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Memorial, Representation, Chimera: In Memory of the Humboldttempel, the Obliterated Synagogue of Favoriten, the 10th District of Vienna

June 19, 2020
Jews, Memorials, Public Space, Small Sensor Digital Photography, Vienna
4 Comments

I haven’t posted to this site for more than two years. The substance and rhythm of work and daily concerns had absorbed me as I immersed myself anew into the small wonders and demanding pressures of life in my native New York.  New impressions, discoveries, and rediscoveries defied short-form articulation and political conflicts and issues of social and economic inequality and change diverted my thoughts and emotions.  Then came the all-consuming pandemic, the “lockdown” and economic implosion, and the weeks of protest and upheaval that followed.  What prompted me to resume posting anew — and to begin with this seemingly obscure subject — was the appearance this week of an electronic “reprint” of one of my old posts portraying memorials to two of the vanished synagogues of Vienna.  The “reprint,” posted on the wien: postkolonial blog, is interspersed with commentary by Austrian sociologist Marietta Mayrhofer-Deak, a valued colleague and interlocutor.  Marietta posted the “reprint” in connection with a series of urban walks tracing places and trajectories relevant to the experience and daily lives of the waves of immigrants and refugees who have settled in Vienna in recent decades.  In that context, it is important that the diversity, rise, accomplishments, and murderous denouement of one of Vienna’s most characteristic and influential minority populations be remembered, honored, and learned from, for it is wise to know in whose footprints one treads.

Humboldttempel

The Humboldttempel, the towering, domed synagogue of the largely working- and middle-class quarter of Favoriten, the 10th District of the city of Vienna, was looted, dynamited, and burnt to embers eighty-one years ago, on the morning of November 10, 1938, during Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a twenty-four hour orgy of intimidation, violence, and destruction of synagogues, dwellings, and livelihoods of Jews throughout the territory that constituted Germany at the time.

Memory

Favoriten is a quarter of Vienna that I came to know well.  Even from afar,  its daily rhythms and the heights and depths of its history, like that of much of Vienna, haunt me.  I wonder how often, if ever, the thoughts of present-day residents of the 10th District –recent Turkish, Balkan, and Middle Eastern immigrants, and working-class descendants of 19th-century Viennese- and provincial-born Austrians and Czechs– turn to the Jewish workers, small-scale merchants, craftsmen, and workshop owners who, long ago, formed a significant part of the quarter’s population, or, for that matter, to the Jewish social activists and politicians who spearheaded the shaping the progressive social ethos, infrastructure, and culture from which today’s Viennese, whatever their origins, still benefit.

The organized Jewish community of Favoriten was founded in the 1870s. The Humboldttempel was constructed in the 1890s and took its name from the tree-filled square on which it was sited: Humboldtplatz.  The main hall of the synagogue was large enough to seat more than 700 attendees.  For decades, the dome of the Humboldttempel was a towering feature of Vienna’s skyline.

The architect of the Humbolttempel, Jakob Gartner, was responsible for three other synagogues in Vienna, as well for as a dozen more in cities and towns across the the former Hapsburg Empire. Gartner died in the 1920s.  Every one of the fifteen synagogues he designed and built was destroyed on November 10, 1938 or in the carnage that Germany — and Austria, as an integral part of Germany during the Nazi years — took with it abroad in its orgy of conquest, looting, destruction, and murder during the six-year-long world war that began less than a year after Kristallnacht.  Indeed, Austrians, as has become clear over the decades, played an out-sized role in the torment and murder of Jews and the destruction of Jewish life throughout most of Europe.

When the Humboldttempel was conceived and built, few would have would have imagined that it would vanish in flames only forty years later, or that its members and community would be deported and murdered. Despite sharp inter-ethnic friction and clerical and popular antisemitism at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, most Viennese Jews, ten percent of their city’s population, were confident of their places and prospects and of the protection of the state.  Others, however, had well-founded doubts and sensed that Jews would be denied a place in the societies and economies of post-imperial Europe — thus the deep roots of Zionism* in Vienna.

Memorial

The wonderful glass and concrete memorial monument to the Humboldttempel — pictured in the three photos above — was installed only a few years ago, at the edge of the park and playground that now fills Humboldtplatz, at a site diagonally across from two post-war apartment blocks that stand on what was the footprint of the vanished synagogue.

