The documentary work of Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952) has played an important role in shaping Austria’s relationship with its past. In this interview with the Viennese filmmaker and writer, Liam Hoare and Beckermann discuss some of the documentaries in her rich filmography, and how they blend political activism and Judaism, in the context of a gradual rise of the far right and a taboo on the fate of Jews during the war.
“One of the reasons I made this movie was that nobody else was doing it,” the Austrian documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann told me about her 1996 work East of War. A year prior, the travelling exhibition “The Crimes of the Wehrmacht” arrived in Vienna. Produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the exhibition used photographs and other evidence to undermine the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht,’ which held that only the SS paramilitaries—and not regular German armed forces—were responsible for the crimes of National Socialism.
During its showing in the Austrian capital, Beckermann was there with her camera and interviewed some of those who turned up to see it: 200 people in all. Among them were many veterans of the Second World War. “Always the same story,” Beckermann recalled in an entry in her shooting journal dated October 23: “They saw nothing, they heard nothing. War is war, and war is terrible.” One after the another, the veterans are confronted with, yet remain able to deny, the crimes for which the Wehrmacht bore responsibility. Two days later, Beckermann wrote:
“I looked through the film material so far. Here they are again, the men that I filmed during the Waldheim campaign ten years ago. I can’t listen to them any longer. I don’t want to let them speak. After all, they are not my fathers. I get impatient, I interrupt them when they drone on about their imprisonment and misery. Some of them invite us to their apartments to look at war albums. No thank you; I want to film them here, among these photos on white tiled walls, in the glare of the neon light. It happened in public, they should talk about it in public.”
Susan Sontag once said in an interview that “for the past 100 years in our society, the most interesting [artists] have mostly been critics of the society.” Indeed, East of War is just one example of how, since the late 1970s and her first forays into filmmaking as a political activist on the left-alternative scene, critical of mainstream of Austrian social democracy, Beckermann has been making the kinds of documentary films that other people in Austria simply weren’t making or did not want to make. For decades, Beckermann’s work has broken the silence, confronted the past, and explored matters that were hitherto taboo.
In The Waldheim Waltz (2018), which mixes the historical and the personal through found footage she had recorded at the end of the 1986 presidential campaign, Beckermann returned to Austrian history, chronicling the moment the myth of Austrian victimhood was shattered. Former UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim—who was exposed as a member of the SA and the Nazi student movement and accused of being engaged in mass deportations of Greek Jews and the Kozara massacre of partisans in Yugoslavia—was a symbol for the uneasy relationship between Austria and its past.
“It happened in public, they should talk about it in public” could be a mantra for Beckermann’s work behind the camera. This is especially true of the movies Beckermann and I discussed in the first part of our conversation reproduced below, held over the course of two meetings arranged either side of the summer of 2023 in a Viennese coffeehouse once frequented by the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard on a backstreet in the center of the city. Our conversation begins with reference to what might be my favorite of Beckermann’s movies, Paper Bridge (1987), a hauntingly beautiful and achingly melancholic exploration of her identity and family history and feelings about Judaism, Austria, and Israel.
In the wintertime, around Hanukkah, Beckermann leaves Vienna and travels to the historic region of Bukovina where he visits Jewish communities in Rădăuți and Siret to find a resemblance to the stories she grew up with. She then travels to Yugoslavia to witness Viennese Jews participate in the filming of an American-produced television show about the Holocaust. The movie ends back in Vienna, where she interviews her parents. Paper Bridge is ambiguous and inconclusive. Beckermann left Vienna to find out something to which she did not get an answer. The past is certain, but the present is not.
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Liam Hoare: In Paper Bridge, you can set up this dichotomy between your father and your mother in terms of how they feel about where they live, their identity, and their philosophical outlooks. Where did this divide come from?
