Volume 38 berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com V o l u m e 3 8 A u s t r i a n a n d H a b s b u r g S t u d i e s Jakub Gortat Austria’s Difficult Past Jakub Gortat ■ H I S T O R Y Volume 38 of Austrian and Habsburg Studies General Editor: Howard Louthan Published in Association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics, and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, social, and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Austria’s Difficult Past Memory of National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960–1980) Jakub Gortat The role played by film in reshaping Austria’s post-war national identity is often studied within narrow historical and geographical margins. Film history traditionally focuses on either the work of a sole director, German cinematography, or the immediate aftermath of World War II, and neglects the link that exists between historical television films and Austria’s distinct culture of remembrance. In Austria’s Difficult Past, Jakub Gortat addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of television films produced by Austrian (ORF) and German television studios between 1961 and 1980. In doing so, he explores the way films mediated the burden of memory and the legacy of Austria’s complicity in the Nazi regime. Jakub Gortat is Assistant Professor in the Institute of German Philology at the University of Lodz. His academic interests fall into the area of the German and Austrian politics of memory, the intersections of film, history and politics in Germany and Austria, as well as German-Polish cultural relations after 1945. He has recently published research in New German Critique; German Life and Letters; Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance; Journal of Austrian Studies, and Holocaust Studies - A Journal of Culture and History. Cover photograph: Young Adolf Hitler sitting in front of the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna. On the movie set of Ein junger Mann aus dem Innviertel – Adolf Hitler. Wie sie es wurden by Axel Corti (ORF/ZDF 1973). © IMAGO / United Archives. Memory of National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960−1980) Austria’s Difficult Past Austria’s Difficult Past This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics, and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, social, and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Recent volumes:  Volume 38 Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960–1980) Jakub Gortat Volume 37 Habsburg Civil Servants: Between Civil Society and the State Alexander Maxwell and Daša Ličen Volume 36 The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I Hannes Grandits, Ibolya Murber, and Katharina Tyran Volume 35 Vanquished and Victorious: World War I Veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938 Václav Šmidrkal, Laurence Cole, Hannes Leidinger, Rudolf Kučera, Julia Walleczek- Fritz, and Radka Šustrová Volume 34 Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700–1914 Ambika Natarajan Volume 33 The Vienna Gestapo 1938–1945 Elisabeth Boeckl-Klamper, Thomas Mang, and Wolfgang Neugebauer Volume 32 Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges Edited by František Šístek Volume 31 More Than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Klaas Van Gelder Volume 30 Estates and Constitution: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary István Szijártó Volume 29 Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy Tim Buchen For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/austrian-habsburg-studies. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Austria’s Difficult Past Memory of National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960–1980) d Jakub Gortat This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. First published in 2025 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2025 Jakub Gortat Some rights reserved � e right of Jakub Gortat to be identi� ed as author of this work has been asserted under the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act, 1988. � is work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). � e terms of the license stipulate that you may reuse, distribute, and reproduce this work in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher and provide a link to the Creative Commons License applied. � is license applies only to the work in full and not to any components included with permission. For uses beyond those covered by this license contact Berghahn Books. A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2025008874 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library EU GPSR Authorized Representative LOGOS EUROPE, 9 rue Nicolas Poussin, 17000, LA ROCHELLE, France Email: Contact@logoseurope.eu ISBN 978-1-83695-020-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-83695-021-9 epub ISBN 978-1-83695-022-6 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202 � is open access edition of Austria's Di� cult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Filmization of Television (1960–1980) has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Funder: the National Science Center, Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Contents d List of Illustrations� vi Acknowledgments� viii Introduction� 1 Chapter 1. The Austrian Culture of Remembrance and the Media� 21 Chapter 2. The Difficult Past in Docufiction� 60 Chapter 3. Axel Corti Comes to Terms with the Difficult Past in the 1970s� 100 Chapter 4. National Socialism Comes to the Heimat: Alpensaga IV and V� 145 Chapter 5. Adaptations: The Difficult Past in Fiction Films� 197 Conclusion� 227 Appendix. Number of Broadcasts and Number of Phone Calls Made by Viewers after the Broadcasts� 232 Bibliography� 240 Index� 265 This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Illustrations d Figures 2.1. Mr. Redlich shortly before being killed by an illegal Nazi. © Dr. Heinz Scheiderbauer GmbH. Every effort has been made to identify the rightsholder for the image reproduced here. For any corrections with regard to the rights information listed here, please contact the publisher.� 63 2.2. Staging Dollfuß’s assassination in the documentary Der 25. Juli 1934. © ORF. Reproduced with permission.� 70 2.3. Viennese youth listening to Innitzer’s sermon in Theodor Kardinal Innitzer. © ORF / Neue Thalia Film. Reproduced with permission.� 84 2.4. Close-up of the face of Cardinal Innitzer, who realizes his mistakes. Theodor Kardinal Innitzer. © ORF / Neue Thalia Film. Reproduced with permission.� 88 2.5. A woman expresses her disappointment with Innitzer’s attitude toward the Nazis in Theodor Kardinal Innitzer. © ORF / Neue Thalia Film. Reproduced with permission.� 89 3.1. Although he does not want to, the Austrian major has to obey the Nazi law. Der Fall Jägerstätter. © ORF / Neue Thalia Film. Reproduced with permission.� 108 3.2. The representative of the Nazi military judiciary also has to obey the Nazi law. Der Fall Jägerstätter. © ORF / Neue Thalia Film. Reproduced with permission.� 108 This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Illustrations   |   vii 3.3. At the end of Ein junger Mann aus dem Innviertel, Hitler acquires the familiar traits of a dictator. © ORF / Westfilm. Reproduced with permission.� 128 4.1. A “civilian” suit vs. a “military” Heimwehr uniform, showing the parting of the ways between two brothers. Alpensaga: Die feindlichen Brüder. © ORF / Studio Film. Reproduced with permission.� 156 4.2. Twin brothers, Gregor and Michl, sharing the dream of going to the US. Alpensaga: Die feindlichen Brüder. © ORF / Studio Film. Reproduced with permission.� 157 4.3. Peter Turrini as an anonymous victim of Nazi persecution. Alpensaga: Der deutsche Frühling. © ORF / Studio Film. Reproduced with permission.� 178 5.1. Walter, former Wehrmacht photographer, recalling “the best years of his life.” Die kleine Figur meines Vaters. © ORF / Satel Film. Reproduced with permission.� 202 5.2. Walter throws a grenade into a bunker, probably killing the Soviet soldiers inside. Die kleine Figur meines Vaters. © ORF / Satel Film. Reproduced with permission.� 206 5.3. Father, son, and the pictures the former took on the Eastern Front. Die kleine Figur meines Vaters. © ORF / Satel Film. Reproduced with permission.� 211 Table Table A.1. Number of broadcasts and number of phone calls made by viewers after the broadcasts. Appendix table made by the author using archival data (Fernsehprotokolle) and reports (Vollinformationen) acquired from the archives of ORF, ZDF, BR, NDR, and DRA (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv).� 232 This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Acknowledgments d The idea for this book emerged sometime in 2018–19. Inspired by numerous academic works on Austrian history and memory, I asked myself the ques- tion of how it was possible for Austria to declare itself the victim of Nazi aggres- sion while simultaneously honoring the former Wehrmacht (and sometimes SS) veterans. In 2019, I read an article in an Austrian newspaper about the discovery of an SS inscription in runes in a Viennese cemetery. Then it began, the great adventure of reading the literature of prominent Austrian “nest foulers.” As a declared motion-picture fan, I realized that Austrian filmmakers had not dealt with the Austrian memory of National Socialism with the same engagement and devotion as Austrian writers had on this issue. This was the point when I applied for the Richard-Plaschka-Stipendium at OeAD, which I was granted in 2020. Therefore I would like to first express my gratitude to the experts of OeAD whose decision facilitated my receiving of the scholarship. My ideas began to solidify during my OeAD research stay in Innsbruck in 2020. I realized that my study should consolidate and extend the existing but rather limited knowledge on the impact of film and television with regard to coming to terms with the Nazi past in Austria, thereby filling a gap both in Austrian and German television and memory studies. It was with a heavy heart that I decided to divide one comprehensive monograph on the Austrian mem- ory of Nazism from 1945 to 1980 into two books. While in the first volume, I focused on films made between 1945 and 1955, this book offers insight into how television films in Austria dealt with the country’s difficult past between 1960 and 1980. I also shared the idea of my project with the dean of the Philological Faculty at my university. Joanna Jabłkowska, professor of German literature, listened to me carefully and then said she appreciated my efforts to search for gaps in the literature and wished me luck. Since words of praise from the lips of the dean are rare, this very much acted as positive motivation for me. So I am very grateful to the dean for expressing her belief in me, for our conversations about Austrian literature and culture, and for her inspiring comments and advice. