Critic's Notebook; Behind Sealed Doors, Opening Up the Past

Transcription

1 Kimmelman, Michael. Critic s Notebook; Behind Sealed Doors, Opening Up the Past The New York Times Online. October 30, New York Times On-Line Critic's Notebook; Behind Sealed Doors, Opening Up the Past Monday October 30, 2000 The Arts/Cultural Desk By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN To the surprise of almost everyone, including its organizers, Vienna's Holocaust memorial is finally done. It was unveiled on Wednesday before several hundred people who crowded together for a solemn ceremony that included the president of Austria, the city's mayor, its chief rabbi and its Roman Catholic archbishop. The memorial, a large concrete box, is in the midst of the Judenplatz, a small Baroque square where a synagogue was burned during a medieval pogrom. Like a similar memorial in Berlin that is still not completed, the memorial here became a source of national embarrassment as its construction was delayed for years. The delay made it seem that the country still couldn't reckon with its role in the murder of Jews. Local opposition to the memorial came from many quarters. Predictably, city council members of

2 Jorg Haider's far-right Freedom Party, which gained power in the recent Austrian national elections, didn't want it. But most unexpectedly, and significantly, neither did Jewish leaders in Vienna. So the big surprise is that the monument is now being embraced even by once outspoken opponents. The project has expanded to include a museum to display newly excavated remains of the burned synagogue and the renovation of an Orthodox Jewish center in the square called the Misrachi House. There is even a statement on a placard, just recently installed at the Judenplatz, by the city's archbishop, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn acknowledging the church's ''culpability in the persecution of Jews'' both during the Nazi years and before. What had recently seemed to be doomed has turned out to be one of the most elaborate and moving efforts in Europe to recognize the legacy of Jews, living and dead, and the centuries-old history of anti- Semitism. Its conspicuous element is the Holocaust monument, designed by Rachel Whiteread, one of the so-called Young British Artists of ''Sensation'' fame, who won an international competition sponsored by the city four years ago. This week Ms. Whiteread looked almost shocked that, after everything that happened, her work had been realized as she had intended. It is a

3 major new example of public commemorative art, a rarity in the proliferating industry of Holocaust memorialization. Its fundamental success is that it creates a rude interruption in a gingerbread square and in a picturesque, tradition-bound capital. It is a thing that now can't be ignored. A ghostly abstraction occupying the better part of half of the square, the sculpture is about 12 feet high, 24 feet wide and 33 feet long, an eggshell-colored minimalist block with double doors on the front that do not open. It is meant to resemble an inside-out library: its exterior is incised to simulate rows of identical books on shelves, spines facing inward. The names of Nazi camps are inscribed around the base. The monument is the size of a large room in one of the houses on the square, an architectural death mask. The symbolism is clear. The room cannot be entered. We will never know what is in the books or their names. They are forever lost to us. It is also a sculpture about public conscience flipped on its head: about making public what some Austrians wanted to shutter away, to keep behind closed doors. The Social Democratic mayor, Michael Haupl, in an interview before the unveiling on Wednesday, said he was pleased to have been able to complete what Germany's capital city has still not finished. But he acknowledged that it had taken 55 years since the

4 end of the war for Vienna to get to this moment. ''It is not a joyful event but an important one,'' he said. The debate during the last four years, he stressed, forced people here to talk about how, and whether, they wanted to deal with the past, a constructive process. ''In the end the outcome probably needed this period of reflection,'' agreed Peter Marboe, the city's councilor for cultural affairs, who played a big role in bringing the different sides together. In 1994 Simon Wiesenthal complained openly about a monument on the Albertinaplatz in Vienna by an Austrian artist, Alfred Hrdlicka, ''Against War and Fascism,'' which includes a bronze sculpture of a Jew scrubbing the sidewalk. People were using the sculpture as a bench. Barbed wire was added to it, making a bad thing worse. Mr. Wiesenthal said Vienna needed a proper memorial for the more than 65,000 Austrian Jews killed by the Nazis. The mayor agreed. The Judenplatz was chosen. Mozart lived there when he wrote ''Cosi Fan Tutte'' with his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, the son of a Jewish craftsman. More to the point, in 1421, during a pogrom, several hundred Jews burned themselves inside the synagogue rather than submit to baptism or execution. A 16th-century plaque with an image of the baptism of Jesus still hangs in the square. A Latin

5 inscription on it commemorates death of the ''Hebrew dogs.'' City archaeologists immediately pointed out that remains of the synagogue might exist. Excavations were begun. The bimah, or holiest part of the synagogue, was found. Meanwhile nine artists and architects from Europe and the United States were invited to compete for the design of the memorial, which could include the remains, as competitors wished. Ms. Whiteread's proposal, which did not involve the synagogue, was picked in January The city promised November of that year as the date it would be finished. But residents of the Judenplatz complained: The square would be ruined. The monument would be a target for neo-nazis. It was ugly. Defenders said it was about the Holocaust and Austrian responsibility for mass murder. It wasn't supposed to be beautiful. Then Jewish opponents of Mr. Wiesenthal spoke up. They resented him for not speaking out against Kurt Waldheim, like him a member of Austria's conservative party, when Mr. Waldheim ran for president. At the same time there were Jews who didn't want a memorial to stir up trouble. Others felt that Ms. Whiteread's project was a cliche: Jews as the people of the book. Weren't the deaths of Jewish

