delirium clemens

Stadt ohne Juden(“City without Jews”) was the title of a 1922 best-selling novel by the Jewish Viennese author Hugo Bettauer  who was assassinated by an Austrian Nazi three years later; it is available in print again (see the review in the German section of my blog). It is an disturbingly prophetic piece of fiction about a Viennese mayor who expels the jews from ‘his’ city (although everything comes to a happy ending eventually; unfortunately is subscribes to some stereotypes about Jews as well).

The racist fantasy of a “city without jews” is also applied in the shocking anti-semitic graffito on a Holocaust (!) memorial in Budapest, AD 2012 (!) The Hungarian slogan says: “This is not your country – filthy Jews.” A striking sign of the bad shape & shame Hungary is in at the moment? The graffiti were only removed recently.

One of my Hungarian friends writes in reaction: “It is quite the country of Jews as well indeed; and also of Roma and homosexuals! It belongs to everyone – Hungarians and non-Hungarians, to all who love this country regardless of their origin. Anyone who claims otherwise is not worthy to be called Hungarian.”

I wish all peope in Hungary thought like that.

This entry was posted on 28 May 2012 at 14:10 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Antisemitism, Austria, Hugo Bettauer, Hungary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.