Column

Eating Bosna at a petrol station somewhere on a country road

A column by Claus Pándi, editor-in-chief of the "Salzburg-Krone".

In Vienna, it's a good thing to find everything bad about Vienna. At least in public. If, for once, the Viennese do think something is good, and this is extremely rare, they only have to talk about it in whispers in the smallest of circles.

In Salzburg, in the city of Salzburg, it's exactly the opposite. There you have to find everything good without exception. At least in public. In Salzburg, the governor even thinks that everything is fine with the housing market. He uses the fact that he sees no homeless people as proof. The governor must be a happy man.

Architects Wimmer, Valentiny, Forsthuber (from left to right) and cultural journalist Elisabeth Nöstlinger-Jochum.(Bild: Markus Tschepp)

However, if you do discover something in the city of Salzburg that is perhaps not quite so perfect, you can perhaps tell a group of friends about it. But it's best to keep any criticism to yourself. Criticism, even well-meaning criticism, immediately leads to the suspicion of treason.

Writer Karl-Markus Gauss.(Bild: Markus Tschepp)

And so, after dark on Thursday in a beautiful house near Leopoldskron, I found myself in a dangerous situation. The architect Robert Wimmer, described by Karl-Markus Gauss as quite a stubborn fellow, had invited his colleagues Thomas Forsthuber and François Valentiny to talk about the state of architecture in Salzburg. The verdict is bitter. There is talk of five years of stagnation. Of a new facelessness, that in some parts of Salzburg you no longer know whether you are in Attnang-Puchheim or Linz, that trees are often uprooted without restraint, that administration rules instead of politics, that you don't know where to go. In the end, you end up at a gas station somewhere on the highway to eat a Bosna.

Robert Wimmer is an optimist, not a complainer. He has a sober view - and describes what he sees. And he hopes that the city can be worked on again after the upcoming political change.

Let's hope with him.