Hersch Lauterpacht and the Convention on Human Rights

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

The Greek Stoic Zeno (336-270 BCE) postulated that all people are equal simply by virtue of being human. In practice, however, this theoretical insight played no role. For the longest time, its reflection was left to the philosophers. It was not until the American Declaration of Independence that human rights found their way into a political format. These rights, however, stopped at the indigenous population and the enslaved. On the European continent, the French Revolution made human rights a political concept. And the French Constitution of 1791 even included Jews – though by no means women. Of course, these rights did not apply to people outside the European continent.

It would take until December 10, 1948, for the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” to be adopted by the United Nations. And it was not until September 3, 1953 that the European Convention on Human Rights was ratified.

Not all of those in authority saw the necessity of a legal approach to international law, human rights, guilt and responsibility in 1945. Fritz Bauer’s work “Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht” (War Criminals on Trial), published in that very year, in which he demanded “a lesson in applicable international law” for the Germans, fell on deaf ears, at least in the perpetrator societies. And yet, the drafting and passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sprang from a direct reaction to the atrocities committed in connection with World War II, particularly against civilians and especially against European Jews and other minorities. Hersch Lauterpacht played a not insignificant role in the development of a universal human rights code.

Lauterpacht, a native of what is now Ukrainian Shovkva in 1897, studied with the Constitutional Law scholar and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen in Vienna, then at the prestigious London School of Economics. From 1938 to 1955 he held the Chair of International Law at Cambridge, from 1951 to 1954 he was a member of the United Nations International Law Commission, and from 1955 until his death in 1960 he was a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

As a young man, Hersch Lauterpacht had experienced the catastrophes of the First World War. They were the trigger for his lifelong preoccupation with international law as well as human rights. The parental family of Hersch Lauterpacht had been murdered in the “Old Austrian” city of Lemberg. This may have motivated his focus on the status of the individual in international law and on the question of the proportionality of nation-state supremacy. It was in this context that Lauterpacht developed the terminology “crimes against humanity” to frame the egregious atrocities committed against civilians, a formulation that gave international law a decisive expansion. At the Nuremberg Trials, it legitimized the prosecution and conviction of Nazi actions against millions of civilian citizens. The definition was “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population before or during war; persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed in the commission of or in connection with a crime over which the Court has jurisdiction, whether or not the act was contrary to the law of the country in which it was committed.” Since then, the protection of the individual against the state can also be claimed in the EU. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is legally responsible for this.

At the supra-European level, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is responsible for questions and proceedings under international law. When Hersch Lauterpacht, who played a key role in drafting the European and International Conventions on Human Rights, was to be appointed as a judge by the British in 1954, voices were raised criticizing this decision with the argument that the renowned international lawyer was not “British” enough for this office, which was clearly indicated by both his origin and his name.

Hersch Lauterbach died on May 8, 1960, fifteen years after the end of WW II in London.

Lucian Brunner: Language Struggle and Nationality Conflict 1900

European Diary, 15.4.2021: 107 years ago today, the former Viennese councillor Lucian Brunner died in Vienna. He was born in Hohenems on September 29, 1850, the son of Marco Brunner and Regina Brettauer. Lucian’s father, like most of his brothers and cousins, had left for Trieste in their youth to participate in the lively textile trade between St. Gallen and the Mediterranean, with which the Brunner family began its steep economic rise. Later Marco Brunner went to St. Gallen, where he represented the family’s business in Switzerland and soon also managed the “Bankhaus Jakob Brunner”, from which UBS was later to emerge.
In 1883, Lucian Brunner also joined his father’s private bank in St. Gallen as a partner. Soon after, in 1889, Lucian and his wife Malwine Mandel settled in Vienna, where he founded his own banking business but also became active as an industrialist and politician. He was active in a small liberal party, the “Vienna Democrats,” for which he was a member of the Vienna City Council from 1896 to 1901, as well as chairman of the “Democratic Central Association” and publisher of the associated newspaper “Volksstimme. In the Vienna Municipal Council he repeatedly opposed the anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger, where he contradicted the ever louder nationalist slogans. In the dispute over the Baden language ordinance, he took a moderating stance in the face of the surging hostility toward the Czechs. He took the view that the German lingua franca should be defended not with nationalist resentment but on the grounds of reason, without devaluing the language minorities in the Reich. “The representation of the city of Vienna (…) must keep in mind that it is not merely the center of a country inhabited by one nationality, but by many nationalities, and it should therefore be prevented that any other nationality of the Empire believes that this resolution contains a point, a hostility against it. (…) It has been customary in Austria for years that a policy of slogans is pursued, and one of the quickest of these slogans is the nationality dispute and the nationality quarrel. When a political party doesn’t know what to do, it starts to provoke nationality quarrels.” When representatives of the Czech minority in Vienna demanded a new school for themselves in October 1897, he also distanced himself from the national furor and called for pluralism to be allowed – referring to his own experiences as a member of the German minority in Trieste. Instead, he was insulted as a “Jew” in the local council. “It is precisely the coercion with which one wanted to force the peoples of Austria to become German that has damaged Germanism. (…) We want the right for our minorities, therefore we ourselves must nowhere suppress the right of a minority! Moreover, it does not befit the great German cultural nation to say that we are afraid of this Czech school in Favoriten. (…) I am a Jew, as you quite rightly say, and gentlemen, I am glad that I am one.”
He became a complete bogeyman of the Christian Socialists with his protest against a planned church building subsidy of the Christian Socialist majority. Lucian Brunner filed a lawsuit against this breach of the state’s religious neutrality, which was ultimately successful before the Supreme Court. He thus defended the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state – and now became a popular target of ongoing anti-Semitic attacks, in Vienna as well as in Vorarlberg. Lucian Brunner’s first wife, Malwine, died during these campaigns, which also affected the Brunner family personally.
Brunner always remained in close contact with his home community of Hohenems. For example, he donated considerable sums for the construction of the hospital and the gymnasium. On several occasions he also tried, in cooperation with Hohenems liberals and the Rosenthal family of factory owners, to realize tramway projects in Hohenems that would connect Hohenems with the Swiss railroad on the other side of the Rhine or even with Lustenau. A final tramway project, which in 1911 was to connect the Hohenems train station with the Rosenthal factory in the south of the market town, also failed to materialize, as the economic situation had in the meantime taken a heavy toll on the Rosenthal company. In Hohenems, too, the Christian Socialists were meanwhile agitating against the “Jew” Brunner-and against the Rosenthals, who would “cram” the school with Italian children.

