Eric
hobsbawm's phrase, “invention of tradition,”Footnote
1
describes the new function of the institution of the museum in the late modern period. In the 1980s, museums and the new format of major historical exhibitions became hotspots of social energy, becoming places that shaped identities, challenged them, and repeatedly negotiated them anew. Already back in the time of nation building in the nineteenth century, the institution of the museum played a very important role in constructing and legitimating hegemonic perceptions of society, state, nation, culture, and history, as contributions from Anita Aigner, Reinhard Johler, and Diana Reynolds-Cordileone in this forum show. As central factories of modernity, museums were, of course, also connected with the related othering mechanisms that helped to produce hegemonic understandings of identity.Footnote
2
Stabilizing identity necessarily makes use of the logic of difference: speaking of “our” history and traditions at the same time constructs an Other, which differs from the self.Footnote
3
This mechanism structures all areas of society, including museums. It means, for example, that the existence of an “Upper Austrian Provincial Museum” (founded in 1833) also indicates the existence of other provincial museums and of related awareness that a specific, individual history will be presented in the museum, a history that differs from that of the other Habsburg Crownlands.Footnote
4
The patriotic knowledge of the fatherland produced here legitimated the concept of the Habsburg monarchy as a multiethnic, multinational state. The idea of a harmonic, ethnically diverse family of peoples, primarily characterized by its different styles of traditional clothing, was also portrayed in the “Kronprinzenwerk” encyclopedia and in numerous other ethnographic publications using both text and images.Footnote
5
However, the most recent postcolonial analyses, which have also been presented at exhibitions in Vienna,Footnote
6
highlight the discrepancy between the recognition of ethnic differences in the sense of a supranational concept of state and the more or less “subcutaneously” embedded hegemony of an imperial culture, mostly shaped by the German-speaking elites.Footnote
7
The attempt to counteract the increasingly important nationalist movements with a pastoral, premodern imagery of harmonious coexisting nationalities was, however, doomed to failure. The heterogeneous diversity of Central Europe could not be sorted according to ethnically homogenous regions,Footnote
8
and the category “ethnicity,” which was problematic anyway,Footnote
9
faded in the light of the increasing persuasive power of the concept “nation.” Institutions of cultural memory primarily found their sphere of influence in the foundation and stabilization of national identity during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was here, too, that both constitutive functions of cultural memory proved to be effective. Externally, they created a boundary against an Other that differentiated between what was “one's own” and what was “foreign.” At the same time, such institutions also created an internal hierarchy. This hierarchy conveyed which narrative is, or should be, universal in a society or, in other words, which narrative should represent the entire community. This same hierarchy also marginalized minority narratives, by making them refer not to the community but rather to individual groups. The universal memory, the hegemonic narrative of our history, is the product of negotiations and conflicts of interpretation regarding the past.Footnote
10
The competition to assert a hegemonic narrative can be seen in commemorative culture projects on all levels—irrespective of whether the project is a history of a village, the construction of a memorial, or national flagship projects such as a national history museum or a museum of contemporary history.Footnote
11
The representations of cultural memory reveal which groups have the power of definition and which are marginalized or excluded. In museums and exhibitions, it becomes particularly clear which stories can be told or represented, as well as where the boundaries of what can be said and shown lie. And it is particularly the swift, temporary medium of exhibition that has the potential to intervene in existing hierarchies and orders of narratives.
This leads us to a further characteristic of memory, by which museums gain a specific position in all societal bodies that produce knowledge about the past. Jan Assmann differentiates between “two modi,” within which cultural memory exists: “at one point in the modus of potentiality as archive, as a complete horizon of collected texts, images, patterns of behaviour and in another in the modus of topicality as a inventory of objectivised meaning, updated and put into perspective by the respective present.”Footnote
12
This makes the museum into a paradigmatic site, which brings cultural memory alive. The objects in a museum are integrated into a never-ending process of paraphrasing, rewriting, and overwriting history. New historical questions give new relevance to objects in storage that had previously been given little attention. Exhibits are put into storage or are given new meanings. This can be seen in the conclusions drawn from exhibitions about Gustav Klimt, who was allegedly rediscovered as an icon of the Viennese Modern Age in the 1980s. However, Klimt's work had already been exhibited during the Nazi period in order to emphasize a specific Viennese identity.Footnote
13
Creating legitimation by referring to heritage and tradition—a central social function of museums—became less important after 1945. The pathos-filled formulas of future and progress, the conflicts of the Cold War, and the trauma of the threat of nuclear war, began to take hold of society's imagination after 1945. It was not until the grand narrative began to fade and “the utopian energies” of modernity (Jürgen Habermas)Footnote
14
were exhausted at the end of the 1980s that attention was again given to museums as engines of identity.