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Acknowledgments   |   ix My reading of Austrian history, culture, and film is indebted to artists, ac- ademics, and friends with whom I enjoyed discussions and email exchanges. I am particularly grateful to the following people: Karin Moser, Kurt Scharr, Maria Fritsche, Peter Pirker, Gunda Barth-Scalmani, Christian Karner, Kerstin von Lingen, Chris Wahl, Christian Frosch, Evi Romen, and last but not least Eva Binder, whose company and advice (as well as coffee and Tirolean bacon) helped me survive the difficult moments of lockdown in 2020 during my stay in Innsbruck. I would also like to express my gratitude to Christian Poik for our discussions on Austrian literature, our chess games in Vienna, and finally for organizing a safe place to stay on that horrific night of 2 November 2020, when a terrorist attack shook the Austrian capital. I conducted the vast majority of my research in 2020 and 2021 in Innsbruck, Vienna, and Krems, during a time marked by COVID-19 and a range of regu- lations that were implemented due to the pandemic. I am therefore extremely grateful to the employees of the Innsbruck University and State Library Tyrol for helping me conduct research during those very strange times. Most of the films examined in this book are not available on DVD. How- ever, thanks to ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk, Austria’s national public broadcaster), some of them were copied for me onto DVDs so I could watch them repeatedly at home. Three films, on the other hand (Der Fall Jägerstätter and the episodes of Alpensaga), had been previously released on DVD by Hoanzl in collaboration with Filmarchiv Austria and the daily newspaper Der Standard. These are the copies I utilized during my research. The research for the reception of the discussed films was conducted in several libraries and archives. With regard to the latter, I was able to utilize the facilities of the Archive of Contemporary Artists in Krems (Archiv der Zeitgenossen— separate files relating to the oeuvre of Peter Turrini: Turrini-Nachlass); the ar- chive of ORF in Vienna (television protocols, data on broadcasts and viewing of films); Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin (archival press); the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—archival press); the archive of Bavarian Television (BR) in Munich (separate files relating to the film Die kleine Figur meines Vaters); the archive of North German Television (NDR) in Hamburg (separate files re- lating to the film An der schönen blauen Donau); the archive of Second German Television (ZDF) in Mainz (data on broadcasts in Germany and separate files relating to ZDF-ORF coproductions); and the German Broadcasting Archive (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv) in Frankfurt am Main (data on broadcasts in Ger- many). Collecting reviews and other texts offering qualitative reception data was possible thanks to research carried out in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek); the Town Hall Library in Vienna (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus); the Library of the University and State of Ty- rol in Innsbruck (Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol); the library of the Austrian Film Archive in Vienna (Filmarchiv Austria); the library of the Film This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. x   |   Acknowledgments Museum in Vienna (Filmmuseum); the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek); and the library of Deutsche Kine- mathek in Berlin. In 2021, my colleague Maria Migodzińska joined me in this painstaking task to search for archival press texts both in print and in microfilms and microfiches. Marysiu—dziękuję bardzo! I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Elisabeth Streit from the Film Museum library in Vienna and Kristina Höch from the library of the Aus- trian Film Archive in Vienna for their preparation of materials, for their advice, and for the warm welcome every time I visited the library. I am indebted to Ruth Stifter-Trummer, Barbara Kerb (ORF archive), Diana Steffens (ZDF ar- chive), Sandra Leibner (BR archive), Sönke Treu (NDR archive), Elke Niebauer (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv), and Hanna Prandstätter (Archiv der Zeitgenossen in Krems) for their assistance and time devoted to preparing and sometimes scanning large amounts of valuable materials that I ordered. I conducted the vast majority of the research thanks to a grant (Sonata 17 program) received from the Polish National Science Center (NCN). My thanks go to the anonymous peer reviewers of the NCN who positively opined on my project proposals and my book draft as well as three reviewers assigned by the publisher. I would like to thank Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska for her critical read- ing of my application for this grant. Her feedback was invaluable and unarguably contributed to its success. I am also grateful for the valuable feedback I received from my Łódź colleagues during our Forschungscolloquien, when I could present excerpts from my project. Ewa Fiuk supported me by reading one of the book’s chapters and offering me very valuable feedback. Thank you! I would like to extend my appreciation to my very good friend Konrad Klejsa, who supported me in writing the project proposals and with whom I have enjoyed plenty of fascinating discussions on film, history, and memory in the German-speaking countries. Finally, my gratitude goes to Peter Turrini. My interview with him provided me with a great deal of useful information about the production of Alpensaga that cannot be found in any archives. Herr Turrini, danke schön! A part of the material in this book has been previously published in a mod- ified form in the Journal of Religion & Film 23, no. 2 (2019) as an article titled “Between Idealization of a Martyr and Critic of a Society: Analysis of Axel Cor- ti’s Der Fall Jägerstätter”; in Przegląd Zachodni 382, no. 1 (2022) as the article “Against Political Compromises—Coming to Terms with the Austrofascist and National Socialist Past in John Olden’s Docudrama the Blue Danube (1965)”; and in Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 17, no. 1 (2024) as the article “Not Only Väterliteratur: The Engagement of Several Media in Talking about the Nazi Past in Wolfgang Glück’s Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (1980).” I would like to thank the editors of the above-named journals for their consent to include these articles, after some modifications, as chapters in this book. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Acknowledgments   |   xi Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife, Ewelina, who has repeat- edly taken on 100 percent of parental responsibilities for our daughter, Zofia, during my forays abroad—whether it was during my scholarship in Austria, my attending scientific conferences, or when I was conducting research. Dziękuję. The research this book is based on was funded in part by the National Science Center, Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction d Film can play a very significant role in developing a state’s national identity. It may mirror and mold the trends in interpreting salient questions relating to a country’s past and present. Since the history of a nation is a crucial factor for the establishment of national identity, history film becomes a medium that has the potential to both reflect the ongoing sociopolitical processes (according to the theory of Siegfried Kracauer) and have an impact on the emotions and worldview of a society (as for example in formalist film theory). In the case of Austria after 1945, film unarguably corresponded to general trends in the memory culture. A significant number of films made in the first two decades after the collapse of the Third Reich, highlighted Austrian culture and presented Austria as a hospitable, cheerful, and friendly nation, whose citizens took pride in its architectural, musical, and theatrical tradition. For some scholars, imperial films emphasizing the splendor of the late Austro-Hungarian monarchy were evidence of a resurgence of the Habsburg myth. In my book devoted to the representation of National Socialism in film, Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-War Film (1945–1955), I argue that even the filmmakers engaged in coming to terms with Austria’s Nazi past repeated widespread narratives that attributed the best human virtues to the protagonists of the films, proving that even in the most inhumane times Austrians behaved humanely. Elsewhere, I return to the political and cultural reality of Austria in order to point out that although Austria’s economy and me- dia system are perceived as peripheral in juxtaposition with the German market, the Austrian postwar culture of remembrance, based on traditional, loyal patri- otism and the expression of a “will” to form a separate nation, had for decades reshaped its image into one of a cultural center.1 Only over time, when a critical culture of remembrance had been developed, were the foundations of this im- age questioned and partially deconstructed. This is the point where this book starts—with a close look at filmmakers as artists capable of providing Austria with a change in its notion of national identity. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 2   |   Austria’s Difficult Past While dealing with the Nazi past in German film has been the topic of much research and a great number of scholarly publications, with regard to Austrian cinema the problem still seems to be only superficially studied. No monograph has been written so far on the evolution of the memory of Nazism in Austrian film, and the existing publications—mainly scholarly articles—tend to deal with individual films or the works of specific directors, or they cover the problem somewhat more broadly but over a rather short period of time (e.g., 1945–55 or 2015–18). What seems surprising is the small number of Austrian films that deal with this topic—while the problem of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has interested representatives of Austrian literature for years, a more intense interest by Austrian filmmakers in National Socialism only became evident from the 1970s onward. This is partly due to the peculiarities of Austrian cinematography—it is a film market with a much smaller potential and scope than that of Germany. The second reason is the culture of remembrance itself in Austria, which is very different from that of (West) Germany, in which it is difficult to find watershed moments such as the social changes of the 1960s and the subsequent reflection on the then-recent Nazi past. Instead, the politics of memory was dominated by two seemingly contradictory narratives: on the one hand, Austria presented itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression (because of the Anschluss in 1938) and displayed symptoms of “convenient