Vienna – 15th October 2023

Discovering Vienna –Where East meets West

Vienna is often referred to as a “gateway to the Balkans”, according to a famous quotation attributed to the Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich in the 19th century.
But the city of Vienna was also an international stage during the Cold War, as its neutrality – written in the newly acquired constitution of 1955 – and geographical position made it an appreciated meeting place for various representatives of “the East” and “the West”.

Less well-known are the events which took place in Vienna in the 1930s on the eve of the Second World War, shaping the culture of remembrance in contemporary Austrian society and thereby influencing the role and relationships of the country with its neighbours, as well as within the region of “Central Europe”.

The participants explored traces of war in Vienna with the goal of revealing these unknown aspects, placing them in the context of the project, and making participants aware of the entanglement of different past conflicts in Europe.

Exploring the city on the traces of war

Participants were divided into four different working groups. Each group was assigned one specific monument, memorial or place connected to a war or pre-war period:

• Flak in the Augarten: these were built in 1944-1945 and used as anti-aircraft gun towers. In recent years, several controversies have risen up around their presence in the public space: some have wanted to destroy them, others fought to keep them as a sign of remembrance of the Second World War in Vienna.
• Holocaust memorial: built in 2000 on the Judenplatz (Jewish Square), which was the centre of Jewish life in Vienna in the Middle Ages and housed its synagogue (destroyed during the 15th century), this memorial is dedicated to the 65,000 Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
• Heldenplatz: the Anschluss was officially announced by Adolf Hitler in March 1938 from the balcony of today’s House of Austrian History (opened in 2008). Over the years, there have been several debates as to whether making “Hitler’s balcony” accessible to the public would strengthen the country’s collective memory of the past or rather create a new pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
• Lueger monument: a statue was erected of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor from 1897 to 1910, by his political party, the Austrian Christian Social Party, to acknowledge his contribution to the city’s modernisation and development into a metropolitan centre. His populist and antisemitic politics have been increasingly brought to light in recent years and his statue has become very controversial: it is seen as a point of shame for the Austrian culture of remembrance.

The tasks to be carried out during this exploration were, on the one hand, to find information on who or what was being commemorated, and on the other hand to engage in discussion with passersby about their own impressions and opinions about the monument or location. Short videos were produced to summarise the city exploration for the rest of the group.

By interacting with the local population, participants could get a sense of the current debates taking place within Austrian society: the topic of cancel culture, the rise of populism in the country (the far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs/Freedom Party of Austria, or FPÖ, being the frontrunner in opinion polls and voting intentions), and the upcoming legislative elections in 2024. Participants learned how history is being instrumentalised for political and societal purposes, and were also confronted with the knowledge they acquired earlier on the different workshops along the route.

The question of whether the Balkans begin in Vienna, or whether Vienna starts in the Balkans, will never be fully answered. But, for our group, leaving Vienna meant beginning a journey to Croatia, and specifically visiting the Jasenovac Memorial Site, on the border to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and thus deepening their learnings about multiperspectivity in history.