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

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

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

Hilda Monte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hilda Monte’s grave in Feldkirch

Olaf vs. Frontex

European Diary, 13.1.2021: The news has hit home. The EU’s anti-fraud agency (Olaf) is investigating the EU border agency Frontex.

For many months, Croatian border guards have been trampling EU law and forcibly driving refugees back to Bosnia at the EU’s external border. They do this with the applause of some governments in Europe. Hungary and Austria are at the forefront of covering up this open violation of the law, or approving it when covering it up no longer works in the face of so much evidence. Finally, Austrian border officials are not squeamish when it comes to covering their ears at the Slovenian border when refugees ask for asylum – and instead forcibly push them back into Slovenia, from where they are deported to the Croats, who then dump them at the Bosnian border. In return, the EU then pays Bosnia money to take care of these illegally deported refugees. In Bosnia, this money ends up in invisible channels – but obviously not in refugee care. For example, hundreds of refugees were allowed to spend the end of the year outside in the freezing cold because the improvised Lipa tent camp still had no electricity, no water and no heating and was therefore closed down by the International Organization for Migration. Since then, not much has happened. Except what is now called “on-site assistance”: a few new, unheated tents, with no water and no electricity. 2000 refugees are now squatting in the forest, mostly under plastic sheets. In sub-zero temperatures. Many of the cases are well documented.
To this day, the European Court of Human Rights does not dare to address this ongoing breach of law by EU member states and aspirants. But at least Frontex, the border protection agency run by the EU itself, is now under investigation. For a long time, countries like Hungary, Poland and Austria placed high hopes in Frontex. Then Orban and Kurz realized that Frontex, too, must abide by laws. And Frontex fell out of favor.
But Frontex Director Fabrice Leggeri apparently wanted to save his reputation in Budapest, Warsaw and Vienna in 2020. So Frontex is now, as has been known for months, in the eastern Mediterranean involved in illegal refoulements off the Greek coast. And there are other things that seem to be going wrong at the agency, from intimidation of employees who have concerns to irregularities in tenders. Whether the ongoing investigations will have any consequences remains to be seen.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ermittlungen-gegen-eu-grenzschutzbehoerde-frontex-17142763.html

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/lipa-lager-bosnien-101.html

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000121752241/berichte-ueber-illegale-pushbacks-von-migranten-an-oesterreichischer-grenze

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

Bosnian New Year

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

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

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

Christmas on Lesbos

European Diary, 22.12.2020: In two days it will be Christmas. The “provisional” Kara Tepe camp on Lesvos, where the inmates of the burned-down Moria camp were forcibly relocated, is sinking into the mud. Then the water is pumped out. Then it sinks into the mud again. It gets cold. Instead of self-made wooden huts, which they could still build in Moria, 7500 people, 2500 of them children, now live in tents without heating. The inhabitants try to produce a little warmth with their gas camping stoves. More and more often they are treated with burns. It is dark in the tents. After three months, there is still no hot water. There are no sanitary facilities either. From 5 p.m. on, it is pitch dark in the camp because there are no working streetlights. There are also no schools or childcare facilities. The inmates are allowed to leave the camp once a week, for four hours, to go shopping.
The camp is located on a former military training area by the sea. The mud is full of lead-containing practice ammunition. Many children do not drink in the evening because they are afraid of having to go to the “toilet” at night. A toilet that does not exist. Many have massive sleep disorders, panic attacks and nightmares. A three-year-old girl has been raped in the camp. Some children commit suicide attempts. The foreign aid workers who look after refugees in the camp no longer know what arguments to use to talk the children out of committing suicide. Some of the helpers work for SOS Children’s Villages. The organization has been running a small child protection center on Lesbos near the new camp for years, which is actually supposed to be closed down at the end of the year. For months, they have been demanding to be allowed to set up at least one daycare center for some of the children in Kara Tepe instead.
For some time, the inmates of Kara Tepe went for a bath in the sea until it became too cold for that. Since people can no longer wash, scabies spread through the camp. Colds and pneumonia are also rampant. And more and more children, not least babies, are suffering from rat bites, Doctors Without Borders report. Things don’t look much better in the other camps on the islands. In the Vathy camp on Samos, 3700 people live in a camp set up for 600 people. Here, residents recently had to be vaccinated against tetanus because of the increasing risk of rat bites.

The Austrian government continues to prevent provinces and municipalities in Austria from accepting refugees from the Greek islands. Pressure is also growing in the ÖVP on the chancellor to finally abandon the populist blockade. But Kurz announced years ago that there would be “ugly pictures.” His policy relies on deterrence, child abuse, torture, bodily harm and deprivation of liberty. Why should he back away from this at the height of his success?

Hostages of this policy are also the Greens, who in parliament on Monday again practiced coalition discipline and together with turkish-blue-blue rejected an SPÖ motion for the admission of refugees. And yet there now seems to be a Turkish-blue double strategy. After all, there are only a few days left until Christmas. The feast of refugees and emergency shelters. Of innocent children. The warmth of hearts.

