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PARTISAN REVIEW
was originally scheduled to open on the one-hundredth birthday of the
new building of the Burgtheater, a heavily symbolic date to mark the
importance and belated celebration of Bernhard, the enigmatic icono–
clast and perennial troublemaker of Austrian letters, as the most impor–
tant national
Dichter
at Vienna's historic national theater (originally
founded and headed by the Kaiser himself, it is over two hundred years
old). Previously, Peymann, in a lengthy interview in the prestigious Ger–
man weekly
Die Zeit,
attacked, in the manner of his favorite playwright
and friend, not only every taboo institution held high and dear in Aus–
tria, including Catholicism and Waldheim's presidency, but also the
Burgtheater and its company. He called its actors stupid and suggested
that the building be wrapped by Christo and burnt because it was so full
of shit. This led some company members to resign from the cast of
Heldenplatz,
and the opening had to be postponed. The fifty-two year–
old Peymann is German: a proud member of the '68 generation of
protesters, he has a long history of masterfully engineered public conflicts,
part of his
mise-en -scenes
connected to specific local conditions. (Even
some of his most supportive critics attribute his missionary zeal to an
enormous ego, a childish narcissism and a knack for self-promotion - all
qualities which, detractors would say, he shares with his preferred writer
and friend.) Forced out of Stuttgart after he had helped pay the dental
bills of the Baader-Meinhof group, he took his staff and company of
sixty-five or so to Bochum, and from there to Vienna. Most of his
company members are German. They replaced some of the ensemble of
the Burgtheater, and this created bad feelings among the company.
Austrians, of course, are well known for their general dislike of
foreigners. Ironically, the Peymann affair divided Austrians along the same
lines Waldheim did.
In
fact, it all but replaced the Waldheim debacle,
with Waldh eim supporters and most of the local press attacking
Peymann. According to some columnists, their animosity towards
Peymann, whose unparalleled artistic success so far was eyed by them with
jealous suspicion as a new "German invasion" (a particularly resonant
term in the year of commemoration), should have proven once and for
all that they couldn't possibly be Nazis after all.
The furor over the
Zeit
interview nearly cost Peymann his position
at the Burgtheater.
It
had hardly died down when passages from
Helden–
platz
were leaked to the press, notably the wholesale co ndemnation of
the nation as a stinking cesspit, the Catholic Church as a "worldwide
perfidy," with the President a cunning, hypocritical idiot
(Banause),
the
Chancellor a conniving broker of nations, all Viennese perpetual anti–
Semites, and all 6.5 million Austrians crippled, mad extras on a stage that
is the country, crying out for a director who would finally come and
push them all into the abyss.
