Tópico: In Vienna: Hitler and Hertzl vs Mozart, Popper, and Freud

[Adriano]

The Austrians I met with were ashamed of Hitler and Hertzl and justifiably proud of Mozart and Freud. There are more of the latter in every country today than in the dark days 100 years ago.


Top: Hitler and Hertzl, bottom: Mozart, Popper, and Freud

(VIENNA) - Everything is ordered in Vienna where I gave two talks on the popular resistance in Palestine. Rows after rows of colorful buildings all with 5-8 floors with housing complexes and offices. Public transportation and public housing in a socialist city that seems to function uniformly in many ways.

But of course this is a city that also generates 'out of the ordinary' characters. My thoughts wonder on the variety of those sons of Austria: Mozart, Hitler, Hertzl, Scwartzenneger. They were/are extraordinary individuals that went beyond other countrymen.

Perhaps each individual has those two sides, the angel and the devil whispering in our ears. Ordinary people live ordinary lives not having the courage to pursue the whispering dreams of their angels and/or devils. The exceptional individuals go for the maximum dreams- some of them in the most creative and positive ways while others in the most destructive.

We pass by the Landstmann Café where Theodore Hertzl sipped his coffee and planned to create a Jewish state. Most Viennese pass by hundreds of plazas and their names evoke no emotion and most indeed today do not know who is Theodore Hertzl or what he stood for.

Like that other Austrian Adolf Hitler, Hertzl built a reputation by playing to the most basic and banal of human emotions: fear, greed, hate and tribalism. Other Austrians built a career appealing to the most uplifting of human emotions: love, hope, generosity, humanism. We are always inspired by the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johan Strauss.

We are blessed by Austrian inventors like Josef Madersperger (invented the sewing machine in 1818) and Peter Mitterhofer (inventor of the typewriter). And I am hard pressed when asked to name decent politicians from anywhere, but the very few names that pop to mind certainly include the Austrian Bruno Kreisky, he was Chancellor from 1970-1983, and the first Jewish Austrian in that office who opened Europe to the PLO in the early 1970s, much to the chagrin of the Zionist movement.

There are controversial Austrians who come to mind and would receive mixed reviews: Kurt Waldheim, diplomat and politician, Secretary-General of the United Nations 1972-1982 and President of Austria 1986-1992; Martin Buber, and Jewish philosopher.

But as a scientist, I have always admired Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, born in Austria, who became British and developed some of the best descriptions of what constitute scientific methods. When I wear my geneticist, Gregor Mendel was there with me and when I put on my Zoologist hat, I cannot help but think of Konrad Lorenz. But back to Hertzl who contributed to 110 years of conflict and suffering for millions of people.

Hertzl wrote in his diaries that “Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies.” Instead of working to better life for all people, he chose to mimic ethnocentric chauvinistic nationalism in Europe and export it to another land whose people had nothing to do with what was happening in Europe.

Another famous Austrian Jew, father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, rejected Zionism because it has within it the same seeds of human frailty that he could easily comprehend.