Perlenrede

The so-called “pearl speech” was the speech Adolf Hitler gave on a makeshift wooden balcony on Vienna’s city hall on 9 April 1938. Held before thousands of Austrians, this speech was the climax of an “election campaign” that employed the most modern means in all available media and all of Vienna’s public spaces. Ultimately, in combination with repressive measures, it led to an overwhelming 99.6% approval of Austria’s “Anschluss” to the German Reich, which had actually already taken place about a month earlier. The Burgtheater, adorned with Nazi Party banners, formed the backdrop for this imperious fascist demonstration of power and Hitler’s succinct speech:

“This you can be sure of: In my eyes, this city is a pearl! […] And I am certain that tomorrow this city too will say ‘yes’ to this “Anschluss”. It is a historical and unalterable ‘yes’; for the only thing that must be and must remain is the German people, today and always.”

Eighty-six years later, the performance artist FLATZ recalls these events in a spectacular, ironic and self-reflective manner. With a display of banners on the Burgtheater’s façade and a mirror-image wooden balcony, an exhibition entitled HITLER, EIN HUNDELEBEN (Hitler, a dog’s life) in the foyer and a performance with Bibiana Beglau, the symbols and rhetoric of populist and fascist propaganda, national warmongering and one-dimensional worldviews and concepts of people are stripped of their appeal, exposed to ridicule and thus turned against themselves in these times of extreme right-wing tendencies in national, European and global politics.