A Dreamer

We are living in a time when it’s tempting to see all kinds of things as the last of their kind. The last earthy pub, the last sparrow in the neighbourhood, the last politician with real convictions and so on. André Heller is someone definitely deserving of the title, and several times over to boot: the last storyteller, the last dandy, the last true all-rounder, the last great self-made man, the last living link with a Vienna now vanished.

Until we attempt to comprehend his career in its entirety: his daring art and show projects, his music, his books, the gardens he created, his acting, his eager self-promotion, his political activity, his travels and last but not least his journalism – all of it taken to extremes. Only then do we understand that the combination of all these different things cannot really work – and if it does, then only in the surreal reality of this now 76-year-old artist.

André Heller is curating an exciting festival at the Elbphilharmonie with the title »Fremd in der Fremde« (A Stranger in Foreign Parts), featuring a wide variety of different music styles and a look at the world of variety theatre.

It’s more than sixty years since the 14-year-old Heller, bearing a cane with a silver knob, entered the Viennese artists’ cafe Hawelka, frequented by literary figures such as Heimito von Doderer, Hilde Spiel and H. C. Artmann, and introduced himself as »a poet«.

And it’s nearly fifty years now since Heller, now in his mid-20s and transformed from a self-styled poet to an actor, radio star and successful chansonnier, embarked on his first tour of Germany under the wonderful arrogant title »A Legend Hits the Road«. By this time, features writers were already mystifying him as »a malicious Narcissus«.

It is forty years since he made Lisbon harbour the scene of a gigantic pyrotechnical experiment before an audience estimated at 900,000: an experiment that got totally out of control, but whose failure turned it into an unequivocal triumph. A year later, Heller repeated the spectacle in front of the Berlin Reichstag, which then lay right on the border between East and West Germany, anticipating metaphorically the fall of the Berlin Wall with his light sculptures in the name of peace and freedom of thought.

In 1985, one more year later, he brought the fine art of Chinese acrobatics to Europe in his show »Begnadete Körper«, inspired by an eye-opening trip he had made to China, which was still closed to foreigners at the time. Incidentally: when we discuss the issue of »cultural appropriation« nowadays, we do so with the luxury of a world view expanded by acts like Heller’s. It was actually Heller’s idea to turn the show, which enjoyed great success for decades, into the »Chinese National Circus«.

But let’s stay for a moment in the year 1985, when André Heller found the time while »Begnadete Körper« was first being staged to explore his idea of a big amusement park for the arts in talks with the pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Keith Haring. And here, in turn, the city of Hamburg came into play as a central venue for Heller’s work.

After he had released his twelfth studio album, »Narrenlieder«, and published his first novel, »Schattentaucher«, and had sent fantastic hot-air balloon sculptures into the air above cities all over the world and above the Niagara Falls, André Heller’s amusement park had its premiere in 1987 on the Moorweide in Hamburg under the musical name »Luna Luna«.

Lichtenstein designed a hall of mirrors for the show and Hockney made a »wonder tree«, while Keith Haring contributed a merry-go-round. Jean-Michél Basquiat, who was still little-known in Germany at the time, decorated a Ferrish wheel, Jörg Immendorff a shooting gallery and Daniel Spoerri the toilets, while in the »Palace of Winds« created by caricaturist Manfred Deix, farting contests were held! And where we’re talking about Heller as the last of his kind: 94-year-old Art Deco graphic designer Erté produced the show booth »Mysterium Cagliostro«, Salvador Dali, then aged 83, created a cathedral, and the entrance gate was built to a design by Sonia Delaunay, whom Heller had met at the age of 92 in 1977, two years before her death.

All these attractions and more – financed by the spicy popular magazine Neue Revue – were put on in Hamburg in the open air, and sometimes in the rain, for the public’s entertainment. After the works of art spent decades stored in containers, there are plans to revive »Luna  Luna« in the USA at the initiative of rapper Drake, who the New York Times reports is planning to invest $ 100 million in the restoration project.

At the time, however, Heller had to subject to a grilling from the two presenters Wolf Schneider and Holde Heuer in the NDR Talk Show on the evening after the »Luna Luna« premiere. Schneider was all prepared to read out a damning review of the anti-elitist art project, but Heller pipped him at the post while the cameras were running. »A single bad review appeared anywhere in Europe,« he declared. »One single one, in the Münchner Abendzeitung. No sooner did I walk on stage than here it is, that one lousy review, with underlinings in yellow, and he (Heller pointed to Schneider) was going to read it out.«

Schneider: »You stole it from me!«

Heller: »Of course I took it away from him. (The audience laughs and applauds.) Here it is! (Waves the newspaper cutting in the air.) The poor review from the Münchner Abendzeitung.

Schneider: »That belongs to me!«

Heller: »The reviewer describes me as ›the world’s worst artist‹! And even more important is something I just found out by the bye: you teach at a school for journalists, don’t you?«

Schneider (head of the  Henri Nannen School for Journalism at the time): »So?«

Heller: »Where you apparently teach young journalists how to deal with truth and truthfulness. Then you say that among 240 good reviews, there’s not one you’re going to read out here. Instead, you hunt down the one bad review.«

André Heller would hardly pull off a number like this any more now, but the anecdote says something about the way he sees himself, and also about the way the public sees him, a view that fluctuates between admiration and hostility. Heller’s boisterous exterior is a cover for his thin skin. Critical recognition has been vital to him from the outset, reflecting as it does his creative dedication to his art. Heller has often been accused of being calculating, but he is actually a totally uncynical artist.

