“Beethoven”: establishing Vienna as a place of remembrance

But what exactly do we mean by a “place of remem­brance?” The original concept, and the definition that accompanied it, were defined by the historian Pierre Nora. Nora was born in 1931 and edited a series of volumes dedicated to France's Lieux de mémoire, starting in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, German historians followed suit, their efforts culminating in a three-volume work entitled “Deutsche Erinne­rungs­orte” (German Places of Remem­brance). Their Austrian counterparts got in on the act in “Memoria Austriae”, another three-volume work that was published in 2004/2005 (incidentally, they failed to include an entry on Beethoven; “Viennese Classicism” is represented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). The historian Heidemarie Uhl argues societies are attracted to places of remembrance and the way they prompt us to focus on our collective memory (a phenomenon that can also be seen in events to mark anniversaries, memorial sites, museums, and other monuments to historical events and personalities) to the fact that a society's attitudes and ex­pectations tend to spring not from what it expects its future to look like, but from reflection on its past experiences. Collective remem­brance of our past is intended to foster and strengthen “identity” and cohesion. Seen from this point of view, the rise of dedicated “places of remembrance” can be inter­preted above all as a political process. Uhl goes on to claim that the concept of lieux de mémoire is ultimately about “capturing the way the national collective memory is re­present­ed”, (Uhl, p. 148), an aim that triggers consequences of its own. Ac­cord­ing to Uhl, the idea of “places of re­mem­brance” serves to differen­tiate between “us” and “them.” It also generates what she calls “hierarchies of memory”, which in turn lead to certain cultural and social norms be­coming dominant. These norms then serve to marginalise or exclude certain categories of people, potentially at the same time as leaving other groups over-represented. Seen in this context, the way Vienna has positioned itself as a place of remembrance for Beethoven is akin to the city claiming ownership of the composer’s name. Doing so then allows it to use the “Beethoven” brand as a vehicle for its cultural and politcal ends and to promote its economy, with a particular emphasis on the tourism sector.

As Martina Nussbaumer has highlighted, Vienna was looking to establish itself as the “world capital of music tourism” as early as 1908 (Nussbaumer, p. 154). Even then, the map of Vienna city centre was already dotted with a considerable net­work of memorial sites dedi­cated to composers. After the statue of Franz Schubert was unveiled in 1872, there was something of a boom in memorials to composers, which also saw a statue of Beethoven erected on the Ringstrasse (Nuss­baumer, p. 101 et seq.). Moves to dedicate entire sites to the memories of various composers around the turn of the 20th century marked another important step in the de­velop­ment of Vienna's network of memorials to musical figures. However, although the city authorities acquired a existing museum dedicated to Joseph Haydn (which was set up in the building where he had spent his final years and opened in 1899), the only significant place of remembrance to be established in this period was the Schubert Museum. The doors of the house on Nussdorfer Strasse where Schubert was born were first opened to the public in 1912, and the new museum became the first memorial to a musician to be set up and curated directly by the city authori­ties. (Nussbaumer, p. 154 et seq.). It was not until after the Nazis came to power in Austria that more commemorative sites were established, including the first Beethoven museum, which opened to particularly odious political fanfare (see below). It would be followed by several more.

Clearly, Vienna was not the only place to instrumentalise Beethoven for political ends. Indeed, this phenomenon can be observed far and wide (and particularly in Germany), and has a long history behind it. According to the music historian David B. Dennis, from 1870 at the very latest (and right up to the present day), Beethoven has played a key role in configuring Germany's different state systems in the context of German nationhood. However, while Beethoven was born in Bonn, Vienna has a crucial advantage in its attempts to style itself as the place to remember Beethoven: the fact that he spent decades living and working in the Austrian capital. Moreover, since the composer moved house so many times (a habit which has long since passed into legend), he left his personal mark all over the city. This made it even easier for the Viennese to convert his presence into cultural and political capital, as well as a lynchpin of their tourism industry. Despite his being born in Bonn, Beethoven's life can be brilliantly brought to life through the geography of Vienna. In this respect, his life story differs markedly from the other representatives of “Viennese Classicism”, since neither Haydn nor Mozart lived or worked in Vienna for anything like the same period of time. However, this also means that Beethoven's physical presence in Vienna (and indeed in its sur­rounding areas) is even more susceptible to existentialist over-exaggera­tion. Many buildings connected to Beethoven, from the houses in which he lived to the venues where his compositions were performed, are still standing today. They bear architectural witness to his life and career, and thus make for particularly effective memorial sites.

