Buried No Longer
The Ephesos Museum is in the Haus der Geschichte Österreich in Vienna. Excavations over more than a century have produced wonderful sculpture, but this is a kind of lapidary with limited public reach. Then, upstairs is a staggering small exhibition – Buried No Longer… It makes the ticket price well worth it.
No Longer Buried
The exhibition occupies a large space just inside the balcony where Adolf Hitler infamously spoke in 1938. Now closed, the visitor is quizzed as to whether it should be opened again with the proviso that the story of 1938 is told in all its menacing horror. The prosaic materialism of that horror is the subject of Buried No Longer…
During building works in February 2018 at No. 16 Malzgasse in Vienna, home to the Talmud Torah School, a treasure trove was discovered. Walled up in a basement room were all manner of wrecked objects and shredded papers from the ransacking of the school and synagogue, following the Anschluss in 1938.
Broken tombstones, tablewares, writing materials, footwear – mostly small things forgotten – were shovelled into the annexe – along with fragments of burnt books. Hundreds of objects. All bear witness to a heinous moment in modern Austrian and European history. For some reason the annexe was forgotten as the Nazis ordered the Jewish Community to use the buildings as an old people’s home.
No Longer Buried
Eclipsing the seductive charms of the great Aegean port of ancient Ephesos, this Pompeian assemblage speaks to so much of our shared heritage. Simple yet profound, Buried No Longer compels you to think about who we are some eighty years after the Anschluss.
