From palimpsest to me-moiré: Exploring urban memorial landscapes of political violence

Political Geography 74 (2019) 102057

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From palimpsest to me-moiré: Exploring urban memorial landscapes of political violence

T

Peter Pirkera,∗, Philipp Rodeb, Mathias Lichtenwagnera,1 a b

Department of Government, University of Vienna, Pramergasse 9, 1090, Vienna, Austria Department of Space, Landscape and Infrastructure Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Peter-Jordan-Straße, 82/I 1190, Vienna, Austria

ARTICLE INFO

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Memorials Memorial landscape Collective memory Public space Political violence National socialism

This paper presents a model for exploring urban memorial landscapes on political violence. It is based on a survey of more than 1,600 memorials erected in public spaces of the Austrian capital, Vienna, since 1945 with references to the Austrofascist and the National Socialist regimes. The paper builds on existing theoretical and methodological concepts, such as the ‘social production of space’ (Von Seggern & Werner, Löw), the ‘sociospatial condition of commemoration’ (Dwyer & Alderman), ‘symbolic accretion’ (Dwyer) and ‘figurations of memory’ (Olick), and submits them to quantitative analysis using descriptive statistics and mapping. In order to distinguish between temporal and spatial patterns of memorialization, the paper explores all memorials along a range of spatial, temporal, thematic and social subjects and then identifies ‘layers of memorialization’, which express the structure under which mnemonic actors at specific times and under specific political conditions have addressed and negotiated specific issues of political violence worth of memorialization. After an analytical disentanglement, the paper presents a recomposed map of the urban memorial landscape by overlaying the main spatial-temporal clusters of six layers of memorialization. Instead of applying the widely used term of ‘palimpsest’, the paper suggests the notion of ‘me-moiré’ for grasping the historically and spatially structured coexistence of diverse temporalities, issues and social and political dimensions present in the urban memorial landscape on political violence.

1. Introduction ‘Too late’: these words, fashioned by plants, were spelled out across a twenty-meter stretch of the Morzinplatz in Vienna's city center in 2011, close to the site where the largest Gestapo headquarters of Nazi Germany were located from 1938 until Allied bombers destroyed the building in April 1945. Sponsored by the Vienna City Council, this artistic intervention claimed that the proper time for commemorating the victims of Nazi persecution at this site had passed. The City Council had only recently failed to establish a new permanent memorial for the homosexual and transgender victims of Nazi persecution at the very same site. However, looking beyond Morzinplatz and considering the entire cityscape, Vienna has seen a strong increase in the memorialization of political violence involving hundreds of new prominent and smaller commemorative symbols such as monuments, exhibitions, art installations, and plaques. A diverse range of traditional and new mnemonic actors have inscribed various forms of political violence such as expulsion, deportation, and deprivation as well as references to

individuals and groups not commemorated hitherto into public space and thereby profoundly reshaped what we refer to as the urban memorial landscape (as defined by Dwyer & Alderman, 2008). Obviously, particular issues of memorialization have their own temporalities and spatial references, which only become visible when taking the whole range of activities of memorialization in urban history into account. There is no shortage of qualitative case studies on the making and transformation of single prominent places of remembrance and the transformation of predetermined limited spaces within a cityscape (e.g. Hay, Hughes, & Tutton, 2004; Jaskot & Rosenfeld, 2008; Jordan, 2006; Niven & Paver, 2010; Till, 2005; Uhl, 2008, 2016). By contrast, investigations into the trajectories of memorialization on a large scale encompassing the whole cityscape and considering not only individual, prominent, and state-funded memorials of national significance, but also the wide range of memorial activism on other scales, remain rare. The challenge we face is to integrate temporal, social, spatial, and topical dimensions into the analysis of public realms of memory in the entire city. This article offers a model of such an analysis

*

Corresponding author. Department of Government, University of Vienna, Pramergasse 9, 1090, Vienna, Austria. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Pirker), [email protected] (P. Rode), [email protected] (M. Lichtenwagner). 1 Present address: Raffaelgasse 5/1, 1200 Vienna, Austria. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102057 Received 3 August 2018; Received in revised form 30 July 2019; Accepted 7 August 2019 Available online 20 August 2019 0962-6298/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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by drawing from an empirical study conducted by a team of researchers in Vienna between 2014 and 2016. The purpose of this study entitled ‘Politics of Remembrance and the Transition of Public Spaces’ (POREM) was to explore how political violence under the Austrofascist (1933–1938) and National Socialist (1938–1945) regimes have been commemorated in Vienna since 1945, when the democratic Second Republic was founded with Vienna as its capital (POREM, 2018). We will begin by outlining some theoretical and methodological considerations, then proceed with an explanation of the framework and data of our empirical study, presenting our findings of temporal, spatial, and social analysis with the help of descriptive statistical analysis and mapping. In the conclusion, we will argue that the widely used term ‘palimpsest’ seems unsuited to grasp a coexisting, multilayered divergence of temporalities, issues, and social and political dimensions present in the urban memorial landscape. Instead, we apply the term ‘moiré’ as a concept for capturing outcomes of ongoing processes of entanglements and modifications of memorialization in the urban context of a democratic society. A synthesis of memorialization and moiré, we introduce the term ‘me-moiré’ for multilayered structures of memorialization that preserve historically, spatially, and socially determined patterns while drawing attention to their changing perceptions through ongoing mnemonic activities.

to a major city such as Vienna with a population ranging from 1.6 to 1.8 million between 1945 and the present and with a highly diverse cultural heritage. Only in recent years has the City Council integrated sites of Holocaust commemoration into the canon of tourist attractions (City of Vienna, 2015), while a topography of the Shoah in Vienna was only published in 2015 (Hecht, Lappin-Eppel, & Raggam-Blesch, 2015). For our purpose of addressing the whole cityscape in its manifold social realms as an arena of public commemoration of political violence, we needed to find a different approach. We approach public space from two perspectives: On the one hand, we consider a political form of physical space, which provides free accessibility and the potential for political communication in open space or inside buildings (Parkinson, 2012, p. 87). On the other hand, we proceed from the social production of space and its social use, thereby focusing on the constitution and transformation of specific spaces as understood by scholars in the field of spatial studies (e.g. Von Seggern & Werner, 2008). For this article, we confined our analysis to mnemonic activities that installed permanent memorials in public space with a specific form, a specific text, and at a specific location, or that altered existing memorials in terms of their dedication or placement. We employ the term ‘agent of memorialization’ to mean a public or private actor who is responsible for funding, designing, and erecting mnemonic objects. A popular metaphor used to depict processes of transformation in urban (memorial) landscapes over time is the term ‘palimpsest’, implying practices of overwriting and retracing (e.g. Berger & Seiffert, 2014; Huyssen, 2006). The wide use of this script metaphor (Assmann, 2010) is rooted in the dominance of qualitative and cultural research based on exploring single memorials and the non-spatial semantic level of Pierre Nora's ‘lieux de memoire’ (Nora, 1989; Uhl, 2010a). The term invokes strong connotations of erasure and overlap in order to denominate practices of transforming cultural memory. Another implication it bears is a kind of single authorship of transformation, which produces a new univocal meaning. While traversing the cityscape of Vienna by bike and analyzing the memorials in their spatial contexts using a GIS-based map, we found few indications of erasure and overlap, but plenty of symbolic accretion initiated and performed by a multitude of diverse actors. The more data we collected, the more the term ‘palimpsest’ seemed unfit to grasp the evolution of the urban memorial landscape of Vienna with its multilayered meanings. In contrast to more metaphorical uses of spatial terms, we wish to emphasize – as Jaskot & Rosenfeld did – that the ‘built environment’ of the city is our material spatial ‘investigative realm’ (2008, 4). In order to capture transformations and multiplicities of urban memorial landscapes over time, we prefer the notion of ‘symbolic accretion’ as applied by Dwyer to an ongoing process of ‘appending of commemorative elements on to already existing memorials’ (Dwyer, 2004, p. 420). Accretion can take shape in a variety of physical expressions and comments ranging from affirmations of dominant discourses to contradictions of or adjustments to the message of a monument. In order to analyze the socio-spatial condition of a memorial empirically, Dwyer and Alderman distinguished between a memorial's ‘placement’ and its ‘relative location’. While a memorial's placement ‘refers to the specific condition of its site’ (Dwyer & Alderman, 2008, p. 168), they suggested that ‘a memorial's relative location or situation is typically examined with the socio-spatial context. Relevant issues here include its location vis-à-vis the area's mosaic of class and identity based antagonisms; its proximity to power-filled sites such as the central business district or other memorials; the flow pattern of those who visit – and just as importantly, those who do not’ (Dwyer & Alderman, 2008). Relative location may indicate spatial patterns of memorialization, distinctive uses of urban spaces for distinctive issues of memorialization, and hierarchies within the general public memory culture regarding the importance and relevance attributed to particular memorials. While the intention of memorialization via material markers seems

