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AUSTRIAN HISTORY

Hitler’s Austrian hometown still honours two Nazis, says association

An Austrian association Thursday demanded that Adolf Hitler's hometown of Braunau rename two streets commemorating Nazis and withdraw honourary citizenship from a composer linked to the dictator, denouncing an "insult to victims".

Published: 24 November 2023 07:45 CET
Hitler's Austrian hometown still honours two Nazis, says association
Protesters gather outside the house where Adolf Hitler was born during the anti-Nazi protest in Braunau Am Inn, Austria on April 18, 2015. (Photo by JOE KLAMAR / AFP)

“It is difficult to believe that in the birthplace of Hitler one of his associates is still an honorary citizen,” Willi Mernyi, president of the Austrian Mauthausen Committee, said in a statement.

He was referring to Josef Reiter (1862-1939), an “ardent national-socialist closely linked to the Fuhrer” who was also born in Braunau. Reiter and “another Nazi fanatical who hated Jews”, Franz Resl, have streets named after them, the association says. “It is an insult to victims that must end immediately,” the association said.

The mayor’s office in Braunau did not immediately respond when contacted by AFP.

The Mauthausen Committee was a Resistance network that began in the homonymous concentration camp in 1944 and works to maintain the memory of the crimes committed there.   

In 2016, the Austrian government bought the house in the small town on the German border where Hitler was born in 1889 and began transforming it into a police station to avoid it becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.

Austria is regularly criticised for not fully recognising its history. Earlier this year, a group of authors tried without success to have five of the country’s nine regional anthems re-written because they were the works of Nazi sympathisers.   

“Our anthem is our anthem and we are not going to let someone else change it,” Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the conservative president of Lower Austria, said at the time. Her region’s anthem was written by a member of the Nazi party who supported Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.   

In 2022, the city of Linz renamed several streets with problematic names, including one named after Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the car company, because of his Nazi past.

In total, 65,000 Austrian Jews were assassinated and 130,000 forced into exile.

The FPO extreme-right party, founded by former Nazis, has participated in three post-war governments and is leading in polls ahead of legislative elections to be held in 2024.

INTERVIEW: By becoming Austrian, I’ve reclaimed my family’s terrible story

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AUSTRIAN HISTORY

Austrian artist turns Hitler manifesto into cookbook

Long reviled as a manifesto of hate, Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" has become the raw ingredient for an art project reconstituting the toxic text into something more savoury: a cookbook.

Published: 25 April 2024 16:42 CEST
Austrian artist turns Hitler manifesto into cookbook

In a cafe in the Nazi leader’s native Austria, an artist is cutting up the book that laid the ideological foundations for Nazism — “My Struggle” — letter by letter and reforming them into recipes.

The sentences are mashed and re-served as instructions for making pizza, asparagus salad, tiramisu and egg dumplings — said to have been Hitler’s favourite dish.

Artist Andreas Joska-Sutanto has been working at it for eight years and has so far finished cutting up about a quarter of the book after almost 900 hours of painstaking work.

“I want to show… that you can turn something negative into something positive by deconstructing and rearranging it,” the 44-year-old graphic designer told AFP in the Viennese cafe, where he can be observed once a week working for a few hours.

– ‘Poisonous words’ –

First published in two tomes in 1925 and 1926, Hitler’s autobiographical “My Struggle” served as a manifesto for National Socialism and the ensuing wave of racial hatred, violence and anti-Semitism that engulfed Europe.

The book entered the public domain in 2016 when its copyright lapsed.

Once it became available, Joska-Sutanto came up with the idea of meticulously cutting out every single letter of the 800-page text — with an estimated total of 1.57 million letters — to rearrange them into cooking recipes.

He glues the pages onto adhesive film before dissecting them.

So far, his cookbook draft has 22 recipes.

The original text “no longer has any weight”, he said, displaying the remains of the gutted copy of the book.

“All the weight in the form of letters is gone.”

He left the Nazi dictator’s portrait in the book untouched, he said, to show that “without his poisonous words”, Hitler was reduced to staring at the void.

‘Irreverent’ artwork 

Reactions to the project have been mostly positive, Joska-Sutanto said, though he once apologised to a spectator who criticised his work as “extremely irreverent”.

At the cafe, owner Michael Westerkam, 33, praised the project — he said the raising of awareness of difficult topics such as a country’s historical past could be achieved “in many ways”.

Experts consulted by AFP were reluctant to speak on the record about the project. One, who asked not to be named, said there was a view that it was a “strange” initiative and of “limited” historical and artistic relevance.

Austria long cast itself as a victim after being annexed by the German Third Reich in 1938. It is only in the past three decades that it has begun to seriously examine its role in the Holocaust.

Joska-Sutanto estimates that it will take him 24 more years to finish his project.

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