6 bakers and housewives as tragic as those of Jewish intellectuals? Then Holocaust survivors attacked it as abstract art; Jews did not die in the abstract, they said. Their distaste for modernism as a language of memory (never mind that Ms. Whiteread's work is hardly radical by contemporary art standards) in a bizarre way linked them with non-jewish Austrians who wished not to deal in any way with the legacy of the 20th century. The excavated synagogue should be the memorial, opponents suggested. It showed the long history of Jews and Jewish persecution in Austria and wouldn't stereotype Jews again as victims of the Holocaust. Besides, Ms. Whiteread's monument would be built above the excavation, and Jewish custom, they claimed, forbids building above a synagogue. Mr. Haider's Freedom Party sided with disgruntled residents of the square. As Jewish opposition grew, members of the party in the city government argued that there was no reason to defy the Jews and build it. The question began to arise: Who was this monument for, anyway? Was it for Jews as a site of mourning? For non-jewish Austrians as an expression of shame? Was it a monument to Mr. Wiesenthal? The memorial, in fact, was not for Jews, who didn't need it to remember what had happened. The

7 Viennese had to do it for themselves. This seemed the point of Ms. Whiteread's design: that Austrians should confront the void they had created in their own society, which is the empty space inside her monument. But the city couldn't build a Holocaust memorial over Jewish objections. Local politicians began to beat a hasty retreat. By the end of 1996 the memorial wasn't built. Most people thought it was dead because, with new city elections, the mayor survived, but a more conservative city council took over. The prediction turned out to be simplistic. Mr. Marboe, a conservative, took over as city councilor for culture and made the project his special mission. He spent the next year and several months trying to negotiate a solution, piece by piece. Jewish custom did not forbid building a memorial above a synagogue, he discovered, only above the bimah. With Ms. Whiteread's approval, the memorial could be moved a meter. Problem solved. The excavation would be expanded to include a museum about Jews in medieval Vienna and a computer center with information about Jews killed during the Holocaust. Vienna Jews who preferred the excavation to the monument were mollified. The city agreed to renovate the Misrachi House, a 500-year-old collapsing building behind the monument, through which the excavation would be

8 entered. The house was occupied by a Orthodox Zionist organization with a synagogue and children's center. This expanded the project to include current Jewish life in Vienna, not just Jewish history. Even residents of the Judenplatz were getting something. Previously jammed with cars, the square would become a pedestrian zone. What started as a $1 million monument escalated to a $10 million effort. Freedom Party members in the city government complained about the cost, and through federal elections last fall Mr. Haider's party entered the national government. But costs had risen because the project had become something far more ambitious. And this was a city project, never a federal one, which now had broad support in Vienna. A monument that had been an embarrassment because of the long delay turned into a civic opportunity. At the unveiling, it was commonly noted that no one from the federal government had been invited to participate. A day earlier, however, the government had signed an international agreement to give restitution to slave laborers under the Nazis. Mr. Marboe stressed that the monument exists above all that: ''It goes beyond contemporary politics. It's a palpable commitment in the heart of the city, beyond all party considerations, that we are sending a signal. We want to remember and consider our own fallibility, our responsibility.''

9 Crowds for the first time entered the excavated synagogue and the museum on Wednesday. Designed by a Viennese architectural team, Andras Palffy and Christian Jabornegg, the museum mixes concrete and stainless steel, an echo of Ms. Whiteread's stripped down aesthetic, straightforward and not too theatrical. Natural light is brought into a double height basement relieving the sense of oppression. An underground passageway leads to a staircase that rises to the excavation. The rise is an important psychological device. Spotlights pick out the bimah and crumbled stone walls of the synagogue in an otherwise black room. Like the rest of the architecture the room is more affecting for being understated. Less is more. Ms. Whiteread's memorial is documented through models and drawings in another room. But the success of Mr. Palffy and Mr. Jabornegg's design is to serve both the monument and the excavation without equating the Holocaust with a medieval pogrom. The two are together but separate. No doubt Ms. Whiteread's work will change as city grime accumulates on it. What's now pristine is meant to become weathered. Dirt should pick out the vertical striations of the pages of the books, articulating the surface, making it more interesting to look at.

10 But this shouldn't alter her Holocaust monument's basic impact. The French writer Jean Baudrillard has talked about how ''forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.'' Useful memorials can't solve the problems of history. But they can articulate them, keep them alive. Whatever may be slightly melodramatic about Ms. Whiteread's metaphor of a library, in the context of this city's architecture, it is, as a sculpture, an unsentimental rupture. Amplifying an appalling fact of history, it is an artistic achievement and a civic achievement for Vienna, too, where a reckoning with the Nazi past was overdue.