Memorial Union
Date: 14:30, 6 June 2023
Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen, Taili Hardiman
Transcript:
Skye Doney: First, I would say there are a few books for sale. Twenty bucks paperback.
Daniel Aschheim: Bargain price.
Doney: Bargain price. So thank you all for coming on a Friday. A lovely Friday two weeks after the semester has ended. We appreciate you making the time. My name’s Skye. I’m the director of the Mosse Program here at UW Madison and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And it’s my pleasure today to introduce Dr. Daniel Aschheim, who currently serves in Chicago as deputy consul general at the consulate general of Israel to the Midwest. He was appointed to this post in September of 2020, where he assumed the role as consul for public diplomacy, serving as the spokesperson to the consulate’s nine-state Midwestern region. In this role he oversees economic, cultural, media, press, academic, interfaith, and community outreach initiatives. So he must speak to many different audiences. And again, this is for nine states. Some of the big states.
He was previously posted to Dakar, Senegal. And he has interned in the Knesset and at the British Embassy in Israel. Dr. Aschheim holds a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in European studies. So naturally Israel has sent him to Chicago and to Senegal, following the internal logic of nation-states. And last year, with the University of New Orleans Press, again, there are copies back there, he published Kreisky, Israel and Jewish Identity, which is the topic of our talk today. This book has been widely praised, including recently by Robert Philpot in the Times of Israel. Philpot calls the book “fascinating and scrupulously balanced in how Aschheim retraces Kreisky’s biography.” He notes that Aschheim’s study should convince historians to give Kreisky a second look, including at the contradictions and the deviations of Kreisky’s attitude toward Israel and toward European politics. And that second look is what we get this afternoon. Dr. Aschheim.
00:02:06
Aschheim: Thank you very much, Skye, for this invitation. Shalom. And I always, when I start, I never know. People tell me when it’s a cold day it’s bad because people never leave the house. And when it’s a hot day, people don’t want to get in because they want to be outside. So I never know if it’s good or bad to be on a good weather day. But I really thank you for coming. It’s not taken for granted to come and listen about something historical. I’ll try my best to make it, also show you why it’s relevant also for today. It’s not only a historical book about historical history. History is important not only about the past, but also for the future.
So, before I even start, Bruno Kreisky, just raise your hand if that name rings a bell besides hearing it today in the presentation. Who has heard the name before this presentation? Raise your hand. Don’t be shy. You heard? In what context?
?: I think it was at a lecture about like after World War Something. But not like—
Aschheim: World War Two.
?: I think it was Germany related. it was a lecture about Germany. I don’t really—
00:03:07
Aschheim: Okay, so we have four hands. And this is a room of historians in the university in the history department, in the department of history. And yet we have four hands here. I’ve done this presentation in Washington, DC in an audience of 120 people. There were five hands risen, and this was in the Austrian embassy. And why is this important? Many people ask me why at all Kreisky, how the hell did you get to write about Bruno Kreisky? So I’ll tell you the story.
I was sitting in the Hebrew University the first year of my master’s studies. And one of the courses, we had an intensive course, was Professor Günter Bischof, an Austrian-American professor of Cold War history. Studied Cold War history, heard about what happened. And one of the issues we discussed was terrorism in Europe during the 1970s. Unfortunately, we have enough terrorism of our own in Israel, so we don’t have a lot of place in our mind for other world’s terror. But it happened to be that there were many terror incidents during the 1970s by a few radical groups from different directions taking place.
And one of them that I was stopped by and was very curious to read more about were things taking place in Vienna in the middle of Europe during those days. I went to Google it and then I saw one of the issues that took place there, the chancellor of that state, the head of state, was a person called Bruno Kreisky. I’d never heard the name before, ever. And the German one we know, the French one. We know many of the big, big names. This wasn’t familiar. And I Googled and I saw he’s from a Jewish origin. And I said to myself, how is this possible that I don’t know, that someone could consider me, myself educated. My parents said I’m not educated. (laughter) But this is the idea, the concept. Never heard the name of a Jewish head of state. Not in prehistory, but in the 1970s, who was head of state, elected three times in a row between 1970 and 1983. In a country which was one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe in days that it’s not only postwar. We are talking about years. It’s not the descendants of Nazis or neo-Nazis. We’re still talking about living Nazis in the 1970s who are the voters in this country. And a Jew was elected and we don’t know anything about him. He was the highest position ranked of a Jew outside of Israel in modern history.
And I read more and I Googled more. And I saw barely anything was written in Hebrew, a bit of conflict, 00:05:34 and I went home to my parents and asked them, “Have you heard of Bruno Kreisky?”
They said, “Of course.” He was the most hated person during the 1970s in Israel. No doubt about that. He was one of the most loved, and still loved persons in Austria until today. And there’s a whole lot of issues about him. But not much was written. In German, much more. But then I decided to drill into his issue with his Jewish identity, his relationship to Israel, to the Middle East conflict, and who he was. I’ll just say that he was the first European leader to talk, or the first western leader, to talk about the two-state solution. The first western leader to acknowledge the PLO as official representation of the Palestinian people. The first European leader to give in to terrorism. And yet when you get into Wikipedia about Bruno Kreisky, none of that is mentioned. And when you get into the Wikipedia of the two-state solution, he is not even there.
And I decided that this demands much more, much more inquiry. And I’ll just show you a two-minute clip, and we’ll start from there.
[shows following video, starting from 4:34 until the end 6:55.]
