Chronicle of a Country Going Off the Rails

»History always repeats itself twice, right? The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In Austria, it’s only the farce that gets repeated, and at some point it let its mask fall and has become gruesome grimace, a grotesquerie.« In autumn of 2024, Austria will elect a new National Council, and the election campaign has been underway for some time.

And Thomas Köck has been keeping a log of the ongoing derailment of the political discourse. Knives are being sharpened at election rallies and journalists are being grabbed in headlocks right in front of TV cameras, while Austrian right-wing activists are giving speeches about mass deportations in Germany and collecting donations from bourgeois circles. Köck can hardly keep up with this (linguistic) spiral. But he doesn't document the events: by drawing on questions of class, origin, and economics, he tries to understand how Austria was able to become the prototype of right-wing subject formation in Europe. The result is a furious, sometimes ironic and biting intervention into the political debate in an election year in which Herbert Kickl could become Austria’s first far-right chancellor since 1945.

»With analytical acumen and biting irony, Köck comments upon the daily flood of verbal attacks on democracy and the incessant linguistic transgressions.« ORF