Ecology and Crisis

In 1871, the term nature conservation was first used in Germany. That same year one of the pioneers of German nature conservation was born: Benno Wolf. While employed first of all as a judge in Berlin from 1912 onward, he also worked for the State Office for the Preservation of Natural Monuments in Prussia, initially as a volunteer, and from 1915 on a full-time basis. Wolf’s drafts for an act for the preservation of nature were groundbreaking, such as for the “Feld- und Forstordnungsgesetz” (Field and Forest Ordinance Law) of 1920, which created the possibility, for the very first time, of designating nature conservation areas. His second passion was the exploration of caves. The Nazis defined nature conservation as the protection of people and their homeland—to the exclusion of those who were not considered “Volksgenossen” (fellow Germans). Wolf had to resign from his official positions after the Nazis seized power in 1933 due to his Jewish roots. His preparatory work, used anonymously, found its way into the formulation of the Reich Nature Conservation Act of 1935. His archival material on caves that was of importance to the underground armaments industry, was confiscated by the SS “Ahnenerbe” (ancestral heritage division). Wolf himself was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942, where he died as a result of the inhumane prison conditions. Decades passed before his achievements in the field of nature conservation and speleology were recognized.

^ Benno Wolf, about 1930, © Verband der deutschen Höhlen- und Karstforscher

< Benno Wolf, Das Recht der Naturdenkmalpflege in Deutschland, Berlin 1920

Map of the Green Belt and map of Europe with the Iron Curtain, Collage: Atelier Stecher, Götzis; © European Green Belt bzw. Michael Cramer

The Nazi “blood and soil” ideology in nature conservation was passed on after 1945. It is even to be found, thinly veiled, in some new environmental movements. Not only occultism that has become topical once again, but also renewed forms of nationalism and militarization pose a threat to environmental protection and nature conservation. In the 1970s, a growing biodiversity could be seen in the no-man’s-land along the Iron Curtain. The death strip between East and West had become an important ecological habitat. As a result, nature conservationists and environmentalists met on the Bavarian-Czechoslovakian border on December 9, 1989, and demanded the protection of the “Green Belt.” In 2002, all the countries bordering the former Iron Curtain joined forces. As a network of biotopes, now the world’s longest, the “Green Belt” extends over a length of 12,500 km along 24 European countries, 16 of which are EU members, from the Norwegian Arctic Sea to the Black Sea. However, since the outbreak of the war in the Ukraine, the long border between Finland and Russia is once again threatened with becoming a military deployment area. Europe has a responsibility to ensure that ecology and social justice for all, democracy, human rights and peace cannot be played off against each other.

Ariel Brunner, in conversation with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, on “The EU’s responsibility in view of the ecological crisis”, Hohenems, October 5, 2020

Hilde Meisel – Hilda Olday – Hilda Monte: The Unity of Europe

European Diary, 17.4.2021: Today, 76 years ago, Hilda Monte was shot, close to the checkpoint Tisis, at the border between Feldkirch and Liechtenstein.

Hilda Monte was born Hilde Meisel in Vienna on July 31, 1914. In 1915, she and her family — her parents, Rosa and Ernst Meisel and her older sister Margot — moved to Berlin, where her father ran an import-export business. While still a teenager, she joined the International Socialist Fighting League (Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, or ISK in German), a group founded by German philosopher Leonard Nelson in 1926.

Hilda Monte

In 1929, Hilde traveled to England for the first time to visit her uncle, the composer Edmund Meisel. In 1932 she moved to Paris. She regularly published analyses of the political and economic situation in England, France and Germany, Spain and the colonies. She spent 1933 and 1934 in the German Reich before emigrating again to Paris in 1934 and to London in 1936. She continued to travel illegally to the German Reich several times after that, helping organize workers’ resistance actions. In 1938, in order to prevent her expulsion from England, she entered into a marriage of convenience with the German-British cartoonist John Olday, becoming a British citizen.

During the war, she remained involved in a wide variety of resistance activities, whether as a courier for the International Transport Workers’ Federation or on behalf of Allied intelligence services. In 1940, her book How to conquer Hitler, co-authored with Fritz Eberhard, was published. In the same year, she was involved in the creation of the radio station ” European Revolution” and worked regularly for the German workers’ broadcasts of the BBC. In 1942, she gave a shocking report on the radio about the mass extermination of Jews that had begun in occupied Poland. And she wrote Poems and worked on her novel Where Freedom Perished, that was published only in 1947.