So Bruno Kreisky—[another video automatically starts to play]
Aschheim: No, that’s not it, Bruno Kreisky. (laughter) Bruno Kreisky was the Jewish chancellor. But he considered himself officially to be the non-Zionist Jewish chancellor of Austria. So he himself never denied his Jewish roots. And he was a proud, acculturated Jew, which is different from an assimilated Jew, which is very similar but not exactly the same. An acculturated Jew coming from the broader Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire, his family’s rooted there. He was a firm Austrian patriot who happened to be against the idea of the Jewish collective state. As he said himself, what does a Jew from Yemen have to do with someone educated like me from the West, from the bourgeois, from these kind of people? Like what do the people from Eastern Europe, the Ostjude have to do with me? Okay, they are from Jewish background, but they don’t need to be sitting together. That’s on the one hand.
On the other hand, what I try to prove that a lot of the actions that he actually did were the opposite. So on the one hand, he says this crusader state, the Jews, the Israelis, they are acting like the Nazis, and really speaking in very, very harsh and de-legitimizing terminology. On the other hand, which I’m going to explain in a moment, a lot of his actions contradicted what he said. And just one needs to go back and understand. Kreisky lost twenty-three of his family members, who were murdered in the Holocaust by the Germans. Yet he, before the war started, he fled to Sweden where he stayed. And that’s where he was exiled during the war. He was before that a member of the Socialist International Party and member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He was a patriot of Austria and a patriot for socialism. And he left. Came back from Sweden to Austria. And very quickly came back as if nothing happened. Which is something that shaped him. Try and imagine the situation. The person is forced to leave his country. Twenty-three of his family members were murdered. He goes out. And after a few years of exile comes back and gets a bit of antisemitism, he claims, in his memoir. But goes back to the party, goes back to the diplomatic world. Very quickly becomes an important figure in the Austrian ministry. Becomes minister of foreign affairs. And then chancellor. And all of this in a very antisemitic Austria where barely Jews came back to.
And these days, Austria saw itself as what is considered to be the victims’ doctrine. So whereas Germany was forced to really think about its history and its role, Schuld, we are schuldig, we are responsible, we need to compensate. If it’s genuine or not, that’s a different conversation. But that’s what happened in general.
At the same time, Austria built an interesting narrative of its own claiming we the Austrians were the first victims of the Nazis. Meaning the Germans came in, invaded Austria. Brackets, forgetting the picture of the flowers sent, and acknowledging and coming and embracing in Austria, Hitler coming. From Austria that is forgotten. Continuing, we were the victims. Therefore, we have zero responsibility now to the Jews. What’s happened, it’s a tragedy, but not—and this doctrine ran throughout history. And when Kreisky was chancellor, not only did he not try to change it; he was one of the biggest supporters of this doctrine.
And he really had this interesting thing that brought people to fight. He fought with Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005). We know the name, the Nazi hunter. They were the biggest, he hated him and he hated him so much, so deeply. They had issues over a minister, a Nazi minister. Yes.
?: Museum in Vienna, Wiesenthal was where—
Aschheim: Oh, that’s where you saw it. Exactly. So these are two Jewish men, prominent men, with deep roots to what they believe. And Wiesenthal, he said, was a member of the opponents in the political party. And Kreisky said he’s trying to screw my career because of that. And he started accusing him that he was a Nazi collaborator. Wiesenthal. And he did resort to lawsuits. It was like the big gossip: the two Jews fighting with each other. But this happened because Kreisky really embraced former Nazis that everyone knew were SS members. And yet he said, oh, go away. This is true, we need to embrace them, what do you want to do.
Now, people ask always why. I think the answer’s two. One, he was a good politician and he understood on Realpolitik, what can you do? If you want to be elected in Austria coming with a kippa and saying אנחנו אוהבים את ישראל and we love Israel would not be the best political move in Austria in 1973. In the other areas that he really needed to get Nazi voters. And he knew that in order to do so, he needed to hide the way that people perceive a Jewish identity. And Israel was also there to bash because you would not imagine a European leader in 1970 saying these kind of claims about Israel if they were not being Jewish. That’s why.
On the other hand, on the general level, I truly believe that he believed that this is the right thing to do. Because he also, I’ll give you a small story that he had before the war. There was a short period of time, many people don’t know about it, when there was a dictatorship in Austria, called the [Engelbert] Dollfuß (1892-1934) dictatorship. Dollfuß dictatorship. Which was a fascist dictatorship and not a Nazi one. And he was opposing it, Kreisky, as a young guy. And he sat in jail with a Nazi who opposed that dictatorship. And they sat in the same cell together. And became cellmates. Like sitting together in conversations and building trust with each other. And they really formed a relationship when later on Kreisky said that he helped him. He met him after. And this made his vision that there are good Nazis and there are bad Nazis. There are small Nazis and large Nazis. And this went with him, the story about this cellmate the Nazi throughout his career.
So when I’m saying he really believed in it, he never legitimized the Nazis. He said they were horrible and horrific and the tragedy, of course. On the other hand, he said it was done by them. Not all were the same bad. And more than that, he also said okay, what do you want to do? So all the Austrians should, if you’re saying everyone is responsible, then everyone should sit in jail and there’s no country? We need to go on. Leben must weiter gehen. Life needs to go on. And also, a lot of people say, how could they think that? We need to be also honest. It’s not a popular thing. But the United States built its resistance to the Cold War by bringing in Nazi scientists to the United States. Because they were useful. So a lot of what we are seeing today in America was built by them. So he said, what are we supposed to do with the country? So what happened, happened. Was war war. And now we need to face the future. So this was kind of his dual thing.
Now coming to Israel, his relationship, to say the least, was tense. I think he fought with every single Israeli leader possible, besides the ultra, ultra left. But when I say fighting, these are emotional fights. Fighting that he called Menachem Begin (1913-1992) “this petty Polish lawyer that has no clue what he’s talking about.” To Golda Meir (1898-1978), he says she’s a crazy, Golda Meir calls him a self-hating Jew. And Begin tells whatever, what do we need this guy who hates his people, hates everything. And then Shimon Peres (1923-2016), he fought with Peres, saying he doesn’t know. Everything, every single thing that you can imagine was talked about there. Anything connected to a Jewish identity and the Jews from America accused him of something, he exploded and got so crazy.
