kurt waldheim gave the hider fascist party

KURT WALDHEIM GAVE THE HIDER FASCIST PARTY FULL

What is important is that the world was run by an Austrian. 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. 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. Kurt Waldheim lied about a past that included 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.

KURT WALDHEIM GAVE THE HIDER FASCIST PARTY FULL

It is beautiful and full of charm, but the nostalgia here is so desperate, and so deep, that it seems to have exhausted the Viennese. Vienna itself has been returned to the natives, and it is a provincial place, a kind of imperial ghost town. 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 siècle Vienna show at the last Venice Biennale. They may not know it, but they miss the Czechs and the Hungarians and the Jews who lived here. They miss what they call the thickness of culture. The Viennese miss the city they had when the Hapsburgs were around.

It is not that the Viennese miss the Hapsburgs-though there are certainly people here who do miss the Hapsburgs. Vienna is probably the only European capital where it is considered normal, among the intelligentsia, to be a monarchist. There have been people like Kurt Waldheim, pretending to stature, and there has been a public anxious to believe in them. There have not been many people of stature in Austria since the war. 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. 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.Ī diplomat here with a clearer head than M. Boursicot went to prison refusing, really, to change his mind. 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. 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 twenty years-providing China with a lot of interesting information from the Embassy’s diplomatic pouch.

The tenor, Shi Peipu, was a secret agent who liked to dress up in his courtesan’s robes from the Peking Opera. Austria’s affair with Kurt Waldheim is a little like the affair between the French diplomat and the Chinese tenor who have just been sent to prison in Paris for spying.

Kurt waldheim gave the hider fascist party