President of a Parliament not yet deserving its name

European Diary, 30.6.2021: 5 years ago today, Simone Veil, the first president of the directly elected European Parliament, died. Until today, this Parliament is struggling to really become one worthy of its name: the representation of a European sovereign. We are still far from that. Simone Veil, who became President of this dream in 1979, survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp at the age of 18. At that time, her name was still Simone Jacob.
In 1944, her family had been arrested by the Gestapo. Her father and brother were deported to Lithuania and murdered. She herself, along with her mother and sister, was deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 and on a death march to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945. There, her mother died of typhus in March before the camp was liberated by the British Army in April.

In 1946 Simone Jacob, by then a law student at the “Institut d’études politiques de Paris” (Science Po), married Antoine Veil from Blamont, a student one year her senior, a descendant of Wilhelmine Löwenberg, who had emigrated from Hohenems to Blamont, France, two hundred years earlier, and whose letters to her parents, so exquisitely polite and written in beautiful Hebrew-German script, now adorn a showcase in the Jewish Museum.

Simone Veil first became a judge, then a leading civil servant in the penitentiary system, and finally as a politician she stood up for the rights of women in particular. As Minister of Health from 1974, she ensured easier access to contraceptives. In 1975, she achieved the legalization of abortion. The law on the abortion period, which she fought through after a tough battle, is still known today as the Loi-Veil (Veil Law).
In 1979, when European citizens were allowed to directly elect their parliament for the first time, she ran at the head of the UDF, the French Liberal Party, and was elected by parliament as its first president. She was a member of the EU Parliament until 1993, the last time she ran as the top candidate on the “Le Centre pour l’Europe” list in 1989, after the French Liberals and Gaullists had not, in her eyes, been sufficiently resolute in their support for European integration.
In 1998, she was to become a member of the French Constitutional Court. For many years, she was also committed to the memory of the Shoah in France. In 2008, she was finally also elected to the Académie Francaise.

A year after her death in 2017, Simone Veil was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in an act of state and celebrated by President Macron with the following words above all as a Frenchwoman: “With Simone Veil, generations of women who created France enter here. May justice be done to them all today through her.” 15 million two-euro coins bearing her portrait and her Auschwitz prisoner number were minted and put into circulation to mark the occasion.

Louise Weiss: Chairwoman by seniority

European Diary, 26.5.2021: Today, the main building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg is named after her. 38 years ago today, Louise Weiss died in Paris.
Born in Arras in 1893, her parents – her mother Jewish, her father Protestant – came from Alsace. Already during the First World War, which was fought between France and the German Reich not least symbolically over Alsace-Lorraine, Louise Weiss – working as a war nurse – began to write under a pseudonym. Many more novels, plays and political writings were to follow, for example about the newly founded Czechoslovakia, to which Weiss was also particularly attached in private relationships. After 1945 she also became known for her documentary films and literary accounts of her travels to Japan, China, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Madagascar, Alaska and the Middle East. Her art and ethnographic collection is now housed in the Chateau de Rohan in Saverne, Alsace.
In 1918, at just 25 years of age, she already founded the magazine L’Europe Nouvelle, in which she promoted Franco-German understanding and the unification of Europe. Its authors included Thomas Mann, Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann and Rudolf Breitscheid. In 1930, she founded the École de la Paix, a private institute for international relations – whose dreams were for the time being dashed in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power in Germany. In 1934, Louise Weiss therefore concentrated on another social struggle, the fight for women’s suffrage. Together with Cécile Brunsvig, she founded the association La femme nouvelle; their campaigns caused a public sensation, not only when they chained themselves to a lamppost in Paris with other suffragettes. Their complaint to the French Council of State, the Conseil d’Etat, was unsuccessful. It would be another ten years before women’s suffrage was introduced in France. At this time, Louise Weiss was active in the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers and the French Vichy regime. In 1945, she founded an institute for war and conflict research in London with Gaston Bouthoul. She was denied admission to the Académie Francaise as late as 1975. It was not until 1980 that Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman to be admitted to this elite circle, which had previously been reserved for men.

In 1979, Louise Weiss was elected as a French MEP for the Gaullists in the first direct elections to the European Parliament. And she was its first “chairwoman by seniority” until her death in 1983. Strangely enough, she does not appear in the many celebrations of the “founding fathers” of Europe. But then, she was not a “father”.