00:17:17
And on the other hand, when he spoke to the biggest dictators in the Arab world, really, people who murdered their people Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) the father, or Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011), you sit and you hear how he portrays them, it’s amazing. He’d say, we sat, we had intellectual conversation. And it was fascinating. And we spoke about classical music and cultural figures from the—you’re thinking he’s speaking with Hegel or with Nietzsche. And now he’s sitting with Gaddafi and Assad the father. So then Peres, this hater, this killer and the Nazis, every time this started. And an anecdote, I interviewed in his 92nd birthday, his apartment in Tel Aviv, Uri Avnery (1923-2018). Uri Avnery was one of the most prominent Israeli leftwing activists and journalists who was the first person to introduce Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) to Kreisky. He was a very close friend of Kreisky. And Kreisky really believed and trusted him. And he was, he built a new statesman in Israel and he was a really prominent person. But he was accused by most of the mainstream Israelis to be a dreamer, a naive person, to say the least. Good but naïve, that was the concept. That he doesn’t understand our world.
And when I met him, I asked him to tell me how do you explain this contradiction when you read what he says about Israeli leaders and how he portrays in a beautiful, majestic, Orientalist way, the Arab leaders? So he tells me, “I think Kreisky was naive.”
And I said, if Uri Avnery says about Kreisky that he’s naive, he must be ultra, ultra naive. But this is about the Arab world.
Coming back to the Jewish issue, I said it’s complicated. Until now, it’s not complicated. Until now, it seems like it’s very clear. He’s not part of what’s called the Zionist entity. On the other hand, during the 1970s, when the Soviet Jews did the campaign “Let My People Go,” leave from the Soviet Union to freedom, many countries said yes, it’s very important. There were demonstrations in America, let my people go. Natan Sharansky and all of that.
And Israel’s closest ally in Europe in those days was Holland. And Holland with the Israeli embassy, too. The Soviet Union was based in Holland. And Holland said yes, how important it is, blah, blah, blah. But no one did anything. The only person who allowed the Jewish immigration, he built this policy of neutrality. So Kreisky, bringing Austria, not an important country during those days, the central of world attention a) because of his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Which also brought problems to Austria. But b) he built the neutrality theory that Austria should be neutral between the west and the east. And therefore it brought a lot of manipulations and maneuvers he could do because of that. So he was the only country allowing Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union to come through his country on the way to Israel operated by the Jewish agency. We have two Jewish agencies sitting in the room, plus one who hires some. And they were running this place called the Schönau Castle. And in this place we have tens of thousands a week of Jewish Soviet Jews coming on their way to Israel.
Kreisky didn’t like the fact that the Jewish Agency was running it and he called it like an enclave, like an ex-territory, Mossad agents. He started inventing people with guns that were occupying the world there. He didn’t like it but he let it happen. And hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews came from the Schönau Castle next to Vienna on the way to Israel.
Now, the Arab countries did not like that fact. Because for them, they made a very clear equation. Every Jew coming to Israel making Aliyah is another part of the demographic war of Israel against the Arab world. Every young immigrant coming is another soldier in the Israeli Army. And therefore, he needs to stop that. There were threats of terrorism on Austria. There were terrorist incidents there which brought criticism to Kreisky from the Austrians, saying why the hell do we need this? Kreisky got his votes not because of these international policies, but he was very, very innovative in socialist ideas. He brought free higher education to the Austrians until today. He bought a lot of unique stuff, which is still, no one competes with today. And that’s why he was voted.
So one day at the end of September 1973, a train with Soviet Jews from the Czech border on the way to Austria, a group of three Palestinian terrorists based in Syria, it’s an organization called as-Sa’iqa this is their only terrorist activity and then they went bankrupt, I don’t know what happened, based with the Syrian government, hijacked the train with these Jewish emigrants and said to Kreisky the following. Number one, Israel needs to release Palestinian terrorists from prisoners, whatever way they called it. Two, we want to go free after we do this incident back to Libya. And three, you need to close the Schönau camp, the immigration camp.
Now in brackets, there’s a story I also quote in the book. I don’t know, I can’t prove it. There’s a claim that the Arab ambassadors of Arab countries came to mitigate and do negotiations between the terrorists and Kreisky. And they proposed Kreisky to say to close the camp before Kreisky—so no, sorry. Kreisky told the Arab ambassadors, tell the terrorists to ask to close the camp. Because he hated the camp. But maybe it’s gossip, maybe it’s true. Who knows, we’ll keep the regular version as if they asked that.
Kreisky, we need to remember, this is one year exactly after the Munich incident in 1972 when the Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. And the German army, the German police screwed up completely. And what needed to be done there was he wanted Kreisky himself said I’ve been doing everything to avoid bloodshed, I don’t want anyone dead in this operation. What he did? The Palestinian terrorists from Israeli were now released. He let them go, the terrorists. And he decided to close the Schönau camp. This was the first time in western history, in modern history, of giving in to terrorist demands. The American administration was a huge outcry. Golda Meir, then Israeli prime minister, was situated in the conference in Strasbourg gets—sorry?
Greg Steinberger: Was it Nixon? Who was president?
00:23:55
Aschheim: This was Nixon, yeah. Coming directly from Strasbourg to Vienna to the office of the chancellor. Gets in completely angry. You can see the picture. You know this one in the book. See this? This is that famous meeting. You can see the beautiful faces there showing a lot of happiness. You can see it on the book cover. And she gets in. She says whatever she says. He says whatever he says. She gets out. There are about 30 Israeli journalists standing outside, coming from Israel to see what’s happening and report it. They ask her, “Golda, how was the meeting?”
And she answers one line only. She says, “Even a glass of water he didn’t offer me.” And that was it. (laughter) All the headlines you can open in the archives, they open, all the newspapers in Israel, Davar, Haaretz, “Golda: even a glass of water he didn’t offer me.”
And these were the biggest headlines. And she was so angry. Just to say in brackets, I interviewed, in the book I have about 30 interviews I did with people who were close to him, and archival material that wasn’t open. And one of the interviews that I did was with Margit Schmidt, who was a close personal assistant of Kreisky. And she said to the last day before he died, he never will forgive Golda for that sentence. Because not only did he offer her to go and have a shower before she came, she herself, Margit Schmidt baked the cake and gave the coffee for that meeting. (laughter) So fake news didn’t start with Twitter, it was much before. It doesn’t matter. That’s the narrative. And when you ask Israelis, if you ask your parents, what do you remember about, what do you remember about Kreisky, they’ll say, “Something with water. He didn’t give her water.” Every person I speak to in Israel who remembers something about him says that even a glass of water he didn’t give me. So, this just shows you. But this is not, this is just the beginning of the story.
She goes back to Israel. It’s the week, before the weekend. She sits in a cabinet meeting with the Israeli security forces. Israeli security forces sit there. And they start reporting the Egyptians are going in an unusual way in the Suez Canal. On the north, the Syrians are going from a different direction. And Golda Meir says, “Yes, but Kreisky’s a self-hating Jew. And do you know what Kreisky did to me? And Kreisky closed the camp and Kreisky—” They’re going, okay. One of the ministers of this cabinet meeting reports, saying, you would think in that meeting that Israel has a front of the Danube River, and not of the Suez Canal. (laughter) The only thing Golda was speaking about was Kreisky, Kreisky, Kreisky.
Now, two days after that, the Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat (1918-1981) sends his special envoy, Ismail Fahmi (1922-1997), the ministry of tourism, to thank Kreisky for his brilliant decision to close the camp. And tells him in that meeting, he sits in this meeting, there’s Fahmi, the Egyptian, Kreisky, and a very close advisor of Kreisky, an ambassador. Those are the only three. So there are different versions of what happened in that incident. But he said to him, the Egyptian said, “There will be war with Israel very, very soon.”
Now, Kreisky claims that he said there will be war like as an idea. The ambassador said, he said there will be war imminently. And Kreisky was so angry at Golda Meir for what he did to her because of that sentence, and he’s shamed her, that he didn’t report it to the Israelis, that incident, that meeting. But, there’s a story I found out in the book which is not published before. That during, that was a weekend. This was before Yom Kippur, which is an important Jewish holiday. And the newspaper’s the most important thing that weekend, people don’t have anything to do, so they sit and they read the newspapers. And Yesha‘yahu Ben Porat was a newspaper reporter from Yedioth Ahronoth a very senior one. Was sent to Vienna before this issue with the castle. It was already scheduled in advance to come interview for the long newspaper. And he sits and interviews. And I heard this from a very close woman to Kreisky, that in this interview, Kreisky tells the reporter about what he’d heard about the imminent war. But when I checked the newspaper, I saw the interview with Kreisky, and I don’t see it published. So how is that possible? So she tells me that Yesha‘yahu Ben Porat, who was also close to her, she heard it from him directly, he heard it from Kreisky. He went to the editor of the newspaper, Eitan Haber and asked, and told him about that. In those days you couldn’t just report things that you needed, there was censorship. He went to his sources in the intelligence world and they told him, in the army, we don’t want to scare the people. There’s nothing happening. Do not publish. And it was not published.
Now, three years ago, I phoned Eitan Haber who was then later the head of the, he’s the one announcing that Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) was murdered. So before he was the editor of the Yedioth Aharonoth. He was very sick when I called him. But I managed to do it. It was a very interesting conversation about other things. I came to ask about that question. Let’s say the minute I asked that question, he was very, very uncomfortable. And that was the conversation stopper. So I then reported, because I didn’t write it in that way in the book because I think for his honor and respect I can’t prove it, but it sounded like it’s definitely the true story. So it wasn’t reported. And all the newspapers in Israel on that Friday reported Kreisky, Kreisky, Kreisky, Schönau, the weekend happens. You all know what’s happened later. Sunday morning, Yom Kippur, everything is collapsing. Everything is taking place there. This was a forgotten story.
00:29:43
About a month later, Kreisky reopened the camp with the Red Cross, allowing immigration to continue to the United States or to stay in Austria or to go to Israel, and hundreds of thousands more came. So later, Golda Meir in her memoir say, you know, we were pretty harsh on Kreisky because he continued everything. We were just going on top of it, but he really did that.
Another example, Begin, who he really hated each other, in the Lebanese War, the first Lebanese War, he needed assistance. And when Kreisky was very old, he phone Kreisky, Begin, said, “I need your help to mitigate a deal to exchange Israeli prisoners.” That was the Ahmed Jibril, the Jibril, first time thousands of prisoners were there. After it was done, Kreisky with a wheelchair came, went to Syria, went to Lebanon to try and help because Begin asked for that. The minute it was published in the newspaper, that thousands of Palestinian terrorists are set free, who is to blame? Kreisky. So they said, “It’s not us. It’s Kreisky doing it.” So it was also a blame game, which was very unfair to Kreisky in that moment. But this is on, on an official level, this is really how he was.
On the other hand, he also writes in the memoir, “I am not, nothing in me is Jewish. I don’t care about the Jewish thing.” On the other hand, I speak to his friends and said all of his friends were Jewish. His wife was Jewish. His humor was Jewish. Everything he did was Jewish. That was who he was.
