We didn't see the town on one of her better days, but we were left with impressions that are worth sharing.
In the Stadtpark (city park), Johannes and Amy pointed out that the city of Wiener Neustadt had been fortified several times and they showed us portions of the different city walls within the Stadtpark. Then, we came upon these gravestones from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that were displayed in front of one of the walls. As the story goes, there used to be a bustling Jewish community in Wiener Neustadt until the reign of Emperor Maximillian in the fifteenth century when he ordered Jews out of the city and converted their synagogue into a Catholic church. In 1846, city workers who were digging around the city walls uncovered these tombstones, evidence of a more tolerant past toward Jews in the city.
We passed this building as we exited the Stadtpark. Remember when I wrote about the Altes Rathaus in Munich, the setting for a hate-filled speech by Goebbels that led to Kristallnacht that has been transformed into a safe, innocent toy museum? Well, this building shares a similar fate.
Beginning in 1938, this building was used as an office for the Gestapo. It belonged to Jewish people, and was seized as were many other Jewish-owned properties in Austria and elsewhere in Europe. Soon after establishing themselves in Wiener Neustadt, around ninety Jews and other political opponents of the Nazis were arrested over the course of two days. Many of these people were later transported to Dachau (next to Munich) and other concentration camps after being tortured and abused here first.
Now, it's called the Europahaus and it houses a kindergarten and a youth hostel.
I'm torn when thinking about this. No amount of remodeling or renaming can hide history. I don't think that buildings such as the Altes Rathaus in Munich or the Europahaus in Wiener Neustadt should be torn down. That would be a denial of history. At the same time, we can't expect Germans and Austrians to keep the buildings as they were in the '30s and '40s. That would make it seem like the people haven't moved on, and from what I know, most people here want to leave that history far behind them. But, repurposing these buildings into innocuous establishments, like toy museums and kindergartens, also feels like a slap in the face.
The United States isn't exempt from this: plantations, Native American villages and burial grounds, lynching trees, the fence where Matthew Shepard was left to die, a movie theater in Colorado, an elementary school in Connecticut. The list goes on. What should be done with these places?
How do we successfully acknowledge the past as well as heal and grow as time goes on?
I don't know the answer to your final question Jen, but I do know that it seems so trivial to make these buildings where mass murders occurred into happy places. I believe we can learn to forgive but never forget which is why making museums out of important places is done throughout the world (Anne Frank's house, Ground Zero, etc..). Perhaps if Germany made museums of all of the places where atrocities took place, the country would be not much else, a monument to horror which is not ideal. But I agree with you, it does feel like a slap in the face to make these places into toy museums and the like...
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Rachel. I agree that monuments and museums should be made out of significant places, but there's a limit too, like you said. A country cannot just be museum after museum. It's striking an appropriate balance, I think, but it's difficult to determine what that balance is.
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