This year marks the 25th anniversary of the political performance work Bitte liebt Österreich [Please love Austria] by the late German theatre and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief, which took place during Wiener Festwochen in the year 2000. Over the course of one week, Schlingensief and his team staged a provocative reality TV-style performance where asylum seekers lived in a container and viewers could vote them „out“ of Austria, mirroring Big Brother. The project, set in the heart of Vienna, directly critiqued rising xenophobia and Austria’s right-wing politics, particularly targeting the influence of the FPÖ party. By blending media spectacle with political critique, Schlingensief forced audiences to confront the intersection of entertainment, nationalism, and exclusion. The following is an interview between Franziska Aigner and Paul Poet, who was not only one of Schlingensief’s key collaborators of the performance, but the performance also later became the focus of his first feature-length film Ausländer Raus! Schlingensief’s Container [Foreigners Out! Schlingensief’s Container] (2002). The interview was conducted at Café Weidinger in Vienna in January 2024 and has been edited by Franziska Aigner and Reece Cox.

Franziska Aigner: Hi Paul! There are always good reasons to talk and learn about Ausländer Raus!, but there are even more reasons today. Europe and the world at large are currently undergoing a massive shift towards the right, towards populism, and a renewed kind of fascism. In many ways, the political climate we’re experiencing now mirrors the atmosphere in Austria in 2000—when far-right politics entered the mainstream under the guise of democratic legitimacy. It is my hope that returning to both the performance and your film today might allow us to reflect on what forms of resistance are possible—and necessary—within a political landscape increasingly shaped by spectacle, exclusion, and authoritarian tendencies. Could you begin by recounting for us the political climate in which you found yourself in in the year 2000?

Paul Poet: Politics was in a complete frenzy in Austria back then. Nowadays, we seem much more accustomed, frighteningly, to there being Nazis and criminals in various European governments again. But in the year 2000, Austria was the first country in the European Union that had an extreme right-wing party in government in post-war Europe. Following the elections and surrounding the coalition talks there was a big uproar in the public, problematizing the FPÖ’s new-found official status after decades of being in the opposition. I mean, they were direct denizens of the National Socialists, they had developed directly out of Austria’s National Socialist past and had retained its ideology. The ÖVP was power hungry and yet, nobody imagined that they would actually form a coalition with the FPÖ, because of the extreme, blatant xenophobia that this party represented. By forming a coalition with the FPÖ, the conservative party normalised the FPÖ’s racism, hate, and enmity. On the level of the European community, some countries stopped their diplomatic and financial exchange with Austria. The media was frightened to touch Austrian people or engage in any meaningful exchange, while the politicians kept a stiff upper lip and said, this is an elected government – as they always say. They didn’t give a shit. There were big demonstrations from the general public against the government every Thursday. When the government was sworn in a few months later, there was a second uproar. The prospective government couldn’t walk to the ceremony in the usual way, because a huge demonstration was blocking its path. They had to walk through an underground tunnel. But after a while it became clear that the demonstrations didn’t have the necessary efficiency to actually protest the government or the political issues at stake anymore, I was quite disillusioned.

And then suddenly this project with Christoph came about. I had known Christoph for some years already as a critic, a punk critic. I had slammed one of his movies in 1990 called Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker (German Chainsaw Massacre). I loved the basic joke of the film, but thought that the film wasn’t good. We had a big fall out before he learned that I loved his other films and eventually became distant friends. I was amazed by his interactive performances like Chance 2000, which still amazes me today. All his actionist pieces brought people from outside the mainstream into focus and on stage. He was marvelous at working with audiences in that way. In the year 2000, Luc Bondy, the director of the Wiener Festwochen at the time, commissioned Christoph to do something to protest the political shift in Austria. Initially, Christoph had wanted to do a project called Der kapital-faschistische Oscar, an Oscar ceremony for the biggest accomplishment in the military-industrial complex. He wanted to stage the celebration at the opera, but it was far too expensive and Ioan Holender, the head of the opera, was completely offended by the idea. There was a lot of fear in the Austrian government of artists like Schlingensief. So the first idea was discontinued, also because we were operating on the remaining budget from the Wiener Festwochen. But Bondy told Christoph, you can still do something, but we have a very limited budget and can’t even include you in the official catalog – whatever we were gonna do was gonna be a quasi underground project of the Festwochen. In the end, there wasn’t even an official announcement of the project.