A PR advisor to the chancellor, Wolfgang Rosam, has long had the idea for an ingenious PR stunt against frostbite on the heart. Now they remembered the SOS Children’s Village, which has been begging for months to be allowed to do something for the children on Lesbos. After the unsuccessful appearance of bouncer Nehammer, who let himself be filmed wide-legged in front of a fat Russian airplane after the fire of Moria, the cargo of which in the meantime gathers in some Greek warehouse (“Help on the spot”) – now the chief diplomat of the empire has to move out.

A few days ago, SOS Children’s Villages was surprised by the joyful news from the Foreign Ministry. There are to be a few less ugly pictures for Christmas after all. And a day care for children in Kara Tepe. However, there is no approval from the Greek authorities yet, and also otherwise it is not really clear if and when the “safe place” for children – at least a few hours a day – will exist. But Foreign Minister Schallenberg let himself for it on the weekend already once in the news time in the picture celebration. A nice picture, the image of a self-satisfied man doing good. At least to himself and his chancellor.
Whether the diversionary maneuver will allow the children on Lesbos at least a small escape from misery remains to be seen. The director of SOS Children’s Villages would also prefer to bring them to Austria right away. But the search for shelter in this country is probably once again in vain.
Merry Christmas.

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

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.

Lesbos: After the Fire comes the Water

European Diary, 16.10.2020: Did something happen? Austria provided “help on the spot” and dumped 55 tons of stuff somewhere on the Greek mainland. That’s it for the federal government of Austria for the time being.

The Greek government has also dumped a smaller part of the refugees from Lesbos somewhere on the mainland, apparently especially those who, as recognized refugees, had the right to do so anyway, a right that they have been denied without any justification so far.
The rest, according to Caritas about 7800 people (40% of them children), are accommodated in a temporary camp, under conditions that are even worse than before. The new camp by the sea is not connected to the local water supply. So there are only chemical toilets, which will probably soon give up. There are no showers, the inhabitants wash themselves in the sea. And they live in tents that are neither wind, water nor winterproof, some of them without floors. Tents that, as the Austrian newspaper Courier reported today, fell down like houses of cards in the massive rainfalls of the last few days. Meanwhile the camp is drowning in water and thus in mud.

Now the winter begins on Lesbos, and it is quite cold, and wet, and windy there, too. And that is exactly what it is supposed to be, obviously. Klaus Schwertner of the Caritas in Vienna looked at the situation on the spot and has the impression that “deterrence is still being worked on”.
And that will probably claim victims in winter. Until then, one leaves it to organizations like Caritas to prevent the worst. After all, the streets on which the homeless refugees slept in the weeks after the fire are now open to traffic again.

The criminals who are to blame for this will probably not have to stand trial for deprivation of liberty, assault and coercion any time soon. Who will dare to take them to court?

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.

“Abendland”

European Diary, 13.10.2020: Tomorrow evening Micha Brumlik (Berlin) will speak in our program about the new discourse on “Christian-Jewish Occident”. To get into the right mood André Heller will sing his unrhymed chanson about “Occident”.
André Heller’s Jewish father fled from the National Socialists and lived after 1945 mainly in Paris. Thus Heller also grew up with French citizenship before he became a chansonnier in Vienna.
In 1967 he was one of the founders of the pop channel Ö3 and presented the program Musicbox. His political commitment was always a balancing act. As a “Jew living in Vienna,” he criticized Kreisky for his compromising attitude toward old Nazis and anti-Semites, and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, even though some critics accused him of “promoting” anti-Semitism. André Heller has not challenged such poisonous absurdities. He has remained as politically awake and critical as ever. When he spoke in the Austrian Parliament on 12 March 2018 on the occasion of 80 years of “Anschluss” in the Austrian Parliament, he ended his speech with a look at the new populism of the icy cold that had entered Austrian politics – and has not been overcome to this day.

“Allow me to tell you another strange thing about my life. For decades I thought I was something better than others. Wiser, more talented, more amusing, entitled to pride. I was arrogant, narcissistic, constantly judging others, and it didn’t do me any good until one day I was looking around me in a London Underground car. There were sitting and standing very different people with different skin colors and I heard different languages: In a kind of lightning bolt into my consciousness, I realized that each and every one of these women and men, old and young, hopeful and desperate, is also myself and that German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or Swahili is not our real mother tongue, but the world mother tongue is and should be the compassion. It enables us to recognize ourselves in each other and to be intimately and lovingly connected with them and to take this realization into account in all our thoughts and actions.

Late time, twilight
hour that carries hope, sadness and ashes
Take a breath, be lonely
Autumn of thoughts and last refuge for me
Occident, Occident ‘I respect and despise you
Occident!

