A sealed concrete library turned inside out, standing on the excavated foundations of a synagogue burned in 1421.
Rachel Whiteread won the competition in 1996 and the memorial was unveiled in 2000, after four years of argument — over the design, over the archaeology found underneath, and over whether it should be here at all.
It is a cast of the inside of a library: a windowless concrete box, ten metres by seven, whose outer walls are rows of books with their spines turned inward, so no title can be read. The doors have no handles. It commemorates the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered between 1938 and 1945, and the reference to the People of the Book is deliberate but not sentimental — the books are unreadable and the room cannot be entered.
Whiteread’s method throughout her work is casting negative space, and here the negative space is the point: what is memorialised is an absence.
What is underneath
During construction, excavation uncovered the foundations of the medieval Or-Sarua synagogue, destroyed in 1421 during the Wiener Gesera — the persecution in which Vienna’s Jewish community was forcibly converted, expelled, or burned at the stake, and the synagogue was pulled down with its stones reused in the university.
That the twentieth-century memorial stands directly on the site of a fifteenth-century destruction was not planned, and it changed the argument about the square.
The foundations are open to visitors, reached through the museum.
Museum Judenplatz
On the corner of the square, part of the Jewish Museum Vienna, with a small permanent exhibition on medieval Jewish Vienna and access to the excavation. A combined ticket covers this and the main Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse, which is larger and covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The rest of the square
A statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Enlightenment dramatist who wrote Nathan the Wise, stands opposite. It was removed and melted down by the Nazis and recreated in 1968.
On the façade of one building is a sixteenth-century relief celebrating the 1421 destruction, with a Latin inscription. It is still there. The city has chosen to leave it, with explanation, rather than remove it — which is a decision worth thinking about while you are standing in the square.