00:31:07
And then again, he says about Israel, the army, the Nazis and that, and the crusader state, and if Israel doesn’t do that and that, it will be the end of it. Now he really cared about the future of Israel. The way he did it was a very peculiar way of showing it. But then on the other hand, his brother lived in Israel. And his brother had a son who served in the IDF, in the army. And he writes in his memoir and his many meetings and interviews how proud he is of his nephew serving in the Israeli Defense Force. So on the one hand, you’ll say they’re crusaders and Nazis. On the other hand, you’re proud of your family.
But then, I said, I need to see who this brother is. How come I’ve never heard of the brother? So again, I checked, I couldn’t find anything on Google. I went to my parents. I said, הורים did you know he has a brother? They said, “Yes, everyone knew he has a brother. His name was Paul.”
I said, “How do you know?”
They said, “He was the most famous beggar in the streets of Ben Yehuda in Jerusalem. He was there begging for money.” He had an accident as a child, fell from a tree. And had a hard life. But he was begging. And it was that thing in the gossip magazines in Israel that it was a great story. The Austrian self-hating Jew chancellor forgetting his Jewish brother in the state of Israel. Showing like how he neglects his brother, and neglects his Jewish brothers and sisters.
So I had to analyze that more. So I interviewed, I found the person called Yehezkel Beinisch, he’s the lawyer, is the husband of the previous head of the supreme court, Dorit Beinisch, he’s a very prominent lawyer in Isarel. And happened to be that he was responsible for the communication between Kreisky, Bruno, and the brother Paul. And I sat with him. He said to me on a weekly basis, Kreisky, Bruno, sent a check through him to his brother Paul on the week. And he phoned about five times a week caring how is his life and how he is, whatever can he do. And he was the most caring brother. But this was never published. So for him it was, he needed to tell me that, the lawyer. He said, “I couldn’t handle this fake news all the time. People are telling he doesn’t care. And he gives the checks of money. It was discreet.” So it wasn’t published.
So this is really another example to show you his contradicting stories of all the time going back and forward on different issues of identity. He really couldn’t acknowledge what it is that the Israelis want for him. And, I’ll end, before I open it to Q&A, there is a story, I don’t know if you know it or not. In the middle of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was really in existential threat and the need for help from the United States. Golda Meir gives a call to then secretary of state Kissinger (1923-2023). “Herr Kissinger, Secretary of State Kissinger, we really need your help now. Now, now, now, this is money time [unclear]. If it’s not done now, there’s no state of Israel. You need to help us now.”
And he tells her, “Look, Mrs. Prime Minister, you need to remember something, you need to remember it well. First, I’m an American citizen. Second, I’m the US secretary of state. And only third, I’m Jewish.”
She said, “Don’t worry. Hebrew read from right to left.” (laughter)
Now this, it might sound funny, but it’s the existential issue. And this is exactly the misunderstanding between Kreisky and the Israeli leaders, that he really saw himself as a proud patriot, Austrian who happens to be of Jewish origin. And that he couldn’t understand why the Israelis and the other Jews don’t see that. That’s who he is. And on the other hand, the Jewish leaders could not see how he does not identify first and foremost with his Jewish brothers and sisters. He can be a proud citizen of the country but care deeply about that.
Now why am I saying it’s relevant for today? We have some people in the room here who I’m sure experience the conversations of who am I first. Am I an American Jew? Am I Jewish American? And what is my relationship to the state of Israel? Can I legitimately criticize it? Am I immediately an antisemite? Am I a self-hating Jew? Should I be involved? Should I not be involved? Double loyalty, double identity. What do these Israelis want from me? Why do they say that I’m not good enough here? This is part of my Jewish values. Who I am, what I am. I’m sure these are conversations I’ve had here, I’m doing it. That’s, on my other hat as an Israeli diplomat here, a lot of the job, that’s why the lectures about the book I found much more relevant than I thought, because I speak about these topics not as part of my book. And then it all gets together of how do we deal with Israel today? What is the relationship? What are the identity challenges? What are the opportunities? And how can we live together in a way that we don’t expect things from the other that are unreal? And they really come from a deep other part. So I’m going to end with that. And I’m going to open it to questions, comments, concerns, or anything that you have in mind. You can disagree, agree. Yes. So, please.
Doney: Thank you. [applause]
00:36:27
?: Do you think that like Kissinger and Kreisky have something in common here? Like what’s the differences, though? They have something, there is something similar.
Aschheim: Definitely, I think a lot of it, a lot of similarity in the way they were, the way Kissinger acted was different than Kreisky. Was also not as controversial. Even though there were criticisms about it. There were a lot of criticisms from different sides, different angles of who he was by the Israelis. Not only Israelis. But it was not the same story of Kreisky really, Kreisky’s the best example, the most extreme thing that you can imagine. Like everything according to the book that you say you would accuse him of. And he was really an Israeli diplomats called him, and I quote that in the book. They say they sat with him in a meeting. And they say he was intellectual, we spoke, everything was great, fascinating person. The minute we talked about his Jewishness, he became a topic for psychologists in terms of insanity. And this is quoted once again and again. He’s Jewish. Every time he was reminded that. And I think Kissinger knew he was Jewish, he needed to deal with it later. Even though a lot of similarities in common.
People also ask me about Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Is it also similar case? Yes, no? I think the Zelinskyy case is not so similar. Because also Ukraine is a completely different story. The way he sees himself is different. Although, yes, he’s still Jewish and he still needs to act in a specific way. I assume he needs to remember where he is. And there’s a limit to what he can say. As a Jew, as a Jewish leader, in a non-Jewish state. And I think that is something that is self-conscious, even if it’s not said. So I think that is the main, please.
Ludwig Decke: Yeah. Building on what you just said, like if you turn to like the context of like postwar Austria. So, can you say a little bit more about how Kreisky negotiated his like Jewishness? Like for his like constituency, like to the press, did it matter at all? Was he perceived as Jewish? Or like to what extent?