Vienna 1900 in 1985 Vienna: Inventing a New Tradition through Exhibitions
The history of exhibitions in Vienna provides a paradigmatic example of the ways in which a museum is literally able to invent new identities. The art and culture of the Viennese Modern Age, which is now deeply rooted in the canon of Vienna's image, did not establish itself as a new trademark of the city until the mid 1980s. This development owed its success to the exhibition “Traum und Wirklichkeit: Wien 1870-1930” (Dream and Reality: Vienna 1870–1930), which was displayed as Sonderausstellung (special exhibition) of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna in the Künstlerhaus from March to October 1985.Footnote
15
It was this major historical exhibition that made the icons of the Viennese Modern Age—Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, and Otto Wagner—into a fixed part of Viennese cultural memory. Unprecedented use of tourism marketing strategies gave the capital city of a small neutral country on the edge of the iron curtain the shine of its former glamour as imperial capital of the Habsburg Empire.Footnote
16
To make this possible, however, it was first necessary to overcome the recently hegemonic Catholic-conservative image of Vienna as the bulwark of Christian Western civilization against the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire, an image that could also be applied effectively to the Cold War. The counterdiscourse of the Social Democratic Party, which had held the absolute majority of seats on the Vienna City Council since 1945, was not able to do much against the dominance of the traditional Catholic image of Vienna—something that will be discussed in greater detail below.
The “Traum und Wirklichkeit” exhibition brought about a major change. Carl E. Schorske's Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, which was published in 1980 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1981,Footnote
17
served as a script for the exhibition, designed by architect Hans Hollein.Footnote
18
Schorske also wrote the historical introduction in the catalogue.Footnote
19
The phenomena addressed by Schorske were, as he himself noted, not entirely scientifically unchartered territory. There were already numerous research works on the topics of philosophy, music, art, architecture, and science around 1900. However, they did not make recourse to an overall concept. Schorske opened up a new perspective on the narrative framework, which went beyond individual artistic and academic personalities to document the astonishing creativity of an entire generation. Schorske's overall concept of the Viennese Modern Age around 1900 starts from the premise that the challenges that affected this generation, and the positions that were developed as a result of these challenges, are of relevance for our present.
Schorske's picture of the Viennese Modern Age, which lacked progressive pathos and was shaped by self-reflection and by the sense that something was coming to an end, corresponded to the self-understanding of the late twentieth century that the paradigm of a self-assured modernism was also coming to an end. The myth of triumphant modernism had found its imaginary capital cities in Paris, London, and New York. The upcoming postmodernism, however, could no longer identify with formulas of heroic pathos. Jürgen Habermas's diagnosis that modernism's utopian energies had been exhausted found a historical reference point in “Vienna around 1900.” The protagonists of the Viennese fin de siècle lived with underlying feelings of a broken, doubting, and failing modernism, marginalized by society and looking longingly at metropolises such as Berlin and Paris.
In academic debates, Schorske's Viennese fin de siècle was seen as a precursor to the decay of the grand narrative of modernism. In Viennese cultural policy, it served as a most welcome narrative framework for the “Traum und Wirklichkeit” exhibition, which aimed to transfer the glamour of the turn of the century to Vienna at the end of the twentieth century.
“Traum und Wirklichkeit” became an important cultural event, with more than 600,000 visitors, a number that, even today, no other Viennese exhibition has ever matched. It allowed Vienna to show its capability of working with a new format of large-scale historical exhibitions, a style that was inaugurated in 1977 with the Die Zeit der Staufer exhibition in Stuttgart that itself had been visited by a record-breaking 671,000 visitors. Exhibitions on the Wittelsbach dynasty in Munich (1980) and on Prussia in Berlin (1981) followed the same successful model, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors.Footnote
20
This new interest in historical and cultural heritage also showed that times had changed: the future-oriented utopias of modernism no longer had the social energy they once did. In their search for orientation, people looked increasingly to the past.
From today's perspective, “Traum und Wirklichkeit” was a perfectly timed intervention, as the fundamental ideas behind the city's historical meaning were in the process of being eroded. Vienna's cultural memory had mainly rested on two competing narratives, which reflected the ideological poles in Austrian politics. From a Catholic-conservative perspective, Vienna's heroic age was back in the time of the Ottoman Wars and during the baroque period, when the city became a stronghold of Christian Western civilization, defending against the Ottoman Turks.Footnote
21
As an antithesis, there was the concept of Vienna as a social metropolis, fought for and created by the labor movement and by the Social Democratic city administration after World War I, and again after 1945. The flagship housing buildings of Red Vienna became icons of the city during the interwar period. In the postwar decades, the visual impact of New Vienna's modern architecture was meant to symbolize progress and prosperity.Footnote
22
At the beginning of the 1980s, neither image of history could glue society together with the same effectiveness as had previously been the case. The erosion of the myth of modernism was particularly revealed by its architectonic symbols—landmarks of modern urban development began to lose their attraction, not just in Vienna, but all over Europe. At the same time, the historical building fabric of the city center was being rediscovered. Beyond politics, local structures of civil society engagement developed to create initiatives to revitalize decaying Gründerzeit neighborhoods such as Spittelberg.
