The Fall of Austria’s Icarus

Having exhausted the ambivalent attractions of two years of sporadic lockdowns in Budapest, my wife and I moved over to Vienna just before Christmas—where, it turned out, the restrictions were even tighter than in Budapest. The transition reminded me of an advertisement offering prizes for a competition that was once offered in an Ohio newspaper—First Prize: One week in Cleveland. Second Prize: Two weeks in Cleveland.  

According to the prevailing protocol in Austria you not only had to show evidence of two vaccinations on entering a restaurant or a museum, but in some places had to fill in a form at your numbered table with name, address and mobile for contact-and-trace in the event someone close by fell ill. Or perhaps you were supposed to contact the Lokal if you fell ill—I never quite got the hang of the system. By January, with Omicron surging, you had to have tests before going to any official or work appointment, and people employed in schools and shops had to be tested at least twice in the week.

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Regardless of this application of the precautionary principle, the daily number of infected cases rose inexorably to the highest it had been throughout the whole pandemic. The government’s reaction was to make three vaccinations mandatory, with a threat of draconian fines down the line for refuseniks. Since then there seem to have been second thoughts, not least because the powerful Länder (see below) are reneging on their original commitment to Impfpflicht (mandatory vaccination). There are, after all, a lot of conservative votes in the Länder.

The new leader of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), a somewhat unprepossessing character called Herbert Kickl, was meanwhile posing as the people’s tribune by organising protest rallies in which as many as 40,000 took part. The slogans alleged that democratic freedoms were being trampled under foot by a medical-political conspiracy. Or, as the FPÖ leader puts it with his customary thought-provoking ambiguity: “I think the principle is that the law should follow the politics, not politics follow the law.” In addition to FPÖ supporters, rent-a-crowd (mostly Neo-Nazi types in Austria) turned out in some force but the Austrians generally prefer shouting to beating people up.

On the other hand, seasoned observers of Austrian governance were impressed but not surprised by the amazing capacity of the rulers to invent new and complex regulations with alacrity, and by the general indefatigability of average Austrians in informing themselves on what the latest one might be and working out how to adhere to it—also how to get round it and to know which bits were likely to be enforceable and which not. The Viennese writer Jörg Mauthe once wrote a sketch about a citizen with an appointment in the Austrian Ministry of the Interior who got lost in the ministry’s interminable corridors and finally ended up at a door bearing the legend: Entry for all persons whatsoever strictly forbidden. “Since a door by its very nature would seem to embody the idea of access,” writes Mauthe, “to find such an instruction posted on one is more than a little disconcerting. Even more bizarre, however, is the injunction affixed beneath this all-embracing prohibition, namely: Mind the step.” Keine Regel ohne Ausnahme (no rule without an exception), as they say in these parts.

Actually, one of the great gifts to mankind, or at least to Europeans, was the Habsburg bureaucracy which had to be fit for purpose across numerous cultures and languages. It is true that certain ill-disposed persons such as Franz Kafka have been inclined to mock this relentlessly diligent system and it has thereby got a bad press; but after all Kafka conceived his works as comedies—black comedies, perhaps, but comedies just the same.

Kafka was a German Jew generally thought to have been of melancholy disposition. Yet, according to Max Brod, the writer’s friend, biographer and literary executor, despite the popular image of the hollow-cheeked, neurotic genius, Kafka himself liked a laugh. Indeed he regarded The Trial, now considered one of his most chilling works, as irresistibly funny and was repeatedly overcome with helpless laughter when reading the first chapter aloud. A tribute in the German newspaper Die Welt has even compared Kafka to Charlie Chaplin (another neurotic) and there is a well-known photo of him wearing a bowler hat at a slightly rakish angle where indeed he looks extremely like Chaplin minus the moustache. Then again, Chaplin’s arguably most famous film, The Great Dictator, dealt with ridiculous and arbitrary power, the emphasis being on the ridiculous.

While I was sitting in the weak January sunshine on a park bench in Schönbrunn (socially distanced of course) a Kafka remark extruded itself from my wool-gathering, namely: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” If this was intended as one of his jokes, it would be tasteless to quote it when so many have been carried off by the horrifying pandemic. I think it was not a joke, however, and sums up quite well what many novelists have spent hundreds of pages trying to explain. In fact, the Viennese have an ambivalent attitude to death whereby tragedy is not always far divorced from comedy. On the one hand funerals were, and still are, grand and solemn occasions; on the other hand black humour is ubiquitous, with splendid synonyms abounding: “putting on wooden pyjamas” and “viewing the potatoes from underneath” are just two of sixteen with which Roland Neuwirth regales us in “Ein echtes Wienerlied”, a mordantly humorous song in Viennese dialect. However, as they say in these parts, “Keine Angst: Der Tod ist die einzige Regel ohne Ausnahme” (“Don’t worry: death is the only rule with no exceptions”).

