Falter - March 14, 2007

FARCE WITH SWASTIKAS

In response to international requests, the complete English translation of an article that appeared in a political and cultural news weekly in Vienna during the week of the Tikun Olam World Congress and Festival of International Jewish Theater appears below with (bracketed) critical annotations by Warren Rosenzweig. (The editor of the publication rejected letters to the editor submitted by Warren Rosenzweig in respond to the article.) For the original (German) version, please click on "DEUTSCH".

FARCE WITH SWASTIKAS

For years, a bitter and partly grotesque conflict rages over an old theater hall on Nestroyplatz. Here, an American director wants to establish a Jewish theater. The owners of the “Aryanized” (1) building are against it. No problem? Not exactly.

By Wolfgang Kralicek

Once upon a time, there was a young New Yorker Jew who made his holidays at the home of an old Nazi. 25 years ago, Warren Rosenzweig was invited by friends to work for a month on a farm in Völkermarkt. At first, everything went perfectly well. The city slicker was exalted by the labors of farm life, the Carinthian family embraced the stranger as one of their own. But then the guest received a letter, which, for the first time, had revealed the young man’s family name. The old man stormed into the parlor where Rosenzweig was sitting for breakfast, pulled a bread knife on him, and shouted: “Jewish American pig, out of my house!” The young man didn’t wait to be told twice and took off, barefoot, in flight.

“That was my first experience with Austria,” says Warren Rosenzweig, today 48. If the story is true, then it explains a great deal. Following his adventurous stay in Carinthia, Rosenzweig traveled to Vienna where he immediately fell in love with the city. But, still today, it is a difficult relationship – one that is permanently marked by crisis. For the first time in his life, Rosenzweig reflected on his Jewishness and what it meant to him. “I was never confronted with this question in New York. It was a simple matter of fact.” Rosenzweig stayed in Vienna for a few years, founded the theater company “Strangers in Wien,” with immigrants from various countries, and married an Austrian woman. They moved together to New York and returned to Austria again in 1998, this time to Graz. Here Rosenzweig founded the Jewish Theater of Austria (JTA), an independent theater company with the goal of bringing back to life a tradition that had been buried since the time of the Nazis. “Through art, Jewish theater can provide a vicarious experience of Jewish life,” explains Rosenzweig. “One doesn’t take being Jewish for granted in Austria.”

The few, small productions and staged readings that the author, director, and puppet theater maker Rosenzweig has produced in Graz and Vienna in the past years with his barely, if at all, supported group have not made any big waves. JTA, which in the meantime has moved to Vienna, is still today more vision than reality.
[WR: The Jewish Theater of Austria independently produces new works every year and has received subventions and awards from many distinguished institutions. It is well established in Vienna, where it has been based since 2001. No Falter writer has ever attended a performance, nor has the publication previously covered any story relating to the Jewish Theater of Austria or its Nestroyhof Initiative.]
Rosenzweig is currently preparing the largest project of the Jewish Theater of Austria to date: from March 18 to 24, the Tikun Olam Festival will bring performances by Jewish artists from around the world to Vienna. The World Congress of Jewish Theater will also take place in Vienna for the first time.

But The Window is only an interim solution. For the past five years, Rosenzweig has had a completely different address in mind for his Jewish theater: Nestroyplatz 1 in the Second District. In late 2001, in the course of his research about the history of Jewish theater in Austria, he discovered the old theater in the Nestroyhof that was closed by the Nazis in 1938, following the “Anschluss” and used, ever since, for purposes other than it was intended, most recently as a supermarket. The stage is now walled up, the glass roof (!) is dirty and, naturally, the decades have not passed without leaving their marks. All the same, it has atmosphere, and it doesn’t require much fantasy to imagine what a beautiful theater hall it must have once been – and could be again. Like a Sleeping Beauty, the theater outlived both the war and the postwar period. Now, it is the last relic of a once flourishing theater scene in the Leopoldstadt. With some two dozen stages, the Praterstrasse was the Broadway of Vienna. The Carl-Theater that was once run by Nestroy was located more or less directly across the street from the Nestroyhof.

As Warren Rosenzweig encountered the theater in the Nestroyhof for the first time, he thought right away: “What an opportunity for Vienna! I need to talk to the Kulturstadtrat!” But the reaction of Andreas Mailath-Pokorny was one of reservation and also the owners of the house showed no interest. The Nestroyhof belongs to nine members of the Polsterer clan, a milling dynasty whose members were the owners of [the first daily newspaper,] the Kurier, and ran their own charter airline, among other things. The 47-year-old Martin Gabriel, whose mother was born a Polsterer, is one of the owners of the house. Also he hadn’t concerned himself about the Nestroyhof for years. In the late 80s, Gabriel was among the members of the legendary pub in the Schleifmuehlgasse and did business in Indonesia for years. Back in Vienna again, he took a tour of all the empty rooms in the Nestroyhof. Since then, he has also been struck by the virus. “Even today, it has a power that everyone feels right away. Anyone who sees the room for the first time is at first speechless for half a minute.”

