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"Berlin of the Mountains": Bad Gastein
Photo: 8020 / iStockphoto / Getty Images
The party is over, the DJ is in a coma.
Bad Regina was once the hippest party metropolis in the eastern Alps, and the pleasure-seekers came in coaches and sports cars from all over the world.
But the party people moved on.
Only a small bunch of the original 4,000 inhabitants is left behind, and they are now sitting on the debts that were incurred to upgrade the town to an amusement park.
One of them is the organizer Othmar, who once managed the "Kraken", a cave-like discotheque that was built into the grotto of a mountain.
The club operator now mainly takes care of the British DJ Alpha X, whom he once had flown in from Manchester and who has been vegetating unconscious since his last intoxication.
In order to give the nursing case the feeling of not being alone, Othmar pounds it with viscous rave music and also uses the flat-rate nursing care fee.
There is nothing else to do and to earn.
Where people wait to die
Because Bad Regina is a ghost town, a place of agony, in which people wait to die while they pounce with conspiracy theories on who is to blame for their misery.
The writer and series creator David Schalko has repeatedly illuminated the darker sides of his homeland and created places that reflect the Austrian soul in all its self-pity and resentment.
In television productions such as »Brauschlag«, »Altes Geld« or, most recently, in the new series of Fritz Lang's film classic »M - A City Seeks a Murderer«, Schalko took up populism, racism and fixation on the past in all Alpine republic forms in a hilarious manner.
The real Bad Gastein is the template for the fictional location Bad Regina in the novel of the same name.
For his grotesquely comical 400-page panorama, Schalko has adopted central parts of the topography of the place built into a deep valley in the Salzburg region;
Striking buildings such as the brutalist congress center from the 1970s or the Grand Hotel de l'Europe, built at the turn of the last century, play an important role.
The Grand Hotel achieved worldwide fame because Wes Anderson was inspired by the picturesque, weathered late-historic building for his art house movie hit "Grand Budapest Hotel".
This fact also ensured that Bad Gastein is now a Mecca for hipsters from all over the world.
The place is celebrated as the “Berlin of the Mountains” because craft schnapps shops in the Neukölln look stand next to rustic beer bars.
The aim is to attract city dwellers who are young enough to value furniture with a mid-century look and at the same time have enough money to be able to afford boutique hotels with yoga courses and a spa area.
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View of Bad Gastein:
Frenzied commerce, creeping decline
Photo: Gastein Tourismus GmbH
Frantic commerce and creeping decline not only go hand in hand in Bad Gastein, they are mutually dependent.
Investors buy large parts of the town, but many houses are empty and look neglected.
The solvent customers of the luxury hotels love the broken flair through which they can stroll during the wellness weekend.
Lost space of luxury tourism
In Schalko's Roman town, the tourist boom is long over.
The architectural gems of Bad Regina have fallen into disrepair;
In the final attempts to acquire a few more guests, the focus is on ruin tourism and a sarcastic display of self-hatred.
Evenings are organized in an après-ski hut where texts by the great Austrian hater of Austria Thomas Bernhard are read.
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David Schalko
Photo: HERBERT PFARRHOFER / picture alliance / HERBERT PFARRHOFER / APA / picturedesk.com
But it doesn't help, Bad Regina looks like a lost space of alpine luxury tourism, the residents of which come up with ever steeper ideas to attract holiday guests to shore.
The place becomes a kind of open-air museum, in which the descendants of imperial nobility and new rights flirting with Nazi slogans exhibit and ironize themselves.
Take a look, Ösi is so fucked up.
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Title: Bad Regina: Roman
Editor: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Number of pages: 400
Author: Schalko, David
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Meanwhile, an ominous Chinese investor is gradually buying up all of the bankrupt restaurants and hostels in Bad Regina.
The local people whisper that he is definitely just a middleman for the "Arab clans" who are supposed to be spreading across the country.
Under the pretended openness to the world and the cynical game with one's own cultural heritage, deeply rooted racism and nationalism slumber.
A material that Schalko will also use in his next project.
He and Jan Böhmermann are working on a satirical film narration about the Ibiza video, in which the then FPÖ Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache offered parts of the Austrian press to a supposed Russian oligarch's niece under the influence of vodka-Red-Bull.
A country is being sold - that is also the theme of "Bad Regina".
At some point, the angry residents plan an attack on the Chinese investor.
But at the end of the novel, rich in twists and turns, the characters return to their own story and make it clear: Austrians don't need foreigners to sell out Austria, they can do that on their own.
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