By Micah Halpern
I've Been Thinking:
A statue of the man who served as mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 was defaced when the word SCHANDE was scrawled on the monument. SCHANDE means “shame on you” in German. Ironically, it also means “shame on you” in Yiddish.
Mayor Karl Lueger was a racist. He was the role model for Hitler. During his tenure as mayor, Vienna was one of the largest cities in the world with a population of over 2 million people.
Nowadays, debates about the appropriateness of statues is commonplace. In the United States statues erected to honor people now considered racist are regularly toppled and destroyed.
Lueger was a racist. He was a self-declared racist. Writers and philosophers use Lueger as the model of a racist. A racist cult of character has grown with Lueger at its center.
But in 1926, Vienna erected the statue to honor Karl Lueger. It represented Vienna as it was then and there is still an undertone of anti-Semitism in Vienna to this day.
The statue of Karl Lueger has not been taken down for a reason. In Vienna there are still many who have very positive feelings about the racism of Karl Lueger.
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