Theodor Herzl Commemorative Plaque
Residenz Elisabeth, Pfarrgasse 2; Note: The plaque is dedicated to three writers: Theodor Herzl, Mark Twain and Franz Werfel
Residenz Elisabeth, Pfarrgasse 2; Note: The plaque is dedicated to three writers: Theodor Herzl, Mark Twain and Franz Werfel
Herzl was born in Budapest, and came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family. He studied law in Vienna and then worked as a Paris correspondent for the newspaper Neue Freie Presse, whose feuilleton he soon headed.
At the beginning of 1896, his main work was published under the famous title The Jewish State. An Attempt at a modern solution to the Jewish question (Der Judenstaat. Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage). In this work, Herzl came to the oft-quoted conclusion that the "Jewish question" is neither a religious nor a social question: "It is a national question." The "solution" announced in the subtitle means the establishment of a state for the Jews.
Although Herzl had left the question of the location of a Jewish state open in his work - he proposed Argentina as an alternative to Palestine - after the First Zionist Congress (1897, Basel; convened and chaired by him), he quickly realized that the goal of the Orthodox groups was Palestine alone. With that in mind, he began to negotiate with diplomats and European rulers.
After the disappointments he experienced in politics and the impressions of the trip to Palestine in 1898, Herzl began work on the utopian novel Old New Land (Altneuland, 1902).
In 1904, Theodor Herzl died at the early age of 44 of chronic heart failure. When the first president of Israel (David Ben-Gurion) proclaimed the new state in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948, he stood under a photographic portrait of Theodor Herzl.
Reference to Ischl
In 1883, one year after receiving his doctorate in law, writer Theodor Herzl visited Ischl for the first time and stayed at the Hotel Post. In the 1890s, he stayed in Ischl in the summer as a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse newspaper. In this capacity, he stayed at the Hotel Elisabeth in 1897 and was an eye-witness of the dramatically worsening flood situation due to the persistent rain.
When Herzl died in 1904, the following was written in the Ischler Wochenblatt newspaper:
"The well-known writer Theodor Herzl succumbed to a heart condition on the afternoon of the 3rd of this month in a sanatorium in Edlach in the Semmering area. ... As we are told ..., Dr. Herzl spent his youth, the eighties, every summer in Ischl and he also wrote his first works here, such as the comedy “Causa Hirschhorn". ... For the last few years, Dr. Herzl stayed in the hotel "Kaiserin Elisabeth".