Ruth Beckermann: My parents met in Vienna in 1949/1950, when my mother—who had emigrated to Palestine in 1938 after the Anschluss—came back to visit an uncle who had survived Auschwitz. Somehow, she met my father, and they fell in love. She went back to Israel; he followed her and stayed for three months, sending her flowers every day, and in the end, they got married in Israel. He then promised her, ‘Just one more year in Vienna, and then we’ll move to Israel.’ One year became another year, and then another, until finally, they ended up staying in Vienna.
My father was born in Czernowitz in 1911 when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war, he was drafted to the Soviet army. After the war, he went back to Czernowitz to find that his family—his mother, his first wife—had been murdered by the Nazis. At first, he went to Romania and started a new life there, opened a small shop, but after the communists began dispossessing people, he came to Vienna in 1948 as a refugee and started again. For him, Vienna was like a dream because he was born in the monarchy. He was a big admirer of Franz Josef and Sisi, and it was his dream to have his shop in the center of Vienna—and he succeeded! I remember him going around the city, admiring the buildings. It made him happy to be here.
My mother, on the other hand, never wanted to come back because she had experienced what had happened: the street-washing, the pogroms. Her father was murdered by the Nazis. And she had been very happy in Israel. So, they gave me different messages, which was complicated but interesting. It gave me different perspectives on life.
LH: Your mother says in Paper Bridge, ‘If I had known what Vienna would be like, I wouldn’t’ve raised my children here.’
RB: She didn’t want to live here, but she got used to it because her life was much more comfortable in Austria than it was in Israel. She also didn’t want us to marry Austrians—and we didn’t, my sister and me! Part of her message got through to us at least.
The Jewish refugees who arrived in Vienna after the war didn’t know anything about the long and great history of Viennese Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the war. Even I—and I was born in Vienna—didn’t know.
My parents were among those who established a new Jewish community in Vienna after the war. Not many Jews survived in Vienna and not many came back. Instead, refugees like my father came from Romania, Hungary, and Poland. It was a completely different community without any history in Vienna. My father hadn’t been in Vienna in 1938. For him, the communists were the enemy because of the antisemitism he experienced in the Soviet army. These Jews didn’t know anything about the long and great history of Viennese Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the war. Even I—and I was born in Vienna—didn’t know. When I was younger, I felt completely cut off and didn’t want to stay here. It was only later that I became interested in and began to rediscover that history.
LH: What was it like growing up in postwar Austria?
RB: It was shit! Growing up here was no fun at all.
LH: So, your mother was right…
RB: She was, of course. When I look back at that time and try to recall my feelings, Vienna was great, but the people were antisemitic and rude. When I was in primary school, I didn’t notice it that much, but in high school, I experienced a lot of antisemitism. I simply wanted to leave Vienna, and after I finished high school, I went to Israel.
My mother’s siblings had stayed in Israel after the war, and my father’s sisters who had survived the war were also able to leave Romania for Israel. As a child, we went there every year for Passover or during the summer. My parents were Zionists and I felt very connected to Israel. For us, the image of the strong soldier and the kibbutznik was important because it was very hard to identify with Holocaust survivors: their sadness, their tears. As children, we didn’t understand their pain—what they experienced.
After I finished high school, I stayed in Israel for a year. But I didn’t like it there either. Not enough to stay. And my relationship to Israel changed. After 1967 and 1973, after the wars and the occupation, I adopted a more realistic perspective on Israeli politics. I became quite active in the peace movement and in leftist circles. It was a process.
But the parts of my childhood that were painful later became a resource for my creativity. They are not only a source for my work, but also in understanding the pain of others. I can understand how kids feel who are the children of refugees in a society that makes them feel unwelcome.
LH: You studied in Paris, Tel Aviv, New York…
RB: I always came back. I went away, came back, went away, came back…
LH: What kept pulling you back?
RB: I think language is very important to me. I can only really know or have a feel for the society, politics, and people of a place if I know the language, the history. I lived in Paris for many years, I spoke French, but I couldn’t feel the subtexts, the nuances. Here, I have that.