In 1943, her book The Unity of Europe was published in London, in which she developed the vision of a socialist Europe and its common institutions as an independent union between the USA and the Soviet Union. In 1944, together with her friend and ISK comrade Anna Beyer, she was parachuted over occupied France to make resistance contacts on behalf of the American intelligence service OSS and Austrian socialists. Soon after, she was taken to Switzerland by René and Hanna Bertholet, were they discussed political theories with socialist émigrés for the period after liberation. When she had time for it, Hilda Monte contemplated the idea to go to China to engage in the development of socialist cooperatives – and produced little sculptures from clay.

In April 1945, Hilda Monte again crossed the border illegally to establish contact with socialists in Vorarlberg and to gather information about resistance groups there and their relationship to each other. A questionnaire she had prepared for this purpose is now in the archives of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn.

On her way back, she was stopped by the border guard in Feldkirch on April 17, 1945, a few days before the end of the war. She tried to escape but was shot and died of her injury on the spot. Austrian socialists placed a tombstone on her grave with the inscription: “Here rests our unforgettable comrade Hilde Monte-Olday. Born 31.7. 1914 in Vienna. Died 17.4.1945 in Feldkirch. She lived and died in the service of the socialist idea.”

After the war, many of her comrades became prominent members of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, pioneers of the emerging European Union and founders of intellectual periodicals, educational institutions and publishing houses, such as the Europäische Verlagsanstalt.

Hilda Monte, born at the beginning of World War I and shot to death a few days before the second one ended, did not live to that.

Today, representatives of the Protestant congregation of Feldkirch, the Jewish Museum Hohenems and the Social Democratic Party of Austria inaugurated a memorial plaque next to her recently restored grave.

Hilda Monte’s grave in Feldkirch

The Limits of Tirol

European diary, 11.2.2021: The mind shift came as a surprise. And one does not quite believe in it yet. Even on the weekend, one heard from Innsbruck mainly strong language and threats against Vienna. More precisely, against the (Green) Ministry of Health. And manifold attempts to somehow resist with embellished figures the recognition of the fact that in the Tyrolean district of Schwaz and especially in the Zillertal a South African and apparently particularly vicious mutation of the Corona virus is rampant, with the highest numbers in Europe.

Once again, the Austrian chancellor seemed to be ripping off his coalition “partner” and kept nobly silent about the Tyrolean rides. There was talk of an unsuccessful call in Innsbruck. That was it for now.

“Then you will get to know us” was what Tyrol’s Chamber of Commerce President Walser told those evil Viennese who demanded quarantine measures – and on the Austrian TV news ZIB 2 on Monday, as a bonus, so to speak, to the rantings of the weekend, he also presented his epidemiological “expertise” on the events of Ischgl.

It will soon be a year since the small town in Paznaun became the super-spreader of the new virus. How this happened has now been clarified to some extent. It was covered up and lied about as long as it somehow worked out. Until thousands of Corona-infected people from Bavaria to Iceland were detected as a result of careless après-ski. And then it was silent.
But that is, so Walser nevertheless not at all the crucial question. It was not yet known “from where” the virus had been brought to Ischgl. Had anyone claimed that the Tyroleans had bred the virus in a snow cannon?

Walser’s complaint about Tyrol bashing somehow sounded disturbingly familiar. As if politicians and business officials had learned nothing from the disaster, even a year later, other than that someone else always has to be to blame.

Meanwhile, borders are now being controlled again. Bavaria is planning to close the borders to Tyrol. Austria did not want to stand back there and controlled already on Monday with demonstrative stringency incoming and above all commuters at the border between Lindau and Bregenz, even if the so-called “incidence” in Lindau is only half as high as in the neighboring Vorarlberg. But even so, one can give the impression that everything dangerous basically comes from the outside.

It is clear that the Tyrolean hospitality industry and even more so the cable car industry are facing an existential crisis in the wake of the pandemic. In this situation, taking a golf vacation in South Africa, as one Zillertal hotelier did, is not really confidence-building. News about illegal lodgings and parties, ski instructor courses with clusters of mutations and tricky registrations of second residences are equally untrustworthy. And then the powerful chairman of the Economic Association and ÖVP National Councilor Franz Hörl, the head of the legendary “Adlerrunde” that calls the shots in Tyrol – himself infected by the British mutation – goes into quarantine without having a clue where he got it. Shouldn’t one worry about whether dangerous recklessness is still at work in Tyrol? Above all, self-pity. According to Governor Platter, one should finally stop pointing the finger at Tyrol.
As it says on Franz Hörl’s website? “Tyrol goes first.” Classic populism sounds like that. You always go first yourself.
But today it sounds somehow misleading. It goes on to say: “When Franz Hörl steps onto the scene, speed is the order of the day. At times he seems to double up, appearing in parallel” … “Franz is on the spot. Especially when there’s a fire. (…) That’s the only way to do politics that helps.” And: “Hörl talks Tyrol”. That sounds like this: The travel warning issued on Monday against Tyrol, was – so Hörl on Monday – a “burp from Vienna”.

