilated Jews - under the Hapsburgs, the official word was tolerierte, or "tolerated" - had rights and privileges that other Jews did not. They were what Hannah Arendt called a "state-people". The Austrians called them "court Jews," and this was often what they called themselves. Becoming assimilated was like changing nationalities, and there were not many assimilated Jews in Vienna before the war who identified with the shtetl Jews who had made their way here from Poland and Russia. They were very Austrian in their negation of reality in fantasy. It was not that anti-Semitism surprised them - anti-Semitism has always been part of Austrian life and politics. It was being identified with other Jews that they found difficult to accept. They agreed with Gustav Mahler, who wrote in bis journal that Jews were smelly people with black robes and long hair. When someone referred to Mahler (who was by then Catholic) as "the Jew Mahler," he replied, "I do not belong to the same people." Kreisky might easily say that he does not belong to the same people as the Polish Jews who came to Vienna from the camps in 1945 and opened cobbler shops and tailor shops in the Ring, or the old Hungarian Jews who arrived in 1956, or the Soviet Jews who live near Mexikoplatz, across the Danube Canal, and run a rough black market with contraband from the East European river freighters that make the Danube route. On the other hand, it was partly due to Kreisky's diplomacy that two hundred and sixty thousand Soviet Jews got exit visas during the thirteen years that he was Chancellor, and entirely due to bis authority that Austria opened its borders to every one of them as a place to live while they were deciding where to go. Most of the Jews here now are Eastern Jews. There are only a few thousand Austrian Jews - Jews who came home after the war or the children of those Jews. Kreisky himself spent the war in exile in Sweden and has Swedish wife, and sometimes he calls himself a Jew and sometimes he says that to call Bruno Kreisky a Jew you would have to use the same crazy racial categories that the Nazis invented at Nuremburg. He dislikes Zionists and Zionism. This has made him something of a pariah to Jews abroad, but in bis day it made him the one European leader who could negotiate for the West in the Arab world.

The intellectuals here like Kreisky. They say that he is authoritarian and proud and Ihat he nearly ruined his party, but they consider him one of them, because he reads what they write and shows up at their Graz conferences and always drops them a note when they publish something good, saying, "Loved, the book, Yours, Kreisky." Even his enemies admit that he is the most interesting Austrian politician in forty years. It may be that in his own way Kreisky is assimilated to anti-Semitism. Erika Weinzierl, a historian at the University of Vienna, says that whenever Kreisky attacks the Israelis or the "Jewish lobby" (meaning American Jews who do not agree with either his Middle Eastern policies or his socialist politics) there are Austrians who think, If the Jew Kreisky can talk like this, then we can, too. She says that Kreisky has not done very much more than Waldheim to correct that vocabulary of explanation which has to do with Jews and Jewish conspiracies and Jewish power.

