Just when it looked safe to unpack those cow bells again and start trilling Doh-a-Deer on the Alpine slopes, along comes Sacha Baron Cohen alias Brüno, in the tightest of lederhosen. After last night’s film premiere in London, Austria’s beleaguered image-makers are probably huddled together at this very moment — one would like to think in a secret basement somewhere — working out how to avoid the fate of Kazakhstan.

It’s the Borat Effect, of course. In Sacha Baron Cohen’s last nation-branding venture he played an ignorant, nude-wrestling, anti-Semitic Kazakh television reporter who presented his excrement in a plastic bag, as if it were a goldfish, to a stunned American family.

That certainly helped to put Kazakhstan on the map, even boosted tourism for a while, but one does not get the impression that the Central Asian republic is quite as grateful as it should be.

Now it is Austria’s turn not to get the joke. In an interview with the July edition of Marie Claire Baron Cohen — in character as the gay Austrian fashionista Brüno — presents his personal A to Z of the fashion world. A, naturally is for Austria where the people are brought up to “try and achieve ze Austrian dream — find a job, get a dungeon and raise a family in it”. Brüno follows up this hommage to Josef Fritzl, the convicted rapist of his imprisoned daughter, with a nod towards another notorious Austrian.

K, he says, is for “Kampf, Mein ... ze fashion bible written by Austria’s black sheep Adolf Hitler. It literally translates as ‘My Flamboyance’.” The film Brüno has more in this vein; Austria is a country where the shaven-headed call for drinks by raising their right arm in a stiff, but familiar salute.

And naturally the Austrians, who will not actually see the film until July 7, don’t like this at all. What about all that mountain air, the verdant, rolling hills, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

“How could a line that obviously points to the most horrifying crime that Austria has seen in decades, namely a father keeping his own daughter in a dungeon for 26 years and fathering her seven children during that time, be considered funny,” asks Lisa Trompisch, a columnist on the online service heute.at. As for the reference to Hitler: “I can’t decide which is worse, the insult to Austria, or to present Hitler merely as a black sheep.”

Austrian state television has already started to fret about the future damage to the national reputation. Will Austria become the new Kazakhstan, asked the broadcaster’s website.

The problem, of course, is that Baron Cohen’s mockery is close to the bone. Austria has talked for years as if Hitler were a German (though he was born in Braunau am Inn, on the Austrian side of the frontier) and it supplied a lot of the Nazis’ leaders. After the war, party members entered Austrian society, and politics, without much of a hitch; veterans were welcomed back to their villages as returning heroes.

This was duly swept under the carpet — allowing far-right populists to win votes by glorifying Hitler’s policies in the 1990s — and a pattern of looking away, of denial, was duly set. When Natascha Kampusch was rescued after almost eight years as a captive in an underground cell, the perpetrator was dismissed as a one-off freak. Then came Fritzl.

So Austria doesn’t really have a PR problem generated by Brüno and his jokes. It has an identity problem.

A quick call to the Salzburg tourist office, where they are gritting their teeth. This is the front line of Austrian tourism and it is time to think positive. “We can recommend the Sound of Music Tour,” says Andrea Heitzer, “The British love that, everybody does.”

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