Firewall with Fire Accelerants? Two Austrian Scandals, Fall 2024
Firewall with Fire Accelerants? Two Austrian Scandals, Fall 2024
by Arno Tausch
In European politics, it has become fashionable to speak of a “firewall against the right,” as the Social Democrats and Greens in the European Parliament recently put it, in view of the success of the populist to extreme right at the ballot box. We read, for example, that the two parties wish to build a firewall against the new far-right group Patriots for Europe. They must “stand in isolation”—the “firewall to the right must be firm.”
As an Austrian whose personal memory of all the Nazi scandals in our country goes back to the mid-1960s, I must skeptically object that there is often the will to do so but, unfortunately, not so often the work. The long history of Austrian Nazi scandals since 1945 has now been enriched by two important and qualitatively new episodes, whose dynamics and prospects for development extend far beyond Austria’s borders, and which are almost symptomatic of the malaise in which the free world has found itself since October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel. It should come as no surprise that antisemitism is now not only endemic on the extreme political right but also rears its head like a hydra on the political left. For those who look at these phenomena systematically, this should not be the least bit surprising.
The process described here is even more dismal because in recent years, under the foreign policy leadership of the Christian democratic-conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Austria has developed a decidedly pro-Israeli foreign policy and strived to maintain good relations with the Jewish community. This has meant, among other things, that the Austrian Parliament was resplendent in Israel’s colors on October 7, 2024, the anniversary of the Hamas massacre.
On September 29, 2024, Austria elected a new parliament, and the German nationalist, right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) became the strongest party in our Republic for the first time. The veritable cabinet of horrors of the far-right and neo-Nazi incidents that have characterized this party since 1975 are on view in the German-language edition of Wikipedia.
The thousandth “incident,” if you like, since the 1950s that is now unfolding before our eyes is, to put it in good Austrian terms, something. The new parliament, with the FPÖ as the strongest party, needs a “Speaker” (in Austrian political jargon, this is called the National Council President), who, according to our constitution, holds the highest office in the country after the Federal President.
Of all people, the FPÖ nominated Walter Christian Rosenkranz: born in 1962, Doctor of Law, former contract employee of the Ministry of Defense, longtime member of the National Council, and former Ombudsman. Is he a “Speaker” of Parliament who deserves the high dignity of his office?
Rosenkranz is still a member of a German nationalist fraternity the Libertas, which forbids Jews from becoming members, in the style of the antisemites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see the articles linked here for quotations in the next two paragraphs). Founded in 1860, the fraternity introduced the “Aryan paragraph” as early as 1878, making it the inglorious first fraternity of its kind in Austria. As late as 1967, the official Libertas commemorative publication stated that denazification and the rejection of Nazi ideology after 1945 was a “fight against Germanness in general.” Racist antisemitism is now downplayed and legitimized by Libertas as “resistance against the influence of Judaism in the cultural and economic field.” In February 2009, it became known that Libertas had awarded its “Carl von Hochenegg Prize” (“for outstanding deeds in the spirit of the national-freedom idea”) to the neo-Nazi Bund Freier Jugend (BFJ). In its justification, Libertas stated: “Through its rallies and events, which are highly publicized by the population, the BFJ has courageously claimed a field that is otherwise almost exclusively reserved for the left; the BFJ is exposed to the strongest state repression for its popular activities.”
Against this background, it is not surprising that Libertas is organized in the Burschenschaftliche Gemeinschaft, the core of the Deutsche Burschenschaft (DB), which is dominated by militant right-wing extremists. At the height of the internal DB dispute over the continued validity of the “Aryan paragraph,” Libertas was significantly among those far-right fraternities that published a “Declaration on the nation-based concept of the fatherland” in the Burschenschaftliche Blätter (February 2011), which protested “against any attempt to declare as dispensable [the principle of] descent as a necessary prerequisite for German ethnicity in general or in individual cases.” Such a “betrayal” would force the fraternity to “give up its inner essence.”
Incidentally, on the website of Libertas, the flag of Germany rather than the Austrian flag is emblazoned on its clubhouse—as if thoughts of an “Anschluss” to the “Reich” were still worth striving for. It is to be hoped that the counterintelligence of our security forces will notice that this association also helps in joining the Austrian Armed Forces as an officer.
One very clear and comprehensible event offers a view of the entire brown swamp that is Rosenkranz’s political environment. In the article “Die Deutschen Burschenschaften Österreichs in der Ersten Republik und im Ständestaat1918–1938,” in the anthology 150 Jahre Burschenschaften in Österreich, Rosenkranz described the Nazi “blood judge” Johann Karl Stich (1888–1955) as a “pillar of society” (Leistungsträger). However, Stich had already been a founding member of the Krems branch of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) in July 1919 (the party was folded into the NSDAP after the 1938 annexation). Following the Anschluss, Stich became SA standard-bearer and general prosecutor for the Nazi judiciary in Vienna. His crimes included the shooting of more than forty political prisoners on April 15, 1945, in Stein an der Donau, as well as his role as prosecutor on April 13, 1945, against seventeen Austrian resistance fighters, including the Kirchl-Trauttmansdorff resistance group, all of whom were executed.