When Kreisky was elected for the first time, he brought a lot of old Nazis into Austrian politics. This is no secret. Kreisky says that in 1970 there were still more than a quarter of a million Austrians alive who had belonged to the Nazi Party, and that there was no way he could have run a government with those Austrians disqualified from political life. He says he took the old official story about turning Nazis into democrats and made it his working hypothesis. The truth is he would never had won in Austria in 1970 without making that hypothesis. He recruited politicians with as much to account for as Waldheim, and whenever anyone brought up their records the Chancellor would say, "I back them, this has to be the end of the discussion." A lot of people who voted for Waldheim this month were really voting against Kreisky and the Socialists. They said it was unfair to talk so piously about Waldheim now, when there had been four ex-Nazis and one S. S. officer in Kreisky's first government. It was particularly unfair, they said when only three years ago Kreisky backed a notorious old S.S. Sturmführer named Friedrich Peter as a president of the Austrian parliament. Peter had a small party of his own, called the Freedom Party, which was supposed to protect the "Germanness" of Austrian life from decadent Slavic influences, and which was clearly appealing to old Nazis like him. The Freedom Party is in a coalition with the Socialists now, but Kreisky had talked about a coalition as early as 1975, when a round of parliamentary elections was coming up and the Socialists were worried about their majority. Simon Wiesenthal - the man who tracked down Adolf Eichmann from a documentation center in Vienna - started investigating Peter then. He discovered that Peter had spent two years on "extermination duty", in the Soviet Union, with an S.S unit that murdered at east ten thousand people - eigth thousand of them Jews. Wiesenthal had already kept one S.S. officer out of a Kreisky government. He never forgave Kreisky for making peace with Nazis, and Kreisky never forgave him. This time, Kreisky accused Wiesenthal of slandering him, of slandering socialism, of slandering Austria abroad. He threatened to take Wiesenthal to court. He called him a mafioso, and then he said that Wiesenthal must have had an "understanding" with the Nazis to have survived the war at all and especially to ve lived through some of it "openly" and "unpersecuted". Wiesenthal, who
spent the war in concentration camps, thereupon filed suit against Kreisky, claiming that Kreisky, in effect, was caling him a Gestapo agent, and Kreisky replied by naming a parliamentary commission to investigate Wiesenthal's center. They were "the only famous Jews left in Austria", as one reporter put it, and before they backed off from their various suits and investigations they nearly destroyed each other.
Wiesenthal is a conservative man. He is close to the Peoples Party, and has beenfor years. No one here was surprised that he refused to challenge Waldheim this spring - he said that Waldheim was an opportunist, but that nobody yet had proved he was a war criminal - or that he attacked the World Jewish Congress, instead, for interfering in Austrian politics and "undoing the work of years of reconciliation." Wiesenthal is old, and maybe he is getting sentimental about Austria, or maybe age has made him susceptible to what Dr. Leupold-Löwenthal calls "the other Austrian disease" - "the situation is hopeless but not serious" disease. As it is, a lot of younger Austrians agree with Wiesenthal. They know the Socialists are just as compromised as the People's Party in their arrangements. Fred Sinowatz, the Socialist Chancellor, quit after the elections this month. He was maladroit and not too bright, and the coalition he made with Friedrich Peter's party was a disaster. Three of Peter's friends joined Sinowatz's government, including a Defense Minister who went to the Graz airport one day last year to greet an S.S. major named Walter Reder, who had just been sent home by the Italians after forty years in a Gaeta prison.