Brunner remained a liberal throughout his life, even though at the end of his life he supported the Zionist movement in Vienna, probably out of disappointment with the political developments in Austria. When he died in Vienna on April 15, 1914, he left a legacy for an interdenominational school in his home community. The Hohenems municipal council did not accept the bequest. An interdenominational school was not desired.

Flashback, April 15, 2020: U.S. President Trump declares that the peak of the Corona pandemic has passed. And announces that the USA will stop its payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). German Development Minister Müller, on the other hand, declares that he will increase payments to the WHO: “The WHO must now be strengthened, not weakened. Cutting funding in the midst of a pandemic is absolutely the wrong way to go.”

Trump also decides that the “emergency checks” announced by the U.S. government to some 70 million needy people in the U.S. – to the tune of $1200 – should bear his name, in the midst of an election campaign that is about to begin. This has never happened before in American history.
Trump is threatening to send Parliament into forced recess on the grounds that he wants to fill vacancies without parliamentary participation. The possibility of ordering a parliamentary recess has also never been used by an American president. Trump plays on circulating conspiracy theories at a press conference, e.g. that the virus came from a Chinese lab.

EU Commission President van der Leyen, meanwhile, is calling for more commonality among EU members, saying, “A lack of coordination in lifting restrictions risks negative effects for all member states and would likely lead to an increase in tensions among member states. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the crisis, but member states should at least keep each other informed,” the EU authority in Brussels warns. Van der Leyen announces a recovery plan for Europe that will include a common fund.

On the Greek islands, 40,000 refugees continue to be held in camps under inhumane conditions. Today, 12 (in words TWELVE) children from Syria and Afghanistan will be flown out of Athens to Luxembourg. Luxembourg is thus the first of eleven countries to show willingness to take in a few unaccompanied or sick minors from the camps. In addition to Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Portugal and Lithuania are participating in the rescue operation. On Saturday, 58 children are to follow to Germany. The Austrian government still refuses to help, although many mayors have now offered to take in new refugees.

„Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism“: About the new struggle about defining Antisemitism

More than 200 scholars from around the world have signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Most of them are Jews who have dedicated their lives to the study of Jewish history, anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. And who are united by a growing sense of unease that prompted me to sign as well.

https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

The fight against anti-Semitism has been hijacked, by political interests that have little to do with defending Jewish life and culture, with defending Jewish self-determination. We live in a world in which an authoritarian nationalist like Victor Orban, who owes his power not least to an anti-Semitic campaign, can declare himself a friend of Israel. His propaganda is based on an effective strategy: he combines racism against Muslim migrants (of which there are none in Hungary) with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the alleged power of a “Jewish capitalist” who wants to rob Europe of its Christian identity by flooding it with “Oriental” immigrants. In the same vein, last year “King Bibi’s” heir to the throne Yair Netanyahu joined the AFD in calling for the end of the “globalist EU” and a “Christian Europe.” The world in which we fight anti-Semitism today has become more complicated.
But when German politicians talk about anti-Semitism today, there is almost only one topic: BDS, the Palestinian boycott movement and its friends – or, precisely, people who are accused of it, but who in fact are not. The dispute over this has various dimensions. It is about whether we understand Europe, whether we understand Germany as open societies in which we may be ethnically, culturally and religiously different, but live together in compliance with common rules, or whether we define identities and territories homogeneously, thus perpetuating the catastrophe of nationalism. This then also includes: to refer the Jews to “their” territory.
At the same time, it is about a painful inner-Jewish dispute: Can we still – or finally – live self-confidently and self-determined in the Diaspora after Auschwitz? Or, after the national delusion of the 20th century, must we all entrench ourselves in a “safe haven” that may turn into a self-imposed ghetto, only this time behind walls of our own making?
And finally, an internal Israeli dispute is becoming ever more apparent, over whether this country should be an ethno-religiously exclusive castle to which Jews can retreat, or whether the country should be “liberated” from “foreign occupation,” as BDS demands. Or whether it can become a common state of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, which must find what these people can share with each other, but cannot be based on what separates them.
How and why one positions oneself in these conflicts also determines which definition of anti-Semitism one leans towards. And what and whom one fights under this sign. Only a few days ago, Germany’s “anti-Semitism commissioner” Klein uttered the strange sentence that there is no wrong and right understanding of anti-Semitism. Could he mean anything other than: there is no need for a proper concept of what we mean by defining something as anti-Semitism, because he alone decides that anyway? “Who is an anti-Semite, I decide”.
The “working definition” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is now used by many governments as a yardstick for such judgments, was launched with noble motives, and is proving to be a boomerang. It oscillates between meaningless generality: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”, and a focus on the issue of Israel that invites political abuse, an abuse that one of the definition’s first authors, Kenneth Stern, has since strongly deplored. To date, it is not really clear what the IHRA actually decided at its 2016 Bucharest conference. Just the skinny four lines posted on the Alliance’s website as a “working definition”? Or also the examples positioned below it, which, it literally says, may serve as an “illustration?
In 2017, the German government eagerly quoted the first sentence of the working definition as an allegedly decided part of the definition: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”

With this “illustration”, which from now on will be colocated as a resolution, the IHRA definition produces above all a misunderstanding.

