March 1, 2007, Thursday

Gerhard Bronner, writer and stage impresario, was born on
October 23, 1922. He died on January 19, 2007, aged 84

Satirist and cabaret artist who, having fled Austria as a
child, took great delight in his ability to provoke it as an
adult

Composer, writer, musician, but above all cabaret artist,
Gerhard Bronner had a huge reputation in Austria as a
controversialist who sharpened his wit on the shadier sides
of recent Austrian history.

When he died, not only did he receive eulogies from the
President, Heinz Fischer, and the new Chancellor, Alfred
Gusenbauer, but television and radio the following day had
to be rescheduled to allow his fans the chance to relive
their favourite memories.

Yet he had not always been so popular in his native land.
Bronner was born a Jew in the working-class Viennese
district of Favoriten in 1922. His father was a decorator
and his mother a seamstress. It was a political, assimilated
world, and from early on Bronner recognised his commitment
to socialism.

Bronner was 15 when the Nazis arrived to interrupt his
education. His father and brother were sent to Dachau; the
rest later perished in the Minsk ghetto. He was to be the
only member of his family to survive.

Bronner fled across the "green border" and made his way to
Brno, which was still largely German speaking. He sang in
the streets and ate the discarded crusts of bread from the
sausage stalls. He made his way to Bratislava and stowed
away on a paddle-steamer to Romania where there were boats
to take Jews to Palestine. But the steamer broke down and he
landed in Bulgaria. He and his best friend decided to swim
across the estuary. Bronner made it, but he witnessed the
other man sucked into a whirlpool and drowned halfway
across.

His beginnings in Palestine were unpromising. He picked
oranges and built dykes in Netanya. Bronner used to joke
that, had it not been for the Nazis, he would have ended up
decorating shop windows, but this was typical Viennese
self-reviling, or schmah. He had played piano and guitar
from his earliest days and soon he found a job playing in a
bar where he was noticed by some British officers.

He was soon conducting an orchestra for the British Army as
a member of the forces entertainment service Ensa. He even
performed at El Alamein shortly before the battle. As a
reward for his labours he was given papers: Bronner became a
British subject.

Bronner worked as a producer on Radio Haifa. He married for
the first time in Palestine and his eldest son, Oscar,
founder and publisher of the leading Austrian newspaper Der
Standard, was born there in 1943.

In 1948 Bronner found himself back in Vienna. He said he
would not remain more than a month in that scheissstadt, but
he was fated to spend most of his life there. He performed
cabaret and, in 1950, teamed up with the equally famous
Helmut Qualtinger, whom he had met in a sauna in the Prater.
He rented the Marietta Bar for those early performances.
They were such a success that he was able to buy the place
in 1955 and the act was transferred to the Intime Theatre.

A series of shows satirised Austria in the years after the
State Treaty, when the country regained its independence and
tried to forget about its past. His shows were broadcast on
ORF, Austrian Radio. In 1959 Bronner took over the New
Theatre.

The cabaret possessed political muscle. One of Bronner's
songs brought down the postwar minister Felix Hurdes.

Bronner's team fell apart in 1961, and six years later he
reopened the Marietta, renaming it Fledermaus, and moved
into pop music. Perhaps his most famous appearances were in
the satirical radio show Guglhupf -a sort of Austrian That
Was the Week that Was.

The mid-1980s were difficult times for Bronner, his biting
attacks on Kurt Waldheim, the new President, caused tremors
of not-quite-dormant antiSemitism. Two years later what he
considered to be preposterous tax bills made him quit Vienna
for Florida. Yet he was lured back to the city again in
1993, when friends made arrangements to pay these off. But
he spent half the year in America for the rest of his life.

At home in Vienna he was often to be seen after midnight in
the Broadway Bar, a Hungarian-run nightclub famed for
high-calibre impromptu musical performances. He talked to
everyone, and always with a cigarette in his hand.

Bronner resented that he was regarded first and foremost as
a cabaretiste when he had been so much more. He translated
musicals such as My Fair Lady and Cabaret, and he wrote
music and libretti. He considered his greatest success a new
version of Fledermaus he made for Covent Garden.