At the end of last week, a bus drove through winter-dark Linz, and the destination display read “Vaccination Is Murder”.

"Is" capitalized.

Since a teenager filmed the mission-conscious wishbone, it didn't take long before the man, as they say in Austria, was "investigated" and dismissed without notice.

The Upper Austrian Transport Association distanced itself just as quickly as the bus company for which the employee had driven.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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The case throws a spotlight on the location of our south-eastern neighboring country, in which the federal states of Tyrol, Salzburg and Upper Austria are tenaciously asserting themselves as the home countries of the vaccine opponents.

In September, a party called "MFG - Austria People - Freedom - Fundamental Rights" moved into the Linz parliament with more than six percent of the vote and three mandates.

The seven-day incidences in Upper Austria are currently significantly higher than in neighboring Upper and Lower Bavaria, the East Tyrolean district of Lienz lies before Ried im Innkreis and Hallein, all three of which are beyond the two-thousand-meter mark.

Kitzloch-Bar, was there something?

Hotspots, then and now. It seems like an irony of history that the criminal investigations into Ischgl were stopped just this week. It all began in March 2020 in the Tyrolean ski resort. The chaotic evacuation of thousands of guests had helped spread the virus from the Kitzloch bar across Europe. The Innsbruck public prosecutor's office, supported by a commission of experts and the Ministry of Justice, found no evidence that would justify further prosecution. Civil law proceedings against the Republic of Austria are pending. The lifts in Ischgl will open next week.

Culture, on the other hand, remains closed, and people who work in culture feel left alone again.

Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schröder, who actually wanted to attract visitors and compensate losses with a Modigliani exhibition - with 2.5 million euros the most expensive show in this museum to date - turned to the government in a video.

He reckons with a loss of at least 2.5 million euros by the end of the year, now one has to rely on the help of the Republic of Austria.

Tourism is also returning to the depression, with Viennese hotels reporting eight percent of the usual occupancy.

The Germans, otherwise responsible for half of the bookings, stay away.

Yawning emptiness at Schwechat Airport.

Two great tremors

Since the beginning of this week, the whole country has been in lockdown and the feeling of having been whipped into an endless loop by politics is epidemic. Covid-19 is just the one virus that has the country under control. Virus number two is the system breakdown in short. What the theologian Ulrich HJ Körtner described in an essay for the Kleine Zeitung, published in Graz, as “the contamination of political culture by the corruption virus”, the philosopher Isolde Charim called “two tremors” in her opening speech for the Book of Vienna: one share with the other all over the world, the other belongs to Austria "exclusively: the hard impact of the so-called 'System Kurz' on the public".

According to Körtner, the opponents of the resigned Chancellor accuse him and his “Praetorians” of their “career-minded coldness”;

the counter-charge is that this charge is about hypocrisy and double morals - all parties are seduced in this way.

According to the theologian, this leads to the “unspoken admission that the willingness to corrupt is part of Austrian political culture”.

Who likes the Wasserkopf Wien?

In search of the historical roots of this political culture one ends up in the Danube Monarchy, on whose shrunken form today's Austria stands geographically and mentally.

The anti-Viennese affect, which, according to surveys, around half of the population cultivates, is gladly tried.

In fact, a third of the nine million people living in the greater Vienna area.

Just five other cities in the state jump the mark of one hundred thousand inhabitants: Graz, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt.