Being Conchita

by Conchita Wurst

  Yet it turned out that many of the people I spoke to are themselves from the provinces. Former US President Bill Clinton, a firm favourite at the Vienna Life Ball, hails from the small town of Hope in Arkansas. Mayor of Vienna Michael Häupl, who made me a Golden Standard Bearer of the City of Vienna for ‘respect and coexistence’, was born in Altlengbach, a village with only 2,700 inhabitants. Ban Ki-moon, former Foreign Minister of South Korea and now Secretary-General of the United Nations, grew up in the countryside. Ulrike Lunacek, Vice President of the European Parliament, comes from Krems on the Danube, and Heinz Fischer, the Austrian President, is a native of Graz, the capital of the Austrian state of Styria.

  There are always going to be exceptions to the rule. To all those who feel voiceless because they’re far away from the global centres of power, I say: wherever we come from, let’s do our bit to make this world a better place! We can be heroes. We just need to want it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CONCHITA GOES BANKING

  ‘I place my faith in you, I do believe’

  FROM THE MUSICAL SCARLET PIMPERNEL

  If there’s been one word in recent years that’s come to epitomise scandalous conduct, it’s banking. This contrasts with what I learnt at fashion school, which prepared us for a level of self-reliance that would be impossible without the services of a bank. During my schooldays, I had enjoyed researching the history of it all. How many people know that the concept of the trading exchange was born 600 years ago, in a house in Wollestraat in Bruges? Back in the fourteenth century, what enabled this Flemish town to stand out from the other European trading centres was one key advantage it had over Leipzig, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris: an inn run by the van de Beurse family. The family’s coat of arms consisted of three leather purses, and not without reason: this was a place where there was good business to be done. It was somewhere that people traded not in goods, but in information. Who was buying or selling where, what and at what price? This was the idea of the van de Beurse family, and it was a successful one. Theirs was a place where traders could do business without needing to have their wares physically with them. Apart from that, the van de Beurse inn served up Flemish specialities, such as rabbit stew with plums and steamed eel in chervil sauce – and so the trading exchange was born.

  Back at fashion school, I had no idea that, just a few years later, I’d be running a company of my own, a company that now employs over a dozen people. With this responsibility resting on my shoulders, I was forced to address some entirely new questions: how do I finance my business? How can I be a dependable employer for my employees? These were the questions that confronted me in the months after the Eurovision Song Contest. To begin with, we worked in two small rooms in the 20th district of Vienna, where we were quite literally stepping on each other’s toes. With five of us all on the phone at the same time, which was frequently the case, you could hardly hear your own voice. We held our meetings across the counter in a small kitchen. My seat was on the stool in the corner, always within easy reach of the coffee machine. It was here that we discussed and planned until late into the night. One thing was clear: we were going to grow, and if you’re going to grow, you’ll need a new home.

  Our new home was an office close to Vienna’s Millennium Tower, spread out over two floors, with enough space for everyone. The conference room alone is as big as our old office, and we’ve got a kitchen, where we cook together once a week. All of this required a solid financial basis. So, on top of my stage work, interviews and travels around Europe, I also began to have dealings with bankers, the very people who in recent years took the whole world to the brink of disaster. I must admit I was sceptical. But then I learnt that not all bankers are the same. The bankers I got to do business with were not the same as the ones in The Wolf of Wall Street. They were more in line with the old-fashioned image of the bank manager concerned with building up a solid business relationship with his clients.

  When Bank Austria asked me whether I could see myself working more closely with them, I was curious to see what they had in mind. The bank employs more than 7,000 people, and since becoming an employer myself, I now see such figures from a new perspective. In this case, 7,000 employees meant 7,000 individual destinies to shape. What finally won me over was when we talked about the slogan for our cooperation: ‘Working together for a better togetherness’. This spoke to me from the heart. I believe that, while we as individuals can achieve only little, we as a team can achieve a great deal. As long as you’re on the right track, there’s nothing else that can go wrong. The bank was planning a cashback system that rewards customers with automatic permanent discounts.

  ‘Reminds me of when I used to collect money-off coupons with my mother,’ I said.

  ‘The only difference is that it’s now all automatic,’ came the reply.

