Recently I stood with my bike at the traffic light in front of the Volksgarten in Vienna, where I had admired the splendor of the roses, looked just as admiringly at the parliament, whose slumber is just coming to an end after a long renovation, and waited for the green to finally when a lady stopped next to me with her bike. I don’t always stick to red, I have to admit, but the ring is an insurmountable obstacle, even for passionate friends of minor misdemeanors like me. And because the two of us stood so peacefully next to each other in the evening light in this magical place between the town hall, Burgtheater and Hofburg, where Vienna always looks particularly stately and immaculate, I also admired the beautiful dress of the lady next to me.
We struck up a conversation – and have been since. Tina Zickler is a curator, she has already organized a number of successful festivals in the city, the most spectacular of which was probably “Memento Mori” last year – a cultural festival about death.
Now she’s upped the ante. And because, as the legendary Georg Kreisler knew, not only does death have to be a Viennese, but politics in Austria is also very vulnerable to damage, the new theme again fits in perfectly with the city and country: “Re:pair”, it says, the leitmotif is: “Are you still consuming, or are you already repairing?”
Apart from the fact that I ask myself whether, in addition to bicycles, lamps, clothes and equipment, as Zickler suggests, one can also sustainably train and improve the soul, karma, body and nature, the Repair Festival, the starts this weekend, really made me think. Wouldn’t that be the perfect opportunity to fix some things in Austrian politics as well? The citizenship law, the ORF law, the climate protection law? Or, one size smaller, the relationship between the ÖVP and the business and corruption prosecutor, the relationship between Pamela Rendi-Wagner and Hans Peter Doskozil?
One would like to wonder what is possible if the City of Vienna used its repair bonus for federal-state relations in matters of renewable energies. Or even just for a real reform of MA 35, the immigration authority. But stop dreaming. Life is not a festival of possibilities.
Instead, crisis and war, or rather crisis because of war, is everywhere you look. The paranoid dictator in the Kremlin is working on the destruction of an already highly imperfect world order, he throws away whatever possibilities of communication and ideal common ground there were, and the world can no longer keep up with the repairs. The Ukrainians are paying the highest price for this, but Putin is also driving the price up and up for the West. A film will be shown at the Re:pair Festival on October 24th, it’s called: “Tomorrow – the world is full of solutions”. At least that’s still true.
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