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

Supply Chaines

European Diary, 3.3.2021: Austria’s Chancellor Kurz says he no longer wants to be dependent on the EU and wants to look into producing his own vaccines together with Denmark and Israel. The science editor of the ORF (Austrian Broadcast), Günter Mayer, comments dryly on this move, saying that this is “not a matter of squeezing an apple”. Such complex production could not be ramped up in a short time by decree, and here Austria would have to deal with pharmaceutical companies whose sales are higher than the Austrian national budget. Not to go into further painful detail: the Chancellor’s grandiose announcements are obviously hot air intended to distract from other problems. E.g. from the following: On the same day it became known that in an Austrian showpiece enterprise, the company “Hygiene Austria”, which manufactures mouth nose protective masks, a house search took place. This is actually the company about which Sebastian Kurz proudly tweeted in May 2020: “The Corona crisis has shown that we must not rely entirely on international supply chains for the production of important protective equipment.”

The raid was carried out on suspicion that masks supplied from China had been relabeled in Austria by workers employed illegally without social security contributions and sold at a higher price than Chinese masks. Hygiene Austria’ has firmly denied this and of course the presumption of innocence applies. Piquantly, there is a close relationship of the company to a close associate of the chancellor, as already reported on August 4, 2020, the research platform Addendum: the husband of Sebastian Kurz’ head of office has a 25% stake in one of the two companies to which “Hygiene Austria” belongs, and which is now to ensure Austria’s mask self-sufficiency with large government contracts. And managing director Tino Wieser of “Hygiene Austria” is their brother-in-law. (https://www.addendum.org/coronavirus/vertragsdetails-geheim/)

The vaunted autarky seems to be faltering. But as a slogan for national awakening – and for distraction from the slowly accumulating investigations and house searches in the closer political circle of confidants of the chancellor – relabeled Chinese masks are probably also suitable. Or perhaps in the future also relabeled vaccines?

The number of corona deaths continues to grow. In the U.S., more than 500,000 people have long since died from the pandemic. New reports of irregularities in the disclosure of deaths in shelters, such as those just shaking the hitherto heroic reputation of New York State’s Democratic governor, Mario Cuomo, suggest an unknown dark figure of dead. Which are likely to exist in other states as well. These dark figures appear to be particularly high in Russia and Mexico when excess mortality is considered as a factor. Even the Russian government does not trust their own official figures. it is said that only 57,000 people in Russia had died from covid-19 by the end of 2020 and about 81,000 by mid-February, whereas excess mortality in Russia in 2020 claimed 323,000 lives. Shortly before the turn of the year, even Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova declared that 81 percent of excess mortality was due to Covid-19. This would correspond to almost 261,000 deaths from Covid-19 by the end of 2020, while other calculations put the number of deaths at well over 300,000.
Russia, which is proud of having introduced the first vaccine, “Sputnik V,” is using the apparently highly effective vaccine primarily as an export hit, for example to Mexico and Serbia, Paraguay and Egypt, while vaccinating its own population is taking a back seat. This leads to the paradoxical result that Sputnik V will possibly help to combat Covid-19 in poorer countries. At least, if it succeeds in ramping up planned production in Brazil and India. In Russia itself, especially beyond the metropolis of Moscow, it appears that herd immunity by infection continues to be the most common prescription for acquiring antibodies.

Addendum on March 9, 2021: In the meantime, the allegations against “Hygiene Austria” and the two parent companies Lenzing and Palmers have been substantiated. While “Hygiene Austria” CEO Tino Wieser still talks about how “proud” he is to have created 200 jobs in Austria, it has become known that these are mainly in dummy companies. Bogus companies that either employ workers officially on a “marginal” basis, but actually have them work full time on the black market, or that get rid of social security contributions by going bankrupt in time. Also subsidies for not effected short-time work had been raked in. Also the suspicion that the “domestic” production partly took place in China, but that the masks were then repacked by illegal workers in “Hygiene Austria” cartons, now seems to be confirmed.

Flashback, early March, 2020: the EU is co-financing the delivery of 25 tons of protective equipment to China. The European Commission reminds national governments in Europe to report their needs for protective masks, test kits and respirators. But it will be weeks before the first requirements come through.
The first cases of Covid-19 are being reported in the United Kingdom. Dominic Cummings, advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, summarizes the British government’s strategy as “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” No. 10 Downing Street denies.

Donald Trump has also spoken out again on Covid-19: “It’s a flu, like a flu.”