The heroic myth of the city's successful defense against the Turks was also being eroded. In 1983, there had already been an attempt to create a major historical exhibition in the Künstlerhaus—and it was here that “Traum und Wirklichkeit” broke all exhibition records in Vienna two years later. The “Turks before Vienna: Europe and the Decision 1683” marked the anniversary of the successful battle for Vienna in 1683 and was remarkably popular with the public. The exhibition was, however, criticized in intellectual and academic circles. The reactivation of a traditional enemy stereotype, which could encourage discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, was seen as giving the wrong signal in an urban society increasingly shaped by migration.Footnote
23
The political fight to establish one memory for the city over another was eventually resolved in the harmonious picture offered by “Vienna around 1900.” This Gesammtbild synthesized elements of both the imperial, cultural heritage that had been shaped by Catholic conservatism and the progressive traditions shaped by Red Vienna. The large-scale, eye-catching installations on the roof of Vienna Künstlerhaus could almost be interpreted as an atonement for the previous cultural-political struggles: the shimmering gold plastic monument in the form of a female nude from Gustav Klimt's allegory of Medicine, on the one side, and the use of an architectural motif from the Karl-Marx-Hof—an iconic municipal tenement complex from Red Vienna—on the other, symbolized the leitmotif of the politically neutralized label “Vienna around 1900.”
By making 1930 the temporal endpoint of the exhibition, the central historical conflicts—including the establishment of the Ständestaat dictatorship in 1933, the suppression of the 1934 February uprising, and the Anschluss in March 1938—were all omitted from the programme. “1934 is not going to appear in this exhibition and neither is 1938,” as Hans Hollein succinctly put it in his comments on the exhibition concept.Footnote
24
However, a section of the exhibition ignored the requirement to stop at the year 1930. The historian Jonny Moser connected the publishing of “Der Judenstaat” by Theodor Herzl in 1896 to Viennese anti-Semitism of the fin de siècle, seeing it as a precursor to the persecution by the Nazis: “When the united Nazi party ran in the Vienna communal elections of 1932, their election posters already bore the slogan ‘When Jewish blood splashes from the knife!’ (...) The Judenhass (hatred of Jews) had reached its peak—it could now be translated into a Nazi policy of extermination, without any additional arguments.”Footnote
25
Moser's contribution draws attention to a gap: the question of the role played by “Vienna around 1900” as a prologue to the “Auschwitz rupture in civilisation” (Dan Diner). Fin-de-siècle Vienna was not just the city of Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, and Wittgenstein, but also of Karl Lueger and Adolf Hitler.Footnote
26
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Vienna, and other large Central European cities with ethnically and nationally mixed populations, developed into a “battlefield of nationalistic chauvinism, of ethnic and social dichotomies, and finally of racism of every sort and of anti-Semitism” rather than into melting pots, as Jacques Le Rider put it.Footnote
27
Contaminations of “Vienna around 1900: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” and Nazi Looted Art
The connection between the Viennese Modern Age and the “Auschwitz rupture in civilisation,” which “Traum und Wirklichkeit” had avoided, was covered in the context of the exhibition “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (15 February to 5 May 1986). The difference between the programmes of the two concepts can already be seen in the different periods focused on. The beginning of “Traum und Wirklichkeit” is marked by the stock market crash of 1873, the endpoint being the global economic crisis in 1929. Both of these dates present Vienna as a guiltless victim of international developments, a narrative pattern on which the concept of Austria as the “first victim” of Nazism is based.Footnote
28
In contrast to this, “Vienne 1880–1938” connects the icons of the Viennese Modern Age—Freud, Herzl, Kraus, Klimt, Kokoschka, Loos, Mach, Musil, Schiele, Schönberg, Wagner, Weininger, Wittgenstein, etc.—with the precarious political developments in Austria in the 1930s. The exhibition ends with the chapter “De Vienne la Rouge à la fin de la république” and “Finis Austriae.” Here, March 1938 is not presented from the perspective of Austrian victimhood, but rather from a perspective of Austrian joint responsibility for the event, in particular regarding the fate of Austrian Jews. In the catalogue volume, the narrative of “Vienne 1880–1938” ends with Paul Celan's “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue).Footnote
29
The different conceptions particularly manifest themselves in the different images, which—as far as can be seen in the catalogue—compose the endpoint of the visual narrative of “Vienna around 1900.” In “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse,” photos show Hitler's reception in Vienna in March 1938, which are contrasted with photographs of “manifestations antisémite à Vienne,” the pogrom-like riots that followed the Anschluss.