Some of this is in questionable taste—that is indeed the point of it. Pondering intimations of mortality while sitting in the beautiful park at Schönbrunn, I noticed that there were fewer feral pigeons about than usual, but a lot of crows. Perhaps the latter had driven out the former, or perhaps the authorities had regulated the pigeons out of existence? They are after all a dreadful and unhygienic nuisance, whereas the ever cheekier crows, allegedly refugees from Ukraine, may well be on Sozialhilfe, so numerous have they become. This reflection brought to mind a captivating ditty by the great American satirist Tom Lehrer—the one in which he lyrically celebrates an excursion devoted to “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” (“When they see me coming / The birdies all try and hide / But they still go for peanuts / When coated with cyanide.”)

Readers may think I am wandering from my topic here. Not at all! It turns out that Lehrer translated and adapted a song, “Taubenvergiften”, by a Viennese cabaret singer, Georg Kreisler, who spent the war in exile in the USA. Kreisler composed a couple of songs in English (“Please, Shoot Your Husband” and “My Psychoanalyst is an Idiot”), but in truth Lehrer’s version of “Taubenvergiften” surpasses the original in sheer heartless zeal (“And may be we’ll do / In a squirrel or two / As we poison the pigeons, / It just takes a smidgeon, / To poison a pigeon in the park, / Tra la la, tra la la.”)

THE POINT about Kafka (who was of course a subject of Austria-Hungary) was that his humour pursued a remorseless logic, which is the logic of the Beamterschaft (officialdom). It originates with Joseph II (sole ruler from 1780 to 1790, formerly co-ruler with Maria Theresa), the Enlightened Emperor who founded the basis of modern administration but annoyed almost everybody while doing so and had to rescind most of his ordinances on his deathbed. Yet Joseph was a misunderstood man who wanted to make his administration more efficient and user-friendly—which was why he travelled incognito (more or less) round Europe to see how other countries managed (or mismanaged) their governance.

In Vienna Emperor Joseph has, somewhat ridiculously, gone down in history for trying to introduce re-usable coffins (Klappsarge—the body was emptied into the grave by opening two flaps underneath). This indeed saved on wood and costs (hence Sparsage as the authorities insisted on calling them), but the Viennese considered them impious and undignified and rebelled against them.

Later, the great if also melancholic, comedian Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–1862) proved the Viennese were in the right, because of the danger of living burial (a risk then more believable than today). This, he said in his will, was why he should be buried in the Währinger Cemetery, for which a device had been invented that enabled the unfortunate victim of a mistaken burial to alert rescuers. For this you would obviously need a coffin fixed with a rope to pull on the bell that rang in the sexton’s office.

At present the Austrians are contemplating a different kind of living burial, namely that of their newly deposed and youthful Chancellor. It could be said of Sebastian Kurz, as was once said of a suddenly prominent television personality in the UK, that he rose without trace. He was plucked from the Volkspartei youth movement to be State Secretary for the Integration of Migrants in 2011 and within two years had become Foreign Minister. He became Chancellor at the age of thirty-one in 2017, having achieved by Austrian standards a landslide election victory for the Volkspartei (ÖVP), on which he had, as it were, pulled a Trump by standing as “Liste Kurz—ÖVP”

Perhaps fatally for him, Kurz was feted as a political Wunderkind (or indeed Wunderwuzzi, the delightful Austrian word for Whizz Kid). At the annual self-lovefest of the world’s greatest carbon-emitters held at Davos, a German politician was ecstatic about the youthful Austrian Foreign Minister: “I wish we had him to come and sort out German politics,” he gushed. Adding after a moment’s thought: “But unfortunately we had a bad experience with an Austrian.” Such unbridled enthusiasm was not necessarily shared by the old lags of the political and intellectual establishment in Austria, including those in what was nominally his own party.

The story of Icarus could have been invented for Sebastian Kurz. He outshone his colleagues because he flew near the sun—which thereby reflected him more brightly, but also melted his wings. He was too young, too full of himself, and worse, he was a conservative populist (a “public relations Chancellor” as my neighbour sniffed). Quietly at first, his nemesis was being prepared and culminated in one of those Byzantine and near-interminable political and legal processes at which the Austrian establishment excels.

In order to understand the full charm and sophistication of this, however, a brief journey round the idiosyncrasies of Austrian democracy is required. It should be said at the outset that Austria is very prosperous, very democratic and (despite the efforts of the Austrian equivalent of the BBC to make it Left-liberal and “woke”) very conservative. There are nine Bundesländer (federal provinces) and six of them draw their governors (Landeshauptmänner) from the conservatives (the Österreichische Volkspartei—ÖVP). The three Länder controlled by the Socialists (SPÖ) are Burgenland, which from time to time changes hands, Carinthia, which was formerly a stronghold of the far-Right Freedom Party (FPÖ) under the “charismatic” Jörg Haider, and Vienna, which the Socialists have won in every free election since Austria became a Republic.

