Opernball (1998)

It is February in Vienna, and the Opera Ball, the annual social highlight for the upper echelons of society, is being held at the Vienna State Opera. Outside the entrance, the almost traditional Opera Ball demonstration is underway, led by anti-capitalist activists. This year, following earlier provocations between the opposing sides in the media, the crowd is especially agitated, and the police can barely keep it under control. Kurt Frazer, who works as a transmission director for a French television network broadcasting across Europe—since the ORF was denied the broadcast rights for the first time—repeatedly interrupts the coverage with footage from the “front,” where the young reporter Gabrielle Becker is reporting from right in the middle of the turmoil. The demonstration spirals out of control, and rioting breaks out. The crowd storms the Opera Passage, where the police surround them, while troublemakers hurl Molotov cocktails into the crowd. There are numerous injuries on both sides, and Gabrielle Becker nearly gets caught between the opposing sides. While all of the city’s police and special-response forces are focused on the rioting, a masked group approaches the State Opera’s central ventilation system through sewers and ventilation shafts. Meanwhile, Kurt Frazer’s television network is broadcasting from inside the Opera, where a celebrity being interviewed makes fun of the demonstrators, but suddenly feels a tickle in his throat and can speak only with increasingly severe coughing, until he is barely intelligible. Suddenly, people begin coughing en masse throughout large parts of the Opera—the roughly 4,000 to 5,000 visitors panic. The orchestra can barely play either and collapses within seconds. The ballgoers rush toward the exits, but most do not get anywhere near them: the poison gas that has been released takes effect quickly, knocking people to the ground one after another and killing them. Rescue workers wearing gas masks pull a few people out of the Opera building, but they are hopelessly overwhelmed. The next day, the police hold a press conference and announce that more than 3,000 people were killed by hydrogen cyanide. They proudly declare that the perpetrators have already been identified, since five of them were found dead beside the gas cylinders. Questions from journalists about the motives, background, people behind the attack, and whether there had been any advance warnings supposedly cannot be answered. Kurt Frazer, who lost his son, a cameraman, in the attack, decides to investigate the matter himself. Kurt Frazer learns of a conspiracy group that calls itself Die Volkstreuen (The Loyalists). The group, previously known as the Bewegung der Volksdeutschen (Movement of Ethnic Germans), is motivated by a Nazi ideology. Its leader is a racist described as a Mormon, with a spiritual bent. He considers his group “chosen” and pursues the goal of a racially pure country. Unlike Feilböck, who also claims the right to lead, he vehemently rejects contact with other neo-Nazi groups, judging their methods primitive and ineffective. A conflict breaks out between Feilböck and the Mormon, ending to Feilböck’s disadvantage: the little finger of his right hand, bearing the group’s tattoo, is chopped off because he is no longer considered worthy of wearing it. All this took place two years before the attack. Feilböck then fled to the police, where he intended to testify about the planned attack on the Opera Ball, but demanded immunity from prosecution in return, which the police could not or would not grant him. He then disappeared without a trace, and the police did nothing. Together with his colleague, Kurt Frazer gets closer and closer to uncovering the group. At an estate in Mallorca, he meets the organisation’s last surviving member. Kurt Frazer persuades the young man, known as the Engineer, to recount the story and background on tape. It emerges that a high-ranking member of the Vienna police knew about the group’s plans, but grossly underestimated how dangerous they were. During the interview, the Engineer realises that it is no coincidence that he is the only one who survived. The Mormon had chosen him as the new Chosen One. The attackers’ deaths in the attack were no accident either. The Mormon regarded their deaths as a sacrifice. He told his accomplices that the gas cylinders contained only carbon monoxide, so they had no fear of dying in the attack. The Engineer flies into a rage, feeling unequal to the burden he now carries. He shoots Kurt Frazer first, then turns the gun on himself. A speech by a senior military officer and statements of his own make clear why the high-ranking police officer who knew about the plans tolerated the activities of Die Volkstreuen and even let the Mormon stay in one of his apartments before the attack: a constant threat to the population was supposed to lead to a drastic strengthening of the state security apparatus, apparently within a very nationalist framework. Several brief scenes show a rally led by the former police officer’s successor, beneath Austrian flags, with an audience consisting only of police officers, soldiers, and snipers positioned on the roof. When Frazer returns to Vienna, the police arrest him at the airport. The tapes, which also contain incriminating material against the police officer, are to be seized and destroyed. The officer in question personally takes the tapes from him and then lets Frazer go. However, they are the wrong tapes, and Frazer is able to hand the right ones to his young colleague. He advises her to “make a real impact” and not let herself be intimidated. Her time has come to prove herself as a journalist, and she is capable of it. He himself, now also abandoned by his English-speaking wife, has been banned from staying in Austria, so he travels on to Rome to visit an acquaintance, where he hopes to begin a new life without covering disasters and wars.