collective amnesia,” while on the other hand, it nurtured the memory of veterans and soldiers killed in the war, empha- sizing their sacrifice and fulfillment of their soldierly duty. The main objective of this book is to examine the contribution of postwar television film (1960–80) to Austria’s coming to terms with its Nazi past in the public sphere. While Austrian filmmakers undertook some attempts to deal with Austria’s recent, difficult past in the films produced early after the war, topics such as Austrofascism, National Socialism, World War II, or the Holo- caust soon ceased to attract their interest.2 Helmut Käutners Die letzte Brücke and G. W. Pabst’s Der letzte Akt, both produced in the mid-1950s (1954 and 1955, respectively) mark a turning point in the first stage of Austrian cine- ma’s dealing with the difficult past. While not all events in the political sphere have to influence developments in the cultural sphere of a country, the year 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty came into force, appears to constitute a symbolic turning point in memories of the difficult past. Thus, the period 1960–80, which I treat as the second stage of facing the past in Austrian film, is both unique and vital to the investigation of Austrian media’s presentation of National Socialism. Since Austrian film was “dead” as a critically acclaimed cin- ema during this period, and due to the aforementioned fact that the filmmakers did not touch the Nazi past, it was Austrian State television, ORF, that pro- duced critical documentaries, cultural presentations, and fiction narratives re- lating to National Socialism. Although the broadcasting of critical approaches This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   3 to National Socialism was still limited, it was, unlike in other European nations that split the topic between cinema and television, almost exclusively a subject for television in Austria. Since literally all of the examined films are German-Austrian television co- productions, the book applies a transnational model in memory studies that includes asymmetric relations between two subjects, as well as methodological tools stemming from film and cultural studies, that can shed new light on the cultural relations between Austria and Germany. Hybrid television films—such as dramadocs, docudramas, and fictional works—were analyzed as well as TV miniseries and full-length fiction films that were produced up to 1980. The existing research of Austrian scholars on critical programs broadcast on Austrian television proves that the topic of the country’s Nazi past was already present in Austrian television in the 1960s: the Austrian public television broad- caster, Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), purchased foreign programs about National Socialism, World War II, and the Holocaust.3 Furthermore, ORF be- gan to produce and broadcast its own documentaries, public affairs programs, and cabaret that touched upon the difficult past. Some of them provoked an emotional response from viewers who very much identified with the victims of Nazi persecution. This audience reaction can be treated as a “final rehearsal” of the process of coming to terms with the past.4 On the other hand, many docu- dramas produced at the same time, despite being based on similar dramaturgical structures, present only a few characters with whom one can identify. Despite this, the programs and films’ narratives offer various attitudes toward Nazism and a general diversity of opinion; therefore television as a medium that presents these narratives can indeed be regarded as a cultural forum.5 The same pertains to German television films produced at a similar time.6 The Structure of the Book This book addresses films representing hybrid docufiction, two (out of six) nine- ty-minute-long episodes of a miniseries, and two full-length fiction television films (adaptations of Austrian prose), all of which deal with Austria’s difficult past. The following films will be examined: An der schönen blauen Donau, dir. John Olden (ORF/NDR, 1965); Theodor Kardinal Innitzer, dir. Hermann Lanske (ORF/ZDF, 1971); Der Fall Jägerstätter, dir. Axel Corti (ORF/ZDF, 1971); Ein junger Mann aus dem Innviertel, dir. Axel Corti (ORF/ZDF, 1973); Alpensaga, episode 4: Die feindlichen Brüder, dir. Dieter Berner (ORF/ZDF/SF, 1978); Alpensaga, episode 5: Der deutsche Frühling, dir. Dieter Berner (ORF/ ZDF/SF, 1979); Die kleine Figur meines Vaters, dir. Wolfgang Glück (ORF/BR/ MTV [Hungary], 1980); and Land, das meine Sprache spricht, dir. Michael Ke- hlmann (ORF/ARD, 1980). This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 4   |   Austria’s Difficult Past The first chapter begins with an explanation of what I understand as the dif- ficult past and the critical culture of remembrance—two terms that will reoccur during the course of this analysis of Austrian television film. The chapter then presents an overview of the emergence and development of a critical culture of remembrance in Austria. It highlights its most striking characteristics, particu- larly in comparison with the case of West Germany. The chapter then moves to underline the significant role of artists and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s who openly challenged the dominant myths and narratives and laid the foundations for a critical culture of remembrance when all of the political forces were rather more interested in maintaining the status quo. Having explained the role of nonpolitical actors in the Austrian culture of remembrance, the chapter concentrates on television. It sets out to discuss teleplays made in the 1960s that challenged the dominant loyal patriotism, and names other examples of histor- ical critique in film and television in the 1970s. The second chapter addresses two hybrid documentary/fiction films pro- duced in 1965 and 1971, which serve as a sign of the emergence of a critical culture of remembrance. They undermine the postwar political thesis of geteilte Schuld (shared responsibility), in which Christian Socialists and Socialists, the precursors of the ÖVP and the SPÖ, were charged with equal responsibility for the destruction of democracy in 1934. The hybrid films also evoke the subter- ranean Nazism in the First Austrian Republic, and they undermine the postwar Austrian foundation myth of being Hitler’s first victim. Two films are analyzed here: An der schönen blauen Donau (1965) and Theodor Kardinal Innitzer (1971). In the third chapter, I focus on two docudramas directed by Axel Corti: Der Fall Jägerstätter (1971), and Ein junger Mann aus dem Innviertel—Adolf Hitler (1973). I argue that the former adheres to the widespread narrative still in congruence with Austrian loyal patriotism while challenging other narratives, thereby introducing a harbinger of the docudrama’s more critical form. The huge resonance Der Fall Jägerstätter attained even marks a change in the political discourse on the role Austria played in National Socialism. The second film, on the other hand, breaks a taboo in portraying Adolf Hitler as a young man whose political worldview is only incipient and corresponds to the research of histori- ans who placed a strong emphasis on the milieu where Hitler grew up. I then examine two episodes of Alpensaga, a television miniseries produced in the late 1970s and created by Wilhelm Pevny, Peter Turrini, and Dieter Berner. The two episodes that I focus on, first broadcast in 1978 and 1979, are remark- able examples of critical film works deeply engaged in the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past. What is more, episode four of the saga also challenges the myth of shared responsibility for the crisis of 1934. The reception analysis, furthermore, proves that such a critical approach was mostly approved by the critics, both in Austria and Germany, while still stirring controversies among ordinary TV viewers. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   5 On the other hand, Wolfgang Glück’s Die kleine Figur meines Vaters, whose analysis opens the final chapter, conveys a notable message about the condition of the postwar Austrian culture of remembrance. The film shows the impli- cations of the unfulfilled process of coming to terms with the difficult past. Partially based on the popular motif of an intergenerational dispute after the war, it presents a character unable to critically reflect on his engagement in Na- tional Socialism. The last film examined in the book, Land, das meine Sprache spricht, appears as a “step backward” in the development of a critical culture of remembrance. It proves that television offered space for “competing memories” and became a forum for the collision of liberal and conservative (in general terms) worldviews. The book ends with a short section containing the conclu- sions of the conducted analysis and offers an appendix showing the number of broadcasts and the number of phone calls made by viewers after broadcasts of the films. Television Forms—Terminological Remarks Before going into details about the Austrian TV productions, I first need to explain what type of television formats will be discussed, under what circum- stances they emerged and evolved, and how they appear in the context of the Austrian media landscape. One of the specifics of television that I will emphasize is the hybridization of artistic and journalistic forms and genres. In the case of the Austrian way of dealing with the difficult past, one can notice the crucial role the long-established Austrian theatrical tradition played in the emergence and development of political satire. A television-specific genre that reflects this cultural phenomenon is Fernsehspiel, usually translated into English as a tele- play, TV play, television drama, or television movie. However, scholars in Ger- man-speaking countries are not unanimous in the definition and characteriza- tion of teleplays. In his monograph devoted to West German teleplays, Knut Hickethier summarizes numerous approaches to this genre in the literature. For instance, he cites Gerhard Eckert, who argues that the teleplay is the “Krönung des Fernsehens” (highpoint of television), since it straddles different cultural forms—literature, theater, and film—in one program.7 However, Oliver Storz claimed that the teleplay simply did not exist as a distinct form, and should be defined rather as a “reduzierter Film” (reduced film).8 Henning Rischbieter held a similar view, stating that the structure of the teleplay dissolves into individual forms: film, theater, and literature.9 The same controversies around the form and definition of the emerging tele- vision genre were not unfamiliar in Britain, where the first teleplays had already been broadcast in the late 1930s. Cecil Madden wondered in 1948 whether television drama was a filmed stage play, and a competitor for film or a broadcast This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 6   |   Austria’s Difficult Past in