In fact the reverse is true. It is not primarily anti-Semites, but the self-proclaimed “defenders” of Israel, who want to define this state as a “Jewish state”, and thus as the core of the “Jewish collective”. And who can thus declare any criticism of this state, its policies, and its exclusive definition “as a Jewish state” to be a case of “anti-Semitism” when the Israeli “Ministry of Strategic Affairs”, set up specifically for this purpose, decides that this criticism is not appropriate.
No, the dispute about BDS is not really about BDS at all, it is about whether one is allowed to discuss a different constitution of Israel, and about whether Jews are allowed to make self-determined decisions about their lives in the Diaspora or not.

The fact that the debate about Israel and Palestine leads to all kinds of injustice, to double standards, and to a toxicity in the debates that can hardly be surpassed, is not primarily due to anti-Semitism. It has to do with the fact that the adherents of the two largest world religions assume that the fate of the world is decided in Jerusalem. This is an attitude that is often not even conscious and does little to resolve the conflict. To declare the respective opponent an anti-Semite or a racist only leads further in a hopeless spiral of violence and non-recognition of the other. The Jerusalem Declaration could help to bring the discussion about Israel and the discussion about anti-Semitism back into more rational waters, and that means, above all, to separate them a bit. Even if the storm of “indignation” or its seconder, the gloating, will not be long in coming.

On a Tower of Skulls: Gerald Reitlinger

European Diary, 2.3.2021: Gerald Reitlinger was born 121 years ago today. The youngest son of Albert Reitlinger and Emma Brunner – who came from the Hohenems family of the same name – he studied cultural studies at Oxford and art at two academies in London. From 1930 to 1931 he took part in excavations in Iraq, subsequently made several research trips to Iran, Turkey and China, and wrote books about his excursions – in 1932 A Tower of Skulls. A Journey Through Persia and Turkish Armenia. In addition, Reitlinger was an avid collector of both Syrian and Persian ceramics.
During World War II, he served in the British Army in air defense and as an instructor.

Portrait of Gerald Reitlinger by Christopher Wood, 1926 (Source: Wikipedia)

But after 1945 he devoted his life to researching the Holocaust. In 1953, he published his book The Final Solution in London, the first comprehensive account of the Shoah. Affected and skeptical, he questioned the national loss of memory that soon swept the former perpetrator countries. The Munich Institute of Contemporary History refused to publish Reitlinger’s book. It did not want to be disturbed by the “outside” in the process of coming to terms with National Socialism. Nevertheless, the book was published in German under the title Endlösung, as was Reitlinger’s 1956 study The SS. Alibi of a Nation 1922-1945, which was given a less sarcastic title by the publisher in order to make it more palatable to the German audience: The SS – Tragedy of a German Era. A third book on Nazi crimes followed: The House Built on Sand. The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia 1939-1945 was published in London in 1960, and under the title Ein Haus auf Sand gebaut. Hitler’s Violent Policy in Russia 1941-1944 in German.
Reitlinger then returned to art and cultural history. His three-volume work The Economics of Taste (1961-1970) is devoted to the history of the art market from 1760 to the present.
He bequeathed his collection, which was damaged by fire shortly before his death in 1978, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where it now forms the Gerald Reitlinger Gallery.

Here some paragraphs from “Final Solution”:
“The inquest is over, but it is not the business of the coroner to find the culprits or to judge them. Nevertheless, the reader, who has had the patience to follow even a fraction of this somber narrative, will have asked himself a dozen questions, and some of these must be discussed even if they cannot be answered.

How much did the man in the street in Germany know and how much did he care? How was it possible that so many hundreds or even thousands of hard-working bureaucrats of all grades went daily to their offices to compose, copy, or pass on the obvious correspondence of race-murder? Why, seeing that every ministry was fighting with every other ministry and that Hitler never knew in the least what was happening, any more than Tolstoi’s generals at the battle of Borodino, did not one of the righteous men, who said their piece at Nuremberg, make a single active Protest? (…)
Is the discarding of selected victims endemic in the overgrown modern ‘democratic’ State? Can it happen again and can it happen here? It may be very long before we know the answers to these questions, which recur throughout this inquest on the Final Solution in the form of a sort of repeat design or chintz.

It is difficult to believe that there existed any fully conscious beings in Germany or German-occupied Europe in the last two years of the war who did not know that most of the Jews had disappeared and who had not heard some story that they had been shot or gassed. Nor do I suppose that there was anybody who did not have a friend who knew somebody else who had seen a massacre. More than a hundred million people must have known such things and whispered about them, and yet they could not make the climate unpleasant for the few thousands who carried them out. (…)

And the higher the Germans rose, the more frightened they became till we reach the case of Heinrich Himmler, who was made head of the Police State almost by chance and whom Hitler retained just because he was a frightened man who could be informed on and intimidated. (…)

But before the July 1944 plot to murder Hitler, not even the obscurest of wartime officials was ever taken away and shot. (…) Were these the me to stand up for the rights of humanity? They were, it is probable, mostly no more cruel and callous than the Germans or, indeed, the human race as a whole. (…)

The German of 1933 was a sort of caricature of European civilization which had grown more frivolous, greedier, and less critical, as material progress undermined some of the older disciplines. (…)

Hiob on his dunghill wished ‘that mine adversary had written a book’ and his prayer has been answered, for indeed there is nothing that this adversary did not commit on paper. I have spent close to four years among these documents and I have found their company neither gloomy nor depressing. For on many pages darts and gleams that thing which prevents all government becoming a living hell – human fallibility. (…) It is possible that murderous racialism is something ineradicable in the nature of ants and men, but the Robot State which will give it full effect cannot exist and never will.”