In “Traum und Wirklichkeit,” images of the economic crisis function as a visual closing sequence—photographs of mass suffering, of the unemployed and homeless, which are connected with the familiar strategies of justification in Austria's collective visual memory. This justification says that the enthusiasm throughout numerous sections of the population for the Anschluss to Nazi Germany can be ascribed not to anti-Semitism, German nationalism, or sympathy for other aspects of Nazi ideology, but rather to the suffering experienced during the 1930s.
The visual representations of the Anschluss in “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” can today be seen as a premonition of the change in perspective toward the country's Nazi past prompted by debates about ÖVP's presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's role during the Nazi period in 1986. The Waldheim scandal initiated a fundamental debate in society about how to deal with the so-called repressed Nazi past of the Second Republic and with Austria's guilt in connection with Nazi crimes, particularly regarding the expulsion and murder of Austrian Jews.Footnote
30
In this case, too, exhibitions were to become the most important sites for the production and communication of this new conception of history. The “Vienna 1938” exhibition in Volkshalle in Vienna's City Hall used photos of Hitler's enthusiastic reception on the 15 March 1938 on the Heldenplatz in Vienna, as well as of the pogrom-like riots against the Jewish population, to visualize the concept of co-responsibility.
Since 1986, when the earlier conception of history was broken with, the persecution, robbery, and murder of the Jewish population and the aftermath in the Second Republic have been frequently addressed. Suddenly, some of the most famous icons of the golden age of the Viennese fin de siècle became contaminated by Austria's perpetrator role in the history of the Holocaust and its shameful aftermath in the Second Republic. Using the more than questionable argument for seeing Austria as the “first victim” of Nazi aggression in 1938, Austrian politics tried to avoid any serious efforts to make material restitution after 1945. The eventual debates over Nazi looted art started with a bang in 1998 when two paintings by Egon Schiele, “Portrait of Wally” and “Dead City,” which had belonged to the collection of the Leopold Museum, were seized during an exhibition of Schiele's work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Further lawsuits followed, with the Bloch-Bauer case being of particular international importance.Footnote
31
Maria Altmann (1916–2011), the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, demanded the return of paintings, some of them masterpieces, by Gustav Klimt from the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere in Vienna. Both these demands and the pressure of public opinion led to the formation of a historian's commission in the autumn of 1998, which was given the task of researching (1) the confiscation of assets in the territory of today's Republic of Austria during the Nazi period and (2) the question of compensation or return to be carried out by the Republic of Austria after 1945.Footnote
32
Also, in 1998, the Kunstrückgabegesetz (Art Restitution Act) was passed with the task “to return collective items from Austrian federal museums and collections, which had become federal property because of or as a result of the NS-tyranny, to their original owners or their rightful heirs.”Footnote
33
In 2008, an exhibition in the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) focused on the importance of restitution of looted art (and other objects) to the heirs. Its starting point was an observation according to which “the restitution of art and commodity objects often constitutes a first point of contact of the third and fourth generation with the family history during the Nazi period.”Footnote
34
In 2000, the furniture museum “Mobiliendepot” in Vienna had dealt with Aryanized furniture as part of the museum's inventory in its exhibition “inventARISIERT.”Footnote
35
The Republic of Austria's embarrassing attitude toward the restitution of Jewish property has often been tackled in numerous publications and exhibitions. The moral obligation to restore Nazi looted art was hardly contested anymore. In 2006, five major paintings by Gustav Klimt were restored to Maria Altmann, among them “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” The Viennese advertising agency GEWISTA used the restitution of the “Golden Adele” for an image campaign in the public space. The aim of the City Light-Teaser campaign, “Ciao Adele—Adele is leaving,” was to demonstrate the kinds of reactions a city light could provoke. For two weeks, Klimt's portrait was exhibited in light boxes at tram and underground stations, with “Ciao Adele” as a text. Many people wondered who commissioned such a campaign and about its aim—the posters became the talk of the town. It was only in the third week of the campaign that the enigma was solved: “Adele is leaving. What now? Efficient advertising. On Gewista's City Lights.” The campaign was a tremendous success. “Approximately two thirds of the Viennese people remembered the campaign, being able to recall it immediately.”Footnote
36
Through the act of restitution, Adele had once again come fulminating within the scope of Viennese memory.
