How the Freedom Party Tried to Recruit steirischer herbst’s Future Director

16.1.26 / Herwig G. Höller

In this blog, steirischer herbst research fellow and journalist Herwig G. Höller shares his discoveries in the festival archive. They frequently reveal surprising connections between steirischer herbst and the world of—local as well as international—politics.

When, in 1984, musicologist Werner Jauk conducted a street survey in Graz, he made an unexpected discovery: Unsurprisingly, the number of steirischer herbst visitors was highest among supporters of the Alternative Liste Graz, a Green party founded in 1982—almost 35 percent of those who had indicated a preference for this party also described themselves as frequent festival visitors.

Yet, in second place, with 12.5 percent, were supporters of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ)—well ahead of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) with 7.89 percent and the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) with 6.98 percent. Thus, the probability that a Freedom Party voter would regularly visit the festival was significantly higher than for voters of the two large centrist parties. In his study, completed in 1985, Jauk suggests that this was partly motivated by a desire to participate in steirischer herbst as a socially significant local event: “For a demographic otherwise concerned with preserving bourgeois values, this may be sufficient motivation; new art appears to be something one puts up with in the process.”1

When asked in 2025, the Graz FPÖ’s former culture spokesperson, Margit Uray-Frick, explained that the party wasn’t aware of this survey back then. That Uray-Frick’s political mentor, Alexander Götz (1928–2018), had a remarkable affinity with steirischer herbst also remained largely unknown. Götz, the mayor of Graz from 1973 to 1983, got on so well with leading curator Peter Vujica (1937–2013) that he even wanted to make him a Freedom Party representative in 1982, when Vujica was already scheduled to become the festival’s director.

Previously, Götz had squarely adopted the anti-modernist stance of his party’s nationalist right wing. In a curious session of the Styrian State Parliament on 13 December 1967, he associated the Graz literary magazine manuskripte with pornography and implicitly called for censorship: “We have reached the point, ladies and gentlemen, where society can no longer stand by, tolerate, and prepare the ground for phenomena that I would deliberately describe as absolutely corrosive.”2

Although manuskripte and its circle also played a significant role at steirischer herbst from the outset, Götz refrained from making similar statements about the festival in the following years. As the city administration’s tourism officer, he supported it in the early 1970s by subsidizing press trips for international journalists. On the festival committees he was part of by virtue of his office, Götz was inconspicuous.

Unlike the right wing of the Styrian ÖVP, Götz and his party colleagues also held back when Wolfgang Bauer’s play Gespenster (Ghosts) caused a scandal at steirischer herbst ’75. The FPÖ party paper Neue Freie Zeitung even took pains to publish a friendly review.3 And when, a few years later, far-right activists and some conservatives protested against a Hermann Nitsch exhibition at the Kulturhaus, Götz took a diplomatic stance. “This morning, Mayor Dr. Götz emphatically reaffirmed his full conviction regarding the artist’s freedom of speech, which must, of course, be balanced by the viewer’s freedom of speech,” City Hall reported on 22 October 1981. Götz wasn’t willing to close this exhibition in an act of censorship, it said.

Even away from the public eye, the mayor and steirischer herbst were on good terms. This is illustrated by letters (preserved in the festival archive) Vujica wrote to Götz between 1980 and 1982—first as a member of the board responsible for steirischer herbst’s program and later as its designated director.

“I still remember your many bon mots, with which you successfully tried to dispel my suspicion that you were an opponent of modernism and thus of steirischer herbst. My elephantine memory also recalls the joyful approval with which you acknowledged my promise to bring that indisputable, international quality to the program of steirischer herbst that we agreed was largely absent,” reads a letter dated 17 June 1980, in which Vujica sought Götz’s approval for the 1981 program.

A year later, Vujica thanked Götz for congratulating him on his appointment as steirischer herbst’s first director. In a letter dated 12 August 1981, he expressed particular delight that the “esteemed mayor” was so committed to the festival’s further development. “Unlike some other organizers, I do not regard politicians’ suggestions and ideas as inappropriate interference attempts but as welcome signs of interest, which I, as a matter of principle, do not turn a deaf ear to,” he wrote. At the same time, Vujica had to disappoint the mayor: For various reasons, some of the latter’s suggestions could not be realized.

Subsequently, Vujica and Götz grew even closer—so much so that in the fall of 1982, the mayor made an offer to the director-to-be that was never made public. The steirischer herbst Archive holds no documents that would reveal what was behind this proposal, which would have brought Vujca into the Graz City Council on a Freedom Party ticket. It stands to reason that the mayor had his sights set on the 1983 municipal elections—which he would lose, ending his political career. Yet, Vujica wittily rejected Götz’s political advances on 13 October 1982.

Peter Vujica to Alexander Götz, 13 October 1982, steirischer herbst Archive

Peter Vujica to Alexander Götz, 13 October 1982, steirischer herbst Archive

Peter Vujica to Alexander Götz, 13 October 1982, steirischer herbst Archive

Peter Vujica to Alexander Götz, 13 October 1982, steirischer herbst Archive

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“I simply believe that people, yours and mine, would take this brilliant twist you are proposing, which on a subjective basis I immediately liked, the wrong way,” Vujica wrote. A nice idea would lead to unfortunate misunderstandings on both sides, he explained. He had to think of the many artists, and the mayor had to think of the many factions within the Freedom Party for whom Vujica’s appointment as city councillor would be a slap in the face. In his letter, the future festival director also indicated that both Governor Josef Krainer and State Cultural Advisor Kurt Jungwirth (both ÖVP) knew about the proposal and had “expressly left these decisions to [him].”

After his tenure at steirischer herbst ended in 1989, Vujica returned to his former day job and played a key role in Austrian cultural journalism as department head at the newly founded daily Der Standard until 2001. In July 1996, he surprisingly declined a previously announced move to the Styrian state administration, where he was to head the culture department.

However, what was not known is that the former steirischer herbst director could still have become a city councillor in Graz later on. After its success in the 2003 municipal elections, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) considered claiming the culture department and remembered that the young Vujica had written for the regional Communist paper Wahrheit. “That would have been an option to get a competent person for culture,” explained Ernest Kaltenegger, a city councillor for the KPÖ at the time, on the phone in December 2025. According to Kaltenegger, Vujica was not averse to the idea, but it did not come to fruition. The culture department ultimately went to the ÖVP with Christian Buchmann as city councillor.

1

Werner Jauk, Neue Kunst und Öffentlichkeit: Analysen zum Interesse der anonymen Öffentlichkeit am Steirischen Herbst sowie zu dessen Prestigeeinschätzung (1985).

2

30. Sitzung des Steiermark. Landtages, IV. Periode – 13., 14., 15. Dezember 1967, 1130.

3

Friedrich Hueber, “Im Grazer Schauspielhaus: ‘Bäuerliche Gespenster,’” Neue Freie Zeitung, 18 October 1975, 8.