Die Presse, Guest Commentary by Dr. Monika Sommer, July 8, 2022
German original: https://www.diepresse.com/6163240/aufschauen-moechte-ich-zu-anderen
Commemoration. Leon Zelman survived the Shoah and stood up for a cosmopolitan Vienna. We should look up to people like him, not to Karl Lueger.
The fact that ten Holocaust survivors - among them Nobel laureate Eric Kandel - recently wrote an open letter to the city of Vienna demanding the removal of the Lueger monument on Vienna's Ringstrasse made me think of an idea that was similarly hotly debated in this city in the late 1990s, also propagated by a Shoah survivor: Born in Szczekociny, Poland, in 1928, eleven-year-old Leon Zelman, together with his mother and brother Schajek, fled from the Nazis to Łódź, where they were interned in the ghetto.
The mother died after years of hunger and ordeal in 1943, the father had been killed in 1939 in the hail of bullets of the German attack on the shtetl. With the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944, the two orphans were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, then to Falkenberg, from where they were driven on foot to Wolfsberg, a subcamp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. Schajek was gassed there. Leon was taken to Mauthausen, then to Ebensee, where he experienced liberation in May 1945: the 178 cm tall 17-year-old weighed 38 kilos. After stays in DP camps in Bad Ischl and Bad Goisern, he came to Vienna involuntarily, as the USA refused to allow the lung patient to enter the country. The U.S. Jewish aid organization Joint supported the Jewish DPs, also with scholarships.
Open hostility towards Jews
In his biography, Zelman describes several times the open hostility toward Jews he encountered in Vienna. He studied newspaper studies and made it his life's mission to confront anti-Semitism in order to change Austrian society. It is hard to imagine how unbearable life here must have been for him: "There were Nazis in every coffee house, in every tavern. You had to be prepared at any time to meet your brother's murderer, and you wouldn't even know it," he writes in "A Life After Survival."
Driven by "the dead I had left behind," he wanted to change Vienna into a city worth living in, even for Jews. That was not a matter of course at the time. Even the World Jewish Congress had been convinced in 1945 that no more Jewish communities should be built in Germany and Austria. Zelman saw things differently. By founding the Jewish Welcome Service, an institution designed to enable displaced Jewish Viennese to visit their home city, he pioneered the improvement of relations between the city and those displaced from it who had survived the Shoah.
Improving Austria's image in the world was Zelman's concern even during the Waldheim affair in 1986, and he was questioned by many international media about his assessment. For his efforts, Zelman received several awards. Since 2011, a park has been dedicated to him, and since 2013, the city has awarded the Leon Zelman Prize to individuals and initiatives that are committed to the memory of the Shoah or to dialogue between Austria and the victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants.
After years of heated debates, Zelman had to realize that he would be denied a dream: quite deliberately, on the Ringstrasse in Palais Epstein, he wanted to create a monument to Jewish-Austrian cultural heritage with a House of History in the late 1990s. It was not to be a static institution, but a house that would be an archive, library, and museum in equal measure and "could fulfill an educational and future-oriented function." Zelman's House of History should have shown how often Austria's history is also Jewish history, thus contributing to reconciliation and understanding between Austria and Jews. Zelman was able to inspire many for the idea, but it did not come to fruition. Eventually, the parliament moved into the Epstein.
Is this "Cancel Culture"?
In view of the debate about the Lueger monument, the question arises as to whose memory the city is commemorating today and in what way, precisely on the Ringstrasse, and whether removing the statue would indeed be "Cancel Culture," as some argue. This fear is unfounded: Many aspects of Lueger's politics are indelibly linked to this city, even without a monument.
I would like to see a Vienna that rejects politics that are even remotely inhumane, in the present and in history, and expresses this in its culture of remembrance. Lueger's statue would not have to disappear in the depot of the Vienna Museum, but it could be moved from the pedestal to the floor. Because I would like to look up to the many representatives of civil society who have stood up for a tolerant, livable and heterogeneous Vienna. Leon Zelman would probably be represented among them. July 11 marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the early promoter of a House of History.
The author:
Dr. Monika Sommer (born 1974 in Linz) is a historian and curator, she has been the founding director of the Haus der Geschichte Österreich since 2017.