color, before coming to the conclusion that the truth lay somewhere in be- tween.10 For a while, the teleplay was identified with live transmissions of theater plays on television, depending on technical circumstances. A play was usually recorded by three or four cameras, whose images were immediately mixed in a director’s room and then broadcast. The invention of the magnetic recording tape in the late 1950s led to a change in the conditions under which plays were produced. However, the first teleplays still closely mirrored theater per- formances, since the plays were done in one take.11 Knut Hickethier notes that reflections on teleplay should also take into account the criteria that differentiate teleplays from other TV-specific forms and programs. Bearing in mind the dif- ferent approaches to the question of teleplays, Hickethier proposed a definition of this type of production: Versucht man unter diesen Gesichtspunkten für den gegenwärtigen Zeitpunkt der zweiten Hälfte der 70er Jahre eine Fernsehspieldefinition für das bundesdeutsche Fernsehen, so ist in einem ersten Schritt das Fernsehspiel als Spiel im Fernsehen, als szenisch-fiktionale Programmform zu bezeichnen, deren Gestaltung teilweise oder ganz von den bundesdeutschen Fernsehanstalten abhängt. (If one attempts, from these points of view, to define a television play for West German television of the 1970s, the first step is to describe the television play as a play on television, as a sce- nic-fictional program form whose design depends partly or entirely on West German television stations.)12 In this regard, Hickethier strays from the location of the teleplay in the the- atrical tradition and accentuates the role of a public institution—federal tele- vision—in the production of the teleplay. In fact, since private television in Germany appeared in the late 1980s (and in Austria much later, at the turn of the twenty-first century), the major influence of public television in production and distribution has been unquestionable for decades. Andrea Pollach points out that the specifics of teleplays in Austria did not differ from those in West Germany and Britain. The first teleplays were staged in a TV studio and directly broadcast. Franz Rest names the example of Goethe’s play Vorspiel auf dem Theater (Prelude on the Theater), transmitted on 15 October 1955, a mere two and a half months after television broadcasting began on 1 August 1955.13 From the early 1960s onward, producers were able to use the technology of recording onto magnetic tape. Most of the plays belonged to the sphere of classical theater or the boulevard genre, whereas only a minority were based on original scripts. This tendency began to change in the mid-1960s when the position of television in Austria was more established, with the medium itself gradually altering its aesthetics and programming.14 Initially, some critics reproached teleplays for merely being an imitation of theater, a long, static, dialogue-dependent form without any motion.15 How- ever, the unique form of the new genre was soon noticed and appreciated by This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   7 artists. Erich Neuberg, one of the most popular authors and directors of Aus- trian teleplays, in his oft-cited interview from 1965, points out the essential characteristics of teleplays and in some ways the advantages of the genre over traditional theatrical plays. First, as Neuberg notes, the teleplay differentiated itself from other genres through the large number of close-ups the format in- cluded. Due to the fewer stage requisites, and a lack of perspective compared to a film production, camera operators did not need to film a play using long shots or full shots, let alone the more sophisticated shots typical for a film. Instead, teleplays concentrated on the figures on stage, presenting them in medium shots and close-ups. The latter characteristic stems from the former and is strictly connected with the art of acting. This is the second point: an actor or actress had to usually per- form with expressions different from those of a film. This relates above all to fa- cial expressions and mimicry. Thirdly, the stage management had to be intimate, while the plot would have to be deep and involve the audience. Finally, a play should not show great passions and emotions but rather smaller problems: “Die Fernsehhelden seien eigentlich die kleinen Leute” (The TV heroes are actually the little people), as Gerlinde Ulm Sanford writes.16 This remark will turn out to be crucial in the context of critical teleplays and other TV productions address- ing the problem of the endorsement of National Socialism among the Austrian population. As I will demonstrate, some “little people” will reveal themselves as “little Nazis,” with their attitude to Nazism being called “everyday fascism.” With time, the style of teleplays evolved, acquiring the attributes developed in “classical” film, such as various camera movements, numerous types of shots, shooting on location, and deep staging. As Jason Jacobs notes, some British tel- evision producers (in the 1950s) were becoming more ambitious with their use of film, “attempting to expand [Jacobs’s emphasis] the space of television rather than limit it. Technical development had benefited both trends—composing in-depth and observing in detail—and by 1954 they could be identified as alter- native schools of television drama style.”17 These trends can be discerned in Austrian teleplays as well. In some, the cam- era occasionally left the studio and began to record exterior scenes on location, using some full shots depicting famous landmarks and streets of Vienna. For instance, in Edwin Zbonek’s Der Befehl (The Order, 1967), many scenes were filmed on location: in the streets of Vienna, the streets of Amsterdam, and rural settings. Furthermore, we can notice a deep space composition that makes it possible to embrace all of the characters presented in the frame or high-angle full shots, which highlight the characters’ feeling of uncertainty. With respect to its form, the teleplay can be viewed as a breakthrough and the first step of the genre toward a television film.18 Nonetheless, the stories of the teleplays usually remained intimate, concentrating on a few characters and concerning emotional dramas rather than great historical events. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 8   |   Austria’s Difficult Past By the same token, the genre of Fernsehspiel underwent a process that is dubbed Filmisierung (filmization). The aforementioned technical novelties, such as specific camera angles, dynamic camera movements, leaving the studio, and shooting on location or deep staging, were some of the elements of this pro- cess. As Christian Hißnauer points out, filmization meant a process in which television had gradually adopted the dramaturgy, staging strategies, and nar- rative styles of mainstream cinema.19 Furthermore, teleplays gradually became longer, with television purchasing an increasing number of films with previous cinematic release that were aired in prime time. This meant another step in the media’s convergency after the initial interlocking between theater, literature, and television that commenced in the 1950s. As Knut Hickethier argues: Mit der Filmiseriung des Fernsehspiels kam es zu einer engen Verflechtung von Kino und Fernsehen, wobei diese Verflechtung aufgrund der sehr viel größeren Nähe der Produktionstechniken und des Endprodukts eine größere Dichte als die Annähe- rung von Theater und Fernsehen in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren erreicht. (The filmization of television drama led to a close interweaving of cinema and television, whereby this interweaving achieved a greater density than the convergence of theater and television in the 1950s and 1960s due to the much greater proximity of the pro- duction techniques and the end product.)20 Another novelty in the 1960s was the stronger orientation of some artists pre- cisely toward the medium of television. The trend observed in West Germany was evident also in the case of Austria, where television offered playwrights and filmmakers new career perspectives. Again, let me cite Hickethier: Seit den 1960er Jahren war es das Hervortreten von Autoren, die jetzt auch direkt für das Fernsehen schrieben, dann aber vor allem seit der Mitte der 1960er Jahre die Fil- misierung des Fernsehspiels und damit die Öffnung der Fernsehfiktion für zahlreiche Regisseure, die nun auch unter dem Konzept des Autorenfilms (der ja letztlich ein Regisseurfilm ist) verstärkt für das Fernsehen arbeiten. (Since the 1960s, it was the emergence of authors who now also wrote directly for television, but then, especially since the mid-1960s, the filmization of television drama and thus the opening of tele- vision fiction to numerous directors, who now also increasingly worked for television under the concept of the auteur film [which is ultimately a director’s film].)21 In this respect, television largely contributed to the development of auteur cin- ema, which especially in Austria did not exist in the 1960s. As I will later argue, one such exemplary filmmaker, who used the potential of television to realize his artistic projects, would be Axel Corti, a director who was prominent in the mediatization of Austria’s difficult past. While teleplays do not belong to the main subject of this book and are only mentioned in the first chapter, the first four films examined in the book do rep- resent other television hybrid forms. This time it is the merging of documentary This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   9 and fictional genres, which is often called docufiction. The most popular term related to this form used in Anglophone literature is “docudrama.” However, there are many other terms to describe this phenomenon and to underline the differences between all possible hybrid forms. Bill Nichols defines docudrama as “stories based on fact but performed by actors and scripted from both docu- ments and conjecture.”22 Even at this point, we can notice that true events serve as the basis for a plot, which itself contains fictional elements at the script level. Derek Paget proposes two general terms related to the hybrid form and stresses that “unfortunately, and confusingly, both … are often used as if there were no difference between them.”23 The first of them is “drama documentary,” which according to Paget is “a documentary treated dramatically.”24 The second term is “documentary drama,” which is “a drama treated documentarily,”25 or which uses “an invented sequence of events and fictional protagonists to illustrate the salient features of real historical occurrences or situations.”26 “Dramadoc” and “docudrama” are shortened terms for both of the aforementioned concepts. David Edgar, whom Derek Paget also cites in his argument, explains the divergence between drama documentary (dramadoc) and documentary drama (docudrama) on the basis of their