Tag des Denkmals: Holocaust Memorial culture in Wien

This is a critical look at how Vienna remembers - or ignores - its Jewish heritage and trauma. Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and with a political party created by ex-Nazis in 1953 coming into power in this country, we want to reflect on remembrance.

So much of our city’s creative dynamism came out of Jewish culture, and we are still missing some of the humour, ambition and curiosity the Jewish community brought to our home town.

Not all memorial culture is official, and it does not need to be respectful. We need more of it, says Eugene, to never forget, but also to take inspiration. He lives in Leopoldstadt, historically the ghetto, and still the heart, of Jewish culture in our city. Songs, demonstrations, films, newspaper articles, posters, novels and badges represent contemporary - and often cool - remembrance. Some significant examples include Primo Levi's autobiographical If this is a Man?, the Shoah Memorial in front of Brandenburg Gates in Berlin, Anne Wiederhold's The Future of Remembrance (she created Brunnenpassage and is curating the future of the nazi bunker under Yppenplatz), Samuel Barber's astonishing piece of music, Adagio for Strings, Victor Frankl's life work on happiness, films like Pianist, Schindler's List and La Vita e Bella, Living Books (where humans sit in libraries and can be interviewed about their remarkable life stories, a visit to Mauthausen or Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, well-presented archives and museums like the Shoah Museum in Berlin or the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Wien, or the innovative avatars who answer for children all kinds of questions about the Holocaust, bringing back to life real people and their experience. Anniversaries are probably the most powerful tool we have in this period.

How do we celebrate the story of Stefan Zweig, Hedy Lamarr, Sigmund Freud and Hugo Breitner?

In fact there are more post-war Jewish heroes than most Viennese know about: Simon Wiesenthal, Bruno Kreisky, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Elfriede Jelinek, Andre Heller, Michael Landau and Elizabeth T Spira.

So what will we visit on this unusual stroll?: Turnhalle in Rudolfsheim, Kindertransportdenkmal in Westbahnhof, two art projects from Kunst im Öffentlicher Raum, Haus des Meeres, bomb damage on Akademie (with inscription), human rights table, Albertinaplatz Hrdlicka sculpture, list of all Jewish victims in front of Nationalbank, Holocaust Memorial on Judenplatz, central synagogue to remember two terrorist attacks, Wiesenthal Centre, resistance monument on Morzinplatz (with museum/archive), and a Stolperstein.

If you visit Munich, Berlin or Nürnberg, you can explore second world war in lots of detail. But while visiting Vienna, you can explore Mozart in lots of detail. This is a missed opportunity, and enables cynical operators to manipulate history, or tell lies.

People around the world are surprised to discover that there is a Jewish population of Germany and Austria now, and so we also choose to look to the present and future.

Eugene has long dreamed of staging a project called Gefilte Flak. The memorials of the Holocaust and Vienna's lost Jews are mostly traumatic and sad. But we want to recreate the Kosher food of the original community, bringing visitors and residents into dialogue, while enjoying interesting and unusual central-European dining. Whereas most monuments are cold stone, we want - through social design - to remember the vitality and curiosity of our city before second world war. Many Austrians choose to forget the contribution of the Jewish people, abut we will present our event on top of Haus des Meeres, originally a Nazi gun attack tower, as a symbolic space. #gefilteFlak