For a long time, performance venues such as the Theater an der Wien played something of a supporting role in official commemorations of Beethoven (Acker­mann/Unseld, p. 17 et seq.). His residences, suppos­ed­ly preserved just as he left them, had a far stronger appeal. As men­tioned above, the first series of memorials to musicians estab­lished by the Vienna city authorities in the early part of the twentieth century was not continued until after the Nazis came to power. This was not a coincidence. Senior Nazi officials, including Gauleiter of Governor of Vienna Baldur von Schirach and Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, turned composers into (Greater) German national heroes in audio form, and saw them as useful tools for consolida­ting the Nazi regime. Their efforts in this direction led to a distinctly nationalistic “popular­isa­tion” of certain com­posers, as exemplified by events like the “Reich Mozart Week” of 1941. Indeed, in a speech that remains infamous to this day, Schirach claimed that he who drew his sword for Germany was also drawing it on behalf of Mozart (cited in Trümpi 2017, p. 38). 

The apartments of these lionised composers could be styled and promoted as physical, walkable monuments to a German “national genius,” complete with a rarefied aura. To mark Reich Mozart Week, the Nazi cultural authorities opened three museums, dedicated to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, respectively. Haydn's “new” museum was in fact an update of the apartment in Mariahilf which, as men­tioned above, had first been converted into a museum as far back as 1899. On the other hand, Mozart's museum was housed in an apart­ment at what is now Dom­gasse 5, while the first Beethoven memorial apartment was set up in the Pas­qualati House, on the street now known as Mölker­bastei. The story of how the Beethoven museum was set up is particularly troubling. Despite the fact that the section of the Pasqualati House in which Beethoven lived at various times from 1804 onwards had actually been demolished in 1841 (something even the museum's director did not attempt to deny), the building was never­theless chosen as the site of the first Beethoven museum. However, it so happened that the rooms chosen to accommodate the museum had previously been occupied by a Jewish family. The family had been removed from the property on the orders of the local Landes­haupt­mann­schaft, or governor, with the Viennese press whipping up an anti-Semitic frenzy. On 11 January 1939, the Viennese edition of the Völkische Beobachter claimed they had been evicted “because these goons of an alien race were hogging the place where the greatest of musical geniuses lived, a place sacred to all Germans.” It went on to report that “The Jews fled from the building in all directions.” 

I later discovered through my own research that the individuals targeted in this act of anti-Semitism were Josef Eckstein, an architect, and his wife Josefine, who was a dress-maker, along with her mother Rosa Hahndel and the couple's children, Hedwig and Clara. All five were forced out of their home on the Mölkerbastei by 20 June 1938. Josef and Josefine were deported to Theresienstadt on 24 June 1943, and on 23 October 1944 they were transferred to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Rosa Hahndel died in Vienna on 9 November 1938, while Hedwig and Clara both managed to flee abroad. Hedwig left for the English city of Bristol on 26 November 1938, with Clara departing for the United States on 25 April 1940. In 1941, the Nazis turned the flat they had been forced to vacate into a museum dedicated to Beethoven. If we accept Heidemarie Uhl's claim that places of remem­brance are there to “represent the national memory,” the story of the museum must be viewed as a particularly frightening case study.

However, memorials do not necessarily have to be desig­nated on the basis of “actual” locations – “immaterial” places work just as well (Ackermann/Unseld, p. 16). For example, Beethoven was also glorified in literary form (including by the writer Felix Braun, 1885–1973), and the “City of Music” has dedicated memorials to him in sound as well as in stone. For instance, Beethoven's opera Fidelio always found its way into the programme at the State Opera at watershed moments in Austrian national politics. For example, it provided the soundtrack to the procla­ma­tion of the “Republic of German Austria” in 12 November 1918, as well as to the Anschluss of 1938. It was on stage again when Austria's Staats­vertrag (State Treaty) was signed in 1955, as the State Opera's building was reopened with a much-discussed production of Fidelio that, in the opinion of various critics in the press, provided a celebra­tory final touch to the events marking the foundation of Austria's Second Republic.

