A Satire on High Society  The stench of sagging flesh

The Opera Ball belongs to Vienna as much as mortar belonged to the construction tycoon Richard Lugner, who died in 2024 and for decades made a media spectacle of being accompanied to the society event by female celebrities. Stefanie Sargnagel has written a deranged satire about her “visit to the haute volée”.

The Viennese writer Stefanie Sargnagel, who first drew attention in the late 2000s with Facebook status updates and tweets on Twitter, has since written several books. Iowa, her autofictional book about a “trip to America”, was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2024. In that same year, she attended the Vienna Opera Ball and first turned the experience into a theatre show and then into a book, a “tour de force on the hardest parquet floor in the world”.

Admittedly, the Vienna Opera Ball is an easy target for mockery; involuntary comedy and self-exposure, including self-embarrassment, are delivered free of charge. But Sargnagel dissects the excesses of this event with particular savagery. Opernball is a ruthless and shameless grotesque, with numerous excursions into the realm of the body and the animal world: “a stench rises from the sagging flesh, … saliva sprays through the beam of the spotlights” and decorations “jingle on men’s bosoms”. Overall, the men look “like mutated poultry: a penguin at the front, a swallow at the back, the bow tie on top, the sparrow underneath”. A grand fairground of vanity, then, with an “atmosphere like a public execution in past centuries”.

The Long Neck as a Breeding Success

This book is teeming with personalities barely known outside Austria. But that hardly matters, as one always enjoys seeing the beautiful and the rich, the tabloid darlings and political celebrities get their comeuppance. For the tabloid press, until the death of the folksy building magnate Richard Lugner, only one thing counted anyway: his annually changing female companion. “All the international public wants to know is whether Lugner’s new girlfriend is called Vogi, Schweindi, Hexi, Schwubsi, Stupsi, Pupsi or Popschi.”

One more warning: it’s not just Austrian high society that comes in for its share, but also Viennese dialect. The on-duty “Kiberer” mutter “fad im Schädl, hocknstad” (Kiberer are police officers, and they are simply bored because there is nothing for them to do at the Opera Ball). The little book is quirky and entertaining and, at not even 80 pages, already over before you know it. It contains delightful witticisms such as: “The greater the differences in power within a society, the more important politeness becomes to gloss over them.” Sargnagel also identifies a physical marker of distinction among aristocratic dynasties that sets them apart from the nouveau riche: “The long neck is a breeding success of the upper classes.”

The ‘People’s Chancellor’ Upside Down in the Chandelier

At Sargnagel’s Opera Ball, all shame and any other boundaries fall away. Cocaine is snorted with abandon. At some point blood is sprayed, and the insane night of dancing mutates into an orgy of disgust. In the end, the “People’s Chancellor” is hanging upside down from the chandelier, urinating into the delighted crowd.

Next up, Sargnagel will be writing about Munich’s Oktoberfest, where excess is certainly no stranger either. Should she one day venture onto the political parquet, the Munich Security Conference, a G7 summit or the World Economic Forum in Davos would be suitable candidates. Access to these major political events might prove more difficult for Sargnagel, but perhaps the same rule applies there too: “The artist is the only scoundrel allowed to change class.”

April 2026