00:38:31
Aschheim: So it’s a great question. So the answer that I took, I would give you, the answer I would give you when I wrote the book, I will tell you people knew about his Jewishness. But the way he dealt with Israel and with the victim’s doctrine showed them he’s one of us. Although he’s Jewish, brackets: he’s a good guy. Like he’s a real Austrian. And as an example, in the first campaign against him, his opponent from the Austrian ÖVP the Volkspartei’s campaign slogan was, the other guy, not Kreisky, ein echter Osterreicher, “A real Austrian.” Who is the not real Austrian here? Why is he, Kreisky, not real? So it was there. But it was not, it was always present. So Ruth Wodak, Professor Ruth Wodak claims that the terminology used against Kreisky in the newspapers say, they don’t say, they don’t use “Jews” or antisemitic thing. They say “the west coast people” or “the east coast people,” which are the Jews. And there are a lot of terminology that is used to say the Jews without saying the Jews. So it was always present.
On the other hand, he kept this going, the victim’s doctrine in Austria ended only the end of the 1980s. Only when the Kurt Waldheim (1918-2007) Affair. Whoever hasn’t heard the name, Kurt Waldheim was the Austrian chancellor. Then he was elected secretary of state of the United Nations. And then it was revealed that he was a member of the SS as a younger guy. And he lied about that. And this is Kreisky after he resigned. He was not any more chancellor. In the end of his days, he’s still supporting Waldheim. Which he wasn’t even in his party. Didn’t need to. And no one understands why did he need to do it? Was already changing tack. Then he changed the terminology. Said yeah, he was angry because he lied to him personally. But this went on and on. And this was the game changer in Austria, the Waldheim Affair. That’s when they started discussing their history, acknowledging the tasks and changing their methods. And it went until those years. And Kreisky, the story I’ve heard from the woman Barbara Taufar who was very close to him. Actually she was his press attaché in Israel, the Austrian embassy in Israel. She converted. She’s lives in Kibbutz Farod in northern Israel. I visited her, eight hours with her every time. Very interesting woman. And she told me, she sat next to him on the deathbed when really before he died. She said he really cried. “He cried and said to me two things. One, he said to me the Austrians didn’t change. They didn’t learn anything. That’s what he said. And two, he cried because he had planned a visit to Israel after being chancellor. Wanting to come and enjoy it and being there. And it was really all planned. And then there were demonstrations against him and he needed to cancel it. And really, that crushed him. He really cared about Israel.”
So again, the two things are, it’s not cohesive.
Mor Geller: You started the talk saying that no one remembers him today. Well, except for your parents.
Aschheim: And Austrians.
Geller: And the Austrians.
Aschheim: Oh, wait, and I owe you still another answer. Sorry. Go ahead.
Geller: So I wanted to ask if you have any thoughts about this forgetting. It’s like active or passing forgetting? Like Shachecha or Nishkecha. ? I wanted to ask another thing, I forgot.
Aschheim: Yeah, Shachecha?
Geller: Exactly. Yeah. I was wondering if forgetting is controversial, it cannot be put it in a box or if you have different thoughts on that.
Aschheim: Great question. So I’ll just answer the angle of how did they perceive him. So when I wrote the book, that’s what I thought. When I did the presentations with Austrians, they told me, “We didn’t even know that he was Jewish.” To that extent. Now, scholars disagree with that. So I don’t know if I met the average Joe who told me that. But the average Joe is relevant here. If the average Joe didn’t know that he’s Jewish, it doesn’t matter what the intellectuals tell me that they did. So I don’t know. I will never know. But I think everyone knew he was Jewish. Just it was not that present. Because they voted for him for his socialist ideas and not for his relationship to Israel. I think the fact he was so critical towards Israel made it easier for, to take it in. Okay. But then why was he forgotten?
Forgetting in memory study is the hardest thing to know why something was forgotten or not. And it’s a relatively new concept, memory studies. And what is collective memory? And who remembers? And what does it mean to be in a collective memory in hindsight? Because we are today looking and saying is he remembered or not? In Austria he’s completely remembered. So there are things on his name. There are roads, there are buildings, there are foundations he’s built. He’s still present in the political discourse. People remember him. In Israel, I would say, it’s a simple, non-intellectual answer. How many Israelis can name the Israeli prime ministers and presidents? And we are not in the United States. We don’t have 200, or whatever. How many do we have?
?: Prime ministers, yeah!
Aschheim: Yes? All of them? He will tell you all of them. Okay. Yes. [unclear] these are the core groups.
00:43:49
Aschheim: No, these are the prime ministers. You think they’re all known?
?: No. I think it’s hard to like say all of them if you didn’t go in the officers course. But if you ask him if you heard this name, it’s like, oh, yeah.
Aschheim: Oh, yes. Right. Exactly. But then you ask them also, have you heard the name of Kreisky? We don’t know because we are living today. And a people who were living before the internet days and they’re not like Einstein or Freud, it’s really much harder. Think about your grandparents. Some of you have grandparents who accomplished things in life. You know, my grandfather was the owner of the biggest, one of the biggest factories in South Africa. Now today you’d Google someone who owns the biggest firms in Africa or anywhere, you have thousands of things on the internet. I can’t find one thing? I see one place that says his name in kind of page 20. It’s like they never existed. They existed in our memories. But this is part of it, that he lived in a time that’s not so much was written. In German, there’s much more. When you put in in German. But again, I don’t think it’s something that people try. Even though there are people who on the opposing political sides, that try to forget. And definitely Israel doesn’t have an interest. I’ll share a secret. I spoke to the Israeli ambassador in Vienna now about the book. He read it and told people about it. He said, “Do we have an interest to bring Kreisky back to the center? Probably not. We have the best relationship we ever had with Austria the last decade. So we have other problems. We don’t want to bring it as, this is as in Israeli diplomacy. That’s clear.” Yeah. You had a question?
