Fritz Ostermayer
Fritz Ostermayer, Vienna, 4 May 2026
“I’ve always been a truffle pig.”
As a nonathletic boarding school student in the mid-1960s, Fritz Ostermayer was free to give himself over fully to masterpieces by Soft Machine and The Velvet Underground along with other sophisticated pop and rock music quite early on in his life. “This music was more than just itself.” It was thus that an interest in Jim Morrison brought him to Rimbaud and Baudelaire—and to this day, Ostermayer has stayed curious and remained true to his tendency to “root around” for new discoveries. In this conversation, the self-described presenter, musician, and former Vienna Poetry School head talks about his first times behind the microphone on the legendary Ö3 radio show “Musicbox,” his current cult show “Im Sumpf” [In the Swamp], his experiences as “a preacher for the love of it,” his writer’s-block-inducing respect for authors, and how one can indeed enrich Viennese Actionism and other performance art formats with a certain lack of reverence. “The professional,” says Fritz Ostermayer in a paraphrase of Brian Eno, “has only one path, but the dilettante has access to infinitely many.”
“I’ve always been a truffle pig.”
As a nonathletic boarding school student in the mid-1960s, Fritz Ostermayer was free to give himself over fully to masterpieces by Soft Machine and The Velvet Underground along with other sophisticated pop and rock music quite early on in his life. “This music was more than just itself.” It was thus that an interest in Jim Morrison brought him to Rimbaud and Baudelaire—and to this day, Ostermayer has stayed curious and remained true to his tendency to “root around” for new discoveries. In this conversation, the self-described presenter, musician, and former Vienna Poetry School head talks about his first times behind the microphone on the legendary Ö3 radio show “Musicbox,” his current cult show “Im Sumpf” [In the Swamp], his experiences as “a preacher for the love of it,” his writer’s-block-inducing respect for authors, and how one can indeed enrich Viennese Actionism and other performance art formats with a certain lack of reverence. “The professional,” says Fritz Ostermayer in a paraphrase of Brian Eno, “has only one path, but the dilettante has access to infinitely many.”