A megalomaniac is speaking, a “macher” who wants to embody the balancing act between “host” and cable car industrialist, between a “mensch” and a functionary, and who can do this as long as he is successful. And he can’t do one thing that is particularly needed at the moment. To question himself and his actions once in a while.
Someone has now finally stepped on the emergency brake. Anyone leaving Tyrol as of Friday will now need an up-to-date Corona test.

Perhaps the chancellor has called his party colleague Platter once again. The instinct to know when a story is about to fall on his feet has apparently not yet completely left Mr. Kurz. But at that point the “speed” may already have been a bit lacking.

Bosnian New Year

European Diary, 2.1.2021: The European crimes against refugees are richer by one facet. For many months, Croatia in particular has been protecting “our” external borders in an illegal but effective manner. Refugees who manage to get to – and across – the Croatian border via Bosnia, for example, are forcibly pushed back again before they can exercise their right to apply for asylum. While this violates European and international law, even the European Court of Human Rights now looks resignedly (or cynically?) under the table when it comes to European “border protection.” Many of the refugees were initially accommodated in the Bira camp in the town of Bihac, then after “protests from the population”, which are now cheaper to buy in Bosnia than bread rolls, they were shipped in September to a tent camp provisionally set up by the army in “the middle of nowhere”, in Lipa. There, international aid organizations were allowed to take care of the stranded people. The Bosnian authorities promised to connect the improvised camp to electricity and water supplies to make it “winter-proof.” But nothing of the sort happened. Out of sight out of mind.
At the end of December, the frost came. But still no possibility to heat the camp, still no electricity, no water. Nothing at all. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) decided to close the camp, where people would otherwise have frozen to death in the onset of winter. And during the evacuation, some refugees set fire to the ramshackle tents they thought they were finally leaving behind.
Negotiations were made with Bosnian authorities to return the refugees to the Bira camp in Bihac or to barracks in other parts of the country. But local politicians announced that there were “protests from the population.” So 900 people spent the Christmas days in the open. Then, however, the evacuation of the homeless camped refugees was on the agenda. 500 of them were loaded onto buses at the end of the year. And they were stuck there. Because the buses did not run. Local and regional politicians bow to the “protests from the population,” which they themselves have done their best to stir up. And the Republika Srpska is not accepting anyone anyway. After all,”it is the Bosniak Muslims who have brought the migrants into the country”. Whatever is meant by this, this populist slogan always gets through. Any attempt by the central government in Sarajevo to enforce law and order (and in this case that means humane accommodation for the refugees) is thus doomed to failure.

So 500 people spent the last two days of the year in unheated buses. For 24 hours. Then they were let off again. They spent New Year’s Eve in the open air. On New Year’s Day, the Red Cross took care of them. Austria promises “help on the spot”. The Bosnian army puts up tents again. There are plenty of tents. Unheatable, like the ones before. The cynical game continues. The winter too.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Ischgl 2.0 ?

European Diary, 29.11.2020: Austria has managed to get to the top again, this time not as a poster boy for anti-corona measures, but as a corona hotspot together with France and Italy. The number of corona victims in all three countries now exceeds the record number of deaths in the USA in relative terms.

What is being discussed in Italy and France, in Belgium and in Germany? How to prevent Christmas and ski tourism from undoing the hesitant success of the second lockdown. After all, Austria was already at the top, in the production of contagions and in the impudence with which one first wanted to cover them up, then play them down and then forget them. To this day, Austria, Ischgl and Tyrol, those responsible for the disaster have never apologized to anyone, even though the small town in the Paznaun valley was the most infectious place in Europe during the first corona wave of the year. And this for reasons that have not changed at all to this day: the budding of a few “real men” in the cable car business and in politics, who have not yet understood that economic success also goes hand in hand with growing responsibility. And probably with a few other things as well.

So now the Bavarians and the Italians and the French are thinking about how to slow down and postpone skiing and everything that goes with it this winter. And they still remember very well that Austria was one of the first states to make some borders tighter again with travel warnings and quarantine threats. As Chancellor Kurz said so beautifully on August 16: “The virus comes to Austria by car.

