Ghosts of Vienna

I wondered if such a bustling, cosmopolitan city shared the view that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. It must be tempting to bury the Nazi past of this city and move on, after more than half a century.

I was pleased that the new Leopold Museum, in the Museums Quarter, had a powerful exhibit on art between the wars which looked squarely at the role of Austria in joining with Hitler and the Nazis.

I could not take pictures of the exhibit and that portion of the Museum’s web page has been malfunctioning for days, but here is a publicity poster of the exhibit nearby that shows the chilling removal of artists from the realm of acceptability to the Nazis.

Along with an exhibit of artists impacted by the war, a documentary playing continuously in one hall at the Leopold showed chilling footage of the triumphant arrival of Hitler into Vienna to cheering crowds in 1937. A lengthy timeline on the wall (entirely in German, unfortunately) documented the ominous series of events that led to the disastrous second World War.

This is the Academy of Fine Arts, which denied admission to Hitler in 1907. The statue is of Friedrich Schiller, the 18th-century German poet and philosopher.

“Degenerate Art,” about Hitler’s infamous exhibit ridiculing contemporary art in the 1930s, is one of the most powerful documentaries ever shown by public television in the U.S. I often teach this episode in my American philosophy of art classes about the power of art and the danger of its repression by tyrants, and I was pleased to see another dimension of this tragic period of history in Austria.

Here is the web site for the Leopold Museum: http://www.leopoldmuseum.org/english/index.html

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