Face to Face Archive
The Stories Behind the
Stories at the Jewish Museum of Vienna: A Roundtable Discussion with Werner Hanak, Curator
During his recent
visit to New York, Werner Hanak, Curator at the
Jewish Museum of Vienna, sat down with CLAL faculty to discuss his role as interpreter of
Jewish culture in a city haunted by its complicity in the Holocaust. Daniel Eisenstadt,
Executive Director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, also joined the
conversation.
A native of
Salzburg, Austria, Werner Hanak studied drama, film and communications at the University
of Vienna, where his thesis focused on a Viennese Jewish theater of the 1920s. He began
working at the Jewish Museum of Vienna in 1992; in 1994, he curated his first exhibition
there: Chagall: Bilder, Träume, Theater, 1908-1920 (Chagall: Images, Dreams, Theater, 1908-1920).
His major projects with the museum include working
with New York artist Nancy Spero on the permanent exhibition Remembrance/Renewal (1996); establishing the museum’s archive and
presenting an exhibition on it called Papier ist doch Weiss? (Paper Is White, Isn’t It?) (1998); and
Eden-Zion-Utopia: Zur Geschichte der Zukunft in Judentum (Eden Zion Utopia: The History of
the Future in Judaism) (1999). Current projects include the museum’s upcoming
exhibition Diaspora: Heimatländer im Exil: Fotografien von Frederic Brenner (Homelands in Exile: The Photography of Frederic
Brenner) and The Making of the City of Music: Jews and Music in Vienna, together with Leon Botstein. Hanak is also planning
an exhibition with Berlin’s new Jewish Museum: Gott, Freud und ich Selbst:
Selbstporträts Jüdischer KünstlerInnen (God,
Freud, and Myself: Self-Portraits of Jewish Artists).
Shari Cohen: How does the Jewish Museum of Vienna make us think differently
about the past and about the future? How does the museum, and your role there, make us
think differently about Jewish identity?
Werner Hanak: You should know that there was actually a Jewish museum in
Vienna before. It opened in 1895, and it is said to have been the first in the world; we
still hold some of its collection. Our museum opened in 1990, about ten years ago.
In 1999, I did an
exhibition—another millennium thing—called Eden-
Zion- Utopia: The History of the Future in Judaism.
It was a very important exhibition for me. When you work at a Jewish museum in
Vienna, you deal mostly, as you can imagine, with the past.
The Jewish community was about 180,000-200,000 people before 1938. Now it consists
of about 8,000 people.
I had already done a photographic
exhibition, Vienna in Those Days, about the turn
of the century, and one called Vienna Today,
with a Viennese photographer who was trying to portray Jewish life in Vienna. I thought it
was time to do something on the future. But the Jewish future in Vienna—I had the
feeling there was not a lot to talk about. It’s a small community. Of course, it
seems like there is more future than there used to be, somehow.
There’s an interesting story
about that. At the end of the 1950s, Vienna’s Jewish community sent its prewar
archives to Jerusalem. That was a time when
the old people knew that they wanted to stay in Vienna, but they expected their kids to
leave for Israel or the States. They thought their community would disappear in 20 or 30
years. But it didn’t. The second and
third generations grew up there, although of course a lot of kids do move to Israel or the
States. I’ve heard that now they are trying to get this archive back—a metaphor
for how the future of Jews in Vienna works.
But for this exhibition, I wanted
to go back into the past to find out how the Jewish people, and really humankind in
general, deal with questions about the future. What does the future mean? What does it
mean to hope? To expect? To fear? What does it mean to cope with the fact that there will
be a tomorrow?
You asked about identity. I think
it’s interesting for you that I’m not Jewish, but work in a Jewish museum.
I’ve been working in this museum for nine years now. I deal all the time with trying
to figure out what identity is, what identity means—a lot of our work is about Jewish
identities in Austria, and in modernity. So of course I ask myself what kind of identity I
have.
I was raised as a Lutheran. My
father used to be a chaplain for the army—a very weird job—so I was more or less
raised in a religious context. I’m
still part of this church, but I don’t attend services. I’m quite secular.
Non-Jewish people in Vienna ask me,
“Why do they allow you to work there?” Well,
it’s a city museum, it belongs to the city of Vienna. You don’t have to have
this religion or that religion to work there. People
from abroad—America, Israel—also ask this question.
