LETTER FROM LINZ:The capital of Upper Austria has become a centre for arts and education and was thus a perfect venue for a conference on print and online cultural magazines, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
‘NO ONE has the right to obey”. This quotation from Hannah Arendt’s account of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 is inscribed in a passageway under the large bridge built by the Nazis over the Danube at Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.
It is an appropriate theme for the city where Adolf Hitler went to secondary school before going on to study architecture in Vienna.
During the second World War, he imagined retiring in Linz as the ideal centre of the Third Reich, remembering it sentimentally as an organic community far removed from the “decadent” modernist culture he encountered in the then capital of the Hapsburg empire.
In the Mauthausen-Gusen labour camp 12 miles to the east, up to 200,000 people, many of them left-wing political prisoners and Polish intellectuals, died horribly quarrying granite for similar buildings throughout the Reich. The two monumental buildings dominating the south of the river would have been joined by an array of “vast pharaonic buildings” on the north side, as Claudio Magris describes them in Danube.
It was not to be. Linz recovered from those dark days to become once again a thriving industrial centre and huge inland harbour around the bend of the river which gave the city its Celtic name, Lentos. It is dominated by steel and chemical plants serving the German industrial economy, its war machine and its postwar car industry.
In the last century it was very much a working-class city, with a socialist majority. This remains true, but since the 1970s it has reinvented itself, becoming more service oriented, environmentally aware and with a contemporary emphasis on painting, music, film, electronic arts, architecture and a thriving university scene.
It is also the city of astronomer Johannes Kepler, novelist Adalbert Stifter, composer Anton Bruckner and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (a contemporary of Hitler at school). The steel plants employ 10,000 now compared to 25,000 in the 1970s. Residents remember how the air got cleaner in the 1980s when new technology reduced pollution.
The city is less burdened by obedience to historical tradition than others in Austria like Salzburg, Graz, Innsbruck or Vienna. Its delightful and strategic position on the Danube has given it a trading and commercial advantage since Roman and medieval times.
To this is now added a major tourist potential for itself and the region, stretching far up the river to Duisburg in Germany through the Danube-Rhine canal and down to Vienna and eventually – another 10-day journey by boat – to the Black Sea.
Magris says the art of Bruckner and Stifter “is born of reverence for the idyllic Austro-Bohemian landscape, with its forests, the onion-shaped dome of the village church, the tranquillity of the home” – which all survive.
The city’s architecture, greenery, lively shopping areas and boisterous Friday and Saturday evenings, when its citizens gather at wine and beer stalls and bars, and restaurants in the main streets and squares, draw you in.
Linz is therefore eminently suitable for conferences. I was there for the annual meeting of Eurozine, a network of European print and online cultural magazines, with more than 70 member and associate publications in 30 or more countries. Its net magazine (eurozine.com) publishes selected summaries and translations from these journals and its own commissioned work.
Translation, mainly into English, French, German, Spanish and Polish, is central to its philosophy of reflecting and expressing diversity while enabling communication across a growing public sphere in Europe.
Members include the German magazines Merkurand Osteuropa, Multitudesfrom France, Resetfrom Italy, the Sarajevo Notebook, Transitfrom Vienna, the French Espritand Sens Public, Index on Censorshipand Soundingsfrom Britain.
Central and Eastern European journals are also well represented.
Compared to similar Irish journals, there is a lot more emphasis on analysing current affairs and – above all – more philosophical and social science awareness and context. This gives their still plentiful literary content more contemporary heft and purchase.
Linz’s geographical position in MittelEuropa is a good place to consider these differences. Magris creatively traces the tension between alternative imaginaries of the Danube, conceived either as an all-German extension of Wagner’s Rhine or as a neo- Hapsburg German-Magyar-Slavic- Romanic-Jewish Central European “hinterworld behind the nations”.
The latter vision echoes Eurozine’s own philosophy. In yet another twist of diversity, its working language, like that of this wider region, is English; “of course” was the response at Linz airport’s information desk when I asked if they spoke the language.
We met in the Lentos Kunstmuseum, an elegant modern art gallery exhibiting Austrian and international work since 1900, across the Danube from the equally striking Ars Electronica centre devoted to contemporary interactive media.
Our theme was changing media. We heard how they influenced the Arab awakening, discussed the future of journalism and free speech in Europe (going backward in Hungary, Ukraine and Belarus), the (rather dismal) media scene in Austria and how new technologies were transforming intellectual property and copyright.
Two major conclusions emerged. European media models tend to co-vary with its varieties of capitalism. The future of German, Scandinavian, Italian (or Irish) newspapers should not be extrapolated only from British or US experience.
And in seeking out diversity, it is important not to lose sight of good journalism wherever it can be found – including in established mainstream newspapers and broadcasters which continue to set standards overwhelmingly followed by the new users of online and social media.