The city is littered with reminders not just of its enthusiastic support for National Socialism, but of its record of vicious anti-Semitism stretching back for centuries. Emperor Franz Josef I, who brutally suppressed Hungarian democracy in 1849, presided over the construction of the famous Ringstrasse, designed to facilitate cavalry and artillery action against any popular uprising. The Votivkirche, erected to give thanks for his surviving an assassination attempt, contains a memorial to troops killed in the Austrian Civil War of 1934, when the Austrofascist Government deployed artillery on socialist council estates. The magnificent grounds and buildings of the Steinhof psychiatric hospital contain a memorial to the hundreds of innocent children murdered there. I could go on - and on. This is a city with so much to be ashamed of that the only logical conclusion for anybody who believes in cancel culture is that the whole place should be flattened in order to avoid the offence that its buildings and memorials must cause to so many people.
I write this after having visited the city for the seventh time, so you will gather that I find its more than chequered past bearable, but for many years I refrained from going because it seemed that the country that elected Kurt Waldheim as President had not come to terms with its past in the way that neighbouring Germany had. Since then, Austria, and Vienna in particular has, belatedly, but I believe genuinely, acknowledged its responsibilities again and again. Recently, it offered Austrian citizenship to the descendants of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. This is not mere virtue signalling; when I visited the Central Synagogue two years ago the young Jewish guide was adamant that Vienna today was a place where he and other Jews felt safe and positive about the future.
Of course not all is perfect or simple. Right now one of the Rothschild family is taking legal action against Vienna City Council over the expropriation of their property by the Nazi regime. There is a battle going on over the statue of Dr. Karl Lueger, a dynamic and charismatic former Mayor (a sort of Austrian Ken Livingstone in many respects) who knew how to obtain electoral benefit from stirring up the strong anti-Semitic streak in most Viennese voters in his day - something not lost on another Viennese resident, Adolf Hitler.
Life is not simple, history is not uncomplicated. We can either learn to live with it and accept it, as Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have said, 'warts and all', or follow the logic of woke, cancel culture and annihilate all history and all memory altogether. Vienna is a magnificent city and the current generation of Viennese running it deserve praise and respect for coming to terms with their past in an intelligent way, promoting tolerance. If you have not visited it, I urge you to do so when you can - before the cancel culture brigade ruins it.
There is no need to take lessons from ignorant woke hypocrites who have been happy to wear Nazi uniforms for 'fun' or who have made a fortune promoting the products of a company whose first boss made his name and his money designing uniforms for the SS.