What is being discussed in Austria? Whether the ski resorts should be allowed to open again as early as next week. And Finance Minister Blümel already knows who should pay if the tourists from Germany and Italy, from France and Switzerland simply don’t come. The EU, of course. He has not yet revealed why “the EU” should do this. Neither can the EU close ski resorts in Austria, nor force the Germans to ski in Ischgl. But it should pay.

Bunker in the Fall

European diary, 29.10.2020: It is now possible to book guided tours of the bunker. As museum people we want to have a look at it, of course. And as Europeans.
In Switzerland, in South Tyrol… everywhere bunkers open their hidden entrances. People are only interested in it because it is bizarre. Or do the bunkers already fit into our time again? Autumn mood prevails everywhere. Instead of the winter season, everyone is waiting to see how high the second wave will be. Everybody bunkers in.
Above the Swiss border town of St. Margrethen, where the Alpine Rhine flows into Lake Constance, the former Heldsberg Fortress is hidden behind a few dummies of single-family homes on the mountainside. Instead of petty bourgeois idyll, cannons and machine guns wait there behind false curtains. And miles and miles of corridors, between crew rooms, field hospital, canteen and turbines for autonomous power supply. That should be enough for two weeks of siege, the museum guide tells us.
In the South Tyrolean Vinschgau Valley, the bunkers lie around on the green meadows, as if one had forgotten to pick them up. Here, too, they have adapted a little to the prevailing idyll, are overgrown, the concrete is slowly deteriorating, cracks are appearing.
When people in Berlin were still fervently singing “from the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt”, Mussolini prepared himself for the Germans to take these things seriously. And set up his guard at the Brenner Pass below the Reschen as well. Nothing came of the war between fascists and Nazis after all. In 1937, the Italian fascists instead passed their anti-Semitic Jewish laws and soon expected more advantages from going out with the Nazis to conquer the world.
Today, the Adige river rushes past the remnants of this rare example of a somehow missed war as if nothing had happened. Past the battlefields of the First World War, which took place two thousand meters higher and killed thousands of people here at Ortler, mainly by cold. And also past the meadows along the Calven, where long before that, in 1499, an army from the Grisons had driven the Austrian armies to flight. The peace-loving “Swiss” bypassed the Habsburgs and cleverly stabbed them in the back. After a few thousand soldiers were killed and the Habsburg mercenaries ran away in panic, the Grisons massacred the local population. The attempts of the hated Habsburgs to retain their influence in the areas of what would later become Switzerland were soon over.
Everywhere grass grows here, colorful autumn leaves fall over the battlefields, the bloody slaughters, as well as the fascist muscle games. Even the cannons behind the false curtains in Heldsberg are only there for the pleasure of the visitors, who are allowed to do target practice with them. On Bregenz, Lustenau and Hohenems, across the border. A strange anxiety does not fail to appear when one’s own place of life appears so sharply in the riflescope. From there, from Hohenems or Bregenz, the Swiss expected a possible German attack from 1938 on.
Despite all the nationalist flaming, despite all the paralyzing eccentricity in dealing with the pandemic, despite all the outdoing in the new discipline of political coldness when it comes to solidarity with those seeking protection: when walking along the Adige river, between the fascist bunkers and early modern battlefields, all this may seem surreal. An optimistic autumn mood, so to speak.

“like a ship bringing the plague to Europe”?

European Diary, 3.10.2020: In Catania, the trial against the Italian ex-Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini for deprivation of liberty begins today with the hearing of the radical right-wing leader, who is now in opposition. In July 2019, Salvini had refused a ship of the Italian coast guard entry into the port of Augusta in Sicily. The ship carried 131 boat refugees rescued from maritime distress. The competent court in Catania considered this a crime of deprivation of liberty, punishable by a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. In February, a majority of the Roman Senate voted to lift Salvini’s immunity – when the coalition between Salvini’s right-wing Lega Nord and the Five-Star Movement was already history. Salvini, who crashed in the polls in the wake of the Corona crisis, is in any case using the process for his permanent election campaign. For days he has been mobilizing in Sicily with flaming speeches and Verdi arias from the tape. “Vincerò” – “I will win”. He had only defended the borders and the honor of Italy by taking 130 people hostage in his right-wing extremist politics. A conviction of Salvini is nevertheless considered unlikely – and so the trial will probably also help him to work on his comeback.