Why is he seen as calculating? Not least because he is not just an artist, but also an old media pro who knows how to take over a talk show when he’s in the mood. Heller first came to fame in 1967 as an opinionated presenter and DJ with the new Austrian pop station Ö3, who interviewed people like Brian Jones, Frank Zappa and John & Yoko (the first two in the studio, the last two in their hotel bed). It goes without saying that an artist like Heller who is a skilled critic as well is going to be a source of suspicion to the critics.

But there are also other reasons for the aggression that Heller has always provoked amongst the critics, especially in his native Vienna. One reason is his provocative love of luxury, which is not at all seemly in a city which expects its artists to show humility and gratitude that they are allowed to exist. Another stumbling block is his willingness to display grand feelings. To quote Hans Magnus Enzensberger on the occasion of Heller’s 60th birthday: »He is not afraid of the emotions that rational people avoid at all costs; the ornament that the Puritans want to banish is sacred to him; and he seems to feel that kitsch is a smaller evil than abstinence. And like all dreamers, he wouldn’t think for a moment of respecting the boundaries of good taste.«

And in Vienna in particular, this is a serious misdemeanour. Vienna is a city whose history is responsible for a phobia of kitsch and bombast: nowhere else in Europe were the postwar years so grey, and nowhere else did the zeitgeist dictate that the artistically valuable response should consist of even more gloom, or of catharsis oozing in Catholic guilt. Typically, Heller, who enjoyed a comfortable upper middle-class upbringing in the 1970s, and the highly dissimilar Austrian cabaret performer and actor Helmut Qualtinger jointly took responsiblility for rehabilitating the popular Wienerlied in the seventies as a genuine musical format equal to both the most knowing art song and the best pop song. Hitherto, this genre of local Viennese song had been despised for its sentimentality, and also turned into pop hits without inhibition.

But let’s return to the issue of Catholic guilt. This is not something Heller wasn’t familiar with. Many of his texts, from the »Angstlied« on his 1980 album »Verwunschen« to his autofictional book »Wie ich lernte, bei mir selbst Kind zu sein«, which was filmed by Rupert Henning in 2019, deal with the trauma of his schooldays in a Jesuiten boarding school.

But Heller managed to overcome the abuse he suffered there, at least in his works, in a way that was always aggressively colourful and endering. His father, the confectionery manufacturer Stephan Heller, was absent for much of his life; he had embraced the Catholic faith with a passion, but was actually born a Jew, and this inspired not only Heller’s work, but also occasional anti-Semitic feelings about him, whether conscious or unconscious.

The awareness of the family’s repressed Jewish roots was a driving force behind Heller’s empathy towards the victims of persecution, as regularly expressed in his political commitment. He participated in the peace demonstrations of the early 80s, and was one of the presenters of 1993’s »Lichtermeer«, a demonstration against the then mushrooming right-wing populism attended by 300,000 people on Vienna’s Heldenplatz. Two years after that, Heller took part in the freedom festival »Fest der Freiheit«, protesting against a series of bomb attacks made by right-wing extremists, which, for example, killed four Romany people in the town of Oberwart. The dauntless Heller appeared at this rally alongside Salman Rushdie, who was already living in hiding after Iranian leader Khomeini had issued a fatwa calling for his death.

Now it’s probably time for me to admit that I’m not an impartial observer: I’ve known André Heller for 13 years, and I co-produced his 2018 album »Spätes Leuchten« with him – for obvious reasons, one of the last such record productions.

In the autumn of 2021, when the world was gradually emering from the lockdown, I had the opportunity to play at his first (and in all likelihood last) home concert, where we were joined by 13 other musicians at his Vienna salon, in itself probably the last of its kind. Cameras were running, the audience came and went – for three nights. Though I must confess that I collapsed outside his house after the first of these, when we had been singing and playing for over three hours without a break. Heller himself, needless to say, just carried on.

I followed André Heller through the streets of Vienna and Marrakesh (he always likes to be at the front), and saw how people stopped and stared at this unusual man with his snow-white hair. Some people realise it’s Heller, while others feel that they surely know him, and wonder where from. Both categories almost certainly know only a fraction of the aforegoing, or of the many other adventures that sprang from André Heller’s mind into reality. For example, he co-founded the »Zirkus Roncalli« in the 1970s, a travelling circus that brought art together with artistry and formed the basis not only for later projects such as »Circus Flic Flac« or Heller’s own »Luna Luna«, but also for what smart business thinkers later expanded into »Cirque du Soleil«. Then there are the botanical wonders that he created first in Gardone on Lake Garda and then in Morocco with his »Garten Anima«.

In his Heller biography »Feuerkopf«, author Christian Seiler tried to pack all the dizzying and manic diversity of Heller’s life work between two book covers. The book was published in 2012, so that the entire last decade is obviously missing. No mention is made of 2015’s »Now!« conference in Vienna, where Heller brought together human-rights organisations and local politicians with the aim of improving the lot of refugees who had fled for existential reasons. There is no reference to the eight episodes of his TV interview series »Menschenkinder« (2013–2016, featuring Conchita Wurst, Arnulf Rainer and Michael Haneke). Or to the publication of his life story »Das Buch vom Süden« (2016), to his moving book about his aged mother »Uhren gibt es nicht mehr« (2017), or to the above-mentioned late album »Spätes Leuchten« of 2018. Or to much more besides.

It’s probably true that Heller was always a dreamer, inspired, as Seiler puts it, by »the deep-seated belief that his own perception is identical with the world«. But his equally large and exceptional talent is his ability, proven by the sheer size and diversity of his life’s work, to make his dreams come true. Whatever André Heller chooses to put on stage at the Elbphilharmonie, the programme will bear witness to all the experiences of a long and colourful career.

This article appears in the Elbphilharmonie Magazin (1/24)
English translation: Clive Williams