Shari Cohen: A related
question is about clientele: Who is the museum for?
Werner Hanak: In the summer, a
lot of tourists come—American Jews, but also people from all over Europe. Of course, like any other museum, we try to bring
the in-town people in for our special exhibitions; otherwise, they just come once every
five years when they have out-of-town guests.
Ours is a very contemporary museum.
It’s not a Shoah museum. We try to
communicate, mostly to the Viennese and the Austrian people, that Jewish Viennese history
is not only the history of the Shoah. Our goal is to inform people about the Jewish
religion, Jewish culture, Jewish history. I support this.
When I was growing up in Salzburg, I knew no Jewish people. When we learned about the Jews in school, we
started with 1938, so the first time I came across the word Jew was in the context of
their being expelled, and murdered. The words
“murder” and “Jew” became synonyms in my mind.
Of course, our museum speaks about
the Holocaust too, in the permanent collection. But I notice that people—mainly those
from the United States—find we do too little about the Holocaust. Well, we know we
cannot please everybody.
Shari
Cohen: One of the
interesting things you told me when we first met was that you felt like all the things
regarding the history of World War Two and the Holocaust in Austria ended up being the
responsibility of your museum, and that you wondered why no one else in the city was
dealing with this.
Werner
Hanak: Yes. When we
first opened the museum, we had to deal with a terrible story about Vienna and its
museums, a story that had stayed hidden a long time. In 1940 or 1941, the Natural History
Museum ordered some masks from a concentration camp—death masks of people who were
murdered in that camp—so the museum could do some anthropological studies. In the
beginning of the 1990s, they were going through their collection and found those masks.
The person who found them, who was not someone from the museum, said, “We could give
these to the Jewish Museum.” These were masks of Jewish prisoners, so she had the
idea of giving them to the Jewish Museum. And it was done within a week.
And suddenly we
realized that we have these here and we’re not the place to cope with it. It should have been the Natural History Museum
that coped with it. The masks stayed in our storage area. Two or three years later, our
Chief Curator Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek had the idea of doing an exhibition on the Shoah,
and using the masks. If we have them, he
thought, let’s do something with them. So we started to research their history. We
went to the Natural History Museum and said we wanted to see all the archives and the
letters about the masks, and then they felt very uncomfortable.
It ended up being a
really interesting exhibition. There were just those 20 masks, lying on metal or
glass—very clean architecture. And there was a camera. We said to the visitors,
“You can choose whether you want to go in there or not, because if you do you will be
filmed. If you want to know how you react, you can go in and watch the film
afterwards.” It was played after a 20 minute delay, so that when you were coming out
you had a chance to see yourself looking at the masks.
We also had a room
with all the documentation of how the masks came to our museum, including the letter the
Natural History Museum’s director wrote to our museum director when the masks were
donated to us. Of course, this made the
Natural History Museum uncomfortable, but we had the feeling that we were doing, again,
their work for them.
And here I am saying “we”
were doing the work for them. Yes, after working for a Jewish Museum for nine years I have
something like a Jewish identity. It’s interesting when I find myself saying, “I’m doing this for the Viennese,”
you know, or “we’re doing this.”
Daniel
Eisenstadt: It seems to me
that one of the questions you’re asking is what makes an artifact Jewish. Obviously,
most cultural artifacts have multiple identities. And in a sense, your museum is dealing
with multiple identities—Jewish, Austrian. So
I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the affair with Bruno Schulz and Yad
Vashem, since that raises this same issue: How should we treat artifacts with multiple
identities?
Werner
Hanak: With the Bruno
Schulz story, you have to consider the problem of Israel’s relationship to the
diaspora, and especially to a place like Poland, or Austria. Viennese Jews always have to
defend themselves anywhere else in the world. If they go to New York or Israel, they get
asked, “How can you live in that city? How, after all that’s happened there, can
you stay?”
On the one hand, I
understand that someone might come along and say, “These things are being neglected
and getting ruined, so let’s take it to a place where they will survive.” But on
the other hand, I don’t really like that the Schulz murals went to Israel. I work a
lot with the Israel museum, and it’s like all those synagogues that are there. It
means something similar, I think—that the diaspora is getting smaller. When you carry away a synagogue to Jerusalem,
it’s no longer in the diaspora.