The memorial is both a three-dimensional architectural model and a near-incorporeal chimera.  Two-dimensional renderings of the exterior of the Humbolttempel are inscribed in black on the thick vertical transparent glass elements of the memorial.  These, combined with a floor plan inscribed on the concrete base of the model and a street plan inscribed on the surrounding asphalt, give an accurate rendering of exterior, interior, and location of the Humbolttempel.   However, with each shift in viewpoint, and with each change in the angle and intensity of sunlight, the three-dimensional recreation of the Humbolttempel seems to dissolve — first into a multiplicity of disconnected planes, and then into abstraction and phantasm.

So far as I gather, the Humboldttempel memorial is the work of an artist named Barbara Asimus. I have yet to track down her.  If anyone reading this post is acquainted with her, please convey my appreciation and admiration or, if you happen to know how I can reach her, please put me in touch.  I am also curious about what led the authorities of the 10th district to commission and place the monument when they did, the process involved, and, not least, in the reactions of people in the district.  As to the Humbolttempel itself, I would welcome information on the demographics of its former membership, as well as on the long-ago Jewish population of Favoriten.

For anyone planning a walk through Favorieten, I would recommend pausing for a moment of silence in front of 106 Favoritenstrasse, the one-time site of  Ansche Emes (People of Truth) prayer house (i.e. a small apartment or storefront synagogue, a “Shtiebl” in Yiddish) and at 22 Rothenhofstrasse, the one-time site of Newe Schalom (Well of Peace) prayer house, both looted and destroyed on Kristallnacht.  Nothing remains of either but, maybe, if one lingers in front of either address, whether on a quiet Friday night or a busy Saturday morning, one might imagine or even sense a distant echo of  sounds of prayer and celebration that once emanated from them.

A word of caution: It is not enough not to obey

One thing bothers me about the monument, however.  The inscription on its base is an oft-cited quotation from Hannah Arendt: “Niemand hat das Recht zu Gehorchen” (“Nobody has the right to obey”).  This is a powerful and indeed worthy admonition but, when applied to Kristallnacht, it obscures matters and provides far too easy a way out.  Ultimately, Nazism was a grassroots movement — a legally sanctioned criminal pyramid-scheme of theft, extortion, corruption, and divvying-up and handouts of the proceeds** — and Kristallnacht was as much or more of a bottom-up affair than a top-down one.  Whatever impetus from the top may have sparked it, Kristallnacht was a popular act of hatred, jealousy, sadism, and self-aggrandizement that individuals chose to participate in — or didn’t — of their own free will.  Yes, we should not obey evil, but we must also curb the evil within ourselves and part from the crowd whenever evil reigns.  Better yet, we should cultivate the integrity and the courage to rise up and actively intervene, whether injustice is in the offing, underway, or embedded in the world around us.

* Although not necessarily in the same political form that emerged in the aftermath of World War II or as pursued by right-of-center Israeli governments from the 1970s on.  See, for example, this recent essay by Peter Beinart in Jewish Currents.

** See, for example, Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 2005-2006, Frankfurt and New York

(Note: The three photos above were taken in December, 2018; the text is based on a draft written in November, 2019.)

Pauses: Online, in New York, in Prospect Park, and Photographically

February 27, 2018
Brooklyn, Fuji X100 digital, New York, Public Space
3 Comments

I haven’t posted to this site since early summer.  Since then, I’ve paused in New York and immersed myself into the concerns and demands of mundane daily life in the city of my birth.  A friend refers to my prolonged stay here as a term of protracted participant research into the increasing bifurcation of a society, the hyper-gentrification of a city, massive demographic changes, the rendering of whole categories of people into superfluity and neglect, and the slow-grinding wheels of unresponsive bureaucracies. In the course of other investigations, I’ve gained two arcane municipal licenses: as a certified tourism guide and as a substitute teacher in New York’s Byzantine and overburdened public school system.  Betwixt and between, as always: study, reading, work, and long urban wanderings.  As often as not, my late-day pauses involve fast walks or slow strolls through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. And my pauses while traversing the Park include stops at number of seemingly random sites including those portrayed above and below: A tree fractured at its trunk, its halves bound together by iron rods below and by near-intertwined branches above, and at the Park’s boathouse, silent and deserted at dusk on late winter afternoons.  There’s been pause in my photography as well: I do not have an analogue camera with me and my perpetually malfunctioning Fuji X-100 digital camera seemed to have given up the ghost during the chill of winter although, as evidenced by the two accompanying photos, every now and then it miraculously springs back to life, for the moment at least. (Note: Please click on the photos for larger images and richer tonality.)