FA: Could you describe the project that eventually took place during the Wiener Festwochen?

PP: Christoph had been asked a few weeks prior to the whole thing by Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Bavarian newspaper, to write something on the Big Brother phenomenon. But he wasn’t really into pop culture. He was into Grindhouse underground extreme stuff, he didn’t care much about mainstream pop formats. So initially, Big Brother had passed him by. But suddenly, he saw this whole thing of living in the public, of being part of the public eye, of people living in this house and being, like, completely… He had this question: What would a concentration camp look like in the 21st century? And his answer was, like a Big Brother container, as in a freight container. So his project proposal to Wiener Festwochen was essentially to put a Big Brother container in the public space for an entire week and have the Austrian public vote asylum seekers in and out of the container and thereby out of the country. Bondy insisted that there was no official mention of the concentration camp aesthetic, but it was obvious to everyone of course. Bondy was Jewish himself, but he wanted to avoid getting in trouble with the government and risk having the whole thing shut down. In fact, we didn’t know if the project would happen until one week before. There was such big pressure from the government placed on both the festival and ourselves to cancel it altogether. We had a hearing inside the opera with 40 magistrate officials who tried everything in their power to cancel the project. They said we would traumatize police dogs, that we would destroy the plants on Karlsplatz…  they really tried to find any reason that might get the action banned. So it was not until five or seven days prior to the festival, that we knew if it would happen at all. We had asked real asylum seekers from all over Austria to take part in the action and they were officially engaged as actors impersonating asylum seekers, which was ultimately an illegal act by the Wiener Festwochen. It was and still is forbidden to employ asylum seekers in Austria. So the Wiener Festwochen could have bitten dust very hard for doing so, people could have gone to jail because of that. The casting of the asylum seekers was Matthias Lilienthal’s job, and once they arrived in Vienna, we had to safeguard them very well, because if the police would have found them, they would have been deported immediately. Most didn’t even have a pending status, but were here completely illegally.

FA: Mounted on top of the container was a big banner that said “Ausländer Raus” (foreigners out), which of course had been one of the election slogans of the FPÖ and which, in a few words, articulated the fascist vision of a cleansed nation promised to the Austrian people by the FPÖ. That same election slogan would also eventually provide the name for your documentary. The container itself was positioned right in front of the Staatsoper, the national opera in Vienna.

PP: Yes, it’s like Times Square in New York. It’s a very in your face tourist spot. The magistrate had originally wanted to put the container in a different part of Vienna, in the pedestrian area in a district called Favoriten, which is the worker’s district, but also, traditionally, the district in which the FPÖ election speeches take place. We knew that if the action would take place there, we would be beaten up and the container destroyed within two days, which would have also been interesting, also a message, just not a very productive one. Then they wanted us to do it in a tourist area in the middle of Vienna, the space behind the Secession, where mostly cars pass by but not many people. It would have been a safe art installation that you can look at from a distance. In the end, it was the magistrate itself that proposed to put the container right in front of the opera. They probably thought that there’s so much happening there that the container would be invisible. Anyone who passes in front of the opera is usually on their way to the Stephansdom or some other tourist destination. And with all the Mozart impersonators swirling around, no one would even see the art piece. But they were very, very wrong, luckily.

FA: And you built up the website and the online voting system?

PP: Yes, that was my responsibility. I wrote all multimedia and online texts and invented all the Big Brother-like soap stories supposedly happening in there. I set up the homepage called www.auslanderraus.at. I was responsible for both its aesthetic and the voting system, which we manipulated a lot to be able to support and keep an eye on how the people in the container could cope with the whole thing. I mean, there were fights inside the container, but people also invaded the container from the outside and there were people screaming at each other in front of the container all day every day, there was a lot of noise. We didn’t know how the people inside would cope with everything. We invented lies and different life stories to somewhat carve out a safe space in the public eye, stories that mirrored parts of their real histories, but with different names and nationalities to make them untouchable. It was Christoph’s intention that the public could feel that what was happening was real, that there was a real edge to it all, despite the game character of the overall action. But I have to say, the asylum seekers seemed to have the most fun of all of us, they knew violence, they knew mistreatment. Sitting at the window, looking out and seeing others go berserk seems to have been fun for some of them. But for some the pressure was too much, and so we manipulated the voting system so that the ones who didn’t cope could leave. One woman didn’t disclose to us that she was very sick, she had advanced cancer. Once we found out, we took her to get medical treatment. There was a lot of pressure on all of us, but also a lot of fun, a sleepless week where we didn’t know if we were going to persist for more than one day.