Doney: I was going to ask about postwar trials again, which happened all over Europe against perpetrators.
Aschheim: In Austria.
Doney: No, no.
Aschheim: There were, some of them were in Nuremberg, of course. But there was nothing, and you saw it, I don’t know how many of you saw the film about the paintings. A few years ago. The famous—
?: Woman in Gold?
Aschheim: Yes, the Woman in Gold. That’s Austria. So I don’t think the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Austria would like to show that as their image. But that’s a very big portion of the way they dealt with it. Nothing. And still today there’s a completely different way of looking at it back. But the older generation was really clear: Austria was not part of the Nazis. They were victims of the Nazis.
And look, we are saying that. But Austria today changes. There are other countries who are still living a different ideal. And to say that certain countries doing very good public diplomacy. And you think about them as cool, trendy. 00:46:31 We are not going to name names, because I’m a diplomat so I can’t say which countries, but you can see European countries that are fun, trendy, cool, they all held the Jews. And the reality’s different. And the other countries that are perceived as the most horrible countries, and they were bad, but they were not worse than other countries. So it’s a matter of public diplomacy.
Greg Steinberger: I had two questions. One, a little bit that is before he fled, what was his Jewish experience? And why did he choose to return? And then I’m just interested a little bit, like this video was particularly provocative. There’s a lot that’s really interesting to me in that. And I think it is contemporary today, right? So I’m wondering about the legacy. Maybe not directly connected to him. Like in memory. But his political thought in current state of affairs. I mean, what he is saying here is not a, you could be saying it today, right? Someone could say these things.
Aschheim: Right. So, I’ll start with the second question. So, when we look at Kreisky today, I did do a chapter saying Kreisky, are you near or false, because there are things that he said. He talked A about the Iranians doing nuclear weapons, if nothing will change. Like who talked about, even Netanyahu didn’t speak about it in the 1970s. He was speaking about the Palestinian suicide attacks much before, if peace will not come, it will come to that. He could see that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will lead to that. So there were certain things that he said that were really – if he would have seen that in the year 2010, yeah, 2010, his views that were considered to be so radical, Prime Minister Netanyahu stood and said “I’m for the two states.” I’m not getting into what he thought of that. But 2010 he stands and says, “I’m for two-state solution.” I mean, Kreisky would not believe that the political system adopted most of his ideas as mainstream.
Today we have a very challenging situation. But that’s a different story. But a lot of the things he talked about were very radical then. And the PLO, Israel deals with the PLO. Talking about the two-state solution became the mainstream of the world. Then it was not. It was controversial in some ways. But the Western world today, not even the west, the majority of the states today consider the two-state solution as the solution. So a lot of these things, he was kind of a pioneer about. And I think he would have been in certain years happy to see what happened. On the other hand, he would say look, I told you if this doesn’t happen, this is what’s going to happen. So I think it’s both. Remind me the first question again?
Steinberger: About his Jewish experience when he was growing up and why he went back.
Aschheim: So he was born into a Jewish family. His mother came from a more aristocrat family, but not also, not so rich. But they were very well off. The father was a worker. But still, they were in the middle class. He saw himself as a higher class than he was. He was a true intellectual. He was raised in a Jewish environment. But again, acculturated the Jews. They were part of the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He sees himself as his generation’s part of that. So he lived that. He was never religious, never observant. He was really like you see the stereotype of that assimilated, acculturated Jews in these areas. He went to Sweden to exile. There he met Willy Brandt (1913-1992) and Olof Palme (1927-1986), then to be the prime minister of Sweden and Germany. And they were considered the trio, the socialist trio. They were going to change the world together, the three of them. Each one focusing on a different work area.
And why he came back to Austria, he really felt—and this is how I see by his writing—it’s like Austria was this amazing place. The empire, oh, fantastic. Bad period, pause, continuing from scratch. Now it wasn’t really the case, because it wasn’t easy for him coming back. He got antisemitic claims. But if we look at it in perspective, it was quite easy. The man came back and then came so quickly to become what he was, it’s pretty, I think it’s a bit of a miracle. But this is how he really truly believed. That this was a pause, a bad part in history, of the larger historical whole.
Brandon Bloch: So, yeah, thanks so much, I mean, this was great. And I also appreciate your ability to deliver a talk without any notes. Which I think all of us in academia could learn something from, and probably relates to your diplomatic position and so forth. I guess my position about how you sort of situated him in a longer historical context. What seems interesting to me is he’s kind of an anachronism. Like the idea of being a sort of socialist, non-Zionist Jew is actually a very like common political position with a very rich history going back into the late nineteenth century. Arguably even exists in the United States after 1945 sort of through the 1967 war. Yet by the 1970s, there’s something that makes it such that this sort of position is entirely kind of unrecognizable in a way that it would not have been, you know, maybe just a couple of decades before. I’m just wondering like what is it about his time that somehow made it so incomprehensible to be a socialist, non-Zionist Jew. And did he ever sort of situate himself in a kind of longer political heritage?