Somewhere Between Europe and Israel – A Conversation with Avraham Burg

European Diary, 25.2.2021: Yesterday Avraham Burg was our guest – online – in a joint event with the Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue (Vienna).

Conflicts about the future of Europe have always been linked to disputes about the role of European Jews. Their emancipation was seen as a test case of the liberal hopes of the 19th century, and their cross-border cosmopolitanism as a precursor of European unification – or as a scapegoat for nationalist ideologies. Today, the state of Israel seems to symbolically take its place – admittedly under the opposite sign, as the favorite child of right-wing populist and nationalist politicians. Avraham Burg has already crossed many borders in his life. After his political career, Avraham Burg is engaged in publishing and in various political initiatives for an ethnically and religiously neutral state of its citizens, a state that would follow the ideals of the European Union. While these ideals are admittedly coming under increasing pressure in contemporary Europe. In a recent interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he explained why he no longer wants to carry the entry “Jewish” as a “nationality” in the Israeli civil registry.

Avraham Burg was born in Jerusalem in 1955. His Dresden-born father, Josef Burg, was a rabbi, leader of the National Religious Party, and minister in twenty-one Israeli governments. Avraham Burg, on the other hand, linked his political involvement with the Peace Now movement and the Labor Party. Between 1995 and 1999, he was chairman of the World Zionist Organization, then president of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for four years. In 2004, he left politics after publicly calling for Israel to choose between democracy and discrimination against the Arab minority.

„The patriarch Abraham discovered God outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the tribes became a people outside the Land of Israel, the Torah was given outside the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is more important than the Jerusalem Talmud, was written outside the Land of Israel, the past 2,000 years, which shaped the Judaism of this generation, happened outside Israel. The present Jewish people was not born in Israel.”

Bruno Kreisky: or the courage of the unfinished

European Diary, 22.1.2021: 110 years ago today, Bruno Kreisky was born in Vienna. To this day, the memory of the probably most popular chancellor of the republic is polarizing., a chancellor who was at the same time anything but a typical Austrian politician. His political opponents in particular left no doubt about this. In 1970, ÖVP Chancellor Josef Klaus ran for office with the slogan “A real Austrian. This, according to the party’s calculations, said everything there was to say about Kreisky, a Jew and emigrant. But Bruno Kreisky led the SPÖ to a relative majority of 48.5 %. And after an interlude of a cabinet tolerated by the FPÖ, which was highly controversial even among his friends, the SPÖ achieved an absolute majority three times in a row with Kreisky. It’s been a long time, one might say.

Bruno Kreisky
Photo: Konrad Rufus Müller / Source: Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue

Kreisky had no qualms about working with former National Socialists. Precisely because he did not want to be told that he was doing politics as a Jew. Kreisky was above all a European politician, and his own experience of persecution and exile had taught him his own Austrian patriotism: which consisted of not wanting to be a nationalist. And certainly not a Jewish nationalist.
This was eventually to drive him into a dispute in which neither his opponent nor he himself could reap any glory. His bitter feud with the arch-conservative Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal stands to this day like an erratic block in the Austrian memory landscape.
Simon Wiesenthal, whose good relations with the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) were not a bit clouded by the traditional anti-Semitism of the Christian Socialists, gleefully scandalized Kreisky’s lack of inhibitions about cooperating with former Nazis, whether such in the FPÖ or those in the SPÖ. Four of the thirteen ministers in Kreisky’s Social Democratic cabinet in 1970 had belonged to the NSDAP. And FPÖ leader Friedrich Peter, with whom Kreisky was considering a coalition in 1975, had been active in an SS terror unit, which Wiesenthal also deliberately brought to public attention.
Kreisky’s subsequent insults against Wiesenthal (“Nazi collaborator”) are legendary. Austria was able to watch two Jews at each other’s throats in public. But behind the dispute was by no means only Kreisky’s political calculation to curry favor with parts of the electorate. Behind it was – more or less unspoken – the dispute about Jewish experiences from which Wiesenthal and Kreisky had drawn diametrically opposed conclusions.
Kreisky’s traumatic experiences did not begin in 1938 with National Socialism, but in the Austrian fascism of the Ständestaat. In 1936, the young socialist Kreisky was sentenced to imprisonment. He had every reason to distrust the political descendants of the Austrofascists as much as the National Socialists, who drove him into exile in 1938. Kreisky survived in Sweden, where he also met Willy Brandt, who had emigrated from Germany – the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Kreisky remained a passionate European, but he did not like Zionism. For him, there was no question of helping to build a democratic Austria after 1945. His four chancellorships were marked by reform initiatives in social policy and education policy, as well as in family and criminal law – and, as with so many Social Democrats, by a confidence in technical progress that also made him blind to the new issues that came onto the agenda with the dispute over the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant. Even defeat in the referendum, however, did not prevent him from winning the 1979 elections for the fourth time.

While Wiesenthal made Israel as a “Jewish state” the core of his own identity in Austria, Kreisky tried to mediate in the Middle East conflict. Which entangled him in contradictions. He cultivated relations with Arab politicians such as Sadat and Gaddafi, and discreetly negotiated with Moscow for the release of Jewish Soviet citizens who wanted to emigrate to Israel.
What Kreisky mastered best was the art of playing with the public. His press conferences are unforgotten. Not necessarily what they were about in each case. But the style was new. Instead of pronouncements, there was communication.
“I don’t value wreaths that posterity will weave for me. I don’t value monuments. What I would like, however, is for the period in which I was able to influence political conditions in Austria to be regarded as a period in which great reforms were introduced, which left their mark on society and brought about an improvement in social conditions. Nothing would be more gruesome than the thought of having merely administered.”

Much of what Kreisky wanted to set in motion is still waiting to happen.
Willy Brandt, Kreisky’s companion for over fifty years, delivered the eulogy for him at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. “Farewell, my dear, my difficult friend.”

Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof and the language of mankind

European Diary, 15.12.2020: 161 years ago today Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was born in Bialystok. In 1887, under the pseudonym Doctor Esperanto, he was to found a planned language that is still spoken and cultivated today by people who hope that the Babylonian confusion of languages will one day no longer stand in the way of a united humanity.
A hope that seems today more than ever in vain.

Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, 1908

Zamenhof grew up in a multilingual world, a multilingual city where Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish were spoken as a matter of course. His father was associated with the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskala, saw himself as a Russian and as an atheist. He worked as a language teacher of French and German – and became a Russian school inspector and censor. Zamenhof’s mother, on the other hand, was religious and spoke Yiddish. Lejzer, who soon adopted the non-Jewish first name Ludwik, drew his own lessons from this cosmos full of contradictions that were not mutually exclusive at the time. First, however, he studied medicine, first in Moscow, then in Warsaw, and became an ophthalmologist.
The pogroms of 1882 led the young Russian, as whom he too initially saw himself, to the early Zionist movement. But the goal of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East seemed unrealistic to him. He saw the future of the Jews in a reconciled world, without linguistic, cultural or religious walls. And consequently became an internationalist.
Even as a child, Zamenhof was enthusiastic about the richness of languages, mastering Russian and Yiddish as a matter of course, learning Polish, German and French at an early age, and Greek, Latin and English at school. He also learned Hebrew, as he was later to translate the Hebrew Bible into Esperanto.
His real dream, however, was an easy-to-learn world language in which a divided humanity could find its way to each other. Not to forget their “own” languages, but to gain a common basis. Already on his 18th birthday he sang a song with his friends in the Lingwe Uniwersale.
Finally, in 1887, he published his final draft under the name of Dr. Esperanto, and began publishing his own magazine, La Esperantisto, address books and dictionaries. And he worked on a universalist-humanist worldview, which he first called Hillelism (after the eminent Jewish scholar of pre-Christian times) and finally, in Esperanto, Homaranismo.
The Esperanto movement soon counted thousands of followers in various European countries. Many families taught the language to their children, including George Soros’ family in Hungary. But the nationalistic self-destruction of Europe during World War I could not stop his movement any more than the peace movement.
Zamenhof experienced the beginning of the war in 1914 in Cologne, on his way from Warsaw to Paris for the 10th Esperanto World Congress. During the war years, Zamenhof withdrew, worked on his translation of the Hebrew Bible into Esperanto, wrote a memoir To the Diplomats, which he called upon not to forget the minorities in the coming peace negotiations, and struggled with his heart disease, which finally defeated him on April 14, 1917. Zamenhof lived to the age of 57. On his last journey to the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, a large crowd accompanied him, including many of his poor Jewish patients.

To this day, there are Esperanto groups in many countries that at least uphold the memory of Zamenhof’s dream. In 2017, even Unesco had included Zamenhof’s 100th death anniversary in the list of official commemorative days of the year. The city council of Bialystok, dominated by the right-wing nationalist party PIS, however, refused to honor the famous “son of the city” with a Zamenhof Year. They really did not want to adorn themselves with a Jewish internationalist.

Omri Boehm: Rethinking Israel

European Diary, 3.12.2020: Yesterday the Israeli philosopher and political thinker Omri Boehm was our guest, in a Zoom event organized together with the German-Israeli Society of the Lake Constance Region.
His book “Israel – a Utopia” is causing lively discussions and joins a growing number of critical voices that no longer cling to the failed phantom of a “two-state solution” but explores new visions for a binational state.
Our Zoom-webinar with him was attended by 150 guests from Vienna to New York and Berlin to Zurich. Here is the recording of the talk, that was mainly conducted in English.

There is a blatant contradiction between a Jewish state and a liberal democracy, says the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm. For a Jew (and thus a fully-fledged Israeli citizen) is only someone who is ‘of Jewish descent’ – or religiously converted. In his great essay, he sketches the vision of an ethnically neutral state that overcomes its nationalist founding myth and thus finally has a future.

Israel has changed dramatically in the last two decades: While religious Zionism is becoming increasingly popular, both leftists and liberals lack convincing ideas and concepts. The two-state solution is widely considered to have failed. In view of this disaster, Omri Boehm argues for a rethink of Israel’s statehood: Only the equal rights of all citizens can end the conflict between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish state and its occupied territories must become a federal, binational republic. Such a policy is not anti-Zionist; on the contrary, it lays the foundation for a modern and liberal Zionism.

Omri Boehm, born in 1979 in Haifa, studied in Tel Aviv and served in the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. He received his doctorate at Yale with a dissertation on “Kant’s Critique of Spinoza.” Today he teaches as professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is an Israeli and German citizen, has conducted research in Munich and Berlin, and writes about Israeli politics in Haaretz, Die Zeit, and The New York Times.

The book:
Omri Boehm: Israel – eine Utopie,
Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2020, hardback, 256 pages,
€ 20.60, ISBN 978-3-549-10007-3
The English edition, A Future for Israel: Beyond the Two-State Solution, will appear in April 2021 at New York Review Books.

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.

Stefan Zweig: Café Europa

European Diary, 28.11.2020: 139 years ago on this day Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna. On February 23, 1942 he took his life in exile in Petropolis, Brazil.
On the way to this last refuge, during the months of his exile in the USA, he wrote his autobiography Die Welt von gestern. Memories of a European. In Hohenems 2014, when we took a look back at the first Europeans, at the Habsburg Jews until World War I in 1914, Stefan Zweig’s critical, melancholic and ironic retrospective view of the “World of Security”, the “dream castle” of the Habsburg monarchy and of Europe inspired by the belief in humanity and progress, which turned out to be a deadly illusion from 1914 to 1945, formed the epilogue, so to speak. We were able to borrow some pages from his manuscript in the original from the Library of Congress in Washington.

