Of course there are friends of his, family members and acquaintances from the past. The evening in the Theater am Kirchplatz (TAK) in the Liechtenstein community of Schaan is a home game for Benjamin Quaderer. He grew up one village, but left the Principality of Liechtenstein with its eleven municipalities, which is trapped in the upper Rhine Valley between Austria and Switzerland, immediately after graduating from high school in 2008. An escape from the narrowness. “If you grow up in such a small state with a population that fits into half a football stadium, then that can’t be the world,” says Quaderer in the TAK foyer. “I had to go.”
Now he’s back again, having come as a celebrated author from Berlin, where he’s lived since 2014. With his debut “Forever the Alps”, the 32-year-old is considered a literary discovery in the German-speaking world. Now the world premiere as a play is pending in the TAK. The Berlin director Friederike Heller has distilled and staged a play from quotations from the book, which was written in diary form. It is a joint production of the small, ambitious stage in Schaan with the much larger State Theater in Mainz. For the latter, production may be routine. It is something special for the TAK. The piece finally shakes a traumatic experience for Liechtenstein, which was followed by the end of the principality as a hiding place and washing facility for dirty money. Despots like Bokassa and Mugabe, drug barons like Pablo Escobar or German party donation tricksters like Helmut Kohl’s CDU – they were all welcome customers in Liechtenstein for decades. Until Heinrich Kieber struck.
The Liechtensteiners are looking for Kieber with an international arrest warrant
It was on February 14, 2008, on the 63rd birthday of Liechtenstein Prince Hans-Adam II. And a few months before Quaderer left the country, when German investigators in Cologne picked up Deutsche Post boss Klaus Zumwinkel in front of the cameras. His data was on a CD that Kieber had given the Germans. He had worked in the fiduciary division of the Fürstenbank LGT and secretly copied the data of hundreds of foreign tax evaders and sold them to their countries of origin. Germany alone paid him 4.6 million euros for this. Kieber went into hiding with the help of various secret services such as the BND and a new identity; some suspect in Australia. The Liechtensteiners are still looking for him today with an international arrest warrant.
What if they got him? “It wouldn’t have turned out well for him in 2008 because there was a lot of aggression against him,” says Quaderer. “It wouldn’t matter today.” Indeed?
After all, history has not let go of the small country for 13 years. There is already a non-fiction book and a documentary about Kieber, which finally expanded his own view of things, on the Internet, on 650 pages. Title: “The Prince. The Thief. The Data”. Quaderer’s novel was published in 2020, now the play follows. In the book and on stage, Heinrich Kieber is called Johann Kaiser, otherwise there is quite a lot of overlap between literary fiction and reality. What novels and drama are definitely not: a Liechtenstein homeland play.
The stage emperor has all the traits that data thief Kieber is said to have: a restless narcissist, manic and unstable, eccentric and drunk with his supposed importance. A child from home, impostor and fraudster, who as a teenager steals the moped from his best friend and runs away with it, in order to first trick convent sisters in Spain, and then a rich family and again a best friend. After an episode as a hostage in an Argentine dungeon, he ends up back in Liechtenstein, where he steals the data and tries to blackmail the sovereign.
Johann Kaiser is a synonym for those who absolutely sit down. Motto Pippi Longstocking: I make the world as I like it.
(Photo: TAK)
But the protagonist in the novel and on the stage shines with a height of fall that goes beyond the figure of Kieber and little Liechtenstein. The Johann Kaiser, whom the actresses Carlotta Hein and Andrea Quirbach, as well as their colleagues Thomas Beck and Julian von Hansemann take turns on stage, is a type of person that is felt to be appearing more and more frequently. Such people dominate bubbles in social networks, you can find them in large numbers among Reich citizens and lateral thinkers: infallible with their own world and truth, their own rules, which they propagate until others fall for them. Johann Kaiser is a synonym for those who absolutely sit down. Motto Pippi Longstocking: I make the world as I like it.
That such a self-proclaimed chosen one brought down one of the largest dirty and black money fortresses in the world is in itself grotesque irony. Where they were so sure of themselves in Liechtenstein that they let go of all caution. Kaiser’s real alter ego Kieber was entrusted with the digitization of customer data as a temporary worker at LGT. When he got the job, his uncle Guntram was amazed: “Even they can’t be that stupid to hire you.” Yes, they were. The fact that Kieber was able to copy customer data unmolested and uncontrolled shows where excessive self-confidence can lead, and the belief: One of us doesn’t do that, the others are always angry.
The fact that the Liechtenstein reforms have initiated gives them a kind of model student feeling
The betrayal led to international pressure that forced Liechtenstein to reform after 2008, to fight money laundering and to cooperate across borders on tax issues. Everything previously unthinkable. In a figurative sense, there are still undiscovered contaminated sites behind the brightly polished facades, especially those of the trust firms, which will explode as a scandal at some point. But many in the country see it like Benjamin Quaderer: “In the end, things went smoothly for the Liechtensteiners. And the fact that they have initiated reforms gives them a kind of model student feeling.”
This can also be felt at the world premiere of “Forever the Alps” at TAK. There are no embarrassed faces in the audience, but there is a lot of laughter at the mischievous staging. Even what a sacrilege, about Prince Hans-Adam II, inviolable for his subjects, who is caricatured on the stage as an arrogant and quick-tempered Absolute. Benjamin Quaderer says he could never have written his book in Liechtenstein. It took distance for that.
At the end of the premiere there is applause and shouts of bravo for minutes. Especially when the Ensemble brings Quaderer onto the stage. A few years ago he would have been treated here as a polluter. Now we are proud of him and his success. The scenery looks as if the evil spirits have been driven out of Liechtenstein for good. And after the premiere there will be champagne and cheese skewers for everyone in the TAK foyer.