  This brought us to the crux of the matter. Anyone in Austria using their bank card to pay for goods or services from a partner of Bank Austria will get cash back every month as a reward. In addition, there’s an automatic donation to a social project as part of ‘Working together for a better togetherness’. For me, this closed the circle. Our aim should not be to have, have, have, but to share wherever possible. Of course, it felt a little strange seeing my own face on a bank card and having cardboard effigies of myself at bank branches across the country. ‘Conchita goes banking’ wasn’t exactly what people had expected from me. Then again, neither was seeing me as a businesswoman. I thought back to when I’d left home as a fourteen-year-old to go down a route that wasn’t available where I lived. Setting up my own business belonged in the same category. So it was important to think back to what had driven me then: curiosity, together with love as the basic essence of everything. It’s the same today, and it’ll be the same tomorrow – and the next day, and the next.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE ROAD AHEAD

  ‘So promise me only one thing, would you?’

  FROM THE MUSICAL PROMISES, PROMISES

  Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, known as Yma Sumac, is a female singer I continue to revere even after her death. Born in Peru, she lived for a long time in the Andes, the longest and second-highest chain of mountains in the world. People live high up in this tierra nevada – the land of snow – at altitudes of 4,500 metres and above. Legend has it that it was the thin air up there that gave Yma’s voice its amazing quality. For her, five octaves was nothing, which prompted the US talk show host David Letterman to describe Yma as ‘a miracle of nature’. Yma herself claimed simply to have the lung capacity of someone who lives in the Andes, which happened to be greater than that of other people. Her breakthrough wasn’t long in coming. Soon her name was on everyone’s lips, with a string of artists being inspired by the so-called Nightingale of the Andes. The Coen brothers used her music for their movie The Big Lebowski, while her phenomenal voice also featured in the Cirque du Soleil show Quidam.

  Yma’s reputation even made it into the German-speaking world when her song ‘Xtabay’ was used in the film The Austrian Method. Why am I telling you all this? Because singing is going to carry on being one of my most passionate endeavours in the future, and I’ll revel in upholding the art of the female singers I admire. Whenever I get the chance to meet such artists personally, my heart beats even faster. That’s what it was like when I had the privilege to meet María de los Ángeles Santamaría Espinosa, who in 1968 became the first Spaniard to win the Eurovision Song Contest, under her stage name Massiel. Of course, I was familiar with hits such as ‘Voy a empezar de nuevo’ and ‘Volverán’. I met her forty-six years after her triumph, and she still looked stunning, glamorous, a star.

  Then there’s Patricia Kaas, a French performer I admire not just for her voice, but also for her energy. There aren’t many female singers who subject themselves time and again to the stresses of a world tour. She was even the first Western female singer to perform in Hanoi after the Vietnam War. When I visited her backstage in Vienna, she was alrea
dy in her dressing gown. Obviously, I’d never have asked her for a photo, but she simply turned the situation on its head and took her own selfie of the two of us. Patricia told me how, in 2005, she’d sung her winning song ‘Herz eines Kämpfers’ in the German heat for the Eurovision Song Contest in front of an audience of millions. ‘I spent many years working in Saarbrücken when I was young. Singing in German is easy for me.’ The same goes for Russian, English and, of course, French. It was in that language that she competed in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow. What nicer way to spend my time than in swapping experiences with such incredible female singers, I thought to myself after our meeting.

  Singing is what gives me my greatest pleasure, and when I’m on stage at music events such as the Malta Song Festival or Albania’s Festival i Këngës, I feel in harmony with my inner self. Another thing I’ll keep up is my love of haute couture, perhaps because my grandmother always attached such great importance to a neat appearance. ‘It’s a mark of respect to others,’ she used to tell me. And also because fashion is art on people. When I sing ‘we can be so beautiful’, I mean two things: we can be beautiful from within, like when we shine because we’ve decided on the right path, because we’ve rejected hate and turned to love. Yet we can enhance our inner beauty from without. This is where fashion comes in. That’s its job. That’s why I’m passionate about it. And it’s with this same commitment that I’m going to turn my attention to a third role: politics. I’ll continue to get involved in the effort to highlight injustices and to motivate people to do something about them. It looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.

  EPILOGUE

  The night before the grand final of the Eurovision Song Contest, I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room. My face half free of makeup, I asked myself: ‘Who am I?’ I thought about how I’d be going on stage the following evening, and racked my brain trying to think what I might say in the unlikely event that I won. The question ‘Who am I?’ also tied in to another question that had occupied me since my early childhood: ‘Why am I the one seeing through these eyes?’ ‘Who am I?’ is the philosophical conundrum that has occupied people for thousands of years, and I believe the question about seeing through these eyes can lead us to the answer: when I look at the world through my eyes and with my emotional reactions, that’s what creates my personhood. I want to share four snapshots that have helped piece together the puzzle of who I am.

