The deputy mayor of Adolf Hitler’s home town has resigned after publishing a poem about immigration whose imagery was described by Austria’s chancellor as “disgusting, inhuman and deeply racist”.
Christian Schilcher, the deputy mayor of Braunau am Inn, published his poem in the Easter edition of a local newspaper affiliated to his far-right Freedom party.
The poem, Die Stadtratte (Nagetier mit Kanalisationshintergrund), roughly translates as The City Rat (Rodent with Sewerage Background).
The title is a play on words referring to a categorisation, “person with migrant background”, commonly used in German-language media and government correspondence for ethnic minority or mixed race citizens.
The poem’s rodent narrator advises migrants to to integrate or “quickly hurry away”.
Austria’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has demanded that the Freedom party – with which his own People’s party is in coalition – distance itself from the “abominable” poem, while the Social Democrat leader, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, said she was reminded of the language of National Socialist propaganda.
Schilcher initially defended himself, saying his poem had been designed to “provoke, but not to offend or hate” and apologised for the “historically charged” comparison between human beings and rats.
On Tuesday morning, the Austrian deputy chancellor and Freedom party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, confirmed Schilcher had resigned over the poem.
While Hitler did indeed liken his political enemies to rats four times in his manifesto, Mein Kampf, some analysts of the Austrian far right said they were more disturbed by the ideas of social Darwinism behind the verses.
“What is truly frightening about the poem is the point it articulates towards the end: that migrants will destroy Austria if they are allowed to mingle with the population,” said Natascha Strobl, an expert on the new Austrian right. “That kind of language is even breaking a taboo within the Freedom party.”
The poem does not liken humans to rats in a derogatory way, but rather posits the animal as a purer embodiment of what it sees as nature’s moral laws. The rat is aghast at human politicians spending money on “integration”, warning that “if you mix two cultures […] it’s as if you destroy them”.
Hitler repeatedly drew comparisons to the animal world in Mein Kampf in order to assert the need for a racially purified German nation, writing: “Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, […] the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse.” Any crossing of two beings, he argued, would produce a racially lower being that would be likely “succumb in the struggle” for survival.
