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PROPAGANDA

Austrian migrant ‘propaganda’ play cancelled after outrage

The first public performance of an Austrian play about migrants has been cancelled after a critic slammed it as "the stupidest propaganda".

Published: 31 March 2018 14:29 CEST
Austrian migrant 'propaganda' play cancelled after outrage
A scene from the play World in Flux when performed at Neue Mittal Schule in Zurndorf. Photo: Neue Mittal Schule
“Welt in Bewegung” (“World in Flux”) was commissioned by the Austrian interior ministry and is about two asylum-seekers: a Syrian called Nadim fleeing the civil war and Mojo “from Africa”, Austrian public radio reported.
 
“Economic migrant” Mojo is depicted as naively leaving his unnamed home country after seeing people smugglers' YouTube videos that suggested new arrivals in Europe get 6,000 euros ($7,400), a car and a house.
   
After his asylum request is rejected, Mojo falls into the clutches of Islamic State extremists. Police pick him up and he is deported. But there is a happy end as he starts a family and a business back in Africa.
   
Polite Nadim on the other hand is well-educated, can prove he is fleeing war, makes an effort to integrate into Austrian society and learns German. He is duly granted asylum.
   
Other characters include two racist older Austrian women, a quote-hungry journalist and a gullible “do-gooder” who offers yoga courses for refugees. Mojo is even into voodoo African magic.
   
The play has already been shown to between 7,000 and 10,000 children aged 11-17 in schools in Vienna and elsewhere, and the first public performance was due to take place at the capital's Weltmuseum in Friday night, the radio reports said.
 
But the venue's online programme showed the performance as having been “cancelled”. Radio station Oe1 reported that this was “in order have another look at the play and the background”.
   
The play's author Edmund Enge told Oe1 that the roughly 350 teachers who have seen the play gave “almost exclusively positive critique and reactions from all sides”.
   
However fellow public radio station FM4 quoted one unnamed teacher who had seen the play as saying it had “put in danger years of integration work”, as well as director Tina Leisch who called it “the stupidest propaganda”.
   
“What the play is about is what the ministry ordered. It's actually not a play, it's indoctrination supposed to result in thinking the right way,” said Gerhard Ruiss from the IG-Autoren writers' collective.
   
Interior ministry spokesman Alexander Marakovits responded by saying: “Things need to be simplified. Integration is a very complex issue… The message was broken down, and under professional supervision.”
 
 “This is nothing to do with propaganda or something. This is just about conveying information,” Marakovits told Oe1.
   
Herbert Kickl from the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), who has been interior minister since December, caused a stir in January by calling for asylum seekers to be “concentrated”.
   
But the play was commissioned by his predecessor from the centre-right People's Party, Wolfgang Sobotka.

JEWS

Shakespeare first to mark 500 years of Venice ghetto

The 500th anniversary of the creation of the Venice ghetto is to be marked by an unprecedented performance of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice", in the neighbourhood to which the city's Jews were confined for centuries, organisers said on Wednesday.

Published: 10 March 2016 08:05 CET
Shakespeare first to mark 500 years of Venice ghetto
Shakespeare's "Merchants of Venice" will be performed in the New Ghetto neighbourhood. Photo: Joanna Penn

The play, in which the best known character, Shylock, is a Venetian Jewish moneylender, is to be put on by the Compagnia de' Colombari and Ca' Foscari University.

It will be performed in the “New Ghetto” neighbourhood of the floating city in the last week of July as one of the highlights of anniversary events which kick off on March 29th, exactly 500 years after the world's first ghetto was proclaimed.

Given what the ghetto represented, the events marking the anniversary will have a bittersweet element, said Renzo Gattegna, President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities.

“As Jews, we do not have any nostalgia for the ghetto which was a symbol of the contempt and arrogance with which we were treated at the time,” he said.

The anniversary year will begin with a concert at the city's celebrated Fenice Opera on the anniversary and is also to be marked by a major exhibition “Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516-2016” which will run from June to November at the Doge's Palace.

The ghetto was created by a decree issued by the Venetian Republic's Senate ordering the city's Jews, then numbering around 700, to live within a designated area of the city which they were only allowed to leave in daylight hours.

“We are not going to be celebrating this anniversary in any sense of the word,” said Maria Cristina Gribaudi, head of the Venice museums foundation.

“It is more about sending a message of peace so that a new generation becomes aware of this history.

The ghetto model was copied elsewhere in Europe and the word itself, derived from the Venetian dialect, went on to be adopted in many languages as a synonym for discriminatory segregation on racial lines.

Originally made up of Jews of mainly German and Italian origin, the Venetian community grew to number more than 4,000 and became more diverse over the years thanks to the city's important role as a centre for trade.

The current community of around 500 people can also trace its roots back to Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal and the Middle East.

The segregation of Jews in Venice was abolished at the end of the 18th Century after the collapse of the Venetian Republic following its military defeat by Napoleon.

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