Today saw the opening of the exhibition “The Last Europeans. Jewish Perspectives on the Crises of an Idea” at the Jewish Museum Munich.

An expanded version of the Hohenems exhibition will be shown here until May 21, 2023, with additional thematic stations, media and a large installation by artist Arnold Dreyblatt, which was created especially for the Munich exhibition.

Katrin Habenschaden, Mayor of the City of Munich, Hanno Loewy, Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Michaela Feurstein-Prasser, curators of the exhibition, and Bernhard Purin, Director of the Jewish Museum Munich, spoke at the opening.

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek und Michaela Feurstein-Prasser,
Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Eva Jünger

Arnold Dreyblatt, Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

The Last Europeans, Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Photo: Eva Jünger

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

Today, the term “feminism” can no longer be explained in one sentence, let alone translated with a single term. Feminism today means a complex pool of currents of socio-political concerns and agendas. Thus, the current discourse speaks of feminisms, not feminism – and the respective interpretations and functions of contemporary feminisms are shaped by questions about the respective socially conditioned specific dimensions of natural or constructed, social and ethnic gender.

Rosika Schwimmer, born into a Jewish family in Budapest on September 11, 1877, could hardly have imagined such a differentiation, even as one of the most prominent women’s rights activists of her time. But she was a surprisingly modern feminist. She was not only concerned with women’s rights, but with the rights of all. She vehemently opposed child labor and fought for world peace.

Rosika Schwimmer did not conform to the norm of a woman of her time. After a year of marriage, she divorced. Most likely she was lesbian, but disciplined her sexuality with morphine. She was stubborn, opinionated, dominant, dynamic – a fighter. In 1897 she founded the Association of Female Office Workers, in 1903 the first Hungarian Women Workers’ Association, and finally in 1904 the Association of Hungarian Feminists. Rosika Schwimmer also did not conform to the female ideal of beauty, nor did she follow the dress code of her time. She tended to be corpulent, wore a bun, pince-nez and – no corset. By the standards of the time, she did not act in a “typically feminine” way, but rather in a “typically masculine” way. As a campaigner for economic, social and political equality, she earned a reputation as a leading advocate of women’s rights in Hungary.

When Schwimmer first arrived in the United States in 1914, she was welcomed with open arms. The Jewish press gushed with euphoria over “Hungary’s great Jewess, darling of women’s rights activists in Europe and America.” Fifteen years later, the right-wing press overflowed with hatred against her. Sometimes she was accused of being a spy for the Germans, sometimes of being one for the Bolsheviks, but above all, “far more dangerous,” of being an “agent of the political-economic movement of Jewry.” By this time, she no longer had any support in the American Jewish community.

For Rosika Schwimmer’s “Peace Ship Expedition” in 1915 had made her even better known internationally as a pacifist than she already was as a feminist. Together with Louis Lochner, she persuaded automobile tycoon Henry Ford to send an amateur diplomatic mission to Europe to broker an end to the First World War. But the mission, widely derided by the press, was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. In this context, American Jews distanced themselves from Schwimmer, accusing her of fomenting Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign during the short-lived, yet highly publicized Peace Ship Expedition. The campaign was no slip; Ford repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic publicity. During the Nuremberg trial, the Reichsjugendführer of the NSDAP, the Viennese Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter Baldur von Schirach was to declare: “The decisive anti-Semitic book that I read at that time and the book that influenced my comrades […] was the book by Henry Ford The International Jew. I read it and became an anti-Semite.” No wonder, then, that many co-religionists considered her a traitor. In 1919, Schwimmer briefly became Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland, but soon after she had to flee Budapest to Vienna to escape the White Terror and emigrated to the United States, where the consistent pacifist was denied naturalization.

From today’s perspective, Rosika Schwimmer operated on the left fringe of the pacifist and feminist movements. In the service of the good cause she was not very squeamish and instrumentalized whom she could instrumentalize. Her uncompromising attitude made her a challenged outsider in a war-driven world of isms and anti-isms where racism, chauvinism, anti-communism, anti-feminism, and anti-Semitism were commonplace.

But she experienced satisfaction: shortly before Schwimmer died stateless in New York in 1948, she had been chosen as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She could not have known that, basically only 20 years later, her feminist activism would be taken up again in the West and that the new women’s movement would stand up stronger than ever to the asymmetrical gender relations in family, society, politics and religion.

In 1946 Simone Jacob, by then a law student at the “Institut d’études politiques de Paris” (Science Po), married Antoine Veil from Blamont, a student one year her senior, a descendant of Wilhelmine Löwenberg, who had emigrated from Hohenems to Blamont, France, two hundred years earlier, and whose letters to her parents, so exquisitely polite and written in beautiful Hebrew-German script, now adorn a showcase in the Jewish Museum.

