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.

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.

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:

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About the freedom of the dissenter: Rosa Luxemburg

European Diary, 5.3.2021: 150 years ago today, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, Poland, which was then part of Russia. When she was two years old, her family moved to Warsaw. A hip ailment suffered by the three-year-old was mistakenly diagnosed as tuberculosis and incorrectly treated. She would suffer from limping all her life. Sentenced to nearly a year of bed rest at age five, she learned to read and write self-taught, remained dwarfed, and at age nine began translating German texts into Polish, writing poetry and novellas. She wrote a Polish mocking poem about Kaiser Wilhelm, who visited Warsaw when she was 13, saying, “Tell your cunning rag Bismarck / Do it for Europe, Emperor of the West / Command him not to shame the pants of peace.”

Rosa grew up multilingual, speaking Polish and German at home, Russian and French, reading English, understanding Italian, and learning Latin and ancient Greek. At the age of 15 she joined revolutionary circles, a group called “Proletariat” founded in 1882. In 1888 she fled from the tsarist police to Switzerland.
In Zurich, women are allowed to study on an equal footing with men. The only place in Europe where this is possible. Many young Jewish women from Eastern Europe take advantage of this opportunity. Rosa studies philosophy, mathematics, botany and zoology, then international law and constitutional law, economics, political science and history. Soon she joins the Polish Socialist Party. But contrary to the party line, she advocates a resolute internationalism, founds the Polish exile newspaper Arbeitersache in Paris with her partner Leo Jogiches and other comrades, and opposes Polish nationalism. She is expelled from the party and founds a new Social Democratic Party that advocates democratic reforms in Russia instead of Poland’s independence. An independent Poland, she argues, is a mirage that would only distract the Polish proletariat from the class struggle, just as in other countries. From then on, as a Jew, she became the target of constant anti-Semitic attacks, insulted as a “Jewish spawn” whose “diabolical work of destruction” was aimed at the “murder of Poland”.
Her fight against the growing nationalism also in the labor movement brought her into fierce conflict with many leading Social Democrats, later also with Lenin. As a Jew and as a woman, she was repeatedly confronted with degrading undertones, also in statements by comrades. Nevertheless, living in Germany from 1897, she became one of the spokeswomen for the left wing of the SPD. She rejected reformism as well as Lenin’s authoritarian party centralism. Nevertheless, she succeeded in persuading leading Western European Social Democrats to make a decisive statement against growing anti-Semitism. Of course, she herself did not want to be thrown back on her Jewishness. “What do you want with the special Jewish pains? Just as close to me are the poor victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the Negroes in Africa, with whose bodies the Europeans play catch ball.” Her internationalism goes beyond Europe. “I don’t have a special corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the whole world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”
She foresaw the coming world war and all the bestialities it would bring, the catastrophe of Europe, with great clarity. In 1913, in Frankfurt, on September 25, at the “Titania” in the Basaltstrasse (Basaltstreet) – a few steps away from where I am writing these lines – she makes a courageous speech against the war that would land her in jail: “If we are expected to raise the weapons of murder against our French or other foreign brothers, we declare: ‘No, we won’t do it!'” Less than a year later, she was sobered to discover that nationalism had washed away all reason – and all dreams of international class consciousness – in the European workers’ parties as well. In August 1914, together with other opponents of the war in the SPD, she founded the “Gruppe Internationale,” from which the “Spartacus Group” would later emerge.

As early as February 1914, Luxemburg was sentenced to fourteen months in prison for her Frankfurt speech on charges of “inciting disobedience to laws and orders of the authorities.” In February 1915 she had to begin her imprisonment in the Berlin “Weibergefängnis”. Her letters from her imprisonment are among the most moving writings she was to leave behind.

Released in 1916, she was arrested again just three months later. She spent more than three years in prison until 1918. In her theses written there under the pseudonym Junius, she drew a fatalistic and at the same time defiant balance in 1917: “The world war has destroyed the results of forty years of work of European socialism.” It was not by a greater power that the socialists had been destroyed; they had “blown themselves up.” The main task in this situation was: “to unite the proletariat of all countries into a living revolutionary power, to make it, through a strong international organization with a unified conception of its interests and tasks, with unified tactics and political capacity for action in peace as in war, the decisive factor in political life to whose role it is called by history.” And at the same time she criticized the totalitarian tendencies of the Russian Revolution: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissent.”
All this remained utopia. In November 1918, the workers’ movement and the short-lived soviet republic in Germany split. In the civil war, the majority of Social Democrats under Ebert allied themselves with right wing Freikorps and imperial troops to suppress the weak revolutionary forces of the Spartacus uprising.