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Beckermann describes her first three documentaries as “pamphlets” in the sense that they were political tracts. In Arena Squatted (1977), a collective occupies a disused slaughterhouse in Vienna with the aim of turning it into a cultural center and prevent it being sold off and turned into a textile plant. Suddenly, A Strike (1978) and The Steel Hammer Out There on The Grass (1981) document forms of industrial action: strikes at a tire factory in Traiskirchen and a march to save a steel mill in Judenburg.
Our political discussion here extends to a more recent work of Beckermann’s called homemad(e) (2001), a movie about Marc-Aurel-Strasse in Vienna’s first district, where she lives and hangs out. It’s about the people who reside there, the businesses along it including the old Café Salzgries, which closed in the years following the film’s release, and the political, social, and economic changes the street—and the country—experienced and was experiencing at the turn of the millennium.
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LH: How did your upbringing inform your politics?
RB: I felt like a stranger here, and my way into Austrian society was through the leftist movements of the 1970s. I’ve never been a party member, but I was close to the Trotskyists for a time, and I co-founded the film distribution company Filmladen with a view to bringing leftist movies to Austria: about South Africa, Vietnam, abortion. Leftist movements would rent our films for their lectures and demonstrations. With Josef Aichholzer and Franz Grafl, I made Arena Squatted (1977) and two other films because we decided we didn’t just want to import films. We wanted to examine what’s happening here. For the first time, I felt involved in Austria—in Austrian politics and society.
LH: The 1970s, the Kreisky era, is thought of as the golden age of social democracy in Austria. Watching them now, what’s very interesting is that, through your films, we can also see the seeds the social democracy’s decline: how workers in Suddenly, A Strike (1978) and The Steel Hammer Out There on The Grass (1981) felt the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) was looking out for its own interests as opposed to the people it represented.
RB : L’élite du SPÖ n’a jamais été de gauche comme nous l’étions, et nous avons toujours été critiques à son égard. Dans Arène occupée, c’est la municipalité sociale-démocrate de Vienne qui nous a chassés de l’Arena, l’a vendue à l’entreprise textile Schöps et a détruit ces magnifiques bâtiments. À l’époque, la société civile n’existait pas en Autriche. Elle n’a commencé à émerger qu’avec l’affaire Waldheim. Aujourd’hui, la ville n’oserait pas nous expulser de l’Arena. Depuis les années 1970, la vie a beaucoup changé à Vienne. La cité est devenue beaucoup plus internationale, moins grise — les gens sont plus gentils les uns envers les autres. Parallèlement, l’extrême droite est très présente à Vienne. C’est une situation étrange.
LH: homemad(e) (2001) showed Vienna on the cusp of change. Vienna was a sleepy city in that movie, and the street was a kind of village, but now, twenty years later, the first district has completely changed.
RB: I miss that time and that café, Café Salzgries. Two magazines, Falter and Profil, had their offices on that street, Marc-Aurel-Straße, so journalists would come to the café. Intellectuals and artists had a place to meet and discuss, to have fun. It was a particular moment—and a good one for me.
LH: Your father’s business was on that street?
RB: No, his were quite luxurious shops in the city center. But when I was a kid and I lived in the same apartment I do now, the whole street was Jewish-owned shops. Now, they’ve been replaced by restaurants, pubs, clubs. Not one of those shops is left. But you know, my movies are also chronicles of Viennese or Austrian life. That’s one of the great things about film: You capture a certain moment in time, and the moment after you’ve filmed it, it becomes history because it’s gone.
LH: The political context for homemad(e) was the first coalition involving the center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) and far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Guests in Café Salzgries were coming in from anti-government demonstrations.
RB: And you can’t anticipate that as a filmmaker. I started out making a film about my street and then the coalition happened, which was good for the film, if not good for us, but that political change makes the film more interesting.
LH: More than twenty years later, we could be on the verge of another center-right/far-right coalition. Has Austria changed?
RB: After the last center-right/far-right government and the Ibiza affair, people still are stupid enough to vote for the FPÖ again. Of course, it’s obvious that people are more pessimistic about their future, and then there’s the decline of the SPÖ, which I had hoped would change. I was happy with their new leader Andreas Babler, but I don’t think he can get people back from the far-right.
