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.