“The Last Europeans” open at Jewish Museum Munich

European Diary, 22.11.2022:

Today saw the opening of the exhibition “The Last Europeans. Jewish Perspectives on the Crises of an Idea” at the Jewish Museum Munich.

An expanded version of the Hohenems exhibition will be shown here until May 21, 2023, with additional thematic stations, media and a large installation by artist Arnold Dreyblatt, which was created especially for the Munich exhibition.

Katrin Habenschaden, Mayor of the City of Munich, Hanno Loewy, Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Michaela Feurstein-Prasser, curators of the exhibition, and Bernhard Purin, Director of the Jewish Museum Munich, spoke at the opening.

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek und Michaela Feurstein-Prasser,
Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Eva Jünger

Arnold Dreyblatt, Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

The Last Europeans, Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Eva Jünger

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Rosika Schwimmer: A Feminist with Many Facets

European Diary, 3.8.2021: 73 years ago today, Rosika Schwimmer died in New York

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

Today, the term “feminism” can no longer be explained in one sentence, let alone translated with a single term. Feminism today means a complex pool of currents of socio-political concerns and agendas. Thus, the current discourse speaks of feminisms, not feminism – and the respective interpretations and functions of contemporary feminisms are shaped by questions about the respective socially conditioned specific dimensions of natural or constructed, social and ethnic gender.

Rosika Schwimmer, born into a Jewish family in Budapest on September 11, 1877, could hardly have imagined such a differentiation, even as one of the most prominent women’s rights activists of her time. But she was a surprisingly modern feminist. She was not only concerned with women’s rights, but with the rights of all. She vehemently opposed child labor and fought for world peace.

Rosika Schwimmer did not conform to the norm of a woman of her time. After a year of marriage, she divorced. Most likely she was lesbian, but disciplined her sexuality with morphine. She was stubborn, opinionated, dominant, dynamic – a fighter. In 1897 she founded the Association of Female Office Workers, in 1903 the first Hungarian Women Workers’ Association, and finally in 1904 the Association of Hungarian Feminists. Rosika Schwimmer also did not conform to the female ideal of beauty, nor did she follow the dress code of her time. She tended to be corpulent, wore a bun, pince-nez and – no corset. By the standards of the time, she did not act in a “typically feminine” way, but rather in a “typically masculine” way. As a campaigner for economic, social and political equality, she earned a reputation as a leading advocate of women’s rights in Hungary.

When Schwimmer first arrived in the United States in 1914, she was welcomed with open arms. The Jewish press gushed with euphoria over “Hungary’s great Jewess, darling of women’s rights activists in Europe and America.” Fifteen years later, the right-wing press overflowed with hatred against her. Sometimes she was accused of being a spy for the Germans, sometimes of being one for the Bolsheviks, but above all, “far more dangerous,” of being an “agent of the political-economic movement of Jewry.” By this time, she no longer had any support in the American Jewish community.

For Rosika Schwimmer’s “Peace Ship Expedition” in 1915 had made her even better known internationally as a pacifist than she already was as a feminist. Together with Louis Lochner, she persuaded automobile tycoon Henry Ford to send an amateur diplomatic mission to Europe to broker an end to the First World War. But the mission, widely derided by the press, was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. In this context, American Jews distanced themselves from Schwimmer, accusing her of fomenting Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign during the short-lived, yet highly publicized Peace Ship Expedition. The campaign was no slip; Ford repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic publicity. During the Nuremberg trial, the Reichsjugendführer of the NSDAP, the Viennese Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter Baldur von Schirach was to declare: “The decisive anti-Semitic book that I read at that time and the book that influenced my comrades […] was the book by Henry Ford The International Jew. I read it and became an anti-Semite.” No wonder, then, that many co-religionists considered her a traitor. In 1919, Schwimmer briefly became Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland, but soon after she had to flee Budapest to Vienna to escape the White Terror and emigrated to the United States, where the consistent pacifist was denied naturalization.

