How do you solve a problem like the Fuhrer? 04.06.08 17:32
Current The Lebrecht Weekly
Home
Calendar
Back Issues
LSM Issues
LSV Issues
Features Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index]
WebNews
Newswire
Throat Doctor
Interviews
Concert
Reviews
CD Critics
Books Reviews How do you solve a problem like the
PDF Files
Links Fuhrer?
Audio
Midi By Norman Lebrecht / May 28, 2008
LSM
About LSM
LSM News
Distribution
In February 1945, as the Russians closed in on Berlin, Linz 2009
Advertising Adolf Hitler ordered his second-favourite architect, All information
Guest Book Hermann Giesler, to build a scale model of his home-town about the
Contact Us Linz and instal it in his bunker. European Capital
Site Search of Culture 2009
Web Search www.linz09.at
One of the last photographs of Hitler shows him sitting at
a low table, studying the Nibelungen Bridge he had
thrown across the Danube as a prelude to more grandiose
constructions. In his final will and testament, Hitler 15 Hotels in
bequeathed Linz his personal art collection. Linz, in Linz
Hitler’s fantasy, was going to be Europe’s capital of Book your hotel in
Linz online. Good
culture.
availability and
great rates!
Next year, that dream will be fulfilled. By some quirk of www.Booking.com/Linz
Brussels chicanery or a triple ironic bypass after a liquid
lunch, Linz has been chosen to succeed Liverpool as
Europe’s artistic hub for the year 2009. It’s a decision Unterkunft in
beyond satire, or reason. Linz
Hotels, Pensionen,
Even if there were cultural grounds for celebrating Linz – Ferienhäuser. Tolle
and there are some – someone on an EU salary should Auswahl, Super
surely have spotted that 2009 is the 70th anniversary of Preise.
www.limba.com
Hitler’s war and the 120th of his birth. No year with a 9 in
it is a good time to talk about the genius of Linz,
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/080528-NL-Fuhrer.html Seite 1 von 3
How do you solve a problem like the Fuhrer? 04.06.08 17:32
regardless of the passage of time. Linz Flights
Save time &
In Linz itself, there is no getting away from the H word. money! Low fares
The Nibelungen Bridge still spans the river and you can’t from dozens of
miss the town hall balcony from which the Fuhrer gave your favorite
his first mass rant on marching into Austria in March airlines.
1938. Cheap homes that he built for industrial workers in Linz.OneTime.com
the Nazi boom are still known as ‘Hitlerbauten’. Although
he was born in the outlying village of Braunau and there
are no plaques on any wall, Linz is Hitler’s town as Salzburg is Mozart’s and
Stratford Shakespeare’s.
Ever since it was named Culture Capital, I have been anxious to see how Linz
would handle the challenge – the more so since culture, for Hitler, was
contiguous with politics and race. For Linz to escape the stigma, it would have
to deconstruct and redefine the meaning of culture in a heterogenous society –
but how can that be done?
Last week, I found out. The first act of Linz09 will be a public exhibition on
‘Linz: the Führer’s Culture Capital,’ displaying Hitler’s blueprints and the art
he planned to hang in the biggest museum in Europe. Opening this September
and running for eight full months, the Hitler show will underline the stifling
mediocrity of Third Reich art, a process augmented by a comparative array of
four 1930s Austrian sculptors – Barlach, Kasper, Thorak and Wotruba.
‘The only way of dealing with Hitler is to be completely honest,’ says Linz09
artistic director Martin Heller, sounding as if he has asked himself the question
many times before. Heller, a Swiss post-modernist, noticed on arrival that there
was no public transport link between Linz and the nearby concentration camp
of Mauthhausen. ‘We are going to include the camp in the cultural programme
and put on a shuttle,’ he pledges. ‘The mayor is supportive. There is nothing
we cannot discuss.’ A disused web of tunnels beneath the town, wartime hiding
places and storage vaults, will be brought into the heart of the programme as a
metaphor for silenced memory.
Exposing the past, however, is not enough. Heller, who ran Zurich’s design
museum and the Swiss national Expo in 2002, brings to Linz09 the lexicon of
post-modern irony and the language of pop art. His advertising slogan is a
fried egg beside an inverted comma. Don’t ask for meaning: it has none. Heller
aims to fragment the perception of culture to the point where it loses any
political dimension.
‘At one point I said, “Let’s not even call it City of Culture,”’ he told me on the
eve of launch. ‘Let’s just say we want to be interesting. We’re not Salzburg or
Vienna. Linz is going to be different - it has to be.’
A key test of iconoclasm will be Anton Bruckner, the monumental symphonist
born locally in the village of Ansfelden and buried in the crypt of St Florian’s
monastery, which Hitler planned to convert into ‘Bruckner’s Bayreuth’. Second
only to Wagner in the Fuhrer’s musical loves, Bruckner was on the radio at all
moments of Nazi solemnity. Integrating Bruckner to Linz09 is almost as tricky
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/080528-NL-Fuhrer.html Seite 2 von 3
How do you solve a problem like the Fuhrer? 04.06.08 17:32
as neutralising Hitler.
Salzburg, in its 2006 Mozart year, staged the complete operas. Linz, instead of
performing 11 symphonies and sundry masses, has commissioned a synthetic
synopsis – all of Bruckner in an hour, or Bruckner’s greatest hits. The aim is
both laconic tribute and ironic commentary. Reduced to an hour, Bruckner will
either acquire a contemporary immediacy or implode in fits of public giggles.
It’s all a question of context.
Instead of imitating Liverpool’s showcase exhibit of the over-exposed Klimt,
Linz is raiding Austria’s national museums for an ad hoc show that may put a
devotional medieval woodcut beside a Paul Klee nude, suggesting a continuity
of culture that overrides transient epochs of faith and ideology.
Heller knows that this, too, will not rehabilitate Linz. Expanded by Hitler from
market town to heavy-industry hub, Linz remains predominantly blue-collar
and increasingly multicultural, with a visible Islamic minority. Rather than
impose monolithic notions of culture, Heller and his curators have solicited
public contributions.
More than 1,700 ideas flooded in and many form part of the programme –
organ tours, new bus routes, rooftop art. There are the obligatory new public
buildings – a new centre for Ars Electronica, a world leader in techno-art, and
an opera house by the London architect Terry Pawson – but the driving aim in
Linz 09 is to get away from the corsets of official culture and make space for
creative possibilities.
To be notified of the next Lebrecht article, please email mikevincent at scena
dot org
Ads by Google Linz Danube Linz Austria Linz Hotel Austria Map Art
Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index]
(c) La Scena Musicale 2001-2006
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/080528-NL-Fuhrer.html Seite 3 von 3