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.

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.”

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.

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.

Hans Kelsen: Elegance and Forgetfulness

European Diary, 11.10.2020: No, Hans Kelsen, who was born 139 years ago today in Prague, was not the sole “author” of the Austrian constitution, whose “elegance” has been so often attempted lately. But the lawyer, who came from a Jewish family, did indeed have a decisive influence on its formulation. Kelsen studied in Vienna, and first converted to Catholicism in 1905, then to Protestantism in 1912.
With his main work, the Pure Theory of Law, he was one of the founders of legal positivism, which tried to distance itself from the so-called natural law doctrine. A dispute hardly understandable for those not educated in law theory. After all, Kelsen also presumed a “basic norm” – existing beyond the positive legal positions – which he first called a hypothesis, then a fiction. And which nevertheless made him a declared supporter of inalienable human rights.

Hans Kelsen: Bust at the Viennese Constitutional Court

In 1917 Kelsen became a professor in Vienna. Among his students was Hersch Lauterpacht, who turned away from legal positivism and, as a follower of the doctrine of natural law, was to become one of the most important experts in international law of the 20th century – and who had a decisive influence on the creation of international human rights jurisdiction after World War II and the Holocaust.

In his work on constitutional law after the First World War, Kelsen already advocated a theory of democracy based on the respect and protection of minority rights: “The rule of the majority, which is so characteristic of democracy, differs from any other rule in that it not only conceptually presupposes an opposition – the minority – in its innermost essence, but also recognizes it politically and protects it in the fundamental rights and freedoms, in the principle of proportionality.” His dispute with Carl Schmitt on the question of whether the power of the sovereign or the right and protection of minorities deserves priority in a democratic society is legendary.

After his decisive involvement in the Federal Constitutional Law, whose 100th birthday was celebrated a few days ago on October 1, 1920, Kelsen remained the constitutional judge of the young republic. And soon came into the sights of the conservative governments that followed. The performance of Arthur Schnitzler’s play “Der Reigen” in February 1921 was to be the subject of an anti-Semitically charged campaign in Vienna. Vienna’s Social Democratic mayor Reumann refused to ban the play, as demanded by the Christian Social government. The Constitutional Court also ruled against a ban under Kelsen, provoking angry threats against Kelsen.

Finally, in 1929, another conflict broke out, ending Kelsen’s career in Austria. The Constitutional Court had made divorce, which had been forbidden in Catholic Austria until then, possible by recognizing the state “dispensatory marriage” introduced by the Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria as legal. The Christian-social federal government thereupon dismissed the entire constitutional empire by law and appointed new judges.

Kelsen accepted Konrad Adenauer’s offer to move to Cologne as a professor. But already in 1933 the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany put an end to his activities in Cologne. As the only one of his Cologne colleagues, Carl Schmitt did not take part in a petition in his favor.

Kelsen went to Geneva, and in 1936 to Prague, where his appointment triggered the furore among right wing anti-Semitic students. In 1940 he emigrated to the USA and settled in California. In 1945 he was honored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, but an invitation to return to Austria never came. The elegance of “his” constitution is gladly remembered. But not so much of the laborious struggle for minority rights. Kelsen died on April 19, 1976 in Orinda, California.

