In the Josefstadt

Green hatred of Jews? Bizarre dispute over park name

It's all about him, the Hamerlingpark in the 8th district. Small picture: the author Alma Johanna Koenig(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Zwefo, Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur)

The Josefstadt Green Party is opposing the naming of a Viennese park after a Jewish author who was murdered by the Nazis. This has earned them accusations of anti-Semitism. In fact, the dispute over the Holocaust victim is taking on bizarre proportions.

The cancel culture hysteria has taken hold of Vienna's eighth district and is sprouting its strangest blossoms. The focus is on a Viennese woman killed during the Second World War. The Greens believe there could be black marks on the writer's vest. But in fact they know almost nothing about her. 

A brief history: Hamerlingpark will be given a new name because the writer Robert Hamerling (1830 to 1889) had anti-Semitic outbursts. According to the original idea, the area was to be called "Alma-Johanna-Koenig-Park". Koenig, born in Prague in 1887, was a poet and storyteller who spent most of her life in Josefstadt and was murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp in 1942. She was Jewish.