What’s the point of tilting the statue of Vienna’s antisemitic mayor?

Tilting a statue. That’s the solution now. At least, that’s what a jury appointed by Vienna city council has recommended as the best way to deal with a controversial likeness of Karl Lueger, the early 20^th-century mayor who shaped the modern city, but also happened to be an antisemite.

Dr Lueger was a social reformer, changing the face of Vienna with new hospitals, schools and state-owned abattoirs, as well as better water, gas and electricity infrastructure, transport systems, a green belt and a distinctive architectural aesthetic. But he was also an ultra-conservative Catholic populist, who regularly indulged in Jew-baiting. 

He can be judged by his fans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler chillingly admired Lueger’s talent for ‘fostering the militant spirit in (supporters) rather than attempting to paralyse it’. It is true that the mayor’s antisemitism was too milquetoast for the future Führer, who derided it as ‘an apparent antisemitism that was almost worse than none’; but Hitler had exacting standards, and an antisemite Lueger was, to the modern sensibility at least.

Which is why his statue – which over the years has been denounced by Holocaust survivors, defaced, concealed and mocked – is to be tilted.