The Hour of the Parliament

European Diary, 6.10.2020: Yesterday the European Parliament debated the present report on the dismantling of legal principles in some member states. A turbulent discussion.
For months, the European Parliament and the Commission have been struggling to find a clear line towards those European states that abandon the rule of law on the way to “illiberal democracy”, i.e. states without a free press, without an independent judiciary, without protection of minorities from arbitrariness, discrimination or incitement, without the political corrective of an alert civil society – states in which the people are only called to the ballot box to confirm their leaders in office, who in any case announce even before the elections that they will not resign if they lose.
At the end of September, the European Commission published its first EU-wide report on the situation of the rule of law in the individual member states, which, as expected, is worrying. The report points not only to the growing state “control” of the press and judiciary in countries such as Hungary and Poland, but also to considerable deficits in areas such as fighting corruption or the separation of powers, including in other states such as Bulgaria, Malta, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia and Romania. Commission President von der Leyen made every effort to remain diplomatic. “Although we in the EU have very high standards with regard to the rule of law, there is a need for action at various points. One would “continue to work on solutions with the member states”. Vice President Véra Jourová had already become clearer in a previous interview with Spiegel, describing Hungary as a “sick democracy”, which immediately prompted Orban to demand her resignation.
In the course of the EU Commission’s 1.8 billion euro deal, which aims to revive the European economy and in particular the most severely affected states after the Corona collapse, the Commission and Parliament had also promised an effective mechanism to demand compliance with the rule of law. Poland and Hungary made it clear from the outset what they thought of this – and threatened to block economic aid in the Council. Admittedly, they themselves would also benefit greatly from such aid. A week ago, the German Council Presidency presented a compromise proposal that looks more like a toothless tiger. Cuts in EU financial aid would thus only be possible after it had been established that violations of the rule of law also have a direct impact on how EU money is handled. The EU Commission wanted to take a tougher approach and make access to funding generally dependent on compliance with the rule of law. But even the German compromise proposal, which would probably remain completely ineffective in case of doubt, naturally fails due to the veto from Budapest and Warsaw.
But the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Finland also vote against the German mediation. For them, the proposal understandably does not go far enough.
And so the EU Parliament is now finally getting ready to get involved in this issue.
Katarina Barley, the German deputy president of the EU parliament, explains to Deutschlandfunk radio that the EU does not want to be blackmailed by Hungary and Poland and their threat to blow the entire budget. “If we give up the rule of law now, then we will have conditions in the EU for the next seven years that our citizens do not want either, because our tax money will then go to regimes like Orbán’s and Kaczynski’s, which above all shovel money into their own pockets but convert their countries into democracies that no longer have anything to do with the values of the EU.” After all, Hungary would be financially dependent on the EU.
In yesterday’s parliamentary debate the Slovakian member of parliament and parliamentary rapporteur on democracy and the rule of law Michal Simecka gave a moving speech. Hungary is no longer a democracy, and Poland is on the way to that. Bulgaria is also on a dangerous path, he said, where people have been protesting unsuccessfully for three months against the rampant corruption of the government. He himself had already experienced before 1989 what it means when people are arbitrarily arrested or lose their jobs because they speak their minds. The image of the EU as a “guarantor of democracy” was severely damaged, he said. Only “better monitoring” as demanded by the EU Commission was not enough. The “rule of law” must also be able to be enforced. The governments criticized in the report reacted differently. While Bulgaria and Romania announced further reforms in line with the EU recommendations, Poland and Hungary attacked the EU head-on and rejected all criticism.

Tomorrow the report will be voted on in the Parliament. A broad agreement is expected. Then it will become clear whether the Parliament will stand firm against the European Council, in which countries like Poland or Hungary threaten with their veto right against the aid budget.
On the Internet, the most loyal friends of Orban’s “new democracy” are already on the move, above all Henryk Broder, who is allowed to make fun of the “dominatrix” Barley in the right-wing blogger paradise “Axis of Good”. Sexism must not be missing in this male association.

Repatriation-Patronage

European Diary, 23.9.2020: The EU Commission makes a new attempt to coordinate the asylum policies of the different member states. In view of the attitude of some states, this already borders on the courage of desperation. The German Broadcast Deutsche Welle reports undaunted: “The fire in the refugee camp Moria and the inhumane conditions on Lesbos give the debate ‘new momentum’ EU officials in Brussels say. The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has announced that the old system, also known as “Dublin rules”, is to be replaced by something new. An obligation for EU states to accept refugees or asylum seekers will probably not be included, because many member states would simply refuse to do so.

Meanwhile, Germany has already relativized its new figure of 1500 a little bit. This figure does not only refer to people from Moria, but also from various other Greek islands. There the same inhuman conditions prevail that led to the explosion on Lesbos anyhow. But at least this new allowance remains an additional admission to those 150 children and teenagers from Moria, as announced earlier. France is also taking in 150 people, Italy 300. The Netherlands on the other hand is cheating. They announced the admission of 100 people from Moria – and reduce their UN contingent by this number. This is a smart way to lie to yourself and the world. Finland is taking in 12 young people. Well then.

