“Communication Problems”?

European Diary, 4.11.2020:  The Austrian Federal Chancellor’s approach to a statesmanlike attitude and “inclusive” level-headedness lasted only briefly. Only two days after the murderous attack by a jihadist in downtown Vienna, Sebastian Kurz has once again begun to serve the anti-EU right-wing populism. And shows himself unimpressed by any knowledge of constitutional principles. How does that work? In this way: Instead of becoming specific about who is currently posing a threat in Austria, the all-purpose weapon of the talk of “political Islam” must first be brought into position again. This phrase, which has been used again and again, has the advantage that, in case of doubt, it can mean anything and everything that can somehow be associated with Islam. Islamic politicians from states inhabited by a majority of Muslims can be labelled with it just as fanatical jihadists who carry out terrorist attacks. Women who wear headscarves because they want to emphasize their Muslim identity, as well as people who want to see some of the ethical principles of Islam (yes, there are such principles, such as donating money to the needy – here it is called Caritas…) implemented in the world of politics, as well as people who use a certain understanding of Islam to justify their male, political, ethnic or social claims to power, and who are prepared to commit all sorts of infamous acts in return. Is there actually no political Christianity? Is there no German CDU (Christian Democrats) and no Austrian Christian-social People’s Party (ÖVP), no human rights-active Caritas and no evangelical, violent Trump followers, ready for action? Just to hint at the broad, contradictory spectrum.

But whoever speaks of “political Islam”, like Sebastian Kurz and so many others, wants to level precisely this differentiation and instead cultivate a general suspicion. That “culture of suspicion” which is partly to blame exactly for encouraging people like the assassin of Vienna in his jihadist frenzy, which shares – and radicalizes – precisely this world view of “we” and “the others”.

But then Sebastian Kurz delighted the public with the surprising insight that the assassination attempt would not have taken place if the perpetrator, who was released after two-thirds of his prison time, was still in custody. Otherwise we would never have thought of this.
However, even the Chancellor could know that this is not only customary in principle, but also makes sense, because it is the only way the judiciary has a handle on imposing conditions on the convicted person, as long as there is no other evidemnce in sight, such as participation in the deradicalization program and regular support through probation services, even for a longer period of time than the actual imprisonment would last. But the Chancellor’s diffuse message was clear: the (green) Minister of Justice and the judicial system, indeed the constitutional procedures in general are somehow to blame for the disaster. The turquoise-blue Chancellor, however, felt that this assignment of blame seemed all the more “necessary” after it became clear that the Ministry of the Interior run by his fellow party member Nehammer and the Federal Department of Domestic Intelligence in particular had a real need for explanation. After it became known that the assassin had tried to obtain ammunition for a Kalashnikov rifle in Slovakia, the Slovakian secret service informed its Austrian colleagues. Only the judiciary and the probation office knew nothing about such things.
In his press conference, which began only an hour late (and with apparently some need for clarification behind the scenes), Karl Nehammer had to admit in a subdued manner that there had apparently been “communication problems”, “mistakes” that called for an independent investigation. Minister of Justice Zadic (of the Greens), on the other hand, politely refrained from now putting up retaliatory measures on her part.
Instead, Sebastian Kurz is now publicly blaming – well, of course, who is surprised – though incredible as it is, the European Union and its “false tolerance”. Against Austrian citizens born in Vienna, like the assassin of Monday? Nobody should ask about the logic of arguments here. The tendency is the usual one. The Kurz’s touch of reason lasted only a short day.

Schleich di, du Oaschloch (Piss off, you asshole)

European diary, 3.11.2020: At the moment, voting is taking place in the USA. And when this will be read, we might know, or perhaps only guess, where the journey might take us. And no matter how it ends, a part of American society will articulate its anger, in a country that has been divided for four years, from above, day by day.