FA: The homepage allowed people all over the world to engage in this despicable process of voting people in and out of the container, whereby enacting, in a very direct manner, the xenophobic fantasy that got the FPÖ elected in the first place. The real-life consequence was, of course, that whoever had to leave the container would be deported from Austria. And whoever was left in the end, was going to get right of stay. These were the official rules of the game. We can see in your documentary that the first two days of the action were relatively peaceful, especially in retrospect, considering what happened at the end.

PP: It’s the Austrian mentality. If something bugs you, you ignore it for as long as you can manage and then freak out. The Wiener Festwochen are a very posh, established art festival that is both connected and financed by the state, so people looked at the action as high art at first. But then they suddenly realized just how interactive the project in fact was, how open it was, and they started to attack it or attack each other, or scream at each other because they couldn’t figure out how they should behave in relation to it. Whether it was the right, the left or the political middle class, everyone freaked out. And even more so after two days, meaning once the media coverage began. Wolfgang Schüssel, the ÖVP chancellor of Austria, personally told Bondy to shut the action down. But also the SPÖ, the social-democratic party, told us to shut it down. They thought it was ugly and an affront to Austria. Bondy eventually went to lunch with Schüssel and asked him how to respond to an interview request for the front page of Le Monde if the action would be cancelled. Bondy essentially blackmailed Schüssel into tolerating the event. So the action slowly became more and more interactive.

FA: The Austrian public seems to have been really transfixed, nobody could look away. I remember reading about it all in the newspaper as a teenager at my mum’s house in Salzburg. Everything about the project seems to have been irritating and it quickly became a problem for everyone. The reason why we still talk about this work is that few political works of art or interventions manage to achieve such an intensity of political engagement from the wider public. What happened inside and in front of the container influenced Austrian political life on a day-to-day level. Why, do you think, did people get so invested and upset about the container?

PP: The work was a public vessel, an open art system that mirrored society, including all its ills and its ugliness. Everyone that participated had to become a part of it politically and was forced to mirror oneself, watch oneself, and be confronted with one’s own hatred. In a way, the project did still provide a safe space, because it’s still art that you can play around in. But at the same time, the work asked you who you really are, who you were politically. Not in the way you mirror yourself on social media today. There was no way to become a part of the work without asking yourself if you are one of those tolerant liberals, or if you are a right-wing fascist. Christoph called it a social plastic. A social plastic forces you to confront yourself with yourself in order to, hopefully, change your ways. It could only have this impact because it was not a dogmatic work of propaganda. I mean, the bottom line of the action was clear, it was against xenophobia, against Ausländerhass, against right wing aesthetics of hate and for human rights. But it was not part of any political doctrine or party otherwise. This means that it was equally in opposition to the Green Party, who in some ways might be closer to Christoph’s own views, as it was in opposition to the FPÖ. We mounted citations on the container by the FPÖ, the ÖVP and the Kronenzeitung, Austria’s largest print medium, which is right wing and interferes with every election in Austria. We invited Jörg Haider to the container, the FPÖ party leader at the time, but he didn’t dare to show up. Because of the open nature of the work, there was no safe ground for him and no clear political gain either, which made it so precious and so unique as a work of political art. There was this great openness that put everyone in a complete frenzy and fear about what would happen. Even 25 years later, the action is still a battleground, some are still afraid of the whole thing, how it unraveled, how it didn’t have a clear outcome. Normally, politics loves it if you make a statement, if people can say yes or no. And here, there was never a clear yes or no. There was just the mayhem that ensued in reality. The nickname I gave the film afterwards was ‘democracy the hard way’, because you really had to go out there and interact. Nobody could know in advance where it would all lead.