LH: Since Waldheim, Austria has changed so much, but in terms of the political conditions, the far-right remains a reality that won’t go away.
RB: No, the far-right has become even bigger.
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Zorros Bar Mizwa (2006) follows four 12-year-old children from different ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds as they prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs. While some celebrations emphasize the central religious dimension of the bar/bat mitzvah, for other subjects of Beckermann’s film, the social seems far more important as well as the ostentatious, the ceremony having taken on a certain overproduced elaborateness and pageantry. Through the prism of this hinge moment in the life cycle, Beckermann shows us the complicated mosaic of contemporary Jewish life in Vienna, while at the same time suggesting that Jewish continuity can take many forms.
Beginning with Return to Vienna (1983), Beckermann made a trilogy of documentaries exploring Jewish history and Jewish identity, Jewish past and Jewish present. Return to Vienna looks at the period between the wars when 60,000 Jews moved from the former Austro-Hungarian empire’s peripheries to the capital and the First Republic descended into fascism through the testimony of Franz West, a Jew who arrived in Vienna from Magdeburg with his family in 1924 when he was 14 years old. A social democrat who found his way to communism, in October 1934, West was arrested by the Austrofascist regime and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, becoming engaged in the Communist Party’s underground resistance upon his release. In 1938, via Prague and Paris, he emigrated to Britain, returning to Vienna after the war. At the film’s end, West recounts the fate of various family members who were either driven into exile or murdered during the Holocaust.
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LH: Let’s go back. To watch your movies in chronological order, it is interesting to observe how Return to Vienna (1983) is a bridge between your first three movies, the political movies, and Paper Bridge. You have this central figure who eventually finds his way into the communist resistance, so there’s that left-alternative perspective, but it’s also the first time there are explicitly Jewish themes in your work. Did you ever want to make a movie that was about Jewish themes or was this an accident? and how did you find Franz West?
RB: You’re right, but also, it’s a bridge away from making kind of pamphlet movies without too much thought for shape and style. Before then, I didn’t think of myself as a filmmaker. It was part of being a political activist. With Return to Vienna, that changed. I had decided on a certain form for the film, but I hadn’t intended on making a film about Jewish communists specifically. The project was, as it started out, about left-wing movements in the second district of Vienna. The socialists and the communists had been very strong there, and many of them were Jewish. In the beginning, I wanted to make a film about three different activists: a non-Jewish communist; a female, non-Jewish radical socialist; and Franz West. But he was such an impressive character and such a great narrator that in the editing process, I decided to make the whole film about him, and that’s how a Jewish angle found its way into my life and work. Though the film is not only about Franz West the Jew, but also the leftist and the resistance fighter.
LH: In the end, the movie tracks simultaneously the death of the First Republic and the extinction of prewar Jewish life.
RB: And his family. Indeed, but that came from him. He and most of the other communists who had fled and came back right after the war didn’t see themselves as emigrants but rather as exiles. They didn’t leave because they were Jews but rather for political reasons. Even Kreisky saw himself as a political émigré. Franz West had never spoken about his Jewish family before. That’s why it was so moving when he recorded his story on cassette at the end of the film. It did something to me, and I went on to do research what happened to the Jews and made the book, The Matzah Island (1984), by collecting other testimonies and photographs. It was like a chain reaction.
When it came out, The Matzah Island was a big success. It was sold out its print run in four weeks. Suddenly, people were discovering there had been Jews in the second district. Even the term ‘matzah island’ was forgotten. The editor of the book said, ‘We can’t use this title because no one knows the word ‘matzah’ anymore, and I said, ‘Let’s try.’ Now, everyone knows the word.
LH: As you say, the final part of his testimony he records into a tape recorder and then he plays it back for you. Do you remember why he chose to do it this way and why he didn’t do it to camera in an interview format?