Stefan Zweig about the Hohenems Family of his mother Ida Brettauer

In the foreword to his autobiography, Stefan Zweig wrote about the upheavals in Europe and what it meant: “as an Austrian, as a Jew, as a writer, as a humanist and pacifist, to have stood precisely where these earth tremors had the most violent effect. (…) But I do not complain; it is just the homeless man who becomes free in a new sense, and only he who is no longer connected with anything needs to take no more consideration for anything. (…) I was born in 1881 in a large and powerful empire, in the Habsburg monarchy, but one does not look for it on the map: it has been washed away without a trace. I grew up in Vienna, a two-thousand-year-old supranational metropolis, and had to leave it like a criminal before it was degraded to a German provincial city. My literary work has been burnt to ashes in the language in which I wrote it, in the same place where my books have made friends of millions of readers. So I no longer belong anywhere, a stranger everywhere and at best a guest; even the true home that my heart chooses, Europe, is lost to me, since it has been suicidally torn apart for the most part in the war between brothers.
Stefan Zweig was the first and last European at the same time. In front of one of the houses where his Hohenems family lived in the 19th century, a sculpture today reminds one of Walter Benjamin and his “angel of history” – who, like Zweig’s “world of yesterday”, became his legacy before he took his own life on the border in 1940 while fleeing to Spain.
Stefan Zweig managed to escape, but the destruction of Europe also haunted him into exile, until that day in February 1942, when the strength to continue had apparently left him. Years later, his farewell letter was to end up with another emigrant in Petropolis, also a descendant from Hohenems.

The Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem invites you to an online event in memory of Stefan Zweig on Saturday, November 28, 2020, from 13.00 to 21.00 (Central European Time).

Access to the zoom video livestream:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83094429169?pwd=bG4wU1dWaEhmc0c4bWJ5Y2tUcTg1UT09

The birthday party for Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) offers readings, reflections and music from Jerusalem and Ramallah, Hohenems and Vienna, Berlin and Addis Ababa, London, Paris, Tel Aviv and Zurich.

The Hohenems session begins at 4.30 pm (CET) and reminds us of Zweig’s Hohenems origins and his last journey to Brazil, of the first and last Europeans. Hanno Loewy, the actor Michael Schiemer and the “World of Yesterday”, and the Brazilian musician Sergio Wagner will be heard.
Thanks to Petra Klose for the wonderful idea and organization of this event.

Here is an overview of the entire program:

1pm (CET) Jerusalem Session – in English

We will welcome you with stunning views from the roofs of the Willy Brandt Center and the Austrian Hospice,

followed by a performance of Stefan Zweig’s text about Viennese coffeehouses by Guy Bracca who will read to us from the Café Triest.

After that enjoy with us a musical performance of Zweig’s favourite composers Beethoven and Mozart by pianist Dima Milenova

followed by an interview with the young writer Iman Hirbawi, participant of the Willy Brandt Center’s Young Writers Project.

2pm (CET) Addis Ababa Session – in English

Filmmaker Terhas Berhe presents to us the Ethiopian world of coffeehouses and ceremonies in Addis Ababa

2.30pm (CET) Berlin Session – in German

Actress Joanna Castelli reads from Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday and his discovery of freedom in Berlin.

3pm (CET) Talk with Avraham Burg – in English

Avraham Burg speaks about Stefan Zweig’s universal approach to Judaism, his concept for Europe and his legacy today.

3.30pm (CET) Tel Aviv Session – in German

Interview with journalist Peter Münch about what Stefan Zweig tells us today from a European perspective.

4pm (CET) Zurich Session – in German

Dramatic reading with actor Christian Manuel Oliveira about Stefan Zweig’s impressions of wartime Zurich

4.30pm (CET) Hohenems Session – in German

Sergio Wagner brings music from Brasil to the Café Europe.

Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems talks about the current exhibition “The last Europeans” and Stefan Zweig’s family connections to Hohenems,

followed by a reading of actor Michael Schiemer.

5.30pm (CET) Paris Session

Musical performance of Debussy’s Prélude “Danseuses de Delphes” by pianist Emmanuel Strosser

6pm (CET) Vienna Session – in German

Readings by the authors Anna Goldenberg, Doron Rabinovici and Timna Brauer

In cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Tel Aviv

7pm (CET) London Session – in English

Introduction and a performance by Rita Manning and Chris Laurence

7.30pm (CET) Vienna Session – in English

Readings by the authors Julya Rabinowich and Nadine Sayegh with a musical performance of oud player Marwan Abado

In cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Tel Aviv

8pm (CET) Ramallah Session

Performance of “La Vie en Rose” from the Palestinian artist Café Garage by accordion player Mohammad Qutati

8.30 pm (CET) Jerusalem Session – in English

Presentation of the Young Writer’s Project with photographer Iuna Viera and young author Hagar Mizrachi Dudinksi.

We will close the program with a dramatic reading of Stefan Zweig by actor Alex Ansky.

Boycot vs. Boycot

European Diary, 19.10.2020: The consequences of the controversial BDS resolution of the German Parliament of May 2019 are once again becoming apparent. It is apparently understood as a blanket power of attorney for censorship – and perhaps it was meant to be. And so an absurd game is set in motion that only helps those who have no interest in a solution to the conflict over Israel and Palestine. And those who want to prevent us from even thinking about it together.

But let me briefly explain. The movement “Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions”, founded years ago in Israel and Palestine, sees itself as a non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation in Palestine. And is otherwise not squeamish in its methods. It calls for boycott actions against Israel worldwide. It calls for an end to the occupation of “Arab land”, which quite deliberately goes beyond resistance to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and calls into question Israel’s right to exist in its present form as a “Jewish” defined nation state at all. And at the same time it demands equal rights for all people in Israel, which can certainly be understood as a possible offer to discuss a bi-national state of Israel. Whatever the case, BDS is and will probably remain a rather half-baked, one could also say an extremely inconsistent movement. For which, by the way, many Jews and Jewish Israelis also express sympathy or at least a certain understanding. In view of the deadlocked conditions. And even if one has a bad feeling about it.

