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Vienna’s Easter lockdown to be extended to April 11th

Vienna’s lockdown will be extended from April 1st to April 11th, Vienna's Mayor Michael Ludwig announced, following a summit with the government on Monday afternoon.

Published: 29 March 2021 17:54 CEST
Updated: 30 March 2021 16:41 CEST

Vienna

People walk along the "Am Kohlmarkt" luxury shopping street in downtown Vienna. Austrian shops are seeing an almost unprecedented number of closures. (Photo by AFP)

Please note: this has since been extended again. Click here for more information.

Lower Austria and Burgenland – the other states to have put in place a stricter lockdown over Easter – will await further developments before deciding whether to extend their lockdown past April 6th.

The move comes after experts said they had doubts whether the closure of shops and lockdown over Easter would be enough to stop intensive care units becoming overloaded, broadcaster ORF reports.

Lower Austria will bring in extra measures in schools and kindergartens to test contact people and put more classes into quarantine in cases of coronavirus.

Shops and hairdressers to close

EXPLAINED: What is allowed in eastern Austria during the hard lockdown over Easter

Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland’s lockdown means that from Thursday April 1st shops will be closed, with the exception of grocery stores, pet food stores, pharmacies, drug stores and tobacconists.

Supermarkets will only be able to sell food, but not non-essential items such as toys.

Hairdressers, museums and zoos will also close again, and exit restrictions will be put in place, meaning people may only leave the house or apartment for specific reasons: to go shopping, to exercise animals or for “physical and mental relaxation”.

Crossing state borders of the eastern region to go shopping will not be allowed, and schools will switch to distance learning until April 9th.

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Vienna Festival director Milo Rau hits back at anti-Semitism accusations

As the conflict in Gaza sharply polarises opinion, “we must be inflexible” in defending the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the acclaimed Swiss director told AFP in an interview this week.

“I’m not going to take a step aside… If we let the antagonism of the war and of our society seep into our cultural and academic institutions, we will have completely lost,” said the 47-year-old, who will inaugurate the Wiener Festwochen, a festival of theatre, concerts, opera, film and lectures that runs until June 23rd in the Austrian capital and that has taken on a more political turn under his tenure.

The Swiss director has made his name as a provocateur, whether travelling to Moscow to stage a re-enactment of the trial of Russian protest punk band Pussy Riot, using children to play out the story of notorious Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux, or trying to recruit Islamic State jihadists as actors.

Completely ridiculous

The Vienna Festival has angered Austria’s conservative-led government — which is close to Israel — by inviting Greek former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and French Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, both considered too critical of Israel.

A speech ahead of the festival on Judenplatz (Jews’ Square) by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm — who has called for replacing Israel with a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews — also made noise.

“Who will be left to invite? Every day, there are around ten articles accusing us of being anti-Semitic, saying that our flag looks like the Palestinian flag, completely ridiculous things,” Rau said, as he worked from a giant bed which has been especially designed by art students and installed at the festival office.

Hamas’ bloody October 7th assault on southern Israel and the devastating Israeli response have stoked existing rancour over the Middle East conflict between two diametrically opposed camps in Europe.

In this climate, “listening to the other side is already treachery,” lamented the artistic director.

“Wars begin in this impossibility of listening, and I find it sad that we Europeans are repeating war at our level,” he said.

As head of also the NTGent theatre in the Belgian city of Ghent, he adds his time currently “is divided between a pro-Palestinian country and a pro-Israeli country,” or between “colonial guilt” in Belgium and “genocide guilt” in Austria, Adolf Hitler’s birthplace.

Institutional revolution

The “Free Republic of Vienna” will be proclaimed on Friday as this year’s Vienna Festival celebrates. according to Rau, “a second modernism, democratic, open to the world” in the city of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and artist and symbolist master Gustav Klimt.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the opening ceremony on the square in front of Vienna’s majestic neo-Gothic town hall.

With Rau describing it as an “institutional revolution” and unlike any other festival in Europe, the republic has its own anthem, its own flag and a council made up of Viennese citizens, as well as honorary members, including Varoufakis and Ernaux, who will participate virtually in the debates.

The republic will also have show trials — with real lawyers, judges and politicians participating — on three weekends.

Though there won’t be any verdicts, Rau himself will be in the dock to embody “the elitist art system”, followed by the republic of Austria and finally by the anti-immigrant far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), which leads polls in the Alpine EU member ahead of September national elections.

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