functions. Whereas in the case of dramadoc our interest is in the rights and wrongs of what is being represented as well as the credibility of the argument, in a docudrama the documentary element is merely a means to the dramatic part, with specific events being used as a source for examining general questions.27 In another text, Paget describes the functions of docudrama more thoroughly. He distinguishes four functions of this hybrid genre: to retell, review, celebrate, and memorialize events; to represent the ca- reers of significant figures; to portray issues of concern, particularly to local and national communities; and more recently, to focus on ordinary citizens and their stories.28 In all four films that I will discuss, we can observe either the first or the second function: these films review and memorialize historical events or portray the life of a famous Austrian. There are some difficulties caused by the differences between English and German terminology. For some authors the English “docudrama” corresponds with the German Dokumentarspiel; for others Dokumentarspiel is viewed as the precursor of the docudrama or an early form of television called “docutain- ment” (or in reference to history programs—“histotainment”).29 In Christian Hißnauer’s differentiation of various hybrid documentary films, we can see that Dokumentarspiel is separated from Doku-Drama.30 Although we might infer that Dokumentarspiel differs from “docudrama” (or Doku-Drama to use the German spelling), it is in actual fact similar or tantamount to a drama documentary, a term that does not, however, occur in Hißnauer’s enumeration and is only referred to when citing Anglo-American literature. Werner Waldmann offers a slightly different approach (however, his text stems from the 1970s): he ar- gues there are two types of Dokumentarspiele. The first main type is based on This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 10   |   Austria’s Difficult Past true historical events. Here the author distinguishes two subtypes: Historienspiel (history play), an elaborated form that conveys the impression that the events probably could have developed as those presented on the screen, and szenische Rekonstruktion (scenic reconstruction), where the story looks credible and sober without the illusion that historic scenes are reenacted. Finally, the second main type, according to Waldmann, is a film that is inspired by true events, and that attempts to discover as many details of the story as possible. Waldmann gives the example of an interview documentary film—the interviews are a means to uncover the truth.31 As we can notice, Waldmann’s Dokumentarspiel is not ex- actly a “docudrama.” Wulf Kansteiner avails himself of another variation on the term—“docuplay,” which resembles an English translation of the German term Dokumentarspiel.32 However, to avoid delving into controversies around each of these terms, I will adhere to the English terminology, especially Paget’s ideas, and the differentiation between documentary drama and drama documentary, assuming that they represent different approaches to the documentary fiction genre. The hybrid forms of documentary and fiction emerged in Britain and the United States in the late 1930s and were developed after World War II, becom- ing established TV genres by the 1960s.33 In West Germany, the first attempts to introduce docudramas and drama documentaries were already being made in the 1950s; however, the symbolic beginning of the genre’s popularity was the establishment of a Dokumentarspiel department in the ZDF television channel in 1965. In Austria, the first teleplay employing elements of a documentary was Alles gerettet, written by Carl Merz and Helmut Qualtinger in 1963.34 The play dealt with the Viennese Ringtheater fire in 1881. One of the supporting roles in Alles gerettet was played by Paul Hörbiger, illustrating that acknowledged theater and film actors could find their place in the new television artistic reality. This new format’s emergence in Austria, which ranged from a dramatized documen- tary to a blend of history and fiction, saw its peak during the time spent by Gerald Szyszkowitz, Viennese playwright and theater director, as head of ORF’s teleplay department (1973–87). However, by the 1980s, the number of such films had declined. Docudramas and drama documentaries were “replaced in large part by cinematic feature films, which by the late 1990s represented almost a quarter of total broadcast time.”35 Thomas Pluch contends that in contrast to the West German television channel, ZDF, which propagated an illusion of authenticity, ORF followed a line of “history-fiction” and “erfundene Doku- mentationen” (invented documentations). A milestone, understood by Pluch as a hybrid between documentation in the journalistic sense of the word and a fic- tion film, was the ORF-ZDF production of Der Fall Jägerstätter (1971), which was soon followed by a number of history documentary plays in the 1970s.36 However, the camera had already left the confines of the TV studio in the 1960s, being “liberated” by directors such as Corti or Lhotzky with the premiere of This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   11 the 1965 documentary play An der schönen blauen Donau (The blue Danube), directed by John Olden, which will be discussed in chapter two.37 The last two chapters of the book will focus on a miniseries and two full- length films, all produced in the 1970s and distributed exclusively on television. From the media history perspective, the 1970s marked yet another stage of tel- evision’s filmization, which originated from the declining popularity of studio programs. As Knut Hickethier points out: Nach dem Bedeutungsverlust der Studioproduktion seit Mitte der siebziger Jahre durch die Filmisierung des Fernsehspiels hat sich die elektronische Studioproduktion vor allem in der Serienherstellung, vor allem bei den langlaufenden Serien, durchge- setzt. (After the loss of the importance of studio production since the mid-seventies, due to the filmization of television drama, electronic studio production has become established above all in series production, especially in long-running series.)38 The overview of the films discussed in this book will thus not only offer an in- sight into how the memory of the difficult past evolved in the 1960s and 1970s but also into how television adapted itself to the challenges and interests of the audience by gradually acquiring the hallmarks of cinema. Television as a Cultural Forum—A Theoretical Framework Both hybrid forms, which straddle fiction with documentary films, including two ninety-minute episodes from a miniseries, mediatize memory. The question of mediated memories corresponds with the theory of Horace M. Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, who treat television as a “cultural forum”—a space for dis- cussion—and who maintain that television does not infer anything ideological about the audience but offers a comment on ideological questions.39 The authors claim that the rhetoric used in fictional television films is often a rhetorical ve- hicle for discussion. I find the theory of Newcomb and Hirsch is also suitable to my analysis as the authors pay a great deal of attention to the reception of television films. What they propose is not only an extensive study of recep- tion (Rezeptionsforschung) but also a study of the aforementioned “resonance” in media (Medienwirkungsforschung). Newcomb and Hirsch claim that the broadcast of some films may provoke a discussion or even fierce debate, when some viewers flatly reject the stories of a film and protest against it, sending let- ters that express their outrage to the press or directly to the television channel. The television premiere of the miniseries Holocaust in 1979, which had wide repercussions, especially in Germany but also, as some scholars indicate, in Austria, could serve as an example.40 As I will argue, the development of teleplays on Austrian television toward fictional films and docudramas was, on the one hand, based on the theatrical This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 12   |   Austria’s Difficult Past tradition, and on the other, was characterized by engaging cabaret and theater actors, such as Helmut Qualtinger in Der Herr Karl (1961) and Der Himbeer- pflücker (1965), and Kurt Weinzierl in Der Fall Jägerstätter (1971). In the case of at least some of the selected films, one might notice that they were aimed at producing public resonance. The technological specifics of the medium and the precise period of its popularization in Austria in the 1960s and the 1970s entail a slightly different approach to the interpretation of the difficult past. As John Ellis points out, the experience of watching a film in a movie theater “with an anonymous group of people, who need have nothing more in common than the fact that they have been attracted to that particular place and that particular fic- tion … becomes a very precise urban experience.”41 By contrast, the experience of watching television is more “mundane” and intimate since television enters our domestic space: “Broadcast TV is also intimate and everyday, a part of home life rather than any kind of special event.”42 This means that we, as television viewers, can witness a significant number of events and be informed a great deal about the past without leaving our homes. Moreover, the shortening of the dis- tance affects not only the physical aspect of the location of a TV set in the home. Vivian Sobchak maintains that, by virtue of their increasing representational immediacy, these new twentieth cen- tury technologies of representation and narration (most significantly, television) have increasingly collapsed the temporal distance between present, past, and future that structured our previously conceived notion of the temporal dimensions of what we call history (as the latter is differentiated from experience).43 Therefore, although there is no doubt that some fictional television films were not just elements of the “culture of attention,” which spontaneously increased awareness of a topic, they did not remain in one’s memory for long. Rather, as I will show, they were anchored in the collective memory of a larger group of people and became mediated memories. When I speak about coming to terms with the difficult past on television, this means that this past was “served” by the filmmakers and television programmers directly to the cozy domestic surroundings of Austrians, who twenty years or more after the collapse of the Third Reich began to realize that what had been intended to be latent had now surfaced again in front of their eyes. Before going into detail about a film’s narration and reception, one needs to ask what kind of audience watched the film, and what kind of preexisting “framework of knowl- edge” (a term borrowed from Stuart Hall, explicated by Janet Staiger) the view- ers very likely had before watching a film.44 The