Simone Veil first became a judge, then a leading civil servant in the penitentiary system, and finally as a politician she stood up for the rights of women in particular. As Minister of Health from 1974, she ensured easier access to contraceptives. In 1975, she achieved the legalization of abortion. The law on the abortion period, which she fought through after a tough battle, is still known today as the Loi-Veil (Veil Law).
In 1979, when European citizens were allowed to directly elect their parliament for the first time, she ran at the head of the UDF, the French Liberal Party, and was elected by parliament as its first president. She was a member of the EU Parliament until 1993, the last time she ran as the top candidate on the “Le Centre pour l’Europe” list in 1989, after the French Liberals and Gaullists had not, in her eyes, been sufficiently resolute in their support for European integration.
In 1998, she was to become a member of the French Constitutional Court. For many years, she was also committed to the memory of the Shoah in France. In 2008, she was finally also elected to the Académie Francaise.

A year after her death in 2017, Simone Veil was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in an act of state and celebrated by President Macron with the following words above all as a Frenchwoman: “With Simone Veil, generations of women who created France enter here. May justice be done to them all today through her.” 15 million two-euro coins bearing her portrait and her Auschwitz prisoner number were minted and put into circulation to mark the occasion.

European Diary, 24.6.2021:  In August 1941, the year of the systematic establishment of the Nazi extermination camps, Winston Churchill reacted disturbed in the face of the beginning mass murder of the European Jews with the words: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” The man who was to give the crime a name and ensure its future punishment by the International Criminal Court was born 121 years ago on this day in a village in Belarus, near Wilna: Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was awarded a doctorate in law from the University of Lemberg (today Lviv). His choice of studies was prompted by the self-imposed question of why the Turkish massacre of a million Armenian women, children and men was not considered a crime, but the killing of a single person was very much a crime under universal law.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich, the Weimar Republic was crushed, and a centralist dictatorship was introduced. Opponents were interned in specially established camps as early as March. By this time, Lemkin was already a respected lawyer in Warsaw, well-versed in international law and well-connected. And he suspected that this was only the prelude to something much worse.

Lemkin drafted a proposal that would define the extermination of national, “racial,” and religious groups internationally as a crime, and sent it to an international conference. But it found little support, even as anti-Semitism became Germany’s national policy. The fascist frenzy that had gripped much of the world left many blind and deaf. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin knew his premonitions would be fulfilled.

He fled Warsaw, made his way to his parents, only to say goodbye to them forever. Together with 38 other family members, they were murdered as Jews by the Nazis. He himself managed to escape to the United States, where a friend got him a job at Duke Law School in North Carolina.

Raphael Lemkin searched feverishly for a term that would do justice to the crime that took place before the eyes of the world. The term mass murder, he argued, was not adequate for the murder of European Jews because it did not incorporate the national, ethnic, or religious motivation of the crime. Nor, he argued, did denationalization capture the crime, since it was aimed at cultural, but not necessarily biological, extermination. His reflections eventually led him to a neologism: genocide. The word is composed of the ancient Greek genos (clan, race, offspring, gender) and the Latin caedere (to kill), the German translation being genocide. However, the conceptualization was only the prerequisite for the actual goal. Lemkin did everything he could to ensure that genocide would be treated and condemned as an internationally justiciable crime.

Lemkin was bitterly disappointed by the Nuremberg trials, in which little happened to codify genocide as an international crime – and nothing to prevent it in the future. But he did not give up, corresponding, lobbying, drafting, and revising the text for a genocide convention. And indeed, after a tireless struggle, he was successful. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations Organization adopted his proposal for a genocide convention. A short time later, Lemkin fell so seriously ill that he had to be hospitalized. Doctors did have trouble finding the cause. He happily diagnosed himself with “genociditis. Exhaustion from working on the Genocide Convention.”

The man who gave a name to the greatest crime of the 20th century and precisely defined the crime of genocide under international law died poor and alone in a one-room apartment in New York in 1959.

In 1979, Louise Weiss was elected as a French MEP for the Gaullists in the first direct elections to the European Parliament. And she was its first “chairwoman by seniority” until her death in 1983. Strangely enough, she does not appear in the many celebrations of the “founding fathers” of Europe. But then, she was not a “father”.