Once when I was on
a tour at the Eretz Israel museum in Tel Aviv, the guide was talking about a Torah shield
that had stayed hidden in Poland from 1938 to 1945. When it came to Israel, she said, it
“returned home.” I asked her, “What do you mean by ‘returning
home?’ ” In this respect, I have a diasporic identity. At the museum, we want to
show history in the place where it has happened, and for this place not to vanish as a
place of remembrance.
Michael
Gottsegen: I know that many
of the people in German speaking countries who are administering the cultural patrimony of
the Jews are non-Jews. I’m interested in the symbolic function of Jewish culture for
non-Jews in Europe today. It’s interesting, for example, that you wrote your thesis
on Jewish theater. You’re a secularist, and yet you have a certain affinity for this
culture. I’m intrigued in hearing what you think about the role it plays for you and,
more generally, for younger non-Jews in Austria today.
Werner
Hanak: I have thought
about this a lot. Let me tell you about a project I’m doing with the Leo Baeck
Institute here in New York. There are always two young Austrians working there, doing
their civil service—in Austria you either have to go into the army or the civil
service. These young people do interviews with Austrian immigrants living in New York,
collecting memories of people who fled Austria. I’m doing an exhibition about their
work. It’s not so much about the immigrants, because this has been a big topic
already. For this exhibition, I’m more interested in the young people going to New
York and doing these interviews.
I want to tell you
something about me, too. I meet a lot of old emigrants from Austria. I do exhibitions,
radio programs, and interviews with them. And sometimes I have the feeling I am looking
for new grandparents, you know? Grandparents who were not part of the NSDAP, grandparents
who have a different way of looking at what Heimat—homeland—means,
because they have not only one Heimat, but two
or three.
This double
dimension, being surrounded by people who have not a one-dimensional life but a
two-dimensional life, is always fascinating for me. I
think I’ve found this more with Jewish people, and especially with these emigrants,
who also have this Viennese identity that I have.
Michael
Gottsegen: Growing up, did
you feel this multiple dimensionality in yourself, or is it more like you have a craving
for a kind of multipleness that was missing in your own culture?
Werner
Hanak: I would say that
my culture was, in a way, boring to me. In high school, I had a very good friend who was
an American. I spent a lot of time with him and his American household. We had a band
together. I was trying to escape this place,
this culture where I was born. Though my
parents, too, have a lot of identities. My
father was a chaplain in the army even though he was a pacifist; my mother dealt with
development aid, and went to Africa a lot. My
grandparents on her side were bourgeois— my grandfather was a librarian at the
University, he studied literature. He was also a member of the NSDAP. I’m trying to
figure it all out. What was my mother looking
for in Africa?
Michael
Gottsegen: Maybe you are
involved in the same quest, but on different continents?
Werner
Hanak: Yes. My mother
wrote a book about women in Africa. She went to all these women’s conferences. But
she was running away from asking her mother and father about that earlier time. She was
born in 1933, she was there.
I am the last of
four children. I have one brother and two sisters, and during the Waldheim affair, one of
my sisters, my brother and I started constantly asking my parents, “And what was
going on in your family back then?” The family has had a lot of quarrels over the
last ten years.
The peak of it was
at a hundred year birthday anniversary for my grandmother—she was no longer alive,
but it would have been her hundredth birthday and the relatives thought it would be nice
to meet for the occasion. About fifty people came, and everyone brought photographs to
show. It was a really nice idea.
But suddenly, we
had the feeling— my brother and my sister and me—that there was no talk of the
years between 1938 and 1945. At least, we thought, one could say something. Somebody told
us, “He was not a Nazi.” So we said, “We thought he was a member of the
Party.” “Yeah, but. . .blah blah.” You will always find in Austria that
someone was too silly to have done anything terrible then, that someone was too nice, or
was not in charge, or whatever. Anyway, within ten minutes it was a whole mess, this
party. Of course what we did was problematic at a party in someone’s memory, but if
you are not allowed to say these kinds of things. . . .
