{"id":1014,"date":"2020-10-13T11:35:18","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T09:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lasteuropeans.eu\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2020-10-13T16:11:32","modified_gmt":"2020-10-13T14:11:32","slug":"abendland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasteuropeans.eu\/en\/abendland\/","title":{"rendered":"“Abendland”"},"content":{"rendered":"

European Diary, 13.10.2020:<\/strong> Tomorrow evening Micha Brumlik (Berlin) will speak in our program about the new discourse on “Christian-Jewish Occident”. To get into the right mood Andr\u00e9 Heller will sing his unrhymed chanson about “Occident”.
\nAndr\u00e9 Heller’s Jewish father fled from the National Socialists and lived after 1945 mainly in Paris. Thus Heller also grew up with French citizenship before he became a chansonnier in Vienna.
\nIn 1967 he was one of the founders of the pop channel \u00d63 and presented the program Musicbox. His political commitment was always a balancing act. As a “Jew living in Vienna,” he criticized Kreisky for his compromising attitude toward old Nazis and anti-Semites, and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, even though some critics accused him of “promoting” anti-Semitism. Andr\u00e9 Heller has not challenged such poisonous absurdities. He has remained as politically awake and critical as ever. When he spoke in the Austrian Parliament on 12 March 2018 on the occasion of 80 years of “Anschluss” in the Austrian Parliament, he ended his speech with a look at the new populism of the icy cold that had entered Austrian politics – and has not been overcome to this day.<\/p>\n

“Allow me to tell you another strange thing about my life. For decades I thought I was something better than others. Wiser, more talented, more amusing, entitled to pride. I was arrogant, narcissistic, constantly judging others, and it didn’t do me any good until one day I was looking around me in a London Underground car. There were sitting and standing very different people with different skin colors and I heard different languages: In a kind of lightning bolt into my consciousness, I realized that each and every one of these women and men, old and young, hopeful and desperate, is also myself and that German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or Swahili is not our real mother tongue, but the world mother tongue is and should be the compassion. It enables us to recognize ourselves in each other and to be intimately and lovingly connected with them and to take this realization into account in all our thoughts and actions.<\/p>\n