earliest of the films discussed were produced approximately two decades after the events they portray, and can therefore be regarded as “szenische Erinnerungsfilme” (scenic memory films), according to the typology offered by Thomas Fischer and Thomas Schuhbauer. The individual memory of most viewers of these films usually could extend to This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   13 the past events portrayed in these films.45 Other films, telling stories located in a more distant past, can be accordingly labeled as “szenische Historienfilme” (scenic historical films).46 This refers most of all to the younger viewers who might have watched the television productions in the 1970s without personal memories of National Socialism. The chronological boundaries of this book are 1960 and 1980, which means that all of the films examined here belong to the category of scenic memory films, with some of them being a “mix” of two categories. In order not to de- liberate on the terminology in the analysis, I will treat all of the examined films (including the hybrid forms of fiction and documentary) as history films. Since some films were retransmitted on television several times and debated long after their premieres—and this is the main thesis of this book—it is the question of the difficult past (i.e., Austria’s coresponsibility for the existence and con- sequences of National Socialism as well as the problem of the nondemocratic Austrofascist state) and the arousal of that past from the state of latency (i.e., its depiction, visualization, and critical treatment) that enervates and ultimately overturns the traditional loyal-patriotism construct. Methodology The choice of the first caesura—1945—probably requires no detailed expla- nation. For a huge part of the world, the end of World War II marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, and Austria was no exception in this regard. The choice of 1980 for the end of my research, however, requires some explanation. The year 1980, in my view, marks the accomplishment of a long development of a critical culture of remembrance in visual media—film and television—which makes me attribute a special meaning to the shift from the 1970s to the 1980s. Touching on the difficult past, first in the dramatized form of documentaries and documentarized forms of fiction films, and then in fiction films and miniseries, substantially undermined the artificial construct based on blind patriotism and enabled the introduction of significant elements of the critical culture of remembrance. The critical films produced in the late 1970s are embedded in a wider context of a shift in Austrian memory, triggered by—among other things—the political affair around the FPÖ chairman, Frie- drich Peter (the Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal affair in 1975). These events related to the fortieth anniversary in 1978 of the annexation, and the debate induced by the broadcast of Marvin Chomsky’s miniseries Holocaust on Austrian televi- sion ORF in 1979. Moreover, the 1980s saw the emergence of new tendencies in Austrian literature. Austrian writers touched on the difficult past of their country more often and in an increasingly provocative way. As Klaus Zeyringer points out, This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 14   |   Austria’s Difficult Past Nicht etwa das Gedenkjahr 1988 war der Beginn der Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit. Diese setzte schon viel früher ein, und ab der Mitte des Jahrzehntes versuchten sehr viele Autoren und Autorinnen, die nationalsozialistische Vergangen- heit und deren ungenügende Bewältigung zu beschreiben und aufzuarbeiten. (It was not the commemorative year of 1988 that marked the beginning of the confrontation with the past. It began much earlier, and from the middle of the decade on, many authors attempted to describe and come to terms with the National Socialist past and its inadequacy).47 Thus, the change took place not with the Waldheim affair in 1986 nor the com- memoration year 1988, but a little earlier. For Anton Pelinka, the affair is viewed as the latest possible moment, when Austrian patriotism lost its unifying persua- sive power.48 In her documentary Waldheims Walzer (Waldheim’s waltz), made in 2018, Ruth Beckermann also repeatedly points out that the change commenced earlier than in 1986. She names a few examples of debates and controversies in the 1980s that demonstrate that the Austrian culture of remembrance was about to be revolutionized. If I had to indicate a more specific moment when this change began, then, judging by the number and frequency of films being produced that addressed the Nazi past, it would be in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The critical films produced until the mid-1980s made considerable prog- ress in coming to terms with the difficult past, as though they had anticipated the Waldheim affair in 1986–87. The dates of premieres of the last films exam- ined in the book coincide with the enactment of the film funding law in 1980, which helped numerous filmmakers in shaping their auteur cinema. In the first stage of my study, I focused principally on the films’ stories. I examined the structure of the introductions, the culmination points, and the endings. Furthermore, I asked the question of whether historical events served as just a backdrop for the characters or whether they determined the narrative. Another question to examine was the relation between the culmination points of the narratives and the peaks of some historical developments. At the same time, I addressed the films’ characters—their characteristics, motivations, constellations, and the conflicts between them. Studying the characters—their behavior and attitude toward political developments—I usually availed myself of the typology created by Beil, Kühnel, Neuhaus, and Eder, who differentiate two main types of characters: a Typus (type), representing the typical features of the kind he or she belongs to, and a Charakter (individualized character), a much more complicated figure with many individual features.49 I also referred to additional categories, based on other oppositional relations, such as “close and open,” “static and dy- namic,” and “one-dimensional and multi-dimensional” characters, which have their origins in the works of theater scholar Manfred Pfister.50 Simultaneously, I sought to straddle the analysis of the stories with a formal analysis focusing on how this historical narrative is translated into a film’s lan- guage and how narration is designed to shape the order of events in the film. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   15 This holistic approach, in spirit of the classical film analysis as proposed by David Bordwell, required not only an examination of the story and narrative structure,51 but also of the visual styles of the films.52 Thus, the formal aspects of the films, such as the lighting, costumes, soundtrack, mise-en-scène, mise-en- cadre, and mise-en-chaîne, have not been neglected when they delivered crucial information for analysis. As already stated, the question of reception is of the utmost importance in this study. In the context of the effect of any meaning, I refer to “plurimediale Netzwerke” (plurimedial networks), a term coined by Astrid Erll. According to her, such networks are constellations between a film and the other elements of the system, such as marketing, awards, criticism, interpretations, censorship, special screenings, or public debates. In my research, I have attempted to re- construct, as far as it is feasible, this kind of network, since I take the view that a film that touches upon salient questions about the past and identity of a state could not have passed unnoticed. As John Fiske posits, texts are the product of their readers. In this regard, “a program becomes a text at the moment of read- ing, that is, when its interaction with one of its many audiences activates some of the meanings/pleasures that is capable of provoking.”53 I am convinced that it is suitable to employ this approach not only to television programs but also to film, both with television and cinematic distribution. The mediation of memory and its functioning in the public sphere are ger- mane to what Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann calls “resonance,” a term that has already been introduced: “Resonance, in this context, describes a media-induced relational and responsive experience interconnecting distinct and diverse per- ceptions and temporalities.”54 Thus, resonance can be treated as a phenomenon that appears in different types of media. Film can engender a debate maintained in other media such as the press, television, or more contemporary online social media, which, however, in the case of the films examined here, did not yet exist. Therefore, the examination of the reactions a film triggered, including the crit- ical observation of debates that took place after a film’s screening, is one of the primary objectives of this study. The reception study has been conducted on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative data. The research into quantitative data relating to television films was not simple because the Austrian television broadcaster ORF did not docu- ment the audience ratings (in German the Einschaltquoten, illustrating Marktan- teil or market share, to demonstrate what percentage of the audience watched a particular program) when the films scrutinized in this book were produced. According to information acquired from the market and media research depart- ment of ORF, electronic registration only commenced in 1991.55 Therefore, I had to limit myself to other, less informative, quantitative data on the broadcast dates (along with the exact broadcast hours), the number of broadcasts from films’ TV premiere until now (2022), and the number of phone calls made to This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 16   |   Austria’s Difficult Past the television station after broadcasts, as noted in the TV protocols. In the case of the data acquired from German archives, the ratings as well as the protocols were available, although sometimes very incomplete. The overview of the data is included in the appendix of the book. The qualitative data reflects the reception of the films by the press and, to a certain extent by the viewers too. The dataset embraces critiques, comments, and any other texts related to the selected films appearing in the German and Austrian daily press (both nationwide and in regional circulation), including in news magazines, film industry press, and in archival TV program listings (such as the Austrian and German editions of the magazine Hör Zu). In addition, the aforementioned protocols stored in the television archives provide comments from ordinary viewers who wanted to share their opinions on the screened films. In the case of one film, I was also able to discover letters sent to the di- rector