  I’m eight-years-old, and am looking out through the net curtains in my bedroom onto the garage driveway. Although the first snow has fallen, there are still leaves showing through everywhere. Freeze. I capture the scene and store it away in my brain, where it becomes picture number one.

  Bad Mitterndorf is a musical town where people know how to party. I’m twelve years old, and, like every Wednesday, there’s a concert taking place in the park. My parents are in charge of the catering, and my father has set up a stall to look like a pretty little house. I stand there, gazing into the empty space. And, all of a sudden, I know: this is picture number two.

  We’re driving through a forest, ‘we’ being my grandmother, who’s behind the wheel, my brother, my two cousins and me. Sitting at the window, I spot the deer. I’m the only one who can see it, and I don’t tell any of the others about it – because I know: this is picture number three.

  The night before the Eurovision Song Contest final, I had these three pictures going through my head like a slideshow: click, picture number one. Click, picture number two. Click, picture number three. And, suddenly, I knew: the day I find picture number four, I’ll have the answer to why it’s me seeing through these eyes. On that day, I’ll have the final piece of the puzzle, and I’ll know who I am.

  I really wasn’t expecting to come across picture number four any time soon. The first three pictures are memories from childhood. As far as I was concerned, it might well be late in my life before the missing fourth picture put in an appearance. Even so, absolutely everything had been possible in recent months. I’d experienced more than I could ever have imagined, even in my wildest dreams. And so the inevitable happened. I’d just come from an engagement in Vienna. I don’t remember what it was. As ever, I felt both elated and tired, so I was glad the taxi driver had no problem with my address. There was no ‘Where’s that then?’ or ‘Can you tell me how to get there?’ He simply started his meter and drove off, while I sank into the comfy seat in the back. Soon after, the taxi turned into Ringstrasse, drove along the Stadtpark, and then into Schubertring, a route I’d taken countless times before. At Schwarzenbergplatz, we saw the Hotel Imperial ahead, a magnificent building from the distant past, a former palace of Duke Philipp of Württemberg. My gaze wandered up the facade to the roof, where, fluttering in the breeze, was the red-white-red flag of Austria.

  ‘Why is it fluttering in slow motion?’ I murmured, but the driver didn’t answer, probably because he didn’t know what I was talking about. In that moment I knew: this is picture number four. The Austrian flag. I was surprised at first, I’ll admit. A garage driveway in winter, the empty space in a park, a deer at the edge of a forest – these are images resonating with symbolism for me, yet probably not for most other people. But the Austrian flag, that’s something else. Picture number four is clearly in a different league. Suddenly I was wide-awake, all my tiredness seemed to have vanished. I could sense a feeling of immense joy spreading through my entire body. The flag, the symbol of my country – of course. It’s a place I can call my own: it’s where I was born, where I’m at home, where I live, for better or for worse. I sang for Austria at the Eurovision Song Contest, and I’ll continue to stand up for Austria in the future. I love Europe and its diverse cultures, I’m a citizen of the world through and through, with a place in my heart for all of humanity.

  Yet Austria is and will remain my homeland – and I’m proud of it.

  Copyright

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  ePub ISBN 978 1 78418 705 7

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  Originally published in Germany as Ich, Conchita, Meine Geschichte aufgeschreiben

  und erzuhlt von Daniel Oliver Bachmann © LangenMuller, Munchen, 2015

  This edition published in hardback in 2015

  ISBN: 978 1 78418 649 4

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  © Text copyright Conchita Wurst 2015

  Picture credits: Pages 10 and 11 top, and page 12 top © Julian Laidig Photography

  Back cover, page 8, page 9 top left and page 32 © ORF/Milenko Badzic

  Page 1, 2, 3 top left and right, and page 12 bottom right © Neuwirth Family Archive

  Page 3 bottom © Gri
eshofer Family Archive

  Page 6 bottom © ORF/Thomas Ramstorfer

  Page 24 bottom left ©Pierre et Gilles: Crazy Love, Conchita Wurst, 2014

  Page 25 bottom right © Nathanael Bibring-Pilliot, courtesy of Crazy Horse Paris

  All other photos © TNBR unstoppable GmbH Archive

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  Even with a newborn, you still have to mind the shop. While I was strapped onto my father’s belly it fell to my mother to look after the guests at the youth hostel in Ebensee.

  Occasionally my grandmother would come to visit us, which was always a special occasion.