FA: What did this mean for you on an artistic level? How did you prepare the day-to-day proceedings of the action?

PP: There was no planning. I mean, we had prepared rituals and texts and invited different guests to speak at the container each day. But I think the important thing was really to let it loose. That’s what made it one of Christoph’s really important pieces, because he abandoned all artistic control in a similar way to Chance 2000. Both works are so precious and unique because he let them loose. After Vienna, he asked me to do a second film with him, and I was following him for some years during the early years of Church of Fear (In mir eine Kirche der Angst). He was in desperation, because he said he could never top it. Three days into the container he was so confused with himself, he didn’t know how to control the container anymore. He felt the importance of losing control, of accepting that the proceedings of the action couldn’t be prepared, foreseen, anticipated by anyone, even himself. It was really a democratic piece of art. There was no artistic genius pulling the strings, we were just swimming through it all. We certainly had some rules, games and rules, and tried to keep them in order, but at the same time, what really happened there, the explosion of political discourse and fights and the way it turned out worldwide through the media and the website was completely out of our hands. It was so beyond ourselves, beyond our grasp.

FA: Within the radical democratic openness of the action and the public space enacted by it, there was nevertheless one group who did not actively participate in this public forum be it before, during, or after the action. And that were the asylum seekers, larping as performers impersonating asylum seekers. How did you conceive of this asymmetry?

PP: There were in fact a lot of asylum seekers, migrants and foreigners within the crowd participating in the quarrels. The ones in the container were intentionally not given a voice, in order to emphasize them as projection pieces, on which the audience in front of the container could try out their differing levels of xenophobia. They enjoyed that a lot, since they had a very relaxed time in the safety inside the container watching all these blood red Caucasian heads getting at each other’s throat. The whole project wouldn’t have worked if we had followed the usual white guilt narrative of click empathy for the fugitive which is in essence just the other side of the coin of the “magical negro”, itself a form of privileged xenophobia, that smothers instead of beating up, but essentially just cares for itself, not the other. As Christoph says in my movie, we didn’t do Amnesty International.

FA: There are many works of art that attempt something like the container. But in order for it to work, people need to want to be part of it. The way that the container interpolated the public was really remarkable, not least because of its many different publics. On the one hand, like you said, there was the public surrounding the container, but they could not look inside the container. They only saw the container from the outside, they had Christoph or a guest talk to them through a megaphone and they had each other to talk and discuss with; a political forum. And on the other hand, there was the online public, which, in a way, got this manufactured and framed view from inside the container, and who could engage with the asylum seekers portrayed as Big Brother contestants by way of a voting system. How are we to imagine this online community in the year 2000? Did it already mirror some of the online dynamics that we experience in the present?

PP: Yeah, sure, but in baby shoes. I edited a five-minute summary film for the online community at the end of each day. I would be in the editing room for a few hours at night, after being up all day. I invented stories, love stories or hate stories or stories of envy, a complete invention with soap opera dynamics. In reality, the asylum seekers couldn’t understand each other very well. They came from such different parts of the world, and there were so many dialects that even the translators had a hard time. They had more fun cooking and dancing together, and watching the people go crazy outside. But there was no, like, real interaction. I invented all this bullshit to make fun of the Big Brother format. We had over a million unique visitors in the year 2000, which was incredible. There were fan groups in Australia, on the other side of the world who didn’t even understand German. They couldn’t believe what was happening and followed it daily. The human heart of the whole thing was both so obvious and so cryptic at the same time. And the relevance of engaging with this massive right-wing rift was just as urgent 25 years ago as it is today.

FA: You said that there was something so spontaneous and mysterious about the container, and something in its ambiguous nature obviously interpolated both the left and the right, but in different ways. In one of your interviews with Schlingensief in your documentary, he talks about how he has little understanding for the Austrian peace activists and that their image ought to be disturbed. He called the work of the container a Bildstörungsmaschine, an image disruption machine. Could you tell us a little bit about how the container interpolated the left and what your criticism of the Austrian left was at the time?

