Due to the current situation, the team of the Burgtheater production is making an appeal. Ahead of the national elections, Mavie Hörbiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Birgit Minichmayr, Caroline Peters, Claus Philipp and Milo Rau demand: ‘Stop the FPÖ!’
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Against a return to the corporate state - for real democracy and true freedom!
An appeal by the team of the production Burgtheater: Mavie Hörbiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Birgit Minichmayr, Caroline Peters, Claus Philipp and Milo Rau
In May 2025, exactly eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Elfriede Jelinek's play Burgtheater, which has been barred in Austria for 45 years, will finally be performed - at Burgtheater itself! Directed by Milo Rau the production will star Mavie Hörbiger, Birgit Minichmayr and Caroline Peters. The play by the Nobel Prize winner, which resulted in Austria´s greatest theatre scandal when it premiered in Bonn in 1985, describes the shameful role played by the cultural and in particular the theatre scene during National Socialism and Fascism - before and after the war - whether out of indifference or complicity.
Not again, says the artistic team of Burgtheater, and addresses the public on this day, three weeks before the Austrian national elections.
From Hungary to Slovakia, radical right-wing parties are in government and are gradually abolishing civil liberties, freedom of the press and artistic freedom. The general director of Slovakia's national theatre has just been dismissed - by a minister who wants to replace ‘gender madness’ with ‘national culture’. The Vienna Festival voiced their protest in an open letter to Slovak Prime Minister Fico, which thousands of European citizens have signed to date.
However, what is happening in Slovakia this summer could become reality in Austria as soon as this autumn if the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) comes to power. The Freedom party and its ‘People's Chancellor’ are calling for an immediate stop to ‘compulsory state levies’ (i.e. subsidies) for ‘woke events’ such as the European Song Contest and the Vienna Festival - this is only one particularly absurd policy in an election programme that, titled ‘Fortress Austria’ allusion to Joseph Goebbels' ‘Fortress Europe’, calls for the transformation of the Republic of Austria into a kind of corporative state 2.0 with an authoritarian government and a radical nationalist ‘Austria first’ ideology.
The election programme, which focuses on cultural and ethnic homogeneity, leaves typical far-right parties such as the German AfD or the French Rassemblement National looking conservative. In over a hundred pages, the FPÖ openly discusses what their European partner parties hide in secret chat protocols: that ‘two genders’ should be enshrined in the constitution, that the minimum income should only be paid out to citizens, ‘remigration’ should be radically implemented and that a two-tier society should be established in general. In the event of an election victory, the FPÖ wants to ‘gain full power over the three essential elements - government, space and people.’ We say: this is rhetoric that could not be more anti-democratic and openly National Socialist!
But why disguise your intentions? The FPÖ has already achieved a majority in the EU elections, and all predictions for the Austrian national elections at the end of September forecast the same. However, it is not only this expectation that is a cause for concern, but also the indifference with which the art and culture scene remains silent - as if the madness of the election programme would not be implemented in the event of a victory on 29 September, as if an EU that has already been shot to pieces and is crumbling before our eyes might still survive this attack. It would not be the first time that we have deceived ourselves with false reason and arrogance about the true intentions of the right.
Let's not allow self-righteousness and indifference to turn - once again - into blind complicity! Because, as has already happened in Slovakia and Hungary, the FPÖ will do exactly what they say they will do in Austria: they will declare millions of people second-class citizens, expel them, smash the republican institutions, ‘homogenise’ a diverse artistic and cultural landscape. In short: to make democracy and a free society disappear.
We say: This far and no further! Not a single vote for the FPÖ!
The team of the production Burgtheater
Mavie Hörbiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Birgit Minichmayr, Caroline Peters, Claus Philipp and Milo Rau