Last year, the Socialists talked about approaching Kurt Waldheim and asking him to run as their candidate. When the People's Party got to him first, the Socialists attacked him. When he came within sixteen thousand votes of the Presidency in the first round of the election, they stopped attacking him. They decided that every attack on Waldheim had meant a vote for Waldheim - and announced that the interests of Austrian unity and an honorable campaign they would not mention the Second World War or Waldheim's part in it, until the voting was over. Peter Michael Lingens, whose magazine exposed Wafdheim, likes to tell a story about his mother and the election this year. Frau Lingens was in the resistance. Her husband enrolled her in the National Socialist Working Women for protection, but she was caught and arrested anyway, in 1942, and sent to Auschwitz, and since the war - at least, until now - she has been a devoted Socialist. She voted for Waldheim, she told her son, because of the hypocrisy of the whole campaign.
Some Austrians want to see the Socialists out of power so badly that they do not much care that they had to start by making Kurt Waldheim President. A President here may have very little to do, but he does choose the Chancellor, and there are parliamentary elections in another year and no clear indication of what the majority will be, or even if there is going to be a majority. The Socialists have already run Austria for sixteen years, and there have been so many scams and scandals over those years that until the Viennese began to amuse themselves by betting on the countries that would still let Waldheim in if he was President (Bulgaria led the list, followed by Czechoslovakia, Libya, and Syria) the favorite parlor game in Vienna was betting on how much money had disappeared that week from the federal treasury. The economy in Austria is a state economy. A lot of the industry belongs to the government, and there are planned deficits to keep that industry going, so that Austria can, say, sell a telephone system to the city of Cairo and then loan the Egyptians the money to buy it. There is room in the system for what Germans and Austrians call Filz. (Filz means "felt", and people use it when a deal is so matted with favors and bribes and padded costs and hidden charges that you can't separate the threads.) There are bureaucrats from the Vienna Rathaus in jail now because of a hospital-construction scandal that has lasted five years and put more than a hundred million schillings - seven million dollars - into their various pockets. The officers from a trading company of the country's biggest steel conglomerate have been fired for "borrowing" a quarter of a billion schillingd to invest in oil futures - and losing them. It is not that the Socialists have a monopoly on graft. (The most interesting scandal this year involved an insurance company that the People's Party controls through one of ist trade Bünde: everyone supposedly took home millions of schillings, including a Cistercian abbot from Styria who was interested in living better.) It is simply that state ownership and state partnerships and state banking and state financing and all the formulas of a state economy have created habits of mind and opportunity that are now "institutionally irresistible", as one banker put it. They are not so different from the corporatist formulas the Fascists invented in the nienteen-twenties and thirties (which is really how Austria got them), but by now they are almost entirely associated with Socialism and with sixteen years of Socialist government. Kurt Steyrer, the Socialist who ran against Waldheim, is a doctor, and a decent man but not a strong one. In 1983, when he was Minister of Health and the Environment, the Socialists wanted to build a power station at Hainburg, east of Vienna, that would have flooded thousands of acres of rare wetland forest. Ecologists and students stopped the project by demonstrating, but Dr. Steyrer never said a word against it. His reputation suffered so much, that even the Austrian ecologists came out for Waldheim after the first round of voting this spring. Waldheim himself began to talk solemnly in what is known as his headwaiter's voice about clean air and clean water for Austria's grandchildren. Kreisky pointed out that there is not much Austria can do about ist grandchildren so long as the countries around Austria have thirty-two nuclear reactors of their own and thousands of nuclear warheads aimed across ist. But the truth, as one young Austrian said, is that "none of these old guys helped us much - not Waldheim, not Kreisky, not Steyrer." It is not lost on young Austrians that Kreisky himself built a nuclear reactor (there was a referendum against it, and it was never used), or that Waldheim never said a word about nuclear risk until Chernobyl exploded, and the ecologists got five and a half per cent of the vote in the first round of an election Waldheim was supposed to win easily.

The fact is that no one really knows why Austria voted the way it did this month. No one knows whether Austria voted for Waldheim or against foreigners and Jews or for the People's Party or against Socialists. No one eben knows whether the politicians in the Peoples Party like Wldheim. Waldheim was their Trojan horse, and he carried them a little close to power, and it was a free ride. None of them had to climb down and say what they were going to do once they got there. All they had to say was "We Austrians Will Vote For Whom We Want!"

