Vienna Is Different 50 Years After the Anschluss

A good investigative documentary should pose hard questions rather than give easy answers, and this state-of-the-nation, cinema verité portrait of Austria one half-century after the Anschluss offers a probing inquiry into the country's recent history, pursuing issues of national responsibility for war crimes and other atrocities. Co-director David Leitner's nervous, hand-held camera and Susan Korda's roving microphone roam the city in search of the ignorant, the concerned, the angry, and the forgetful, at one point tracking down President Kurt Waldheim himself on the eve of his election. Each interview is spontaneous and provocative (if somewhat haphazardly arranged), but underneath all the heated debate is an uncomfortable truth: the ideology of anti-Semitism is alive and more (un) healthy than ever, only now better camouflaged behind a respectable and conservative public face. In the city of Strauss and Mozart it's all part of a national schizophrenia, an inability (as one witness says), "to admit being an accomplice in the Hitler War."