Judenplatz and the Nameless Library

Historic · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

A sealed concrete library with its books turned back to front, standing in a Vienna square over the synagogue pulled down in 1421.

Judenplatz holds a library nobody can read. Rachel Whiteread cast it in concrete: a block ten metres by seven, no taller than a single storey, its outer walls made of shelves of books turned back to front. The double doors are solid concrete, cannot open, and have no handles. It stands for more than 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered by the National Socialists between 1938 and 1945, and the camps they were sent to are cut into its base. Underneath lie the foundations of the Jewish quarter's synagogue, pulled down in 1421 after the city's Jews were burned, forcibly baptised or driven out. In 1998 the city shifted the memorial a metre so that it would not stand on the synagogue's reading platform, and marked the platform's outline in the paving instead. The square is small and closed in by house fronts, one side taken by a baroque palace that now holds a high court. On the house at number 2, a stone relief and a Latin verse from about 1500 still celebrate the killings of 1421.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in the last hour of daylight — Low sun rakes across the wall, and the surface breaks into thousands of separate books. At midday the same wall flattens into a plain grey box.
Walk right round the block first — Three of its four faces are shelves and nothing more, so it is easy to arrive at the blank side and stop there.
You are looking at the inside of a room — Whiteread casts the empty space inside things, then removes the thing. That is why you see page edges here and never a title.
Nothing fences the memorial off, so you can reach it at any hour — The synagogue floor underneath is indoors and closed on Saturdays, because the museum that covers it keeps the Jewish sabbath.
The bronze figure on the square is the German writer Lessing — whose play Nathan the Wise argues that no religion holds the whole truth. The Nazis removed the first cast in 1939; this one is newer.

Things to do

1
Trace the outline of the buried reading platform
Step a few paces out from the memorial's long wall and you will find an outline set into the paving. Walk its edge. It marks the bimah below, the raised platform in the middle of a synagogue where the Torah is read aloud. This is the only piece of the buried building the square shows above ground.
2
Read the wall from an arm's length
From across the square the wall reads as rows of books. Move in to an arm's length and it becomes ruffled paper edges in concrete, shelf above shelf, running unbroken round the corners. The double doors are the only interruption anywhere on the block, and they are cast as solid as the walls around them.
3
Go down to the synagogue's own floor
The foundations lie under the paving, and the way down is a stair inside the museum at number 8. You come out among low walls of rough stone. What survives is mostly the floor: large patches of the original surface, the base of a pillar, and the footing of the platform whose outline you traced upstairs.