+++

The first most Austrians heard about a problem involving Kurt Waldheim was last September. People came home from vacation, and by the end of the month anyone with a friend in the Socialist Party knew that something was up - something terrible about the war that was going to come out and finish Waldheim in a couple of days. It is curious now how many people did think that the news about Waldheim - not his past so much as his having lied so calculatingly about the past - would finish him. The Socialists figured it was a matter of time before he dropped out of the election. The World Jewish Congress gave him three or four days. The reporters at Profil concluded that the Socialists were in business for another sixteen years. The Socialists claim that they did not get interested in Waldheim until January, when the Minister of Defense - the same minister who had welcomed the S.S. major home - allowed some Air Force officers to hang a plaque in honor of Alexander Löhr on the wall of the National Defense Academy, in Vienna, and in the discussion that followed someone mentioned that Kurt Waldheim had been Löhr's adjutant. The truth is that the Socialists were interested in Waldheim for as long as they knew that he was running against them. A local historian by the name of Georg Tidl had been working on Waldheim's file for a year before anyone at Profil heard about Waldheim's being a lieutenant in Löhr's Balkan command - the Heeresgruppe E, it was called. Nobody knows whom Tidl was working on Waldheim for - he is supposedly a little odd, and sometimes he says the New York Times and sometimes the South Africans and sometimes the "cossacks" - but the Socialists must have known about his work, because even the People's Party knew about it. ' Hubertus Czernin, at Profil, says that Tidl went to the secretary of the People's Party in April of 1985 and told him that Waldheim had some sort , of Nazi past, and that the secretary refused to listen. After that, the information was more or less available. Some people think that the Socialists bought it, and eventually leaked it to the World Jewish Congress. Other people say no, that it was not Tidl but a man named Leon Zelman - he runs the Jewish Welcome Service here - who got the information and told the Socialists and the congress what was going on. Zelman is a Socialist and a Jew, a shtetl Jew from Galicia. He spent three and a half years in concentration camps - Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and finally a camp called Ebensee, near Mauthausen - and then he settled in Vienna, and the little Jewish community here has been his life and his passion. Early last year, Zelman arranged an invitation for the World Jewish Congress to hold its annual meeting in Vienna. It was the first time the congress had met in Vienna since before the war. And it happened to be the moment the Italians chose to let Walter Reder out of jail. The government that welcomed the World Jewish Congress one day welcomed the S.S. major the next, and then, to everyone's distress, Chancellor Sinowatz appeared at the congress to make amends and gave a speech about how much the Sinowatzes had suffered the day the Jewish family next door was taken away by the Gestapo. All the Sinowatz children cried and cried, the Chancellor said, and had to have a lot of candy to get over the experience.

Many of the Jews here are conservative, like Wiesenthal. They look after themselves, and they do not want any more trouble in their lives. They were embarrassed when people from the World Jewish Congress started to talk about leaving Vienna because of Walter Reder. They did not think it was sensible for foreign Jews to talk publicly about whether to stay in a country that sends ist Defense Minister to welcome a war criminal home. They did not want the attenlion. Like other Austrians, they did not want to confront the anti-Semitism here. They preferred to put anti-Semitism in a drawer and close the drawer and hope it would disappear, like an old letter that has been around too long to answer. They liked the euphemistic surfaces of Austrian life. They liked reality that curved like a baroque bow into something pleasing. What they did not like was Israel Singer - who is an abrasive character - coming to Vienna and making judgments in their name. Many of them thought it would be nice if Kurt Waldheim was President. They approved of Waldheim for the reason other Austrians approved of him - because he was prominent. Zelman's friends say that when Zelman saw this his heart was broken. Now he tells people that the city he loved so much, the city that gave him peace and let him live in safety, was an illusion. "I was selling an illusion," he said, two days before Waldheim won.
Waldheim made a trip to Jerusalem when he was at the United Nations, and Zelman sometimes talks about that trip, because Waldheim referred to Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, and then, when his aides told him that as far as the United Nations was concerned Tel Aviv was the capital, he refused to wear a yarmulke at the Yad Vashem Memorial. Zelman says that of these days Waldheim will show up at the synagogue in Vienna to make his peace but that this time "I am sure that he will put a yarmulke on, and I am not so sure that the congregation will refuse to let him in."

+++

Hubertus Czernin started investigating Waldheim after the Defense Minister and the Minister of Buildings had an argument about whether to take down General Löhr' s plaque from the Defense Academy wall. Cernin called the German military archives, in Freiburg, and the Germans referred him to a veterans' club in Linz, where an amateur historian was doing research on Waldheim's Army unit in Russia. The historian, in turn, sent Czernin to George Tidl and to the State Archives, here in Vienna, behind the Ballhausplatz. Czernin had nothing against Waldheim then. In January, when the argument about the plaque started, someone from the Socialist Party had called him and asked if he had heard the rumors about Waldheim. He said he didn't take them seriously at all. He made a crack about Waldheim's having been Löhr's righthand man, and mentioned it to a reporter at Profil who was writing an article on the plaque. The reporter did take the rumors seriously, and said so, and the in'estigation began.

