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JÖRG HAIDER'S MUSEUM

Many continue to mourn the death of Jörg Haider, an Austrian far-right politician who died in a drunken car crash last year ...

From Economist.com

“Of course I knew Mr Haider personally!” says Mr Berger, taking a break from his singing. He had been accompanying a melancholy Alpine choir at the opening of a museum commemorating Jörg Haider, an Austrian far-right politician who died in a drunken car crash on October 11th 2008.

Mr Berger pulls a collection of photos from his jacket pocket to prove his point. They show him in lively conversation with Haider at some kind of party. Mr Berger is not especially famous or politically active, he explains, but in Carinthia, Haider made it his business to know everybody. He had an irrepressible bonhomie, a shrewd networking sense and an uncanny memory for names and faces. For a party trick he sometimes surprised people by knowing their names even before being introduced to them.

Mr Berger knows only too well that people from outside Carinthia often fail to appreciate their fallen leader’s virtues—many journalists, he laments, have a “negative attitude”—which is why he is not prepared to give his first name and why the woman with him will say nothing at all. The curator of the exhibition is also evidently upset at the way Haider was portrayed in the media, explaining to visitors at length that journalists who criticised him were driven by “envy”, and that they were cowards for voicing their opinion from “behind closed doors” rather than confronting their victim face-to-face.

The objects on display are ordinary, considering Haider's wealth and flamboyance: some pocket notebooks “in his own handwriting”, a pipe, a friendship bracelet, a watch, a pen, a pair of toddler-size shoes his father made him and Caesar, his rocking horse. But modesty was one of Haider’s chief virtues, according to the exhibition’s notes, which rhapsodise, “His mind was against the big and his heart with the small.” Set against this cosy fantasy, on the back wall of a darkened vault dedicated to Haider’s death, is a projected image of the mangled car in which he died. A clip from a radio bulletin on the morning of his death intones, “Jörg Haider, the governor of Carinthia, is dead.”

Boards detailing “injustices” done to Haider line the walls. One “unsolved mystery” is how an autopsy could find that he had three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood when he crashed, when, according to the boards, he had abstained from alcohol that night (not mentioned is how he came to be driving at more than twice the 70km/h speed limit when he crashed). Some see the alcohol as “evidence” of an assassination carried out by Mossad. Mr Berger posits that the elevated level of alcohol was a side-effect of Haider’s extreme physical fitness. Another thing that warrants further explanation, apparently, is the whereabouts of Haider’s left shoe.

The boards also assure visitors that Haider’s immense estate was purchased in 1941 not from an Italian Jew desperate to leave Austria, but from a “Zionist who wanted to emigrate”. We are also told Haider’s father was not (as indeed he was) a committed Nazi who remained faithful to the ideology throughout his life, but one of thousands who “sought to defend themselves against Austrian fascism”. And, yes, Haider had decided to stay on at the pub on the night of the crash rather than return home for his mother’s 90th birthday, but family was the centre of his existence. Curiously, there is no denial of countless stories claiming that he was gay.

One cabinet showcases the media coverage Haider’s calculated flirtation with Nazi rhetoric and populist grandstanding whipped up over the years. The glory years for his supporters began in October 1999, when his Freedom Party (FP) won 27% of the vote and a place in Austria’s coalition government. Yet his party proved better at rabble-rousing than governing, and Haider retreated to his political fortress in Carinthia.

But, as the memory of those failings fades, the far right has been on the rise again. The FP and Haider’s breakaway Alliance for the Future together won 28% of the vote last September. And Haider’s Alliance party romped to victory in Carinthian local elections on a wave of post-mortem sentiment, taking 45% of the vote in March.

Picture credit: viZZZual.com (via Flickr)

(This is a correspondent's diary published on Economist.com)