2. In search of a quantitative temporal-spatial approach According to Dwyer and Alderman, a ‘memorial landscape’ is constituted by ‘a host of material culture elements associated with collective memory, e.g. street signs, historical markers, landmarks, statuary, preserved sites, and parks’ (Dwyer & Alderman, 2008, p. 167). While their definition includes a number of diverse material forms, the approaches they offer to studying memorial landscapes adhere strictly to qualitative methods of studying single memorials or memorial landscapes. There have hitherto been few efforts to tackle the challenge of closing the gap between theoretical thought on memorial landscapes and its operationalization for empirical research on a large scale. Winberry, for example, analyzed Confederate monuments erected in towns of southern US states between 1867 and 1929 and provided explanations for their temporal and spatial distribution within the South Winberry (1983). Meanwhile, Alderman explored inscriptions on 1,543 Highway Historical Markers in North Carolina through content and discourse analyses, identifying important social changes since the 1970s ‘but also continuing injustices in the depiction of slavery and African Americans’ (Alderman, 2012). While he thereby called attention to the exclusion of social groups from dominant representations of public history by a single state actor, the study lacked the complex spatial dimension of an urban locality. Most relevantly for our study, Stephen P. Hanna and E. Fariss Hodder performed content and discourse analyses of 277 historical markers and monuments in the small town of Fredericksburg, Virginia designed to commemorate colonial, antebellum, and Civil War history (Hanna & Hodder, 2015). Most of these had been created since 2000. Using a qualitative Geographic Information System, they analyzed the centrality and marginality of addressed topics in the context of the city's tourist memorial infrastructure relating to its historical heritage, which emanates mostly from having been a strategically significant site during the Civil War and a famous battlefield. Thus, their ‘visitability index’ scored the locations of historical markers and their issues relative to the main tourist routes, the central retail district, and heritage attractions at the time of research (Hanna & Hodder, 2015, 514–515). This enabled them to deduce that markers dedicated to representing slavery and emancipation, although centrally located, still ‘have to compete with many more markers that work to systematically annihilate enslaved persons and their struggles for freedom’ from the town's collective memory (Hanna & Hodder, 2015, 526). However, they offered no tools for uncovering topical shifts in the memorial landscape in relation to sites and dates of memorialization. Furthermore, it is hardly applicable 2

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to aim at a permanent presence, we argue that memorialization always shares the risk inherent to public space that ignorance, contestation, or de-recognition of legitimacy via unintentional forms of appropriation can be expressed, too (e.g. Foote & Azaryahu, 2007). Effective memorialization in public space rarely marks the end of a process, but can rather trigger more of the same as well as different memorials. Jeffrey Olick offered a useful processual approach for grasping temporalities of memorialization by adopting the concept of path dependency for studying politics of remembrance in the long term. Adopting a relational perspective on changing interactions between available pasts and the needs of the present, he noted that ‘images of the past depend not only on the relationship between past and present but also on the accumulation of previous such relationships and their ongoing constitution and reconstitution’ (Olick, 2007, p. 56). If we take an urban memorial landscape as constituted by all existing memorials up to a specific date to construct a significant image of dealing with the past, we face the problem of cumulative and entangled ‘figurations of memory’ (Olick). In order to identify time- and space-related mnemonic interactions between past and present, we must disentangle the memorial landscape and retrace the precise temporal and socio-spatial interrelations of the origins of the single memorials that constitute the history of the urban memorial landscape. Conceptually, we apply an understanding of landscape as synthesis (Kühne, 2010): Landscape can be understood as a physical manifestation of social and ecological processes, as well as an ideal construct. For the analytical integration of the ‘sum of all natural resources’ (Sauer, 2005) into a ‘system of man-made spaces’ (Jackson, 2005) – in our case from the built and unbuilt environment of the city to an urban memorial (cultural) landscape – all the respective memorials must first be inventorized, categorized, and typologized according to their spatial, temporal, topical, and social attributes. In our model, we use the term ‘place of remembrance’ to mean a unique physical site where actors have established one or more signs of remembrance that are intentionally or accidentally tangible to people. The data on the memorials can be applied to year-by-year, georeferenced digital mapping and allows for a preliminary detection of their socio-spatial context. In order to proceed from the mapping of singular memorials towards an understanding of the entanglements between them, we conceptualize two further notions: By spacing and synthesizing (Löw & Sturm, 2005), mnemonic actors relate physical places of remembrance to each other and thereby create specific ‘spaces of remembrance’ over time. By intersecting temporal and spatial data with data on issues and agents of memorialization, we are able to carve out predominant figurations of memory, which we call ‘layers of memorialization’. This approach also allows us to identify deviant activities of memorialization and to explore what Alon Confino called the ‘multiplicity of time’ when he noted that ‘the memory time of the state and nation at times converge and at times diverge from the memory time of individuals and their social groups’ (Confino, 2000, p. 408). In short, we understand layers as public mnemonic structures under which actors address and negotiate issues of memorialization in society and on various scales of government; from where they start to commemorate hitherto ‘forgotten’ persons or incidents, invent new forms of memorialization, and generally reshape public spaces to connect present-day society with its past and its historical progression. Through such an investigation of temporal, spatial, and topical entanglements, we can draw analytical maps for each layer of memorialization. The mapping operation of layering involves a superimposition of ‘various independent layers one upon the other to produce a heterogeneous and “thickened” surface’ (Corner, 1999, p. 235), which shows the evolution and accretion of specific historical types of memorialization and their presence in the urban memorial landscape (Fig. 1).

