Burgtheater boss on Austria: “It’s only going downhill”
Kušej spoke of a “worrying development” and a “backward spiral” from times when there was even more “reliability”: “It’s been really downhill for years now and I find that really worrying.” The Burgtheater is currently devoting itself to the topic of “noise”, also because of the noise that is being made in politics: “What I also find hard is the system of corruption. In each party this is now being hailed from the others. I don’t know where a current should come from that will lead us out of there. I just don’t see that anywhere. “
“We are art with our own rules”
Kušej self-critically admitted that it took a “certain time” before he got into his role as an important Austrian theater director: “I am not a fan of theater as a bourgeois moral institution. I know Schiller’s texts about it, society was in at the time That was a noble ideal that was never achieved. For me, political theater is not a standard term, but we are in an interrelationship with the people who live here. We are art and it has its own rules. “
Kušej defended his reluctance to stream performances during the lockdown by pointing out that from his point of view filming productions was something like “selling the silverware”: “I see it as a danger to our business, to our art.” When asked about the decline in viewership, he spoke of stabilization at a lower level than before the pandemic. “Maria Stuart”, however, is “sold out right up to the roof”.
Franzobel: “We have homo korruptus”
The Austrian writer Franzobel had on Monday said in conversation with the “Kulturzeit” on 3Sat: “At least we have good entertainment. Europe can sit back and maybe watch this free operetta performance on the Politbühne in Austria with some enjoyment. We have homo korruptus in Austria, that’s how the country works.” The fact that nepotism extends to the “hair tips” of the leadership elite is “new”: “But as an Austrian, you didn’t expect anything else.” The way of life as such also has “something charming”, but it is “intolerable” in high politics.
The Austrians like their politicians with saviors: “The Austrians love even more to see these messiah-like politicians please.” Sebastian Kurz, however, “got stuck halfway up”.
“He practices in front of the mirror for hours”
It was only in September that the young Viennese author Elias Hirschl caused a sensation with his novel “Salonbaren” because the book was read as a satire on Kurz (“Julius Varga”) and its fans. Hirschl, who was a guest in the KulturWelt on Bayern 2, describes the young ÖVP milieu as neglected affluence and exclusively oriented towards lifestyle. The Hanser-Verlag praises the title as “Austrian Psycho”: “For hours he practices his smile, his way of speaking in front of the mirror. Julius Varga, the party leader, is the great idol of the nameless narrator.” The reviewer of the Hamburg “Zeit” judged: “Unfortunately one cannot say that everything is always easy to bear.”