Tales from the Imperial City

Tales From the Imperial City Gitta Honegger We land in Vienna in late afternoon. Rush hour, one would assume. But the airport is deserted. An eerie silence fills the halls. Even the footsteps of arriving passengers seem muted. A few soldiers with machine guns lean against the walls along the route to the customs officers, expressionless men in sparkling glass booths. There is a feeling of having arrived after the catastrophe. I am trying hard not to read things into that moment. This is my hometown. Paranoia has become a reflex reaction, almost as clich6d and "typically Viennese" as waltzes, schnitzel, and schlag once used to be. "So, how's Waldheim," friends in America have been greeting me lately. At a theatre party last spring I casually mentioned that I was Austrian. "I wouldn't emphasize that these days," Peter Zeisler, director of TCG, commented with his unreadable deadpan face. It was meant as a joke (we all know from another Viennese what jokes really tell us). But it was the next discovery that kept haunting me: Peter's family background was Austrian. The distance that separates his Austrian biography from mine is defined by the silence that I experienced in Vienna ever since I can remember. Apparently it was the "Waldheim experience" that finally broke the silence. I needed to find out for myself. I hadn't been back "home" (?) in quite a while. I needed to take my own reading of the city I had been running away from for most of my adult life. I would start from where I had left off twenty years ago: theatre. I wanted to see how the Viennese theatre responded to the present situation. This was, after all, also the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, Austria's annexation into Hitler's German Reich in March 1938. 45 There have been some radical changes in the profile of the Vienna theatre during the past two years. George Tabori had taken over a fringe theatre and renamed it Der Kreis (The Circle). With his politically and aesthetically provocative productions he became, within the shortest time, the most admired , most discussed, director in the city. At the age of seventy-four, the Hungarian-born director, translator and playwright who had worked for many years in the U.S., found himself suddenly celebrated by the German press as Europe's "youngest director." At about the same time the Republic of Austria invited German director Claus Peymann to assume the leadership of Vienna's most venerable theatre institution: the Burgtheater. As Austria's National Theatre it is a wholly government-subsidized organization whose artistic directorship falls directly under government authority. Fifty-one years old, Claus Peymann is, next to Peter Stein, the most notable director in the Germanlanguage theatre. Equally known for his dazzling imagination and penchant for political confrontations,,he first came to prominence as artistic director of the Stuttgart Theatre. After five years of triumph as a director he was fired by the city fathers for raising money to help pay the dental bills of the Baader-Meinhof group. He took his staff and company to Bochum and from there with a core-group of sixty to Vienna. This meant that sixty members of the Burgtheater had to leave to make room for the incoming team. Actors in the "Burg" ensemble couldn't be fired after ten years of employment, a long-established, sacred rule Peymann had to change to begin to accomplish some of his reforms. Peymann's dramaturgs Hermann Beil and Uwe Jens Jensen, together with resident artistic director Alfred Kirchner, also serve as his co-directors. They have been working together for the past sixteen years. The transition didn't happen without resistance from within the company, the conservative press and population who felt threatened and/or outraged by this new "German invasion." The expression, of course, evokes ominous memories which have come particularly close to the surface in this anniversary year. But only in Waldheim's Vienna can the same people who feel themselves attacked as anti-Semitic use their sentiments against Peymann as cynical proof that they couldn't possibly be anti-Semitic since they are now also accused...