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There is something magical and morbid about this summer freshness in the Salzburg region.

The Belle Époque health resort with its hotel palace ruins on the edge of a spectacular gorge with a waterfall only fell into disrepair for decades - and has now been in trend for a few years, because city dwellers are discovering the place as a hipster backdrop: Carl Jakob Haupt blogged about here, the musician Friedrich Liechtenstein called his album “Bad Gastein”, and now the Viennese cult director and author David Schalko is also moving his new novel here.

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The connoisseur will quickly identify “Bad Regina” as Bad Gastein, but it is not a banal key novel, but a cheerful and evil parody.

To tourism, to Europe in times of immigration and to Austria, where the guests are called “Milk cows” and the village pavilions “Luziwuzi” - after Archduke Ludwig Viktor, the failed brother of Emperor Franz Joseph.

The guys who populate Schalko's ghost town are ready for the stage up to the bang.

A mayor whose only ambition is to correct the steadily declining population of his place on Wikipedia.

A head of the hydropower station, Peter, who had himself made Petra, but everyone calls Petzi before and after.

A star DJ who is now in need of care because he wanted to extend a nightly “trip” on the ski slope.

And the hotelier Moschinger.

He wants to revitalize Bad Regina as a "theme park", but the topic has not yet been determined.

Maybe Thomas Bernhard, whose original leather pants the Moschinger has just bought for 3000 euros on Ebay.

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As far as characters, cinematic storytelling and the stage-ready setting are concerned, Schalko's novel reads like a serene and evil blend of Wes Anderson's film “Grand Budapest Hotel”, Dürrenmatt's “Visit to the Old Lady” (money before morality) and Beckett's “Waiting for Godot”: Because what is the Chinese investor, to whom half the village has already sold its ruined property, really up to?

And why do you never see him?

Does he want to let the place deteriorate further or does he want to revive it - and if so, with whom?

David Schalko has mastered the fine art of the colportage novel.

David Schalko: Bad Regina.

Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 400 pages, € 24.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

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Source: Welt am Sonntag