If you want to know more about the background of the current Hamas rocket attacks and the air raids on the Gaza Strip, you will find only sporadic information in European newspapers, and if you want to know more, you have to look in the New York Times or in Israeli newspapers like Haaretz. The whole disaster began to unfold as early as April. This year, several occasions for possible provocations coincide. The Israeli “national holidays”, not least the commemoration of heroes on the so-called Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance of the fallen soldiers, went hand in hand with the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Elections were once again scheduled in the occupied Palestinian territories. The last ones were held 15 years ago – and once again they were canceled. Once again, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were not to be allowed to participate in the elections. And Fatah feared an election victory for Hamas.
On the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu had to fear that a coalition might actually form against him. That alone was enough to play with dynamite. And there was plenty of it in April. Unnoticed by the world public, this new drama, if one is looking for a symbolic turning point, had probably begun on the evening of April 13. The commemoration of Yom Hazikaron is to take place once again at the Wailing Wall. But it is also the first day of Ramadan, the highest Muslim holiday. And Israeli soldiers storm the Al Aqsa Mosque to cut off the juice to the prayer leader and his microphone. There are priorities.
At the same time, six Arab families in East Jersualem are fighting their expulsion from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The houses they live in have been legally disputed since it became possible after 1967 for Jewish Jerusalemites to reclaim their real estate property lost in 1948 when they were expelled from East Jerusalem, while conversely there is still no chance for Arab expellees from the west of the city to have their lost property returned. The Supreme Court’s decision on the acute case is still pending.
Protests against the expulsion began to gather momentum in April. And a few days after the first incident on the Temple Mount, for Arabs the Haram al-Sharif, the Israeli government has the square at Damascus Gate closed, the main access for the city’s Muslims to the Old City and its main mosques, all this during Ramadan. And there are increasingly brutal police operations against the protests. In Sheikh Jarrah as well as on the Temple Mount. Stun grenades are used, including on the grounds of the Al Aqsa Mosque, and as a result there are serious injuries. Attacks by Arabs on Jews further inflame the atmosphere, and as early as April 21, hundreds of Israeli right-wing extremists from the “Lehava” group parade through the Old City, chanting “Death to Arabs” and indiscriminately attacking Arab passersby.

Hamas is not long in taking advantage of this escalation to play to the fore as the true defenders of Palestinian interests. While the Haram al-Sharif Authority and Abbas’ Palestinian government stand as impotent cardboard cutouts, Hamas unleashes its arsenal of rockets. Twenty-seven days after the April 13 provocation.
In the meantime, however, something else has happened. The coexistence of Jewish and Arab Israelis in the mixed cities of Haifa and Akko, Jaffa and Lydda has turned into a civil war-like situation. For a long time it was pretended to the world public that a harmonious coexistence of the “Jewish state and its minorities” was possible there. And those who were of good will on both sides did everything to ensure that this possibility was lived out as well as possible, despite all resistance and discrimination, prophecies of doom and warning signals.

Now mosques and synagogues, Arab and Jewish houses are burning. Armed gangs roam the streets, spreading a mood of pogroms. But in this conflict, too, the government is making it clear who is the strongest and who actually enjoys the protection of state power in all consequences. Even though many police officers are actually trying to contain the violence of right-wing Jewish mobs as well, and not just to take action against Arabs. The official rhetoric, on the other hand, knows exactly who and what is meant when “pogroms” are mentioned. Only one side. And the Israeli government and its friends, in Europe and the United States, they keep pouring oil on the fire.

While the Israeli flag flies at the Chancellor’s Office in Vienna, as it does at some German town halls and government buildings, international diplomacy tries to persuade both sides to end the violence. But the Israeli government has no plan except to stay in power and prevent a “fall” of Netanyahu. And until that happens, the bombardment against Gaza continues unchecked and aimless. While Hamas has long since achieved “its” war goal. They have already symbolically won, no matter how many houses in Gaza Netanyahu still has reduced to rubble, no matter how many civilians on both sides have to believe in it. In any case, there will be many more on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side, and the agitators on both sides can live with that.

And something else remains visible in the midst of this absurd and at the same time absolutely expected spiral of violence. For the first time, both Netanyahu and his opponents have actually included something hitherto completely impossible in their calculations, a new hypothesis: neither of the two camps can govern any longer without a partner from among the Arab parties. And no one has ruled out this possibility any longer. In the midst of the madness, a completely paradoxical, tiny option for normality, of a state that will either eventually be a joint state of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Or, in the end, will no longer be a state at all.

Flashback, 18.5.2020: EU foreign affairs envoy Josep Borrell congratulates the new Israeli government while warning it on behalf of the European Union not to annex parts of the occupied West Bank. The coalition agreement of the new Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz envisages “extending Israel’s sovereignty” to parts of the West Bank. The EU maintains that it would not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders without the mutual consent of Israelis and Palestinians, and that unilateral annexation would violate international law.