I have asked myself
often if I am a philosemite. I suppose that experience of searching for something else,
some other grandparents or another culture, was a motivation for my work in the beginning,
but I don’t think that’s really it any longer.
Robert
Rabinowitz: Does Judaism, or
Jewishness, symbolize something for you, or is it just a culture?
Werner
Hanak: In European
society, there was this process of assimilation that in many ways did not work because
non-Jews still regarded Jews as being the Other. This was a pillar of the Nazi ideology.
But when this Other is no longer there because they have been murdered, it has to be made
possible to remember, to remind ourselves that there was this group of people different
from the mainstream—or this group that wanted to be different in some ways, and
wanted to be the same in others. Though I am not sure I have ever been able to give an
answer to this question.
Robert
Rabinowitz: When I was in
Vienna about ten years ago, I was struck at first by how few Asian or black people there
were there. Later I noticed that during the rush hour traffic all the guys selling papers
looked like they might be Indian, or Bangladeshi. And so I am wondering whether Jews are
really no longer the Other in Austria. Is it that Jews are symbols of an Other who is no
longer there? Are there other “Others” now?
Werner
Hanak: I would say yes
and no. Austria has, for example, a number of Turkish immigrants. Others have come from the former Yugoslavia and
other places to the east of Austria. Because Austria never had colonies, there was never
much interchange with black or Asian people. But
when you hear what Jorg Haider is saying—of course, he is trying to make foreigners,
immigrants, into the Other.
But this is
different from how it is, or was, with Jews. These new immigrants stand out, they look
different. I think part of the problem with Jews and Austrians, or Austrian Jews, or
Jewish Austrians, was that Jews did not really look different. Why was the yellow star invented?
Shari
Cohen: You mean that
because Jews were so integrated, they were a particular kind of Other?
Werner
Hanak: Well, the
Yugoslavians, and the second generation of the Turkish, still have their own culture, but
they have also become more and more integrated. I would call that a good process. It is good that there is a second generation of
different looking people. It’s different in Austria than in the States. When I come
here, I have the sense that Jews define themselves as one of many different groups.
Libby
Garland: Going back to
this idea of non-Jewish involvement in Jewish culture, again, I am wondering what you
think might be different about coming to a Jewish museum than, say, going to a klezmer
concert or studying Jewish history, which non-Jews in Europe also do. Is it particularly
tricky or interesting to reflect on Jewish culture through the medium of a museum?
Werner
Hanak: What is always
interesting for us is the story behind the things. That’s what we are trying to
provide. We have a lot of historical or ritual objects.
On the top floor of the museum is our storage area—but we have made it
public. There’s a huge glass cube; inside it is an enormous bunch of ritual objects. It’s not a collection. These are all objects
that were saved, or robbed, or found from the synagogues that were burnt down. We do not exactly know their history—we
don’t know how they came back into the Jewish community after 1945 again.
We tried not to
exhibit them as artifacts, but just as a mass—to make a memorial out of them, these
things that remain. And we’re telling the story behind them, which is that we do not
know the story. But we are also saying that this is not a collection, because a collection
is when someone collects something with a goal—to collect the most Austro-Hungarian
spice boxes, or whatever.
This is different
from the way things are exhibited in Paris. What
I’ve seen in Paris is much more beautiful: things are displayed in these very French
ways so that you are amazed by the beauty of the things, which is okay. But this is the
difference between Vienna and Paris. Vienna,
and Berlin too, of course, have a special role in Europe.
What’s the
difference between a klezmer concert and a museum? I think they are not so different,
though maybe with music there is something more emotional. A museum is also emotional, but
it’s more about reading, and it’s always about history. Although when you do an
exhibition, you’re also very much in the present.
Daniel
Eisenstadt: I have a
colleague in Poland who runs the Center for Jewish Culture in Krakow. The main audience
for his Center are Poles, non-Jews. For him,
one important role the center plays is helping to build civil society in Poland, and
particularly in Krakow. It makes me think
about the role of museums, of memorials, in trying to help build a civil society for the
future by taking the past and weaving in the present. In Poland, so much of this has to do
with post-communism. Does building civil
society play a role in Austria, where there’s a significant civil society already?