This ought to give conservatives a built-in electoral advantage and indeed, if you add in the Freedom Party’s votes, conservatives mostly have a reliable plurality in Austria—which is to say they would have if the FPÖ were a reliable party, instead of one that periodically explodes or implodes. But there is another problem, which is that the Volkspartei’s local bigwigs are very successful and diligent in weakening the leader of the party at the federal level in order to preserve or enhance their own power.

Indeed, as soon as a new leader is appointed (often nowadays some rather colourless figure whom no one particularly objects to), one or more of the ÖVP’s Landeshauptmänner begins industriously digging his grave (so far at federal level the ÖVP has not been so incautious as to elect a female leader). Sebastian Kurz set out to change the imbalance of power, partly by using his personal charisma with the electorate, and partly by placing reliable allies in the apparat. Very likely he had just as many enemies in his own party as he had in the Left-leaning establishment. The “kleinen Kaiser” (and one Kaiserin) of the Länder do not take kindly to being ignored.

The fall of Icarus began with an indirect strategy, namely the entrapment (“Ibizagate”) of the leader of the ÖVP’s coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ). This involved a compromising video made on the Spanish island of Ibiza that surfaced in the German press in 2019, though made three years earlier. It showed a deal being offered by someone impersonating the niece of a Russian oligarch. Buying up the mass circulation Kronen Zeitung, a very popular Austrian daily newspaper (thus ensuring favourable coverage for the FPÖ before the election of 2017) was one idea and there could be other useful bungs from anonymous donors. In return the oligarch would be in line for government contracts. A well-refreshed Strache appeared to go for this in the extensively and professionally edited hours-long video (although much later another extract from it surfaced which appeared to show him rejecting the deal and his colleague saying they would not do anything illegal).

Strache, however, was already toast and resigned as Vice-Chancellor, whereat Kurz prevented the Interior Minister, who was also from the Freedom Party, from conducting the necessary investigation on the grounds that he would possibly end up investigating himself, like Richard Nixon, with similarly unreliable results. This move by Kurz earned him the undying enmity of the said (now ex-) minister, who is the sort of politician who makes Machiavelli look like a rank amateur. He has since been out in the streets with the anti-vax mass demonstrations against the government. Subsequently the ÖVP/FPÖ coalition was dissolved and a caretaker government ruled for a few months before new elections.

There was something decidedly odd about all this—the obvious professionalism of the scam, the lengthy planning and expense it would have required, the difficulty the press seemed to have in tracking down the perpetrators, and eventually the somewhat fishy but convenient claim by an Iranian living in Vienna that he had been paid 600,000 euros as facilitator. By whom, then? The veteran German CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble said the squeeze bore the hallmark of a “Kompromat” organised by a government intelligence agency. He was not alone in this view, and some pointed the finger at Austria’s own intelligence agency. The agency had recently been the target of some murky Razzie (police raids) in respect of which the man on the Viennese tram could have been forgiven some confusion as to who was investigating whom and why. After all, it is not every day that the Minister of the Interior (one Herbert Kickl, as it happens!) uses the traffic police to stage raids on his own intelligence community. “Curiouser and curiouser” as Alice memorably said in Wonderland—but then, she had never visited Austria.

Strache was later convicted of corruption arising from donor details that emerged in the video and has other charges pending. The caravan had however moved on. Kurz resoundingly won re-election in 2020 and formed a government with the Greens; but by mid-2021 the jackals were circling him as well. The first allegations concerned perjury before a parliamentary committee investigating Ibizagate. For the following six months he was subjected to massive “lawfare” in which personal emails going back years were fished up and he faced interrogation for hours before a parliamentary committee as its members strove to find something—anything—incriminating.

Eventually it was claimed that in the past he had probably used taxpayers’ money improperly and paid for fake opinion polls to bolster his political prospects. Or he had let others do that for him. Or at least he had known about it. His parliamentary immunity was lifted so that he could be prosecuted, but at the time of writing the public prosecutor has still not formally laid any charges against him, though allegations are regularly leaked. He resigned as Chancellor, and from politics, and went off to work as a strategist for the US billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

FOR a reliably left-wing take on all this, the Politico website will give you all you need. If you were at all uncertain, there is the dog-whistle reminder for liberals that Kurz and Viktor Orbán in Hungary are friends—what more evidence of guilt could be needed? However, like most political scandals, wrote Politico itself in May 2021,

the web of accusation and suspicion swirling around Kurz and his inner circle is complicated; distinguishing fact from supposition can be difficult. It’s not even clear whether that ultimate truism of political scandal—the cover-up is worse than the crime—applies here, in part because the alleged cover-up has been comically inept.