Two of the 27 EU states have withheld their consent to the EU foreign affairs envoy’s statement. The anti-Semitic Orban government in Budapest and the Austrian federal government. Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn regrets the two states’ walk-out. The Austrian Foreign Ministry refers to a statement by Foreign Minister Schallenberg that Austria rejects a “prejudgement” of Israel. The Israeli government would be “judged by its actions.

The Greek Stoic Zeno (336-270 BCE) postulated that all people are equal simply by virtue of being human. In practice, however, this theoretical insight played no role. For the longest time, its reflection was left to the philosophers. It was not until the American Declaration of Independence that human rights found their way into a political format. These rights, however, stopped at the indigenous population and the enslaved. On the European continent, the French Revolution made human rights a political concept. And the French Constitution of 1791 even included Jews – though by no means women. Of course, these rights did not apply to people outside the European continent.

It would take until December 10, 1948, for the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” to be adopted by the United Nations. And it was not until September 3, 1953 that the European Convention on Human Rights was ratified.

Not all of those in authority saw the necessity of a legal approach to international law, human rights, guilt and responsibility in 1945. Fritz Bauer’s work “Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht” (War Criminals on Trial), published in that very year, in which he demanded “a lesson in applicable international law” for the Germans, fell on deaf ears, at least in the perpetrator societies. And yet, the drafting and passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sprang from a direct reaction to the atrocities committed in connection with World War II, particularly against civilians and especially against European Jews and other minorities. Hersch Lauterpacht played a not insignificant role in the development of a universal human rights code.

Lauterpacht, a native of what is now Ukrainian Shovkva in 1897, studied with the Constitutional Law scholar and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen in Vienna, then at the prestigious London School of Economics. From 1938 to 1955 he held the Chair of International Law at Cambridge, from 1951 to 1954 he was a member of the United Nations International Law Commission, and from 1955 until his death in 1960 he was a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

As a young man, Hersch Lauterpacht had experienced the catastrophes of the First World War. They were the trigger for his lifelong preoccupation with international law as well as human rights. The parental family of Hersch Lauterpacht had been murdered in the “Old Austrian” city of Lemberg. This may have motivated his focus on the status of the individual in international law and on the question of the proportionality of nation-state supremacy. It was in this context that Lauterpacht developed the terminology “crimes against humanity” to frame the egregious atrocities committed against civilians, a formulation that gave international law a decisive expansion. At the Nuremberg Trials, it legitimized the prosecution and conviction of Nazi actions against millions of civilian citizens. The definition was “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population before or during war; persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed in the commission of or in connection with a crime over which the Court has jurisdiction, whether or not the act was contrary to the law of the country in which it was committed.” Since then, the protection of the individual against the state can also be claimed in the EU. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is legally responsible for this.

At the supra-European level, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is responsible for questions and proceedings under international law. When Hersch Lauterpacht, who played a key role in drafting the European and International Conventions on Human Rights, was to be appointed as a judge by the British in 1954, voices were raised criticizing this decision with the argument that the renowned international lawyer was not “British” enough for this office, which was clearly indicated by both his origin and his name.

Hersch Lauterbach died on May 8, 1960, fifteen years after the end of WW II  in London.

The new Posterboy of the AfD: Yair Netanjahu

Netanyahu promptly received applause from AfD Member of the European Parliament Joachim Kuhs on his Facebook page. Which Yair Netanyahu answered with an enthusiastic call to Kuhs and the AfD to finally end this “madness” with his “colleagues.” What was meant was EU support for NGOs in Israel and Palestine.
Kuhs, chairman of the “Christians in the AfD” and member of the AfD federal board, has only recently visited Israel together with representatives of the “Jews in the AfD” to meet representatives of Likud – and writes again and again in right-wing and radical right-wing German and Israeli media about the “hostility of the EU towards Israel”, apparently one of his favorite topics.
The AfD, whose members are repeatedly seen with Israeli flags at right-wing demonstrations, also make no secret of the kind of Israel they love: namely the one that finally ensures that the Jews no longer want to be part of Europe – and in this way they can finally be gotten rid of.

Hilda Monte was born Hilde Meisel in Vienna on July 31, 1914. In 1915, she and her family — her parents, Rosa and Ernst Meisel and her older sister Margot — moved to Berlin, where her father ran an import-export business. While still a teenager, she joined the International Socialist Fighting League (Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, or ISK in German), a group founded by German philosopher Leonard Nelson in 1926.

