Lecture, Wiener Library, 19.2.08

Karl Pfeifer was between 1982 and 1995 editor of the official monthly of the Jewish Community, Vienna. He writes regularly for Searchlight, London and for the Budapest weekly Hetek, in Vienna he is also Curator of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (DOW).

Had somebody predicted in January 1995, when I wrote a very short review for the official monthly of the Jewish community in Vienna, that I would stand, because of 460 words, in three Viennese courts as accused and in four courts as plaintiff, that I would, 13 years later, inform an audience in London about this, I would not have believed them.

Why did it happen? Because I could not believe, that "the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933" and because I found the name of the German writer Kurt Tucholsky misspelled.

Did a "Jewish" journalist drive a "Catholic" to his death?

In January 1995 the political academy of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) Freiheitliche Bildungswerk] released its "Yearbook for Political Renewal" ("Jahrbuch für politische Erneuerung"). A contribution appeared under the title "Internationalism against Nationalism" ("Internationalismus gegen Nationalismus"). The author Dr. Werner Pfeifenberger taught political science at Münster Fachhochschule, a college in Rheinland Westphalia (NRW). Pfeifenberger started with a vicious attack on the Jewish roots of Christianity and saw the French Revolution as being under Jewish influence. The Jews had since then played a decisive role in European history, especially in the expansion of communism. Above all, Pfeifenberger saw their menacing power prevailing: the Second World War had not begun in Germany, because "in 1933 Judea had already declared war on all of Germany" and the war is still going on.

On February 3rd 1995 I published my review in the official monthly of the Jewish community in Vienna, 57 percent of which consisted of quotes from Pfeifenberger's article.

Here is the main part of my review:

"FPÖ Yearbook 1995 with (Neo) Nazi Tones"

More than a quarter of the authors in the FPÖ yearbook 1995 are noted in the "Handbook of Austrian Right Extremism". In the "Yearbook for Political Renewal 1995" of the FPÖ, Werner Pfeifenberger, born in Salzburg in 1941, takes up the "deadly enmity" between "Internationalism and Nationalism". Long-windedly, Pfeifenberger reheats the old Nazi tale of the Jewish world conspiracy.

Pfeifenberger determines the "seeping in of oriental (Jewish) Messianism in the form of the missionary-offensive early Christianity…" and depicts the victory of National Socialism in Germany: "It seemed to succeed! More and more proletarians fell away from internationalist socialism and moved over to National Socialism - an unheard of ideological insult, which was done by the Volk to the international socialists. After the Second World War this audacity was be to paid for bitterly as 'collective guilt'." And further, "In interior affairs this dispute was won by the nationalists, both the struggle for the souls of the youth as well as for the workers… Since the inner-state conflict in Germany - partly ethnically conscious, partly limited by the strong Jewish membership in internationalist bodies - degenerated into a battle between Germans and Jews, which was continued by the political victor after the taking of power on the state level as well, it is explicable that the losers also shifted it to the inter-state level.” Pfeifenberger also spreads the tale of the Jewish war against Germany. “This war didn't break out in 1939 and didn't end in May 1945. It is much older and is continued as a post-war war until this day, with other means, on another level, not no less hate-filled and no less pernicious than half a century ago. The hate tirades of the slander campaign against Kurt Waldheim should once again show everyone that this world war is by far not yet over." The classical perpetrator-victim reversal.

The author lies are based on absurd quotations taken out of context: "The internationalist hater, Kurt Tucholski (sic!)…wished all the people of his German host land to be killed by gas, because they thought much too nationalistically for him." That is Nazi diction. The Nazis burned the books of the German writer Kurt Tucholsky; they claimed that Jews could not be Germans.

As a result, Werner Pfeifenberger sued me and the Jewish community for libel and demanded 240,000 Schilling compensation - and lost. In May 1998 the upper court of Vienna also acknowledged the text of Pfeifenberger as having “Nazi tones”, but found that I have not accused the plaintiff of having transgressed the Prohibition law prohibiting nazi activities and I was acquitted.

In Germany the Students Union (AStA) took a staunch stand against Dr. Werner Pfeifenberger, because he advocated apartheid in South Africa and because of his extreme right wing "revisionism". The social democratic minister of science in NRW protected W.P. for many years claiming "freedom of expression", but in 1999 she transferred him to the college in Bielefeld, where he was free to do unspecified research.

In 1995 parliamentary questions by socialist and green MPs were asked. However the public prosecutor found no reason to start proceedings against W.P. in 1995. The Minister of Justice was at the time a nominee of the socialist party. Had there been really a left-wing conspiracy to accuse Dr. Pfeifenberger, the public prosecutor would have started proceedings, but he didn't.

