Despite these idyllic photos, Klagenfurt is up there in my list of least favourite places in Austria. Carinthia (which Klagenfurt is the capital of) is known for being particularly racist. The state is geographically isolated by mountains (at least until the Koralm Tunnel opens), and though it’s an idyllic and wealthy place with a sunny climate, it has a real streak of darkness and authoritarianism. Notorious far right politician Jörg Haider of the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party) was governor of the state from 1999-2008, and the only reason he stopped is that he died in a car crash.
I had an unpleasant experience with some Neo-Nazis in Klagenfurt. I arrived in the city on a Sunday afternoon. My work colleagues weren’t in town for a few more hours. The weather was beautiful, so I decided to waste some time wandering around, and go to a petrol station to buy a drink and snacks as everything else was closed on Sundays.
My route to the petrol station went through the Schillerpark, an attractive park in the city centre. There was nobody else in there, which seemed very strange. I was thinking “why is this nice park in central Klagenfurt totally deserted on a beautiful Sunday afternoon?” when I came across two Nazis practicing nunchucks and blasting out Blood and Soil Nazi punk music about “purifying our land from the pollution of foreigners”. (I regretted understanding German at this point). If you saw them on a TV show, you’d complain they were too much of a cliché with their nunchucks and battle jackets with Nazi patches on.
They started staring at me, and I hurriedly left, feeling bad that I was just leaving them to it, but also not wanting to get beaten up with nunchucks within twenty minutes of arriving in Klagenfurt. When I came out of the park, there was a police car just sitting there. The local police seemed to save their energy for things like hassling an African man who was peacefully eating an ice cream in the town square.
Klagenfurt is near a beautiful blue lake, the Wörthersee, ringed with palm trees. I went up there one day on the bus after school, thinking the people might be nicer than in Klagenfurt itself, but there was still a weird hostile atmosphere and aggressive men hanging about. The students at the school were perfectly nice, but there’s a weird dark edge to Klagenfurt.
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