From today’s perspective, Rosika Schwimmer operated on the left fringe of the pacifist and feminist movements. In the service of the good cause she was not very squeamish and instrumentalized whom she could instrumentalize. Her uncompromising attitude made her a challenged outsider in a war-driven world of isms and anti-isms where racism, chauvinism, anti-communism, anti-feminism, and anti-Semitism were commonplace.

But she experienced satisfaction: shortly before Schwimmer died stateless in New York in 1948, she had been chosen as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She could not have known that, basically only 20 years later, her feminist activism would be taken up again in the West and that the new women’s movement would stand up stronger than ever to the asymmetrical gender relations in family, society, politics and religion.

President of a Parliament not yet deserving its name

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

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

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

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

Raphael Lemkin: Giving the Crime a Name

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

European Diary, 24.6.2021:  In August 1941, the year of the systematic establishment of the Nazi extermination camps, Winston Churchill reacted disturbed in the face of the beginning mass murder of the European Jews with the words: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” The man who was to give the crime a name and ensure its future punishment by the International Criminal Court was born 121 years ago on this day in a village in Belarus, near Wilna: Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was awarded a doctorate in law from the University of Lemberg (today Lviv). His choice of studies was prompted by the self-imposed question of why the Turkish massacre of a million Armenian women, children and men was not considered a crime, but the killing of a single person was very much a crime under universal law.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich, the Weimar Republic was crushed, and a centralist dictatorship was introduced. Opponents were interned in specially established camps as early as March. By this time, Lemkin was already a respected lawyer in Warsaw, well-versed in international law and well-connected. And he suspected that this was only the prelude to something much worse.

Lemkin drafted a proposal that would define the extermination of national, “racial,” and religious groups internationally as a crime, and sent it to an international conference. But it found little support, even as anti-Semitism became Germany’s national policy. The fascist frenzy that had gripped much of the world left many blind and deaf. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin knew his premonitions would be fulfilled.

He fled Warsaw, made his way to his parents, only to say goodbye to them forever. Together with 38 other family members, they were murdered as Jews by the Nazis. He himself managed to escape to the United States, where a friend got him a job at Duke Law School in North Carolina.

Raphael Lemkin searched feverishly for a term that would do justice to the crime that took place before the eyes of the world. The term mass murder, he argued, was not adequate for the murder of European Jews because it did not incorporate the national, ethnic, or religious motivation of the crime. Nor, he argued, did denationalization capture the crime, since it was aimed at cultural, but not necessarily biological, extermination. His reflections eventually led him to a neologism: genocide. The word is composed of the ancient Greek genos (clan, race, offspring, gender) and the Latin caedere (to kill), the German translation being genocide. However, the conceptualization was only the prerequisite for the actual goal. Lemkin did everything he could to ensure that genocide would be treated and condemned as an internationally justiciable crime.

Lemkin was bitterly disappointed by the Nuremberg trials, in which little happened to codify genocide as an international crime – and nothing to prevent it in the future. But he did not give up, corresponding, lobbying, drafting, and revising the text for a genocide convention. And indeed, after a tireless struggle, he was successful. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations Organization adopted his proposal for a genocide convention. A short time later, Lemkin fell so seriously ill that he had to be hospitalized. Doctors did have trouble finding the cause. He happily diagnosed himself with “genociditis. Exhaustion from working on the Genocide Convention.”

The man who gave a name to the greatest crime of the 20th century and precisely defined the crime of genocide under international law died poor and alone in a one-room apartment in New York in 1959.

 

Louise Weiss: Chairwoman by seniority

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

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

 

War Without Aim

European diary, 18.5.2021: The Austrian chancellor has packed the flag away again. For days, an Israeli flag hung above the Chancellor’s Office on Ballhausplatz. As it was said out of “solidarity with Israel”, which suffers from the terror attacks of Hamas. The chancellor pushed through this sign against reservations in his own ranks. In fact, it was probably mainly a matter of political bargaining chips. At the expense of the people in Israel and Palestine. Because when it comes to solidarity between Sebastian Kurz and Benjamin Netanyahu, there is no longer any question of Austrian neutrality. Not even in the face of a civil war in which both sides are doing what they can to fuel the conflict. But one side has the more efficient means to do so. This should not be completely forgotten.

