Those were the days when Georg Rösch von Geroldshausen described the town’s main source of income in 1558: “Swatz is all perckhwerck muater admittedly / Of that sych ayn really swarms.” The cow that is milked here is no longer the mountain, but the tourist.

And the mother of all mines, Schwaz in Tyrol, is today the home of playwright and actor Felix Mitterer, who is well known in Austria and who moved to North Tyrol from his adopted home of South Tyrol last year at the age of seventy-three.

Before that, he had spent a long time on the island of Ireland, which baited writers as a tax haven.

Time to retire on the home soil.

But the luck near the Inntalautobahn didn't last long.

The Tyrolean authorities asked the famous man - he had written television history in the 1990s with his "Piefke-Saga" - to name his income for 2019 and estimate that for the current year, so that he could be given the law in Tyrol enshrined tourism tax for entrepreneurs could unbutton.

The apartment has already been cancelled

Mitterer called in the provincial governor and the state minister for culture, and a smooth solution was found – since his income was earned outside of Tyrol, they wanted to exempt him from the tax.

But by then Mitterer's decision had already been made, the apartment was terminated.

Reason: No matter how high, he rejects the levy on principle.

It is not he who has to pay a fee, but tourism to him.

If you take into account how much the author has done to raise awareness of his homeland in the land of the Piefkes, you can understand that.

The TV film, which was broadcast in four parts between 1990 and 1993, makes fun of northern German summer visitors as well as the locals in the catering and hotel industry, neither side comes off really well.

Mitterer is currently working on a fifth part,

Mitterer is not the first to be bothered by the tourist tax, and of course a debate has now flared up calling for its abolition or consistent enforcement.

The author himself is already moving to other inner-Austrian countries in October.

The federal states of Upper and Lower Austria are being discussed, i.e. the home of all those original Viennese who come from the Reichraminger Hintergebirge, the Traungau or the Strudengau.

Literary biologists, a long-term observation is due: Does the Tyrolean Felix Mitterer succeed in releasing himself into the wild in a species-appropriate manner?