Czernin wanted to be fair with Waldheim. Actually, he was so fair that he called on Waldheim and asked whether Waldheim objected to his looking through some of the files at the State Archives; he thought that maybe he could help clear up the rumors that were going around. Waldheim, he says, was gracious, or maybe just oblivious. He sent his secretary with Czernin. The secretary was a young diplomat by the name of Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff, who had come home from the embassy in Bucharest for what he probably thought was going to be a predictable and pleasant campaign that would put him in touch with a lot of important people and look terrific on his resuné.

Czernin is Austrian by birth, Czech by origin. He is thirty years old - a friendly young man with black hair falling in his eyes and a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses on his nose - and he wears polo shirts and bluejeans to the office and carts around two plastic shopping bags full of books about Nazis and Nazism, which he has been accumulating since the Waldheim story broke. To many people here, Czernin presents what has always been best about Austria - the et´hnicity, the civility, the intelligence, the very "Austrian" understanding of how complicated reality is. He is a fine reporter in a city where most of the press is terrible. The fact that it is terrible gives people something to complain about and another wistful comparison to make with the golden days when the press was good. The papers and magazines in Austria belong to businessmen or to banks or chambers of commerce with official links to the various partie, and they are expected to serve their owners' interests. It may be true - the Viennese say it is - that the country is so corrupt that you have to queue upat the newspapers with your scandal, but it is also true that most newspapers will turn you away. The papers identify with power. They are respectful and obliging, and nearly all of them chose to protect Kurt Waldheim. A piece of information to the effect that, say, Kurt Waldheim once approved orders for a "cleansing operation" that led to the deportation of sixty thousand Yugoslavs to concentration camps would appear in the papers here as "Jews Accuse Waldheim of War Crimes". The biggest daily, a tabloid called Kronen Zeitung, with a circulation of a million, belongs to a neighbor of Waldheim's on the Attersee. Die Presse, which used to be the great Vienna paper in the days when it was the Neue Freie Presse and had people like Theodor Herzl contributing, belongs to the Chamber of Commerce and reads like the People's Party public-relations bulletin on newsprint. Profil itself belongs to al daily paper called Kurier, which, in turn, belongs to a syndicate of businessmen and an agricultural bank that are People's Party fiefdoms. Lingens and his partner sold the magazine to Kurier in 1975, when it was four years old and they were having a hard time keeping it going, but they demanded an independent charter, and guarantees, and to their surprise got them. They tried o model Profil after a good German weekly. They made it look like Der Spiegel, but they say they wanted it to sound like Die Zeit. It had been so long since Austrians had read any news about Austria besides good news that they did not know what to make of a magazine that talked about "investigative reporting" and had people running around the country asking questions and printing the answers. They are used to it now, but the fact is that any Austrians who did not read Profil over the past six months could easily believe that Kurt Waldheim spent the war with his law books, because that is what the papers they did read told them.

Most young Austrians learn very little at home about the Second World War. In school, if they get to the war at all, they usually learn that the Second World War was the time that foreigners came here and stole the Austrian farmer's chickens. Hubertus Czernin says that his Gymnasium class never even heard that there was a war. The class went right from the Treaty of Versailles to the State Treaty of 1955, which established the Austrian Republic. Czernin was one of the lucky ones, he says, because he had parents who talked about the war. Czernin's father knew a general in the plot against Hitler and was sent to prison in Vienna and his maternal grandfather was half Jewish and in politics, and he spent the war in the concentration camp at Mauthausen. Czernin and Lingens have the resistance in common - which means they have the war in common - and it may be because of this that the magazine took it as a duty to establish a record of Kurt Waldheim's career. Not any Austrians are willing to make a distinction between the men who fought for Hitler and the men who refused. In 1947, the priest of a parish church near Linz asked his bishop for permission to print a story in the church newsletter about a devout Catholic farmer named Franz Jägersteter, who had refused to swear an oath to the Third Reich when he was drafted, and was executed. The shop said no. He said so many other Austrians had lost their lives fighting that it would not be right to take one farmer who had lost his life for not fighting and call him a hero.

At first, a lot of the people at Profil and on Waldheim's staff believed that Waldheim represented those "other Austrians". When he talked about the war at all, he talked about the hundreds of thousands of Austrians who were in the Wehrmacht. He neve missed a chance to mention that the only serious attempt at a coup against Hitler was the Wehrmacht coup in July of 1944, but he never addressed the war itself, or his lying about the war, or the cost to himself or to any Austrian soldier of having fought for Hitler. The problem - at least for the staff that planned his strategy and wrote his speeches was that he could never really bring himself to identify wilh those hundreds of thousands of Austrians who were not heroes, who were drafted and given a uniform with a swastika and sent away to fight. Some of his staff wanted him to talk about the difficulty of heroism, to take the part of ordinary Austrians who had lacked the will or the courage or the understanding to resist, and to say something about a life spent working for a world in which decent, ordinary people like that would never have to confront such a terrible choice again - and fail themselves. It was, to say the least, a moment for statesmanship, but Waldheim, despite his years as an ambassador and a foreign minister and even a secretary-general, had never learned statesmanship. He was too vain to understand the uses of humility and regret and failure and a properly stated mea culpa. The best his people got was the speech he made about anti-Semitism, late in May, at the Schwarzenberg Palace. (The irony of the mise en scéne may have been lost on Waldheim; the Schwarzenbergs were an Austro-Czech family who had challenged Hitier by registering as members of the Czech minority instead of citiens of the German Reich.)

It may be that Waldheim was so used to the ceremonial euphemisms of United Nations high life that he had come to believe that life was protocol and truth was the last word spoken by the highest-ranking person. When Czernin called on him a second time, Waldheim denied everything his file from the archives said. Czernin says that Waldheim would look at the photocopy of bis Wehrstammbuch, his Army record, with his signature on membership cards from the S. A. riding club and the National Socialist Student Union, and even at his own Photograph, and say, "No, not me, not true", as if there were nothing there - no papers, no picture, no embarrassed reporter, no young diplomats with their mouths open. It was a photograph from the archives that interested Czernin most. It was a head shot, the kind of picture that goes on passports and identity cards, but it reminded Czernin of something, and then he realized he had seen a face like that in a picture somebody had sent to Profil that fall - a picture of a grup of young Austrians waiting on the Heldenplatz on May 1, 1938, to welcome Hitler to Vienna. Czernin was so bewildered by then - bewildered by the two pictures and by the Wehrstammbuch he had seen and by Waldheim's always saying, "No, not me", and smiling so politely - that he went straight from the meeting to a café in the Hotel Erzherzog Rainer and sat up until one in the morning drinking and talking with Peter Marboe. Who was Waldheim's chief of staff, and Gerold Christian, Waldheim's press secretary, trying to make some sense of the conversations he and Waldheim had had. "I told them, 'Wow! Waldheim must have had terrific contacts to be able to stay in Vienna and study law for two whole years in the middle of a world war', and they went back to Waldheim, and then Waldheim said, 'Well, maybe I was only sick for two months, and maybe then I went to the Balkans.' But the thing is, he would never tell the whole story and this was very annoying, because it turned out that he was one of the best-informed officers of the Balkans. He knew everything." In the end, Profil and one Salzburg paper, Salzburger Nachrichten, asked that Waldheim withdraw from the campaign. An "alternative" paper called Falter gave all the reasons why he should withdraw from it. The rest of the press preferred to write about how the World Jewish Congress was paying Greek partisans - a hundred and fifty thousand dollars is the latest figure - to say that Kurt Waldheim had beat them up.