PP: We already talked about the weekly Donnerstagsdemonstrationen, the weekly demonstrations by the Austrian left. Over time the demonstrations became something of a narcissistic exercise with no real impact on politics. People had somewhat become content. Like in the early selfie generation, it seemed to have become more about making an appearance. They just wanted to be recognized as in opposition to the government, but there wasn’t any real interest or investment in political action. I lost belief in the whole thing and so I stopped going myself. Both Christoph and myself were disillusioned that this mode of protest would go anywhere. I mean it’s always good if people go on the street to protest something, but there was no actual political message anymore. So the image disruption of the container was about the production of a polarized image of the left and the right while opening a real political discourse, a political exchange, and thereby, to change the ills that are out there.

FA: The Wiener Festwochen took place in June 2000, just three months into the new government’s legislative period. How did this fatigued left respond to this image disruption machine?

PP: You mean the demonstration that destroyed the container for a short time?

FA: Yes, one might imagine that the harshest backlash against the container would have come from the right but I understand this wasn’t the case…

PP: Well, two nights earlier, some Nazi skinheads had already waited for us in front of the container. There were severe attacks on the container from the right. In fact, Nazi skins invaded the place twice. There were acid attacks, people with knives who broke into the container at night. Everyone hated the project, the government, the officials, but also the police. The police ignored everything happening at the container. So if there would have been people trying to burn or kill us, they wouldn’t have protected us. But this level of fear, of not being in a safe spot, might have given us the energy to pull through. And thankfully, we had security, which worked. So it is important to say that most of the appreciative audience that assembled daily in front of the container was from the left. But you are right. We had invited the Donnerstagsdemonstrationen to come and speak in front of the container and voice their side, their political views. But they didn’t want to participate and said it was a sponsored art piece, and that they were not doing political actions as art. And so, on Thursday of that week, the whole demonstration passed by the container and got into this frenzy. They wanted to free the asylum seekers as a statement, to transform the art piece into what they thought was a real political statement. The tricky thing was of course that all the asylum seekers were actual illegal aliens. And the moment the police would have gotten them, they would have been jailed and deported immediately. So it would have been a terribly fatal act. The demonstration went to the container and caused mayhem for two hours or so. Eventually they climbed on the container, nearly causing it to collapse, setting the banners on fire and attempted to free everyone. We had to evacuate the asylum seekers to a hotel nearby so the police wouldn’t arrest them. Basically, the demonstration tore the whole thing apart and Christoph handed the container to the demonstrators in an act of capitulation and officially declared the art piece to be over. Then we went out for a drink and to bed. But at seven or eight in the morning, Christoph got up and said, no he can’t keep this clean picture for the left. So he went back to the container, invited the asylum seekers to return, and we kept going for the rest of the week as planned.

FA: You point out in your documentary that the right wing in Austria is well known for engaging with the public in a very direct and impactful manner. But after a mere couple of days, there were daily public assemblies in front of the container, there were giant demonstrations that you already mentioned, and of course the action was the subject of massive national and international media coverage. Schlingensief went on Austrian national TV for the evening news to publicly debate the action with both local and national politicians. So in a matter of a few days, the action managed to compete with the conservative and the right in terms of both media coverage and public attention. How did the right respond?

PP: The two government parties, the FPÖ and the ÖVP, were invited to the container, but they completely ignored it. They feared it. And they didn’t need to claim the container because we had already put up their quotes as banners and posters on the side of the container. FPÖ politicians were open to being interviewed for my film afterwards, Jörg Haider and Peter Westenthaler of all persons, months later, when they felt more secure to comment on the project, but during the action itself, they would have been too anxious to become the clowns of the whole show. They might be right, if they had dared to come to the container, that could have easily been the case. So I understand that they didn’t dare to show up, and that they instead tried to shut it down by all means available to them.

