delirium clemens

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) took the liberty of placing an overtly racist poster in Vienna for the City Council elections on 10 October, bearing the slogan: Mehr Mut für unser Wiener Blut (‘More courage for our Viennese Blood’). This is in many ways instructive for hopeless cultural analysts like me who are interested in vampirism as well.

At first sight, the poster clearly shows a little linguistic shortcoming. According to the Duden Dictionary of German, the correct form is Mut zu (like in English, ‘the courage to’). Mut with the incorrect preposition für (‘for’) is a rather unknown construction in German, crying out for some proofreading. Or does the slogan mean that the ‘Viennese blood’ actually needs some courage, because it is rather lame otherwise, anemic, so to speak?

However, this might not be intended by the poster designers, since obviously there is a certain kind of biologism alluded to in the slogan: the so-called blood racism, the core of which forms the delusional idea of the ‘purity of blood.’ This is one of the most dangerous fantasies of Nazism, by the way, for which many millions of innocent people throughout Central Europe, Jews, Slavs, Roma and many others, paid with their lives in the early 1940s.

In this light, the lame excuses of FPÖ chairman HC Strache in August did not really sound convincing. According to him, the campaign poster of his party only referred to Johann Strauss’s waltz Wiener Blut from 1873, the year well-known in Austria for its world exhibition and stockmarket crash. (The Strauss family had Jewish roots by the way and probably would not be amused about that particular use of one of their number one hits.)

Also interesting is the musical prehistory of Wiener Blut: The eponymous comic operetta was cobbled together by the young Adolf Müller in 1899 under Strauss´s name, when the maestro was already terminally ill, in order to save the Carl Theater in Vienna from bankruptcy. The operetta´s plot is thin, containing some erotic confusion which at the end leads to the correct coupling of lovers among whom we find a woman with the hardly ‘Austrian’ name Cagliari. The Viennese blood here is thicker than you might think, stirred from a variety of ingredients – and it is not necessarily ethnically defined. In Strauss’ and Müller’s operetta, it makes its owners dance in an uncontrolled manner, for its rhythm sits ‘in the blood’, as does the ‘courage’ which our amateur poet Strache (who would later record a racist rap song) might have quoted:

Wiener Blut, /Wiener Blut! /Eig’ner Saft, /Voller Kraft, /Voller Glut. /Wiener Blut, /selt’nes Gut, /Du erhebst, /Du belebst /Unser’n Mut!
(‘Viennese Blood, / Viennese Blood, / special juice/ full of power, / full of fire./ Viennese Blood,/ rare possession,/ you raise / and animate / our courage!’)

Is this what the alleged operetta fan Strache wanted to say? I don’t think so. What was rather meant by the right-populist Freedom Party was probably that Viennese blood is a ‘rare possession’; the juice of life that should be ‘protected’ against ‘foreign influence’, as the childish rhyme of the FPÖ poster slogan says chauvinistically: ‘Too much foreign stuff does not do you any good’ (‘Zuviel Fremdes tut niemandem gut’). This somehow reminds me of the AIDS campaigns in the late 1980s; condoms for Vienna to stop the alien intruder?

But actually, Viennese blood is not a prime example of ‘racial purity’ (or zero immigration) as fantasized by Austrian supremacists. At least a quarter of the Viennese population count Czech ancestors into their pedigree, and the rest of the inhabitants have Hungarian, Jewish, South Slavic, Italian, German-German and other roots,  a fact in which many take pride. But no, it was not the ‘ethnic mix’ of Habsburg Vienna around 1900 he wanted to criticize, said Strache soothingly in August. He might have been afraid that the slogan could backfire.

He´d better be careful himself. Like so many others in Central Europe, the name ‘Strache’ stems from just that particular ‘ethnic mix’ of the Habsburg Monarchy, and certainly, it is not of German(ic) origin. Just as if the immortal political comedian from Vienna, Johann Nestroy, had invented this name, the word strah (without -e) means FEAR in most Slavic languages…

Here, once again, Viennese reality proves to be much more ironic than any satire could be. The fear mongering Blood-and-Soil poster abusing the term ‘Wiener Blut’ reveals and deconstructs itself by the name of the party´s Führer. As if it really mattered if your mixed Central European cholesterol level is raised by excessive Austrian sausage or Turkish donair consumption… The foreign influence has always been there, at least from the invention of the Kaffeehaus which emerged from a Turkish incentinve in the late 1600s.

Anyway, how many stupid, fear-filled, or just resentful people among the city’s population will go for that home-bred Viennese Brood, the elections will show. In general, liberal humanism and even simple common sense seem to fall sadly short in dealing with right-wing populism, not only in Austria but throughout (Central?) Europe.

For instance, ‘Pozsony, NO: Bratislava!,’  reads a right-wing Slovak poster. According to it, the capital of Slovakia must not have a (btw. historic) Hungarian name as well, although a significant number of its inhabitants and visitors belong to the country´s Hungarian minority. So today, the ticket machines of the streetcars in Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg are, apart from Slovak, labeled in English and German only, but not in Hungarian. At least the tourists should be able to read them. But that´s a different story, isn´t it?

In his version of Wiener Blut from 1988, Falco sings, ‘… with murder and manslaughter/ we have nothing to do.’ The ‘golden Viennese heart’ as cold comfort? Let’s not forget that the sinister German metal combo Rammstein has also released a song entitled Wiener Blut.  The refrain goes: ‘Welcome to Darkness.’ Willkommen in der Dunkelheit.

(c) Clemens Ruthner & LIDOVÉ NOVINY, 2010.

Other versions of the text: German original +  Czech translation (Lucie Zídková)

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NB. Here Rammstein obviously tries to exploit the notorious Fritzl incest case in an incredibly tasteful manner. However, the infamous Austrian sex perpetrator is not Viennese, but from Amstetten, Lower Austria. But distances don´t seem to count in German pop culture, eh?

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SPECIAL MALUS TRACKS: the operetta-loving poster boy HC Strache rapping.

And a little premature cover version from 2006:

PS. There is more stuff out there on YouTube

This entry was posted on 4 October 2010 at 12:19 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Austria, Bratislava, Central Europe, FPÖ, Muslims, Racism, Right populism, Slovakia, Vienna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.