5 - Missing Images: Memorials and Memorial Projects in Contemporary Vienna

Summary

Vielleicht ist jedes Gedenken, sind alle Rituale und Mahnmale immer Instrumente des Vergegenwärtigens und des Vergessens zugleich.

[Perhaps every form of commemoration, all rituals and monuments, are always instruments both of remembering and forgetting at the same time.]

—Doron Rabinovici, Ohnehin

AS EXPLORED IN THE INTRODUCTION to this study, the decades since the Waldheim Affair of 1986–88 have been marked by a change in attitudes in Austria toward its National Socialist past and its complicity in the Holocaust. This has been reflected not only in the literary and cinematic works explored in the previous chapters of this study, but also in Austria's public spaces, with Austria's increased historical consciousness leading to an increased desire to commemorate victims of National Socialism, and Holocaust victims in particular, in public space. Heidemarie Uhl has termed this “die Wiederentdeckung der Orte” (the rediscovery of place), the refocusing of attention on the concrete places where Nazi persecution occurred. Often springing from grassroots initiatives investigating persecution in concrete places or localities within the cityscape, these memorials draw attention not only to the fact that Holocaust victims lived in streets that one may walk down every day, or indeed live in, but to the “lokale[n] Verstrickung in den Holocaust” (local involvement in the Holocaust), the fact that without the support of ordinary men and women who lived in the selfsame streets and neighborhoods, the Holocaust could not have happened. This, for Uhl, constitutes “die verstörende Dimension der Orte” (the disturbing dimension of places), and accounts for the impact of these local memorial projects.

Public monuments and memorials are symptomatic for how a nation or group of people perceives its past at a given moment in history. As Heidemarie Uhl has traced, developments and conflicts in Austria's attitude vis-à-vis its own history have been reflected in the postwar Austrian memorial landscape.