RB: He did it when he was alone. He started to think about it for the first time, and I think it was very emotional for him and he didn’t want to show these emotions on camera.
LH: He says, ‘It’s important to talk about the past from time to time in the hope that it might change the present.’
RB: He was a communist. He was an optimist. He believed that, and at the time, I believed it too. Not anymore. Now I don’t believe that a film or even a political movement can change people.
LH: What for you, then, is the point of the culture of remembrance in general and in making a movie such as Return to Vienna that captures the testimony of someone who lived this experience?
RB: For me, the purpose of making a movie is either to contradict something or show something that has not been shown until that very moment. At the time, all that footage I used in the film from the 1920s and 1930s was unknown. We found it. And people like Franz West were not known in Vienna, in Austria. It was completely covered up or forgotten—all those stories about the prewar left. I was born in Vienna near the second district, and I didn’t know these stories at all. That was my aim at the time: to excavate Viennese history.
LH: This exploration of Viennese Jewish history ends up at Paper Bridge, in which you yourself—your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions—are the center of the film. In that movie, you say, ‘As a second-generation Viennese Jew, you live as a kind of object of fascination or study by definition.’ Did that make you reluctant to make the movie?
RB: Psychologically, it was the most complicated movie I’ve ever made. I didn’t want to be the object, but I did want to take history into my own hands and show my own perspective on it. It took me three years to make that movie, not because I couldn’t find the money, but because it was so stressful and difficult to cope with it and find the right form because I didn’t want to work with archival footage. Also, I didn’t want to make a film about the Holocaust, but I did want to make a film about the memories I live with and facts of history that are part of my identity today as a Viennese Jew. That’s not only memory of the Holocaust but also Israel, the stories of the shtetl in eastern Europe, and contemporary Vienna. My identity is formed of various parts, and I tried to draw all of that into the film, which wasn’t easy.
LH: You said that it took three years to make Paper Bridge.
RB: At the time, talking about Jews was taboo. It was also like that on the New Left. People talked about themselves as communists, it was their identity. Even the poet Robert Schindel never talked about being Jewish—only later in the 1980s. Before Waldheim, nobody talked about the fate of the Jews in public. I began making Paper Bridge in 1984 before the Waldheim affair. We finished it in 1986 and it came out in 1987 after the Waldheim affair had happened. That’s why it toured the States because suddenly people were interested in Austria. It was very strange. After the Waldheim affair, it was much easier to talk about Jews.
LH: That film is deeply melancholic, I think, in part because it’s a movie with all these questions to which you never find the answer.
RB: In general, I don’t think movies should try and give answers. You open a discussion or present reflections. I’m not interested in giving answers. Maybe my first movies did, but today, I’m more interested in making movies that surprise people—or surprise me.
LH: Content dictates form, and because the basis for the movie is memory, and there’s the travelling aspect of it—you’re going out in search of something but that something is not necessarily concrete—the form is not linear. It’s very interesting in that way.
RB: The most important aspect of my work is the relationship between content and form, meaning finding a form for a particular content. The most difficult thing is to find the right form, and here it’s very important for me to stress the difference between TV work and filmmaking. TV people, they take whatever they find—archival footage, interviews, shots of buildings, travelling shots, voiceover—and mix it. Making a film is more concentrated. When I made East of War (1996), I only shot in the exhibition space. I didn’t even show images of the photographs on the walls. People I interviewed asked us to come to their homes because they wanted to show us their war albums and I said, ‘No, my concept is to shoot in one space.’ Why? Because the content, again, was about memory, and I wanted to juxtapose the different memories. If I would have cut from an interview to photographs of Nazi war crimes, I would have juxtaposed memory with fact and history because photographs are much more factual than what people remember. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to have nuances between different memories, not photograph and memory.
But form can also shape your content. To give you an example, in Towards Jerusalem (1990), a film about the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I stick to the road and what happens by the side of the road. The concept was not: I want to make a film about Israel. I could have gone to the most interesting intellectuals, artists, historians in Israel, but I didn’t want to do that. I love open forms where I don’t predetermine who’s in the movie. In Towards Jerusalem, the road decides. In Paper Bridge, we went to Romania, and we encountered people I’d never met before. Things happened that I couldn’t foresee.