Many answers to many European questions – and some new questions

European Diary, 17.2.2021: The Jewish Museum Hohenems has been open again for a week. Time to document which traces and comments our visitors have left behind so far in our exhibition The Last Europeans. For this purpose, we have created space on two large maps under the questions: “Which states should belong to the European Union in the future?” and “What is Europe for you?”.
This is the place for your answers and reactions to many European questions and, of course, also for new questions. Now the maps are full and we now make room for new answers and questions – and the game starts all over again.

Here a few insights: traces of visitors on our maps in the exhibition.

„full of fish, by the way“

European diary, 31.12.2020: So now Brexit is done. 1200 pages of “deal”, a few hundred pages of which Boris Johnson already held up to the camera at Christmas during his three-and-a-half-minute Christmas speech on Twitter, promising his countrymen that there was plenty of fish in it. His whimsical speech about hope, turkey, pudding, Brussels sprouts and brandy butter will go down in history. As what, this very history will still prove. Literarily, at any rate, as a parody.
It has spread good cheer on the island. The European friends on the continent, who declared the negotiations concluded on Christmas Eve, were somewhat less credible in their good mood. There is no triumph involved, at most the relief that a superfluous torment has finally reached its at least halfway bearable end. This morning, the British ambassador in Vienna was also allowed to make an attempt to create a good mood on the radio. This was much more difficult for him than for his prime minister.

The Erasmus program, which has brought hundreds of thousands of young people from the mainland and the islands closer together, has come to an end. Even Leigh Turner couldn’t turn that into brandy butter. But when asked whether the Brexit agreement and Britain’s exit from the EU would bring any advantages, he could only proudly emphasize that the trade agreement that has now been concluded would be better … than a no-deal Brexit. We would have thought of that, too.

What remains is fish. The fishing quotas of European fishermen in British waters are now to be reduced by 25% over the next few years. That won’t ruin the EU. Nor will it help British fishermen much. If they ever wake up from their stupor. For the money that the Brexit has cost – and will still cost, e.g. to carry out customs controls, for duties that should not be levied – the British fishermen could probably have been better helped. But the dream of restoring Britain to its former stature as a global leader was stronger. A dream that is admittedly torn between two claims, the idea of itself as the center of the Commonwealth representing a supranational empire, and the old colonial feeling of representing a superior culture.
But “the proof of the pudding comes with the eating”. Whether much will remain of these dreams, other than more fish from British fishermen, only time will tell. For it is the Europeans on the continent who are supposed to buy this fish.

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

Avraham Burg: Reading Stefan Zweig

European Diary, 1.12.2020: A few days ago the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem celebrated Stefan Zweig’s birthday together with us and other partners. Avraham Burg shared his personal reflections on Stefan Zweig’s autobiography The World of Yesterday. Memories of a European, reading the book several times in various translations. A journey from education sentimental to a vivid portray of present challenges. Thanks to the Willy Brandt Center Jerusalem for the permission to share Avraham Burg’s thoughts here.

The Idea of Europe

Installation “The Idea of Europe”

The concept of the “United States of Europe” has been around already since the 18^th century, based on the model of the United States of America. So far, it has not materialized. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) was among those who pursued this idea.

The son of the well-known founder of AEG—himself a prominent entrepreneur—was responsible for the supply of raw material for the German Reich during World War I. He also demanded the use of Belgian forced laborers to offset the lack of manpower in Germany caused by the war.

Already before the war, Rathenau had made the case for the establishment of a Central European customs union with a German-Austrian economic community at its center; he envisaged that in the long run its appeal would be irresistible to Western European countries. After 1918, he pursued in various political functions the normalization of the relationship between Germany and the allied victorious powers as well as a settlement with Soviet Russia. In 1922, the Pan-European Movement was founded based on the “return to Christian, Western values.” Its first major donor was German-Jewish banker Max Warburg. To the present day, however, it has remained largely ineffective. By contrast, Rathenau’s idea of a European Economic Community became reality in 1957, which eventually evolved into the European Union in 1992.

^ Walther Rathenau, presumably Berlin, ca. 1920, © Jewish Museum Berlin

Rathenau did not live to witness Europe’s unification or World War II. He was labeled as “compliance politician” by the ethno-centric right of the Weimar Republic, his actions as foreign minister were construed as evidence of the “power of international Jewry,” his negotiations with Russia vilified as “Jewish Bolshevism.” The extreme right’s hatred of anything Rathenau represented was vented not only by chanting the slogan “Gun down this Walter Rathenau, the godforsaken Jewish sow!” In fact, on June 24, 1922, he was assassinated by members of the right-wing extremist terrorist “Organization Consul.”

