An Austrian ex-mayor who said journalists and Jews should be hanged will not stand trial for hate speech, prosecutors said. A spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office of Krems an der Donau, a municipality located 35 miles east of Vienna, said that Karl Simlinger, a former mayor of the village of Gfohl, will not be…
Austrian actor Maximilian Schell, who won an Academy Award for his role as a German defence attorney in the 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg”, has died aged 83. The Vienna-born actor died overnight at a clinic in Innsbruck as the result of a “sudden and serious illness”, his agent, Patricia Baumbauer, told the Austria Press…
I discovered “Girls” when it was well into the second season. I had lived in New York for several months to attend the Columbia University School of Journalism. The initial excitement of being in the City That Never Sleeps had waned. I had gotten used to discovering that almost every other person I met was…
Exactly 75 years ago, between November 7 and 13, 1938, a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms swept across Germany and Austria. This year, a group of German historians chose to commemorate the events, which marked a turning point in the Nazi’s persecution of Jews, using an unconventional medium: Twitter. On October 28, the five historians who…
Theodore Bikel, who fled the Nazi occupation of his native Vienna for prestate Israel, will be honored by the Austrian government on the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. On Thursday, Bikel, 89, will accept the country’s highest honor in the arts before giving an hourlong concert of mainly Yiddish songs interspersed with a few numbers in…
Austrian Jews have praised a Viennese former museum director who resigned because of board members’ ties to an art collection which belonged to a pro-Nazi film director. “The resignation of the director of the Leopold Museum, Tobi G. Natter, is a bold step,” the Jewish Community of Vienna, or IKG, wrote in a statement. Natter…
It is hard to imagine finding a line from the Talmud at the post-election celebration of Austria’s populist, far-right Freedom Party. The scene, in a tent on the glittering Ringstrasse right next to Vienna’s City Hall, was smoke-filled and dimly lit. The overwhelmingly male crowd sat at long rows of wooden tables and benches, drinking…
The family of a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna in 1938 has filed a claim for the return of one of the country’s national treasures. The heirs of Erich Lederer, wealthy Austrian Jews who were important patrons of artist Gustav Klimt, have asked for the restitution of Klimt’s 1902 creation “Beethoven Frieze.” The claims were…
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