Turning Beethoven into an icon by celebrating his birthdays and anniversaries was another practice that made a major contribution to the culture of remembrance surrounding Beethoven's life. The Wiener Beethoven-Zentenarfeier (Vienna Beethoven Centenary Celebration), organised jointly by the Austrian government and Vienna's local authorities in March 1927 to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer's death, is just one example of how this worked in practice. The event celebrated the man it dubbed “a hero in sound” with a major exhibition in Vienna’s city hall, as well as with numerous concerts, a “Festive Symposium” and a gala performance of “Fidelio” at the State Opera (Köhn, p. 77 et seq.). In this context, it is fitting that one of the people responsible for organisation the celebrations was Guido Adler, who had first coined the term “Viennese Classicism” a few years previously. There is a clear parallel here with Ludwig Finscher’s “discovery” of literature-focused “Weimar Classicism” (primarily built around Goethe and Schiller). Weimar Classicism was hailed as an expression of “a joint Austro-German self image following the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Habsburg state.” Efforts to cement Vienna's position as Beethoven's memorial city certainly promoted the culture of remembrance surrounding the composer's life over decades, well beyond the First Republic and the Nazi regime. The effects of these efforts can be seen in the foundation of the Wiener Beethoven-Gesellschaft (Beethoven Society of Vienna) was formed in 1954, which proceeded to make a significant contribution to consolidating the network of memorials dedicated to the composer. For instance, in 1970, to mark Beethoven's 200th birthday, it dedicated and opened a new memorial to Beethoven in Heiligenstadt.(http://beethovengesellschaft.at/aktivitaeten/veranstaltungen_geschichte).

However, there were those who refused to pay their respects at the great memorial to Beethoven that Vienna had become. Particularly in the 1970s, the voices of critics who felt Beethoven had been elevated to unjustified heights became impossible to ignore. One of those voices belonged to the writer Hans Weigel. In 1970, he very publicly called for Vienna's “Year of Beethoven” to be used to mark the 150th anniversary of Jacques Offenbach's birth in 1969 – an event that had been completely neglected by officialdom. In a similar vein, the activist Joe Berger directed his biting sense of humour against the reverence attached to Beethoven: To mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's death in 1977, he came up with his famous slogan “Banause-Beethoven”, or “Beethoven the Philistine.”

However, such acts did not damage the culture of remembrance surrounding Beethoven in Vienna. The authorities in Vienna stood by their man – and they are still standing by him to this day. The 100-page programme for the first half of the “Vienna Beethoven 2020” festival, which was planned to last all of that year, extolled the “adopted Viennese” Beethoven and the city of Vienna as “a dream couple.” On page 7, it stated that: “Together with Haydn and Mozart, he made Vienna what it still is today: the world capital of music”.

Further reading (all in german)

• Julia Ackermann/Melanie Unseld, “Erinnerungsort Beethoven: Theater an der Wien”, Beethoven.An.Denken. Das Theater an der Wien als Erinnerungsort, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar  2020, pp. 15–22.
• David B. Dennis, “Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989”, New Haven 1996.
• Ludwig Finscher, “Art. Klassik, ›Wiener Klassik‹ und die Etablierung des Epochen­begriffes”. MGG Online, ed. von Laurenz Lütteken, Kassel, Stuttgart, New York 2016 ff., first published 1996, published online 2016, https://www.mgg-online.com/mgg/stable/47038
• Constanze Marie Köhn, “Erinnerung im öffentlichen Raum. Die Beethoven-Gedenktafel(n) am Theater an der Wien”, Beethoven.An.Denken. Das Theater an der Wien als Erinnerungsort, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2020, pp. 74–94.
• Martina Nußbaumer, “Musikstadt Wien. Die Konstruktion eines Images”, Freiburg im Breisgau/Berlin/Vienna 2007.
• Fritz Trümpi, “Der „Musikstadt Wien“-Topos als Instrument der national­sozialistischer Herrschafts­sicherung”, in: Markus Stumpf / Herbert Posch / Oliver Rathkolb (Ed.), Guido Adlers Bibliothek – Restitution und Erinnerung an der Universität Wien, Göttingen 2017, pp. 31–44.
• Fritz Trümpi, “Komponisten der 'Wiener Klassik' als politische Repräsentations­figuren. Gründungen von Wiener Musiker­gedenk­stätten im National­sozialis­mus.” In: Juri Giannini / Maximilian Haas / Erwin Strouhal (Ed.). Eine Institution zwischen Macht und Re­präsen­tation. Die Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien im Kulturleben des Nationalsozialismus. Vienna 2014, pp. 221–237.
• Heidemarie Uhl, “Gedächtnis – Konstruktion kollektiver Vergangenheit im sozialen Raum”, in: Christina Lutter et al. (Ed.), Kulturgeschichte. Fragestellungen, Konzepte, Annäherungen, (= Querschnitte 15), Innsbruck et al. 2004, pp. 139–158.