A painter from Lower Austria was presented with the bill for posting anti-Semitic content in court on Friday. The verdict was two years imprisonment.
Although the painter is little known to the general public, he is well known in artistic circles. In March 2022, he made anti-Semitic comments on a blog. His entry was tantamount to a denial and trivialization of Nazi crimes. As a result, he was finally sentenced to two years’ imprisonment at the Vienna Regional Court for being involved in National Socialism.
The blog operator deleted this post and blocked the author. However, the text had already been commented on 195 times by this time.
The public prosecutor’s indignation at the incriminated passages was noticeable when the prosecution presented her case. The accused had “denied the National Socialist genocide, at least roughly played it down” and “approved the Nazi crimes against humanity”.
Painter “horrified”
“I plead guilty to writing that, but I’m appalled at how it’s being interpreted,” said the 73-year-old defendant. He is “not a Nazi”. He took what he wrote “from the newspaper”: “Unfortunately I don’t have it here, but that’s in many newspapers. That’s journalistically proven.”
“I’m not a Holocaust denier”
A member of the jury was stunned and addressed the accused directly: “How can you publish something like that as a professor (the artist who is attributed to fantastic realism and abstract painting adorns himself with a professor’s title on his website, note. )? How dare you say such a thing?” – “Anyone who says something against the system will be misconstrued,” replied the accused. And further: “I’m not a Holocaust denier, you can believe me.”
picture as an excuse?
The painter’s legal assistant emphasized that he was “a pensioner with an extremely small pension” and “a freelance artist”. “He has Jewish relatives himself,” the lawyer knew. The text at issue was not his “own creation”, but “a conglomerate of different works”. His client wanted to give the Jewish community one of his pictures as a “donation in kind” as compensation, the legal assistant added.
“A Bit of a Confused Mind”
The painter’s works fetch sales prices in the four-digit euro range. His most media-noticed work is a Lenten cloth that he made a few years ago for a collegiate church. The painter accepted his conviction. “I’m a bit of a confused spirit. That’s why I love the quiet world of the brush,” he explained to the jury at the end of his hearing.