Aschheim: So, great question. He saw himself as part of, again, this intellectual milieu of fin de siècle Vienna, of being part of this really, of this amazing history of the place. That’s who he was. The Jews, of course there were Jews in Vienna at the time. But he was part of the general phenomena. The fact that he was Jewish puts him in that. And as you were saying correctly, there was Léon Blum (1872-1950), there were other people that were in high positions before that played important roles in history that were non-Zionist, Bundists, or whatever they were. I think what is different, we’re talking about post World War II Europe, which the Jews barely played a part in. They did not play, and until today, we need to say it, there is a growing community in Germany, true. There’s a growing community, there is the British community, which has continued. The French community is different. But the vast majority of the European Jewish communities are not significant in importance on the larger scale. They are for their families and communities, but on the level of the nation, they were wiped out. And I think a chancellor coming so quickly after the war in one of the countries that again, it’s not in France and not in Britain. In Austria, being elected is very unique, A). And B), I think that in terms of the significance of the things he’s done, what I said, the first to talk of the two-state solution, the first to acknowledge the PLO and first to give in to terrorism, he shaped a lot of the things. After him, a lot of things changed in the war on terrorism. Units were built. After him, negotiations were open with him. He had conversations with Arafat, and long and interesting conversations. So a lot of the things were connected. I think his legacy comes A, because of his Jewish thing. But B, because of the other things that he has done. Which are significant to when looking today. And I know there’s no other Jewish leader who, okay, you could say Zelenskyy, but who was head of state since then.
?: I have two questions. So, one is more of like a thought or a wonder than a question. I feel like what it was hard for not Israeli Jews, that I was alive, but it’s not that he was not Zionist. Not even about whether he is Jewish or not. But why do you have to be like that kind of statements in the 1970s, saying like Jews are like Nazis, like twenty years after the Holocaust, it’s something that even someone was not Jewish, I can’t imagine them coming to Israel without protests. This is nothing about his Jewishness when you say he was supposed to be, I feel like with Kissinger, no one loved him in Israel, but this was nothing like that. Because still today, a few days ago, there was an interview with Kissinger in Israel. This was like accepted well. So I think that’s amazing.
Aschheim: So I’ll answer that, and then the second question, because I always forget when people ask me two.
?: Okay.
Aschheim: I completely agree. And I think this is part of the challenge. Because you could be, it’s legitimate that you’re not Zionist and you don’t believe in it. And you can just live your life. And you have Austria, and you have the whole world and you have Austria. But it wasn’t the case. He was obsessed about it. Obsessed about his Israelness, and obsessed about his Jewishness. And I claim in the book that his obsession, too, that was part of his Jewish identity complex. It was not only the political need. You know, he could have been the Jewish chancellor. He could have dealt with, he could have kept, let’s say, the victim’s doctrine alive if he wanted to show the Nazis that he’s not for, that he’s not a real, like the Jewishness doesn’t play a role. He could have stayed with the victim’s doctrine without the whole Israeli chapter so aggressive. Because it didn’t interest the Austrians. They were not, they were very provincial. They were not people of the world thinking about the Middle East. It just brought terrorism to Austria, which brought criticism of Kreisky. It wasn’t worth for his politics. It was a bad move. That’s why I think this over-obsession was really an obsession. You can see in the book. Hopefully you will buy it. In the book you can see I tried to prove also that it was really much more than Realpolitik. It was really something to do with him trying to suppress it. And especially when people reminded him of that, he exploded. Every single conversation about it, he exploded. So there is, it’s really, there are people who say like say in the beginning of the book, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t have the capacity to deal with these things. I don’t know how to. But this is needs to have also psychologist involved in the analysis. Second question.
?: So it’s like I wonder if there was, and if there was, what was it, the questions, it’s like you try to, that you try to answer in your book. What is the question?
Aschheim: How is his Jewish identity part of his politics? That’s what I try to get into. Because with all the other books besides one and a half, they don’t see it at all as part of it. I came back from Berkeley three days ago. I was in a conference there, Austrian studies. And there was one BA student from a university in Holland who wrote—it’s a very small world—I was in a Kreisky conference in Minnesota, their apex person in the world. I was humbled to be invited. And then he was a BA student writing about Kreisky’s involvement in the Middle East. And he has a thesis why. And he claims it’s because he was scared from the Austria’s position in terms of the Cold War. I loved his presentation. But I said to him, “I think your thesis is wrong. But maybe I’m wrong.” But my thesis claims that his Jewishness played an important and vital role in the decision-making process that he had. To prove it, no one can prove it. It’s not social science. We can say whatever we want, really. (laughter)
Decke: Jewish identity, that’s probably like factor that you stress, like you also mention his like Austrian like patriotism? What about like the third potential factor, which is like socialist identity? And what would you say, like to what extent does his like socialist like out to the global, too, right? You mentioned like Palme, like Brandt. They were trying to like reach out to the global south, which includes like Arab nations, like OPEC, like all this things was going on. What do we say, like to what extent did this also play a role in this like stance particular towards both the Arab world and Israel.
Aschheim: Number one is that, I would say number one is his socialism. His socialist role as, it used to be an organization, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the Socialist International during the 1970s was the most important political organization in the world. And he was leading it. And for him, his politics, his worldviews, was as a socialist and then an Austrian and then all the rest. And never a Jew. I think his Jewishness came in together, but I think there’s also a contradiction between the fact, and I write about it, also. On the one hand, he’s a true socialist globalist universalist. On the other hand, he’s an ultra-Austrian patriot. And an ultra-Austrian nationalist. It shouldn’t go together, in my view. You know, or you’re a universalist, or you’re a particularist, or you try and combine. But you can’t be a firm this and a firm this. It’s a paradox. You know, if you are socialist in the world, everyone needs to be equal. You need to deal with the world. And on the other hand, he deals with Austria to make Austria great again. you know, kind of very, very Austrian, firm patriot. And don’t mess with Austria. Don’t do that. So I think definitely there’s no question that his socialist identity played a huge role in his politics abroad. Inside, his Jewish narratives came into these as, without knowing. His subconscious. He will tell you and he writes it never played a role. It’s not him saying it. He says his Jewish part never played a role in his politics. And I interviewed ministers in his cabinet who said yes, definitely it played an important role. They would not tell him that, because he’s dead. But they told me. But, yeah.
Doney: So please join me in thanking Dr. Daniel Aschheim. [applause]
[End recording]
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