the capital of a new Austrian republic. The two strongest political parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials, collaborated on the federal scale until 1920, when the Social Democrats left the coalition and henceforth represented the major oppositional force to successive center-right governments. By contrast to the federal scale, the Social Democrats governed Vienna's City Council with a majority of up to 60% of the votes and built up the now famous ‘Red Vienna’. Spatially, the progressive educational, cultural, and social institutions of Red Vienna were clustered around large municipal housing projects newly erected mostly in the industrial districts of the urban periphery. In March 1933, Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuβ eliminated the federal parliament, stripped the Social Democrats of their power in Vienna, and established an authoritarian regime (‘Austrofascism’). In February 1934, police and military forces defeated the Social Democrats during brief combats with around 360 causalities. Most of the battles took place in and around the housing projects. The regime change in March 1938 through a combination of a takeover from within by Austrian National Socialists, military pressure from Nazi Germany, and wide popular support among the Austrian population resulted in the dissolution of Austria as an independent state and its integration (‘Anschluss’) into Nazi Germany (Botz, 2008). Compared to the state repression between 1933 and 1938, the National Socialist regime and its political police, the Gestapo, used state force far more intensely against those it considered political opponents and against those it classified as enemies of or incompatible with National Socialist society (the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’). During its reign, the National Socialist regime executed around 600 political opponents at the regional court located in Vienna's political and cultural center, close to the university and the city hall. By far the largest group were activists of the Communist Party (KPÖ), many of whom had lived and worked in the southeastern industrial districts of the city. With around 170,000 members, Vienna had the largest Jewish community in the Germanspeaking world and the third-largest in Europe. Before the Shoah, about half of the Jewish population lived in the triangle of the second district (40% of the population of the second district, Leopoldstadt, were Jewish) and adjacent parts of the first (25%), ninth (25%), and twentieth (18%) districts (John & Lichtblau, 1993). The other half lived dispersed across the rest of the city. Beginning immediately with the takeover, Nazis as well as ordinary citizens perpetrated widespread antisemitic violence in the streets. Many non-Jewish Viennese citizens benefited from the ‘Aryanization’ of apartments, shops, and factories. Of some 200,000 Viennese citizens classified by the Nazis as Jews, more than 66,000 were murdered and, by the end of 1945, the Jewish community registered only 3,955 members (DÖW 2013). The systematic cleansing of the urban populace hit the Sinti population of an estimated 700 individuals equally severely. Only some 10–20% survived the persecution. Furthermore, the regime killed around 10,000 people through its racist social and health policies. As part of a policy of social discipline, the Gestapo and the criminal police systematically persecuted workers for undisciplined behavior, homosexuals, so-called antisocial people, and people who had committed criminal offences. By 13 April 1945, the Red Army put an end to Nazi rule in Vienna and, on 27 April, the founding parties of the Second Republic, namely the Socialist, later Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), the Christian Social People's Party (ÖVP), and the KPÖ, proclaimed the independence of Austria with Vienna as its capital. Despite the widespread integration of Austrians in the Nazi regime, first the Allies in 1943 and subsequently Austrian politicians in 1945 claimed that Austria had been the first victim of Nazi aggression in order to legitimize the restauration of an independent nation state separate from Germany and to provide a convenient point of departure for reconstruction and a new process of nation-building. Consequently, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding parties presented Austria and the Austrians altogether to the Allies as innocent victims of Nazi Germany. They even extended victimhood to Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers and ‘inveigled’ members of the Nazi Party. The Declaration of

3. Vienna under Austrofascism and National Socialism After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Vienna became 3

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Fig. 1. Schematic representation of a concept for a socio-spatial, temporal, and topical analysis of the urban memorial landscape.

Independence depicts the infamous Austrian victim myth in its purest form (e.g. Uhl, 2010).

Table 1 Nine types of memorializing Austrofascism and National Socialism in Vienna, 1945–2015. Modes

Issues

Number

%

Remembering

Monothematic

Austrofascism National Socialism War

43 1,132 17

2.60% 67.50% 1.00%

Total

1,192

71.00%

Austrofascism & National Socialism National Socialism & War Austrofascism, National Socialism & War

82

4.90%

14

0.80%

9

0.50%

Total

105

6.30%

1,297

77.30%

50 234 93

3.00% 13.90% 5.50%

377

22.50%

Not coded

4

0.20%

Total Removed

1,678 82

100.00% 4.89%

Multithematic

Total Forgetting

Austrofascism National Socialism Austrofascism & National Socialism Total

4. Data survey and coding In an early stage of the project, enquiries with public authorities revealed that there was no up-to-date documentation of the memorials that were of interest to us. The most comprehensive documentation to date was published by the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) in 1998, with a small supplementary volume being published in 2001 (DÖW 1998; 2001). As the cityscape has undergone intense development over the past twenty years, we decided to collect not only data on newly created signs of remembrance but also to check, complement, and update the list of memorials published by the DÖW. Our other main sources were publications on the city's cultural heritage, state archives, registers of public authorities, web resources such as databases of public funding institutions, webpages, and printed media of survivors', veterans', and memory associations, cultural and religious institutions, and of universities, schools, and museums. We rechecked data by sending questionnaires to district municipal authorities and frequent installers of memorials. We met the most active civil society groups and established an ongoing exchange of data. District by district, mostly by bike or on foot, we then explored all the memorials in the urban landscape. In each case, we noted the exact placement and form of the object, took photographs, and recorded the location for georeferenced digital mapping. After an initial phase of research on around 200 memorials, we drafted a template for organizing the data in a subsequent MYSQL database. It included two different kinds of data fields. We developed manifest (descriptive) codes for data on the memorials' placement in 4

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Fig. 2. Absolute numbers of memorialization of political violence by dimensions of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ per year; political events structuring politics of history.

Fig. 3. Ratio of activities of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ per year with periods of memorialization.

public space (e.g. on façades, streets, or building interiors), the historical references made at the site (e.g. sites of birth, sites of residence, and sites of deportation), the form of the memorial (e.g. monument, plaque, exhibition, or memorial room), the agents of memorialization and their affiliations, whether individuals were named or not and, if so, their gender, on the form (e.g. monument, exhibition, or plaque), and on the language used (Cope, 2016; Weisberg, Krosnick, & Bowen, 1996). We then created a second type for topic (analytic) codes consisting of three data fields based exclusively on the memorials' texts and non-textual symbols in order to note the historical periods addressed and the issues and people remembered. For the first category, we defined the codes Austrofascism, National Socialism, WWII, and none (i.e. no historical reference). Regarding issues, we listed 14 codes (e.g. imprisonment, deprivation, deportation, execution, resistance, or liberation), and for social groups remembered we listed 13 codes (e.g. victims of National Socialism in general, Jews, political opponents, and forced laborers). In order to arrive at a more consolidated data structure for descriptive statistics as well as for further applications in ArcGIS and digital public history mapping projects, we reviewed the data and came

up with seven final categories with up to six subcategories (see POREM, 2018). For the purposes of this article, we chose the categories ‘modes of memorialization’, ‘social identity’, and ‘agents of memorialization’. 5. Modes of memorialization: remembering and forgetting We surveyed both signs of remembrance that directly address issues of political violence as well as signs of remembrance that do not, the latter category including all those signs commemorating individuals or events without mentioning that their biography or genesis was deeply affected by persecution. Thus, we also recorded ‘gaps, omissions and absences in the narratives’ (Beiner, 2008, p. 111) in these memorials. Most of them commemorate artists, scholars, and politicians who lived and worked in Vienna. We distinguished between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ gaps. Within the first category, we coded memorials that addressed particular issues of political violence while omitting others. To memorials without any references to political violence, we attributed the latter code and the value ‘forgetting’. With this in mind, we found a way of addressing empirically the problem of selectivity in studying 5

Political Geography 74 (2019) 102057 a Out of 82 removed memorials, we were able to trace the year of removal in 73 cases (89%). The percentages refer to these 73 cases. The percentages in the rows depict the share of removed memorials in relation to all memorials erected in previous periods.

