1957: "Wohin, kleines Pony?" — Bob Martin

Austria competed in the Grand Prix d’Eurovision for the first time in 1957. The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) sent Bob Martin (Leo Heppe) to the European pop music contest with the song Wohin, kleines Pony? (Where To, Little Pony?), written by Kurt Svab and Hans Werner.

In the song, the singer light-heartedly rides his little pony over moors, fields and valleys. They are a “carefree” pair and are enjoying the world: “Who else sees the world as so beautiful. As beautiful as we see it?” A little more than a decade after the end of the Nazi regime, as Austria stepped onto the European stage of televised music, it presented itself in a way that was, tellingly, infantilising and markedly unburdened by the past. Days gone by, or memories of them—as evoked by All the golden dreams of yesterday in the UK song (Patricia Bredin: All), for example, or the entries of Switzerland (Lys Assia: L’enfant que j’étais (The Child I Was) and Luxembourg (Danièle Dupré: Tant de peine (So Much Pain)—were absent from the Austrian entry: it looked only towards the future. The song finished in last place.