No Jews allowed

11May09

Ha’aretz reports:

A hotel in the Austrian region of Tyrol that said it does not accept Jewish guests has caused shock in the local media and tourism industry, the daily Tiroler Tageszeitung reported Sunday.

A Vienna family of seven had had tried to make a reservation at the Haus Sonnenhof apartment hotel in the village of Serfaus, but the owner replied by e-mail that although the room was free, she did not want to take in Jewish guests because of “bad experiences” in the past.

Dear Kitty comments:

Austrian far Right politician Jörg Haider may be dead; unfortunately, his ideas do not seem to be so yet.

Here’s Eva Menasse writing in March:

An image from Villach‘s carnival, which Austria’s Carinthians are as proud of as the people of Cologne are of their own: Gerhard Dörfler, head of the provincial government, sucks at the dark brown fabric breasts of a joker dressed as a – let’s put it in Dörfler’s vocabulary – “negro mama.”

Since becoming the successor to Jörg Haider after the governor’s fatal accident in October, Dörfler has won attention beyond Carinthia’s borders for one thing, above all. In the presence of his friend, Afro-Cuban schmalz-pop singer Roberto Blanco, he told a joke about two breast-feeding mothers, one black, one white. The white baby lets go of its mother’s breast and says, “Mummy, I want cocoa, too.” Of course this ruffled feathers, especially in distant Vienna; Roberto Blanco affirmed that he didn’t feel insulted, and Dörfler said he wouldn’t ban humor. With his carnival appearance in a garbage man costume, whose orange is also the colour of his party – the right-wing splinter group BZÖ (Alliance for the Future of Austria) – he once again confirmed who’s setting the standards for taste in Austria’s southernmost state.

Last Sunday, this Dörfler, who has neither the looks nor the brains of his charismatic predecessor Haider, was elected to office with an overwhelming 45 percent. And with that, all opinion polls were rendered obsolete; no one had believed Dörfler could do it. Or rather: No one had thought the Carinthians capable of granting a governing majority to a dead man. Because that is what the BZÖ did, in a manner as simple as it was outrageous: they waged a dead man‘s campaign. It wasn’t just that Haider’s political executor campaigned as “BZÖ – Jörg Haider’s Slate”; it wasn’t just that their slogan all too clearly linked itself to Haider’s autocratic, paternalistic understanding of poltics, which the Vienna Falter aptly described as “agrarian socialism with a nationalist face.” And it wasn’t just that Haider’s widow Claudia fought hard in the election and almost made people forget that Haider’s significant other for the last six years was named Stefan Petzner. No, in order to make it clear to every last granny that one can still vote for “ol’ Jörgl”, BZÖ helpers turned out in Klagenfurt a few days before election day with boxes full of memorial candles. The sea of candles from Haider’s death on 11 October was simply reconstructed – the day “when, in Carinthia, the sun fell from the sky,” as Gerhard Dörfler put it back then.

Filed under: Austria, Fascism and antisemitism   |  6 Comments
Tags: anti-semitism, antisemitism, Austria, Haus Sonnenhof, racism, Serfaus, Tyrol