Meanwhile, the city of Vienna is trying to recover from a shock, the effects of which are also not yet foreseeable. But there are some signs that this shock may not deepen the division that is also felt in Austria. The split into a society that knows only “we” and “the others”.
Yesterday, on monday evening, the city of Vienna was like being at war. An unknown number of assassins had, at least that is how it seemed, starting from the Vienna Synagogue, the city temple, spread the center of Vienna with terror. Attacks by armed terrorists were reported from all over the city. The Austrian television reported in a continuous loop, without being able to report anything more than that the situation was unclear, the perpetrators unknown, the situation unchanged, and police forces were deployed everywhere. And that one should stop posting any videos on the Internet and instead download them from a police website, which urgently needs clues as to whether more perpetrators are on the way. At that point, it was already known that one of the perpetrators had been shot. In every second sentence, however, the media reported primarily on the proximity of the crime scenes to the synagogue. And they puzzled over whether the attack was aimed primarily at Jews.
The president of the Vienna Kultusgemeinde, Ossi Deutsch, remained calm and explained that the synagogue was closed already and that no one from the Kultusgemeinde had been harmed. And some journalists noticed that the attack took place not only in the vicinity of the synagogue, but also in the middle of the city’s busiest pub district. The evening before the lockdown. All of Vienna was on the move. And yet it could be felt that many were just waiting to hear it: an anti-Semitic attack, possibly a refugee, the scenario par excellence. One could not get rid of the feeling that the synagogue was being served as if on a silver platter as an explanation for the horror, which after all had a simple form. The perpetrator(s) had apparently shot indiscriminately at all the people they encountered. They obviously meant: all of us!
This morning the sad outcome was known. Some as expected, some a little different, some quite different. The victims: four dead, 22 injured, many of them seriously, including a policeman. The perpetrator: one person, a selfdeclared Islamist, with rifle, pistol and machete. And an “explosive belt”, which was a dummy. A born Viennese, with North Macedonian roots, completely failed with his life, grown up in exactly the city, the society he hatefully declared “war” yesterday. For less than a deadly quarter of an hour. Nine minutes after the first emergency call was received by the police, he was shot by policemen, while the emergency forces, some in plain clothes, searched for hours for potential accomplices. And apparently even alarmed citizens in various parts of the city being mistaken for terrorists themselves and causing panic accordingly.
As early as 2018, the assassin, who had not been able to cope with school, having been in conflict with his family, sought his salvation in ever more radical Islamist ideologies, allowed himself to be recruited by the IS. Instead of reaching Syria as hoped, this brought him to court in Austria and into jail. Even an official deradicalization program, as we now know, did not have the desired effect. So far so bad.

But instead of defending “Europe” against its “external enemies” like France’s president in his solidarity address, the rhetoric of Austrian politics today remained unusually “inclusive”. Chancellor Kurz managed, to the surprise of many, to speak for the first time of “all people living in Austria”. And Minister of the Interior Nehammer specifically emphasized the “migrant background” of some courageous helpers. In fact, it was two martial artists of Turkish origin who first brought an old woman out of the fire at the risk of their own lives and then carried the seriously injured policeman to the ambulance. And it was a young Palestinian who first dragged the policeman from the assassin’s field of fire to cover and stopped his bleeding. Just like the assassin, the young man, Osama, and his family had already been in Austrian newspapers a year earlier. His parents had wanted to buy a house in Weikendorf, Lower Austria, and had been prevented from doing so for months by the mayor, who did not want to have any more of “these people” in “his” town.

But the declared hero of the people was the Viennese of unknown – one could also say: whatever – origin, who spontaneously called out his anger after the assassin. “Schleich di, du Oaschloch!” (Piss off you asshole) This was not exactly a heroic deed, but it was honest in a typical, sly Viennese way.

Bunker in the Fall

European diary, 29.10.2020: It is now possible to book guided tours of the bunker. As museum people we want to have a look at it, of course. And as Europeans.
In Switzerland, in South Tyrol… everywhere bunkers open their hidden entrances. People are only interested in it because it is bizarre. Or do the bunkers already fit into our time again? Autumn mood prevails everywhere. Instead of the winter season, everyone is waiting to see how high the second wave will be. Everybody bunkers in.
Above the Swiss border town of St. Margrethen, where the Alpine Rhine flows into Lake Constance, the former Heldsberg Fortress is hidden behind a few dummies of single-family homes on the mountainside. Instead of petty bourgeois idyll, cannons and machine guns wait there behind false curtains. And miles and miles of corridors, between crew rooms, field hospital, canteen and turbines for autonomous power supply. That should be enough for two weeks of siege, the museum guide tells us.
In the South Tyrolean Vinschgau Valley, the bunkers lie around on the green meadows, as if one had forgotten to pick them up. Here, too, they have adapted a little to the prevailing idyll, are overgrown, the concrete is slowly deteriorating, cracks are appearing.
When people in Berlin were still fervently singing “from the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt”, Mussolini prepared himself for the Germans to take these things seriously. And set up his guard at the Brenner Pass below the Reschen as well. Nothing came of the war between fascists and Nazis after all. In 1937, the Italian fascists instead passed their anti-Semitic Jewish laws and soon expected more advantages from going out with the Nazis to conquer the world.
Today, the Adige river rushes past the remnants of this rare example of a somehow missed war as if nothing had happened. Past the battlefields of the First World War, which took place two thousand meters higher and killed thousands of people here at Ortler, mainly by cold. And also past the meadows along the Calven, where long before that, in 1499, an army from the Grisons had driven the Austrian armies to flight. The peace-loving “Swiss” bypassed the Habsburgs and cleverly stabbed them in the back. After a few thousand soldiers were killed and the Habsburg mercenaries ran away in panic, the Grisons massacred the local population. The attempts of the hated Habsburgs to retain their influence in the areas of what would later become Switzerland were soon over.
Everywhere grass grows here, colorful autumn leaves fall over the battlefields, the bloody slaughters, as well as the fascist muscle games. Even the cannons behind the false curtains in Heldsberg are only there for the pleasure of the visitors, who are allowed to do target practice with them. On Bregenz, Lustenau and Hohenems, across the border. A strange anxiety does not fail to appear when one’s own place of life appears so sharply in the riflescope. From there, from Hohenems or Bregenz, the Swiss expected a possible German attack from 1938 on.
Despite all the nationalist flaming, despite all the paralyzing eccentricity in dealing with the pandemic, despite all the outdoing in the new discipline of political coldness when it comes to solidarity with those seeking protection: when walking along the Adige river, between the fascist bunkers and early modern battlefields, all this may seem surreal. An optimistic autumn mood, so to speak.

Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey: Border Crossing Between All Worlds

European Diary, 20.10.2020: Hardly anyone has crossed so many borders as he has, and this under many different names. 115 years ago today he was born in Baku or in Kiev: Lev Abramovich Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said alias Mohammed Essad-Bey. His father was a Georgian Jewish oil industrialist, his mother a Russian Jewish revolutionary in addition to my own. A German nanny took care of young Lev, who attended high school in Baku, until the family fled the Bolsheviks across the Caspian Sea in 1918.

His odyssey led the 15-year-old Lew to the German colony of Helenendorf in Georgia in 1920, and from there via Tbilisi, Istanbul, Paris, and Rome to Berlin. In 1922 Nussimbaum converted to Islam there, renamed himself Essad Bey and began to be active in the Berlin Islamic community. He studied Turkish, Arabic and Islamic history and became acquainted with the literary scene in Berlin, with Else Lasker-Schüler, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak. As a journalist he wrote about the “Orient” and Islam for German newspapers, and in 1929 he made his debut as a literary author with an autobiographical novel, Oil and Blood.

Memorial Plaque at the Mansion Essad Bey lived in at Fasanenstraße 72 in Berlin, Fasanenstraße 72. Without any reference to his Jewish background…

This was followed in 1932 by a biography of Mohammed that is still considered a reference work today. His anti-Communist writings, on the other hand, and the fact that his Jewish origins were not an issue in Berlin at first, also gave him access to the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1934. But in 1936, Essad Bey, who was now living in Vienna, was banned from publishing in Nazi Germany. He published his next novel, Ali and Nino, under his new pseudonym, Kurban Said. And the book became a great success in Germany as well. (New editions followed till 2000 and 2002). In 1938, Essad Bey, who by then had come to admire Italian fascism, traveled via Switzerland to Italy, presumably to write a biography of Mussolini. Under growing physical pain he reached Positano in southern Italy, where he was diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease. His German nanny from Baku cared for him during the last months of his life, in which he completed his last, so far unpublished novel, The Man Who Understood Nothing about Love. In 1942 Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said died in Positano.

The American journalist Tom Reiss wrote Nussimbaums weird biography: The Orientalist. Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

The Orientalist

Lew Nussimbaum’s biography may be one of the most extreme examples of the borderline crossings that led many Jews to a keen interest in Islam and its history as early as the 19th century – starting with the representatives of the “scholarship of Judaism”, such as Abraham Geiger, who was to be one of the founders of modern Oriental and Islamic Studies.

Boycot vs. Boycot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”)

 

 

Travel Warning

European Diary, 8.10.2020: Berlin warns against travel to Vienna and Vorarlberg, Munich now warns against travel to Berlin and against Berliners on trips, Vienna warns against travel to Serbia, Norway warns against Austria, Switzerland warns against travel to Vienna, Prague is on the red list, Frankfurt now too, but from Madrid you are not allowed to come to Frankfurt, although Madrid and Frankfurt are both red. And France? The west of Switzerland will soon have the same numbers, but you can’t warn about Switzerland. You were still allowed to travel to Israel from Austria when the next lockdown was already decided there. But Croatia was already a no go. The Czech Republic, on the other hand, can still be partially traveled from Austria, although the figures there are skyrocketing? Or are they just falling again? Italy is also still accessible from Austria at the moment. But can you also return from there? And the small border traffic?
The regime of travel warnings and risk regions is no longer manageable. Or to be more precise: nobody knows his way around anymore.
Where do I still get to with a quarantine test, or to visit my family, or as a commuter. And anyway, what is a commuter?