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Eric hobsbawm's phrase, “invention of tradition,”Footnote 1 describes the new function of the institution of the museum in the late modern period. In the 1980s, museums and the new format of major historical exhibitions became hotspots of social energy, becoming places that shaped identities, challenged them, and repeatedly negotiated them anew. Already back in the time of nation building in the nineteenth century, the institution of the museum played a very important role in constructing and legitimating hegemonic perceptions of society, state, nation, culture, and history, as contributions from Anita Aigner, Reinhard Johler, and Diana Reynolds-Cordileone in this forum show. As central factories of modernity, museums were, of course, also connected with the related othering mechanisms that helped to produce hegemonic understandings of identity.Footnote 2
Stabilizing identity necessarily makes use of the logic of difference: speaking of “our” history and traditions at the same time constructs an Other, which differs from the self.Footnote 3 This mechanism structures all areas of society, including museums. It means, for example, that the existence of an “Upper Austrian Provincial Museum” (founded in 1833) also indicates the existence of other provincial museums and of related awareness that a specific, individual history will be presented in the museum, a history that differs from that of the other Habsburg Crownlands.Footnote 4 The patriotic knowledge of the fatherland produced here legitimated the concept of the Habsburg monarchy as a multiethnic, multinational state. The idea of a harmonic, ethnically diverse family of peoples, primarily characterized by its different styles of traditional clothing, was also portrayed in the “Kronprinzenwerk” encyclopedia and in numerous other ethnographic publications using both text and images.Footnote 5 However, the most recent postcolonial analyses, which have also been presented at exhibitions in Vienna,Footnote 6 highlight the discrepancy between the recognition of ethnic differences in the sense of a supranational concept of state and the more or less “subcutaneously” embedded hegemony of an imperial culture, mostly shaped by the German-speaking elites.Footnote 7
The attempt to counteract the increasingly important nationalist movements with a pastoral, premodern imagery of harmonious coexisting nationalities was, however, doomed to failure. The heterogeneous diversity of Central Europe could not be sorted according to ethnically homogenous regions,Footnote 8 and the category “ethnicity,” which was problematic anyway,Footnote 9 faded in the light of the increasing persuasive power of the concept “nation.” Institutions of cultural memory primarily found their sphere of influence in the foundation and stabilization of national identity during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was here, too, that both constitutive functions of cultural memory proved to be effective. Externally, they created a boundary against an Other that differentiated between what was “one's own” and what was “foreign.” At the same time, such institutions also created an internal hierarchy. This hierarchy conveyed which narrative is, or should be, universal in a society or, in other words, which narrative should represent the entire community. This same hierarchy also marginalized minority narratives, by making them refer not to the community but rather to individual groups. The universal memory, the hegemonic narrative of our history, is the product of negotiations and conflicts of interpretation regarding the past.Footnote 10 The competition to assert a hegemonic narrative can be seen in commemorative culture projects on all levels—irrespective of whether the project is a history of a village, the construction of a memorial, or national flagship projects such as a national history museum or a museum of contemporary history.Footnote 11 The representations of cultural memory reveal which groups have the power of definition and which are marginalized or excluded. In museums and exhibitions, it becomes particularly clear which stories can be told or represented, as well as where the boundaries of what can be said and shown lie. And it is particularly the swift, temporary medium of exhibition that has the potential to intervene in existing hierarchies and orders of narratives.
This leads us to a further characteristic of memory, by which museums gain a specific position in all societal bodies that produce knowledge about the past. Jan Assmann differentiates between “two modi,” within which cultural memory exists: “at one point in the modus of potentiality as archive, as a complete horizon of collected texts, images, patterns of behaviour and in another in the modus of topicality as a inventory of objectivised meaning, updated and put into perspective by the respective present.”Footnote 12 This makes the museum into a paradigmatic site, which brings cultural memory alive. The objects in a museum are integrated into a never-ending process of paraphrasing, rewriting, and overwriting history. New historical questions give new relevance to objects in storage that had previously been given little attention. Exhibits are put into storage or are given new meanings. This can be seen in the conclusions drawn from exhibitions about Gustav Klimt, who was allegedly rediscovered as an icon of the Viennese Modern Age in the 1980s. However, Klimt's work had already been exhibited during the Nazi period in order to emphasize a specific Viennese identity.Footnote 13
Creating legitimation by referring to heritage and tradition—a central social function of museums—became less important after 1945. The pathos-filled formulas of future and progress, the conflicts of the Cold War, and the trauma of the threat of nuclear war, began to take hold of society's imagination after 1945. It was not until the grand narrative began to fade and “the utopian energies” of modernity (Jürgen Habermas)Footnote 14 were exhausted at the end of the 1980s that attention was again given to museums as engines of identity.