The perpetrators Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer perished in the course of their arrest in Saaleck in Saxony-Anhalt and were hastily buried at the local cemetery. Hitler had a monument erected for these “heroes” with an inscription that was removed in GDR times. Following German reunification, the tomb became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. As a result, the army removed the stone and the local parish abolished the burial plot. In 2012, on the 90^th anniversary of the assassins’ death, a boulder was placed here by unknown individuals featuring—in runelike script— the name of these two men.

Michael Miller (Vienna) about Antisemitic accusations after WW 1 and the Paneuropean-Movement:

Do We Understand Each Other?

Installation Do We Understand Each Other? Photo: Dietmar Walser

Having grown up in Białystok, now Poland, a formerly multiethnic, multireligious, and polyglot city in the Russian Empire, Ludwik Zamenhof (1859–1917) began already early on to think about a new, universally understandable language. Like some of his contemporaries, he hoped to improve international and ethnic relations through the development of a easily graspable universal language. He was convinced that “division and hate among the nations will completely disappear only when all of humanity will have one language and one religion.” In 1887, the son of a Yiddish-speaking mother and a usually Russian-speaking father published his “planned language” under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (the hopeful). This would soon become the name of the invented language. Its logical structure and possibly also Zamenhof’s translation of the Hebrew Bible into Esperanto contributed to the fast dissemination of the language—and to the formation of an international movement propagating it. Already in 1905, the first World Esperanto Congress took place in Boulogne-sur-Mer, which was followed by annual conventions around the world.

> Quotes regarding the rejection of the Zamenhof-year by the Białystok municipal council, December 2016, © mounted by Günter Kassegger, source: www.esperanto.de

Esperanto had the potential of becoming a common language in a united Europe. Yet, politics and language is always also a matter of power. Hence, several national languages have prevailed for use in EU bodies and not Esperanto. However, UNESCO has paid tribute to the significance of this linguistic utopia. Zamenhof’s death anniversary was included in the official list of UNESCO commemoration days for 2017. Then again, the Białystok municipal government failed to display any particular interest in the city’s illustrious son who had worked to enable Europeans to better understand each other. When in 2016, a motion was made in the municipal council to commemorate him with an official program on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his passing in 2017, it was rejected with the votes of the national-conservative PiS (“Law and Justice”) party. Esperanto, it was argued, had no longer any significance today. This decision was originally reported only in several Polish newspapers. However, when this was brought to international attention by the newsagency Agence France-Presse and then by Yahoo, reports about Ludwik Zamenhof’s repudiated heritage and the PiS party’s nationalist anti-Semitism were published all over the world.

Liliana Feierstein (Berlin): About Esperanto as a Jewish, European, and International language

Union Europe?

Installation Union Europe? Photo: Dietmar Walser

The European Union started out as an economic community after World War II. Its history dates back to 1952 when its predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, was founded. Today, the EU is also a political community. The only directly elected body since 1979 is the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Its first president was the French politician and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil (1927–2017). In addition, that same year, the French champion of women’s rights Louise Weiss (1893–1983) became an MEP for the Group of European Progressive Democrats. Already during World War I, she had founded the peace-oriented journal L’Europe Nouvelle and kept publishing it throughout two decades. Despite being highly vulnerable as the daughter of an Alsatian Jewish mother, she was active in the Résistance during World War II. Her efforts toward a united, democratic Europe were honored by appointing her the first Oldest Member of the European Parliament and by naming the parliamentary building after her. Indeed, Louise Weiss understood that the concept of the Union was limited in scope to economic aspects, and early on, she pointed to the lack of a European community of solidarity by stating: “The Community institutions have produced European sugar beet, butter, cheese, wines, calves, and even pigs. They have not produced Europeans.”

Also delegated to the European Parliament in 1979 was Stanley Johnson—grandson of the last interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Kemal. As MEP for the British Tories, he belonged to the same group as Weiss. In 1992, he vehemently endorsed the Maastricht Treaty, which endowed the European Union with its current form. Now, his son Boris Johnson is leading the United Kingdom out of this Union. Do the grandchildren of the World War II generation regard Europe as nothing more than a sentimental and obsolete peace project? Hostilities against the EU are also triggered by parties on the Continent. Are the demands for more national autonomy symptoms of a growing right-wing nationalism? At the same time, exit demands are multiplying also in countries at the edge of Europe that find themselves—despite all the lip services paid to a European community of shared values—confronted with Europe‘s de-facto erosion of solidarity. Is it thus already possible to consider European integration as having failed? Is this the beginning of the end of Project Europe?