On the initiative of the Plattform Geschichtspolitik, a group of students and teachers of the Academy of Fine Arts, the monument to the Nazi poet Josef Weinheber on Vienna's Schillerplatz is being artistically redesigned and contextualized. The project is realized in cooperation with KÖR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the City of Vienna. Since 2010, the Plattform Geschichtspolitik has been working on the redesign of the monument. Eduard Freudmann, Chris Gangl, Gabu Heindl, Tatiana Kai-Browne, Katharina Morawek and Philipp Sonderegger worked on the project in various stages and different constellations.

Josef Weinheber first joined the NSDAP in 1931 and was actively involved in its cultural organizations. He received massive support from Nazi cultural policy and rose to become one of the most important writers of Nazi Germany. Weinheber wrote numerous Nazi propaganda poems, such as "Hymn to Homecoming", "To the Führer" or "Ode to the Streets of Adolf Hitler". He received various honors and awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna and honorary membership in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Furthermore, in 1944, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels included him in the so-called Gottbegnadeten list. In April 1945 he took his own life. In the years that followed, his literary memory was cherished above all by writers who, like him, had been close to National Socialism.

The memorial at Schillerplatz was erected in 1975 by the private Weinheber-Gesellschaft and taken into the care of the City of Vienna. After the installation, there were repeated interventions, for example by graffiti or theft of the bust. In 1991 the bust was re-poured and the monument was redesigned by the authorities. "What is remarkable," says contemporary historian Florian Wenninger, "is that the redesign was not based on a critical examination of Weinheber's Nazi biography, but rather in the sense of an architectural fortification and thus immunization against the interventions. The bust was mounted in a more stable manner and the monument was given a new, easier to clean base, which was anchored in a concrete foundation beneath the earth's surface. In this static reinforcement, the Platform for Historical Politics sees the expansion of the monument by an additional element, "which is so characteristic of the way NS history was dealt with in the Second Republic precisely because of the invisibility of its massiveness.

The Plattform Geschichtspolitik has been working on the monument since the fall of 2009. A first intervention took place in May 2010, after which a draft for the artistic redesign was submitted to the City of Vienna, which included the uncovering of the underground concrete foundation in order to make the monument ensemble visible in its entirety and to refer to the decades of conflict surrounding the monument. After the design was rejected on artistic grounds, the Plattform Geschichtspolitik exposed the foundation of the monument in June 2013 without official approval. Public debates about the monument followed. Josef Haslinger saw "the small wound in the green space of Schillerplatz [as] a metaphor for the great wound left by National Socialism in Austrian intellectual history". Asa Mendelsohn pointed out that the protracted negotiations with the relevant authorities and public discourse should be understood as part of the artwork, just as the spatial intervention in the monument itself. The intervention, which was described as a landscape architectural measure in a confessional letter by the Plattform Geschichtspolitik, was reversed by the authorities after three days because no permission had been granted beforehand. After an adapted design was approved in 2014, the project will now be implemented permanently. Next to the redesigned monument, an additional plaque will be installed, which was created in cooperation between the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and the City of Vienna and contains information on Josef Weinheber's biography and the history of the monument.

Text: Eduard Freudmann