Hilda Monte

In 1929, Hilde traveled to England for the first time to visit her uncle, the composer Edmund Meisel. In 1932 she moved to Paris. She regularly published analyses of the political and economic situation in England, France and Germany, Spain and the colonies. She spent 1933 and 1934 in the German Reich before emigrating again to Paris in 1934 and to London in 1936. She continued to travel illegally to the German Reich several times after that, helping organize workers’ resistance actions. In 1938, in order to prevent her expulsion from England, she entered into a marriage of convenience with the German-British cartoonist John Olday, becoming a British citizen.

During the war, she remained involved in a wide variety of resistance activities, whether as a courier for the International Transport Workers’ Federation or on behalf of Allied intelligence services. In 1940, her book How to conquer Hitler, co-authored with Fritz Eberhard, was published. In the same year, she was involved in the creation of the radio station ” European Revolution” and worked regularly for the German workers’ broadcasts of the BBC. In 1942, she gave a shocking report on the radio about the mass extermination of Jews that had begun in occupied Poland. And she wrote Poems and worked on her novel Where Freedom Perished, that was published only in 1947.

In 1943, her book The Unity of Europe was published in London, in which she developed the vision of a socialist Europe and its common institutions as an independent union between the USA and the Soviet Union. In 1944, together with her friend and ISK comrade Anna Beyer, she was parachuted over occupied France to make resistance contacts on behalf of the American intelligence service OSS and Austrian socialists. Soon after, she was taken to Switzerland by René and Hanna Bertholet, were they discussed political theories with socialist émigrés for the period after liberation. When she had time for it, Hilda Monte contemplated the idea to go to China to engage in the development of socialist cooperatives – and produced little sculptures from clay.

In April 1945, Hilda Monte again crossed the border illegally to establish contact with socialists in Vorarlberg and to gather information about resistance groups there and their relationship to each other. A questionnaire she had prepared for this purpose is now in the archives of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn.

On her way back, she was stopped by the border guard in Feldkirch on April 17, 1945, a few days before the end of the war. She tried to escape but was shot and died of her injury on the spot. Austrian socialists placed a tombstone on her grave with the inscription: “Here rests our unforgettable comrade Hilde Monte-Olday. Born 31.7. 1914 in Vienna. Died 17.4.1945 in Feldkirch. She lived and died in the service of the socialist idea.”

After the war, many of her comrades became prominent members of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, pioneers of the emerging European Union and founders of intellectual periodicals, educational institutions and publishing houses, such as the Europäische Verlagsanstalt.

Hilda Monte, born at the beginning of World War I and shot to death a few days before the second one ended, did not live to that.

Today, representatives of the Protestant congregation of Feldkirch, the Jewish Museum Hohenems and the Social Democratic Party of Austria inaugurated a memorial plaque next to her recently restored grave.

Hilda Monte’s grave in Feldkirch

Brunner remained a liberal throughout his life, even though at the end of his life he supported the Zionist movement in Vienna, probably out of disappointment with the political developments in Austria. When he died in Vienna on April 15, 1914, he left a legacy for an interdenominational school in his home community. The Hohenems municipal council did not accept the bequest. An interdenominational school was not desired.

Flashback, April 15, 2020: U.S. President Trump declares that the peak of the Corona pandemic has passed. And announces that the USA will stop its payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). German Development Minister Müller, on the other hand, declares that he will increase payments to the WHO: “The WHO must now be strengthened, not weakened. Cutting funding in the midst of a pandemic is absolutely the wrong way to go.”

Trump also decides that the “emergency checks” announced by the U.S. government to some 70 million needy people in the U.S. – to the tune of $1200 – should bear his name, in the midst of an election campaign that is about to begin. This has never happened before in American history.
Trump is threatening to send Parliament into forced recess on the grounds that he wants to fill vacancies without parliamentary participation. The possibility of ordering a parliamentary recess has also never been used by an American president. Trump plays on circulating conspiracy theories at a press conference, e.g. that the virus came from a Chinese lab.

EU Commission President van der Leyen, meanwhile, is calling for more commonality among EU members, saying, “A lack of coordination in lifting restrictions risks negative effects for all member states and would likely lead to an increase in tensions among member states. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the crisis, but member states should at least keep each other informed,” the EU authority in Brussels warns. Van der Leyen announces a recovery plan for Europe that will include a common fund.

On the Greek islands, 40,000 refugees continue to be held in camps under inhumane conditions. Today, 12 (in words TWELVE) children from Syria and Afghanistan will be flown out of Athens to Luxembourg. Luxembourg is thus the first of eleven countries to show willingness to take in a few unaccompanied or sick minors from the camps. In addition to Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Portugal and Lithuania are participating in the rescue operation. On Saturday, 58 children are to follow to Germany. The Austrian government still refuses to help, although many mayors have now offered to take in new refugees.