Feet Unfettered, Ears Unfilled: A Siren’s Song from the Coney Island Surf

July 12, 2017
Brooklyn, Faces, Fuji X100 digital, Music, Public Space, Uncategorized, Urban Dynamics
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On his epic voyage homeward from Troy to Ithaca, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, had his crew bind him to the mast of his ship to keep him from being lured away by the enchanting sound of the Siren’s song. The crew stuffed their own ears with beeswax, to cut out not only the music of the Siren but also their captain’s delirious orders for them to set him free.

My own mundane journeys homeward in search of traces “my” vanished (or imagined) New York include a ritual of recurring late-day walks from Brighton Beach, past Coney Island, and on to Seagate and back, sometimes over the sand but usually on the part-wood, part-concrete surface of the historic boardwalk. Unlike Odysseus and his crew, I do not fear the songs of local Sirens. I traverse my route with ears unfilled and feet unfettered. Among the rewards: A pastiche of overheard conversations in Russian, Yiddish, Spanish, Haitian Creole-French, and even English, these inter-cut with melodies and rhythms of live and recorded music: Salsa, Hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, and mid-20th-century Soviet pop and post-Soviet Russian Rap. The music, in turn, brings with it occasional chances to join in summer-evening dance events, organized and impromptu.

A few weeks ago, a new Siren’s song led me from the boardwalk, across the windswept beach, and into the cold surf of Lower New York Bay.  What had first caught my ear was a distant Serbian-Roma brass-band sound not unlike that of Goran Bregovich that then seemed to merge with the tightly-arranged, turn-of-the-20th-century military marches of John Philip Sousa and then take on a hip-hop beat.  Turning seaward towards the source of the music, I saw the blinding glint of late-day sun rays bouncing off the polished brass bells of two Sousaphones.  There, standing in the surf, was a dozen-person-strong brass orchestra, its members attired as monochrome gladiators or, with a flight of fantasy, as Odysseus and his crew.  The name of the band: Funkrust.  I hope to hear — and see — them again.

The Architecture of Social Democracy, Red Vienna, 1919-1934: Karl-Marx-Hof and the Amalien Bath

June 22, 2017
Architecture, Fuji X100 digital, Housing, Infrastructure, Public Policy, Public Space, Urban Dynamics, Vienna
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Over the past three years, betwixt and between,I’ve been delving into the housing policies and achievements of “Red Vienna” (i.e. the visionary, socialist-dominated municipality of Vienna from 1919-1934) and its legacies, physical and social.  So far, my method has been two-fold: On a number of extended stays in Vienna, I’ve systematically walked the streets of the city from core to periphery, stopping at the great Gemeindebau (municipal housing estates) of the period. I’ve also explored relevant literature; amongst my primary guides: Architectural historian Eve Blau’s masterful The Architecture of Red Vienna (MIT Press, 1999).

Between the end of the First World War and the right-wing, fascist coup d’état that brought down the legitimate government of Austria in 1934, the left-wing “red” government of the municipality of Vienna managed to do what few cities have done before or since.  In only fifteen years, Vienna built scores of housing complexes providing a total of more than 65,000 new apartment units — affordable, modern, appealing dwellings for a total of more a quarter of a million people— and this in the face of a massive housing shortage, a legacy supply of substandard housing, minimal available green- or brown-space, a declining tax base, and severe economic deprivation stemming from the post-WWI dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and compounded by the worldwide great economic depression.

To put this in perspective, imagine the city of New York, which today has a population four times greater than that of Vienna during the 1920s (more than 8,000,000 people in NYC today vs. almost 2,000,000 in Vienna at the end of WWI), having built more than 250,000 new apartments for more than a million of its residents in the space of only a decade-and-a-half — and this not even during well-heeled times a la the Bloomberg and de Blasio years, but, say, during the great depression of the 1930s or the municipal bankruptcy era of the 1970s.

