In Austria, as elsewhere in Europe, the ranks of the far right are steadily growing, and it is highly likely that the FPÖ will soon be able to appoint a Nazi-admiring chancellor in the form of Herbert Kickl. K. will soon be documenting this worrying prospect. In the meantime, it’s interesting to place it in a more general political context, that of an Austria grappling with its past, with a young but already crumbling social democracy, torn between backward-looking conservatism and a certain intellectual and artistic vitality. Viennese filmmaker and writer Ruth Beckermann’s documentaries bear precious witness to this recent era. Here, Liam Hoare interviews her about her political and artistic commitments, and their link to a Jewishness that could not be expressed in Austrian political language.
Stéphane Mandelbaum lived a life as raw and transgressive as his art. With the current Drawing Center exhibtion in New York in mind, Mitchell Abidor explores the tortured Belgian-Jewish artist’s turbulent journey—one shaped by his Jewish identity, dyslexia, and fixation on both society’s rebels and its villains and a love for alternative and ground-breakin artists, from Francis Bacon to Pierre Goldman. Mandelbaum left behind a body of work that is both haunting and confrontational, forcing viewers to grapple with the boundaries between art, crime, and identity.
For K., if there are still a few intact snippets left to build on, they are to be found in Europe. Dispersed, weakened, undermined by falsely universalist and vainly critical postures, they are nonetheless still alive in many of the consciences of European countries – indeed, in the majority of them. Our task is to offer them the intellectual means to express themselves more and better than is currently the case. It is also the duty imposed on Europe by Trump’s victory: to reconnect with its project. And for this, using the modern Jewish question as a spur is certainly not the option least suited to the constraints of the present. So we end this week’s issue with a critique, formulated from the current political wanderings of Jews, of what makes contemporary progressivism so inconsistent in the face of the push from the reactionary camp.
