Austria - Digging up the Past
In the heart of Vienna, locked behind heavy gates and hidden by a high wall studded with shards of glass, lies the Wahring Jewish cemetery. Itís a tangled rundown jungle lurking at the heart of an obsessively tidy city, which has been long ago forgotten by most local residents. It is, however, remembered by one historian, and she is determined to put it back on the city map and at the forefront of the cityís conscience.
Mark Corcoran joined the historian Tina Walzer, on one of her walks through the cemetery as she explained why the cemetery is so historically important and how she is trying to get the city and state officials to recognise this and help her to rebuild and maintain the site. There has been some success of late, with an inter-government agreement to provide funding for this purpose, but she fears it may be too late, given that foxes and other wild scavengers have already dug up some of the graves and scattered bones around the site, and attacks by vandals have left many headstones permanently damaged.
However, Tinaís struggle to combat the inertia of government agencies in her clean up campaign is matched only by her struggle to overcome the historical dead ends she has encountered in trying to track down the whereabouts of some of the specific remains of people buried in the Wahring cemetery.
To prove their master race theories Ė Nazi anthropologists from the Vienna Museum of Natural History exhumed between 200 and 300 Jewish graves from Wahring, including the remains of a woman called Fanny Von Arnstein. Credited as one of Austriaís first feminists, she was a leading member of 19th century Viennese society, creating the cityís first bourgeois salon and regularly entertaining diplomats, politicians, artists and writers in her home. Tina Walzer would like to know where she is now. She believes that the Museum of Natural History holds the key to her final resting place, but the authorities there maintain she was reburied in 1947 and refuse to be drawn any further on the issue.
Corcoran visited the Museum and spoke with the Head of Anthropology, Professor Maria Teschler. She is now in charge of the Museumís collection, which holds about 40,000 individuals from different time periods, and like many of her fellow anthropologists around the world, she is grappling with important ethical issues regarding some of the human remains in her care.
In the early 1990ís a newspaper investigation revealed that the museum still held the remains of Jewish concentration camp inmates and Polish resistance fighters. There was a public outcry and eventually, in 1999, these remains were handed back. The scandal led Professor Teschler and her team to undertake a lengthy investigation of human remains collected during the Nazi period.
There is now a fairly comprehensive archive in place and itís acknowledged that some Nazi era exhibits still remain in the collection, (although now out of view from the public) for reasons of historical and scientific research.
No further information was forthcoming about Fanny Von Arnstein, but Tina Walzer is prepared to keep up her search, just as she is prepared to continue her work in the Wahring cemetery and to exert pressure on the Austrian authorities to take responsibility for the necessary repairs and upkeep.
For Tina, it is a deeply personal endeavour, because some of her ancestors are buried there, although she has yet to find their graves. For most of the people buried in the cemetery, however, there are no descendants to remember them or fight on their behalf Ė they perished in the Nazi concentration camps or were forced to leave Austria, never to return. As far as Tina Walzer is concerned, they will never be forgotten.
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