Юденплац: История и Память Вены

Square in Vienna

Judenplatz (German, 'Jewish Square') is a town square in Vienna's Innere Stadt that was the center of Jewish life and the Viennese Jewish Community in the Middle Ages. It is located in the immediate proximity of Am Hof square, Schulhof, and Wipplingerstraße. It exemplifies the long and eventful history of the city and the Jewish community focused on this place. Archaeological excavations of the medieval synagogue are viewable underground by way of the museum on the square, Misrachi Haus. Two sculptural works, a carved relief and several inscribed texts are located around the square that all have subject matter relating to Jewish history. One of these sculptures is a statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The other is a memorial to Austrian Holocaust Victims, a project based on an idea of Simon Wiesenthal and unveiled in 2000. Created by British artist Rachel Whiteread, the memorial is a reinforced concrete cube resembling a library with its volumes turned inside out. The Austrian Supreme Administrative Court has its seat on the square.

Jews began settling in Vienna and in the area that was to become Judenplatz around 1150, coinciding with the settlement of the House of Babenberg. The first written mention names named the area "Schulhof" in 1294, a name which lasted until the pogrom of 1421. By the year 1400, 800 inhabitants lived here including merchants, bankers, and scholars. The Jewish city extended north up to the church Maria am Gestade, the west side became Tiefer Graben street, the east side was bounded by Tuchlaubenstreet, and the south side formed the square "Am Hof". The Ghetto possessed 70 houses, which were arranged so that their back walls formed a closed delimitation wall. The Ghetto could be entered by four gates, the two main entrances lay on the Wipplingerstrasse. At Judenplatz was the Jewish hospital, the Synagogue, the bath house, the house of the Rabbi and the Jewish school all among the most important in German speaking countries.

In the middle of the northern end of the square, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial stands for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah, made by the English artist Rachel Whiteread. It consists of a 10 by 7 metre block that is 3.8 metres tall. It is located in the northwestern end of the square before the Misrachi Haus and faces the Lessing Monument in the southeast, with its walls parallel to the length of the square. The memorial is site specific in many ways and is therefore dependent on the setting of Judenplatz. One facet of this site specificity is that it was designed at a domestic scale. It was imagined as if one of the surrounding buildings had a room cast inside out and placed in public in the middle of the square. The walls of the memorial resemble library walls of petrified books. However, the spines of the books on the walls are not legible; they all are turned inwards. On a concrete plinth, the names of the 41 places at which Austrian Jews went to their death during Nazi rule are written. Although this "nameless" library has a symbolic entrance, it is not accessible. The memorial stands in close relation with the exhibition of the Holocaust that is installed in the neighboring Misrachi Haus, where the names and data of 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews are documented and accessible through computer terminals. Excavations were undertaken to establish the Memorial from July 1995 to November 1998; these are considered the most important urban archaeological investigations in Vienna. Uncovered on the eastern half of the square were quarrystone walls, a well and cellars of a whole block from the time of a medieval synagogue. Controversy arose over the placing of the memorial over the archaeological excavations, which resulted in moving the memorial one meter from its original position on the site. The complete reorganization of the square and its transformation to a pedestrian plaza were completed in the autumn of 2000 with the inauguration of the Holocaust memorial. The erection of a museum sector in the Misrachi Haus was conceived in 1997 to supplement the show area at Judenplatz 8. In addition to the archaeological findings, exhibitions by a branch of the Jewish Museum Vienna would document Jewish life in the Middle Ages as well as the data base produced by the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance with the names and fates of Austrian Holocaust victims. and was therefore in a position to influence and shape the Viennese cultural climate. Lessing's "Ringparabel" in the drama "Nathan der Weise" is considered a key text of the Enlightenment and helped in the formulation of the idea of tolerance. From 1962 to 65, Charoux created a second Lessing monument out of bronze, that was unveiled at Ruprechtskirche in 1968 and moved to Judenplatz in 1981. This is the monument that stands on the square today.