Ladies and gentlemen.
For me, the opening of the Bregenz Festival is a wonderful opportunity every year to briefly become a little uncomfortable. It’s like the twelve-tone music of the festival speeches.
Thematically, this is not a great challenge, since almost everything is either exciting or frustrating at the moment.
Climate – irritating and frustrating.
Politics – irritating and frustrating.
The EU – irritating and frustrating.
Democracy – agitates and frustrates.
Even an asterisk or a colon – irritating and frustrating.
You have to ask yourself: Why is that?
Is Austria too tired of the climate to think regarding measures?
Too tired of conflict to talk regarding Ukraine?
Too tired of democracy to be enthusiastic regarding voting?
No,
Austria is not tired!
Because that’s not who we are.
On the contrary: democracy, peace, freedom, security, climate, our rights, our homeland and Europe – I know that these are fundamentally and expressly important to the majority!
So what is going on?
Maybe you, or we, are just “totally fed up” with the way we talk regarding it. The world we talk regarding publicly is very simple. It can be explained in a flash. It is unambiguous. Something is either black or white, big or small, up or down, good or bad.
There is nothing in between. In this world, you are “either-or”:
Either a climate terrorist or an air polluter.
Either angry citizen or do-gooder.
Either a conspiracy theorist or a sheeple.
Either friend or foe.
Open the drawer – put it in – close the drawer.
Practical!
But dangerous.
The “either-or” may be a welcome system of order,
but: It divides us.
It puts us at opposite poles and not only prevents us from working together, it often even prevents us from communicating sensibly.
Unfortunately, it has become a popular method to speak in contradictions. A real, differentiated conversation requires time and effort. But time is too short and effort is too tedious. And in the end there is only the truth here and the lie there. Ours here and the others there.
Social networks follow the logic of quick clicks, and the more excited and scandalous the headlines, the quicker they are clicked. Even traditional media are not immune to this. To stay in the game, people look less for facts and more for stories and sensations. And sensations are not complex. They are temptingly simple.
Many adopt this simple world of “either-or”, look for affiliations and label their drawers with “the media”, “the elites” or “the system”.
Ladies and gentlemen,
we have to be damn careful regarding what and why and wen we pigeonhole every day.
I ask them:
For example, what category do you put someone in if they harvest their own organic cucumbers and eat pork schnitzel with them?
Or a person who cycles to work every day and drives through Italy in an old VW bus in the summer?
What regarding someone called Mustafa who speaks in a harsh Tyrolean dialect?
Or someone who is at the front of every tent festival, but then strictly orders the veggie menu in the canteen?
What regarding someone who is a firm believer in wearing leather trousers – and is just as committed to gender equality?
Or someone who cares regarding borders and is committed to helping the local refugee family?
It’s not just black and white, is it?
Not everyone who rides a bike is an eco-fanatic.
And not everyone who eats a schnitzel is a climate sinner.
We have always done well when everything was a little more relaxed. If at the end of the day but everyone might be who they are. Contradictions included.
I’ve been asking myself lately: Where has our serenity gone?
We humans are not “either–or”! We are everything in between.
Unfortunately, there are forces that do not use our wonderful Austrian contradictions as a bridge to one another, but as an instrument of division.
They don’t see nuances, they only see differences.
They don’t see what they have in common, they see what divides them.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I promised you twelve-tone music at the beginning. Well:
Division. Is. Not. a. Law. of. Nature.
It also happens because so many people are playing along.
So let’s not play along. Don’t play along. We all have a say in whether the atmosphere between us is trusting or toxic.
And division is a poison.
It poisons what we think, it poisons how we talk to each other. And it poisons what we do: looking for someone to blame. Despising and mocking those who think differently. Devaluing the other person. And in the end: Violence. Like on Saturday in the USA. may no room.
Contempt is not an election manifesto. And hatred is not a solution to our problems.
We in Austria in particular know where it can lead when we classify, categorize and marginalize people.
So don’t let yourself be divided, categorized and marginalized.
And if possible, take them all out of the drawers you have put them in. So that we can talk to each other normally once more – regarding climate, politics, democracy.
Who knows – in the end it might turn out that there is more that unites us than divides us.
So. Who has now discovered a taste for twelve-tone music? I can only recommend it to you.
I wish you a wonderful festival, which I now declare open.