The housing complexes and ancillary social infrastructure of “Red Vienna” provided people with more than just shelter.  Their siting, layouts, external architecture, interior design and fittings, communal facilities, shared space, and interfaces with the city-at-large were painstakingly thought out and implemented down to the smallest details to foster family life, social cohesion, and individual growth, and to craft both a new aesthetic and a better urban and socio-economic environment.  Not least, in addition to the enormity of physical achievement of its housing program, the land acquisition and funding strategies involved in building projects of “Red Vienna” were brilliant exercises in public administration and finance.

Today, almost a century later, the aesthetic and social legacies of the building programs of “Red Vienna”  — anathema to the Austrian and German right-wingers and Nazis who attempted to destroy them between 1934 and 1945 — have endured to the present.  Physically, they continue to house lower-income Viennese, new immigrants primarily.  Ideologically and in terms of ethos, they lay dormant, a “sleeping beauty” of sorts ready to provide any and all who are interested with ample clues and inspiration for how to deal with today’s crisis-level social and economic bifurcations and the associated lack of affordable housing that fillets the demography and eats away at the foundations of major cities worldwide.

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The photos at the top of the page and immediately above provide but a bare-bones introduction to the architecture of Red Vienna and the world it attempted to shape:

At the top: The main courtyard and emblematic arched facade of the Karl-Marx-Hof housing estate, designed by architect Karl Ehn and built between 1926 and 1930.   Conceived and constructed in the form of a single, elongated structure well over a kilometer in length, the interconnected blocks of Karl-Marx-Hof snakesaround a series of open and enclosed courtyards on a plot with an area of more than 150,000 square meters.  Massive archways still open the complex to pedestrian through-traffic, making it’s length a real and a symbolic gateway rather than a barrier.  At its opening, the Karl-Marx-Hof contained 1,400 apartments intended for more than 5,000 inhabitants.  It’s original communal laundries and bath and shower facilities yielded way over the decades to apartment-based amenities.  The central area shown above was severely damaged during the fascist coup of 1934, when working-class residents of Karl-Marx-Hof rose up to defend their new home against right-wing militias. Euring the years of the Nazi period the name “Karl Marx” was (temporarily!) expunged.

Immediately above: The Amalien Bath, built in the early 1920s, one of the world’s largest swimming pool and bath complexes and a gem of the social infrastructure of “Red Vienna.”  Towering over Reumannplatz,a central square in the traditionally working-class 10th district of Vienna, the complex was named after a Viennese social-democratic children’s and women’s rights advocate, Amalie Pölzer.  The Amalien Bath was severely damaged by aerial and artillery bombardment during the Soviet advance into Vienna in 1945 but was restored to its original appearance during the immediate post-war years.  The luxury of its interior continues to give ordinary Viennese access to low-cost but luxurious swimming and spa facilities.

More on this subject in the future …

Springtime Moments and Details Recalled: Istanbul and Sofia

April 13, 2017
Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Green Space, Istanbul, Public Space, Sofia, Turkey
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DSCF0402Two recollections of moments and details from spring-times past. Above: A kite, a delighted child, and a patch of green on the shore of the Golden Horn near Fener, Istanbul, 2012.  In the background, a shipyard and dry-dock dating from early Ottoman times. Below: Blossoms, greenery, and the weathered, roughly-welded sheet-metal wall and numbered spaces of an empty parking lot in Sofia, Bulgaria, 2014 (the straightforward text on the signs: “paid unguarded” + “parking”).

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Recollections of Sofia: Empty Balconies, Life Turned Inward, and Harsh Light on Peeling Facades

March 15, 2017
Bulgaria, Film-based Photography, Photography, Public Space, Rolleiflex 6x6cm, Sofia, Uncategorized
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One summer, a little over twenty years ago, I took to wandering the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria late in the evenings, with a medium-format camera and a light-meter slung over one shoulder and a heavy tripod balanced on the other. At the time, I was entranced by the interplay between strong artificial streetlight and the textures of well-worn building facades and the way it registered on high-contrast black/white film pushed a stop or two beyond its rated sensitivity.