In these days of spiraling events, Rosa Luxemburg also came into sharp opposition to the leadership of the Spartacists around Karl Liebknecht. She warned in vain against the futile attempt at armed revolution and demanded that democratic elections be held. But her admonitions went down. The last weeks of her life must have been marked by helplessness and a desperate will to hold on to the armed revolution publicly in the newspaper Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag), against her own convictions – while calls were made in the streets of Berlin for her and Liebknecht to be murdered.
On January 15, 1919, on the same day as Karl Liebknecht, she was arrested in Berlin by soldiers of the “Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division” and murdered in a bestial manner. She was tortured in a posh Berlin hotel where the militia had set up their quarters, then dragged to a car. Her killers tried to smash her in the head with a rifle butt, drove the unconscious woman to the Landwehr Canal, shot her in the head on the way, wrapped her body in barbed wire and threw her into the water. At the end of May, her remains were found at a lock. Thousands attended her funeral on June 13, 1919.

Julius Gumbel, a Social Democrat from Heidelberg, later researched political murders in Germany. He arrived at the following figures: From 1918 to 1922, leftists murdered 22 people. There were 38 convictions. Right wing perpetrators committed 354 murders in the same period. There were 24 convictions. In 23 cases, the courts acquitted even confessed perpetrators who openly boasted of their deeds.

Barbara: Göttingen

European Diary, 24.11.2020: Twenty-three years ago today, Barbara Brodi died. Born in 1930 as Monique Andrée Serf, she was known, of course, primarily under the name with which she conquered the chanson stages of the world: Barbara.

Barbara in Amsterdam, 19. October 1965

Her father Jacques Serf came from Alsace, her mother Esther Brodsky from Odessa. In 1940 she fled with her Jewish family out of the German-occupied part of France. She was finally able to go into hiding in a small rural community in southeastern France, and in 1944 she experienced liberation in hiding, now near Paris. A music teacher from the neighborhood heard her singing, and soon she received singing and piano lessons. She had her first musical appearances in a Parisian cabaret and soon moved to Brussels where she sang chansons by Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco. Back in Paris she also performed songs of her new friends Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens.

At the beginning of July 1964, even before her big breakthrough one year later, Barbara came to a guest performance at the “Young Theatre Göttingen”. She had only hesitantly accepted, and finally, perhaps to put the seriousness of this first invitation from Germany to the test a little, insisted on playing on a grand piano. When she entered the stage on July 4, 1964, however, there was only a little piano – and she refused to perform. The grand piano was finally borrowed by an old lady in Göttingen and carried through the city by ten students. The concert began two hours late. And Barbara stayed for a week. On the last day she wrote a song that was to become a melodious symbol of French-German peace and friendship, sung by a Jewish singer: “Göttingen”. In 1967, when she was to perform again in Göttingen and this time in the sold-out Stadthalle, the municipal concert hall, the concert was broadcast live in France.

And here the text in French and English.

Barbara

Göttingen

Bien sûr ce n’est pas la Seine
Ce n’est pas le bois de Vincennes
Mais c’est bien joli quand même
À Göttingen, à Göttingen

Pas de quais et pas de rengaines
Qui se lamentent et qui se traînent
Mais l’amour y fleurit quand même
À Göttingen, à Göttingen

Ils savent mieux que nous je pense
L’histoire de nos rois de France
Herman, Peter, Helga et Hans
À Göttingen

Et que personne ne s’offense
Mais les contes de notre enfance
Il était une fois commence
À Göttingen

Bien sûr nous, nous avons la Seine
Et puis notre bois de Vincennes
Mais Dieu que les roses sont belles
À Göttingen, à Göttingen

Nous, nous avons nos matins blêmes
Et l’âme grise de Verlaine
Eux c’est la mélancolie même
À Göttingen, à Göttingen

Quand ils ne savent rien nous dire
Ils restent…

Göttingen

Certainly, there is no Seine
And also the forest not of Vincennes,
But there would be a lot to say
From Göttingen, from Göttingen

Paris is sung about again and again,
There are no songs about Göttingen,
And love blooms there as well
In Göttingen, in Göttingen.

