A Pretty Blue Cornflower

[Carla_Danger]

I think it is deliberately nasty for the Freedom Party to use this flower. Why not choose another flower? You'd think they would try to distance themselves.

"The cornflower is a complicated symbol," Vienna historian, Bernhard Weidinger, tells me. "It was the German Kaiser Wilhelm's favourite flower, and was used by pan-German nationalists in the 19th Century.

"Then between 1934 and 1938, when the Nazis were a banned party in Austria, it was the secret symbol they used to wear in order to recognise each other."

The beautiful flower with an ugly past - BBC News

 

[strollingbones]

ahh dont be hating on the cornflower....i love it...down the roadsides....and it is chicory too

 

[Carla_Danger]

ahh dont be hating on the cornflower....i love it...down the roadsides....and it is chicory too

It's a pretty flower, but it has an ugly past.

 

[Carla_Danger]

Oh, the smell of fascism!


The Freedom Party has moved on a long way from the heyday of its firebrand leader, Joerg Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008. Back in the 1980s and 90s, Haider openly praised aspects of the Third Reich. These days, Freedom Party members who veer in that direction are quickly silenced or removed from their posts.

A day or so later I fall into conversation with a young man called Michael, in a park in Vienna.

It's a balmy spring evening, the chestnut trees are in bloom, and in the distance a jazz band is playing a free concert on an open-air podium. "What do you think about the Freedom Party and the cornflower?" I ask.

"I hate those people," he replies. "And the cornflower isn't great. But you know, I'm not quite as worried about their attitude towards the past as I am about their attitude to what's going on now. Their barely-concealed racism, their rhetoric against Muslims and refugees is really wrong."

He looks around at a family playing with their well-groomed dogs. "And the other thing that bothers me," he says, "is that they are working on people's fears and encouraging our worst instincts. Like Donald Trump does. Austria is better off than most countries in the world. It's safe - and in general life is pretty good here. But to hear the Freedom Party talk, you'd think we were living in some desperately difficult country." He shrugs.


The beautiful flower with an ugly past - BBC News

 

[Carla_Danger]

 

[RodISHI]

The right-wing populist political party in Austria led by Heinz-Christian Strache a member of the Europe of Nations. Things are alter just a bit from the original but the spirit remains it was representative of a "Third Camp" in politics. Clinton calls their movement "The Third Way". Pretty simple if you can look at their bigger picture and put the pieces of their history in there along with what is transpiring now and has been going on for a lot of years now un-noticed.

 

[L.K.Eder]

the splaination for wearing this flower is that blue is the color of the party, and the color of europe. lol.

and they try to tie it to the 1848 freedom movement.

when in reality it is, as stated above, the mark of the nationalsozialisten in österreich.

 

[Dogmaphobe]

ahh dont be hating on the cornflower....i love it...down the roadsides....and it is chicory too

Cornflowers and chicory bear a superficial resemblance, but they are in different genera.

Chicory is Cichorium intybus whereas Cornflower is Centaurea cyanus. The first is a perennial with a tap root much like a dandelion while cornflowers are annuals with a more fibrous root system.

 

[L.K.Eder]

and do you know why they no longer had to wear the flower after 1938?

austria became the first victim of hitler.

 

[yiostheoy]

Osterreich huh?

Now that's trivial pursuits for you there.

 

[Coyote]

The cornflower is one of my favorite roadside flowers, and this time of year it is in bloom everywhere. It also has quite a history of symbolism:
Centaurea cyanus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In folklore, cornflowers were worn by young men in love; if the flower faded too quickly, it was taken as a sign that the man's love was not returned.[8]:126


The blue cornflower has been the national flower of Estonia since 1968 and symbolizes daily bread to Estonians. It is also the symbol of the Estonian political party, People's Union, the Finnish political party, National Coalition Party, and the Swedish political party, Liberal People's Party, and has since the dawn of the 20th century been a symbol for social liberalism there.[citation needed] It is the official flower of the Swedish province of Östergötland and the school flower of Winchester College and also of Dulwich College where it is said to have been the favourite flower of the founder, Edward Alleyn.


The blue cornflower was one of the national symbols of Germany.[10] This is partly due to the story that when Queen Louise of Prussia was fleeing Berlin and pursued by Napoleon's forces, she hid her children in a field of cornflowers and kept them quiet by weaving wreaths for them from the flowers. The flower thus became identified with Prussia, not least because it was the same color as the Prussian military uniform.[11] After the unification of Germany in 1871, it went on to become a symbol of the country as a whole. For this reason, in Austria the blue cornflower is a political symbol for pan-German and rightist ideas.[12][13] Members of the Freedom Party wore it at the opening of the Austrian parliament in 2006.[14]


It was also the favourite flower of Louise's son Kaiser Wilhelm I.[15] Because of its ties to royalty, authors such as Theodor Fontane have used it symbolically, often sarcastically, to comment on the social and political climate of the time.[citation needed]


The cornflower is also often seen as an inspiration for the German Romantic symbol of the Blue Flower.[citation needed]


Due to its traditional association with Germany, the cornflower has been made the official symbol of the annual German-American Steuben Parade.


In France the Bleuet de France is the symbol of the 11th November 1918 armistice and, as such, a common symbol for veterans (especially the now defunct poilus of World War I), similar to the Remembrance poppies worn in the United Kingdom and in Canada.[16]


The cornflower is also the symbol for motor neurone disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.[17]


Cornflowers are sometimes worn by Old Harrovians.​

 

[Carla_Danger]

He reeks of Nazi.

Often, Hofer’s flirtation with the iconography and language of the National Socialist movement has been far from covert. As late as 2013, he attended party gatherings wearing a blue cornflower on his lapel – a plant popularised as a symbol of the pan-German movement by the Austrian politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer, whom Hannah Arendt described as Adolf Hitler’s “spiritual father”. Strache has stated that the cornflower represented “the bourgeois freedom movement of 1848”, a claim that historians dismiss as fictitious.


Norbert Hofer: is Austria's presidential hopeful a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'?