“Does one find enough references in the city’s public space to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who lived in Vienna before 1938?” – Oskar Kostelnik posed this question at the beginning of his research. With his search for traces, he wanted to point to monuments, plaques, street names and building names that remind us of the people of Jewish descent who were born, had once lived or worked in Vienna, or who have died, as well as of Jewish institutions. The criterion of “Jewish” is broad: All those who were of Jewish descent – even if they had fewer than four Jewish grandparents and whatever confession of faith or free-thinking they followed – are represented. Why? Because they were persecuted according to the Nazi racial laws, their departed loved ones vilified, their monuments removed and their books burned, while streets named after Jewish people were changed. They are, therefore, ascribed to the Jewish intellectual and cultural world, indeed to a Jewish community of fate.
Oskar Kostelnik, a member of the Mauthausen Committee, has succeeded in finding out about 800 addresses or locations and around 650 personalities in Vienna’s public space, which he has arranged alphabetically by districts and within the districts themselves. Moreover, the addresses are correlated with the individual persons in an index of names, thus creating a detailed register of Jewish traces in Vienna.
Advance booking requested: Tel.: +43 1 535 04 31-1510 or e-mail: events@jmw.at.
Free admission as of 6:45 p.m.
Photo (c) Echomedia
Tuesday, 22 Jan 18:30,
Museum Dorotheergasse