If you want to know more about the background of the current Hamas rocket attacks and the air raids on the Gaza Strip, you will find only sporadic information in European newspapers, and if you want to know more, you have to look in the New York Times or in Israeli newspapers like Haaretz. The whole disaster began to unfold as early as April. This year, several occasions for possible provocations coincide. The Israeli “national holidays”, not least the commemoration of heroes on the so-called Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance of the fallen soldiers, went hand in hand with the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Elections were once again scheduled in the occupied Palestinian territories. The last ones were held 15 years ago – and once again they were canceled. Once again, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were not to be allowed to participate in the elections. And Fatah feared an election victory for Hamas.
On the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu had to fear that a coalition might actually form against him. That alone was enough to play with dynamite. And there was plenty of it in April. Unnoticed by the world public, this new drama, if one is looking for a symbolic turning point, had probably begun on the evening of April 13. The commemoration of Yom Hazikaron is to take place once again at the Wailing Wall. But it is also the first day of Ramadan, the highest Muslim holiday. And Israeli soldiers storm the Al Aqsa Mosque to cut off the juice to the prayer leader and his microphone. There are priorities.
At the same time, six Arab families in East Jersualem are fighting their expulsion from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The houses they live in have been legally disputed since it became possible after 1967 for Jewish Jerusalemites to reclaim their real estate property lost in 1948 when they were expelled from East Jerusalem, while conversely there is still no chance for Arab expellees from the west of the city to have their lost property returned. The Supreme Court’s decision on the acute case is still pending.
Protests against the expulsion began to gather momentum in April. And a few days after the first incident on the Temple Mount, for Arabs the Haram al-Sharif, the Israeli government has the square at Damascus Gate closed, the main access for the city’s Muslims to the Old City and its main mosques, all this during Ramadan. And there are increasingly brutal police operations against the protests. In Sheikh Jarrah as well as on the Temple Mount. Stun grenades are used, including on the grounds of the Al Aqsa Mosque, and as a result there are serious injuries. Attacks by Arabs on Jews further inflame the atmosphere, and as early as April 21, hundreds of Israeli right-wing extremists from the “Lehava” group parade through the Old City, chanting “Death to Arabs” and indiscriminately attacking Arab passersby.

Hamas is not long in taking advantage of this escalation to play to the fore as the true defenders of Palestinian interests. While the Haram al-Sharif Authority and Abbas’ Palestinian government stand as impotent cardboard cutouts, Hamas unleashes its arsenal of rockets. Twenty-seven days after the April 13 provocation.
In the meantime, however, something else has happened. The coexistence of Jewish and Arab Israelis in the mixed cities of Haifa and Akko, Jaffa and Lydda has turned into a civil war-like situation. For a long time it was pretended to the world public that a harmonious coexistence of the “Jewish state and its minorities” was possible there. And those who were of good will on both sides did everything to ensure that this possibility was lived out as well as possible, despite all resistance and discrimination, prophecies of doom and warning signals.

Now mosques and synagogues, Arab and Jewish houses are burning. Armed gangs roam the streets, spreading a mood of pogroms. But in this conflict, too, the government is making it clear who is the strongest and who actually enjoys the protection of state power in all consequences. Even though many police officers are actually trying to contain the violence of right-wing Jewish mobs as well, and not just to take action against Arabs. The official rhetoric, on the other hand, knows exactly who and what is meant when “pogroms” are mentioned. Only one side. And the Israeli government and its friends, in Europe and the United States, they keep pouring oil on the fire.

While the Israeli flag flies at the Chancellor’s Office in Vienna, as it does at some German town halls and government buildings, international diplomacy tries to persuade both sides to end the violence. But the Israeli government has no plan except to stay in power and prevent a “fall” of Netanyahu. And until that happens, the bombardment against Gaza continues unchecked and aimless. While Hamas has long since achieved “its” war goal. They have already symbolically won, no matter how many houses in Gaza Netanyahu still has reduced to rubble, no matter how many civilians on both sides have to believe in it. In any case, there will be many more on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side, and the agitators on both sides can live with that.