30 (1.9%) 9.84 786 2006–2015 (10 years)

78.6

21 (2.5%) 2.06 257 1996–2005 (10 years)

25.7

5 (0.9%) 2.55 188 1988–1995 (8 years)

23.5

1 (0.25%) 0.55 119 1976–1987 (12 years)

9.91

117 1956–1975 (20 years)

5.85

1.05

12 (4.1%)

Highest value of average activities per year up to 1988; high proportions of ‘remembering’ – Remembering peaking and declining First years without any memorialization; low level of absolute numbers, slim majority of ‘remembering’, highest proportion of removals – Remembering contested and pacified Years without any memorialization, higher mean value than period 2 but ratio of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ lower than 1 – Forgetting dominant Two memorial years which top the arithmetic mean of period 1; few activities during the intermediate years; similar structure to the 1960s; clearly higher ratio of remembering and forgetting than in periods 2 and 3 – Remembering occasion-related Two memorial years with slightly lower peaks; higher level of activities during the intermediate years; lower ratio of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ than before - Remembering spreading, forgetting returning Two memorial years with intense activities; level of activities during intermediate years clearly and constantly higher than in previous periods – Remembering normalized 4 (2.2%) 5.85 16.1 178 1945–1955 (11 years)

Arithmetic Mean/Year Absolute Numbers Periodi-zation

Table 2 Periods of memorialization – description of modes.

Ratio of Remembering and Forgetting

Removalsa

Description of Modes

P. Pirker, et al.

memorial landscapes on a quantitative scale. Based on this distinction between the values of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ and the general historical frames of Austrofascism, National Socialism, and war, we distinguished nine types of memorialization as represented in 1,678 memorials (Table 1). In light of the often remarked, long-term predominance of the selfportrayal of Austria and the Austrians as pure victims of suppression and warfare in general (e.g. Lehnguth, 2013), it is surprising to note the low proportion of multithematic memorializations (6.3% of all signs, 8% of the signs with the value ‘remembering’). Actually, the broadest inclusion of Austrofascism, National Socialism, and war accounts for the lowest number of memorials. If one understands memorialization as an expression of social perceptions of the past that serve the formation of identity, then this data strongly challenges the societal impact of the alleged dominant self-perception of Austrians as victims. As can be seen from Table 1, we counted only 82 removals of memorials, which underlines our basic argument that accretion was the dominant process. 5.1. Periods of memorialization In order to identify periods and subsequently layers of memorialization, we combined a temporal analysis of data on the issues addressed with an analysis of the spatial distribution of all activities of memorialization. First, chronologically, we tackled the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions by counting activities thematizing (‘remembering’) and omitting (‘forgetting’) political violence. Fig. 2 shows absolute numbers per year from 1945 to 2015, while Fig. 3 shows the distribution per year in percentage for the same period. Fig. 2 reveals that activity addressing political violence on memorials did not follow a linear development. The line of remembering resembles that of degrading waves at the beginning with a similar, slightly stronger movement forty years later, separated by a long ebb, and the beginning of a third similar but even stronger movement since 2005. The first wave of remembering abated in the early 1950s but remembering remained a factor until 1955, when Austria received full sovereignty through the State Treaty with the Allies, and Vienna abolished the spatial order of the five zones of Allied occupation that had dominated for the past ten years. Activities suddenly resumed in 1988, two years after the controversial election of former UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim as the Federal President of Austria and the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power with the ‘Anschluss’ and the November Pogrom against the Jewish population. With his remark that he ‘did nothing more during the war than did hundreds of thousands of other Austrians, which was to fulfill my duties as a soldier’, Waldheim provoked an intense international debate on Austria's engagement with the past and the co-responsibility of Austrians for war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as with hitherto ‘forgotten’ victims of Nazi persecution (Uhl, 2010). Disputes between antagonistic actors in the domestic party political sphere – the left-wing Green Party and the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) – and demands from civil society (historians, artists, and actors of social movements) put much pressure on the prevalent memory regime. Thus, an international debate on national engagements with the Nazi past instigated the second wave of remembering. Characteristically, its course was driven by a new kind of political staging of commemorative years with the decisive innovation of temporal extensions from anniversaries into memorial years. The series of prominent memorial years began in 1988 and was followed by the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Second Republic in 1995, also the year of Austria's accession to the European Union. When Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) in 1991 addressed the Austrians' co-responsibility for Nazi crimes in a speech in the Austrian parliament, he explicitly presented the challenge for Austria in coming to terms with the past as a contribution to a new political culture in Europe. In 1995, the new narrative on co-responsibility and ‘forgotten victims’ was officially adopted and institutionalized with the 6

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Fig. 4. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1945–2015. Small map: numbers refer to the districts: Innere Stadt (1), Leopoldstadt (2), Landstraβe (3), Wieden (4), Margareten (5), Mariahilf (6), Neubau (7), Josefstadt (8), Alsergrund (9), Favoriten (10), Simmering (11), Meidling (12), Hietzing (13), Penzing (14), Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus (15), Ottakring (16), Hernals (17), Währing (18), Döbling (19), Brigittenau (20), Floridsdorf (21), Donaustadt (22), Liesing (23). Table 3 Comparison of Average Nearest Neighbor Ratio (NNR) for phases of three periodizations. Periodization 1

NNR 1

z-value

Periodization 2

NNR 2

z-value

Periodization 3

NNR 3

z-value

1945–1955 1956–1965 1966–1975 1976–1985 1986–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

0.4257 0.4924 0.4421 0.4791 0.4914 0.5118 0.3867

−15.02 −7.58 −8.20 −10.11 −14.27 −14.97 −32.89

1945–1951 1952–1987

0.4385 0.4741

−13.20 −16.89

1945–1955 1956–1975

0.4257 0.4962

−15.02 −10.56

1988–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

0.4980 0.5118 0.3867

−13.31 −14.97 −32.89

1976–1987 1988–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

0.4640 0.4980 0.5118 0.3867

−11.51 −13.31 −14.97 −32.89

Note: NNR measures range from 0 to 1 and represent a value for spatial clustering. A ratio of 1 indicates a highly dispersed, a ratio of 0 a highly clustered spatial order. The z-value allows for an interpretation of whether a spatial configuration of a dataset is random or not. A value between −1.65 and + 1.65 allows for an interpretation of randomness, while values below −2.58 and over +2.58 reflect a less than 1% likelihood that a pattern could be the result of random chance.

government nevertheless joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2001. From 2005 onwards, a third wave of memorialization is observable, most striking for its repetition of the cycle of anniversaries. In domestic politics, the SPÖ, now in opposition on the federal scale, took the lead by confronting its own engagement with the Nazi past in various historical projects (Mesner & Berg 2005; Neugebauer & Schwarz, 2005). On the municipal level in Vienna, the governing SPÖ instigated new memorial projects, the most prominent being a memorial dedicated to the Austrian victims of the Shoah in the city center (Uhl, 2010). As Fig. 3 shows, we counted more acts of ‘remembering’ than ‘forgetting’ per year for these periods of memorialization in general, while

establishment of the National Fund for Victims of National Socialism (Lehnguth, 2013). Although the following anniversary years in 1998 and in 2005 saw slightly fewer memorialization activities, the high level of new memorialization remains remarkable. On the European and international level, two initiatives were important. In 1995, the European Parliament launched an initiative for a day to commemorate the Holocaust, which Austria joined in 1997. In 2000, the international Stockholm Conference on the promotion of Holocaust education, research, and remembrance took place. While the inclusion of the right-wing extremist FPÖ into a federal government led by the ÖVP was met on the European and international level with harsh criticism, the federal 7

