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Posts from the ‘Urban Photography’ category

Vienna Judenplatz: centuries & memories of the Jewish community

Above/featured: Judenplatz at night. The Holocaust memorial is in the foreground at centre. In the background are “To the little trinity” at centre and Misrachi House (Museum Judenplatz) at right. Photo, 10 Jun 2022.

At Judenplatz are clear visual reminders of the city’s first Jewish community in medieval times.

The first Jewish community in Vienna settled around present-day Judenplatz in the Middle Ages with mention in written documents dated mid- to late-13th century AD/CE. Daily Jewish life thrived around the Or-Sarua Synagogue, the Jewish School, and the Mikveh ritual bath. The community along with the surrounding Jewish neighbourhood came to an end with the Pogrom of 1421. Catholic Habsburg Duke Albrecht II rolled out a decree (Wiener Geserah, Vienna Gesera) which legitimatized the expulsion, incarceration, torture, and murder of some 800 Jewish residents; accompanied by destruction and forced takeover of buildings and property.

Below I highlight remnants and traces to the medieval Jewish community at this square in central Vienna.

Judenplatz, Vienna, Wien, Oesterreich, Austria, fotoeins.com

Facing northwest: B, Bohemian Chancellery; H, Holocaust Memorial; L, Lessing monument; M, Misrachi House; T, To the little Trinity. Photo, 20 May 2018.

Facing southeast: B, Bohemian Chancellery; J, Jordan House; H, Holocaust memorial; L, Lessing monument. Photo, 20 May 2018.

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Vienna: Wall of Names Holocaust Memorial

Above/featured: Shoah Namensmauern Gedenkstätte memorial site.

I drag my fingers gently down each stone block, across the fine indentations and the print of countless names.

I give quiet voice to each name I see.

In Vienna’s 9th district is a small green space, Ostarrichi Park, in front of the Österreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank). The park is home to the Shoah Namensmauern Gedenkstätte (Holocaust Wall of Names Memorial), dedicated to over 64-thousand Austrian Jews murdered during the Nazi regime. Public inauguration of the memorial occurred on 9 November 2021 on the 83rd anniversary of the Pogromnacht.

The establishment and realization of the memorial has been a lifelong project for Vienna-born Holocaust survivor Kurt Yakov Tutter, who with his family fled to Belgium in 1930. Kurt and his younger sister, Rita, survived with the help of a Belgian family; their parents were deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

He made a new home in Toronto, Canada, where in 2000 he began working to create a memorial to murdered Austrian Jews. Funding from the national Austria state emphasized the enormous significance of the historical memorial; responsibility for continuing maintenance of the memorial is now shared by the Austria National Fund and the City of Vienna.

The names of over 64-thousand children, women, and men are engraved onto 160 giant granite slabs, arranged in the park space as an oval ring. Within the open and uncovered space, visitors to the memorial can walk briskly past each vertical block, but the air is thick with names.

• Jewish Welcome Service
• Austria National Fund for Victims of National Socialism
• Austrian Holocaust Victims database, DÖW (Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance)
• Audio: Mr. Tutter speaks about Austria’s very late road to dealing with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and why he created the Wall of Names project.

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Vienna: Aspang Station Deportation Memorial

“Well into the 1970s, the area around present-day Leon Zelman Park was the site of the Aspang Railway Station, which was built in 1880–1881 as a terminal for the regional Vienna-Aspang-Pitten rail line. Despite its relatively central location in the city’s 3rd district, the station served only regional rail traffic and was not very busy. These were likely reasons why after the “Anschluss” the Nazis chose this station for deportation transports.

Two transport trains departed in October 1939 with 1584 Jewish men deported to Nisko in the Lublin District of the General Governorate of occupied Poland as a failed attempt to create the Lublin reservation for expelled European Jews. Much larger deportations resumed from February 1941 to October 1942. 45451 Austrian-Jewish men and women were deported on a total of 45 transport trains to ghettos and extermination sites in (what are now) Czechia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia.

In Vienna, the cynically-named Nazi ‘Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung’ (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration) organized deportation efforts including forced captivity and assembly or collection points. Four internment stations were established in the city’s 2nd district where prisoners were abused and stripped of their possessions. For every transport, about one thousand people were driven to Aspang Station in uncovered trucks, in plain and open sight of the city’s population.

