Over the past twelve months, much has been written about the ways in which German “memory culture” around the Holocaust has been used to silence artists and cultural producers who speak out about the genocide in Gaza. But what about Austria to the south — a German-speaking country also characterized by concentrated wealth, high taxation, generous funding for the arts, and historical responsibility for antisemitic crimes?
Here, a situation that is in certain ways worse has been much less widely publicized. Austria was the only European country apart from the Czech Republic to vote against both cease-fire resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly in the last months of 2023. Its second most prominent politician, the president of its National Assembly, was still asserting in April 2024 that Austria “stand[s] unconditionally at the side of Israel.” Things have not changed visibly under his successor, Walter Rosenkranz of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), who took office after this latter’s election victory last September. While less spectacularly brutal than in Germany, censorship of pro-Palestinian speech in the Austrian cultural sphere has been no less systematic, and the treatment of dissenting Jews no less shameful.
Given the relative absence of an “Austrian memory culture” akin to the much-trumpeted German variant, this may seem paradoxical. But as a country in which the main post-Nazi political party, the FPÖ, was always integrated into the system of “consociational,” or cartelized, parliamentary democracy, Austria’s inability to confront its history of antisemitism is inseparable from another failure: its inability to marginalize the main party of the far right. Seeing as this party has…
Auteur: Rose-Anne Gush