In Austria the public prosecutor is not independent

Following the revolutions of the nineteenth century the institution of the independent judge was created in Austria. The search for justice was henceforth supposed to take place in the courtrooms and not in political cabinets. To this day judges cannot be removed from office, are not subject to any instructions, and are supposed to represent a third branch of State power, which can treat everyone the same - above all, even the president of the republic - without having to fear personal consequences. However, Austrian criminal law in practice deprives this fundamental principle of all effect. The public prosecutor, who is subject to instructions from the office of the Minister of Justice, decides what comes before a judge. Prosecutors know that their career may depend on the click of a minister's fingers. That turns them into cowering vacillators rather than energetic investigators. Instead of raking through the muck and carrying out painstaking investigative work, they look upwards so as not to fall down. Austrian Justice ministers from all parties know why they do not wish to relinquish their right to issue instructions.

It's a complete mystery to me why the public prosecutor of Vienna in April 2000 started proceedings against Dr. Pfeifenberger more than five years after my publication and after a conservative-extreme right wing coalition (ÖVP-FPÖ) was installed in Austria. Now under a Minister of Justice who was nominated by the FPÖ, Dr. Pfeifenberger was to stand jury trial in Vienna on June 26. He committed suicide on May 13, 2000 and already three weeks later on 2nd of June 2000 the right extremist Vienna weekly Zur Zeit came out with the allegation, that "the Jewish journalist" Pfeifer had "opened up a man hunt, which was to result in the death of the hunted." Zur Zeit emphasized the fact, that W.P. had a "catholic" background.

Zur Zeit is published until the present by Andreas Mölzer, who is today MEP for FPÖ, who was also a co-editor of the "1995 Yearbook". Zur Zeit is subsidised by the Austrian taxpayers by tens of thousands of Euros, on average by 60,000 a year.

I consulted the legal department of the Journalist trade union and sued Zur Zeit to defend my reputation and won in the first hearing. The limit of freedom of speech had been crossed, media judge Bruno Weis determined and sentenced Zur Zeit to a 50,000 Schilling (Euro 3,633) compensation. An appeal was issued against this decision and on October 15, 2001, Judge Doris Trieb overturned the decision. Labelling me as a murderer and slanderer represented an "admissible assessment", which could be supported "by a correct fact substrate". The lady pointed her finger at me, while reading the judgement and stated: "With your article Mr. Pfeifer you produced an avalanche, which led to the Greens and Social Democrats in Germany pushing Pfeifenberger out of office". In the written judgment she omitted the Greens. She concluded, "that there was merely an allocation of a moral responsibility. This is clear as a final conclusion and value judgment of the facts of the case as reported in the article and should not be understood to be a statement of fact."

According to Dr. Trieb one could say that a "Jewish journalist" drove the "catholic" Dr. Pfeifenberger to his suicide.

Did the Vienna upper court have one standard for a "Jewish" journalist and another for an extreme right wing politician?

My answer is YES.

18 months earlier, when the Vienna weekly Falter republished a caricature of Haider as a little devil, Dr.Trieb saw the good reputation of the Kärnten State Governor in danger. She found then "a reference to the applicant as to the "absolute evil" or rather to an "abominable monster" cannot be established". She concluded: "In contradiction to the explanation of the Lower court there are not only horns on the head of the applicant clearly recognisable, but from the general impression for the sensible consumer of media the only content of meaning of the portrayal, the applicant be the devil, therefore a figure, who personifies evil"

Is it exaggerated to claim that a Jewish journalist who reports about right extremists is only granted a fraction of that protection by the Austrian court, which is awarded to the FPÖ?

Andreas Mölzer is chief editor and publisher of the weekly Zur Zeit. He is often invited on to Austrian TV, sometimes as "rightist intellectual“. One [freelance] collaborator of Zur Zeit was convicted in 2001 of violation of the law forbidding nazi activities and given a suspended one year prison sentence. In this case Austrian police and justice could not establish who was responsible for publishing this article. A real Austrian wonder: a freelance writer could publish an article so that no editor saw the article before publication.

Mölzer's rag was in February 2001 in need of money, in a begging letter to his readers he wrote: "the pressure of our adversaries on our weekly has dramatically increased", wrote Mölzer. In order to get money he listed those enemies, who would "force" his rag “to its knees.“

He wrote:

"Then there is the case of Karl Pfeifer v. Zur Zeit. The long-standing editor of the Jewish religious community's magazine, Karl Pfeifer, was identified following Professor P.'s [family name in full] death as a member of the hunting society that drove the conservative political scientist to his death. It was common knowledge that court proceedings were due to be opened against P. under the Nazi Prohibition Act on account of his statements in the Freedom Party's 1995 yearbook. The Jewish journalist Karl Pfeifer had condemned the statements for their Nazi tone and as a result had unleashed the judicial avalanche against P. When Zur Zeit dared to show that this was the cause of the suicide, Pfeifer lodged a complaint. The extremely complex, time-consuming and costly proceedings, naturally accompanied by a corresponding media campaign in the trendy left-wing rags, are still in progress."