But the EU Commission now wants to talk about a new “migration pact”. The old Dublin system is to be overcome, announces EU Commissioner Schinas, reports Deutsche Welle: “In the future the member states could choose whether they want to accept asylum seekers or rather help with the repatriation and deportation of rejected asylum seekers. Commission President von der Leyen follows suit. This system should be obligatory. States like Hungary, Poland (or Austria), which do not participate in the reception of refugees, should then organize their repatriation in the future. And in doing so they should adhere to all international regulations. Something for which these increasingly authoritarian and illiberally governed states are generally well known. But the EU Commission has now apparently switched to sarcasm, too, and calls its new proposal “repatriation sponsorships”, or “patronage”. No, looking at the calendar does not clear this up either. Today is not April 1.

The tale of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”

European Diary, 28.9.2020: Do you know this joke? Mayer, a Viennese Jew, wants to travel. At the train station in Vienna, already on the platform, he realizes that he still has to go to the toilet. He asks around: “Excuse me, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Me? Well, that’s an insinuation. I love the Jews.” “Okay, You obviously can’t help me.” And he turns to the next one: “Excuse me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Well, really, not at all. I love Israel, such a wonderful country, fighting against those…” “Let it go.” And again he turns to the next one. “Please, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “How not! Of course, Jews rule everywhere, even the weather…” “Thank you, you are at least honest. Can you watch my suitcase for a minute?”

Austria’s “Integration Minister” Susanne Raab loves it, Germany’s AfD loves it, Viktor Orbán loves it, Identitarians love it, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz loves it, the German CSU loves it, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Martin Engelberg love it: the “Christian-Jewish Occident”. HC Strache even loves the “Christian-Jewish-Aramaic heritage”. But hardly anyone is interested in that anymore.

I don’t remember exactly when the Jewish-Christian dialogue, that began in the 1950s under the impression of the Shoah – and the critical reflection among Christians – was taken up by the slogan of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”.

In Germany, this was already being talked about more and more often in the late 1990s. The Enlightenment and the Greek heritage were also frequently invoked. The only thing missing in this talking was Islam. As if it had not been Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages who had a decisive contribution to Europe’s rediscovering of its Greek heritage in the Middle Ages. One could not avoid the impression that this void in public identity rhetoric was the only real thing about this discourse.

In 2010 the slogan of “Christian-Jewish Occident” also arrived in Vienna. Martin Engelberg, editor of a “Jewish” magazine and now a conservative (that is – in Austria – for the time being right wing populist) member of the Parliament and “Israel expert” of the Chancellor, invoked the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and the notion of a “common Jewish-Christian community of values” (after 1000 years of Christian persecution of Jews). And he warned against Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, talk of “imported anti-Semitism” has become commonplace and serves not at least as justification for racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic asylum and migration policies.

And it serves as a distraction from everything that does not fit into this world view of essentialist identities. The greatest danger for Jews in Austria and Europe in fact still emanates from right-wing extremists, even if many Islamists make a successful effort to learn from them. Even in the everyday life of the middle classes and bourgeois circles, the so-called middle of society, Jews still have to listen to cultivated resentment about Jewish influence on this or that.

More than ever before, the most intimate friends of Israeli politics – from Victor Orbán and Matteo Salvini to Marie le Pen, to the right-wing populists of the Netherlands, Belgium, and most Eastern European countries – are always capable of rough-caliber anti-Semitic rides. That is in effect, when it is not about Israel, the Jews in the Middle East, who, as vanguard of the “Occident,” are expected do the dirty work for Europe and the United States, and are supposed to receive the blows for it.

Jews all over the world instead defend their right to live in open societies, in which it is not ethnicity or religion that decides whether one enjoys civil, political or social rights.

Thus, as a Jew, one has to deal with the fact that Israel, of all countries, as a “Jewish state” is now being misused by the nationalists of this world as a justification for their own racism, and is happy to be used.

And thus one now is faced with a strange constellation of ardent anti-Semites and fanatical “friends” of Israel: more and more often the same people.

The “fight against anti-Semitism”, which the current Austrian government has written in full in its program, and even more so the commitment to Israel as a “Jewish state”, is in reality not directed against anti-Semitism at all, but against everything that can be interpreted as “too far-reaching” criticism of Israel. Is it Austria actually that decide whether Israel defines itself in terms of ethnic-religious or secular pluralism?