Vienna 1900 in 1985 Vienna: Inventing a New Tradition through Exhibitions
The history of exhibitions in Vienna provides a paradigmatic example of the ways in which a museum is literally able to invent new identities. The art and culture of the Viennese Modern Age, which is now deeply rooted in the canon of Vienna's image, did not establish itself as a new trademark of the city until the mid 1980s. This development owed its success to the exhibition “Traum und Wirklichkeit: Wien 1870-1930” (Dream and Reality: Vienna 1870–1930), which was displayed as Sonderausstellung (special exhibition) of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna in the Künstlerhaus from March to October 1985.Footnote 15 It was this major historical exhibition that made the icons of the Viennese Modern Age—Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, and Otto Wagner—into a fixed part of Viennese cultural memory. Unprecedented use of tourism marketing strategies gave the capital city of a small neutral country on the edge of the iron curtain the shine of its former glamour as imperial capital of the Habsburg Empire.Footnote 16 To make this possible, however, it was first necessary to overcome the recently hegemonic Catholic-conservative image of Vienna as the bulwark of Christian Western civilization against the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire, an image that could also be applied effectively to the Cold War. The counterdiscourse of the Social Democratic Party, which had held the absolute majority of seats on the Vienna City Council since 1945, was not able to do much against the dominance of the traditional Catholic image of Vienna—something that will be discussed in greater detail below.
The “Traum und Wirklichkeit” exhibition brought about a major change. Carl E. Schorske's Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, which was published in 1980 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1981,Footnote 17 served as a script for the exhibition, designed by architect Hans Hollein.Footnote 18 Schorske also wrote the historical introduction in the catalogue.Footnote 19 The phenomena addressed by Schorske were, as he himself noted, not entirely scientifically unchartered territory. There were already numerous research works on the topics of philosophy, music, art, architecture, and science around 1900. However, they did not make recourse to an overall concept. Schorske opened up a new perspective on the narrative framework, which went beyond individual artistic and academic personalities to document the astonishing creativity of an entire generation. Schorske's overall concept of the Viennese Modern Age around 1900 starts from the premise that the challenges that affected this generation, and the positions that were developed as a result of these challenges, are of relevance for our present.
Schorske's picture of the Viennese Modern Age, which lacked progressive pathos and was shaped by self-reflection and by the sense that something was coming to an end, corresponded to the self-understanding of the late twentieth century that the paradigm of a self-assured modernism was also coming to an end. The myth of triumphant modernism had found its imaginary capital cities in Paris, London, and New York. The upcoming postmodernism, however, could no longer identify with formulas of heroic pathos. Jürgen Habermas's diagnosis that modernism's utopian energies had been exhausted found a historical reference point in “Vienna around 1900.” The protagonists of the Viennese fin de siècle lived with underlying feelings of a broken, doubting, and failing modernism, marginalized by society and looking longingly at metropolises such as Berlin and Paris.
In academic debates, Schorske's Viennese fin de siècle was seen as a precursor to the decay of the grand narrative of modernism. In Viennese cultural policy, it served as a most welcome narrative framework for the “Traum und Wirklichkeit” exhibition, which aimed to transfer the glamour of the turn of the century to Vienna at the end of the twentieth century.
“Traum und Wirklichkeit” became an important cultural event, with more than 600,000 visitors, a number that, even today, no other Viennese exhibition has ever matched. It allowed Vienna to show its capability of working with a new format of large-scale historical exhibitions, a style that was inaugurated in 1977 with the Die Zeit der Staufer exhibition in Stuttgart that itself had been visited by a record-breaking 671,000 visitors. Exhibitions on the Wittelsbach dynasty in Munich (1980) and on Prussia in Berlin (1981) followed the same successful model, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors.Footnote 20 This new interest in historical and cultural heritage also showed that times had changed: the future-oriented utopias of modernism no longer had the social energy they once did. In their search for orientation, people looked increasingly to the past.
From today's perspective, “Traum und Wirklichkeit” was a perfectly timed intervention, as the fundamental ideas behind the city's historical meaning were in the process of being eroded. Vienna's cultural memory had mainly rested on two competing narratives, which reflected the ideological poles in Austrian politics. From a Catholic-conservative perspective, Vienna's heroic age was back in the time of the Ottoman Wars and during the baroque period, when the city became a stronghold of Christian Western civilization, defending against the Ottoman Turks.Footnote 21
As an antithesis, there was the concept of Vienna as a social metropolis, fought for and created by the labor movement and by the Social Democratic city administration after World War I, and again after 1945. The flagship housing buildings of Red Vienna became icons of the city during the interwar period. In the postwar decades, the visual impact of New Vienna's modern architecture was meant to symbolize progress and prosperity.Footnote 22
At the beginning of the 1980s, neither image of history could glue society together with the same effectiveness as had previously been the case. The erosion of the myth of modernism was particularly revealed by its architectonic symbols—landmarks of modern urban development began to lose their attraction, not just in Vienna, but all over Europe. At the same time, the historical building fabric of the city center was being rediscovered. Beyond politics, local structures of civil society engagement developed to create initiatives to revitalize decaying Gründerzeit neighborhoods such as Spittelberg.
