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Die Presse - Jan. 20, 2007 Was ich lese (What I Read)
WARREN ROSENZWEIG, DIRECTOR OF JEWISH THEATER OF AUSTRIA
My favorite authors are renegades. Allen Ginsberg, for example, who as my mentor in the rapture of poetry, music, and protest, shamelessly threw himself into my arms one lonely day, plastering his mushy wet lips smack against mine.
Alas, it stung – he did not love me for my poetry – but at least he had nothing to hide, willing as he was to challenge the canons of social repression in his life as he bravely did in his taboo-breaking literature (“America, when will you look at yourself through the grave?”).
A daring volume of non-fiction that breaks taboo in Austria is “Unser Wien” (Our Vienna) by Tina Walzer and Stephan Templ (Aufbau Verlag, 2001). This unsurprisingly neglected tour guide to aryanized Vienna is not endorsed by the Office of Tourism and is probably despised by the beneficiaries of Fascism, being a what’s what and who’s who in the destruction of Jewish life and culture in Vienna.
Following a critical, introductory essay that describes the general mechanisms of plunder used by average Austrians to profit from membership in the Third Reich, the volume includes a highly selective catalogue of some 500 examples of guileful thievery that generously names both victims and their willing dispossessors, while it focuses on architectural objects that have yet to be returned.
“Unser Wien” puts faces back on some of our many thousands of skeletons in the closet.
© 2007 Die Presse
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