It seems to me, we are far worse connoisseurs
In terms of “France’s great men
When Hermann, Helga, Fritz and Franz
In Göttingen.

Here also played without question,
The fairy tale of our childhood days:
“Once upon a time…” Yes, where did it begin?
In Göttingen.

Certainly, there are no Seine
And also the forest not of Vincennes,
But I never saw such beautiful roses
In Göttingen, in Göttingen

The dawn is not the same
Like Verlaine, the silver-pale one,
But sadly it is also true for the French
In Göttingen, in Göttingen

It does not get further with words,
Then know that smiling is smarter:
It can achieve even more with us,
The blond child in Göttingen…

What I say now, that certainly sounds
For some people unforgivable:
The children are exactly the same
In Paris, as in Göttingen.

Let this time never return
And never again hatred will destroy the world:
There are people I love,
In Göttingen, in Göttingen
But weapons should speak again,
It would break my heart!
Who knows what would be left over
From Göttingen, from Göttingen.

Beautiful roses bloom
In Göttingen, in Göttingen.
But weapons should speak again,
It would give me

break the heart!
Who knows what would remain
From Göttingen, from Göttingen.

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.

Prologue: European History of Violence in the 20th Century

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Our list of the dead of European violence in the 20th century counts 125,300,000 people. It is not complete.
By the end of the exhibition “The Last Europeans” on May 21, 2023, they will have disappeared from the display.

Foto: Eva Jünger

1888–1908: The atrocities committed by the Belgian colonial power in Congo claim approx. ten million Congolese victims.

1900: In the course of the Second Boer War, 22,000 Britons and 32,500 Boers perish.

1900: The Russian invasion of Manchuria claims 112,000 lives.

1903/04: During the British expedition to Tibet, more than 600 Tibetans are killed.

1903–1906: In various Russian cities, 4,245 Jews are murdered during pogroms carried out by Russians, Ruthenians, Greeks, or Cossacks.

1904/05: The Russo-Japanese War ends with 90,000 casualties on the Russian and 75,000 on the Japanese side.

1904–1908: In German South West Africa, approx. 70,000 members of the Herero and Nama fall victim to the genocide at the hands of the “German Schutztruppe” (protection force).

1906: Dutchmen kill 1,000 Balinese in today’s Indonesian Badung.

1906–1911: The Wadai War in today’s Chad and western Sudan claims 4,000 French and 8,000 Wadai victims.

1908: In Bali, Netherlanders kill 194 Balinese.

1909: The second Melilla war in Morocco claims 2,517 Spanish and an unknown number of Kabyle victims.

1911/12: In the course of the Italo-Turkish War,  1,432 Italians and 14,000 Arabs and Berbers meet their death in the territory of today’s Libya.

1911/12: In the East Timor war, 289 Portuguese and 3,424 Timorese are killed.

1912/13: The Balkan Wars claim 71,000 Serbian, 11,200 Montenegrin, 156,000 Bulgarian, 48,000 Greek, and 100,000 Turkish lives.

1914–1918: In the course of World War I, about 20 million people of all belligerent nationalities perish in Europe.

1914–1921/23: During the Zaian War, 782 French and 3,600 Moroccans die.

1915: More than one million people fall victim to the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians.

1917–1923: The Russian civil war results in seven million dead.

1918–1920: The Latvian independence war claims 17,000 victims.

1919: Cossacks murder 1,700 Jews in Proskurov in today’s Ukraine.

1919: The Third Anglo-Afghan War claims 236 British and 1,000 Afghan lives.

1919: In Amritsar, India, British soldiers shoot and kill at least 379 Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus.

1919/20: In the Hungarian-Romanian War, 3,670 Hungarians und 3,000 Romanians lose their lives.

1919–1921: The Irish War of Independence claims 714 lives.

1920: In the Polish-Lithuanian War, 454 Lithuanians die.