So Rosenkranz is supposed to play a central role in strengthening democratic awareness in times of growing totalitarian threats? And as a member of a fraternity with a still-existing Aryan paragraph, is he supposed to credibly combat antisemitism? On June 18, 1948, his social pillar Johann Stich was sentenced to eight years in prison by the young Austrian Second Republic at the Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Vienna for his Nazi crimes.
A second brown scandal in Austria in recent weeks is all the sadder because the perpetrator was unfortunately the very founder of the Alliance for Democracy and Respect, which sought to mobilize against the FPÖ in the recent September elections. The episode is even more shocking because, like a bolt from the blue, a world-famous Austrian economist—and initiator of a civil society initiative against the extreme right—now appears to be an Israel-hater and left-wing antisemite.
In the left-liberal Standard, we read that the primary aim of Schulmeister’s initiative was to prevent the right-wing FPÖ from joining the government in the next federal government. FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl was “quite obviously preparing to take power,” Schulmeister explained. Before the National Council elections on September 29, it was surely necessary to draw attention to the dangers of “blue” (FPÖ) government participation on a large scale. Yet what good is all this if the firefighters themselves now become antisemitic arsonists?
Born in 1947, Schulmeister was a researcher at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research from 1972 to 2012. On October 7, 2024, the anniversary of the Hamas pogroms in Israel, and during the Jewish High Holidays, he reposted a tweet featuring a picture of Joseph Goebbels—unfortunately, you read that correctly—with the outrageous insinuation that the State of Israel would use Goebbels’s “playbook.” He also retweeted a mocking picture of an Orthodox Jew at prayer with the caption “After we stole their land and killed their children, they are now resisting” (see here, here, here, and here).
Reactions to this antisemitic scandal were limited, and the left-liberal to left-leaning weekly newspaper Falter, for example, in which Schulmeister, as in so many other media, liked to create an echo, tried to play down the whole affair. Schulmeister is just an honorable left-liberal, anyway, and not an antisemite at all! He just messed up! “The poor boy in the dark forest,” was indeed my first thought when I read his later apologia.
But Schulmeister should have known better, not only as chairman of the Alliance for Democracy and Respect, which has warned against FPÖ participation in government and to which numerous personalities from Austria’s Catholic civil society belong, but also as a world-renowned academic. There is no excuse. He inflicted pain and fear on Jews at a time of existential need.
Schulmeister has been honored many times over for his decades of work. He received the 2018 Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book, as well as the 2020 Keynes Society Science Prize, and even, in 2013, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class. His writings have been published by ÖGB-Verlag and Picus-Verlag, among others, and his Wikipedia pages were accessed 7661 times last year. He is the pop star of left-liberal political economy in Austria. His scandal reflects upon the entire Austrian intellectual and cultural establishment.
The scandal also, and above all, reflects upon the left-liberal and left-leaning part of Austrian Catholicism. In his student days, Stephan Schulmeister was organized in the Catholic student association Österreichischer Cartellverband and expressed solidarity with the Allende government in Chile. In 1973, after Cardinal Henriquez celebrated a Te Deum for the dictator Pinochet, he resigned from the church, but he still likes to quote from Pope Francis’s encyclicals.
As the Austrian political scientist Anton Pelinka, who has apparently once again demonstrated his prophetic and seismological ability to predict tectonic shifts in Austrian society, said in his interview in the Furche about the toxic debates of the Second Republic, it is striking that Schulmeister’s fundamental conflict with his famous father, the journalist Otto Schulmeister, was not because of the latter’s role as a propaganda officer for the Third Reich, but because of his support for the Vietnam War. It seems symptomatic that the generation of 1968 and the subsequent “Chile generation” vehemently fought against the crimes of “imperialism” (with and without quotation marks), but hardly problematized the role of their fathers in the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the other terrorist apparatuses of the Nazi regime.
Among the supporters of the Hamas-affiliated GAZA list, which received more than 19,376 votes too many in the recent Austrian National Council elections, are unfortunately also some representatives of the left-wing Catholic segment.
Yet Christians are called to stand in solidarity with Israel in the Jewish state’s most difficult hour. In Acts 1:6–8, we read the last words of Jesus of Nazareth, which refer precisely to the reestablishment of Israel; and in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46b–55) Mary states the Most High will take care of his servant Israel.
Instead of swimming in the brown cesspool of social networks and sharing their content, an internationally recognized Austrian scientist should have informed himself about current events in the Middle East by consulting the items on the Middle East in the Think Tank Review of the freely accessible library of the Council of the European Union, or at the leading Middle East think tanks in Israel and the world. Instead, he has done great damage not only to the cause of Catholicism in Austria but also to the reputation of Austrian science and the reputation of his former employer, the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. And for the Jews of Austria, the pain of the antisemitic attack by a distinguished Austrian scientist remains.
These two scandals cast long, dark shadows over Austria, yet I still believe in the power of renewal through civil society—not least through the well-organized ecumenism of world religions in our country.
[On October 24, 2024, Walter Rosenkranz received 100 votes out of 183 deputies and was elected as the new Speaker of the Austrian Parliament. —ed.]
Arno Tausch is Visiting Professor of Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.