Kafka meets operetta.

The press and Austrian Broadcasting (ORF) are in full cry against what is depicted as the “System Kurz”. First the confidential negotiations between Kurz and possible coalition partners were leaked and deplored, as if such negotiations constituted some disgraceful behaviour that had never happened before. Thereafter a diligent search was made of appointments not in the gift of the government but where the latter had appeared to interfere with what should be an open tender. Again the implication was that this was some speciality of Kurz and Co.

But is this true? In reality Austria has always operated what is delicately known as “Parteibuch Politik”, whereby power and position (and handsome pensions) were shared out between the two major parties. Take, for example, the Bundesbahn (ÖBB) which is known as a Socialist fiefdom (the last Socialist Chancellor, Christian Kern, had only recently been head of it before rising to the top political job). I recall sharing a hospital room with a rather grumpy middle manager from the ÖBB whose opinions seemed to dovetail in every particular with the program of the Freedom Party. At one point however, he told me candidly that he was a Socialist supporter—“otherwise one can’t get on in the ÖBB”.

Allegedly there are professions such as teacher where it is prudent to have two Partei Bücher—just in case. One of Kurz’s alleged misdemeanours is that he interfered in the appointment of a new head of the State Holding Company (ÖBAG, later part-privatised ÖBIB). Apart from the fact that one might expect a government to take an interest in how state investment is managed, the idea that nobody ever sought such influence in Austria is bizarre. In fact the Chairman of its board elected in 2014 was already quite controversial for his association with a Russian oligarch and he had made his main career with the concern founded by the Socialist-supporting entrepreneur Frank Stronach.

The fact is that Kurz was a disrupter of a cosy, convenient and consensual political world. He had, like Trump, effected an internal coup on the lacklustre conservatives by appealing directly to the populace over the party’s head. He had, for instance, promised to get a grip on immigration (at 19 per cent of the population with “Migrationshintergrund”, Austria is only a point behind Sweden, which now has serious problems; but Austria has been more successful with integration, not least due to measures suggested or taken by Kurz). Controversially (and like the British government under Cameron), Kurz also ended the system whereby child support of migrant workers whose children were not being brought up in Austria was paid at the same rate as for Austria (even the Socialists admitted the system was being abused).

The Kurz program was certainly conservative—inter alia income support for the family, tax reductions and accompanying reductions in government expenditure, far stronger alertness to Muslim extremism (mostly salafism in Austria) and rationalisation of bureaucracy. Under him Austria was firmly with the so-called frugal four (later five with Finland) which resisted the EU/ECB printing money for Covid compensation and then throwing it at a country like Italy without demanding to see how it would be spent. The affected lobbies have reacted with the usual shroud-waving, including the claim that press freedom is endangered and even that Kurz tried to fix the judiciary. Yet, if all this were true, how is it that the press still presents a daily deluge of allegations and the Chancellor has been hauled before a criminal investigation by prosecutors lasting five hours? As Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, “You celebrate the power of the press—do you never dread its tyranny?”

One result of all this has been renewed discussion over the famous (notorious?) Amtsgeheimnis, which binds civil servants to a code of confidentiality which in theory could land them in prison if not complied with. Critics say this is a relic of imperial times, but in fact it was incorporated into the Constitution in 1925. It was actually designed to prevent corruption (through selective leaking and blackmail), but of course it is now claimed that it is used to cover up corruption. The rights and wrongs of this can fill many pages of legal journals, but the current demand in the media is that Austria should pass a Freedom of Information Act (after all, Albania has one). A promise to do this, or at least to think about it, has appeared previously in party manifestoes but mysteriously runs into the sand after elections. You will not be surprised to hear that the Länder are not at all keen on it. Tony Blair passed such an Act in the UK and later was heard to lament that it was the stupidest thing he had done.

At any rate the present political and legal campaign has achieved the desired end: Mistah Kurz—he dead. As my Viennese friend put it: “He flew too close to the sun.” This is not an extravagant characterisation of what happened to the political genius dubbed so recently as “the young Metternich” or the embodiment of “progress, self-confidence, dynamism, elegance, and determination”. In Auden’s marvellous poem, Icarus plunges to oblivion in the sea, unremarked by the world. Kurz seems to have vanished from the scene almost as quickly. As a Socialist Chancellor once remarked, “Everybody is in favour of reform in Austria—as long as everything stays the same.”

Nicholas T. Parsons is a freelance author, translator and editor who lives in Vienna. He contributed the article “Sovereignty and the European Union” in the June 2021 issue