Next Likely Chancellor Of Austria Called ‘Baby Hitler’
An image tweeted out by the satirical magazine Titanic. Image by TITANIC
By Ari Feldman October 17, 2017
A German satirical magazine is under investigation after tweeting an image of Sebastian Kurz, an Austrian politician, with crosshairs over his heart next to the words, “Finally possible: Kill baby Hitler,” Politico.eu reported. The tweet was sent out by the magazine Titanic a day after Kurz’s party, the People’s Party, one the most vote in Austria’s parliamentary election. Kurz is likely to be the next chancellor of Austria.
The election has put many observers on edge because analysts say it is likely that Kurz will form a governing coalition with the far-right Freedom Party, which garnered nearly a quarter of the votes in Sunday’s election.
“We would like to acknowledge that in the case of this joke, there was a problematic crossing of boundaries — namely to Austria, where they are obviously not so nonchalant about their own Nazi past as we good, reformed Germans are,” Tim Wolff, Titanic’s editor, told a German-language newspaper.
Wolff said that Austrian authorities had not contact him, though the magazine tweeted that they had been contacte by the “Vienna department for time travel.”
The tweet appears to be a reference to a thought experiment that is popular in Germany and Austria: if you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler as an infant?
Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