And something else remains visible in the midst of this absurd and at the same time absolutely expected spiral of violence. For the first time, both Netanyahu and his opponents have actually included something hitherto completely impossible in their calculations, a new hypothesis: neither of the two camps can govern any longer without a partner from among the Arab parties. And no one has ruled out this possibility any longer. In the midst of the madness, a completely paradoxical, tiny option for normality, of a state that will either eventually be a joint state of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Or, in the end, will no longer be a state at all.

Flashback, 18.5.2020: EU foreign affairs envoy Josep Borrell congratulates the new Israeli government while warning it on behalf of the European Union not to annex parts of the occupied West Bank. The coalition agreement of the new Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz envisages “extending Israel’s sovereignty” to parts of the West Bank. The EU maintains that it would not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders without the mutual consent of Israelis and Palestinians, and that unilateral annexation would violate international law.

Two of the 27 EU states have withheld their consent to the EU foreign affairs envoy’s statement. The anti-Semitic Orban government in Budapest and the Austrian federal government. Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn regrets the two states’ walk-out. The Austrian Foreign Ministry refers to a statement by Foreign Minister Schallenberg that Austria rejects a “prejudgement” of Israel. The Israeli government would be “judged by its actions.

Hersch Lauterpacht and the Convention on Human Rights

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Netanjahu, the German Right and Christian Europe

Flashback, 6.5.2020: The far-right AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) in Germany now advertises with the portrait of Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister who repeatedly stands up for his father.
Yair Netanyahu had tweeted on April 28: “Schengen zone is dead and soon your evil globalist organization will be too, and Europe will return to be free, democratic and Christian!” And further: “The EU is the enemy of Israel and all Christian countries in Europe.” What was meant was the support of the EU representation for the large annual peace event of the Combattants for Peace, which commemorates the victims on both sides on the eve of Israel’s Heroes’ Day.

The new Posterboy of the AfD: Yair Netanjahu

Netanyahu promptly received applause from AfD Member of the European Parliament Joachim Kuhs on his Facebook page. Which Yair Netanyahu answered with an enthusiastic call to Kuhs and the AfD to finally end this “madness” with his “colleagues.” What was meant was EU support for NGOs in Israel and Palestine.
Kuhs, chairman of the “Christians in the AfD” and member of the AfD federal board, has only recently visited Israel together with representatives of the “Jews in the AfD” to meet representatives of Likud – and writes again and again in right-wing and radical right-wing German and Israeli media about the “hostility of the EU towards Israel”, apparently one of his favorite topics.
The AfD, whose members are repeatedly seen with Israeli flags at right-wing demonstrations, also make no secret of the kind of Israel they love: namely the one that finally ensures that the Jews no longer want to be part of Europe – and in this way they can finally be gotten rid of.

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

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.

 

Combattants for Peace

European Diary, 14.4.2021: Beyond all the terrible nonsense that is talked about Israel and Palestine, beyond all the demagogy and fanaticism, there are other voices. 200,000 people participated yesterday online in the annual ceremony of the Combattants for Peace, on the eve of Israel’s National Day, when above all memory is suppressed, the memory of the Palestinian catastrophe. Instead of singing the praises of heroes and martyrs, this evening commemorates the victims on BOTH sides. It is therefore no wonder that our “free press” in Europe hardly reports about this event. There, plain language is spoken. And worked on it, to break the logic of the conflict, at which large parts of the world, from all sides (!) used to feast. Here is the recording of this moving evening:

Home_memorial

 

Marcus Samuel: Of shell collectors and oil

European diary, 4.4.2021: The history of many a multinational enterprise begins with pioneers on unknown terrain. And many a detour in a biography: Marcus Samuel was born 222 years ago today.

By Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

Since ancient times, the sea has exerted a specific attraction on man. It is dangerous and tempting, it separates and connects, it has murderous power and it gives food. Special and peculiar treasures of the seas have always exerted their own fascination on man. Spectacular sea finds were objects of princely desires, who could live out their fantasies of power with their possessions in their cabinets of curiosities. In the modern age, exoticism as well as natural science are attracting ever broader interest. Inspired by literary fantasy travel, wanderlust and real vacation memories, shells in particular appeared as souvenirs in Central Europe during the “Adria Exhibition”, the most important maritime show in Vienna. The “Adria Exhibition” of 1913 was the last major exhibition in Austria before the outbreak of World War I and the last major exhibition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. [1] Souvenir shells had already been big sellers at the legendary “Venice in Vienna” show in 1885, where “ornamental and gallantry objects made of lava, coral, shells and tortoiseshell” had been offered.[2] But some time earlier, a businessman had already cleverly exploited the magic of vastness, depth and distance that shells exude: Marcus Samuel (April 4, 1799 – November 24, 1872).

As early as 1833, Marcus Samuel opened an antique store in London – some called it a colonial goods store, others say it was more of a curio store. In favor of the latter assessment is the fact that Samuel did not belong to the Sephardic elite of London, but rather came from modest Bavarian-Dutch migrant backgrounds. Another curiosity-shop variant is that one of his early best-sellers was a souvenir object, namely “knickknack boxes” with glued-on shells, which he sold on the beach in Brighton. However, in his store Marcus Samuel also offered the public interested in natural history and marine biology sea shells that sailors brought him from their voyages. The business flourished to such an extent that Marcus Samuel was able to persuade his sons to travel ever further distances by ship themselves in order to find – from an English perspective – ever more unusual shells. As the supply and demand grew, so did Samuel’s small fleet. Each of the ships was given a logo of sorts, each of which was a different shell.

Marcus Samuel Jr. eventually discovered that there was something else in the sea besides shells that could be exploited: Mineral resources. His brother Samuel Samuel also realized the importance of the oil trade during a trip to the Black Sea. And so the brothers switched from shellfish to kerosene and oil. Business skyrocketed and the Samuels formed a company, which was registered in 1897 under the obvious name of “Shell”. Of the various shells, they chose the crested shell or pecten as the final company logo in 1904. In 1907, the company merged with the Royal Dutch Company of the Netherlands and the Shell Group in its present form was born.[3]

Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted. London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, 1902

In 1902, Marcus Samuel Jr. was raised to the peerage of Baronet and became the second Jewish Lord Mayor of London. In recognition of his services in supplying fuel to the British Empire during World War I, he was finally honored with the newly created title of Viscount Bearsted in 1925.

His son Colonel Walter Horace Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted MC (March 13, 1882 – November 8, 1948) was chairman of the Shell Transport and Trading Company. In addition, he was a dedicated art connoisseur and collector. His works of art included works by Rembrandt, Canaletto, George Stubbs, Hans Holbein the Younger and Hogarth. He was also a trustee of the National Gallery as well as the Tate Gallery and chairman of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

His house and collection were donated to the National Trust in 1948, making them public. He served in World War I, but made his mark especially in World War II, working with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS aka MI6) and then Special Operations Executive (SOE). As an officer in Section D of the SIS, he was initially involved in early attempts to establish resistance networks in Scandinavia from 1939 and was then a key figure in plans to establish a British resistance organization – the Home Defence Scheme. In the summer of 1940, he oversaw the transfer of some of the SIS intelligence to the new auxiliary units. Walter Samuel was a member of the anti-Zionist Jewish Fellowship, founded in 1942. Nevertheless, in the 1930s he advocated the emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany to Palestine while maintaining a peace there.[4]

 

[1] Unter dem höchsten Protektorat Seiner k.u.k. Hoheit des durchlauchtigsten Herrn Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand von Österreich-Este. Österr. Adria-Ausstellung Wien 1913. Hrsg. von der Ausstellungskommission. – Wien, 1913. (Under the highest protectorate of His Imperial and Royal Highness the Most Serene Lord. Highness of the Most Serene Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este. Austrian Adriatic Exhibition Vienna 1913. ed. by the Exhibition Commission. – Vienna, 1913.)

[2] Norbert Rubey/Peter Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien. Theater- und Vergnügungsstadt der Jahrhundertwende , Vienna 1996.

