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Outrage in Austria over ninth woman is murdered in 2021

The ninth killing of a woman in Austria this year sparked outrage and promises of action from the government on Friday, with the latest victim a 35-year-old mother of two.

Published: 1 May 2021 08:42 CEST

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The city hall in Vienna with two screens projecting hygiene measures to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic on April 12, 2021. JOE KLAMAR / AFP

The woman died after being shot late on Thursday in a northern district of the capital Vienna, prompting the interior ministry to announce a summit next week to discuss ways of addressing the spate of killings of women by their ex-partners.

Police confirmed to AFP that a 42-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of committing the murder with a handgun.

According to Austrian media, the suspect in the latest murder is a man who hit headlines in 2018 when a Green politician Sigrid Maurer accused him of sending her obscene Facebook messages.

Maurer said she had gone public with the case in order to draw attention to the problem of online harassment.

The man denied writing the messages, saying they had been written by someone else from a computer used by customers at the bar he runs and sued Maurer for defamation.

A court ruling backed him, saying that Maurer should have taken more care to establish whether he really did write the messages.

But the man later dropped the complaint, with Maurer being exonerated.

The case drew much attention in Austria with the initial decision against Maurer being condemned by feminist activists and others.

READ ALSO: Man held after homemade bomb leaves his ex-wife with serious burns

On Friday, Maurer said that “the fact that it seems the culprit was the bar owner is personally shocking to me”.

Women’s Minister Susanne Raab was one of many other politicians to react to Thursday’s “shocking murder”, saying she was “profoundly saddened”.

Green Transport Minister Leonore Gewessler was visibly moved as she called for more action on the issue at a press conference.

Austrian media have been raising the alarm over high levels of femicide, with 31 killings of women in 2020.

One of the country’s most important news weeklies, Profil, devoted an issue to the subject recently and cited Eurostat figures showing that Austria was the only country in which more women than men were victims of violent crime.

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Could be wurst: Vienna sausage stands push for UN recognition

The owners of 15 stands in the Austrian capital have formed a lobbying group and applied last week to have the “Vienna sausage stand culture” inscribed as intangible cultural heritage by the UN agency.

“We want to create a kind of quality seal for Vienna sausage stands,” said 36-year-old Patrick Tondl, one of the association’s founders whose family owns Leo’s Wuerstelstand — Vienna’s oldest operating sausage stand.

“At the sausage stand, everyone is the same… No matter if you’re a top banker who earns hundreds of thousands of euros or if you have to scrape together the last euros to buy a sausage… You meet here, you can talk to everyone,” he adds.

High inflation driving consumers looking for affordable meals, plus a new wave of vendors with updated flavours, have helped keep the stands busy.

Tondl’s great-grandfather started their business in the late 1920s, pulling a cart behind him and selling sausages at night.

The family’s customers have included former chancellor Bruno Kreisky, recalls Vera Tondl, 67, who runs the shop together with her son Patrick.

Leo’s is one of about 180 sausage stands in Vienna today, out of a total of about 300 food stands, selling fast food at fixed locations and open until the early hours, according to the city’s economic chamber.

Whereas the number of stands has remained similar over the last decade, more than a third have changed from selling sausages to kebabs, pizza and noodles, a spokesman for the chamber told AFP.

‘Momentum’

But sausage stands have seen a “mini boom” in customer numbers recently, according to Patrick Tondl.

Many have been drawn back to the stands by high inflation, where a meal can be had for less than 10 euros ($11) with lower overheads than restaurants.

New stand operators have also brought a “bit of momentum”, said Tondl, bringing the likes of organic vegetarian sausages with kimchi.

Tourists are already drawn in droves.

“When you come to Austria, it’s what you want to try,” 28-year-old Australian tourist Sam Bowden told AFP.

The cultural legacy of Vienna’s sausages is far-reaching, including the use of the term “wiener” for sausages in the United States, which is believed to have derived from the German name for Vienna, Wien.

However Sebastian Hackenschmidt, who has published a photo book on the stands, said the legacy of the “Vienna phenomena” is more complex.

He says that for many in multicultural Vienna, the sausage stands hold little appeal — equally for the growing number of vegetarians — and their universal appeal is something of a “myth”.

“Vienna is a city in great flux… With the influx of people, cultural customs are also changing,” Hackenschmidt told AFP.

Some 40 percent of Vienna’s two million inhabitants were born outside the country, where the anti-immigrant far-right looks set to top September national polls for the first time.

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