Vienna’s municipal housing blocks stand as symbols of the city authorities’ endeavor to create living space and improve the underprivileged social classes’ conditions. Today, these buildings, in their architectural variety, are regarded as visible proof of Red Vienna’s political accomplishments. During the Nazi era, the municipal housing blocks were appropriated and “re-encoded” along the lines of the totalitarian ideology in power. The regime tried to lend the buildings a “völkisch” character by means of sculptures, reliefs, and other applications on the façades.

The outside front of the Thury-Hof in Vienna’s ninth municipal district has also shown such an addition for several decades: probably installed in 1939, the sculptor Alfred Crepaz’s work invokes the Nazi virtues of sense of duty, fidelity, and heroism in its inscription: “Dear Lord, let us never hesitate and become cowards, let us never forget the duty we have taken upon us.” Though the signature of the author of these lines, Adolf Hitler, was removed after the end of the Second World War, the inscription has survived as has the life-size terracotta figure of a warrior bursting with energy, his head proudly raised, his hands clasping a sword.

Maria Theresia Litschauer’s approach to the presence of Nazi iconography on a municipal housing block aims at a historical sociopolitical contextualization: the artist is not concerned with removing traces of the past and thus obliterating the memory of the most horrible era of the twentieth century. By providing additional information on the fate of Jewish victims and people expelled from the Thury-Hof, she conveys an idea of the deep rift within those years’ society that the residents experienced and suffered from on the micropolitical level of living together on an everyday basis.

Brackets enclose the terracotta figure and the inscription on the façade of the Thury-Hof. A three-meter-long concrete band runs from the foot of the sculpture across the area in front of the municipal building to a glass panel offering a short documentation of the block’s history under Nazi rule, the Jewish residents’ fate, and an interpretation of Alfred Crepaz’s sculpture.

The three elements sign, concrete band, and text panel not only critically thematize the ideological background of the “völkisch” connoted sculpture, but also highlight Adolf Hitler’s readable quoted statement from 1933. That only the name of the author was deleted in 1945 is a measure indicative of the “consider-the-matter-closed” approach and the continuities to be observed in the postwar era.

The artist pursues the opposite purpose with her [ transkription ]: she does not cover things up, but initiates reflection and, extending the isolated interpretation of this work from National Socialist days, recalls the fate of the expelled and murdered Jewish residents of the Thury-Hof after comprehensive research. Thus, Maria Theresia Litschauer’s work of art forges a bridge to the present and the communicative memory of present-day and future occupants of the Thury-Hof.