1920: In the course of the Turkish-Armenian War, 198,000 Armenians and an unknown number of Turks perish.

1920/21: The Polish-Soviet War claims the lives of 431,000 Russians, 202,000 Poles, and 60,000 Jewish civilians.

1921–23: During the Greco-Turkish War, 9,167 Turks and 19,362 Greeks lose their lives.

1921–1926: The Rif War ends with 63,000 Spanish, 18,500 French, and 30,000 Riffian victims.

1922/23: The Irish Civil War claims around 2,000 victims.

1932-33: Famines in Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union, exacerbated as a means of repression, claim more than 3,000,000 lives.

February 1934: In the Austrian Civil War, 357 people die.

1935–1941: The Italian war against today’s Ethiopia claims between 350,000 and 760,000 Abyssinian victims.

1936–1939: During the Spanish Civil War, thousands of interbrigadistas and more than 400,000 Spaniards die.

1936–49: The revolt against the British mandatory power, the Arab-Jewish civil war in Palestine until May 1948, and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war until 1949 claim the lives of 165 Britons, 6,000 Jewish Palestinians and Israelis, 9,000 Arab Palestinians, and 5,000 Arab allied soldiers.

1939: In the Slovak-Hungarian War, 22 Slovaks and eight Hungarians perish.

1939–1945: In the course of World War II, approx. 50 million people of all belligerent nations meet their death in the European theaters of war.

1939–1945: In the context of the systematic annihilation of the European Jews by the German Reich’s National Socialist regime, approx. six million Jews are murdered.

1939–1945: In the context of the systematic annihilation of the Roma by the German Reich, approx. 200,000 members of these groups are murdered.

1941–1945: The Croatian Ustasha murder 500,000 Jews, Serbs, and Roma. 1945: The Battle of Surabaya, East Java, claims 1,000 British and 12,000 Indonesian lives.

1945–1949: In the Indonesian War of Independence, 1,200 British, 6,125 Dutch, and approx. 60,000 Indonesian soldiers perish.

1945–1950: In the context of the expulsions from Central- and Eastern Europe, more than 500,000 Germans perish.

1946: Inhabitants of the Polish city of Kielce kill forty Jews.

1946–1949: In the Greek Civil War, 50,000 people die a violent death.

1946–1954: In the course of the First Indochina War, 130 000 French and one million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lose their lives.

1948–1960: During the Malayan Emergency, Britons kill more than 10,000 Malaysians.

1952–1956: In the course of the Tunisian independence war, 17,459 French soldiers and at least 300,000 Tunisians perish.

1952–1960: During the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, 200 British soldiers and 20,000 guerilla fighters perish.

1954–1962: In the Algerian War of Independence, approx. 24,000 French soldiers and approx. 300,000 Algerians lose their lives.

1961: The French police carry out a massacre against 200 Algerians in Paris.

1963–1964: The Cypriot civil war claims 174 Greek and 364 Turkish lives.

1968–1998: In the Northern Ireland conflict, 3,500 people perish.

1974: The Turkish invasion of Cyprus claims the lives of 3,000 Turks as well as of 5,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

1979–1989: In the course of the Soviet-Afghan War, 14,453 Soviet soldiers and approx. one million Afghans lose their lives.

1982: In the Falklands War, 258 British and 649 Argentinian soldiers die.

1991–1995: The Yugoslav Wars claim 52,800 Bosnian, 18 530 Croatian, 30,000 Serbian, 4,000 Kosovar, and 800 Albanian lives.

1995: In Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs carry out a massacre against 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks.

1992–93: In the Georgian Civil War, 10,000 people perish.

1998/99: The Kosovo War claims the lives of 2,170 Serbs and 10,527 Albanians.

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

“Peace treaty”?

European Diary, 15.9.2020: Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the Foreign Minister of Bahrain Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayan signed a so-called “peace treaty” this afternoon in Washington in the presence of Donald Trump. Masks are not worn. The White House still does not want to bother with such things like Corona.

The signing was preceded until the last hours by cabbals between the Israeli governing parties on the question of who may sign the treaty at all. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is under indictment, needed permission from the foreign minister of the rival party Kahol Lavan.