Has anyone in all these months come up with the idea that it might be possible to create more security in the EU with uniform measures to contain corona? Instead of national decathlon in disciplines that are now well known? Why do the Austrians have to abolish compulsory masks and the Italians keep them, why are the Viennese only now coming up with the idea of asking guests in pubs for contact details? The Germans have been doing that for a long time. Why should people in Vorarlberg shift their drinking home at 22.00? Would more clarity in the confusion of travel warnings be possible with more Europe-wide clarity of measures? Or is the chaos actually a clever system? According to the principle: the more confusion, the less mobility?

Hans Kelsen: Elegance and Forgetfulness

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

Hans Kelsen: Bust at the Viennese Constitutional Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

René Samuel Cassin and human rights

European Diary, 5.10.2020: 133 years ago today René Samuel Cassin was born in Bayonne, one of the most committed advocates of human rights in the 20th century. In 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements.

René Samuel Cassin

Cassin’s father Azarie Henri Cassin came from a Sephardic, Portuguese-Marran family and worked as a wine merchant in Nice. His mother Gabrielle Dreyfus came from an Alsatian-Jewish family. Cassin was drafted to serve in World War I as a doctor of law and returned seriously wounded in October 1914. Still during the war, he founded the Union fédérale, the French association of war victims, together with other war participants, which he was to preside over from 1922. In 1921 and 1924 he organized conferences of war-disabled and veterans who advocated understanding and peace agreements between the enemy nations. He did so as a French patriot who was convinced of a French universal mission:

“For centuries we have embodied an ideal of freedom, independence and humanity”, and therefore for him the members of the Union fédérale were the “representatives of French morality in the world”.

As professor from 1920 in Lille, then from 1929 at the Sorbonne in Paris, he taught international law. Above all, however, Cassin was active in countless non-governmental organizations and political offices.  From 1924 to 1938 he represented France at the League of Nations. In 1940 he emigrated to London and, together with Charles de Gaulle, founded France Libre, the French exile army in the British armed forces. From 1941 to 1943 he became National Commissioner of the Free French Government in London and in 1944 he was one of the initiators of the French Committee for National Liberation in Algiers and as president of its legal commission prepared French legislation after 1945. In 1944 he became vice-president of the French Council of State (until 1960) and in 1946 also president of the French elite academy École nationale d’Administration.

From 1946 to 1958 he represented France at the United Nations and was one of the founders of UNESCO. In particular, he was one of the closest circle of authors of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, together with Karim Azkoul, the Lebanese diplomat and philosopher.

Finally, from 1959 to 1968 he was vice president, then president of the European Court of Human Rights.

A trip to Palestine in the 1930s, perhaps also his Sephardic family heritage, had motivated him to work for the advancement of the Arab-Jewish population of Palestine. After 1945, in addition to his many other offices, he became president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (which in the 19th century represented the ideals of the French Revolution and was intended to spread European education among Oriental Jews, not without a certain amount of European-colonial arrogance).

“Hitler’s main goal was the extermination of the Jews,” wrote Cassin, “but their annihilation was also part of an attack on everything the French Revolution stood for: freedom, equality, brotherhood and human rights. Hitler’s racism was essentially an attempt to erase the principles of the French Revolution.”
Cassin supported the Jewish national Zionist project after the annihilation of European Jewry. After 1945, however, Cassin demanded clear limitations on national sovereignty in all matters of human rights, which must take precedence over any national legislation and must also be enforced by means of coercive measures. His advocacy of social rights also aroused distrust of him in the United States. An official of the State Department did not hesitate to call him a “crypto-communist”. But apart from his commitment to human rights and the ideals of equality, Cassin remained a classically conservative liberal in many sociopolitical issues. For example, he had a rather hesitant attitude toward legal equality for women, and in the French parliament in exile in Algiers he even voted against the immediate introduction of active and passive suffrage for women.

Cassin died on 20 February 1976 in Paris.

