musings of a neurotic mind

something really caught my attention lately. tv5 usually airs what i would call “sounds and sights” of various countries all over the world where you can watch it. it’s called “tv5 en/au/aux/à … et partout dans le monde” and it usually serves as kind of a “filler” between the commercial break and the upcoming program. recently, they included Austria in the list of the countries featured. well, here’s a short description “tv5 en Autriche”:

it starts quite innocently with some snow-covered austrian mountains and then switches to people skiing. up next are again some mountains but this time in summer and you see people hiking. in the background you hear some modernized version of a classical viennese waltz. so far nothing’s wrong with the picture. but then suddendly the music tune changes into something what i would call traditional austrian music and you see some folks in lederhosen and then some pictures of other people drinking wine at the “heurigen”. it continues in this fashion blending out the “important” aspects of our culture (like arts, classical music, architecture and so on) and focusing entirely on things like yodeling, lederhosen and heurigen.

this is exactly what bothers me: i can’t identify with this picture of austria. the aforementioned aspects are surely a part of our culture and they fall into the stereotypical image of austria. interestingly, when it comes to other western european countries they hardly play traditional music but stick to a more contemporary theme… it really scared me. for the record: austrians hardly wear lederhosen, most of them can’t yodel and it’s usually folks older than 50 years enjoy traditional music or “Volksmusik”. oh well…

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under media culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.