Occident
Not my tiredness
But the longing for dreams makes me look for sleep
The disturbing possibility of the transformations of my figure
Into other characters and locations
In the Von der Vogelweide
Cervantes, Appollinaire and James Joyce
Children’s crusades, funeral pyres, guillotines, colonies
The infamy, in fornicators on the Holy See
Expeditions to the edge of consciousness
Bankruptcy of good intentions
Congresses of the cynical laughing masters
Marc Aurel’s “Astronomy of contemplation”.
The storm baptisms Vasco da Gamas
Leonardo’s mirror writing
Gaudi’s anarchy of buildings
In Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Who grabbed the wishes by the tail
The Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto
The Great Progroms of Armenia and Spain
Percival, Hamlet, Woyzeck, Raskolnikov
The flowers of evil
De Sade, Hanswurst and the man without qualities (“Mann ohne Eigenschaften”)

“like a ship bringing the plague to Europe”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little more is a little less less…

European Diary, 18.9.2020: It works after all. Or at least a little bit. To quote Claude Juncker: “A little more would be a little less less”.

Germany now apparently wants to take in an additional 1553 refugees from the burnt down Moria camp. For a long time, there was no movement between Minister of the Interior Seehofer and the 150 German cities and municipalities (including Berlin) that demanded to be allowed to take in refugees. Again and again there was talk that Germany should not go it alone. After the catastrophe on Lesbos, Chancellor Merkel, Minister of the Interior Seehofer and representatives of the SPD have now agreed on a different approach. The more than 1500 refugees from Moria are said to comprise a total of 408 families, among them already recognized refugees who were stuck on Lesbos despite their asylum status due to Greek asylum policy and the still upheld “Dublin rules”.

In reality, of course, the problem is much greater, because the conditions in the Greek “reception camps” on the islands were and are not only catastrophic on Lesbos, but as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on September 16, also on Chios, Leros, Kos and last but not least on Samos. In the local camp Vathy there are also almost 7000 people housed. About ten times its capacity. The fact that the possible repatriation of migrants whose asylum applications had been rejected – as agreed in the so-called EU-Turkey deal – did not come into effect was, as the FAZ dryly notes, not primarily due to Turkey. Instead Greece did not even build up the resources on the islands to be able to properly examine the asylum applications.

Thus a fatal development took its course, which primarily increased the suffering of the refugees. The FAZ reports alarming conditions. A woman, who has been there for six months with her husband and her small child, tells of her rescue from the sea by the Greek coast guard – “but above all of the torture afterwards: of a housing container with beds without mattresses, of queuing for several hours every day for meals in heat, rain or cold. Of an impassive police force that does not intervene when the weaker ones are beaten or robbed. By a single doctor for several thousand people – and above all by the uncertainty of how long all this will remain their own living environment”. In the camp, frustration grows, competition between different groups whose origins are not always compatible – after all, they come from war zones – and of course desperation breaks out violently, in demonstrations and protests against the guards, and mostly against each other. How could it be otherwise? The inhabitants of the nearby Greek towns also demonstrate, and they too no longer always remain peaceful.

The mayors of the islands demand in vain government solidarity on the mainland, Greece demands, mostly in vain, solidarity with Europe, and even a hardliner like Horst Seehofer meanwhile bursts his collar when he thinks of Austria, and explains in the Spiegel interview: “I am disappointed by the attitude of our Austrian neighbors not to participate in the reception of a manageable number of people in need of protection from Greece. (…) If we do nothing, we will strengthen the political fringes”. Well, the political fringes have long since reached the Vienna Chancellery.

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.

“An Aura of Ghosts”

European Diary, 11.9.2020: Thousands of refugees from the Moria camp on Lesbos are now living on the streets in the dirt. Germany and France, and several other European countries want to take in 400 children and young people. Austria is willing to send some blankets and tents. The day before yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Schallenberg added his very own tone to the Austrian concert of shame.

Jovial as always, in chosen words, he confirms to interviewer Armin Wolff on Austrian TV that the misery on the Greek islands has its purpose: deterrence. And he says that this is something that we do not want to change in the future either. “It is precisely this calm and objectivity” that gives his appearance, as Irene Brickner writes in the Standard, an “aura of the ghostly and unspeakable”. He talks like a good-humored, nice, friendly gentleman who is completely at peace with himself. But he talks about hostage-taking, child abuse, coercion, and bodily injury resulting in death. Just about those things with which he and his colleagues are currently inscribing themselves in the history of violence in Europe. Armin Wolff had no chance to break open this “armour of official mentality and refugee deterrence”, said Brickner. Meanwhile, other European politicians are slowly bursting their collars. Germany’s conservative Minister of the Interior Seehofer “is surprised”. Jan Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, is speaking plainly: “The whole of Europe has been taken in by Kurz’ talk that all that is needed is to close the borders so that the refugee problem can be solved.” Even the Kronen-Zeitung thinks that this is now going too far. And it quotes the Austrian chancellor with downright disgust: “Why are the children on the Greek islands closer to us than those in Venezuela?” A telling question…

Angel of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Help on the spot”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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