“RECOLLECTING”

MAK Catalogue, www.mak.at
“RECOLLECTING”
Looted Art and Resitution
(12.03.2008 – 02.15.2009)
The show entitled “RECOLLECTING” presents art and everyday objects from Jewish possession and their history between robbery and restitution. Especially for the exhibition, new artworks were created which put this issue of controversial topicality in a present-day perspective.

Honoring Jahoda – Prammer: Witness to Austrian History

Austrian Press Agency (APA) (12/10/2008)

Honoring Jahoda – Prammer: Witness to Austrian History

Grand Decoration in Silver for one expelled in 1939 – Representative of the Claims Conference: Austria has two faces

Vienna – The eighty-two year-old native Viennese, Hans Jahoda, was awarded by the President of the National Council, Barbara Prammer with the Grand Decoration in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria. At a celebration in Parliament, Prammer said that Jahoda is “a witness to Austria’s and Europe’s history during the 20th century.” Expelled from Austria in 1939, he assumed later on dual Austrian-Israeli citizenship, and served as a representative of the Jewish victim organization, Claims Conference in Austria, in matters of restitution payments, Jahoda explained that for him, Austria has “two faces.”

Late homage: Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel becomes honorary citizen of Vienna

Austrian Federal Chancellery (10/20/08)

Late homage: Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel becomes
honorary citizen of Vienna

7 October 2008 the Municipal Council Committee on Culture and Science adopted a unanimous decision to appoint 79-year-old neuro-scientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel “honorary citizen of the City of Vienna“. He was born into a Jewish family in this city in 1929, who was driven out by the Nazis to the USA in 1939. He spent his remaining elementary school years at the Yeshiva in New York’s neighbourhood Flatbush, until he changed to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1944, where he became interested in history and literature – the subjects he later studied at Harvard University. In 1952 he started to study psychiatry at New York University. He became increasingly interested in the biological processes of the brain and started to work in the lab of neurobiologist Harry Grundfest at Columbia University. Kandel became a pioneering brain researcher, after gaining fundamental insights in tests with the Califonia sea slug, a marine mollusk, in Paris in 1962. Later he became active at the Department of Physiology and Psychiatry of the New York Medical School, where he helped to establish the Department of Neurobiology and Behavioural Sciences. He conducted epoch-making research on the short and long-term memory. Evidence was finally provided for Eric Kandel’s assumption that specific learning mechanisms may be observed in all living beings.

Jewish people remember their Vienna in the 20th century

Austrian Federal Chancellery (11/17/2008)

Jewish people remember their Vienna in the 20th century

About 200 Jewish citizens were invited to the presentation of the book “Wie wir gelebt haben. Wiener Juden erinnern sich an ihr 20. Jahrhundert“ (“How we lived. Viennese Jews remember their 20th century”), edited by Tanja Eckstein and Julia Kaldori and published by Mandelbaum-Verlag, in Vienna’s City Hall on 11 November 2008. About 70 guests contributed as witnesses of the time numerous photos and the pertinent memories to the wonderful book enshrining unique short stories, “from the little comedies of daily life in the 1920s and the horror of the late 1930s and 1940s, which they escaped only narrowly, to their settling down in post-war Vienna and founding their own families”, as Edward Serotta, Head of Centropa (Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation) stated in his preface. Centropa was founded in 1999. One of its goals is to preserve the memories of older Jewish people – to whom we owe today’s flourishing Jewish life in Vienna – for future generations. Other texts in the book were authored by superb writers such as Joachim Riedl, Barbara Tóth or Doron Rabinovici.

