Students demand Leuger statue goes
THE AUSTRIAN Union of Jewish Students (JÖH) is campaigning to have a prominent monument to the antisemitic former mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, removed from the centre of the Austrian capital.
“In Vienna stands a centrally-located monument to a proponent of a murderous ideology (antisemitism) and one of Adolf Hitler’s most important role models,” JÖH’s petition contends.
“To celebrate one of the most significant Jew-haters in Viennese history with a metre-tall statue mocks [Lueger]’s victims more than it contributes to the process of coming to terms with the past”.
Their petition is close to reaching its goal of 800 signatories.
The Lueger monument has become a flashpoint in recent weeks in the context of protests and debates in Britain and the United States about memorials to slaveholders and colonialists.
On June 10, the base of the memorial was smeared with pink paint. Ten days later, the word Schande - shame - was graffitied in red on the stone pedestal.
Lueger, mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910, was a transformative and modernising figure in Viennese politics.
He brought the water, gas, and electricity supplies under municipal control, expanded the public transport network as well as exptending pension and healthcare coverage.
But Lueger was also a Catholic supremacist, greater German nationalist and political antisemite.
During the time he was active in city politics, antisemitism in Vienna was so pronounced that Theodor Herzl concluded Jews had no future in Europe, writing The Jewish State.
Resident in Vienna between 1907 and 1914, Hitler characterised Lueger in Mein Kampf as the German-speaking world’s “greatest mayor”.
Lueger’s statue, erected in 1926, stands on a square also named after the former mayor.
In 1934, part of the Ringstrasse adjacent to the University of Vienna was also named after Lueger.
It was recast as Universitätsring in 2012. At that time, city officials established a historical commission to investigate the remaining streets in Vienna named after antisemites and Nazi sympathisers.
The square was not renamed. In 2016, the city unveiled a plaque at the base of the Lueger monument contextualising the former mayor,
KarlLueger-Platz, Vienna outlining his achievements and political antisemitism.
Vienna’s culture secretary Veronica Kaup-Hasler appeared to close the door on JÖH’s call for the statue’s removal when she said June 20, “As to the question of whether to tear down or contextualise [the monument], the city has long stood for the latter option.”