Vienna Is Different: 50 Years After the Anschluss

When Hitler's army invaded Austria in 1938, not a shot was fired. His motorcade sped across the border toward his birthplace, Vienna, to the cheers of Austrian citizens. So begins Vienna Is Different, a searing psychological study of a nation and its citizenry. Shot in and around Vienna and Braunau in March of 1988 during the official "Year of Reflection," a month-long commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Auschluss, the film holds a mirror up to the Austrian people who, as Strauss's Die Flederma us alarmingly si ngs, forget what cannot he changed anyway. Filmmakers Korda and Leitner ask about Austrian responsibility to history at the height of the Kurt Waldheim controversy over his shrouded past as a member of Hitler's army.