[3] http://www.gilthserano.de/businesswissen/011202.html; http://www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=ch-de&FC2=/ch-de/html/iwgen/zzz_lhn.html&FC3=/ch-de/html/iwgen/sitemap.html

[4] https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-62461;jsessionid=A80F57D8CA3484776EB356F441160DE9

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

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

https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

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

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

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

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

 

Gambled

European Diary, March 23, 2021: Apparently, Austria’s Chancellor Kurz has now completely lost his way. Here is the current summary of a week of Austrian own goals. One more grotesque than the other.

Not quite two weeks ago, Kurz announced a “European scandal.” Looking at the different vaccination progress in various EU states, it was apparent that some states were moving faster than others. And that was indeed, due to different delivery rates. Kurz linked this to an alleged “bazaar” that favored some countries. The accusation had been around for barely half a day before it was exposed as a propaganda lie. There was a simple reason for the differences in supply volumes. Some countries wanted more of the more expensive Biontech, others more of the cheaper Astra Zeneca vaccine. And then there were the well-known supply problems at Astra Zeneca. You can work out the result for yourself.
It also quickly became clear that it was not least governments with a – how shall we put it – pronounced “EU skepticism” (e.g. Austria’s) that had prevented the EU Commission from simply distributing the vaccines evenly according to population size. No, they wanted to determine for themselves who received how much of which vaccine.

Austria, by the way, happened to be right in the middle on the overall balance of deliveries. Compared with the other countries, Austria had received neither too little nor too much.

But then the next gust burst. The chancellor heard that the Austrian representative on the EU steering committee had apparently missed an opportunity to secure a few additional orders. The fact that Kurz did not want to know anything about this prompted the otherwise calm political scientist Peter Filzmaier to ask on Austrian radio what “Chancellor Kurz actually does for a living”. Now the “culprit, an old ÖVP veteran, was fittingly sitting in the Green Ministry of Health, which gave the chancellor the opportunity to publicly show off the Minister of Health, who had just been prevented from attending due to illness. And to have nothing to do with it himself. All this without anyone noticing that there is now a significant gap between “order” and “deliver. In other words, if Clemens Martin Auer had placed his additional order, no more vaccines would have arrived in Austria in the foreseeable future. In any case, more vaccines have already been ordered than Austria needs.

After this “scandal” also vanished into thin air faster than anyone could watch, Kurz became the advocate of the “short-changed” and categorically demanded an EU summit. Which, however, was just around the corner anyway.

In view of the truly unequal supply volumes affecting some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria, Croatia and Lithuania, the EU Commission now wanted to show action on its part. And announced a negotiating success with Biontech.
10 million doses are now to be brought forward from the fall and will benefit the countries with poorer supplies in particular, even though they may basically have only themselves to blame for their malaise. But what does one not do to calm the spirits.
As soon as this warm rain of additional cans appeared on the horizon, the Austrian chancellor changed his shirt again and proudly announced that Austria (so far neither disadvantaged nor advantaged) would be entitled to 400,000 from these new deliveries and let himself be celebrated for it. But even this celebration lasted only a short time. After all, Austria would now enrich itself at the expense of the previously disadvantaged. The announcement from Brussels, but also from other EU countries, was not long in coming. Austria is to expect times at the moment exactly zero additional doses. Now the Austrian chancellor stands before the shambles of his own scandal. And threatens with a veto.

At least he has managed to distract from things that could have really gotten in the way of his anti-EU rhetoric. The scandal and Hygiene Austria and other problems with “message control.” And then there’s the South African mutation in Tyrol. Not at all bureaucratic, the EU had reacted to the hotspot of the South African mutation in Tyrol. And led the district of Schwaz out of the crisis with a generous emergency supply of vaccines. Now, of course, everyone wants that, too. But this actual favoritism of Austria has really not lent itself to scoring points in Austria with anti-EU propaganda. In any case, Kurz got this problem out of the way in the short term.