But unfortunately, the success of BDS is limited above all to striking the wrong people. For lack of ability to assert themselves in those places where it could hurt Israel, activists (especially in the USA) repeatedly concentrate on scandalizing appearances by Israeli scientists and artists, boycotting cooperation at universities or cultural events. “Cultural boycott” is by no means approved of by all BDS activists, but of course such actions quickly reach a large public, and that is tempting.

And at the same time you hit exactly those who could actually be won over for a possible dialogue. What remains is the pale aftertaste that many in the BDS movement with their cultural boycott actions (from which the leadership of the movement does not publicly distance itself anyway) want to torpedo any discussion about common perspectives. For whatever motives.

So far so bad. But even more successful is the boycott that is now spreading in Europe. And is acting up as “measures against BDS”. These “measures” include in particular the withdrawal of public funding for projects, a broad field for arbitrariness of all kinds. For what is a subsidy? It ranges from the financing of NGOs, subsidies for cultural organizers and projects at universities to the renting of public spaces. And who makes the decision on this? And what does all this have to do with a liberal democracy and a constitutional state? These “measures” authorized by the German Bundestag are now mostly not directed against the BDS movement itself, but against all people who have been publicly suspected by anyone, with whatever right, to have anything to do with BDS. (It is sufficient to have co-signed some appeal years ago…). We have landed in the middle of a new form of McCarthyism. “Are or were you a member?” Or do you know someone?

An interesting example of how far this absurd spiral of boycott and counter-boycott has come in the meantime can be seen in Berlin at the moment. There, at the Weißensee Art Academy, a group of Jewish Israelis has been studying the Zionist narrative of history for a year. Yehudit Yinhar is the spokesperson of the group (“School for Unlearning Zionism”), which is currently planning an exhibition at the Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz and is organizing lectures, film evenings, and workshops in English and Hebrew.

Before she moved to Berlin to study as a master student at the Weissensee School of Art, she was one of the activists in Israel of the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement Combatants for Peace, which organizes a joint bi-national memorial day for the victims of both sides one day before the Israeli state holiday for the fallen soldiers every year. Even though the movement is massively hindered by the Israeli state, more and more people take part in this ceremony every year, including well-known Israeli music stars such as Achinoam Nini (Noa). In May 2020, 200,000 people finally watched the ceremony online this time due to the lockdown. The Combatants for Peace, who are searching for ways out of the conflict between the fronts, regularly have to put up with harsh criticism from BDS as well as from the Israeli government. And, of course, from all kinds of organizations and media that act as watchdogs against “anti-Semitism”.

This is now also the case with the project at the Weißensee Art Academy. The Jewish-Israeli group has come under fire. And so the opponents of BDS are now organizing a boycott against Jewish Israelis.

First, the right-wing populist Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, which is close to the government, scandalized the project. The newspaper’s denunciation can now affect anyone. And sometimes nothing happens. But this time the Israeli embassy and the self-proclaimed champion against BDS in Germany, former member of the Bundestag Volker Beck, jumped on the bandwagon immediately and, strangely enough, so did the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. “No tax money should be used for the delegitimization of Israel,” they said. The NGO Amadeo Antonio Foundation ranks the Israelis’ project under “Anti-Semitic incidents”. And Volker Beck even demands the withdrawal of “indirect” funding. This could perhaps even lead to the ban of critical Jews and Israelis in Berlin from using the (state-subsidized) subway. Yehudit Yinhar probably sums it up best in the Berliner Zeitung: “A group of Jewish Israelis wants to take a critical look at their own history, but then the white German comes along and says: No, you can’t do that! As if the power to define our own history were German property. What does this amount to? Are we again divided into good and bad Jewish women? When German institutions seriously claim that they want to protect Jewish life in Germany and then withdraw funds from us on suspicion of anti-Semitism, something is going very wrong.”

Now let’s imagine that Donald Trump would demand that the money be withdrawn from projects at German universities that critically deal with American history (for example, the “Indian Wars”) on the grounds that it “delegitimizes” the United States. Or Putin would demand that Russian emigrants in Germany no longer be allowed to critically examine the October Revolution. Or Erdogan would demand that no more Kurdish artists be allowed to perform in German concert halls who also talk about Turkish policy toward the Kurds. (Oh yes, that’s right, he does indeed, and yet he gets rather clear answers…).

Funding for the Berlin project now is stalled and the website is taken offline by the Art academy, that fears loosing future public funding and thus their existence. Welcome to the illiberal democracy of Victor Orban in Germany.

19.10.2019: The House of Commons in London votes in a special session against the immediate approval of the new Brexit Treaty. Boris Johnson is forced to apply for an extension of the Brexit deadline in Brussels. Great Britain is still refusing to withdraw from the EU at any price.

Hannah Arendt: Jewish Cosmopolitanism and Broken Universalism

European Diary, 14.10.2020: She was one of the most dazzling Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. Today 114 years ago she was born in Hannover: Hannah Arendt.

She did not want to be called a philosopher. She saw herself as a political theorist. And in her unsparing analyses of political systems of rule and ideologies, her contributions to the theory of democracy and plurality, she saw herself as a historian.
Her studies took her through the German intellectual province, to Marburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, to Heidegger (with whom she had a love affair that was later much discussed), Husserl and Jaspers, with whom she had a moving, friendly and contradictory dispute about the relationship between Germans and Jews before and after National Socialism. “For me, Germany is the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry,” she wrote to Jaspers before 1933, while at the same time emphasizing the need to keep a distance. She did not want to have anything to do with a “German being” that Jaspers liked to talk about.

