Aspirin for Amnesia in Austria

We all know the slogan, “In case of risks and adverse effects, read the package insert and ask your doctor or pharmacist.” But last month in Vienna I ended up with unsolicited advice when trying to pick up some blood pressure medicine. I was told not to buy the Teva product I wanted — I should get a Bayer product instead. There’s nothing unusual about that; I get suggestions like this now and then, depending on price or accessibility, even comfort or quality considerations. And since the latter product is historically more common and popular in Europe, I asked for the reason to consider it.

But this time it was different. It caught me off guard. Even though I was aware of the video of Italian medical staff discarding Israeli products, I was unsuspecting, expecting something reasonable or scientifically grounded. I should have known better.

It wasn’t about the products themselves at all, but because Teva is an Israeli company; thus, complicit in genocide. So, I should get something from a company completely innocent, like this reliable German brand… Oh, wait.

That suggestion, in its casual moral arithmetic, tried to erase almost a century of unspeakable complicity — and that’s where the moral calculus collapsed under its own weight. Clearly, when the pharmacist recommended Bayer over Teva, it wasn’t a pharmacological judgment but a geopolitical performance disguised as consumer advice. And the irony? That the “innocent” alternative carries its own historical burden, considering Bayer’s role during the Holocaust.

IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate of which Bayer was part, was notoriously entangled with the Nazi regime; not merely through profiteering, but through direct involvement in war crimes, including the production of Zyklon B and the exploitation of forced labour from Auschwitz. Bayer itself took advantage of the absence of legal and ethical constraints on medical experimentation to test its drugs on unwilling human subjects in several concentration camps, particularly in Auschwitz.

Yet, by the mid-1970s, Bayer had re‑emerged as one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, without ever fully confronting its Nazi past.

That legacy doesn’t vanish with a rebrand or a century of Aspirin ads. And yet, there I was, being nudged towards Bayer as the “better” choice, as if history were a footnote.

There’s something chilling about how easily these names circulate in everyday life, stripped of their historical resonance. It’s not just irony but a kind of amnesia dressed up as consumer advice. And in Austria, where memory and forgetting are so politically charged, the layers multiply.

This moment exposed the absurdity of purity politics in pharmaceutical choice — as if one could navigate global trauma by switching brands, as if complicity were a matter of origin rather than of structure and intent.

Teva, headquartered in Israel, becomes shorthand for a contemporary conflict; Bayer, with its connection to IG Farben, is somehow sanitised by time and familiarity. The logic is not just flawed but historically incoherent.

The reasoning that refuses an Israeli product to perform virtue ends up excusing real, documented crimes as distant prehistory. There’s a difference between being of a nation and acting in its name; between complicity imagined and complicity recorded in ledgers and lab reports. Moral clarity requires memory, not selective outrage. And perhaps that’s the only prescription we’re really missing.

It’s a parable of selective memory: how trauma is compartmentalised, how consumer choices become moral performances, how history is flattened for convenience and selectively remembered or forgotten, how ethical discomfort is outsourced to the shelf behind the counter. It’s not about the medication itself but about the story we tell ourselves when choosing it.

I arrived at the pharmacy to manage my blood pressure and instead was handed a dose of historical amnesia and unsolicited geopolitical judgment. The irony wasn’t just historical but somatic: the very act of seeking care became a trigger for moral inflammation.

Maybe the pharmacist was right after all. In Austria, Aspirin isn’t just for pain; it’s for memory too. It soothes the ache by erasing the cause. Amnesia, unlike hypertension, is seldom treated; it’s dispensed as virtue, over the counter. But amnesia doesn’t cure complicity; it only dulls the symptom. And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous drug of all.