Exhibition Horror Patriae
Department of Mild Megalomania
In a 16th-century painting, Austria thrones over both Europe and Africa, defying logic and geography. The painting’s hierarchy is based upon different rules, a premodern world in which there are neither passports nor borders nor national languages. Peasants identified with their villages, while the ruling classes thought of themselves in more abstract terms: through allegiance to a dynasty. This dynasty’s power could extend over huge polyglot domains with no clear boundary.
The mild megalomania of dynastic power became stronger whenever European houses invoked the translatio imperii (transfer of rule) and claimed to be heir to ancient Rome. The Holy Roman Empire, paradoxically named the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, adopted a Roman style, but also the Roman language: Latin, to which the title of this exhibition refers and which remained an official language throughout Europe until the mid-16th century. In militantly Catholic and thus pro-Roman Austria, Latin was a state language almost until the 1840s. Here, it is a modest 1920s cap made of laurel leaves, probably used in an Austrian family theater, that provides an ironic reference to centuries of Roman cosplaying.
The Holy Roman Empire was ended in 1806 by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). His cult was alive all over Europe for nearly a century, as the decorative box exhibited here shows. Bringing a unified liberal legislation to the lands he conquered, Napoleon opened the door to the new global order. At the same time, he ushered in an era of anti-aristocratic bourgeois nationalism. The revolutions of 1848 metaphorically and literally waved national flags—for many future countries still just a wish. On a visionary map of Europe published that year, Styria’s hero, Archduke Johann (1782–1859), appears as the head of state of a newly unified Germany. That was never meant to be.
While many European countries were discovering their alleged mononationality, the Habsburg monarchy remained huge and multiform until its collapse in World War I. Forced to join the club of single nations in 1919, Austria developed its own megalomaniac, at times toxic dreams. As is well known, one of them was about creating a new, all-encompassing German empire. Here, it is illustrated by an almost anecdotal story of a small village in Styria that was mistaken for a place of Teutonic glory.
Two contemporary films screened here were produced by artists who found themselves in the midst of dangerous megalomaniac dreams. In the 20th and 21st centuries, such dreams have led to wars. In the early 1990s, Tomislav Gotovac provocatively identified with post–Cold War, right-wing paranoid fantasies. Against the backdrop of the Russo-Ukrainian War, led by an insane dream of a new empire, Sergey Bratkov tries just to remain human—which is already a lot.