European Diary, 3.10.2019: The captain of the sea rescue vessel Sea-Watch 3, Carola Rackete, today gave a speech to the European Parliament in Brussels, at a hearing of the Committee on Home Affairs – and received a standing ovation from part of the MEPs. The Austrian Broadcast ORF reported in detail about this unusual event on the same day:

“‘I was received like a ship bringing the plague to Europe,’ Rackete said on Thursday in the Parliament’s Committee on Internal Affairs. ‘It was hard to be an EU citizen these days. I was ashamed.’

Rackete’s hearing took place on the sixth anniversary of the Lampedusa refugee tragedy in which 366 people died. While the deputies commemorated the tragedy with a minute’s silence, Rackete stressed that not much has changed since then.

The German activist vividly described her experiences as a rescuer at sea, for example when her ship hit a wreck around which bodies were floating. Some had held each other in their arms as they died, ‘the bodies inseparably connected’. She also saw three children ‘holding the body of a baby in their arms. Then some sang for this baby and rocked it as if it was still alive.

None of these experiences were as bad as the ‘frustration’ of spending 70 days with rescued people on the Sea-Watch 3 in the Mediterranean ‘and explaining to people that Europe didn’t want them, Europe, the symbol of human rights’. In this context, Rackete once again defended her decision to go to the port of Lampedusa. This was not a provocation’, said Rackete. ‘I should have done it much earlier’, said Rackete, referring to the protection of human life. ‘Yes, I would do it again any time. People die every day, of course I would do it again,’ she later replied to a corresponding question.

When she landed in Lampedusa against the will of the Italian government, she received ‘a lot of unwanted attention’, Rackete told the MPs. But where were you when we called for help through all possible channels, where were you when we asked for a safe place? If we are really concerned about torture in Libya, Europe must stop cooperating with the Libyan coast guard,’ Rackete demanded, to the applause of the MEPs.

Six years have passed and instead of avoiding similar tragedies, the EU has externalised its responsibilities and delegated them to Libya in violation of international law. But there is ‘hope’, namely the actions of civil society organizations.

Rackete called for a radical change in the way migration is handled. A reform of Dublin is ‘long overdue’, she said, and humanitarian corridors and safe and legal routes to Europe are needed. A landing of rescued persons must be in accordance with the law and must not be left to ad hoc negotiations.

‘After my arrest, there was great interest in sea rescue. I hope that this will be reflected in the deeds. I hope for real progress and not that it will become even more difficult for me and many organizations,’ said Rackete. ‘We must be careful about what is negotiated in the coming weeks and make sure that our demands are enforced,’ she urged MEPs.

At the hearing, representatives of Frontex, the EU Commission, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency and Italian coast guard captain Andrea Tassara made it clear that the rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean should not be criminalized. However, differences emerged during the debate. Conservative members of parliament insisted on putting a stop to the smugglers. Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri repeatedly avoided the question of whether he considers Libya a safe third country.

The Director for Migration of the EU Commission, Michael Shotter, pointed out that since June more than 1,000 people have already been able to land and have been distributed to other member states and Norway in ad hoc actions. ‘We now need a reliable and continuous search and rescue operation instead of ad hoc actions,’ said Shotter. It is therefore ‘important’ that after the Malta agreement, other member states participate and show ‘solidarity’.

The chairman of the interior committee, Spanish Socialist Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, also insisted on clear rules that prevent the criminalization of sea rescue. The committee will draft a resolution on this issue, which will be adopted at the next plenary session of the European Parliament.

MEPs from right-wing populist parties, such as the Slovakian Milan Uhrik, who himself suggested that Rackete himself should leave for Africa, countered this. I can only identify with Salvini, who says you should be in prison,’ said the member of parliament for the ‘People’s Party – Our Slovakia’. The German right-wing populist Nicolas Fest followed up by asking Rackete if she considers it part of her mission to ‘endanger the lives of Europeans by infiltrating torturers and terrorists’. In the debate, ÖVP delegation leader Karoline Edtstadler voiced little veiled criticism of the activities of the sea rescue workers. I simply wonder how we are going to end this business if the rescue is still the ticket to Europe,” said the former state secretary on the question of the ‘pull factor’ of rescue operations. The EU should not allow itself to be ‘divided into good and bad states’, Edtstadler demanded the establishment of a system ‘that does not play into the hands of the wrong people’.

SPÖ MEP Bettina Vollath demanded an end to the criminalization of sea rescue workers. It can never and under no circumstances be criminal to help people in need, but it is a moral and legal obligation,” she emphasized in a statement referring to current figures of the United Nations, according to which this year already more than 1,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and since the beginning of 2014 more than 15,000 people. ‘Legal entry routes, fast and legally secure procedures and local help are needed to combat the causes of flight’, she stressed.