Of the 47035 Jewish men and women deported from Aspang Railway Station, only 1073 (2%) survived, according to the research by Austrian historian Jonny Moser, himself a survivor of the Holocaust/Shoah. In total, more than 65-thousand Austrian Jews fell victim; most of them began their road to their deaths at Aspang Station.”

• Paraphrased from Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien (Art in public spaces Vienna).

After the war and Allied-occupation period, little was done to improve the station and its tracks. The station was closed in 1971 and the station building was demolished by 1977. The turn of the millennium provided momentum to both city and the national rail company for redevelopment of the area, including apartment blocks, green space, and a memorial. Today, the former railway station is Leon Zelman Park, named after Dr. Leon Zelman who established in 1980 the Jewish Welcome Service Vienna and led the organization until his passing in 2007. The inauguration of the deportation memorial occurred on 7 September 2017 with full opening to the public on the following day.

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Wien Museum, Otto Wagner Pavillon Karlsplatz, 4. Bezirk, Weiden, Wien, Vienna, Austria, Österreich, fotoeins.com

Vienna: 22 urban frames for 2022

Above/featured: “The first Sunday.” Karlsplatz, 1st district – 15 May 2022.

Earlier in the year, I spent four weeks in Vienna, soaking in late-spring and early-summer weather in Austria’s capital city. I highlighted 3 images and scenes which in addition to time spent left personal impressions. Below, I highlight in a “last chance effort” an additional 22 visual examples of the urbanity in Wien, folding in splashes of colour, lines of focus, and accessibility to good timing.

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Vienna: Imperial Court Pavilion Hietzing, by Otto Wagner

Above/featured: Hofpavillon Hietzing in afternoon light, facing east with the departing eastbound U-Bahn U4 train. Photo, 15 May 2022.

Along Vienna’s U4 metro line, a dark-domed white cube-like structure seems to float over the tracks between Schönbrunn and Hietzing stations. Most may not realize the building’s relevance to the history of the city’s first railway, the city’s rapid urban evolution into the 20th-century, and the railway architect’s eventual “break away” transition from historicism to modernism.

Vienna was going to look very different after 1890. The city undertook its second and greatest expansion, absorbing 6 outer districts and ballooning the total population to almost 1.4 million (almost doubled in 10 years). The city’s administration recognized the challenge of efficiently transporting people between its new outer suburbs and the inner city. In 1894, Vienna appointed architect Otto Wagner with the complete design and construction of the new Wiener Stadtbahn metropolitan railway. The railway saw the creation of four new lines: the Danube canal line (Donaukanallinie), the “Belt” line (Gürtellinie), the suburb line (Vorortlinie), and the Vienna river valley line (Wientallinie). Today, the city’s U-Bahn U4 and U6 lines and the S-Bahn S45 line operate electrified over much of the original routing.

The Vienna valley line brought track and construction in front of Schönbrunn, the imperial summer palace for the ruling Habsburgs. The rail line’s new Schönbrunn station was located at the northeast corner of the palace grounds. But at the grounds’ northwest corner, Wagner created two stations: one for the public, and one for the Habsburgs. Built for the inauguration of the city railway on 1 June 1898, the imperial pavilion was set aside for the emperor, family, and staff. Emperor Franz Josef I only used the pavilion twice, as he was reluctant (hostile) to accept rapid changes brought by modernity.

Wagner created a domed-building whose interior was furnished with floral and vegetal elements in the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) style, a painting with a bird’s eye view of the city over Schönbrunn, a private suite for the emperor; and whose exterior included the uniform green and white colours seen throughout the entire rail network, glass and wrought-iron elements, and a separate portal providing a covered entrance for the imperials. Out of the many station buildings Wagner designed for the entire system, the imperial pavilion at Hietzing is most associated with the “historical” architectural style. The building is now a part of the city’s Wien Museum after successful post-war efforts to save and restore the structure.

The informal name is the “Hofpavillon Hietzing” (Imperial Court Pavilion Hietzing), but the building’s formal name is “Pavillon des kaiserlichen und königlichen Allerhöchsten Hofes” (Pavilion of the Imperial and Royal Highest Court). In the images below are divided sections: “exterior”, “interior”, and “sketches”.

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