At the same time, I know just how important the action was and is for the FPÖ. They envied what we were doing, because as a right-wing party, they perceived it as a very successful way of manipulating the public. They didn’t see the interactive or enlightening elements of the whole thing. They only saw how the action managed to transfix and engage the public. I know that people like Martin Sellner from the Identitären or Johann Gudenus from the FPÖ studied my film in order to learn from the action and use it in a propagandistic way under different circumstances. It’s frightening. If you watch the neo-fascist movements of the past twenty to thirty years, they’ve clearly studied the left, left wing art and left-wing subcultures in order to claim it. A lot of the young FPÖ and Identitären learned from the techno scene in Vienna. A piece of art is never innocent, you have to keep opening it up and severing any ties to political manipulation and parties using it as propaganda. So the right was and is certainly there and they were watching, but they never supported the piece. They would never have said that Ausländer Raus was a cool event, but they are still trying to nourish themselves from it and take notes on how to use it at a later point.

FA:. How did the action end, how did it all end?

PP: After this fateful Thursday demonstration, the last day was more like, whoa, we lived through this. And even the right wing that were assembling on the square appreciated that there was some kind of exchange after the fact, even if there were screams and it was violent to a degree. But in the end, both the right and the left seemed to appreciate what happened, to go back to the roots of democracy, to go to a square and go at each other’s throats. That there was a dialog. Nowadays, we’re all splintered, we’re so atomized and distant from each other. It’s no wonder to me how far the whole world has moved down the authoritarian right wing rabbit hole. People are so distant from themselves and from any real political exchange. Today it’s all about representing yourself and trying to give yourself a political image rather than being a political being yourself.

FA: Following the massive opposition and resistance to the action from all sides, how did your work on the film about the action proceed? Was it met with equal resistance?

PP: We tried to apply for funding with a number of established production companies, but after the container, we were completely shut out. In fact, immediately after the action, the Austrian minister of art and culture at the time told the funding jury that had convened to decide about the next funding period to not allocate any funding to the Ausländer Raus film. He walked into the meeting and addressed the jury directly. He didn’t want the action to get a further platform that would give it permanence through a movie. We had to do the film with almost no money. Christoph and I wanted to make another film later on, but we had no chance of getting funding for it neither.

FA: Both the action and your film ask this question of the art of assembly, of how something like parrhesia – of speaking truth to power – is possible in the present. The action was remarkable in how it brought about a temporary yet concrete political forum which could tolerate such a great deal of pressure and criticism. Both the action but also you, meaning those who cared for the people inside and in front of the container, could take these violent negativities.

PP: When I presented the film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014, it was really a shock to me. I mean it was beautiful, we sold out the cinema and the screening was followed by this amazing Q&A. But the basic reaction of this leftist intellectual elite of New York City that was watching the film together with me was, that if this would have happened in New York, we would have been either shut down, jailed or shot within two days. I realized just how much the times have changed and how much the possibility of doing political art has changed. There have been several artistic projects that tried to learn from the container. Most obviously Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Centre for Political Beauty) who even asked me to do a film together with them. But theirs was not an open, democratic piece of art in the sense that no one knew what would happen. It’s important for the enlightening effect of political work that people work on themselves as if it were public therapy, but not with the intention to heal the public, because it’s up to the individual that participates in the work and in the social interaction to find out about themselves. In fact, that’s what can be healing, not the intention of the artist. Or maybe I should rather call it an exorcism or something like that. It’s about engaging in an interaction, a real interaction with the public, be it fun, be it thoughtful, be it excruciating, that doesn’t matter.

FA: Now, 25 years after the container, many European countries have voted in populist or right-wing governments. In the last Austrian elections in 2024, the FPÖ won the most votes for the first time, the German AfD has become the second strongest party in the German Bundestag. What are your thoughts on what lies in front of us?

PP: I fear we’re currently trapped inside a big end-fight about the remaining power of democratic thinking in the fatal grip of capitalism. We’re undergoing this big right-wing drift, because right wing thought is the only one that completely aligns with free market thinking and the consumerist readymade culture that we have completely devoted our lifestyle to. Our world is like the church of goods exchange, and it is slowly shifting the entire political arena towards autocracy and the right. Even left wing and green politics are completely devoted to this ready-made goods exchange mode of thought. That’s why the left doesn’t work anymore. The digital age has only furthered this mode of thought. There’s no ambivalence, and there’s no growth, no way of learning. If you’re a democratic being, you have to have the empathy to listen to each and every life story and get on an eye level with others, be a conscious social being within a democratic thought frame. But there’s little time or space left for that currently.

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