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Fig. 5. Small map: Occupation districts 1945–1955. Big map: Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1945–1955.

and nineteenth districts, which are high-income sectors. Many districts have cultivated strong local identities, such as the industrial quarters of Favoriten (tenth district), Simmering (eleventh district), Ottakring (sixteenth district), and Floridsdorf (twenty-first district), with prominent historical (Czech) and current (Turkish and former Yugoslav) immigrant and working-class populations. Today, the Leopoldstadt (second district) once again has a relatively visible Jewish cultural and social life. Since the early 1990s, the socio-spatial structure of densely built up Vienna was transformed by ‘soft’ municipal renewal policies that confined market-driven upgrading processes of gentrification (Rode, Giffinger, & Reinprecht, 2010). Fig. 4 shows the spatial distribution of all memorials erected from 1945 to 2015. We counted all activities on the smaller level of registration districts and distinguished the memorials between ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’. Registration districts represent residential quarters within the administrative districts as a second level of social life and allow for a more detailed analysis than the latter administrative category. Thus, we created impressions for spatial patterns of all surveyed activities of memorialization. The overall pattern recalls the nodal structure of the city with a dense center and a decreasing density towards the periphery. Within this overall picture, three main spatial patterns become visible. First, there are registration districts with a high density of memorials within the inner districts of the city (thick dotted white line). While most of the area clearly reveals a higher proportion of ‘remembering’ than ‘forgetting’, the area in the western part of the first district reaching into the adjacent eighth district shows a more constant distribution of remembering and ‘forgetting’ (thin dotted white line). This area harbors the main national and municipal political institutions,

the period from 1956 to 1987 reveals a very different picture for absolute numbers, which are generally low for memorialization and with few exceptions comparatively strongly in favor of ‘forgetting’. Between 1956 and 1975, ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ seemed equally weak, while for the following period from 1976 to 1987 ‘forgetting’ prevailed slightly over ‘remembering’. During the second wave of memorialization, we counted in some years more cases of forgetting, with 1996 constituting the last year of dominance and 2004 displaying a balance. From 2006 onwards, the distribution in favor of remembering was similarly clear as in the first post-war years up to 1951. Table 2 presents how we deduced from our data six distinctive periods of memorialization, also including removals of memorials. 5.2. Layers of memorialization In order to reveal spatial patterns of memorialization, we adopt the idea of relative location discussed above for a quantitative analysis. Vienna ‘in contrast to most other big cities with nodal structures […] has remained a city with a center’ (Mattl, 2003, p. 248). The municipal administrative and political setting is based on a circular structure of 23 administrative districts that form ‘the living framework for Vienna's residents; for their self-definition they represent the first level of social space’ (Mattl, 2003, 243). Since the mid-nineteenth century, the first district and the encircling Ringstraβe have harbored the most important political, administrative, and cultural institutions on the municipal and national scales. The adjacent circle of districts inside the circular ‘Gürtel’ road harbors small businesses and bourgeois classes, while the outer ring of districts harbors industries and the working-class population, with the exception of some areas in the thirteenth, eighteenth, 8

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Fig. 6. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1956–1975.

the main institutions of justice, Vienna University, and many cultural institutions. A more constant distribution between the values of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ may reveal spaces of remembrance built through multiple memorialization periods resulting in a distinctive diversity of memorials displaying an area of a highly amended memory of political violence. Second, there are three areas signified by a lower density of memorialization (dotted blue lines). These areas have a similar social-spatial structure as they are all outside the ‘Gürtel’ road or across the Danube and encompass registration districts with residential buildings from the late nineteenth century and municipal housing projects of ‘Red Vienna’ traditionally inhabited by the working class. Nevertheless, the area to the north in Floridsdorf and the area to the south in Favoriten reveal a higher proportion of values of remembering compared to the area to the west with a more constant distribution. Third, the map reveals five islands with a high density of memorialization separated from the surrounding urban space (dotted turquois lines), including the Central Cemetery in the southeastern periphery, which has been shaped by multiscale usage on personal, municipal, national, and international levels, and as such can be considered a special case. The other islands may indicate either similar distinctive spatial connotations or extraordinary activities of local mnemonic actors. While the map displays cumulative patterns of mnemonic activities over a period of seventy years, it does not reveal their evolution. For this, we needed a space-related method for disentanglement. First, we chose the tool Average Nearest Neighbor in order to investigate whether mnemonic activities in distinctive periods had spatial features as well. With Average Nearest Neighbor, we measured changes in spatial

clustering of memorials over time and compared three different sets of periodization as shown in Table 3. Periodization 1 follows an arbitrary periodization according to ten-year steps, periodization 2 posits period 2 as lasting from 1952 until 1987, as 1952 could be taken as the end of the first wave of memorialization (see Figs. 1 and 2), while a low intensity of activities prevailed until 1987 (see graph 1). The third set followed the periodization described in Table 2. We propose to apply the periods of periodization 3 as a temporal definition for a deeper exploration of spatial patterns of memorialization. These periods show a continuously high level of significance of > −10.56 and a significant differentiation of the degree of spatial clustering. Two layers of high clustering were generated from 1945 until 1955 and from 2006 until 2015, three layers with medium clustering originated in the periods 1956–1975, 1988–1995, and 1996–2005 and a layer of comparatively low clustering occurred in the period from 1976 until 1987. In summary, the cluster analysis reveals that agents of memorialization have shaped the cityscape at different periods in different ways. It allows us to speak of six temporal-spatial layers of memorialization. They provide a diachronic structure for exploring the evolution of the urban memorial landscape and ask for distinctive features for each layer. Thus, we disentangled the map displayed above (Fig. 4) into six different maps each showing one of the six extracted layers of memorialization. This disentanglement allows us to explore the making of distinct spaces of remembrance within each layer and subsequently across all layers over time. Fig. 5 shows a tripartite usage of the urban space until 1955, when remembering first peaked and then declined. The foci lay on the workers' districts outside the ‘Gürtel’ and across the Danube Canal in the Soviet zone of occupation (cluster 1), the peripheral Central 9

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Fig. 7. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1976–1987.

Fig. 7 maps the layer stemming from the period 1976–1987, when ‘forgetting’ was dominant. Overall activities show a continued aggregation in the center (cluster 1). For the first time, there are some activities of memorialization located in areas formerly strongly inhabited by Jews, in the second district Leopoldstadt close to the center (cluster 2). Beyond the center, there was a dispersed distribution with a majority of values of ‘forgetting’. The spatial order indicates a segregated centralization of remembering encircled by an almost normalized and non-clustered space of forgetting. The following layer 4 (Fig. 8), stemming from the critical period between 1988 and 1995 and the invention of the memorial years, shows a continuity of the centralization pattern (cluster 1) and an intensification of activities in the Leopoldstadt (cluster 2). Particularly striking, however, is the reversal of the relationship between the values of ‘forgetting’ and ‘remembering’. Among the decentralized activities, Floridsdorf stands out, as it already had a relatively large number of activities in the first layer. However, a noticeable clustering did not occur (cluster 3). In general, the urban space outside the ‘Gürtel’ road shows a similarly dispersed distribution pattern as in the previous layer, but with two differences: This space is included not only by usage of the Central Cemetery (cluster 4) as a culturally designated memory space but also by the usage of public spaces in districts next to the ‘Gürtel’ (cluster 7, 8), moreover stretching to residential clusters next to the southern city limits (cluster 5, 6), where the value of ‘remembering’ predominates. In relation to the previous layers, these results show a dispersion of remembering to historical places of violence and resistance, thus a spatial extension. In layer 5 (Fig. 9), the spatial distribution pattern resembles the previous one. The center and the Leopoldstadt (cluster 1) continue to