The wording of the “peace agreement” – between three states that are not even at war with each other – remains a mystery. So far only rumors about its content have been spread. What is clear, however, is that the treaty apparently clears the way for a number of major weapons deals, including the delivery of American F-35 fighter jets to the UAE, which significantly enhance its strategic role on the Gulf.

Allegedly the treaty would also open the way to a “two-state solution”. But what the Trump administration understands by such a “two-state solution”, Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the astonished global public, already experienced last year: a patchwork of Bantustans under Israeli control. So a first class funeral. The fact that the Arab monarchs in the Gulf region do not even rhetorically care about any “peace solutions” or the interests of the Palestinians is basically not a new insight.

The annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank, especially along the Jordan River, and with it the final and definitive rejection of any “Palestinian state”, has, of course, been postponed for the time being, and not only for the sake of better optics. This postponement is entirely in line with current Israeli interests in not shifting the so-called “status quo” too quickly in the direction of a violent “one-state solution” – without reconciliation with the Arab population and without their having equal rights. For, as is well known, there are a great many problems lurking along this path.

Even if Netanyahu has to promise this step again and again to his radical right-wing partners in order to secure their decisive election support.

Behind the new pact are not least of all common security interests, by which is meant not least the retention of power by absolutist rule in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Behind the scenes, this cooperation between Israelis, Americans, some Gulf states and also some Palestinians, such as the former “security chief” of Fatah Mohammed Dahlan, has been going on for years, and has long since become no secret.

Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, sees in the absolute monarchy of the Emirates a “progressive democracy”. What conclusions this allows for his own understanding of Israel as a democracy is also no longer a secret.

One of the few real surprises is rather how much some people are blinded by this coup, with which both Netanyahu and Trump want to distract from the catastrophic consequences of their policies for their own people. Israel is now in lockdown again starting Friday. The paragon of pandemic control has become the leader into crisis. The US should also be back in lockdown by now, up to 1000 people still die every day in the richest “greatest” country in the world.

But European newspapers such as the NZZ are undauntedly celebrating the agreement between Israel and the UAE as a historic step towards “peace”. Nevertheless, the Israeli soccer club Beitar, traditionally associated with the right-wing populist parties and proud to be the only Israeli professional club that has never fielded an Arab player, is now negotiating with new investors: a group of sheikhs from the Arab Emirates. Even Jewish right-wing radicals know (as an old German pop song details): “because only the sheikh is really rich”.

Brexit 2.0

European Diary, 14.9.2020: The British House of Commons decides on the unilateral termination of the Brexit Treaty requested by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as part of the so-called “Single Market Act”. The fact that both British laws and international law are thereby broken seems to be of no concern not only to the Brexit Government but also to the majority of the House of Commons. The main argument is the indeed precarious status that Northern Ireland will receive in the new set of rules that Johnson whipped through parliament as a big deal not even a year ago. In a customs union with Ireland and the EU – and a customs border with the rest of the British Kingdom. At least when the negotiations for a comprehensive free trade agreement between the UK and the EU are in trouble. His predecessors John Major and Tony Blair are now “horrified”, but the exit-drunk majority doesn’t care anyway.
Once again, it is clear what price the Brexiteers are apparently willing to pay for their nationalist revolt against European unification. The laboriously achieved, yet precarious state of peace in Northern Ireland is now in danger of being deliberately sacrificed. The fact that Johnson likes to play with fire is well known. But most of his tories now follow him like lemmings. All it takes is a few absurd conspiracy theories that are becoming increasingly popular among right-wing populist leaders: the EU is planning a “food blockade” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the Kingdom.
The Brexiteers grotesquely overestimate Britain’s possibilities to play itself up as an international economic and trading power outside the EU under the protectorate of the USA. This will take its revenge when it is already too late. As it stands, in the next few years Britain will be less concerned with its great, in reality rather ailing economy than with the centrifugal forces that Brexit releases, from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and eventually in London. To which the answer is likely to be nothing more than nationalistic furor.

The Idea of Europe

Installation “The Idea of Europe”

The concept of the “United States of Europe” has been around already since the 18^th century, based on the model of the United States of America. So far, it has not materialized. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) was among those who pursued this idea.

