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Writer Rabinovici
Photo: Tania / contrasto / laif
No one is far off the beaten track now and nowhere.
Even Vienna, the city that would like to make its visitors believe that it has completely fallen out of time, is not immune to the terror of our day.
To person
The Austrian writer Doron Rabinovici was born in Tel Aviv in 1961 and has lived in Vienna since he was three.
His book successes include the novels "Ohnehin" (2004) and "Andernorts" (2010). In 2013 he and Matthias Hartmann presented the stage project "The Last Witnesses" with Holocaust survivors at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Most recently he published the volume "New Antisemitism? Continuation of a Global Debate" together with Christian Heilbronn and Natan Sznaider.
Not long before the murders, we - my wife, my daughter and I - were sitting in a restaurant with Israeli cuisine to give an interview about the success of this cuisine, not far from the streets where people were to be murdered shortly afterwards.
It was just a coincidence that we didn't meet the journalist who questioned us with the microphone a little later.
It was probably just lucky that we weren't in that other Israeli restaurant that is right in the middle of the bloody event.
It was only absolutely important to get together on Monday, because a slight lockdown was to come into effect that night.
After that, the restaurant would be closed for a month.
It was a warm, sunny November day.
The restaurants, bars and coffee houses were full of people who wanted to go out again, as if there was no tomorrow and no increasing case numbers.
No wonder that the assassins struck on this last evening of social gathering.
A short message whether we are fine
In any case, we told in that restaurant about the boom in Israeli culinary art, about the appeal of Tel Aviv, about the cosmopolitanism of this Middle Eastern metropolis on the Mediterranean, which vibrates with the pulse of time, although this heartbeat of modernity has something of a barrage about it.
We got home just in time to be surprised by the first news about the attack and at first it just seemed like a bitter aftertaste.
A short message whether we are fine.
A friend answered from downtown.
You think you heard gunshots.
Possibly from the area around the Vienna City Temple, the old main synagogue of the Jewish religious community.
That still sounded unreal and improbable.
But for the next few minutes we were flooded with communications.
On Whatsapp, on Twitter and via e-mail, we kept getting new information that exceeded each other and sometimes contradicted each other.
Relatives and acquaintances from different continents worriedly wanted to know what had happened and whether we were well.
We were sent videos showing an assassin firing at passers-by, how people ran for their lives and how individuals were gunned down.
It could be watched on television.
The center of the city was now a deployment site and resembled a war zone.
At first it was said that an attack on the synagogue had taken place.
Soon after, there was written about a hostage situation in the sixth district.
Then news of a shootout in another neighborhood spread.
At some point - I remember - there was even talk of 27 assassins who would have struck in very different places.
The terrorist hoped for the smartphones
As I write these lines, the investigation is by no means over.
Four civilians and one assassin were killed.
Twenty-two are injured, some seriously.
It was initially unclear whether the attack on the synagogue and whether it was a right-wing extremist or a jihadist bloody act.
The appearance of several terrorists at the same time rather pointed in the Islamist direction, but both ideological groups are thoroughly anti-Semitic and pursue similar strategies.
The terrorist who was eliminated was an Islamist.
No, not a refugee, as some people immediately thought, but a twenty-year-old born in Vienna.
Around his body he wore a dummy bomb belt.
But even though he walked around with this sheer imitation without explosives, he knew how explosive it was with it.
He believed that the transmitter for the explosive power of his bomb belt was in all of us anyway.
He hoped for the remotes, the smartphones, the social media.
The killers' strategy is obvious: by watching it happen, we are watching it happen.
The terrorists speculate with our fear.
No country is an "island of the blessed" - this is how Pope Paul VI once said.
Were called Austria.
Terrorism is the shadow of our open society.
There is no safe place where we will be safe from him.
But the jihadists 'and right-wing extremist violent criminals' calculations will not work out if we are not intimidated by them and if we do not succumb to the logic of their hatred.
At this moment it becomes clear how good it is that the FPÖ politician Herbert Kickl is no longer acting as Interior Minister and can profit from this massacre.
On the contrary: his successor Karl Nehammer from the ÖVP pointed out that it was two Muslim Austrians who rushed to the aid of the seriously injured police officers during the exchange of fire.
It is now necessary to reject the anti-Muslim agitation and at the same time to fight jihadism politically.
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