“Between Religion and Culture: Two Sites of Jewish Memory in Vienna Today”
Professor Abigail Gillman
Boston University Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures
This lecture analyzes two newly established sites of Jewish memory in the heart of Vienna: The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, re-opened in 1993, and Rachel Whiteread’s “Nameless Library,” a monument to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, erected in 2000. Both were designed to commemorate the Austrian Jewish past in the wake of the Shoah, as well as to confront the ongoing exclusion of Jewishness from the public sphere in the postwar period. As a reflection of this complex agenda, each incorporates a variety of recollective strategies–traditional-religious, historical, and postmodern (“virtual”). Compelled to lay bare chapters of the Austrian Jewish past too long hidden from view within a highly tendentious atmosphere, the monument and museum take a strikingly similar approach: they not only retrieve the past, they represent their endeavor as problematic and unresolved.