Cemetery (cluster 2), and to a lesser extent the historic city center (cluster 3). A key feature is that the number of memorials with the value ‘forgetting’ was generally low, especially in the remembrance spaces listed above. In comparison to the spatial patterns identified above, it becomes clear that two of the dispersed spaces, namely Favoriten and Brigittenau/Floridsdorf as well as the Central Cemetery constitute this layer and thus represent the oldest memorial landscapes of Vienna pertinent to our context. The first district, which was jointly governed by the Allies, was a stage of memorialization activities, too, albeit to a lesser extent and, as we will see later, a highly contested space among party political agents. In conclusion, we can register a tripartite sectional foundation of the urban memorial landscape which was structured by the spatial order of occupation, class-related activities in industrial districts, and political competition in the representative political, cultural, and academic spaces of the city center. By contrast, the following layer (Fig. 6) generated after the end of occupation, when remembrance was contested and then politically pacified, is first of all characterized by a relocation of activities to the political, cultural, and academic center, albeit on a low level in absolute numbers (cluster 1). The small clusters in the districts Döbling (cluster 2), Ottakring (cluster 3), and Floridsdorf (cluster 4) are also remarkable. The distribution between the values of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ is roughly balanced in the center, similarly distributed in Döbling and Floridsdorf, but in Ottakring clearly dominated by ‘forgetting’. An equal distribution indicates strongly differing local cultures of remembrance, which were effective not only at the center but also at the local level. The dual use of the city center following a layer of memorial competition suggests a unifying centralization as the dominant spatial pattern of this layer. 10

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Fig. 8. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1988–1995.

dominate as spaces of remembrance, with spreading values of ’remembering’. In the ring around the center, the district Alsergrund appears for the first time as a space of remembrance. In the center and adjacent areas, three local foci can be identified: the Volkertviertel in Leopoldstadt (cluster 2), the university district at the intersection of the first district and Alsergrund (cluster 3), and a quarter in Brigittenau (cluster 4). In the outer districts, a new spatial distribution has been established which not only affects the general distribution but also the distribution of values of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’. A district with a relatively high amount of memorializations in the previous layer, Floridsdorf, now receives only a few more memorials. By contrast, comparatively many memorials have been added in Simmering (cluster 5), Döbling (cluster 6), Hietzing (cluster 7), and Liesing (cluster 8). However, the distribution of values of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ varies from district to district. The map suggests that within layer 5, a break-up of the previously dominant order of center and periphery occurred in favor of a polycentric use of the urban space produced by the aggregation of explicit memorials around specific places of violence as well as educational and cultural institutions. The most recent layer (Fig. 10) shows a significant shift in the spatial distribution of memorials. Relatively speaking, the center (cluster 1) has lost its dominance as a space of remembrance in favor of an intensified usage of districts with a strong Jewish presence up to 1938 and of middle-class districts surrounding the inner district and a dispersal transcending the ‘Gürtel’. An intense, area-wide memorialization in parts of the Leopoldstadt (cluster 2) as well as in the adjacent district of Brigittenau (cluster 3), Alsergrund (cluster 4), and in the university quarter (cluster 5) is striking. New accretions are to be found in Josefstadt (cluster 6), Landstraβe (cluster 7), and Mariahilf

(cluster 8). Beyond the ‘Gürtel’, new foci are visible in some neighborhoods of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus (cluster 9), Hietzing (cluster 10), Liesing (cluster 11), and Floridsdorf (cluster 12). In addition, clustered activities are visible in two urban development areas: an area with new cultural and social infrastructures of the Jewish community (cluster 13) and the large urban development zone of Seestadt Aspern (cluster 14). Taken together, an intense engagement with political violence in residential areas in the historical Jewish triangle, the political and cultural quarters, and the middle-class districts between the center and the ‘Gürtel’ brought about a densification of space in multilayered areas while similarly intense activities in some quarters of the outward districts produced a few multilayered islands of memory. 6. Social identity: agents and frames of memorialization From the foregoing projection of data on modes and periods of remembrance onto public space, we learn that agents of memorialization have used the cityscape in highly selective and changing ways over the past seven decades. Memorials not only mark spatial patterns of memory, they above all represent material figurations of relations performed by agents of memorialization when they make an enduring appeal to public attention on behalf of mostly deceased people or incidents they find worth of remembering at specific sites. In doing so, ‘different political parties, factions, and “publics” negotiate understandings of the past (and social identity) at multiple scales through place’ (Till, 2003, p. 295). They articulate and display bonds with specific individuals, groups, and places. Exploring the social entanglements of memorialization can disclose which perceptions of the past agents of memorialization consider appropriate for shaping collective 11

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Fig. 9. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 1996–2005.

identities for their respective group, in specific societal sections or at various scales of society at large. In the following, we will focus specifically on the activities of memorialization intentionally performed to remember Austrofascism and National Socialism. Theoretically, we emphasize two frames of identity building via memorialization activities: Heroic identity building, our first frame, refers mostly to political opponents, resistance fighters, and soldiers of liberation. Typically, the inscriptions and symbolic language of these monuments honor the tragic though heroic sacrifice made by one or more individuals for a collective cause, which is shared by those who remember and who promote this as a commendable way of acting. A second frame of memorialization features persecution and the painful suffering of victims, generally without bearing a similar intrinsically positive sense of inspiration for grouprelated collective identities, which we refer to as materializations of a traumatic or ‘negative’ memory (e.g. Koselleck, 2014, p. 241; Foote & Azaryahu, 2007, p. 130). Such memorials commemorate mostly victims of antisemitic, racist, and other National Socialist forms of perpetration. In general, they aim at the recognition of group-related past discrimination, deprivation, deportation, and murder committed against minority groups within a majority not affected by such violence but rather supporting it or benefiting from it. Aside from expressing mourning on behalf of relatives and survivors, they pose the question of how perpetration could have happened, who was responsible, and how the non-affected populace behaved. Thus, we may perceive them both as signs of a critical engagement and of a demarcation against social practices and behavior that led to various forms of perpetration. The overall picture of the distribution of the two frames of identity building is very clear. Fig. 11 shows that memorialization was highly

selective in layers of memorialization 1 and 2. However, there has been a steady fall in memorializing resistance and liberation within the sacrifice scheme from 91% in layer 1–11% in layer 6. By contrast, the share of memorializing persecution shows a steady rise from 6% in layer 1–82% in layer 6. The share of memorials commemorating both resistance and persecution is generally low throughout the layers, with the highest values in layers 4 and 5 and the lowest in layers 1 and 6. Thus, we can conclude that layer 4 represents a period of transition from resistance to persecution and layer 5 one of a reversal. With the Waldheim affair, mnemonic actors both renewed and challenged memorialization patterns of previous layers. Austria's accession to the European Union in 1995 clearly favored the persecution frame. The trend towards drawing attention to the persecution of Jews, Roma and Sinti, and victims of Nazi medicine gained a similar dominance since 2005 as the resistance and liberation frame in layer 1. Turning to the agents of memorialization (see Fig. 12), it is interesting that state actors were not among the keenest to celebrate the heroic sacrifice of resistance fighters and liberators in favor of a new social and political order. This was clearly the remit of the founding political parties of the Second Republic – the SPÖ, the ÖVP, and the KPÖ. They created distinct memorials for party leaders and members who had fought and suffered for their respective party as the bearer of a general collective cause. The strong share of business management and staff reflects party influence in industry and business: The KPÖ had a strong bearing on industries in the Soviet occupation zone (Fig. 5, cluster 1), the SPÖ on public transport services, and the ÖVP in certain state companies such as the postal services. The fact that political parties and companies are the most prominent mnemonic actors indicates that neither at the national nor at the municipal scale did 12

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Fig. 10. Spatial distribution of memorialization and modes of memorialization, 2006–2015.

