“Actually, the Bible discriminates against us LGBTIQys! After all, God the Father created human beings, and from these people, among other things, the jeans boyish arose,” writes Hermes Phettberg recently in his “Falter” column “Phettberg’s preaching service”. He complains that he can no longer live out his longing for sadomasochism. “I can actually only lie in bed and sit in a wheelchair.” Today, Wednesday, the Extalkmaster turns 70. “My unattractiveness didn’t make anyone really horny for me. And where there’s no horniness, there’s no echo,” Phettberg once named the problem in an APA interview. After several strokes, Phettberg, whose real name is Josef Fenz and describes himself as “miserable”, lives a secluded life. The “extremely neurotic” has been discovered by several young bands in recent years: for example, he took part in the music video “High Castle” by the Austrian band Nancy Transit and in “Metropolis” by the Hamburg black metal band FAULNIS, which was used to shoot in his apartment in Vienna-Mariahilf came. He was also visited by the Berlin band Drangsal and by Dagobert and band. “Young bands seem to like me,” Phettberg says.
From bank clerk to pastoral assistant
In everyday life, Phettberg needs help due to the impairment of fine motor skills and language skills, even when writing. Nevertheless, “Phettberg’s preaching service” continues to appear in “Falter”, and until recently he also wrote the “Fisimatenten” for the street newspaper “Augustin”. Until 2018 he also wrote his “gestion logs”, a kind of internet diary, every day. For a long time, his appearance at the Rainbow Parade on the Wiener Ring was also an annual fixture.
Hermes Phettberg was born on October 5, 1952 in Hollabrunn. The son of a winegrower first worked as a bank clerk before becoming a pastoral assistant in the Archdiocese of Vienna after further theological training. In the mid-1980s he was a co-founder of the “Libertine Sadomasochism Initiative Vienna” association and the “Polymorph Perverse Clinic Vienna” project. He became publicly known with sadomasochistic art actions (such as his “Permanences of Disposal”) together with Walter Reichl as part of “ErotiKreativ” at the WUK.
Many Leit in the “Nette Leit Show”
From the early 1990s, he played various roles in Kurt Palm’s “Sparverein Die Unz-Ertrennlichen” theater group. Phettberg has been writing his weekly “Falter” column since 1992. A collection of the “Moths” columns appeared as a facsimile of the typescripts under the title “Hundred Hens. Catecheses 1992 – 2003”.
In his talk show “Phettbergs Nette Leit Show” he welcomed various celebrities from the end of 1994, including Marcel Prawy, Hermann Nitsch, Manfred Deix and Josef Hader. In 1996, together with Kurt Palm, he published the book “Frucade oder Eierlikör” with interviews and monologues from the show. In 2003 and 2004, ATV broadcast the program “Beichtphater Phettberg”.
In 1993 Phettberg received the Franz Grillparzer Prize from the “Anonymous Actionists” and in 2002 the Prize of the City of Vienna for journalism. At the time, the then City Councilor for Culture Andreas Mailath-Pokorny (SPÖ) called Phettberg a “radical and subjective observer of everyday life in Vienna” and that he wrote cultural history with his “Nette Leit Show”. In 2007 his old friend and discoverer Kurt Palm dedicated the documentary “Hermes Phettberg, Elender” to him, in which the two of them review the life of the once colorful Viennese scene figure in a dialogue.
Public bondage and great excitement
In 2012 he caused a stir with “Garten der Lüste”, a public tie-up campaign as part of the “Vienna Week”, and in the same year the artist book “Everything Terrible! Selected Texts” was published by Sensationsverlag. When Sobo Swobodnik’s black-and-white documentary “The Pope isn’t a Jeans Boy”, which won the 2012 Max Ophüls Prize, about Phettberg’s everyday life was shown on 28 evenings in Vienna’s Stadtkino in the summer of 2013, the protagonist, despite having a walking disability, attended every single screening .
Walter Fröhlich made a graphic novel out of the entries made in his “gestion protocol” during this period: “Blue Jeans. The Phettberg Comic” was published in 2015 outside of the book market, financed by a crowdfunding campaign. Also in 2015, Phettberg starred in the feature film “A Perception” by German director Daniel Pfander.
Source: Nachrichten