Mölzer was not compelled to bring a proof for his claim. It was merely his "opinion" and as such protected by Austrian Justice. Mölzer was acquitted in February 2002 by the lower court, his statement so Judge Bruno Weis said, was not libel. It was permitted, again, to denounce a journalist, who had criticised, by right, a right wing radical Professor publicly as a moral murderer. Bruno Weis, who condemned in 2001 similar reproaches as “no trifle“, suddenly could not see anything defamatory in charging a Jewish journalist with moral complicity for the suicide of a professor. Weis said: "Mölzer has located Karl Pfeifer by chance in the rows of the hunting society, and those rows are not as at Horst Wessel so tightly closed". The "Horst Wessel-Lied", named after the leader of a SA-assault column, was in the Third Reich the official hymn of the Nazi party The first verse reads: "The banner high! / The rows tightly closed!" ("Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen")

Haaretz dedicated a whole page to my court case. The title of the story was "The Jew is guilty even of the suicide!"

The case came before the upper court of Vienna, Dr. Werner Röggla, the same judge, who acquitted me and wrote in September 1997 in his judgment that all my criticisms of Dr. Pfeifenberger were the "truth" and "truth based on facts", had in the meantime been promoted to the upper court. In the verdict by the Vienna Upper Court judge, Dr. Röggla in the case against Mölzer repeated Mölzer's argument, declaring: "In this case, the plaintiff charged Professor Pfeifenberger that his article in the Freedom Party's Yearbook contains 'Nazi tones' and that he advocates 'glorification of the Volksgemeinschaft' [the ethnic German community from which Jews were excluded], which is contrary to paragraph 3 of the laws forbidding Nazi activities. Criticism of this contravention and its consequences can be equally harsh."

Röggla's verdict meant that the court used laws forbidding Nazi activities to gag a critical Jewish journalist.

Yet the same judge in a case brought by Pfeifenberger against Karl Pfeifer in 1997 stated explicitly "the conclusions drawn by the accused [Karl Pfeifer] from Dr Werner Pfeifenberger's article are true", and made no reference to the laws against Nazi activities.

His judgement in 2002 showed, how part of Austrian justice has followed closely in the footsteps of the right-wing Austrian coalition government which has been telling the world that Austria has very strict laws prohibiting Nazi activities. But the judiciary has used the same laws to silence anti-Nazi journalists.

The Human Rights Convention demands limits to the freedom of expression, when they are necessary to the protection of the good reputation of others in a democratic society.

The democratic discourse should - after the experience of nazi rule - be protected from the undemocratic. Apparently, Viennese Justice has not understood this entirely yet. So I had to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. This court concluded:

"the statement that "Karl Pfeifer was identified following Professor P.'s death as a member of a hunting society that drove the political scientist to his death" clearly establishes a causal link between the applicant's and other persons' actions, and P.'s suicide in 2000…Whether or not an act has a causal link with another is not a matter of speculation, but is a fact susceptible of proof. Although it is undisputed that the applicant had written a critical commentary on P.'s article in 1995 and that, years later, in 2000, P. had been charged under the Prohibition Act in relation to this article and had committed suicide, the defendant had not offered any proof for the alleged causal link between the applicant's article and P.'s death…By writing this, Mr M.'s letter to the subscribers to Zur Zeit overstepped acceptable limits, because it in fact accused the applicant of acts tantamount to criminal behaviour…

In those circumstances the Court is not convinced that the reasons advanced by the domestic courts for protecting freedom of expression outweighed the right of the applicant to have his reputation safeguarded. The Court therefore considers that the domestic courts failed to strike a fair balance between the competing interests involved. There has accordingly been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention."

Does the fact that the seven court cases of Karl Pfeifer from 1995 until 2002 drew so little attention in Austria, have to do with antisemitism in Austrian society?

Not really.

As far as Austrian media is concerned, it has to do with the fact, that I was a retired journalist, who was not known. Had I been a famous person, their reaction would have been different.

From 1995 until 1998 there were plenty of reports in the German media, including German TV and radio. Austrian state TV and radio refused to report my case. The fact that I did not belong to an Austrian party and that I always refused to play the role of a token Jew could also have played a role.

I was lucky, the Jewish community in Vienna and in the first case against Zur Zeit the Journalist Trade Union was covering my expenses and I had an experienced excellent and engaged lawyer, Dr. Gabriel Lansky, who took the risk on himself to appeal to the ECHR.

Without their help I could never have won the case.