Among my favorite subjects, then as in recent years: balconies.  As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, Sofia was and still is a city of balconies: wrought iron, wooden, concrete, and plaster.  Two decades ago, however, just as today, most of Sofia’s balconies appeared empty, even on springtime and summer evenings.  Life had turned inward, so it seemed, and had yet to reemerge.  The social function of balconies as an interstice between the private and  public realms had ceased, with nobody observing public life from balconies nor conducting  their private lives in view of  neighbors or passersby.  Instead, a sharp, albeit invisible, dichotomy arose between public and private and indoors and out.

The source of this dichotomy is by no means a mystery. Factors include a rise of urban anomie in general, a search for privacy and an over-reaction against the pressures and intrusions of the public realm during the communist period, and the absence of social cohesion and trust in the time since.  The replacement of physical interaction and neighborhood connections by internet-based social networks also plays a part, as does the out-dated confusion of gated isolation with status.  For an in-depth examination, both of the history of Sofia and matters of public vs. private space in general, I recommend urbanist Sonia Hirt’s excellent book, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City, which I have been savoring chapter-by-chapter over the past year.

Meanderings Past: Two Random Street Corners, Istanbul

January 7, 2017
Architecture, Fuji X100 digital, Istanbul, Public Space, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Street corners.  Anchoring points in the urban landscape.  Places to pause, linger, turn, or confront unexpected vistas.  Apt metaphors for the start of a new year.  Places devoid of meaning from the vantage points of automobiles.

Above and below: Two seemingly nondescript street corners in Istanbul, 2014.

At the top: An intersection in Gümüşsuyu near Taksim — a 1920s apartment house, a late-nineteenth-century neighborhood mosque, and a high-rise cube under construction. Straight ahead, a 45-degree plunge into the quarter of Fındıklı; a turn to the left, and a grid of steep side-streets and concrete stairways wending down to the Bosporus.

At the bottom: A hard-left-turn upwards past a rarely-used sidewalk, a recent generic apartment block, and the wall of a centuries-old cemetery at the edge of Hasköy on the Golden Horn, photographed late one Sunday afternoon at a moment when the roadway was free of its usual, near-continuous, high-speed stream of rattling bus, truck, and automobile traffic

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The Viennese Secession, the Battle against Tuberculosis, and a Postal and Banking Palace for Everyman: Otto Wagner’s Postsparkasse Building

December 25, 2016
Architecture, Economics, Fuji X100 digital, Public Space, Vienna
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Above: The main entranceway and facade of the Austrian Postal Savings Bank Building, the Österreichische Postsparkasse (originally the k.k. Postsparcasse Amt, the Royal and Imperial Postal Savings Bank), designed by Otto Wagner and built between 1904 and 1906. Below: The Kassenhalle, the main hall and one-time central banking area of the building.

As the 20th-century began, Otto Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank building brought a new face to public sector architecture in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: streamlined, free of superfluous decoration, and with meticulous attention to the choice, finish, and unadorned display of materials, including glass, aluminum, and polished steel. Inside and out, the building marked a shift from from Jugendstil to modernism, as well as from ornate neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque displays of state power to aesthetic simplicity and the perfection of the environment in which public employees worked and the general public accessed essential services — secessionist architecture geared both to the public eye and to public health and welfare.

Late-Hapsburg Vienna was a densely-populated city. For most people, housing was substandard, overcrowded, and unhealthy, as were the city’s factories and workshops and the dank rooms in which ordinary office employees worked long hours.  In tenement dwellings and at work, fresh air and sufficient sunlight were rarities for the bulk of Vienna’s population. Tuberculosis was endemic and  conditions for its transmission rife.

Otto Wagner’s design and implementation of the State Postal Savings Bank building stressed provision of light, circulation of air, and availability of adequate and open work space.  The Kassenhalle, the main banking hall, of the building is a case in point. The photo below shows its overhead glass skylight and its opaque glass-brick floor.  Together, these transmitted a glow of light directly into the hall itself, and indirectly into the postal services section of the building one flight below, thus improving ambience and saving energy at the same time.

Just as the design and implementation of the building eased the lives of those who worked in and patronized it, so did the services the Postsparkasse offered.  The inception of postal savings  in 19th-century Europe brought secure ways to save within the reach of the mass of ordinary people.  Postal savings services, however, were founded on more than government largesse.  They served to channel volumes of small hordes of cash out of proverbial mattresses and other hiding places and into the hands of the state, thus keeping money in circulation and augmenting governmental coffers with what was, in effect,  an immense stream of ongoing,  low-interest, long-term loans.