In the name of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”, this naturally affects not only Muslims, who – like Christian fundamentalists – get stirred up to the “fight for Jerusalem”, but at least as often it is directed against Jews, i.e. the “right ones”. Cosmopolitan Jewish Intellectuals, or even critically minded Israelis. Orbán has demonstrated this most vividly. Advised by his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, he cemented his power with a campaign against the “Jewish world conspiracy” of George Soros, who would try to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants.

In Germany, one can observe the beneficial activity of a state sponsored “commissioner against anti-Semitism” for quite some time. In the meantime, he denounces so-called “left-wing liberal” critics of his politics (most of them Jewish and Israeli intellectuals) as latently violent “anti-Semites”. We will certainly get such specialists in Austria soon.

Lucian Brunner

Lucian Brunner (1850 – 1914) spent his childhood and early adulthood in Hohenems and St. Gallen, but was also often in Trieste and traveling. The son of Marco Brunner and Regina Brunner, née Brettauer, worked at the “Jacob Brunner Bank” in St. Gallen until 1888, but eventually settled in Vienna together with his wife Malwine Mandel and their three boys; here he was active as industrialist and politician. He became involved in a small liberal-oriented party, the “Viennese Democrats,” assuming functions as Viennese municipal council member, as chairman of the “Demokratischer Zentralverein” (Democratic central association), and as publisher of the associated newspaper Volkstimme. In the Viennese municipal council, he repeatedly confronted the anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger, for instance, when preventing subsidies from tax money for a church construction or when contradicting nationalistic positions. Lucian Brunner always kept in touch with his home community in Hohenems and donated significant sums for the construction of the hospital and the gymnasium. When he passed away on April 15, 1914, he left behind a bequest for a non-denominational school in his hometown of Hohenems. The Hohenems municipal council refused to accept the bequest. The sketch shows the Brunner family as typical representatives of Vienna’s upper bourgeoisie whose evenings were used for self-representation in their own parlor.

Lucian Brunner, speech in the Vienna City Council on the German-Czech Language conflict – after a Language decree by Minister of Interior Badeni made Czech a second mandatory official language in Bohemia and Moravia. Vienna, April 27, 1897.

Lucian Brunner, speech in the Vienna City Council about minority rights in Vienna and Trieste – on the occasion of the planned extension of the Czech Komensky-School in Vienna-Favoriten. Vienna, October 22, 1897.

“Christian-Judeo Occident”

Installation “Christian-Judeo Occident”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

The Jewish communities in Europe are in part significantly older than the Christian communities; after all, Europe’s Christianization was completed only in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, until recently, the term “Christian Occident” was applied to Europe; hereby, eleven million Jews who had lived here prior to the National Socialist period were erased from European culture via linguistic usage. The relationship between Catholicism and Judaism was put on a more positive footing only under the impact of the Holocaust and with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This had been preceded by the establishment of Christian-Jewish associations—as a critical reaction to the anti-Semitism and complicity of the churches in the genocide of the European Jews. It would take until 1986 until the first pope, John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła (1920-2005), would enter a Jewish house of prayer, namely, the Great Synagogue of Rome together with Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff.

< Pope John Paul II and Chief Rabbi Toaff on their way to the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, © Str/EPA/picturedesk.com

> Anti-Islam protests in the Czech Republic with Miloš Zeman on the occasion of the 26^th anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” in November 2015, © Matej Divizna, Getty Images

The catchword “Judeo-Christian West,” which has recently become popular, is a political battle cry. With its help, an old minority is meant to be coopted and mobilized against a new minority. It alludes to the cultural heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity as well as to the Bible. The fact that a significant part of this heritage is owed to Arabo-Islamic mediation is withheld as is the fact that Jews have always been forced into precarious life conditions and threatened by pogroms. Moreover, European protests against the construction of mosques recall prohibitions to build synagogues, which had been in force in large parts of Europe until well into the second half of the 19^th century. Thus, the protests are also directed at the houses of worship of Muslims who speak Slavic languages and are shaping the culture of Southeastern Europe since hundreds of years. The concept of a European “Judeo-Christian community of shared values” blatantly contravenes Article 10 (1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union that declares: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

Doron Rabinovici (Wien) über die Rede vom “christlich-jüdischen Abendland”:

