Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna

"The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial also known as the Nameless Library stands in Judenplatz in the first district of Vienna. It is the central memorial for the Austrian victims of the Holocaust and was designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread.


The memorial is a steel and concrete construction.  The outside surfaces of the volume are cast library shelves turned inside out. The spines of the books are facing inwards and are not visible, therefore the titles of the volumes are unknown and the content of the books remains unrevealed. The shelves of the memorial appear to hold endless copies of the same edition, which stand for the vast number of the victims, as well as the concept of Jews as "People of the Book." The double doors are cast with the panels inside out, and have no doorknobs or handles. They suggest the possibility of coming and going, but do not open.

The memorial represents, in the style of Whiteread's "empty spaces", a library whose books are shown on the outside but are unreadable. The memorial can be understood as an appreciation of Judaism as a religion of the "book"; however, it also speaks of a cultural space of memory and loss created by the genocide of the European Jews. Through the emphasis of void and negative casting rather than positive form and material, it acts as a "counter monument" in this way opposite to the production through history of grandiose and triumphal monumental objects.

As a work of art, the memorial was not intended to be beautiful and as such it contrasts with much of the Baroque art and architecture of Vienna. A member of the design jury had noticed a resemblance to a bunker and the military fortifications of the Atlantic wall were later confirmed by the artist as a source of inspiration for the project. There is an aspect of discomfort in the monument that was meant to provoke thought in the viewer through the memorial's severe presence. It was intended to evoke the tragedy and brutality of the Holocaust and in the words of Simon Wiesenthal at the unveiling, "This monument shouldn't be beautiful, It must hurt." - from Wikipedia

Susie West adds this "[the] Holocaust Memorial, a cast of spaces around books on bookshelves, to signify books not written, not read, and not loved by citizens who were Jewish." in Contexts A151 Book 2, (2012) Solid but unstable: the early modern book, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Book Review : AVSI Judaism - Norman Solomon 7*

I had a bit of an autodidactic spree before starting a degree course and read a few of Oxford University Press' A Very Short Introduction series, and generally they are very good little books, offering a necessarily brief yet reasonably academic view into the topic of each book.

AVSI Judaism is the fourth of the religion introductions I have read after Linda Woodhead's Christianity, Eleanor Nesbitt's Sikhism and Islam by Malise Ruthven. Of the four, Woodhead writes clearly and distinctly and stands back from the subject in a proper academic fashion, Nesbitt and Solomon both appear slightly too close to the religion they are describing, and Ruthven's book is in parts a baffling impenetrable collage of concepts, ideology and phrases that left me little the wiser at the end.

Solomon has chosen to write in a very simple style, perhaps the accusation overly simple could be levelled at some points, his use of language does sometimes come across as a kindly old man teaching a class of six year olds.  Never the less, Solomon explains the tenets, practices and history in a clear and succinct style, albeit shaded by obvious proximity to and love of his subject.

The ongoing tension and clashes between Jewish Israel and the Muslim Middle East are obviously hard to describe for anyone who has a vested interest, and I feel that Solomon did not manage to stand back far enough from this difficult part of the subject.  Solomon talks about the Jewish military concept of tohar ha-nesheq with its demand that soldiers must take care to avoid collateral damage and civilian casualties, but he does not make it clear whether he thinks that Israel's armed forces embrace this concept.

In other places Solomon's love for Judaism shines through, especially in the chapter on home life.  These points aside though, it is a good description of one of the world's great religions, easy to read and understand and gain a basic understanding of the subject in hand.