Austria's grim memorial shows wounds still festering

Austria's first memorial to Jewish citizens murdered by the Nazis was unveiled yesterday at a special ceremony which the Austrian right-wing Government was asked not to attend.

Vienna's Jews vehemently oppose the Austrian People's Party's power-clinching coalition with Jurg Haider's populist xenophobic Freedom Party.

They did not want the Government associated with the memorial to 65,000 Austrian-Jewish holocaust victims in Vienna's ancient Judenplatz, (Jews' square).

The rise of Haider's party, which regularly attacks foreigners and minorities, has dismayed Vienna's Jewish population and the memorial, funded by Vienna's socialist city council, has been mired in politics since its commission five years ago. This week, the memorial's creator, Rachel Whiteread, said she wanted to avoid talking about politics lest it "inflame" the situation. But five years ago she described Vienna - where Hilter spent his youth - as the birthplace of modern anti-semitism.

"Vienna is the place where all these historic crossroads run together," she said. "To be asked to make a monument there is a sculptor's greatest challenge."

The memorial is a stark, white, concrete library turned inside out and engraved with the names of concentration and work camps where Austrian Jews perished. Although Vienna already has monuments to victims of fascism and the dead from the Second World War, this is the first to commemorate Jewish genocide victims.

The most moving moment was provided by the now bent and crippled 91-year-old Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, who championed the Vienna holocaust memorial from the start. In a thin, reedy voice, he said he had dedicated his life to the battle against forgetting "the greatest tragedy in history."

He warned the small crowd that Nazism was still alive.

Wiesenthal suggested criticisms that Whiteread's creation was not beautiful missed the point.

"It is important that the art is not beautiful, that it hurts us in some way," he said.

And he was glad Whiteread had picked a library theme to remember the Jews, the People of the Book, for it was the community's books, ideas, values and cultural achievements that had been torched again and again during centuries of persecution, he said.

A few moments later the sound of the Kaddish - the Jewish mourning prayer - rang hauntingly through the square, somehow evoking the thousands of Jewish victims the memorial honoured.

But in a country which has failed to deal with its shameful war-time past - and its collaboration with the Nazis in the genocide of Jewish citizens - the memorial is divisive. Like Haider's rise, Whiteread's monument has again exposed the deep xenophobic, anti-semitic seam in Austrian society.

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