The heroic myth of the city's successful defense against the Turks was also being eroded. In 1983, there had already been an attempt to create a major historical exhibition in the Künstlerhaus—and it was here that “Traum und Wirklichkeit” broke all exhibition records in Vienna two years later. The “Turks before Vienna: Europe and the Decision 1683” marked the anniversary of the successful battle for Vienna in 1683 and was remarkably popular with the public. The exhibition was, however, criticized in intellectual and academic circles. The reactivation of a traditional enemy stereotype, which could encourage discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, was seen as giving the wrong signal in an urban society increasingly shaped by migration.Footnote 23
The political fight to establish one memory for the city over another was eventually resolved in the harmonious picture offered by “Vienna around 1900.” This Gesammtbild synthesized elements of both the imperial, cultural heritage that had been shaped by Catholic conservatism and the progressive traditions shaped by Red Vienna. The large-scale, eye-catching installations on the roof of Vienna Künstlerhaus could almost be interpreted as an atonement for the previous cultural-political struggles: the shimmering gold plastic monument in the form of a female nude from Gustav Klimt's allegory of Medicine, on the one side, and the use of an architectural motif from the Karl-Marx-Hof—an iconic municipal tenement complex from Red Vienna—on the other, symbolized the leitmotif of the politically neutralized label “Vienna around 1900.”
By making 1930 the temporal endpoint of the exhibition, the central historical conflicts—including the establishment of the Ständestaat dictatorship in 1933, the suppression of the 1934 February uprising, and the Anschluss in March 1938—were all omitted from the programme. “1934 is not going to appear in this exhibition and neither is 1938,” as Hans Hollein succinctly put it in his comments on the exhibition concept.Footnote 24
However, a section of the exhibition ignored the requirement to stop at the year 1930. The historian Jonny Moser connected the publishing of “Der Judenstaat” by Theodor Herzl in 1896 to Viennese anti-Semitism of the fin de siècle, seeing it as a precursor to the persecution by the Nazis: “When the united Nazi party ran in the Vienna communal elections of 1932, their election posters already bore the slogan ‘When Jewish blood splashes from the knife!’ (...) The Judenhass (hatred of Jews) had reached its peak—it could now be translated into a Nazi policy of extermination, without any additional arguments.”Footnote 25
Moser's contribution draws attention to a gap: the question of the role played by “Vienna around 1900” as a prologue to the “Auschwitz rupture in civilisation” (Dan Diner). Fin-de-siècle Vienna was not just the city of Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, and Wittgenstein, but also of Karl Lueger and Adolf Hitler.Footnote 26 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Vienna, and other large Central European cities with ethnically and nationally mixed populations, developed into a “battlefield of nationalistic chauvinism, of ethnic and social dichotomies, and finally of racism of every sort and of anti-Semitism” rather than into melting pots, as Jacques Le Rider put it.Footnote 27
Contaminations of “Vienna around 1900: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” and Nazi Looted Art
The connection between the Viennese Modern Age and the “Auschwitz rupture in civilisation,” which “Traum und Wirklichkeit” had avoided, was covered in the context of the exhibition “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (15 February to 5 May 1986). The difference between the programmes of the two concepts can already be seen in the different periods focused on. The beginning of “Traum und Wirklichkeit” is marked by the stock market crash of 1873, the endpoint being the global economic crisis in 1929. Both of these dates present Vienna as a guiltless victim of international developments, a narrative pattern on which the concept of Austria as the “first victim” of Nazism is based.Footnote 28 In contrast to this, “Vienne 1880–1938” connects the icons of the Viennese Modern Age—Freud, Herzl, Kraus, Klimt, Kokoschka, Loos, Mach, Musil, Schiele, Schönberg, Wagner, Weininger, Wittgenstein, etc.—with the precarious political developments in Austria in the 1930s. The exhibition ends with the chapter “De Vienne la Rouge à la fin de la république” and “Finis Austriae.” Here, March 1938 is not presented from the perspective of Austrian victimhood, but rather from a perspective of Austrian joint responsibility for the event, in particular regarding the fate of Austrian Jews. In the catalogue volume, the narrative of “Vienne 1880–1938” ends with Paul Celan's “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue).Footnote 29
The different conceptions particularly manifest themselves in the different images, which—as far as can be seen in the catalogue—compose the endpoint of the visual narrative of “Vienna around 1900.” In “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse,” photos show Hitler's reception in Vienna in March 1938, which are contrasted with photographs of “manifestations antisémite à Vienne,” the pogrom-like riots that followed the Anschluss.