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Remembering November 10, 1938: Phantasm and Reflection, Two Memorials Without Words

November 10, 2016
Architecture, Fuji X100 digital, Green Space, Identities and Traditions, Jews, Memorials, Public Space, Vienna
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The night of November 9-10, 1938: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass:  Throughout Nazi Germany (including Austria, which had folded itself seamlessly into Nazi Germany some months before) synagogues were plundered and set afire, with crowds of bystanders cheering, and police and fire brigades standing idly by.  Shops owned by Jews were looted and destroyed, Jewish men beaten and arrested, Jewish women terrorized and molested.  All this a seeming apotheosis of European religious antisemitism, exclusionary nationalism, “scientific” racism, nostalgia for a past that never was, and urban economic, social, and spatial competition.

In Vienna, all but one of the city’s monumental synagogues and modest prayer-houses were destroyed during the 24-hour rampage.  How are they remembered today?  Barely, and by few.  Memorial plaques mark the sites of a quite a number of the city’s destroyed synagogues, but their texts are as often as not confusing and bland, with events sanitized and the perpetrators obfuscated by overuse of euphemisms and passive voice in German and by shoddy accompanying translations into English.

Phantasm and Reflection: Two Photos of Monuments without Words

The photographs above and below portray two impressive memorials to two Viennese synagogues destroyed on Kristallnacht.  Both memorials eschew words for silence and didacticism for emotion.

The photo at the top was taken through a large plate-glass plaque set as a memorial on the corner of the Eitelbergergasse and Neue-Welt-Gasse in the posh Viennese suburb of Hietzing.  The plaque stands across the street from the one-time site of the “Neue Welt Tempel,” a freestanding structure, quite modern in its time, designed by architect Artur Grünberger in a style seemingly influenced  by the Viennese Secession. The Neue Welt Tempel was constructed in the late-1920s and early-1930s in the midst of Hietzing’s quiet tree-lined sidestreets and Jugendstil mansions.

Silkscreened onto the surface of the glass plaque is a finely-rastered, semi-translucent reproduction of an archival photograph of the exterior of the Neue Welt Tempel taken sometime in the mid-1930s, probably from the exact location where the plaque now stands.  By positioning oneself at just the right angle and distance from the plaque, a viewer is treated to a mirage … suddenly, the present and past are juxtaposed, and a ghost-like image of the Neue Welt Tempel appears to sprout from the surface of the yellow apartment house now standing on its former site. For a moment, the Neue Welt Tempel reappears as if still there … and then, just as suddenly, juxtaposition is lost and the illusion fades.

In the photograph below, a sparse, minimalist garden fills the length and part of the width of the one-time footprint of the 1870s, Neo-Renaissance style, “Turnertempel” synagogue at Turnergasse 22 in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, not far from the Gürtel and the shopping thoroughfare of Mariahilfestrasse.   The greenery at the edges of the garden offsets the starkness of the gravel surface, concrete pathways, and benches of well-weathered wooden beams.  The trees at the left of the photo are lindens. Summers, the scent of linden blossoms fills the garden and, as the weeks pass, fallen linden petals turn into perfumed dust that cushions the garden’s gravel surface. The total effect is apt: life emerging from, but never quite obliterating, destruction.

This past summer, I stopped at the Turnergasse memorial garden a number of times to read, write, reflect and rest.  There were few other visitors: workmen on lunch and cigarette breaks, occasional pairs of daytime beer drinkers, small numbers of neighborhood residents, judging by their appearances and voices, immigrants mostly, from the Balkans, Turkey, and the Middle East.  Did they know what once stood at the site where they were sitting?  Were they aware of its fate?  Could they sense the one-time prayers, concerns, and celebrations of people who had preceded them, and who had played out-sized roles in Vienna’s former greatness and in the shaping of the city in which they now live and the rights and security they now enjoy?  Probably not.  Most people in Vienna,  like most people elsewhere, are propelled by the intentionality of their own immediate concerns.  Others in Vienna, native-born Austrians and immigrants both, turn up their noses at the memories of Jews and bristle at reminders of their murder.  But for those of us open to it, to those of us who bear the weight of its absence, a presence seems to hover in the garden at Turnergasse.