Werner
Hanak: I would say that
building civil society is not so much our goal; I think Austrians have the feeling that
there is one in their country. The goal for our museum—and it’s a double bind
situation— is to reveal the lies about history that Austrians have told. When I was
growing up, for example, I had the feeling that Austria was a very nice country. That’s what we were told in school: Austria
was nice, it was neutral, it was between the blocs.
I mean, that was the peak of the Cold War in the ‘80s. Since we are
neutral, we must be nice, see how everyone loves our music and so on. We were not told why
we were neutral – because we were supposed to be a dangerous state.
While the museum is
not really about civil society, there were political reasons to make a museum that would
deal with this history. The mayor of Vienna, when he came to the 1986 “MOMA
1900” Show—he was a social democrat, was against Waldheim—announced,
“We are going to open a Jewish Museum.” It was part of a foreign policy thing. So here we come back to this: that we are
cleaning up “their history,” in a way.
Robert
Rabinowitz: Who’s
“we” and who’s “they”? There’s the institutional
“we,” of course, but then there’s also Werner. Is he the unmarked Other
inside the institution of the unmarked Other?
Werner
Hanak: It’s hard
for me to know whether I’m a “they” or a “we.” It’s really
hard. Sometime it’s more like this, sometimes more like that. It changes.
In a way, I like
that we are a museum of the city of Vienna. It’s a statement by the city after all
these years to say that Jewish Viennese history is Viennese history. But most people think that the Jewish Museum is
run by Jews. Are we responsible for working
through the Nazi history of Austria?
For instance,
we’re planning an exhibition about the Second Republic—since 1945—and its
Jews. It will be an interesting show, but again—that’s a topic that should be
done by a historical museum. And it is a horrible show, it is horrible to consider what
has happened since the Holocaust, or what hasn’t happened.
Michael
Gottsegen: In light of our
discussion of other minorities in Austria besides Jews, I’m thinking that you
can’t do an exhibit about the Second Republic’s Jews that doesn’t raise
questions about the country’s relationship to its other “Others.” The
interest in the Other in the past must suggest to the museum-goer something about the
parallels between now and then: How are we similarly oblivious today? How are we
comforting ourselves today with blinders as people did before?
Werner
Hanak: These are all the
things that can be problematic with Jewish museums in Europe. On the other hand, a Jewish museum shouldn’t
try to do everything—because then it can get too comfortable. There has been discussion about making a museum of
Austrian history, where such topics can be dealt with.
Robert
Rabinowitz: What if other
institutions did do their own dirty work? The Natural History Museum was the place that
commissioned those death masks, so they should have the exhibition there. They could
explore really interesting questions about the nature of science, and the connections
between science and ideas about race. But if everyone else were facing up to their
history, if a history museum existed, and had a section on Jews and one on immigrants, and
people were talking openly in Austria more generally, and so on, what would be the
function of the Jewish Museum?
Werner
Hanak: I think we’d
be more focused on informing people about Jews in Austria before 1938, and about the
Holocaust.
Shari Cohen: So it would be a less living museum, in a way?
Werner
Hanak: Well, it would be
more like the Jewish Museum on 5th Avenue here in New York. We could do things
like a Chagall exhibition, or a Soutine exhibition—the regular vocabulary of a Jewish
museum. If your scenario, your utopian scenario, were real, then I suppose we would be a
museum of the Jewish community.
Daniel
Eisenstadt: Some of the
dynamism of the European phenomenon of the Jewish Museum is a result, it seems, of what
isn’t being addressed in the wider society.
Robert
Rabinowitz: The Jewish Museum
in London is very dull. The permanent exhibition is a collection of ritual objects. It is
very much like a catalog.
Libby
Garland: Since we’re
talking about Vienna, it makes me think about psychoanalysis. One of the implications of what you’re saying
is that a museum can function to bring “essential conflicts” to consciousness,
and to talk about how they are at the root of what goes on in present-day culture.
Obviously psychoanalysis is about individuals, but it’s interesting to think of the
museum as playing the role of the analyst to Vienna—raising the question about how
the city’s history with Jews is getting worked out in the present.
Werner
Hanak: This is true, in a way. This is what makes it
interesting to work there. That, and that I am allowed to do at the Jewish Museum what I
wouldn’t be allowed to do elsewhere. That is a good thing.
(Edited by Libby Garland)
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