In “Traum und Wirklichkeit,” images of the economic crisis function as a visual closing sequence—photographs of mass suffering, of the unemployed and homeless, which are connected with the familiar strategies of justification in Austria's collective visual memory. This justification says that the enthusiasm throughout numerous sections of the population for the Anschluss to Nazi Germany can be ascribed not to anti-Semitism, German nationalism, or sympathy for other aspects of Nazi ideology, but rather to the suffering experienced during the 1930s.
The visual representations of the Anschluss in “Vienne 1880–1938: L'Apocalypse Joyeuse” can today be seen as a premonition of the change in perspective toward the country's Nazi past prompted by debates about ÖVP's presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's role during the Nazi period in 1986. The Waldheim scandal initiated a fundamental debate in society about how to deal with the so-called repressed Nazi past of the Second Republic and with Austria's guilt in connection with Nazi crimes, particularly regarding the expulsion and murder of Austrian Jews.Footnote 30 In this case, too, exhibitions were to become the most important sites for the production and communication of this new conception of history. The “Vienna 1938” exhibition in Volkshalle in Vienna's City Hall used photos of Hitler's enthusiastic reception on the 15 March 1938 on the Heldenplatz in Vienna, as well as of the pogrom-like riots against the Jewish population, to visualize the concept of co-responsibility.
Since 1986, when the earlier conception of history was broken with, the persecution, robbery, and murder of the Jewish population and the aftermath in the Second Republic have been frequently addressed. Suddenly, some of the most famous icons of the golden age of the Viennese fin de siècle became contaminated by Austria's perpetrator role in the history of the Holocaust and its shameful aftermath in the Second Republic. Using the more than questionable argument for seeing Austria as the “first victim” of Nazi aggression in 1938, Austrian politics tried to avoid any serious efforts to make material restitution after 1945. The eventual debates over Nazi looted art started with a bang in 1998 when two paintings by Egon Schiele, “Portrait of Wally” and “Dead City,” which had belonged to the collection of the Leopold Museum, were seized during an exhibition of Schiele's work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Further lawsuits followed, with the Bloch-Bauer case being of particular international importance.Footnote 31 Maria Altmann (1916–2011), the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, demanded the return of paintings, some of them masterpieces, by Gustav Klimt from the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere in Vienna. Both these demands and the pressure of public opinion led to the formation of a historian's commission in the autumn of 1998, which was given the task of researching (1) the confiscation of assets in the territory of today's Republic of Austria during the Nazi period and (2) the question of compensation or return to be carried out by the Republic of Austria after 1945.Footnote 32 Also, in 1998, the Kunstrückgabegesetz (Art Restitution Act) was passed with the task “to return collective items from Austrian federal museums and collections, which had become federal property because of or as a result of the NS-tyranny, to their original owners or their rightful heirs.”Footnote 33
In 2008, an exhibition in the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) focused on the importance of restitution of looted art (and other objects) to the heirs. Its starting point was an observation according to which “the restitution of art and commodity objects often constitutes a first point of contact of the third and fourth generation with the family history during the Nazi period.”Footnote 34 In 2000, the furniture museum “Mobiliendepot” in Vienna had dealt with Aryanized furniture as part of the museum's inventory in its exhibition “inventARISIERT.”Footnote 35
The Republic of Austria's embarrassing attitude toward the restitution of Jewish property has often been tackled in numerous publications and exhibitions. The moral obligation to restore Nazi looted art was hardly contested anymore. In 2006, five major paintings by Gustav Klimt were restored to Maria Altmann, among them “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” The Viennese advertising agency GEWISTA used the restitution of the “Golden Adele” for an image campaign in the public space. The aim of the City Light-Teaser campaign, “Ciao Adele—Adele is leaving,” was to demonstrate the kinds of reactions a city light could provoke. For two weeks, Klimt's portrait was exhibited in light boxes at tram and underground stations, with “Ciao Adele” as a text. Many people wondered who commissioned such a campaign and about its aim—the posters became the talk of the town. It was only in the third week of the campaign that the enigma was solved: “Adele is leaving. What now? Efficient advertising. On Gewista's City Lights.” The campaign was a tremendous success. “Approximately two thirds of the Viennese people remembered the campaign, being able to recall it immediately.”Footnote 36 Through the act of restitution, Adele had once again come fulminating within the scope of Viennese memory.