Willi Resetarits

Willi Resetarits was an Austrian singer, musician and actor, best known as Ostbahn-Kurti, the rock and rhythm and blues character he played for twenty years. He was a Burgenland Croat, born Wilhelm Resetarits on 21 December 1948 in Stinatz (Stinjaki in Croatian), a Croatian-speaking village in the Austrian state of Burgenland. That is why he is on Muzika-Balkan: by his own account he only began to speak German at three and a half, after the family moved to Vienna in 1952. He grew up in the Favoriten district of Vienna, lived there all his life, and died in Vienna on 24 April 2022, aged 73, after a fall on the stairs at home. He was buried in an honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

He sang in school bands such as The Odds, studied English and sport at the University of Vienna to become a teacher, and gave that up when music took over. In 1969 he joined the band Schmetterlinge, with whom he represented Austria at the Eurovision Song Contest 1977 in London with "Boom-Boom-Boomerang".

From the mid-1980s he became Dr. Kurt Ostbahn, a figure invented by the writer Günter Brödl. With Ostbahn-Kurti & die Chefpartie, and later with Kurt Ostbahn & die Kombo, he recorded several albums of rock, blues and rhythm and blues songs translated into Viennese and played big concerts for years. From 1995 to 1998 he hosted the radio show Trost und Rat von und mit Dr. Kurt Ostbahn on Radio Wien. After Brödl died in 2000, Resetarits sent the character into retirement at the end of 2003, apart from a few memorial concerts.

He kept making very different music. With Stubnblues he mixed folk songs in German and Croatian with blues, Viennese songs and poems set to music, and he toured with the Kurdish singer Şivan Perwer. In 2009 he recorded the album ohne di with Ernst Molden, and later joined Molden, Walter Soyka and Hannes Wirth in a quartet; their album Schdean came out in 2021. He received the Amadeus Austrian Music Award for his life's work in 2017. His brothers are the cabaret artist Lukas Resetarits and the TV presenter Peter Resetarits.