Fig. 11. Frequencies of group frames per layer of memorialization in percentage (N: 1,260 cases).

memorialization of resistance and liberation offer a common ground for shared identity building. Instead, memorializing sacrifice opened up a field of conflict among sectional memories fostered by the political parties within state administrations and civil society, which is obvious especially in the case of the city center (Fig. 5, cluster 3). While the SPÖ and the KPÖ aimed at reestablishing loyalty within their respective camps and competed for supporters among the working class, the SPÖ

and ÖVP were deeply divided in their perceptions of the political regime between 1933 and 1938. Rather than finding a common national ground of honoring political opponents of Austrofascism and National Socialism, political parties used politics of remembrance to foster sectional political identities (Fig. 13). This picture changed steadily in layer 2. Under full Austrian sovereignty and in the wake of intensified memory conflicts between 13

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Fig. 12. Frequency of group frames per type of actor within layers of memorialization. The diagram shows only the highest values for every type of placement (N: 1,260 cases). For the sake of clarity, we merged party-affiliated survivors' associations into the category ‘political parties’. ‘Business & staff’ includes management, staff associations, and unions. In contrast to memory associations, cultural associations do not confine their activities to mnemonic activism.

Fig. 13. Mapping of memorials overlaid with group frames (1945–1955) and agents of memorialization in Vienna city center. Source: https://www.univie.ac.at/ porem/maps/#SocialIdentity/15/1824436,6141748/all/Antifascism%20and%20its%20Contestation.

resistance associations and Wehrmacht veterans' associations on the question of who had made a true sacrifice, federal authorities established the first prominent national, non-partisan memorials. With regard to building national identity, layer 2 was much more important than layer 1. Case studies on the Austrian Heroes’ Memorial and the memorialization of victims of the Nazi justice system strongly confirm this impression. The common basis of nation building in the field of politics of remembrance became the acknowledgment of sacrifice, be it that of resistance fighters or of Wehrmacht soldiers (Pirker, Koch, &

Kramer, 2019) (Fig. 6, cluster 1). By contrast, the memorialization of persecuted people remained for decades the affair of actors very different from civil society and public institutions. Non-party-affiliated survivors' associations, most prominently the Jewish community, were the first to establish a few memorials, mostly in semi-public, community-owned spaces of mourning (Fig. 6, cluster 2). In 1961, the Jewish community established the first plaque in public space in commemoration of the destruction of a synagogue, but it remained a completely isolated affair without any 14

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Fig. 14. Memorials founded by remembrance associations overlaid with group frames, 2006–2015.

political and public response. An important change is visible in layer 3: Beside singular actors in civil society, some actors within the public educational system set a precedent for commemorating persecuted Jews in 1984 in the limited context of their institutions. On the broader societal scale, their initiatives challenged municipal authorities on their failure to commemorate persecuted Jewish citizens. Remarkably, this would take another 27 years from the original initiative by the Jewish community. Finally, in the memorial year 1988 (layer 4), the City Council placed a dozen plaques commemorating antisemitic persecution at sites of synagogues destroyed throughout the cityscape in 1938, thus confronting the urban populace in everyday social life with antisemitic violence that took place in their neighborhoods. With the Monument against War and Fascism, the City Council erected a prominent memorial in the heart of the city that featured antisemitic persecution, the sacrifice of political opponents, and victims of warfare strung together in a patriotic narrative of drama and despair that ended with the resurrection of an independent Austria (Uhl, 2010). The monument triggered an intense debate on the subordination of the Holocaust in a patriotic perception of sacrifice. Consequently, the

memorial to the Austrian victims of the Shoah by Rachel Whiteread, erected by the City Council in 2000 at the Judenplatz, symbolized the murder of Austrian Jewry abstractly as an inverted library; as a senseless, eternal loss. A similarly critical debate on sacrifice and victimhood driven by civil society actors on the memorialization of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers resulted in two major transformations at the central Heldenplatz/Ballhausplatz in layer 6. Almost simultaneously, the Austrian Heroes’ Memorial dedicated to the sacrifice of fallen Wehrmacht soldiers was closed down as an official memorial site while on the other side of the square, close to the presidential office and the chancellery, the Monument to the Victims of National Socialist Military Justice was unveiled in 2014 (Pirker, Koch, et al., 2019). With the memory associations, a new kind of actor beyond traditional party, community, and public institution affiliations emerged to a significant extent in layer 5 and dominated the activities in layer 6 (see Fig. 14). The most active memory associations appeared from 2005 onwards, when descendants of a Jewish family living in Israel and Vienna adopted the idea of German artist Günther Demnig (e.g. Imort, 2010) of placing a memorial stone in the sidewalk in front of the former 15

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Tripartite sectional foundation Unifying centralization Segregated centralization Spatial extension Polycentrism Densification of multilayered areas and islands

Sectional, competing memorialization of sacrifice National, pacified memorialization of sacrifice Resilience of sacrifice scheme Division of sacrifice and victim schemes Turn towards negative memorialization Reinverting ‘negative’ into ‘positive’ memorialization

Antifascism and its contestation Memory conflict and pacification Segregation and omission Memorial years Forgotten victims Memory boom

residence of the persecuted. These private initiatives devoted their ongoing activities almost exclusively to the retracing and remembering of expelled and deported people who had lived in their local environment. They implicitly addressed the indifference of ordinary people towards the persecution of their neighbors and their participation in acts of state-driven political violence. With ties to relatives of the persecuted and murdered all over the globe, who in many cases were the ones demanding memorialization, articulations of belonging and synthesizing within these new processes of memorialization established new glo-cal bonds, leaving behind the nation and/or the municipality as determining frames of identity building. At the same time, on a symbolic level, they restored the destroyed diversity of the respective neighborhoods and reclaimed a universal ‘right to the city’ for residents. Thus, they used similar strategies of place-based memorialization but thematically differed strongly both from the early class-related mnemonic spacing in the working-class districts and from the community and family-oriented memorialization of the Shoah by traditional mnemonic agents such as the Jewish community (Pirker, Kramer, & Lichtenwagner, 2019). In summary, the data confirms our thesis that not victimhood but tragic heroism and sacrifice were the main resource of identity formation for the decades after WWII (see Table 4). The main feature of layer 1 was a sectional, competing, and in general declining memorialization of the sacrifice of resisters and liberators taking place in three distinct areas of the cityscape. Typical for the precarious (discordant) nature of post-war nation building, we termed the first layer ‘antifascism and its contestation’. Layer 2 was molded by governments who sought to overcome latent conflicts in the politics of history in order to consolidate the process of nation building, as a result of which its main stage was the city center. We designated this layer ‘memory conflict and pacification’. Unsurprisingly, pacification fostered a tendency towards silence over the past. However, civil society actors created a few memorials exclusively dedicated to Jewish victims, but in rather segregated places. Thus, we designated layer 3 ‘segregation and omission’, as a second layer of national consolidation. In the wake of the Waldheim affair in 1986, domestic politics reacted to the sudden internationalization of politics of history by the invention of ‘memorial years’ (layer 4), which drove actors within the educational system and the municipal administration to set a precedent for commemorating antisemitic violence and persecuted Jews more prominently and more systematically in various places throughout the cityscape. The following layer of ‘forgotten victims’ generally represents a turn towards a critical memorialization of victimhood. Towards the end of the period under investigation, conflicts on memorials became rare, while hundreds of new, mostly small plaques were placed in large areas of the city instead, resulting in a densification of multilayered areas and new islands. Representing the ‘memory boom’ it seems that within layer 6 another inversion process took place with the disappearance of the generation of experience: The ‘negative’ memorialization of victims of persecution has turned into an element of positive identity building widely accepted in Vienna's public life. Both municipal and federal government institutions sponsored the memory associations to various degrees and used the display of the urban memorial landscape for positioning the city and the country as openminded, reflexive spaces that have successfully overcome previous shortcomings in dealing with past political violence (City of Vienna, 2015; Nationalfonds 2015). However, the mnemonic focus on victims of persecution hardly fostered a critical engagement with the local system of perpetration and the behavior of non-affected inhabitants. There is still no place in Vienna comparable to the Topography of Terror or the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, or the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich, where expulsion, deportation, and annihilation is on permanent display.