Gabriel was able to convince the rest of his kin to abandon the search for a commercial tenant in favor of cultural use. “There were several different proposals. Surprisingly, my family liked my concept most.” Three years ago, they agreed on a contract that could be cancelled by either party at any time. Back then, Gabriel and Rosenzweig were still following a common line, both had a common interest. Yet the harmony did not last long. Concerning the cause of the discord, there are naturally two different versions. Rosenzweig says that Gabriel was suddenly unwilling to have any further discussion of a theater and absolutely not a Jewish theater. “All of a sudden, Rosenzweig wanted to determine what could or could not happen at the Nestroyhof,” counters Gabriel.

But Warren Rosenzweig did not give up. Instead, he began a campaign against Gabriel that bore, in part, some bizarre traits. Then there was the matter of the swastikas. A few days after Gabriel’s rejection, Rosenzweig discovered seven swastikas scrawled onto or scratched into the walls of the basement of the [theater in the] Nestroyhof. Rosenzweig read a message into this and called a press conference where he presented photographs of the swastikas and reported the case to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. No charge was raised against Gabriel. “I asked him how he came to the idea that I would go down into my own basement and paint swastikas on the walls,” says Martin Gabriel. “‘We wanted to test the law’ was his answer.”
[WR: The first press conference about the Nestroyhof took place in November 2004, five months after I discovered the swastikas. The subject of the conference concerned the history of the house and questions about its future. The swastikas were mentioned briefly, but no photographs of them were shown. No direct accusation was made concerning who had made them. Following the conference, Mr. Gabriel was interviewed by reporters who asked him if and when he would remove the symbols. Nearly six months later, the Jewish Theater of Austria called a second press conference in May 2005 under the title “Does Austria Need a Living Jewish Culture?”. (2) The Nestroyhof Initiative was discussed and photographs of the Aryanized Jewish theater were shown, including a few images of the then still extant swastikas. Austrian law formally prohibits the expression of National Socialist ideology. I submitted my complaint to the Public Prosecutor′s Office in April 2005. More than half a year later, following a brief police inquiry, Gabriel finally removed the swastikas.]

The high point of the bizarre affair came last July in the form of an article that appeared in the publication, Augustin, in which Gabriel is supposed to have accused Rosenzweig of painting the swastikas in the basement himself. As a result, Rosenzweig initiated a lawsuit against Gabriel, which is to be tried in court. In the media, the conflict surrounding the theater-less theater director Rosenzweig and the Nestroyhof has been conducted in large part, befittingly, in the homeless people’s newspaper, Augustin, in which the reports are clearly partial: the articles read as if Rosenzweig himself had dictated them.
[WR: Articles about the struggle surrounding the Nestroyhof have appeared in numerous publications in Austria and internationally. Augustin is a professional, independent, bi-weekly news source in Vienna with a sound reputation for serious coverage of social and cultural issues, in particular, relating to marginalized sectors of the population. It is sad to see Falter besmear a non-rival publication like Augustin.]
A few weeks ago, it was reported that a lawsuit against the Jewish Theater of Austria was intended to “gag” the company. In fact, there is now a lawsuit in which Martin Gabriel claims the right to own the Internet address www.nestroyhof.at. Rosenzweig had previously secured this and three similar URLs. Whoever types www.nestroyhof.at, www.nestroyhof.com, www.nestroyhof.net, or www.nestroyhof.org lands at the homepage of Rosenzweig’s Nestroyhof Initiative. Instead of a performance schedule, one finds here, among other things, facsimile documentation dating from the Nazi era.

Rosenzweig learned that the Nestroyhof had been “Aryanized.” The Polsterers acquired the house in December 1939. As was the fashion at the time, the previous owner, Anna Stein, never saw any part of the money associated with the sale of the building. She emigrated to New York, where she died shortly after the end of the war. Her heirs registered a claim for the Nestroyhof and the restitutional court hearing resulted in a settlement in 1951: the heirs renounced their right to repossess the property and the Polsterers paid a “cost” of 3500 Austrian schillings.
[WR: The “restitutional court hearing” took place in 1950. The property was confiscated from the same Polsterer brothers who had obtained it as Nazis and “restituted” to the heirs of Anna Stein. The 1951 “settlement” was a separate, later development. (See www.nestroyhof.at / "Document Gallery" for copies of original documentation).]

