Austria

Herbert Kickl is calling for a “healthy slap” for children. The adjective is a rhetorical trick. It is meant to turn violence into medicine. As if there were a sick slap and a healthy one. As if the boundary between discipline and abuse were a matter of dosage. It is not. Children can never help it. They do what parents, surroundings, and culture have taught them. Every “difficult” behaviour in a child is a message about the system in which it lives. ...

I was never good at staying in the lane. My mind constantly draws connections that are simply not foreseen within the lane. Theology and geopolitics. Music and spirituality. Austrian narrowness and global thinking. This was often read as unreliability. As if “staying focused” were a synonym for “seeing less far.” I grew up in a conservative culture. Austria maintains its forms. That has its value — continuity, depth, rootedness. But it also costs something: whoever thinks laterally pays for it. With isolation. With the feeling of never quite belonging. ...

Eleven texts on this site. Different topics, different lengths, different registers. Rebellion in France and Austria. Punk in Vorarlberg. Communication. Pigeonholing. Family history. Meaning and motivators. A Williamson quote. Only on looking back did I notice that all of them circle around the same word. Kowtowing. Where the Word Comes From January 2026, LKH Rankweil. I talk with people — patients, nurses, doctors, an AfD voter, people at various stages. I ask them: tell me honestly when I am being annoying. No performative nodding. No polite yes that means no. ...

This manifesto grew out of a conversation about a music box. Someone walks through Feldkirch at medium volume and wonders whether that is a good idea. From that question came three articles and one insight: Austria does not have a volume problem. It has a permission problem. I. The Diagnosis France has written into its constitution that resistance to oppression is a fundamental right. Austria has written into its culture that one should not stand out. ...

In France, resistance is not a disruptive factor. It is a civic duty. This attitude is not a whim, not a national cliché, not a matter of temperament — it is the result of a history that has consistently repeated itself over centuries. Whoever wants to understand why millions of French people take to the streets for weeks over a pension reform, while in Austria a letter to the editor is at best what gets written, must know this history. ...

Third part of the series “Rebellion as Civic Duty” The first two articles dealt with the big question: why does France rebel, and Austria does not? With Hofstede and Milgram, with police and media, with systems and structures. This article goes back to the beginning — to the moment when rebellion in Vorarlberg actually happened. Briefly. Loudly. And then it was over. Feldkirch, 1977: Two Weeks to the First Concert At the end of 1977, a few young people came together at the Graf Hugo youth center in Feldkirch. Galle, Franz, Slaughter, and Chy — four guys who had heard about punk in England through the German magazine Sounds and, yes, Bravo. The spark didn’t come from Vienna, not from Innsbruck, and certainly not from any Austrian institution. It came from a Zurich DIY fanzine called “No Fun,” published by Peter Wittwer and Martin Byland. Inside was a sentence from an English punk magazine: “Buy a guitar, learn a C, learn a D, learn an E and join a band.” ...

Follow-up to: “Rebellion as Civic Duty: What Austria Can Learn from France” The first article was about the streets — about the difference between a culture that understands protest as a civic duty and one that perceives it as a disturbance. But rebellion does not only take place on the streets. It takes place — perhaps even first — in the media. Or not at all. The question is not only: who takes to the streets? But: who tells the story? Who decides what the public learns? And who pays for it? ...

“My doctor says I have the most extreme version of psychiatric diagnoses.” That’s how I put it. Bipolar Type 1, with psychoses. I say it at the bar, over coffee, on a walk. Openly. Directly. For years. What happens next is almost always the same: people start talking. “My brother has that too.” “My aunt was in the clinic for years.” “In our family, no one talks about that.” Sometimes they want to unload. Sometimes they want to understand. Often both. ...