1945–1955 1956–1975 1976–1987 1988–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015 1 2 3 4 5 6

Remembering peaking and declining Remembering contested and pacified Forgetting dominant, remembering segregated Remembering occasion-related Remembering spreading, forgetting returning Remembering normalized

Spatial patterns Modes Temporal Layer

Table 4 Layers of memorialization – summary of temporal, spatial, and social dimensions.

Social identity

Designation

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Fig. 15. Overlay of clusters of memorialization.

7. Conclusion: structures of memory – from palimpsest to memoiré

memorials, or in other words the temporal-spatial and social varieties of memorialization, we felt that a different, more suitable term was needed. A phenomenon we needed to address is the multifaceted figure of coexisting layers in their temporal, thematic, and social shapes and in relation to each other. This ambivalent composition and ambiguity does not come about through overwriting, as the popular metaphor ‘palimpsest’ insinuates, but through symbolic accretion, that is, through continuous addition and differentiating, through shifting and changing meanings applied by multiple, partly continuous and partly new actors. To capture the effects of ongoing processes of entanglements and modifications of foregoing periods of commemoration and their particular pasts as well as the construction of new pasts by multiple modes of symbolic accretion, we propose to adopt the notion of ‘moiré’ from the field of optics. It may be useful to describe the phenomenon of a decades-long process of agglomerating changing activities of memorialization. A moiré effect occurs when ‘repetitive structures are superposed or viewed against each other’ (Amidror, 2009, p. 1). Superposition shows a new pattern which does not appear in the original structures but changes their previous appearance. In our case, the interference of existing layers and the production of new layers engenders the emergence of changing patterns of memorialization in which old and new commemorative elements are present and comment on each other. From this, we developed the term ‘me-moiré’ to describe the phenomenon when clusters with different structures of remembrance are layered over each other. It is a disturbing image which alters the perception of patterns present while preserving their original figurations. It reflects what accretions of new memorials effect in social reality, changing the perception of a previous generation of memorials or of

After a series of analytical disentanglements, we recomposed the essences of the six layers by superimposing the extracted spatial-temporal clusters in a new map (Fig. 15). This gives us a condensed image of Vienna's urban memorial landscape and its genesis. On the one hand, we can apply Dwyer and Alderman's concept of relative location, revealing how previous memorializations have been complemented, commented, and amplified locally by new activities. On the other hand, the overlay of time-space clusters describes the dominant location of memorials in relation to the urban space as a whole. The map shows three local continuity clusters: the political and cultural center, the decentralized center of Floridsdorf, and the peripheral Central Cemetery. Taken altogether, they contain the greatest variety of modes of memorialization, social identity formations, forms, and involved actors. Second, the map shows overlays of clusters deriving from several layers of memorialization. There are neighborhoods dominated by the two most recent layers, primarily the historic Jewish residential area near the city center. Other areas outside the ‘Gürtel’ road have temporally ‘distant’ overlays, as in Döbling and Brigittenau. There, the sacrifice of resistance fighters was memorialized early on with the theme of antisemitic persecution following several decades later. Finally, the map shows relative locations of decentralized memorialization clusters that indicate specific local conditions at specific times. Old, place-based, and either nationally, communally, or class-related memorials are still present. As the widely used term ‘palimpsest’ does not really grasp the visible presence of diverse temporalities, issues, and social entanglements of 17

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spaces hitherto structured by omitting shameful chapters of history. Within such spaces, new memorial activism resulted in separating, complementing, intersecting, interfering, and interweaving practices of memorializing over time. Here, new memorials triggered further examinations of shameful pasts in these spatial contexts. ‘Dark’ chapters such as the murder of whole sectors of the urban population formerly shamefully hidden are now indeed termed the ‘darkest’ chapters of history while exposed to the ‘light’ of public spaces in the residential, cultural, political, and business quarters of the city. Recently, the City of Vienna has begun promoting such memorials as distinct art in public space that positions Vienna not only as a city with a rich cultural heritage but also as a city ‘remembering for the future’. In this respect, the mnemonic exposition of a shameful past in public space adds to a positive image of dynamic change with previous abortive cultures of memorialization not being overwritten, but remaining a contour in the composition of the ‘me-moiré’. In order to portray distinct overlaid clusters, we propose speaking of ‘local me-moirés’. Examples for such dense urban spaces of remembrance in Vienna are the university district, some working-class quarters, and those neighborhoods with a formerly strong Jewish presence. We suggest the term ‘urban me-moiré’ to grasp the basic structure of the entire urban memorial landscape. From our empirical research, we can conclude that the concept of symbolic accretion and the notions of ‘layers of memorialization’ and ‘me-moiré’ seem to capture processes of memorialization especially well in the context of timeframes and spatial frames without major upheavals in the political system, which are often accompanied by the removal, replacement, and/or overwriting of memorials. Layers are figurations of outcomes of social and political processes with different sets of actors involved. As an analytical tool, they represent the actual states of power relations and offer a useful approach for a spatially and temporarily informed analysis of the contemporary presence of heterochronous mnemonic products. Thus, ‘me-moirés’ of an urban space produced by superpositioning the most important clusters from layers of memorialization make a dense urban memorial landscape more easily legible. At a glance, they can show continuities and processes of transformations in politics of remembrance for certain dates and periods as well as hierarchies of remembrance on a large scale and for specific spaces of remembrance. They offer a good starting point for an in-depth analysis of the politics of mnemonic space and for place-making as a crucial topic in memory studies. Referring to the term palimpsest, Aleida Assmann noted that contemporary presence in no way means that all layers of a city's architecture are noticed contemporarily or that they are always or necessarily present in the consciousness of contemporaries (Assmann, 2009, p. 18). Beyond the analytical value, we view the production of me-moirés as a performative act of remembering in its own right: Me-moirés can strengthen our perception of the urban memorial landscape as a highly differentiated and contested public space of remembrance consisting of varieties of figurations of memory shaped by different actors and modes of making over time.

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Declarations of interest None. Acknowledgments The authors would like to recognize the contribution of Johannes Kramer who helped collecting and coding data. The authors would like to thank Tim Corbett, Eva Schwab, Andreas Kranebitter for constructive comments and advice and three anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Funding: This work was supported by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) and the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. 18

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