After the Waldheim affair many colleagues and people had started to make movies about Jews and I said to them: ‘Why are you making movies about Jews? You must confront the Nazis in your own families.’ Nobody did.
LH: And in East of War, the form is that you film in the exhibition and who shows up dictates the content.
RB: And the amazing thing was that it wasn’t only Austrians who showed up. A guy from eastern Europe showed up. A Jew who’d served in the British army showed up. The world in a drop of water. We had this woman who showed up who had been a communist and ran away to the Soviet Union. It was so surprising to me as a filmmaker and that’s what I’m interested in: finding forms that allow for things to happen that I wouldn’t have thought of or didn’t go to searching for.
LH: Looking back at your shooting journal from East of War, you write at a certain point, “I can’t listen to them any longer. I don’t want to let them speak.” You clearly didn’t like being in this situation where you were interviewing all these old Nazis. Why make movies that are so difficult for you?
RB: I’m very much interested in the other. People I don’t know. Why should I make movies about people I like? I think documentary filmmakers should make many more movies about their enemies, so-to-speak—about the other.
One of the reasons I made this movie was that nobody else was doing it. I spoke to so many colleagues and people who, after the Waldheim affair, had started to make movies about Jews and said: ‘Make movies about your own families. Why are you making movies about Jews? You must confront the Nazis in your own families.’ Nobody did. That’s why I decided to make East of War, and I think it’s a pity that all those memories of those who were enthusiastic about Hitler and the Nazis are more-or-less lost. How did it happen? Why did they become Nazis? Too few people asked their parents these questions.
LH: I found the responses of those you interviewed fascinating because there they were, in this exhibition, confronted with these photographs, and still they said to you, ‘Well, yes, I was in the Wehrmacht, but I didn’t see these things in these pictures, and actually all those things were committed by people who came from behind in the SS or the SD.’ Those atrocities were happening, well, east of war. Somewhere else.
RB: Everybody constructs their own memory and history. It’s a story. I don’t think I could have made this film before 1995. By that time, the interviewees were old, retired, getting closer to death—so they talked. I think 10 years prior, they wouldn’t have. That’s also why it’s very important, in making documentaries, to find the right moment for a certain subject. East of War became an extremely widely discussed film. After screenings, people would sit together for hours and talk about their parents. It was a very personal film for non-Jews, children of Nazis, so in that sense it was important.
LH: In homemad(e), one of the people you interview says to you, ‘Nobody can understand what that was like who didn’t experience it,’ and then in Paper Bridge, one of the questions that’s raised is, ‘Who are we?’ and another, ‘What would I have done if I had been there?’ On the one hand, you can’t understand the past; on the other hand, you want to understand it.
RB: Can’t understand to a certain extent, but when you hear what other people did, you also ask yourself questions. That’s why, in Paper Bridge, I filmed this debate between the young Israeli and the Holocaust survivor. He, the Israeli, couldn’t understand why he, the survivor, didn’t resist or take a knife and kill the nearest Nazi.
The story of my grandmother, Rosa, is very important to that film—and to me. She was able to survive the war in Vienna because people helped her—and because she must have been an extraordinary person. She succeeded in getting all five of her children out, and she stayed because she thought her husband would come back, though he was murdered in Buchenwald. A woman alone—a very simple woman who came from Galicia, from a shtetl. She must have been extremely strong. Why did she decide not to go to Theresienstadt? Why did she decide to take off the yellow star and hide and go underground? Why did she decide, I’ll stay here, even though all my friends and the people I know have gone to Theresienstadt? She died when I was five, so I couldn’t ask her these questions. If you’d ask me with which dead person I’d most like to speak, it would be my grandmother. And I ask myself: How would I have reacted? What would I decide to do if something like that happened today? Stay or go?