The Hour of the Parliament

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

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

The Opening

European diary, 4.10.2020:
Our exhibition The Last Europeans. Jewish perspectives on the crises of an idea | The Brunner Family. An estate has begun. Under corona conditions, an unusual opening in front of a small audience – with due distance and limited space, as the situation demands. Everything is just a little different at the moment.
For this, many guests took part in the livestream and now the opening speeches of Mayor Dieter Egger, State Governor Barbara Schöbi-Fink, Aleida Assmann, Ariel Brunner, Hannes Sulzenbacher and Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek – as well as the film by Ronny Kokert about Moria in February 2020 – can be seen on our youtube channel. It’s worth taking a look and listening, there are many surprises to be discovered. We are looking forward to stimulating discussions in our house.
The speeches are mostly in German. Ariel Brunner’s remarkable talk though is in English. It begins at 39’40.

 

Here are some impressions of the first day, captured by Dietmar Walser.

Photo: Dietmar Walser

Photo: Dietmar Walser

The rascals from the first bench

European Diary, 16.9.2020: My first cinema experiences were “Hurray, hurray the school is burning” and “The rascals from the first bench”. To funny box office hits of German 1960s cinema that told the adventures of spoiled brats from well done families that you somehow liked anyway. No rebels in fact. When it came to real problems, the rich father of the young “hero” bribed the director of the school. That was funny.

Not funny, however, is what the schoolboys in the Austrian government do today. They can’t even send a halfway plausible application to the EU Commission, in order to help the Austrian economy, hit by the pandemic, with extra subsidies that are conflicting somehow with fair competion rules in the EU. Actually, this is important enough to make a bit of an effort.

Already a few days ago, Minister of Finance Gernot Blümel once again scolded the EU for blocking the extension and expansion of the generous economic aid to ailing companies (fixed cost subsidies). Now they yesterday met in Vienna, interestingly enough in front of invited press representatives, to discuss the disagreements with the EU representative in Vienna, Martin Selmayr. Did Mr. Blümel in erneast thought he could publicly embarrass the EU representative.

Thanks to the Austria Press Agency and the Standard, we were able to get a closer look at an utterly failed exercise in Message Control. Martin Selmayr was obviously not amused, partly because he was the last to speak instead of being allowed to explain the EU’s objections. The rascals from the first bench first had to present to the press their own interpretation of the sinister EU machinations. Martin Selmayr, himself a rather conservative politician, visibly had to stick to himself. And then calmly pointed out to the schoolboys that they simply had to submit a legally compliant application.

And that actually “today”, that is now yesterday, was the last day to do that. Time enough to do the homework had been indeed since the beginning of August, when the concerns of the EU Commission were communicated politely to the Austrian Minister of Finance. “If today the notification takes place as suggested by Mrs. Vestager (the Commissioner for Economic Affairs) last Friday, then it will be done tomorrow,” Selmayr said. A correct application could be done, “if three intelligent people get together, within half an hour”. He hopes that the Ministry of Finance and the Commission will “get it done this afternoon”. And he offered effective tutoring: There are three possible solutions, he said, even “if it is quite tight on the last day”. Then Selmayer insisted on tearing up Blümel’s original application in detail and demonstrating in public what an unprofessional sloppiness had been delivered. Which in turn did not amuse Gernot Blümel and Minister of Tourism Elisabeth Köstinger.

Selmayr explained to them coram publico how to write a proposal. What was possible in times of lockdown, namely to blame everything on a natural catastrophe and to pretend that there were no sales at all, that no longer corresponds to the circumstances. The basis for the application must now be a reference to the severe economic crisis that triggered the pandemic: “Then the Commission can approve immediately.”

The caught Blümel became impudent. “I ask you, stop with these paragraphs; I already know that one must pay attention to legal things”, so Blümel. “It is about Austrian, not European tax money that is to be used.”

Martin Selmayr continued to show his patience and advised once again to simply work together instead of stubbornly sticking to an application that could not be approved. And he also agreed with the company representatives present, who complained about their suffering, and repeated time and again that they were entitled to be helped, even in the amount they ask for. The schoolboys in Vienna would just have to do their homework “properly”, just like everyone else.

Gernot Blümel showed himself obviously disinterested in the fact that common and legally effective rules in the EU also apply to Austria, even when it comes to “Austrian tax money”. This is exactly what these common rules, from which Austria has so far benefited particularly in the Eastern and Central European markets, are made for.

Or is this loutishness calculation, the desire to play with fire in order to continue to stir up anti-EU sentiment. And as the already running program of financial aids for businesses is not really working smoothly – isn’t it better to blame Brussels for the mismanagement of the Austrian government and its authorities anyway? After all, their is an election campaign running in Vienna. Mr. Blümel is number one on the right wing-conservative party list.
And if nothing helps, daddy can bribe the director after all.

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.