As universalistically as she thought in terms of political issues, she always understood herself to be a Jew and took an offensive approach to the Jewish role as the pariah of society.

In 1933 she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. And from then on, “If you are attacked as a Jew, you must defend yourself as a Jew,” as she dryly remarked in a legendary television interview by Günter Gaus in 1964. There was hardly anything that burdened her as much as the fact that her own intellectual environment in Germany not only came to terms with National Socialism, but like Heidegger and many others, was even attracted by the new power. She never doubted that such decisions were the responsibility of the subjects. She had nothing but biting derision for the “tragic” self-image of many Germans who, after 1945, had understood themselves in categories of entanglement and doom, as being “guiltless guilty”.
But also for the attempts of Holocaust victims to lend some positive meaning to the mass crimes, as a cathartic event in history, she had no sympathy. “Auschwitz, that must never have happened,” was her bitter résumé, which was also behind her book on the Eichmann Trial, with which she attracted fierce criticism in the Jewish public.

But before that she had experienced flight, internment, and statelessness. In 1933 she fled to France. In Paris, she belonged to the circle of friends around Walter Benjamin and the lawyer Erich Cohn-Bendit (the later father of Dany Cohn-Bendit). In 1940 she was interned in Gurs, now stateless, as an “enemy foreigner” in France, an experience that she dealt with in her essay Wir Flüchtlinge (We Refugees). After a few weeks she managed to escape from the camp, and in 1941 she was able to emigrate to the USA. In her luggage she carries Walter Benjamin’s last manuscript, his theses on the concept of history, his examination of the myth of progress and the growing heap of rubble that the angel of history must look upon, which the storm drives backwards into the future.
She now argues more and more independently as a Jew for Jewish self-defense, and after 1945 she is committed to the rescue of Jewish cultural assets whose real location, the Jewish communities of Europe, have been destroyed – and which must find a new use, especially in the USA and Israel.

She maintained a critical distance from the Zionist project of territorial Jewish sovereignty at the expense of the resident Arab population – and mixed feelings between sympathy, solidarity and political disillusionment. When, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, Jewish militias massacred the Arab population of Deir Yasin in 1948, she issued a fiery call, together with Albert Einstein and others, for a conciliation with the Palestinians. She saw her own place in the USA, a society she believed capable of reconciling universal civil equality and collective rights to belong to particular identities. Later, in private letters, she also expressed her attachment to Israel as a Jewish retreat, at a time when her disappointment about the persistence of anti-Semitic resentment was growing.

In the ever more intense debates about Jewish “identity” and self-confidence, however, she publicly took up a very individual, Jewish-cosmopolitan position, with which she came between all chairs, as Natan Sznaider showed in his book about Memory space Europe. The visions of European cosmopolitanism emphasized. Natan Sznaider will open the European Summer University for Jewish Studies in Hohenems in June 2021 with a lecture on this topic.

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

“Never Forget!”

Installation “never Forget”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

The imperative “Never Forget!” is a warning that endeavors to keep the memory of the National Socialist regime’s crimes and the Shoah alive. Indeed, as early as in 1946, Communist Vienna city councilor for cultural affairs Viktor Matejka mounted a large exhibition with that title at the Vienna Künstlerhaus. It was organized by the “Austrian federal association of former politically persecuted anti-fascists,” the umbrella organization of Austrian victims of National Socialism that existed until 1948, which had been joined by the “Austrian federal association of individuals persecuted for reasons of origin.” Yet, it was only at the last moment that Heinrich Sussmann (1904–1986), a Jewish Auschwitz survivor, was commissioned with designing a poster and exhibition room VI, “Persecution of the Jews.” It was not, however, Sussmann’s poster, which addressed the suffering in the concentration camps, but rather Victor Slama’s resistance fighter forcefully destroying the swastika that became the main advertisement vehicle. Even beyond that, exhibition preparations proved to be conflict-ridden. The Austrian People’s Party was unwilling to see the events immediately preceding the National Socialist period addressed, that is, the authoritarian corporate state, which had started with Austrians shooting at Austrians; and both large parties wished to have the Austrian victim theory underscored. No party was interested in dealing with the active participation of Austrians in the pogrom and murder of the Jews.

< Heinrich Sussmann, poster for the exhibition “Never Forget,” Vienna 1946, © Austrian National Library-Picture Archive

> Anti-Semitic “game” anonymously sent by mail to Simon Wiesenthal, n. d., © Archive of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

v Simon Wiesenthal, Vienna 1988, © Archive of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

Throughout his entire life, Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal (1908–2005) implored to never forget that the Shoah had been a consequence of the dismantling of democracy and human rights. Through the “Documentation Center of the Association of Jews Persecuted by the Nazi Regime,” which he had founded, he collected and documented Nazi crimes and searched for escaped perpetrators around the world. Politically, Wiesenthal was close to the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party). His protest against former Nazis being ministers in the FPÖ-supported (Freedom Party of Austria) minority government of the SPÖ (then: Socialist Party of Austria) under Bruno Kreisky—who in turn had found himself berated as “Saujud” (sow of a Jew) by an ÖVP member of parliament in 1966—prompted the Federal Chancelor to maliciously insinuate that Wiesenthal had been a Nazi collaborator. Now, two Austrians of Jewish descent were attacking each other in public, and the republic watched. Despite all the educational efforts and all the affirmations of their anti-fascist convictions automatically uttered by politicians, Wiesenthal was repeatedly exposed to rude anti-Semitism. When in 1990 an FPÖ mayoral candidate let it be known in an interview: “I’ve said to Simon Wiesenthal: We are already building ovens again, but nor for you, Mr. Wiesenthal —you have plenty of space in Jörgl’s pipe,” it only was the tip of the iceberg.

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.

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: