Europe’s cultural capital: Bad Ischl and the salt on the Empress’s skin

2024-01-24 12:46:51

“Here, every corner of the ground is touched and influenced by people.” Cultivated, somehow. That’s what someone who should know says, the young Valentin Salvator Markus Graf Habsburg, an IT specialist in his main job, but who, as the great-great-grandson of the Austrian imperial couple Franz Joseph and Elisabeth, was probably destined to take over the imperial villa in Bad Ischl, which was not nationalized in 1918, as their wedding present .

At the moment, however, a room music is playing in the precious salon next door and the guests are jostling in front of his ancestor’s 2,000th chamois, which was shot down, and in front of his declaration “To My Peoples”, written here in the corner study room, which triggered the First World War. For the first time, the family has made the noble property accessible for a reception in advance of a very significant opening: Bad Ischl and 22 other communities are – together with Estonia’s Tartu and Norway’s Bodø – European Capital of Culture 2024.

European cultural region actually. A first in the almost 40-year history of the idea to make European cultural values ​​visible and promote it, initiated in 1985 by the then Greek Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri. They – it’s a ski race in Kitzbühel, everyone is looking at the downhill race on the Streif – but they don’t get a lot of attention in Austria.

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Nevertheless, the Salzkammergut is a particularly good choice not only because of its beauty, but also because of its history. 7000 years of industry, trade, culture. Cosmopolitanism in a tight spot. Overtourism in Hallstadt, which has long been duplicated in China. Old Nazis were in Bad Aussee not so long ago, very close to the legendary, never-found gold in Lake Toplitz. However, much older traces of humanity can be found in the Hallstadt salt mountain.

Salt – white gold – “white treasure,” says the mayor, it sounds like “white trash.” That’s why the economically valuable area of ​​high mountains, narrow valleys and lovely lakes came into private ownership of the Habsburgs early on. They boiled the brine in an early industrial way and earned a third of their income with it: in the Kammergut, Salzkammergut, organized from Gmunden. The Saline Austria in Ebensee was state-owned until 1998.

Almost 200 years ago, the strictly Catholic Erzhaus also stimulated tourism and summer holidays in the Protestant region: on the advice of her personal physician Franz de Paula Augustin Wirer, later ennobled as a Knight of Rettenbach, Archduchess Sophie came to Ischl to cure herself after five miscarriages. Three “Salt Princes”, including the much-needed heir Franz Joseph, were the quick successor and – thanks to the subsequent imperial stays every summer – the region’s tourism wealth until long after the Second World War. And today again in magical places of now fashionable deceleration, regionality and sustainability.

Sprinkle salt into each other’s soup

The tourism associations quickly got their feet together in anticipation when Austria – after Graz in 2003 and Linz in 2009 – was once again awarded the title of Capital of Culture for 2024. But then you first had to come to an agreement and bring together the interests of each group and many initiatives.

Everyone sprinkled a lot of salt into each other’s soup. Soon the Salzburg part of the three-country region with Fuschl, St. Gilgen and St. Wolfgang was no longer interested. In the end, 23 often SPÖ-dominated towns in the ÖVP-governed federal states of Upper Austria and Styria came together with initiatives and programs, from the 900-inhabitant community of Steinbach am Attersee (where Mahler, Klimt and Friedrich Gulda stayed) to the city that took over the leadership Bad Ischl with 14,000 residents.

This is where the emperors drank: The drinking hall of Bad Ischl

Quelle: picture alliance/Zoonar

One has a little leadership experience in the still operetta kuk idyll between Traun and Ischl, Katrin, Jainzen and Siriuskogel: where the Danube Monarchy was ruled from for 83 summers, from June to September; where the most important heads of the entertainment industry promenaded on the Esplanade in the interwar years, before most of them emigrated or were deported to Auschwitz after 1938; From where the Zauner confectionery, which has been in its seventh generation since 1821 and employs at least 140 people, sends its Zaunerstollen, Ischler tarts, Lehár slices, Stolz-Herzerl and, more recently, European cakes (with oranges and salted caramel) all over the world .

