A Swiss is the girl rapist of Vienna. Switzerland knows nothing about it

The Swiss are beautiful. With his finely sculpted, slightly androgynous face, he resembles the Italian silent movie star Rudolph Valentino, who drove both women and men crazy in Hollywood. The Swiss is 31, his name is Alfred Lohner and he is the big star at the Burgtheater in Vienna, playing Romeo, Hamlet and all the other young heroes of the heart.

He was arrested on February 14, 1933. Vienna is in shock. Lohner is said to have abused numerous underage girls. To schoolgirls, daughters of friends, girls from the better Viennese society. The principal of a girls’ school and parents have contacted the police, who are hesitant to investigate, but they do and the suspect has confessed.

His protective claim is that he did not know the ages of his victims. He also claims that 12-year-olds were considered 14-year-olds and thus were under the age of consent for consensual sex acts. He is sentenced to five months in prison. The Burgtheater fires him because he is no longer acceptable to the “sensitive audience”. After his release, he first accepted some engagements in the German-language theaters in Czechoslovakia, before returning to Switzerland in 1938 with his wife Annelies, who was barely twenty years old.

Austrian historian Peter Melichar compiled the Lohner case for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the interesting thing is how Lohner tried to control his public image. He hired two relatively old men for this, the Burgtheater colleague Otto Tressler (60), but especially the publicist and hunter Felix Salten (61).

Salten once had a questionable reputation as a journalist because large parts of his articles – for example about an earthquake in San Francisco – turned out to be pure fabrications. But then he managed to become a world bestseller with the fawn tragedy “Bambi”, which would become one of the first full-length Disney films in 1942, and Salten’s popularity was ensured.

He was also considered an expert pornographer. In 1906, the novel “Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Wench Wench Told by Herself” was published, the author remained anonymous, all of Vienna was sure that his name was Felix Salten, but Salten said nothing. Not no and not yes. “Josefine Mutzenbacher” is the story of a prostitute who was abused as a sex toy at the age of five and learned as a child to seduce and satisfy adults. The whole thing is camouflaged as a self-empowerment story from a woman who has always been sexually confident.

In Germany, between 1982 and 2017, the book was on the index for writings harmful to young people because of child pornography and was banned. Although Salten did not claim responsibility for the book, his estate contained a manuscript similar in style and content, and his descendants demanded royalties for “Josefine Mutzenbacher” with extraordinary speed.

In the case of Lohner, Salten now presents himself as the author of “Josefine Mutzenbacher”, as an expert in the erotic and sexual potency of underage girls. In sympathy with Tressler, who speaks of the “difficulties” of actors falling into the greedy hands of young girls, in an article titled “Little Girl Trial” he conjures up Lohner as the poor victim of his siren-like groupies who “Seduction of overly annoying, overly pushy young girls».

The strategy worked. Other journalists agreed with the two. Everyone was to blame, the parents, the upbringing, the girls, the creative milieu – except Lohner. There is talk of ‘mass psychosis’. And what should someone do if his job gives him such an erotic look?

Switzerland does not notice or does not want to know. Here Lohner lays out his own heroic story as an anti-fascist who could no longer hold out in Austria. An obituary in the Badener New Year’s Leaves, which appeared in 1992, two years after Lohner’s death, says: “In Vienna, the audience only went to the theater because of the actors, and the actors were at least as important as the ministers of state. Yet Lohner left Vienna when the brown hordes began to gain the upper hand here too. Once he and a colleague tried to stop a Nazi torchlight procession; the only thing that saved the two of them from the awkward and threatening situation, literally against the wall printed was the Iron Cross, which the colleague happened to have with him».

It sounds like someone was urgently trying to join the community of exiled artists who were actually threatened by the Nazis, such as those who were very present at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. His friend Salten, whose real name was Siegmund Salzmann, was also one of them. He died in poverty in Zurich in October 1945. In 1950, a cooperative in Oberstrass dedicated the Bambi fountain to him.

In Switzerland, Lohner did a lot of theater and made films, but he was no longer a star here, his acting ideal was too “classic”, too “dramatic”, he hated newer plays and staging styles, hated authors like Beckett and Ionesco . Only in Vienna was he celebrated, where after the war, as before, he received standing ovations as a guest at the Burgtheater.

On the other hand, his wife Annelies, born in Bavaria, is celebrated. In Switzerland she discovered her feeling for the mountains. She learned mountaineering from a prominent mountain guide in Zermatt and organized a Himalayan expedition in 1947, including a first ascent. Before leaving, she tells in the “Echo der Zeit” that she has climbed about three dozen four-thousanders in recent years, as well as the Matterhorn from all four sides. In the Himalayas, she will be responsible for communications, press work, and needle and thread repairs.

When she leaves for the Himalayas for the second time in 1949, the Swiss press is at her feet. The NZZ can’t get enough of her descriptions of wild swarms of bees and insects that plagued her during the first expedition: wants to achieve new mountaineering achievements. Let’s hope she can hoist the home flag healthy on some conquered peaks!” Her colleagues affectionately call her “Gemsli”.

During the months-long tours she falls in love with another Alfred, the Thurgau industrialist Alfred Sutter. It is unclear when she will divorce Alfred Lohner and marry Sutter, but as early as 1951 the two had a beautiful white villa built in Münchwilen in Thurgau, which is still an idyllic destination today. Anneliese dies in 2012 at the age of 94.

Lohner has been dead for 22 years, most recently being an avid fan of Ronald Reagan, reciting poems to longtime fans and ranting against every possible religion, especially Islam. Until the end he kept to himself why he had to leave the Burgtheater.