Why Vienna’s Latest Attempt to Come to Terms with Its Anti-Semitic History Falls Flat

Oct. 21 2022

On Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse there stands a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of Karl Lueger, who served as the city’s mayor from 1897 until his death in 1910, and did much to give the city its current form. A leader of the staunchly Catholic Christian Social party, Lueger was one of the very first successful politicians to make anti-Semitism a key plank of his political platform. The anti-Jewish fervor of Lueger’s loyal voters, more than anything else, convinced Theodor Herzl that the Jews would never find enduring security in Europe.

Last week, the city Vienna—responding to controversy in recent years concerning the statue of Lueger and his place in the city’s history—unveiled an installation intended to “contextualize artistically” the Lueger monument. Liam Hoare examines this “enormous wooden structure,” created by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch and titled Lueger Temporary.

The Austrian Union of Jewish Students . . . protested the decision to “colorfully window-dress” the Lueger monument. From the point of view of the city, however, the color and bombast as well as people’s protestations are part of Lueger Temporary’s attraction. The installation will be, it hopes, something that will draw people in, make them curious, and initiate a conversation.

But a conversation about what, exactly? The Lueger monument as a standalone piece is an honorific object that perpetuates the cult of personality Lueger himself helped construct during his lifetime: Lueger as a modernizing mayor who was a champion of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. A successful act of artistic contextualization would have to cut this myth down to size and undermine the monument’s political foundations by framing it with the information the monument doesn’t tell us: that Lueger was a Catholic supremacist . . . and political anti-Semite.

By this measure, Lueger Temporary is a failure. Six and Petritsch’s elementary-school collage amounts to little more than a compendium of what the artists learned in the course of doing their research about Lueger monuments. It neither directly addresses nor communes with the very monument it is supposed to be contextualizing. Rather, Lueger Temporary is guilty of distracting and shifting the focus away from the Lueger monument, relativizing and minimizing the subject at hand. Instead of deepening the debate about the very thing the city has spent more than two years arguing about, Lueger Temporary seeks to broaden it, making it thinner in the process.

Read more at Vienna Briefing

More about: Anti-Semitism, Monuments, Theodor Herzl, Vienna

 

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023