Monika Vana, head of the Austrian delegation of the Greens, wants to launch an EU sea rescue programme. ‘The Mediterranean is a mass grave for those in need of protection, that is a disgrace for the entire EU’, Vana told ORF.at. She is in favor of legal and safe entry into the EU. The trade of smugglers must be stopped and safe escape routes must be created. The EU-Council has to agree to the Frontex-Fund ‘Search and Rescue’, which was proposed the day before yesterday by the budget committee of the European Parliament, demanded Vana.

According to MEP Erik Marquardt of the German Greens, ‘humanitarian aid became part of a political game’: ‘The EU should send ships to the Mediterranean to save people. This is not only a responsibility of the Commission, but of each member state. It is not only the people who are drowning in the Mediterranean, but also our European values’, said Marquardt.” (Source: https://orf.at/stories/3139594/)

Angel of History

European Diary, 26.9.2020: 80 years ago today Walter Benjamin took his own life in Port Bou on the border between France and Spain. He was fleeing from the Nazis, had already crossed the border – and feared being sent back to occupied France by the Spanish border guards.

A few months earlier, in May 1940, he had written to his friend Stephan Lackner in Paris:

„One wonders whether history is not in the process of forging a witty synthesis of two Nietzschean terms, namely that of the good European and that of the last man. This could result in the last European. We all struggle not to become one.“

Benjamin’s last significant text, his theses on the concept of history, saved Hannah Arendt for posterity. Since August, a sculpture by Günther Blenke has been commemorating his “Angel of History” in Hohenems, in front of the former Gasthaus Engelburg at the intersection of the former Judengasse and Christengasse. Inspired by the piece of a burnt tree into which lightning has struck.

Installation of the sculpture in Hohenems byGünther Blenke, August 8, 2020. Photo: Julie Walser

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ”

Thanks to Günther Blenke – and Franz Sauer, who recovered the fragment of the burnt tree in the forest..

Günther Blenke, Franz Sauer and the “Angel of History”. Photo: Julie Walser

“Help on the spot”

European Diary, 25.9.2020: Austrian television reports from Lesbos. Late hour. Afterwards one cannot sleep well.

The nation’s best paid bouncer, Austrian Minister of the Interior Karl Nehammer lands on Greek territory with the fattest plane he could rent from the Russians. He brings along some 55 tons of “relief supplies” and police officers. He stands wide-legged in front of the camera and speaks of “help on the spot”. We already know this. And he now also makes it very clear what he means by that.

It’s not about helping the people who have been imprisoned on the island for months, some of them for years. It’s about helping the Greek governement to continue to treat them badly, as a deterrent. With the Austrian tents a new camp is to be built, seven kilometers away, far from any other settlement, even more controllable, even more deterrent than Moria already was. But at least for the beginning a bit more orderly and clean. Until the press is gone and the people can be left alone again in the dirt, which will settle down by itself in the fall.

The people who are now forced into the new camp with “gentle pressure”, as they say, have to drag their few possessions, strapped on pallets, boxes or boards, along the road for miles and miles to the new camp. The children just pull the smaller boxes, the adults the big ones. These pictures, too, will not be forgotten so quickly. At least now we know how Austria sees “help on the spot”.

That which prevents us from sleeping should indeed look and feel exactly like this. As an Austrian (Greek, Hungarian…) politician you have to bring along a pathological sadism to do your job.

Meanwhile, the provincial governor of the islands explains to the Austrian journalists, how one views the situation in Lesbos: “We thank Austria for its efforts, but we would have had our own tents, we wouldn’t have needed this help at all.” What they are still waiting for on the islands is that Europe will finally distribute the refugees among the member states. Well, the Greek government could of course take them to the mainland, but on this issue the Greek government and the European coalition of the unwilling are in agreement.

Chancellor Kurz has been calling for such camps on Greek islands for years. And Austria’s former Minister of the Interior, Mr. Kickl of the right extremist FPÖ, who was so talented in creating new language, also had an inventive name for them: “Concentrating Camps”. Just say that Austria and many other EU countries have learned nothing from history.