Flashback, 23.3.2020: Two Boeing of the airline AUA fly in 130 tons of medical protection material from China for Tyrol and South Tyrol. The airlift is celebrated with great media attention as a spectacular success by Chancellor Kurz and South Tyrol’s Governor Kompatscher. The mountain sports outfitter Oberalp Group is also celebrating itself for the relief action. A total of 20 million protective masks are to be delivered. A short time later, however, the protective masks delivered turn out to be largely unusable. Certificates, without which the goods should not have been imported, are completely missing. Only 1.7 million masks out of 20 million already paid for are finally delivered at all.

The EU Commission asks the member states to ensure that the flow of goods within the EU is maintained by setting up green lanes with priority for freight traffic, in view of the threat of further border closures that could lead to supply bottlenecks for vital goods.

Vaccination Nationalism

European Diary, 20.3.2021: The dispute over the distribution of vaccines in the EU is further fueled by the Austrian Chancellor. Last year, the EU Commission’s plan to distribute vaccines fairly among all EU countries was torpedoed, not least by countries like Austria, which wanted to choose their own vaccines – within the limits of the total quantities allocated according to population size. As a result, countries that relied on the cheap vaccine from Astra Zeneca, such as Bulgaria or Croatia, are currently losing out due to the production and delivery difficulties of the British supplier. And those that relied on the expensive Biontech vaccine, such as Malta or Denmark, are currently doing better.
Austria, however, has so far received neither too much nor too little vaccine, measured against the quantities available. But that did not stop the Austrian chancellor from proclaiming himself the spokesman for the “too short”. And to publicly attack his own Ministry of Health.

Apparently, the Austrian representative on the EU vaccine panel, Clemens Martin Auer, a veteran ÖVP man, missed an opportunity to do exactly what Chancellor Kurz is now accusing others of doing, namely placing another extra order at the “bazaar.” Whether this would have led to a faster delivery of vaccine doses may be doubted. Austria and the entire EU have already ordered far more vaccine doses than would be needed to vaccinate the population this year. The current delays are obviously not due to hesitant orders, but to slow deliveries.

A few days before the next EU summit, Kurz is calling for an EU summit. This demand sounds as if he were emphatically calling for sunrise after sunset, only to announce a success a few hours later.

EU Commission President von der Leyen announced a few days ago that the delivery of a further 10 million doses from Biontech-Pfizer could now be brought forward, after there were delivery problems from this manufacturer just a few weeks ago. With these doses now countries could be preferred, which bet with their orders in the last year on the wrong map. The fact that Austria, which has so far neither benefited nor been disadvantaged, is now making additional demands does not go down well with them, of course. After all, the attempt to compensate for the different delivery quantities with these additional Biontech vaccine doses depends on the willingness of some countries to voluntarily forego part of the deliveries to which they are entitled as agreed. The vaccination nationalism fomented by Austria is not really helpful in this regard.

Lithuania, meanwhile, is making a grand gesture of announcing that it will now allow its citizens to decide which vaccine they want to be vaccinated with. This, too, is obviously just a propaganda coup. Because the choice between Astra Zeneca and Biontech apparently consists primarily of getting vaccinated now or sometime later. Since there is too little of both, the Lithuanian government is at least gaining a little time – and its citizens: nothing.

Flashback 20.3.2020: Israeli historian Yuval Harari sees “the first coronavirus dictatorship” emerging in Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu is apparently using the Corona crisis and the imposed lockdown to secure a fifth term and break opposition to his reappointment, while the trial for fraud, embezzlement and bribery waits and waits for him.

Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is announcing what appears to him to be the toughest anti-Corona measure yet on the British Isle: “We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub.”

In an interview with the German Bild-Zeitung, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz explains that it was a phone call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that woke him up. He probably means the telephone conference of numerous EU prime ministers on March 9, in which Netanyahu had also participated. Netanyahu would have meant, Kurz said, “you underestimate this in Europe.” The dramatic situation in neighboring Italy since early March apparently has not been enough to wake up the Austrian chancellor.

The EU Commission is reacting to the expected economic problems in the wake of the pandemic and its control. It is now allowing exceptions to the strict rules designed to limit distortions of competition caused by government subsidies. It has adopted a temporary framework that allows member states to grant economic aid within a short period of time.