The Waldheim affair in Yugoslav public and political discourse
Abstract
Historians deal with the lives of famous and important figures who have left behind a good or bad historical legacy, mostly after the deaths of the individuals concerned. The former Secretary-General of the United Nations and the most isolated legally elected president of a country, who was not a dictator, Kurt Josef Waldheim, was most definitely the opposite case. A politician who earlier symbolized stability, respect and trust, became a person of interest to international public opinion only in his later years. Waldheim’s respectable diplomatic and political career and personal credibility, which he had cultivated for decades, suddenly turned gray in the mid-1980s. The carefully buried Nazi past caught up with the respected politician and turned him into a reality star in the late 1980s. However, he emerged with a smile on his face from an almost impossible situation, sublimating the entire absurdity of the Cold War into his personality, because that was the one of rare historical periods in which people with a dark past could live with impunity and their heads held high, and at the same time be even respected.
The aim of the paper is to show, through a description and analysis of the Waldheim Affair, a critical approach to literature and the press, in the broadest context, how the main actor himself dealt with it, and how the Affair influenced the shaping of public discourse and political developments in countries and among peoples for whom it represented a catalyst that initiated the confrontation with unresolved issues arising from World War II and the first post-war years, with special reference to Yugoslavia.
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