Postscript on September 30, 2020: Today the news report the dry fact, that the “55 tons of supply” never arrived on Lesbos, but were stored somewhere in Greece on the mainland. The Greek government does not know what to do with the 400 tents Mr. Nehammer brought along last week. As they said before: “Tents we have…”

The Gate to Hell

European Diary, 9.9.2020: Today completely without countenance and diplomacy. Naked and stunned. The Moria camp no longer exists. A major fire has destroyed the refugee camp on Lesbos, where thousands of people have been imprisoned for years as hostages of European politics. For several months 13,000 people have been living there in shelters that can accommodate only a fraction of them. Under inhuman conditions, hopelessly overcrowded, without sanitation, poorly kept alive by NGOs and the United Nations, which in return have to face insults from the criminals who rule us today. Austria pays something for the guarding of these people by the Greek police.

13.000 people, among them children, sick people, were kept there like cattle, as a deterrent against all those who possibly still believed in Europe’s “values” (be it moral, be it material).

For months NGOs have been warning that at some point Corona will break out in the camp. Largely isolated from the rest of the world, Moria was spared from Corona for a while. But a week ago there was the first serious case and numerous infections. Fear spread, of infections and even more so of the “quarantine”, because nobody is allowed to leave the camp anymore. Nevertheless, some managed to flee to the surrounding hills. The refugees are even more afraid of being shipped to newly planned, hermetic prison camps somewhere on Lesbos or Chios, and of losing the rest of their self-determination and dignity.

As a result, clashes broke out between different groups of refugees. At some point, the accumulated desperation of many months of hopelessness and torture turned into sheer panic.

The populists of Europe finally managed to explode the situation. The camp burned down. There are countless potential dangers in the shelters crammed with people. But there is talk of arson, and nobody would be surprised. If you have no other choice, the last resort is to set fire to the roof over your prison cell.

Austria’s Minister of the Interior uses the catastrophe for further agitation: “Migrants who are prepared to use violence have no right to asylum in Europe.” This makes one fear the worst. The cynicism of the last months and years is probably followed by even worse cynicism. This is the bare contempt for humanity. How can such a person still look at himself in the mirror in the morning? But perhaps the Nehammers and Kurz and how they are all called have taken down their mirrors in the meantime.

“Symbolic politics”

European Diary, 12.9.2020: The Austrian chancellor posts a video message. This has the undeniable advantage for him that he no longer has to put up with uncomfortable questions from rebellious journalists. Lying is even easier that way.
After all, more refugees cannot come here every year, he says. But in fact they have been getting fewer and fewer for years. In 2019 there were as few asylum applications as hardly ever since 2000.
Once again he reiterates his refusal to accept unaccompanied children or anyone else from the destroyed camp Moria. And in doing so he demonstrates a stubborn version of “morality”. “This inhuman system of 2015, I cannot reconcile with my conscience.” What “system” is he talking about? What conscience?
Instead, he says, “help is given on the spot, so that a decent supply is guaranteed.”
In the meantime, one had the opportunity to do this for years. And Austria has not lifted a finger. Because the conditions in Moria were supposed to serve as a deterrent, and therefore could not be inhumane enough. The demand for more humanitarian commitment on the part of Austria “on the ground” has so far interested Sebastian Kurz only in rhetoric, both as Foreign Minister and even more so as Federal Chancellor. Almost nothing has happened. Now he is calling for a “holistic approach”. What does he mean by this? He rejects “symbolic politics”, by which he obviously means the modest (shameful?) attempts by Germany, France and some other European states (including Switzerland) to free at least a few hundred children from the inferno on Lesbos.
This is the same man who looks dutifully serious at commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Shoah when the Talmud is quoted: “Whoever saves a human life saves the whole world.”
I don’t know if that is really true either. But every child rescued from the chaos on Lesbos will at least feel that way.
Thousands of refugees are still camping out in the open. But even for Salzburg’s Governor Haslauer, the 13,000 refugees are just a collective arsonist and blackmailer who set fire to his house “so that (his) neighbor(s) will have to take him in”. And who therefore should not be helped.
This sick logic is currently widespread not only in Austria’s government, but above all in social networks. Does it still make sense to argue against it in any way? With such helpless sentences like:
Most of the people there didn’t set fire to anything at all, only a few of them did. And wasn’t it customary in Austria to rescue children from a house, even if one of the inhabitants of the house was perhaps an arsonist? But the people in Moria did not live in a “house” anyhow, but were locked into a camp against their will. And they were “kept” there under conditions that everyone knew would eventually lead to an explosion of despair. In the end, Corona came to the camp and the naked panic broke out.
How will people even talk to each other when such simple truths no longer matter? But that is exactly the point. There is no point in talking to each other here. That’s why there is a video message.