of the film after its broadcast. The two decades between 1960 and 1980 marked significant changes in the Austrian press market. Firstly, the influence of the political party newspapers steadily diminished. The watershed moment was the closure of Neues Österreich in 1967. Having been founded immediately after the liberation of Austria in the spring of 1945, the newspaper had united three Austrian political parties (the conservative ÖVP, the social democratic SPÖ, and the far-left, communist KPÖ). Secondly, just as in many other Western democracies, the press market in Austria underwent a process of consolidation that had reached quite a con- siderable level by the mid-1960s. The number of edited newspapers gradually decreased (the most drastic contraction of the press market took place in 1971), with more and more titles belonging to a select number of publishing houses.56 Thirdly, in 1959 an old newspaper reemerged on the Austrian market—Neue Kronen Zeitung, commonly known as Krone, which resurrected the old Kro- nen Zeitung, published between 1900 and 1944. The new Krone became the first tabloid newspaper in Austria and is today still the title with the largest circulation nationwide. Lastly, media scholars agree that 1970 marks the be- ginning of critical journalism in Austria. Two news magazines emerged on the market: profil (stylized in lowercase, and subtitled Das unabhängige Magazin Österreichs / Austria’s independent magazine), which covers the latest develop- ments in politics, economics, and culture, with a slight left-liberal orientation; and Trend, a news magazine devoted specifically to economic issues, which for this reason is not of interest here.57 The news magazine profil meanwhile began to appear once a week (between 1970 and 1973 it was published monthly), and in 1977 another news magazine was established—Falter, which reflected a broadly left-liberal standpoint, usually with a Viennese perspective. The number of daily newspapers available nationwide decreased at the same time from twenty-eight in 1960 to twenty in 1980.58 Die Presse, Kurier, and Kleine Zeitung consolidated their position as titles of the high-quality press This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   17 with the largest circulations nationwide, whereas the tabloid Neue Kronen Zei- tung sustained its position as the newspaper with the highest circulation in general. The last newspapers that I refer to, representing the left wing of the press, are Arbeiter-Zeitung, the main organ of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, published between 1889 and 1991 (with a short break from 1934 to 1945), and the communist Österreichische Volksstimme, established in 1945 and renamed Volksstimme in 1957 before being discontinued in 1991. I include all the aforementioned newspapers along with the most popular regional press titles even though they did not place a special emphasis on film issues. According to data collected by Gstettner Astrid, the dominant cultural area in newspapers such as Krone, Kleine Zeitung, Salzburger Nachrichten, and Tiroler Tageszeitung in 1979 was classical music, including concerts (25 per- cent), theater (20 percent), exhibitions (15 percent), opera and operetta (9 percent), and literature (8 percent), whereas only 1.5 percent was connected with film.59 Thus, the analysis of critical press texts would be incomplete if I did not take into account film industry newspapers and magazines. A film journal that emerged only for a relatively brief time (1964–73) was Österreichische Film-Rundschau. Its authors focused solely on films with a cinematic distri- bution. I could find only one review in this magazine that was relevant to my research. Finally, I avail myself of the Austrian television program magazine Hör Zu (the original version was founded in Germany in 1946, in the British occupation zone and exists to this day).60 Other more contemporary film mag- azines were established in the 1980s and therefore exceed the time scope of this analysis.61 Literally all the films discussed in this book are Austrian-German copro- ductions. They were made in collaboration between the Austrian ORF and the German ZDF or one of the regional television channels (the North German NDR, or the Bavarian BR). Therefore, such a transnational production and distribution also requires a transnational focus on the reception. To this end, I availed myself of critical texts revolving around a particular film that were printed in the leading nationwide German quality press, including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, die tageszeitung, and the news magazine Der Spiegel. I also examined numerous re- gional newspapers (including West Berlin) with the largest circulation in these particular West German states (Bundesländer), according to the archival sta- tistical:62 Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, Berliner Tagespost, Badische Zeitung, Hamburger Abendblatt, Rheinische Post, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, and some others whose copies were to be found in the files belonging to the archival sets stored in the television archives, as well as the German edition of Hör Zu. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 18   |   Austria’s Difficult Past Notes   1. Gortat, “Austrian National Identity.”   2. See Gortat, Coming to Terms.   3. See Öhner, “Fernsehen”; Winter, Geschichtspolitiken und Fernsehen.   4. Öhner, “Fernsehen,” 136.   5. Keilbach, “Geschichte als Geschichten,” 129–30.   6. See Kansteiner, “Nazis, Viewers and Statistics.”   7. Hickethier, Fernsehspiel der Bundesrepublik, 40.   8. Hickethier, 52.   9. Hickethier, 53. 10. Madden, cited after Jacobs, Intimate Screen, 28. 11. Hickethier, Fernsehspiel der Bundesrepublik, 44. 12. Hickethier, 63. 13. Rest, “Explosion der Bilder,” 266. 14. Pollach, “Close-up,” 16. 15. Pollach, 21. 16. Poidinger, Die Fernsehhelden, cited after Ulm Sanford, “Ödön von Horváths,” 199–200. 17. Jacobs, Intimate Screen, 129. 18. Pollach, “Close-up,” 26. 19. Hißnauer, “Fernsehroman,” 68. 20. Hickethier, “Produzenten und Vermittler,” 153. 21. Hickethier, “Wie aus Literatur,” 45. 22. Nichols, Representing Reality, 160. 23. Paget, No Other Way, 135. 24. Paget. 25. Paget. 26. Paget, 120. 27. Edgar, The Second Time as Farce, cited after Paget, 167. 28. Paget, “Docudrama.” 29. See the introduction to the essay by Hißnauer, “Geschichtsspiele im Fernsehen.” 30. Hißnauer, Fernsehdokumentarismus, 247. 31. Waldmann, Das deutsche Fernsehspiel, 70. 32. Kansteiner, “Nazis, Viewers and Statistics.” The term “docuplay” turns up in the text’s numer- ous footnotes. 33. See Paget, “Docudrama,” 250; Paget, No Other Way, 186–97. 34. See Keilbach, “Geschichte als Geschichten, 113. 35. McVeigh, “Popular Culture,” 253. 36. Pluch, “Vom Fernsehspiel,” 332–33. 37. Pluch argues that “Axel Corti and Georg Lhotzky befreiten die Kamera aus der Enge des Fern- sehstudios.” See Pluch, “Vom Fernsehspiel,” 323. 38. Hickethier, “Entwicklung, Funktion, Präsentationsformen,” 2356. 39. Newcomb and Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum.” 40. See Uhl, “Endlösung.” 41. Ellis, Visible Fictions, 26. 42. Ellis, 113. 43. Sobchack, Persistence of History, 4–5. 44. Staiger, Media Reception Studies, 80. 45. Fischer and Schuhbauer, Geschichte in Film, 26. 46. Fischer and Schuhbauer. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Introduction   |   19 47. Zeyringer, Innerlichkeit und Öffentlichkeit, 145. 48. Pelinka, Zur österreichischen Identität, 18. 49. Beil, Kühnel, and Neuhaus, Studienhandbuch Filmanalyse. 50. Pfister, Das Drama. 51. Bordwell, Narration. 52. Bordwell, Visual Style in the Cinema; and Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light. 53. Fiske, Television Culture, 14. 54. Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Media Resonance.” 55. Here I would like to thank Ms. Eva Sassmann from the market and media research department of ORF, who shared statistical data with me and answered my numerous questions concerning the examined films. 56. For more about the press market concentration in Austria, see Melischek and Seethalter, Zur Pressekonzentration. 57. See Kaltenbrunner, “Geschichte der Tagespresse, 190; Hanisch, Der lange Schatten, 457. 58. Steinmauer, Konzentriert und verflochten, 13–15. 59. Gstettner, Aktuelle Kulturberichterstattung, 202–4. 60. However, contrary to the German edition, the Austrian Hör Zu was released for a much shorter period—only between 1961 and 1985. 61. These include magazines such as the monthly Filmschrift (since 1981), Retro—das Filmjournal (Austrian edition of the German magazine established in 1980, appearing since 1983), or Blimp (since 1985). 62. The information on the highest-circulation regional daily newspapers in Germany comes from the Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern e.V. (Infor- mation community for determining the distribution of advertising media, IVW) which pub- lished “Auflagenliste” (circulation lists) with data on every quarter in years between 1950 and 1997. The data I cite come from the third quarter of 1975: IVW, “Auflagenliste.” This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Chapter 1 The Austrian Culture of Remembrance and the Media d The questions of what is Austria’s difficult past, how it was mediated, and what the contribution was of intellectuals, primarily artists, to the emer- gence of a critical culture of remembrance are the focus of this first chapter. I will look at selected political, cultural, and social phenomena since the 1960s that have questioned the traditional image of Austria. The first, rather theoreti- cal part elucidating such terms as difficult past, loyal and critical patriotism, and critical culture of remembrance will draw on examples from Austrian literature, drama, film, and finally television. Selected examples will substantiate the the- sis that the Austrian way of dealing with the Nazi past was above all a cultural rather than a political phenomenon, which distinguishes it considerably from the (West) German case. The overview of cultural texts created in the 1960s and 1970s, some of which drew on earlier theatrical and literary traditions, invites a more profound reflection on social changes in Austrian history that took place during these two decades. The Difficult Past What is the difficult past? I have already used the term several times, so it is high time to define it and explain its significance. At the very beginning, I must point out that I adopted the term from Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz. Although the authors do not deliver any definition of a difficult past, in their essay on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the USA they argue that the memorial “deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 22   |   Austria’s Difficult Past than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of consensus.”1 The authors take up their subject “by tracing the social, political, and cultural