Nevertheless, the first artistic director was lost in 2021. Enter Elisabeth Schweeger (70), as brash as she is sharp, as clever as she is brutal, as tame as she is sandpaper-charming, tanned in the cultural administration of Vienna, Linz, Munich, Venice, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hanover and Ludwigsburg like hardly any other Austrian. She got to work quickly, sorted things in and out, stood up against small-minded local politics and nostalgic postcard idylls. Her motto was “Culture salts Europe” and ensured that in around 300 projects out of 900, not only tradition and the future, but also today, including feminism and queerness, get their due.

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Elisabeth Schweeger doesn’t have a lot of money, but she does have an enormous sense of mission. 30 million euros have to be paid; for Graz there were still 60. In the empty Ischler Bahnofsbeisl, a young, wild restaurateur is organizing a pop-up “tavern laboratory”. But few things are as sustainable as studios in an old school next to the proud craft house as a presentation location for the entire region in Bad Goisern. Where they not only sell the famous Goiserer hiking boots, but also think about the further development of traditional shapes and patterns in a very practical way with a turner from France and a fabric designer from the USA.

After all, the Old Brewhouse in Ischl, which has been empty for years and is now being lovingly decorated by an international artist group with drizzled stones, salty rain showers and powder labyrinths, will in future become a place of culture. Likewise the damaged Lehár Theater, which is no longer even suitable as a cinema, where George Antheil and Fernand Léger’s “Ballet mechanique” flickers across a small screen as a surreal film while fully automatic pianos, drums, sirens and propellers play more than a million notes in 20 minutes spit.

View from the Wildenstein castle ruins to Bad Ischl

Quelle: picture alliance/imageBROKER

Simultaneity takes place in regional space. So on the morning after the successful opening party there will be a day-long morning pint in the parish hall from the D’Ischler traditional costume association with the mayor and MEP, with clarinet music, Dreig’sang, Danzl trio and Schuhplattler, while in the former imperial stables there will be an intellectual hangover breakfast as the world salon “Europe im Umbruch” is invited to Kolatschen and Großes Braunen with Herfried Münkler; The state governor sits there, as does the Habsburg count and the former Salzburg festival president.

Elisabeth Schweeger never tires of conjuring up the future viability of these mountains, valleys and 76 lakes up to 200 meters deep in winter, especially if she is female. And so at the opening there is the town clerk Mieze Medusa among the Ischl pillory shooters, Sofia Gubaidulina on the Bruckner organ and the naked new folk dancers Sons of Sissy. Even the tour guide is actually from Guatemala, and at the ornate, beautiful fountain-yellow post office, the following is cross-embroidered in giant letters on a brochure: “As long as it stays, because it’s so woa, I’m a feminist.”

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On the large open-air stage in front of the Kurhaus, Schweeger really lets it rip. The local hero Hubert von Goisern, who has long been a world music musician, sends a yodel around the globe as a gentle, primal scream, accompanied by 23 “Zamgdiced” brass players from 23 communities with more than 1000 participants. Conchita Wurst, also a native here, appears as a non-binary revenant of Empress Sisi (also 40 Sommer Ischlerin) and, after strange art pop, specifically asks her audience to think of “a little bit of humanity” when voting.

And then there is the Atterseer Doris Uhlich with her provocative powder dance – completely naked – as a bird-wild sweep of salt birds, light people and paper costume parades. Their troupe of people of color and wheelchair users repeat this again – at five degrees below zero – to Vivaldi’s “Winter”. 5,000 people from Ischl (10,000 more celebrating in the streets) have something to see and think about. Meanwhile, in the theater hall behind, operetta is still getting its due: with Barrie Kosky’s Berlin reloaded version of Oscar Straus’ “A woman who knows what she wants” for the turbo players Dagmar Manzel and Max Hopp.

Elisabeth Schweeger, locally grounded through various summers with her St. Gilgen grandmother, who from April onwards lets the Japanese Chiharu Shiota weave her fabric threads in the Ebensee concentration camp memorial tunnel, also has Ai Weiwei on board and still on August 18th, 108 years after his Death, who of course celebrates the emperor’s birthday in Ischl, knows above all in view of an artistically salted swimming sauna stack in Lake Traunsee in front of Orth Castle: “Whatever you do, the beauty of the Salzkammergut is simply stronger.”