Quasi. Helmut Qualtinger and Speculative Austrialism

My grandfather once got in a fight with Helmut Qualtinger. They were in the same Schanigarten in the Vienna Prater, equally piss drunk, and my grandfather furthermore pissed that Qualtinger had temporarily left Vienna to live in Hamburg. So he walked up to him and expressed his disdain. Nobody knows for sure what exactly happened and how it went down, but Qualtinger, or “Quasi” as he was known among friends, did move back to Vienna shortly afterwards, and made the following film about “The Future of Austria” in 1970.

In it, a young Thaddäus “Teddy” Podgorski – one of the most influential personalities in Austrian television – plays a reporter introducing the futurologists as “the prophets of the present”, and goes on to discuss cybernetic discourses, such as bionics, implants, climate modeling, a Mars and Venus landing, psychopharmacology, creation of life, etc. and postulates that he “fails to see why Austria shouldn’t also have a future”. He then goes on to interview several people on the streets of Vienna, all of them of course played by Qualtinger. Austria’s “optimistic and future-oriented being” is working along this roadmap (all in German):

If you google “austria future” or something similar today, you will not find anything like this. You will find the websites of the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, the right wing FPÖ splinter party Jörg Haider founded in 2005. You all know the last election results. It’s been 5 years this week that Haider auto-destructed in his aptly named Volkswagen Phaeton, by the way. My mother went to school with Haider in Bad Ischl. There are a couple of photographs of them in a school play of Nestroy’s Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus, and I let you guess who played the evil spirit Lumpazivagabundus. If you just watched the video above, you will have seen the Tyrolean man stating that the future of Austria lies in the mountains. He seems to be quite right. A friend of mine was in the Austrian military for a while. He told me that Austria’s main strategy in the event of an invasion from the East is the immediate surrender of eastern Austria, i.e. Vienna, Lower Austria, etc., and a complete retreat of all troops to the Alps.