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Footnote on Resources

For the past months, a small exhibition at Vienna’s Jewish Museum showcased the research and meticulous computer-generated recreations of the exteriors and interiors of Viennese synagogues and the urban contexts in which they once stood, done by Bob Marten and Herbert Peter, and published in book form some years ago as Die zerstörten Synagogen Wiens: Virtuelle Stadtspaziergānge and later in English as The Destroyed Synagogues of Vienna.

Beneficent Brutalism: A Hill-Top Church and a Towering Housing Estate, Vienna

November 7, 2016
Architecture, Fuji X100 digital, Housing, Public Space, Religion, Vienna
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Two magnificent, successful works of brutalist architecture, both at the very outskirts of Vienna …

The “Wotruba” Church

Above: The Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, set on a hilltop in suburban Liesing, at the edge of the Vienna Woods.  The church is popularly called the Wotruba Church, after its designer, sculptor Fritz Wotruba, who died one year before the structure, comprised of more than 150 massive concrete blocks, was completed in 1975.

Despite their weight, the blocks comprising the Wotruba Church appear to float, and the large glass windows on three sides of the church give the building a gossamer appearance usually not associated with concrete structures. When circumnavigating the exterior of the church, visitors are treated to a kaleidoscopic view of seemingly random shapes and plays of light that appears to change with each step.  The front lawn of the church offers a spectacular panoramic view of Vienna and far beyond, northwards, to the Marchfeld, the great Moravian plain.

Two curious footnotes: Between 1938 and 1945, when Austria comprised an integral part of Nazi Germany, the hilltop upon which the Wotruba Church stands had been the site of a Wehrmacht barracks, making the envisioning and building of the church an act of expiation of sorts (to the degree that expiation for past violence is possible).  Also, one of Fritz Wotruba’s early pupils, sponsors, and lovers was Anna Mahler, the daughter of Gustav Mahler and Alma Schindler, Mahler’s wife at the time and, later, the wife of Walther Gropius and, subsequently, of Franz Werfel.

Housing Estate at Alterlaa

Below: A partial view of but one of the immense apartment blocks comprising Wohnpark Alterlaa  (the Alterlaa Housing Estate), also at the edge of Vienna, designed by architect Harry Glück and built in the late-1970’s and early-80’s.  The saw-tooth design of the windows on the upper floors ensures that apartments are filled with light throughout the day. The curved set-back of the lower floors ensures ample sunlight and rainfall for nourishing balcony gardens and also creates a lush hanging-gardens-of-Babylon-like appearance that offsets the deliberate roughness of the concrete exterior.

Despite its seeming inhuman scale, the results of sociological surveys and anecdotal inquiries suggest that the Alterlaa complex is beloved by its residents.  Echoing the tradition of Viennese public housing implemented by socialist “Red Vienna” between 1919-1934, the complex contains social amenities: rooftop gardens, ample meeting and club rooms, swimming pools and sports facilities, nurseries and kindergartens, and even its own church. Grounds between the towers are landscaped and well-lit, and shopping and public transport are nearby.

In all, there is a feeling of community among the residents of Alterlaa.  The positive side thereof is that the physical attributes of the complex seem to have indeed succeeded in their mission of creating appealing private and public space.  Also, the relative isolation of the site fosters self-containment.   But, there is a more problematic side: Whether and to what degree the relative homogeneous demographics of the Alterlaa estate may have contributed to the satisfaction of its residents.

Unlike the great working-class public housing complexes of  1920s and early-1930s Vienna, Wohnpark Alterlaa is a cooperative, rather than a municipal, housing development.  The economics of cooperative apartment ownership skews the demographics of Alterlaa middle-class-wards and, thus, in terms of the class and ethnic matrix of Vienna, “ethic-Austrian-wards” as well. It is an open question whether such relative class and ethnic homogeneity eased the way to community or, more negatively, to a “bastion mentality” fostering solidarity and contentment in the face of perceived external threats. These, however, are matters for investigation by the experts.

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Afterthought: For the tragic saga of a paradigmatically unsuccessful municipal housing project conceived in the racist, class-ist mold of 1950s and 60s urban renewal as practiced in numerous American cities  (and designed by the future architect of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, mourned since its criminal destruction in 2001 but a resounding and resented flop in its early years) see the excellent documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.