+++

Eli Rosenbaum the general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, flew to Vienna on February 4th -two weeks before Czernin visited the State Archives and met with Waldheim. Rosenbaum says that the congress had only just heard about Löhr and Waldhelm - that one of his researchers had read the article on Löhr in Profil, and showed it to Israel Singer, who took it to Edgar Bronfman who said, "Go ahead." Not many people believe that, but it is the congress's story, the way the Socialists' story is that one of their staff happened to read about Waldheim and Löhr in Profil, and showed the article around, and that after that the Socialists got busy. The World Jewish Congress blames the Socialists for their "deafening silence" after the first round of voting. Singer claims, with justice, that the Socialists were immensely cynical in their campaign - which went from attacks on Waldheim to silence about Waldheim to elder-statesman rectitude from Kreisky to the resignation of Chancellor Sinowatz once Waldheim was elected and the Socialists had nothing to lose, and a lot to gain, by showing some appropriate indignation. On he other hand, the Socialists blame the World Jewish Congress for a certain potshot style that does not do well here. Some Socialists agree with Wiesenthal that the World Jewish Congress is raising the level of anti-Semitism in Austria. But the argument between Wiesenthal and the World Jewish Congress has as much to do with Jewish politics, which are at least as involuted as Austrian politics, as it has to do with Kurt Waldheim. Simon Wiesenthal does not really like the congress's moving, as it were, into his territory (even the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angees has been at odds with him over his reluctance to condemn Waldheim), and the World Jewish Congress does not really like the attention Wiesenthal gets as a famous Nazi hunter. Israel Singer says that Jews do not cause anti-Semitism - anti-Semites do. He is right, of course. When Michael Graff, the general secretarv of the People's Party, actually accused the World Jewish Congress of provoking "feelings that we all don 't want to have", a jourialist here named Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi replied that it was not a matter of whether you wanted to have those feelings - it was having them that counted. She said that the most painful thing in Austria right now ls watching anti-Semites warn other anti-Semites against anti-Semitism.

+++

Monsigniore Leopold Ungar, who runs the Catholic Charities here, thinks that the Allies made a terrible miscalculation after the Second World War. They believed that the Austrians were going to recover, morally and historically, and that it was the Germans who were going to have to start all over again - the hunters and gatherers, so to speak, of modern Europe. In fact, it is the Austrians who are without a history. People who have seen the new Vienna shows (the Künstlerhaus version was called "Traum und Wirklichkeit", which means "Dream and Reality") often remark on the passion with which the artists and intellectuals of prewar Vienna abandoned history. Harold Bloom, the Yale critic, could have been talking about Vienna instead of Wordsworth when he described what an "anxiety of influence" was. That kind of anxiety hangs over Vienna even now. lf there is no real Austrian literature of the war - no "Tin Drum" of the Anschluss - it may be because the important Austrian writers of the past forty years, writers like Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, went right back past the war to the questions about art and language which the early modernists posed and never resolved. Austria's evasions are the same evasions that Karl Kraus wrote about in every issue of Die Fackel - they have a spezial language , whether it is the language of anti-Semitism or the language of the victim, and writers here believe that any true recovery for their country has to startagain with language, as Austrians use it. They are more interested in Wittgenstein than in their military historians. Still, when Waldheim began to talk about doing his duty as a soldier, Peter Handke offered his services to Steyrer, twelve hundred intellectuals published a letter of protest, and another group of writers and artists took ads in the daily papers to say that, while they didn't really like the Socialists, Kurt Steyrer would do less damage than Kurt Waldheim as an Austrian President. The only "artist for Waldheim" seems to have been a Hungarian sculptor who spends his summer vacations in Gablitz, in he Vienna woods, and thinks that Waldheim is the "greatest living European." Last month, the sculptor sent huge bronze bust of Waldheim to a People's Party rally in the Gablitz Festhalle. It was a striking likeness of the new President. It could be the first gift in a long career of getting gifts that Waldheim will want to donate to a worthy cause instead of taking home and keeping it for himself.