trajectories of the negotiation process that resulted in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial” and note that this process relates to issues from three aspects: “the social problems of fixing painful parts of the past,” “the political problem of commemorating an event for which there is no national consensus” and finally “the cultural problem of working through and against traditional expectations about the war memorial genre.”2 Thus, one might discern three relevant char- acteristics of a difficult past. Firstly, it refers to some historical events that are anything but glorious. Secondly, its public evocation engenders controversies. Thirdly, it undergoes an active process of negotiations that take place on the social, political, and cultural levels. The term “difficult past” also appears in the anthology Northeast Asia’s Dif- ficult Past, edited by Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz, although its authors also refrain from providing a definition. As we can read in the introduction, the editors note that “unforgettable traumas prevent nations from coming to terms with the problems of the present.”3 In the East Asian context, in which the chapters of the anthology are embedded, the difficult past induces debates or conflicts not only on a national level but also in bilateral relations between Japan and its continental neighbors, who were once subjected to tremendous violence and crimes perpetrated by the Japanese. Based on these observations, we can discern another attribute of the difficult past—it very often concerns vi- olent, traumatic events, such as war, occupation, persecution, and mass crimes. Dealing with this past is difficult both for the victims and the perpetrators—it reminds the victims of their wounds, which are difficult to heal, and generates a feeling of shame or fear of being discovered in the minds of perpetrators. In their essay about the commemoration of Apartheid in South Africa, Chana Tee- ger and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi also describe the difficult past as “an event that many (mostly the victims) wish to remember, many (mostly the perpetrators) wish to forget, and many wish that it had never have taken place.”4 The plurality of perspectives on a negative, traumatic event renders the process of coming to terms with it unusually complicated and long-lasting. This can be summed up with the words of Primo Levi, who stated: “A person who has been wounded tends to block out the memory so as not to renew the pain; the person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory deep down, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt.”5 Holger Pötsch is the author who proffers a definition of “difficult pasts.” He claims that “difficult pasts are traumatic events that carry widely different con- notations for different—and often opposed—communities.”6 Here, too, we find trauma and controversy at the heart of consideration of the difficult past. In his work, Pötsch refers to Brian Conway, who describes the notorious Bloody Sun- day massacre in Northern Ireland as an event that “gave rise to emotionally and This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Austrian Culture of Remembrance   |   23 politically charged and competing impulses to remember and to forget among both victims and perpetrators.”7 Thus, once again we can observe that a difficult past is the subject of negotiations between two once antagonistic social groups. The crucial issue in any difficult past pertains to the problem of forgetting and the efforts to act as though this past never took place. These two processes of downplaying, remaining silent on, or marginalizing the difficult past are often described as “suppression” (Verdrängung). In German literature about National Socialism, the term often appears in the context of a deliberate forgetfulness of one’s own culpability for crimes or positive sentiments relating to the period of Nazism.8 This common understanding of “suppression” refers firstly to the perpetrators who are not forthcoming about expounding their roles in the pre- vious, nondemocratic regime. Suppression of the difficult past in their minds prevents them from self-criticism, self-incrimination, and contrition, and is the precondition of a peaceful life in a new, democratic state. The phenomenon can be easily explained by the often-cited observation of Friedrich Nietzsche on the condition of a perpetrator: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually the memory yields.”9 In this book, I eschew the term suppression since the term is principally linked to the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry. Furthermore, in some cases the suppression of the memory of a traumatic event appears to be something that has been accomplished and is durable. As some authors argue, “in the af- termath of trauma, little is known about why the unwanted and unbidden rec- ollection of traumatic memories persists in some individuals but not others.”10 Instead of calling the memory of the difficult past “suppressed,” I espouse the concept of a “latent” memory and state of “latency.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines latency as “the fact of being present but needing particular conditions to become active, obvious, or completely developed.”11 Moreover, one may repeat the observation of Sigmund Freud: Since the time when we recognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace, we have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish, that every- thing survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for instance, when regression extends back far enough.12 Latency, not suppression or forgetting, is the term also employed by Hans Ul- rich Gumbrecht, who writes about a peculiar feeling when something hardly identifiable with its origin in the past lingers on in the present time: I would like to stress that while Stimmungen often make us assume that something is latent, they rarely provide a means of identifying what it is—in general, Stimmun- gen emerge as effects of latent conditions, but they do not necessarily originate with them.13 This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. 24   |   Austria’s Difficult Past Although I do not employ Gumbrecht’s further reflections on the forms and origins of latency, I find his general observations on the nature of latency truly inspiring. Gumbrecht’s reference to the question of Stimmung, which he trans- lates as “mood”—or on a metaphorical register as “climate” or “atmosphere”— stresses the background of latency. In the case of “latency,” a supposition arises that something from the past has left a mark on the present and is still dis- cernable or implied. Furthermore, the state of latency appears as something imperfective and unaccomplished and suggests a memory can be awakened. The fact that memory becomes latent results from the process of domination of one narrative—or memory—over another. As Lorraine Ryan notes: “Having been subjugated to the present, dominant version, these suppressed memories remain latent until such a time as they do merge with the public focus on the past.”14 In terms of collective memory, awakening (or reactivation) from the state of la- tency is a process that can rarely occur when the sociopolitical climate is defined by traditionally understood patriotism. With this in mind, we move on to the second important term: patriotism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines patriotism as “love of one’s country.”15 A national identity construct is predicated on a set of positive self-stereotypes, which all together form the very conventional notion of patrio- tism, called by some scholars “blind” or “loyal.” Blind patriotism means a rigid and inflexible attachment to a country and is characterized by unquestioning positive evaluation, staunch allegiance, and an intolerance of criticism.16 It can be added that such loyal, uncritical patriotism “lends itself to a false sense of history and its corollary, a troubling loyalty to current political leadership and its policies.”17 This loyal/blind patriotism assumes that the state and nation are a priori to be respected and cherished; it imposes a flawless interpretation of the state’s condition and—no less significantly—its past. Critical patriotism is the opposite concept—it is open to revising the country’s past to rectify the mistakes once committed as well as to enhance a country’s image. It is thus the constructive/critical patriotism that entails an engagement with the darkest and worst histories and strays from “myopic understanding of na- tional history” and an unhealthy attitude of superiority relative to other cultures and polities “that are attributed to loyal patriotism.”18 As one can see, both vari- ants of patriotism acknowledge the significance of the state. However, whereas loyal/blind patriotism intends to preserve the status quo, critical/constructive patriotism is oriented at active modification of the public memory. Critical patriotism has been discussed in numerous academic circles in Eu- rope and America. Its influence also appears to have taken root in non-Western contexts, as for instance in an essay about constructive patriotism among social studies teachers in Singapore.19 The concept was also discussed in nondemocratic states. Poland in the 1980s delivers a revealing example. In 1981, Jan Józef Lipski, a Polish literature critic, demanded a new approach to the notion of patriotism: This open access edition of ‘Austria’s Difficult Past: Memory of National Socialism and the Fulmination of Television (1960-1980)’ by Jakub Gortat has been funded by the National Science Center Poland [grant number 2021/43/D/HS2/013449]. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836950202. Not for resale. Austrian Culture of Remembrance   |   25 Patriotism is not only respect and love for tradition; it is also the relentless selection and discarding of elements in this tradition, and an obligation to this intellectual task. The burden of guilt for making fallacious judgments about the past, for perpet- uating morally false national myths which serve national megalomania, for remaining blind to the blemishes in our history is, from the moral point of view, not as great a sin as committing evil against our fellow man, but is the premise of evil and the path to future evil.20 The selection of light and dark chapters of history is the key element of critical patriotism. The attempt to marginalize, leave unsaid, or suppress the dark chap- ters is perceived as an evil persistent both in present times and in the future. The Polish intellectual Jerzy Jedlicki arrived at a similar conclusion in his essay “Dziedzictwo i odpowiedzialność zbiorowa” (Heritage and Collective Responsi- bility), published in 1987, where he claimed that full recognition of history and its “brave” adoption even has a “therapeutical effect.”21 Thus, these concepts of critical patriotism were formulated a