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A Swiss theatre director known for re-enacting landmark trials has been told by a judge in Vienna that his publisher must withdraw a book in which he alleged that a far-right Austrian politician sang a song mocking the victims of the Holocaust.
On Thursday, Vienna’s regional court fined independent German publishing house Verbrecher Verlag €1,500 (£1,300) for publishing a book in which Milo Rau alleged that Heinz-Christian Strache, the former leader of the Freedom party (FPÖ), once sang a song with the line: “We’ll manage the seventh million”, a reference to the approximately 6 million European Jews murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Rau, who this summer made global headlines with a verbatim staging of the Gisèle Pelicot trial, conceded that the statement was “a factual error”. But he alleged that the defamation suit against his publisher fit into a broader pattern of nationalist parties using legal means to intimidate critical voices in the arts.
“What we are seeing is far-right parties using the arsenal provided by democracy in order to destroy it,” he told the Guardian.
Strache, who served as Austria’s vice-chancellor between 2017 and 2019 but resigned over the so-called Ibiza affair corruption scandal, has announced his intention to pursue a further defamation claim against Rau personally, for repeating the allegation in an interview with the Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek.
Rau, meanwhile, said he intends to make his experience the theme of a new theatrical production at Hamburg’s Thalia theatre next February.
The defamatory passage was part of a speech Rau made in Berlin in March, in which he spoke about the way the FPÖ has agitated against “woke events” such as Eurovision and the Vienna festival, which Rau has been the artistic director of since 2023.
The speech was reprinted in a collection of Rau’s writing called Resistance Has No Form, Resistance Is the Form, which was published in May and withdrawn from sale last week, ahead of the trial.
It says: “What can we learn from a period – our period – in which a member of the biggest Austrian party, the FPÖ, a man called H-C Strache, sings the song ‘We’ll manage the seventh million’ in the morning and in the afternoon goes on to visit the Yad Vashem remembrance centre, where the dead of the Holocaust are commemorated?”
The mention of the song is a reference to a 2018 scandal where an FPÖ politician was found to have been a member of a fraternity or Burschenschaft whose songbook made light of the Holocaust and glorified the Wehrmacht.
One of these drinking songs contained the line “Step on the gas, you ancient Germanic peoples, we’ll manage the seventh million”. Dating back to the 19th century, the song was sung in the 1930s by liberal fraternities to make fun of the SS but was then adapted by neo-Nazi groups after the war, when the line mocking the Holocaust was added.
Rau said that while the specific allegation against Strache was incorrect, he still stood by the broader criticism it was trying to make: that the FPÖ, which was founded by former members of the Nazi party, was now pretending to act as protectors of Jewish interests.
As leader of the FPÖ, Strache made several visits to Israel and caused a scandal in 2010 when he visited Yad Vashem wearing not a kippa but the traditional cap of a student fraternity.
“Strache’s visit to Yad Vashem wearing the headgear of a German nationalist fraternity was more brazen than anything alleged in my book,” said Rau.
While German-language student fraternities can range from far-right national socialists to liberal societies, Austrian fraternities have historically been located on a more narrowly nationalistic spectrum, and more vocal about their commitment to the idea of a “Greater Germany” based on ethnicity, precisely because they were located outside German borders.
