The Willed and the Unwilled Monument

Abstract

The Willed and the Unwilled Monument: Judenplatz Vienna and Riegl’s Denkmalpflege takes a new approach to the competition for the Monument and Memorial for the Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Austria. Noting the complication of the case by the discovery of medieval archaeological remains on Vienna’s Judenplatz, and the ambivalence of the jury in choosing a sculptural project that made no reference to these remains, Mechtild Widrich turns to a lucid source of thinking about memory and public building, Alois Riegl’s essay on the monument cult (Denkmalkultus) and the newspaper articles and government documents he produced on the same subject. Through Riegl’s distinction between “willed” and “unwilled” monuments, and the force the latter exert on the subjectivity of modern spectators, the choice and execution of Rachel Whiteread’s “Nameless Library” in Vienna becomes intelligible, as do wider trends in restoration and commemoration of the late 1980s and 1990s.