Chronik der laufenden Entgleisungen

History always repeats itself twice, doesn't it? The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In Austria, only the farce is repeating itself, and it eventually forgets its face and becomes a grimace, a grotesque. In autumn 2024, Austria will elect a new National Council, and the election campaign has long begun. Thomas Köck keeps track of the everyday political derailments: knives are sharpened at campaign events, and journalists are put in headlocks on live camera, while Austrian activists of the New Right in Germany give lectures on mass deportations and collect donations from bourgeois circles. Köck can hardly keep up with his record of (linguistic) escalation. But he doesn't stop at mere bookkeeping: drawing on questions of class, origin, and economy, he tries to understand how Austria became the prototype of right-wing subject formation in Europe. An angry, at times ironically biting intervention emerges in that election year, in which Herbert Kickl could become the first far-right Chancellor in Austria since 1945.