The son of the well-known founder of AEG—himself a prominent entrepreneur—was responsible for the supply of raw material for the German Reich during World War I. He also demanded the use of Belgian forced laborers to offset the lack of manpower in Germany caused by the war.

Already before the war, Rathenau had made the case for the establishment of a Central European customs union with a German-Austrian economic community at its center; he envisaged that in the long run its appeal would be irresistible to Western European countries. After 1918, he pursued in various political functions the normalization of the relationship between Germany and the allied victorious powers as well as a settlement with Soviet Russia. In 1922, the Pan-European Movement was founded based on the “return to Christian, Western values.” Its first major donor was German-Jewish banker Max Warburg. To the present day, however, it has remained largely ineffective. By contrast, Rathenau’s idea of a European Economic Community became reality in 1957, which eventually evolved into the European Union in 1992.

Rathenau did not live to witness Europe’s unification or World War II. He was labeled as “compliance politician” by the ethno-centric right of the Weimar Republic, his actions as foreign minister were construed as evidence of the “power of international Jewry,” his negotiations with Russia vilified as “Jewish Bolshevism.” The extreme right’s hatred of anything Rathenau represented was vented not only by chanting the slogan “Gun down this Walter Rathenau, the godforsaken Jewish sow!” In fact, on June 24, 1922, he was assassinated by members of the right-wing extremist terrorist “Organization Consul.”

The perpetrators Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer perished in the course of their arrest in Saaleck in Saxony-Anhalt and were hastily buried at the local cemetery. Hitler had a monument erected for these “heroes” with an inscription that was removed in GDR times. Following German reunification, the tomb became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. As a result, the army removed the stone and the local parish abolished the burial plot. In 2012, on the 90^th anniversary of the assassins’ death, a boulder was placed here by unknown individuals featuring—in runelike script— the name of these two men.

Michael Miller (Vienna) about Antisemitic accusations after WW 1 and the Paneuropean-Movement:

Tea Brunner

In 1916, Rodolfo Brunner had acquired the large compound of Forcoli in Pontedera, Tuscany, which almost three decades later would become a refuge for some family members while other members of the Brunner family escaped to Switzerland or left for England in time. After the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in September 1943, Rodolfo and his wife, Gina, his daughter-in-law Maria Teresa (“Tea”) Brunner, née Clerici (1908-1947), and her four children fled to Forcoli; here they did not raise the German invaders’ suspicions and survived war and persecution while Leone Brunner, Tea’s husband, was involved in the resistance against the National Socialists. In honor of the American liberators, Tea Brunner gave a dinner party for “Combat Command B” on August 18, 1944. Tea Brunner died at a young age, leaving behind five children. Her eldest son was Carlo Alberto Brunner.

Rodolfo Brunner

The second generation of the Hohenems immigrants in Trieste catapulted the Brunner family to their social and economic zenith. On the one hand, Rodolfo Brunner (1859-1956), eldest son of Carlo Brunner and Caroline, née Rosenthal, owned substantial shares of the family’s industrial enterprises (including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, mines, and shipping companies) and held management functions in companies such as Generali insurance, of which the Brunners were also shareholders. On the other hand, he specialized in the modernization and optimization of agriculture in Veneto and Friuli, not least in the Isonzo river delta. Politically, he was sympathetic to the Liberal-National Party of Trieste, which demanded a stronger orientation toward Italy, while he kept striving for reconciliation with Habsburg-Austrian interests. Like the majority of Trieste’s elite, but also many of the city’s Jews, he aligned himself with the Italian Fascists already early on. As business tycoon, he probably had frequent contact with the city’s top-ranking politicians. However, the reason for the meeting with Mussolini in this photograph is unknown; perhaps it is in connection with the award of the “Blue Star for Agricultural Merits,” which was bestowed on Rodolfo in 1937. His grandnephew Oscar Brunner (1900 – 1982) was an architect and sculptor, but only few of his works can be found in public collections.