“The promotion and protection of human rights is a priority for the European Union“

Installation Promotion and Protection of Human rights. Foto: Dietmar Walser

The European Human Rights Convention formulated in 1950 aims to safeguard the protection of individual human rights against state arbitrariness. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg watches over its implementation. One of the pivotal figures in the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights was Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht (1897–1960) from Żółkiew in at the time Austro-Hungarian Galicia. After his studies in Vienna under Hans Kelsen, the expert in constitutional law, legal philosopher, and co-creator of the 1920 Constitution of Austria, Lauterpacht moved to London. Here he developed his concept of human rights. Possibly, its humanitarian character is linked to his personal experience: Lauterpacht had lost almost his entire family in the Shoah. He defined the “issue of human government” as securing the “natural and inalienable rights of man.” As adviser to the British prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials against the major criminals of war in1945-46, Lauterpacht developed the legal concept of “crimes against humanity” as elements of offense against international law. ^ Hersch Lauterpacht, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, 1958, © The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge, UK < Tramway station “Droits de l’Homme” in front of the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg 2016 ©, Rainer Unkel/picturedesk.com > Greek police guarding the Turkish-Greek border, February 29, 2020, © Emrah Gurel/APA/picturedesk.com In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights decided in a landmark judgement that in case of expulsion/refoulement of refugees

“pursuant to Art.3 of the European Human Rights Convention, the repatriating state must prevent any ill-treatment in the country of destination
acquiescence to refoulement to the torturing country of origin violates against Art.3 of the European Human Rights Convention
collective expulsions also on the high seas and of boat people violate against Art.4 of the Fourth Protocol to the European Human Rights Convention
boat people can avail themselves of remedies against their refoulement pursuant to Art. 13 of the European Human Rights Convention.”

Implementation of the European Union’s commitment as formulated in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon to accede to the Human Rights Convention has been blocked to this day—repeated avowals to do so notwithstanding. Could it be that then also an independent monitoring body would have to scrutinize the actions and credibility of the member states?

Europe’s Borders

Installation Europe’s Borders. Photo: Dietmar Walser

“We were able to travel without passport and permit, wherever we desired, nobody inspected our views, origins, race, and religion.” By the time Stefan Zweig completed his—albeit slightly idealized— Memories of a European in his Brazilian exile in 1941, he was faced with a radically altered reality in Europe. As early as in 1938, Switzerland had closed its borders to the rising numbers of Jewish refugees from Germany and refused them political asylum. In the period from 1938 until 1939, the St. Gallen police commander Paul Grüninger saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees, also by forging the dates of border crossings. In early 1939, he was suspended from office and sentenced. Only in 1995, he was rehabilitated by Switzerland. While Grüninger is being honored as someone who came to the rescue of refugees, many helpers today are once again criminalized. One of the great achievements of the European Union was the Schengen Agreement of 1985, which enables the abolishment of border controls within the EU. In the meantime, also non-EU countries such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Iceland, and Norway participate in the Agreement. At the Austrian-Swiss border near Hohenems, the local border traffic in both directions has long since become part of everyday life. Some sectors such as agriculture, construction, or nursing are heavily reliant on “migrant workers” from Southeastern Europe. For them, special arrangements, independent of EU membership, have been put in place.

< Paul Grüninger-Bridge, as seen from Switzerland toward the Hohenems border crossing, 2020 © Dietmar Walser/Jewish Museum Hohenems

> Border fences between Hungary and Serbia, erected by Hungary in the summer of 2015 © Attila Kisbendedek/AFP

In 2009, on the occasion of the accession negotiations with the EU, the Republic of Serbia, too, was granted access to the control-free Schengen Area. This was to change in the wake of refugees moving in the direction of the EU. Numerous countries, among them also Austria and Germany, have reintroduced border checks. And since in the summer of 2015 about 160,000 refugees had reached Hungary, it erected a 300-km long and up to four-meter high barbed wire fence along its “external EU border.” In the meantime, the EU’s focus has shifted to the external border between Greece and Turkey. More than four million war refugees live in Turkey. In the framework of the EU-Turkey Agreement, the country has received financial support from the EU to stem the refugee flow toward the EU. Following the expiration of this agreement, Turkey brought refugees to the border in late February 2020 to put pressure on the EU. At that, Greece suspended, initially for one year, the right to asylum, which was openly in violation of the EU Human Rights Convention and the Geneva Refugee Convention. Then again, in the course of Corona, “migratory labor” in Europe is revealing its flaws: low pay, tough working conditions, and inhumane accommodations have unexpectedly been recognized as a problem for all of society.