Austria Doesn’t Fear Bruno…Why It Should

Sacha Baron Cohen is on the verge of unleashing his third motion picture Frankenstein: the Nazi-fetishizing Austrian fashionista Bruno. While the Cambridge-educated comedian’s other creations—Ali G and Borat—enraged the black identity police and the Kazakh government respectively, Bruno does not even register on Vienna’s radar. When confronted with a question about Baron Cohen’s next movie project, an Austrian Foreign Ministry official responded, “Bruno who?”

Despite being the birthplace of Hitler, the Austrians seem to have moved on from worrying about historical stereotypes, especially in light of media attention surrounding the government’s recent imprisonment of the British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving. While Viennese diplomats may not be taking much notice of the faux reporter who argues that the fashion-illiterati should be "put on trains and shipped off tocamps," the same cannot be said for the country’s tourism industry. According to one report:

"Panic is now spreading among Austria’s tourism marketers, who fear that the gay fashionista, Bruno, will trigger images of a country brimful of Nazis instead of the advertised mountains, blue lakes and pretty girls in Dirndl folk costumes. If Borat’s success is indicative, they are justifiably terrified. Bruno’s air-headed adoration of Adolf Hitler could well remind prospective visitors that Austria still has a number of unresolved issues with its Nazi past, not to mention an active and rather successful rightist party."

Perhaps the tour marketers understand the mass-mediated global environment a bit better than Viennese policymakers. In today’s world of over-stimulated, under-educated, culturally-confused Western youth, your country is only as good its last pop-cult reference. Austrians wrongly assume that the average American 20-year old knows much more about their country than they know about Kazakhstan. I would be willing to bet that they would wrong at least half of the time. I am not saying that American youth are brimming with facts about Nauryz, kumiss, Kashagan field, the Nazarbayev clan, etc., but that they know very little about Austria. If you polled one on the street, I think you would be lucky to pry a single viable factoid from their brain. Given such unhappy realities, the country’s governmental image-makers would be wise not to ignore Baron Cohen.

Kazakhstan’s diplomatic legions made the best of a bad situation when Borat shoved their country into the spotlight. They worked hard to counter Baron Cohen because they knew that he had more power than they did among certain sections of the general public. Over time, they tamed their out-of-control national brand. The Austrians have a false sense of confidence about the resonance and content of their country’s image. This comes from being the descendent of one of Europe’s largest empires, Austria’s special role in the Cold War as a neutral meeting ground for East and West, and most recently from EU insulation. Austria is situated completely within Europe—mentally and physically. Of course Brits, Slovaks, and Swedes know something about Austria because the trains run through there. But what about the Americans?

It’s time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. If Vienna’s Scheißendummführeren do not counter Bruno, there will be a generation of American youths that think all Austrians are gay, fascistoid Schantineux.