Rodolfo Brunner and Benito Mussolini, probably in 1937. Photoalbum of the family with scenes from their activities own their farms in the Isonzo delta. Jewish Museum Hohenems, Carlo Alberto Brunner Estate

Carlo Alberto Brunner, “Il Fondo del Ghetto“ (The Bottom of the Ghetto): About Rodolfo Brunner and the adventure of industrialization

Carlo Alberto Brunner, “Il Fondo del Ghetto“ (The Bottom of the Ghetto): About Rodolfo Brunner and World War I

Carlo Alberto Brunner

The Jewish Museum Hohenems owes its collections of Carlo Alberto Brunner (1933-2014) to his children who, after his passing, have decided to permanently loan the museum part of his estate. Carlo Alberto Brunner grew up in Trieste as the first son of Leone Brunner and Maria Teresa Brunner (née Clerici). He survived the Nazi period with his family on their compound in Forcoli, Tuscany. From the German invasion onward until the late 1960s, the family had to face substantial economic losses. After the sale of the property in Forcoli, Carlo Alberto moved to Israel and converted back to Judaism. He first lived on a religious and then on a socialist kibbutz. In 1974, he married Nurit Feuer and went on living with his family in an apartment in Giv’atayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv, surrounded by memorabilia from his Hohenems and Triestine family, oil paintings from the early 19^th century and from Trieste, heirlooms and memories. Carlo Alberto Brunner also left behind a book manuscript, Il Fondo del Ghetto, in which he contemplates the stations of his life and his family history as mirrored in the great political ideas, historic events, and nationalistic catastrophes of the 20^th century.

Carlo Alberto Brunner: Il Fondo del Ghetto (The Bottom of the Ghetto), Manuscript. Jewish Museum Hohenems

Carlo Alberto Brunner, Il Fondo del Ghetto (The Bottom of the Ghetto). Childhood under German occupation

Carlo Alberto Brunner, Il Fondo del Ghetto (The Bottom of the Ghetto). Israel and ethnic nation states

Leone Brunner

Leone Brunner (1908 – 1969) was the youngest child of Rodolfo and Gina Brunner in Trieste. He studied agriculture and converted to Catholicism in 1930. In 1932, he married Maria Teresa (Tea) Clerici; the couple had five children. On his family’s estates, Leone led the life of the landed gentry, characterized by a passion for hunting and other hobbies befitting his rank. As heir of his parents‘ considerable possessions, he also became board member of Banca Triestina as well as president of the stockbreeders’ association. After the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Trieste in 1943, he joined the resistance against the National Socialists and assumed in this context the false identity of “Leopold Berti.” Part of his resistance activities consisted in drafting reports to the American armed forces on locations and types of the German invaders’ military installations and vehicles. In the meantime, his family remained fairly protected on the Brunners’ Forcoli country estate. Following liberation, the family returned to Trieste. After his wife’s death in 1947, Leone Brunner would never remarry.

Location description of German military installation in Rome, February 26, 1944. Jewish Museum Hohenems, Carlo Alberto Brunner Estate

Guido Brunner

The crumbling of the multicultural city of Trieste into ethnic and political camps had a deep impact on families: Guido Brunner (1893 – 1916), older son of Rodolfo and Gina Brunner and, like his mother, an adherent of irredentism, the movement directed against Austria and in favor of annexation to Italy. This also brought him into conflict with his father who was loyal to the Habsburg Monarchy. As Austrian citizen, Guido Brunner was drafted to the army. However, he deserted and joined the Italian troops. His cousins, too, fought on different sides in World War I, for the Austrian Monarchy and in the British army.
On the Austrian side, Guido was sentenced to death as renegade, but pardoned by Emperor Franz Joseph. Nevertheless, he went to war for Italy in 1915 and was killed on June 8, 1916 in the battle of Monte Fior in the Alps. His remains were never found. Guido Brunner’s horse “Trieste” survived the battle and spent the rest of its life at the Brunners’ Tuscan estate in Forcoli. In line with an equestrian tradition, a hoof was prepared after the horse’s death and used as an object of decoration or utility. The metal cap displays the inscription: “Trieste Segui in guerra il suo padrone Guido Brunner mori e fu sepolta a Forcoli li 8. XII.1918” (“Trieste — He followed his master, Guido Brunner, into war, he died, and was buried in Forcoli on December 8, 1918.”)

Carlo Alberto Brunner, Il Fondo del Ghetto (The Bottom of the Ghetto). On Guido Brunner’s “heroic death”