Angiola Sartorio

Angiola Elise Sartorio (1903-1995) was the daughter of Julie Bonn and the Italian painter Giulio Aristide Sartorio. Her grandmother Elise Bonn, née Brunner, a sister of the “Triestine brothers” of the first generation, had married into the Frankfurt banking family Bonn. Following her parents’ separation and years spent in England and Sweden, Angiola Sartorio moved back to Germany where she became acquainted with the ideas of modern dance and entered the company of Kurt Jooss, a student of the influential dance theoretician Rudolf von Laban, to eventually embark on a remarkable career as choreographer and dancer. In 1933, she created a choreography for Max Reinhardt’s Italian stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Florence. She rejected, however, Reinhardt’s invitation to accompany him to the USA. She had just opened a dance school of her own in Florence where numerous dancers fleeing from Germany and Austria had found work starting in 1933. In 1939, Angiola Sartorio decided to flee to the USA herself, first to New York, then to Santa Barbara where she continued teaching dance and choreography. She remained professionally active until the end of her life and took a stand for minorities and civil rights.

Moritz Julius Bonn

Moritz Julius Bonn was born on June 16, 1873 in Frankfurt am Main as son of the banker Julius Philipp Bonn and Elise Brunner of Hohenems. Following studies in Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, Freiburg, and London as well as research visits in Ireland and South Africa, he started his successful career as a political economist. In Italy, he met Theresa Cubitt, a native of England and married her in London in 1905. That same year, he completed his habilitation on English colonial rule in Ireland. From 1914 to 1917, he taught at various universities in the USA. As a political consultant, he took part in numerous postwar conferences, wrote on the topics of free trade and economic reconstruction, and drafted critical studies on colonialism as well as European democracy, which he considered viable only if based on pluralism and ethnic diversity. As rector of the Berlin College of Commerce and head of the Institute of Finance, founded by him, he eventually became one of the leading economic experts of the Weimar Republic. In the wake of the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, Bonn was forced to emigrate, initially to Salzburg, then London, and finally to the USA where he began his autobiography Wandering Scholar (German: So macht man Geschichte). After the war, he permanently settled in London where he passed away in 1965. Moritz Julius Bonn had spent his childhood summers at his grandparents’ in Hohenems and also

Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Education of a liberal and synagogue service in Hohenems

Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Multicultural diversity in “Felix Austria”

Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Memory and Return from Exile?

“Domiciled in all EU Member States”

Installation “Domiciled in all EU Member States”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

There are numerous linguistic and ethnic minorities in Europe, among them, for instance, the Sámi, Bretons, Basques, Sorbs, Frisians, Sards, Pavees, Yenish, or the Roma. Also counting as part of the Roma are the Sinti, Manouches, Kalderash, Lovari, and Ashkali. With a total of 10-12 million people, the Roma constitute Europe’s largest minority and are, according to the European Commission, “domiciled in all EU member states.” Contrary to common stereotypes, the overwhelming majority of European Roma are settled. After roughly hundreds of thousands of Roma have fallen victim to National Socialist racial fanaticism, the European states are now officially aware of their human rights obligations to protect all their minorities. On February 1, 1998, a Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities entered into force in the member states of the European Union. In 2007, the artist Damian Le Bas (1963–2017) built together with his wife, Delaine, the first Roma pavilion at the Venice Biennale. < Damian Le Bas, Gypsyland Europe, Berlin 2017, © Delaine Le Bas > Deported Roma at Lyon Airport, 2010, © Philippe Desmazes/AFP In August 2010, as part of a “security crackdown” targeted and primarily directed at the Roma, French security forces dismantled forty illegal Roma camps. Seven hundred people from Romania and Bulgaria were forcefully deported although as EU citizens, they enjoy the right to freedom of movement. To enable frictionless deportations, special charter flights were organized. Not only the chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma saw in this an act of discrimination and violation of minority rights. French intellectuals such as André Glucksmann joined and demanded freedom for the “border-crossing mobile homes.” The Minister of State for European Affairs of France at the time, Pierre Lellouche, who is proud of his Tunisian-Jewish origins, not only defended the actions taken by the security forces, but also put up for negotiation the definition of the freedom-of-movement principle within the Union. He viewed criticism coming from the EU Commission as “interference from Brussels” although the mentioned Framework Convention of the European Council had been violated. On the other hand, Lellouche criticized the European Commission for shutting the eyes to the European phenomenon of a massive “antiziganism” and for not developing visions for an improvement of the life situation of the Roma everywhere in Europe.