People
Impresario and soul gardener: André Heller turns 75
The Austrian artist André Heller turns 75. Photo: Christian Bruna/EPA/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The Viennese all-round artist is known, among other things, for exotic circus shows and the slogan of the German soccer World Cup in 2006. Today he is interested in intimate moments instead of big illusions.
The Austrian singer, writer, documentary filmmaker and show producer André Heller is in demand as a garden artist these days.
He has offers to design parks all over the world, he says in an interview that will be broadcast on March 22 on the Austrian broadcaster ORF on his 75th birthday. Rich people no longer wanted only to increase money, but also to leave places where “their grandchildren can walk and say: This is healing, this is inspiration, this is trembling, this is beauty, this is fragrance, this is coolness, this is Accuracy, that’s diversity.”
Heller has not only lived in Vienna for several years, but also in Morocco. There he designed a park with palm trees, orchids, papyrus plants and sculptures on the outskirts of Marrakech at the foot of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains. Heller had previously operated and sold a similarly lavish facility on Lake Garda. Other garden projects are underway, says Heller, without giving details. For the universal artist, his music, his circus projects, his shows with African and Chinese artists and his work with nature can all be summed up in one common denominator. “There are things that strengthen us, that encourage us and that make us more capable,” he says. The people who enter his world should be better off afterwards than before.
In the collective memory of Germany, however, Heller is not because of his green thumb, but because of the sentence “The world is a guest of friends”. Heller came up with the slogan for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The Austrian was commissioned to design the cultural program. Heller already used his creativity and his contacts during the German project presentation to the world association FIFA: the then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, supermodel Claudia Schiffer, tennis star Boris Becker and ex-national player Günter Netzer appeared together in Zurich as a silent “fingers crossed” for the German application on.
However, football is not actually one of André Heller’s many talents. He did not grow up on a sports field, but in a family of confectionery manufacturers in which culture and education were very important. His father, who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, fled Austria from the Nazis and continued to spend most of his time abroad after World War II. Little André suffered as a student in a Jesuit boarding school and saw in his father a tyrant marked by war and drugs. However, André’s independent creative spirit was not stifled by this, but strengthened: “I understood that I could no longer leave the essential decisions to my father and mother or holy fathers and mothers of God,” Heller wrote in his autobiographical story “How I learned, with me to be a child myself.”
Heller made his way: He worked for Austria’s first pop station on public radio, appeared as a singer-songwriter and founded the circus Roncalli with Bernhard Paul in the mid-1970s, with whom he soon fell out. Heller then developed into an impresario of artistically charged variety shows, fireworks and productions such as “Blessed Bodies” and “Afrika! Africa! », for which he brought Chinese and African artists to Europe.
“I’ve always fulfilled my dream of trying to be the best with the best of the best,” Heller said recently at a concert with Austrian musicians that was recorded by ORF in his apartment. He took this concept to extremes in 1987 when he created the avant-garde Luna Luna fairground in Hamburg: Artists from Salvador Dalí to Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat contributed the art, and Herbert von Karajan provided the music, writes Heller’s biographer Christian Seiler .
For years, Heller has also been increasingly involved in projects in which he is no longer the center of attention: house concerts, a children’s book and a series of intimate interviews – including the film “Im Toten Winkel” (2002), in which Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge has her say came. For his birthday, however, he is drawn to a big stage: the artist is in Berlin to work again on his production of Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier”, which will be heard again at the State Opera from March 20 after a break due to the pandemic it from his office in Vienna.