Vienna in row over legacy of historic mayor Karl Lueger: the plans to change street signs bearing name of the antisemitic politician who inspired Hitler cause far right complaints >article (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2012
Archive for April, 2012
Undoing Lueger in Vienna
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Antisemitism, Austria, Karl Lueger, university, Vienna on 29 April 2012 by delclemPosted in Uncategorized with tags Amstetten, Austria, crime, documentary, Josef Fritzl on 26 April 2012 by delclem
4 years ago, the daughter of Josef Fitzl was liberated from her father’s basement, after almost 25 years of captivity and incest.
However, the aesthetics of the documentary not only investigates the dark side of white trash culture in Lower Austria – in its search for ‘fitting images’ for the almost unimaginable crime, it also reveals the stereotypical Othering of Austria in the cultural imaginary of Great Britain… (c) SKY & back2back, 2009
“Watching it happen…”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags bosnia-hercegovina, Canada, Croatia, radio footage, Yugoslav Wars, yugoslavia on 24 April 2012 by delclem
The Canadian radio show Living Out Loud featured news reports from the early 1990’s and recordings with people who escaped the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia – also people who came to Canada before the wars broke out, people of Bosnian, Serb and Croatian background and their Canadian born children. All of them were interviewed separately in Toronto in 1992/ 1993, and then twenty years later >audio link (c) CBCradio, 2012
>More photos from Sarajevo, 1992-1995
Besetzt – Occupied!
Posted in Uncategorized with tags alternative culture, Austria, exhibition, Hausbesetzer, squatters, Vienna on 22 April 2012 by delclem
Occupied! is the current motto at the Wien Museum. A new exhibition explores the struggle for free spaces in the city. Between the “Happening of 100 Days“ in 1976 and the eviction of squatters from “Epizentrum Lindengasse” in 2011 Vienna has seen some turbulent times. Article (c) wieninternational.at, 2012
Political Manicheanism
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Austria, Manicheanism, politics, popular art, Right populism on 21 April 2012 by delclem
Political Pop Culture from Austria, or a little follow-up on stupid Rightpopulist propaganda: red is color of the Social Democratic ‘devil’, blue the national ‘forces of light’, spiced up with a bit of redneckism (Volk) under the disguise of grassroot democracy. However, it looks as if the devil were more muscled and in the winning position: intended by the amateur artist Richi Benz who drew this and posted it on facebook?
“Everything ‘national’ has become something really bush-league long ago.”
(THOMAS MANN, Werke, XIII: 743)
Biting (Sex?) Appeal
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Dracula, Great Britain, Ireland, Romania, Stoker, Transylvania, Vampire on 20 April 2012 by delclem
20 April 1912 was not only the 23rd birthday of an unknown wanna-be named Hitler; it was also the day when Bram Stoker, author of the immortal Dracula novel, died. > GERMAN TEXT VERSION
“This is the textbook of vampirism, but the journalist Bram Stoker has turned it into a typewriter ad,” wrote the Austrian Alfred Kubin, himself a master of uncanny art, in a letter full of contempt in 1915. He has not been the only critic since trying to desecrate the tomb of the Anglo-Irish author. However, this has done little damage to the undead popularity of the literary work in question: Dracula (1897), apart from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) probably the most successful undead monster of world literature; a novel that has never been out of print in its more than 110 years on the book market.
Continent of Corruption
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Austria, Central Europe, corruption, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, politics, Slovakia on 17 April 2012 by delclem
Bribes as the Lubricant of Neoliberal Central Europe
Let’s be honest: the center of Europe is not just the region of phony Habsburg nostalgia and a shared cuisine. It is also the place where experienced patients hand over a box of chocolates (with a creatively hidden banknote) to the treating doctor and/or the nurse. Continue reading
Titanic Centenary
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Atlantic, naval disaster, Titanic, UK, USA on 15 April 2012 by delclem
100 years ago, the Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank.
“The Holocaust Is German Family History”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags family history, family memory, Germany, Holocaust, Moritz Pfeiffer, National Socialism, Second World War on 12 April 2012 by delclem
“German historian Moritz Pfeiffer asked his granddad what he did in World War II, and then fact-checked the testimony. His findings in a new book shed light on a dying generation that remains outwardly unrepentant, but is increasingly willing to break decades of silence on how, and why, it followed Hitler.”
> Article & photo abum (c) DER SPIEGEL, 2012
> The notion of cultural memory (c) Goethe Institut
PS. On the problematic function of family memroy, also see
> Harald Welzer, Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi (c) AJC
Life & death on my street in Sarajevo
Posted in Uncategorized with tags bosnia-hercegovina, Bosnian War, Sarajevo, siege, ulica Logovina on 9 April 2012 by delclem
“For two years, Barbara Demick chronicled the trials of one Sarajevo street (ulica Logavina) during the Serbian siege. In her latest book, Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street, she catches up with the people she befriended.”
> Article by Barbara Demick (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2012
Photo: Laurent Van Der Stockt/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
delirium clemens 