Anti-Haider protest turns its wrath on the arts
From Bill AllenWHEN the best a country can manage in terms of pulling in international statesmen for its premier cultural event of the year is the president of Kazahkstan, you know things are going badly.
But that was what the pariah state of Austria managed on Thursday at the famed Vienna Opera Ball, along with a smattering of porno starlets and division B TV pundits from home and Germany. It was the clearest sign yet that the resignation of Austria's far-right leader Joerg Haider has failed to put the brakes on the collective suicide of the thriving arts and cultural community in his country.
Everything from large-scale productions such as the Salzburg Festival - as featured in the Sound of Music - to cornershop poets' societies are in retreat in protest at the ultra-right Freedom Party's inclusion into government.
The pressure from within could be the most damaging for Austria commercially. Billions of pounds is generated annually in tourism - much of it cultural tourism in cities such as Salzburg, Graz and Vienna. The decision to literally shut down the national heritage will be a blow it could take the country years to recover from - far longer than the four years the party will be in power.
Thursday night in the capital bordered on a Mel Brooks farce. Fifteen thousand protesters banging pots and blowing whistles hissed and booed those who did turn up in their finery to attend what has hitherto been the jewel in the crown of the Austrian social calendar.
The undoubted star of the night was a man dressed as Adolf Hitler who turned up in a white Rolls-Royce, managed to bluff his way in past security men before he was bundled into a police van and driven away shouting anti-Haider slogans.
This year's ball was more about who didn't show up than who did. Jorge Sampiano, president of Portugal which holds the current EU presidency, boycotted it as did many other politicians from both Austria and the EU.
The mayors of Frankfurt and Athens, Greece, celebrities Catherine Deneuve and Claudia Cardinale and Israeli opera singer Anat Efraty stayed away. The American opera singer Neil Shicoff sent his regrets saying "moral reasons" impelled him not to go.
Instead porno stars like Dolly Buster from Germany were welcomed by the organisers who were determined that all the tickets would be sold, no matter who they went to.
While the outside leverage continues on the Alpine state the isolation is being felt in small ways daily. As artists as well as the intellectual and cultural elite of the nation move out, the exodus is threatening to change Austria's character in the years to come.
The Opera Ball is not the only grand event to suffer. In Salzburg, there is also a crisis. The main sponsor of its annual music festival who has given US$20 million dollars over the years has pulled out in protest. American philanthropist Betty Freeman said: "I will not sponsor after this year. It is my protest vote."
Her announcement follows the resignation of Gerard Mortier, the Festival's artistic director who is also quitting in fury at what he called the "fascist" nature of the new government.
Heinz Schaden, Social Democrat mayor of the city, said: "This could mean less avant-garde productions of the Edinburgh fringe variety will be staged. It is a knock-on effect disastrous for Salzburg and Austria. The fact that Joerg Haider has resigned means nothing."
Artists are threatening to leave in their hundreds or have already done so. Sylvia Camreling, chief conductor of the Vienna Sound Forum, has left, the Austrian Poetry School has shut down for a year and will only be active on the internet and several arts schools and classes said they will close in protest.
"When a political party hostile to artists and incapable of the civilised usage of language comes to power this cannot be a good thing for the school of poetry which draws on multi-ethnicity and the traditional plurality of languages in Vienna, one of the capitals of the United Nations," said the Poetry School in a statement.
The dramatist Elfriede Jelinek has banned her plays from being staged anywhere in Austria while the government remains in power - a move that will result in chaos in Viennese and provincial theatres. Relatives of the late writer Ingeborg Bachmann have withdrawn the right for the writer's name to be given to the annual prize for talent awarded in Klagenfurt every year "until it is proven that politics in this country are not discriminatory".
"This is a potentially devastating movement in Austria," said social historian Walter Reinhardt. "Although the government probably thinks it can afford to lose a few scribblers and daubers this kind of self-imposed exile strikes at a nation's soul. They might be in power for four years but the damage they have done to the arts might take a generation or longer to reverse."
Claudio Maierling, a poet, added: "Artists are the soul of a nation, the people who speak for those with no voice. We are also its conscience.
"It is our moral duty to oppose Joerg Haider, his party and everything it stands for."
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