Campaign of the City of Vienna: free copies of book by Ruth Klüger

Austrian Federal Chancellery (11/17/2008)

Campaign of the City of Vienna: free copies of book by Ruth Klüger

As from 19 November 2008, 100,000 free copies of Ruth Klüger’s memories “Weiter leben. Eine Jugend“ (“Continue Living: My Youth”) are distributed to avid readers in Vienna. The author born in Vienna in 1931 was ostracised as a child during the Nazi dictatorship and later deported to concentration camps. Klüger read from her work at a book presentation on the premises of Vienna’s district-heating company (“Fernwärme Wien”) on 20 November 2008. This is already the seventh year that the free-book campaign has been organised by Echo-Medienhaus. Ruth Klüger was lucky and survived the Holocaust. Later she studied in the USA and became a recognised literary scholar. She lives in Irvine (California). Recently, she became a guest professor in Tel Aviv. Klüger has received numerous prizes and awards, in Austria the Austrian State Prize for Literary Criticism (1997) and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book (2002).

Becoming Edith. The Education of a Hidden Child. Edith Mayer Cord.

Becoming Edith. The Education of a Hidden Child. Edith Mayer Cord.
The Wordsmithy, LLC publishers. New Milford, New Jersey, 2008.

Edith Mayer Cord is a successful financial advisor who fled from the Nazis during her childhood in Austria. Born in Vienna between the wars, her parents struggled to raise their children and then had to run for their lives – first to Italy and then to France. Edith’s father and brother were caught and murdered in Auschwitz.

Jewish Community Takes Legal Action Against the Federation

Die Presse (07/26/2008)

Jewish Community Takes Legal Action Against the Federation
by
Judith Lecher

Restitution. Since 2001 Austria is obligated to maintain the Jewish cemeteries. But neither the Federation nor the Regional Governments want to pay.
Vienna. Since 2001 the Federation, Regional Governments and Communities are fighting over who is responsible for maintaining the Jewish cemeteries in Austria. To this day there is no overall concept. The Jewish Community Vienna’s (JCV) patience has been tried and now it wants to take legal action against the Federation. “Our attorneys have already been authorized,” says JCV President Ariel Muzicant to die Presse.
The basis of the lawsuit: In year 2001, Austria and the USA concluded the so-called Washington Agreement. According to this agreement under international law, Austria committed itself to symbolical compensation payments to Jewish victims’ organizations, including the maintenance of more than sixty Jewish cemeteries.

Dark Figures

Profil (08/11/08)
Dark Figures

Restitution. Vienna’s Leopold Museum continues to dispute being in possession of NS looted art. Now explosive documents have surfaced regarding the source of three pictures by Albin Egger-Lienz.

His works mirrored the personal taste of the Führer. Until his death in November of 1926, Albin Egger-Lienz painted romantic mountain landscapes, farmers eating at midday and men with angular bodies mowing the wheat fields with scythes. In the prologue to the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition by the NS organization, “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength through Joy) in Berlin, it is said of Egger-Lienz that “no other Austrian artist transcended painting as he did to create and establish Germany’s artistic importance.

Austrian Federal Chancellery (12/15/08)

Austrian Federal Chancellery (12/15/08)

Federal President Fischer pays visit to Israel and Palestinian territories

Federal President Heinz Fischer and his wife Margit started their four-day state visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories on 14 December 2008. Among the members of the delegation accompanying them are Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger, Minister of Defence Norbert Darabos, Minister of Education Claudia Schmied and the Vice-President of the Economic Chamber Austria, Richard Schenz. The subjects for debate are the Middle East peace efforts and intensified cooperation between Israel and Austria.

The Impossibility of Being Kafka

Der Standard (07/03/2008)
The Impossibility of Being Kafka

July 3 is the anniversary of Franz K. for the 125th time. Reiner Stach has been working for thirteen years on a comprehensive biography consisting of three volumes, two of which are now currently available. He tells Sebastian Fasthuber of his approach to finding the real Kafka.
Standard: You quoted in your book, “Kafka. The Decisive Years,” an essay taken from an American journal: ”The Impossibility of Being Kafka.“ For a long time it appeared impossible to write a credible Kafka biography. How did you first become involved with him?
Reiner Stach: Under very normal circumstances. As a young man I read his works. What initially triggered my interest was when at the end of my twenties I saw his Diaries and Letters to Milena and to Felice Bauer for the first time. There was a phase when I fully identified with the author, also with the people he wrote about.
Standard: Which actually was…..