Theater and politics in Austria: spiritual people in the ghost train

She should be rewarded right from the first scene: Last week, the Austrian media landscape was looking forward to the return of their 1988 Nazi past state crisis play, because Frank Castorf, long-time director of the Berliner Volksbühne, is staging Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” in Vienna. 36 years ago, exactly 50 years after Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany, the play caused the biggest theater scandal in the country’s history.

Directly addressed by actor Marcel Heuperman, encouraging boos were given to the audience from the stage right at the beginning. Guests such as the incumbent Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) and the former National Council President Andreas Khol (ÖVP) were sworn into a scandal. But that didn’t come about. The state act was much less spectacular than the premiere directed by Claus Peymann, who was also present that evening. No pile of dung was dumped in front of the Burgtheater. A top politician left the hall several times, not out of fear, but with his smartphone in his hand. Instead of the corrupted, toothless Austrian press, which is exhibited in its puniness in Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz”, the wave of shock news from Second German Television swept down the blue Danube on this premiere weekend: Jan Böhmermann’s summary of the FPÖ’s right-wing extremist contacts was the cause.

In typical Bernhard style, the evening begins with a repetitive, fraying scene about right and wrong ironing and proper compliance with the regulations when folding shirts. The housekeeper Zittel is broken in fulfilling the norm compared to her late Professor Schuster, echoing the theme of the piece on an individual level: the compulsive echo of false norms. Overall, the evening, with its many theses-rich monologues and inserts from texts, such as travel reports by the US writer Thomas Wolfe or John F. Kennedy, which form less connections than monoliths, is supported by strong individual performances by the entire ensemble.

Stage and flashy costumes: banana dress, disposable tents, vinyl and leather, feather boa borrow from a vanished America. The oversized legs of the fallen Marilyn Monroe in the iconic skirt protrude from the ground next to the entrance to Brooklyn’s “Borough Hall Station”. Coca-Cola advertisements and a Pepsi machine are the few shining death-conquerors of this atmosphere of doom. In the background, inevitably depressing: an enormously enlarged photograph of a meeting on the Nazi party rally grounds, with his right arms outstretched a thousand times.

About the plot: Professor Josef Schuster, who returned from forced emigration at the request of the mayor of Vienna, killed himself by jumping out of the window of the apartment at Heldenplatz – the parade ground for Hitler’s follow-up speech, with the famous balcony. Even today, the young people of the Freedom Party include it in their social media clips as a longing-filled vanishing point. Extremism researchers don’t see this as a coincidence. Schuster’s suffering in the world can be heard from everywhere: from the provincial constitution, the hatred of Jews, the bland, depraved newspaper landscape, the mass enthusiasm during the annexation in 1938. Under these merciless circumstances, Bernhard describes a condition that is impossible for “spiritual people” to live in. To the professor, wiping out oneself seemed like a harmonizing strategy compared to the screaming.

Schuster’s brother, Robert, dressed as a mummy, played with a Viennese grumble by the phenomenal Birgit Minichmayr, flees into pure harmony. He sees the music club as the haven of a neat, unchanging Austria, which is conservative and Catholic, and which simply continues to keep the Austro-Hungarian Empire alive as a farce and in a consistently ignorant manner.

The relatives urge Robert to at least sign a letter of protest against the construction of a road through the family’s apple orchard in Neuhaus (a town in the Vienna Woods). This request is negatively acknowledged by the person who has been lost to the world with the scandalous monologue about “six and a half million idiots and death addicts”, meaning the Austrians, inimitable by the bandaged Minichmayr, grotesquely contorting herself in a chair. The resigned attitude is presented as the last possible and most radical form of resistance to impulses for change.

A travel report by the young John F. Kennedy is woven into the first part, including a slide show about his road trip through fascist Germany in 1937: He only remembers the “lovely weather”, small German towns that are superior to those of the Italians… and well-bred dachshunds.

Overall, the production has no stringent narrative, only recurring jokes; it places text sources next to each other and does not pick up threads that have been unrolled. This creates a hopeless madness, an incomprehensible convoluted path to the Holocaust: countless costume changes, piles of mannequins with their arms raised to attention, the recurring sad song of the burning shtetl, communal peeling of potatoes as a funeral feast are individual building blocks that, when thought together, form a “painful dialectic from which the comic arises” (Frank Castorf), over four and a half hours.

The evening’s soundtrack uses irony to record the susceptibility of the culture industry to ideological leadership claims: “There’s a train going nowhere,” “Blond is a big deal” and “Opernring Blues” by the Viennese rapper Bibiza, with the lyric: “Two beautiful ladies and cocaine . I’ll do this until I earn big.” The camera work during long, contemplative train rides and in a claustrophobic bunker, from whose chandelier gas finally flows out and thus dissolves the mourning community, creates the impression of a general panicked powerlessness despite some lengths in the evening – especially in this Austrian super election year.

Next performances: February 24th, March 3rd, March 28th