A ridiculous sum, but of course it was not the price that was received by the heirs. Rather, it was a mere contribution towards the legal costs involved.
[WR: The source of this claim is apparently Martin Gabriel. There is no evidence to substantiate its validity.]
Without question: the restitution of “Aryanized” property commonly meant that the rightful owners were simply defrauded a second time [after the war]. How bad this was in the case of the Nestroyhof is hard to say based on current knowledge. Martin Gabriel assures that his forbears were “no little pigs.” To substantiate this assessment scientifically, he has commissioned an expert report in which the “Aryanization” and restitution of the Nestroyhof will be fully explained by historians.
[WR: Documents clearly reveal that, during the Nazi era, the Polsterer brothers were particularly active in the pursuit of stolen Jewish properties and that the Nestroyhof is not the only such property that the family has managed to retain possession of even until today. (For more information and to examine some of the existing documentation, see www.nestroyhof.at.)]

But even in the event that the results of the inquiry should come out less than flattering for the Polsterer family, this will have no actual bearing on the questions at hand. “The one thing has nothing to do with the other,” says director Robert Quitta, who recently presented his production “Freud analysiert sich” at the Nestroyhof. “The theater was closed by the Nazis and not by the Polsterers.” And the fact is that now, nearly seventy years after its closure by the Nazis, the theater in the Nestroyhof is now being used again. Since two years, there have been frequent performances, readings, and exhibitions, which have time and again been disrupted through actions of Warren Rosenzweig. Before the premiere of the Jelinek play “Stecken, Stab und Stangl,” an agitprop mini-drama was performed in the auditorium, in which an actress, costumed as a concentration camp prisoner, shouted: “I condemn the Polsterer family of thieves!” At the opening of a video exhibit of Francesca Habsburg’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary at the Nestroyhof, Rosenzweig distributed Jewish stars and Hitler mustaches to the visitors.

“No one has a spiritual right to something, just because he comes from a Jewish corner”, says director Frederic Lion (Theater Transit), who presented last year an evening of mini-dramas by Antonio Fian (“Abendfuellend”) and directed a reading series with texts by Jewish writers in the Nestroyhof. “I’m also Jewish and I think there is something far more Jewish about a [Gentile] writer like Fian than an Israeli author. In the end, ‘Jewish theater’ is just a marketing tool that I can’t relate to. Practically every theater is a Jewish theater.” Together with Quitta and Gabriel, Lion founded the non-profit entity, Theater im Nestroyhof, for which, in a letter to the editor in Augustin, he was disparaged by Rosenzweig as a “sidekick who identifies himself as a ‘Jewish artist’.”
[WR: The letter in Augustin was in response to a previous report that had attributed slanderous remarks to Gabriel and his associate: “[He] accuses Rosenzweig of having painted the swastikas himself. There is an artist who stands behind Martin Gabriel in this conflict […] who describes himself as a Jewish artist [and] accuses Rosenzweig of ‘inverse Fascism’.” (3) My letter to Augustin was an unambiguous response to slander that included the line: “[I am] troubled by a few statements that were contributed by Polsterer family member Martin Gabriel and a sidekick who identifies himself as a ‘Jewish artist’.” (4) (The complete texts of the Augustin articles are available online, in English and German, at www.jta.at, Press, Augustin, July 1 and Sept. 1, 2006).]

It is fairly certain that the Nestroyhof will now continue to be used as a theater in the future. The agreement [between Gabriel and his family] will soon be turned into a long-term contract, after which Gabriel plans to apply himself seriously to the project and will also seek support from the City of Vienna. He sees a “flexible concept” for the theater whereby also gastronomy will again play a role. Warren Rosenzweig has a different idea: “The Polsterer family should sell the building to the Jewish Community.”

[WR: As Artistic Director of the Jewish Theater of Austria, I began working for the rescue, protection, and reestablishment of the Jewish theater in the Nestroyhof in 2001 and am responsible for bringing its cultural heritage as an Aryanized Jewish theater to light. The Jewish Theater of Austria has successfully raised public consciousness in Austria and abroad concerning the history of the building and the question of its future. This is well documented. The writer of the article above does not even once refer directly to the fact that until it was expropriated by the Nazis, the theater in the Nestroyhof, located in the center of the densest Jewish quarter of Vienna until 1938, was a Jewish theater and the permanent home of the Jüdische Künstlerspiele from 1927 to 1938. Curiously, the Falter writer has omitted perhaps the most significant detail concerning the Nestroyhof discussion and the international attention it has generated.]

Copyright © 2007 Falter
(trans. JTA)

(1) i.e., confiscated by the Nazis
(2) Braucht Österreich eine lebende jüdische Kultur?
(3) See www.jta.at / “Press” / Augustin, July 1, 2006 (“When a Swastika Still Has its Hooks”)
(4) See www.jta.at / “Press” / Augustin, Sept. 1, 2006 (“The Swastika-Controversy”)