Wolfgang Porsche’s tunnel: Are the Salzburg fed up with their rich?

For a long time in Salzburg you have been very proud of your wealthy and prominent inhabitants. Not only because the richest of all Austrians, Red Bull-Erbe Mark Mateschitz, is a real “bullwasher”, as the locals are called in Salzburg. The company was estimated to be super rich at various festivals and spread their arms out of the added billionaires from the neighboring German, which in the Mozart City and the surrounding communities, their idyll.

Now something could have changed. One of the most prominent election salt castles is the Porsche/Piëch clan, which has been closely linked to the country for generations, but more in the Alpine Pinzgau, where the car manufacturers have been a homemade for generations. The members of the family include mountain railways, ski lifts, castles, an alpine pasture and shares in dairies. In Pinzgau, the Porsches are treated like kings because they are somehow.

But clan boss Wolfgang Porsche is moving into the city, and there is suddenly stress and resentment waiting for him. The people, the media, the left politicians – they all get upset about a 500 meter long tunnel, which he builds completely legally, but wants to use his exclusive. What should be reprehensible about it? Have these neighbors registered when it came to financing the building?

Green politicians and the communist deputy mayor even demand that he may make his villa usable in some cases because a famous writer lived there, Stefan Zweig. Where were they all when the building fell into disrepair and the city did not want to know about buying it itself and making it a public place. So why should he, Wolfgang Porsche?

The 81-year-old head of supervisory board of Porsche AG and Supervisory Board of Volkswagen and Audi is sure not to have done nothing wrong. From a legal perspective, this is probably true. Porsches 500 meters long tunnels should start at a parking garage at the end of the tourist Linzengasse and end at Porsche’s private parking space, which is big enough for nine cars. The previous access is narrow and strongly frequented by walkers, most limousines and SUVs hardly fit through. Stefan Zweig had already described the magical place as “inaccessible to cars and only climbing more than a hundred steps”.

With the listed and somewhat dilapidated villa, he also acquired the reason in 2020 for an impressive 8.4 million euros, thus the cellar law. He acquired the entry law via the garage last March by contract with a one -off payment of 40,000 euros. Since then he has also had the usage rights of the piece of public soil. A sum that is too low so that the process would have to be approved by the local council. The former interim mayor Harald Preuner from the conservative ÖVP, who signed the contract at the time, confirms all of this to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and can hardly believe the “giant theater”. The sum was calculated based on a comparable report. So what does the people want?

At the end of 2021, the unnoticed change of ownership of the property with house number Kapuzinerberg 5 in the press was still called “as a new hope”. The history of the Paschinger Schlössl goes back to the early 17th century, it served as a hunting lodge for the prince’s bishops. Nannerl Mozart gave piano lessons here, from 1919 to 1934 Stefan Zweig lived with his wife Friderike in it, and he is said to have written 200,000 manuscript pages in this place. After the century writer had fled from the Nazis, the castle dawned and became an enchanted place of longing for the Salzburg population. For a long time, one wished that the great Jewish writers and Nazi persecutors are remembered here. Instead, the son of an SS man is moving in, grandson of Hitler’s best carmaker.

What Wolfgang Porsche might have escaped is a fundamental change of mood. The KPÖ Plus Communist Party not only moved into the town hall, it had previously become the second strongest party in the country. Many people have found that the immigration of the rich also made the small rental apartments unaffordable and that nothing can be bought from the sophisticity that may turn away to you. Too often has been grassed and lubricated in the past. The one tunnel, even if it came about legally, was probably 500 meters of rich arrogance too much.

Perhaps Porsche takes an example of his pre-resident Stefan Zweig, who has extensively renovated the castle: he equipped it with electrical light and telephone connection, set up an original secretary Beethoven-and opened it for the city’s artists and intellectuals.