Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (monument)
In Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (German: *Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus*), a walk-in memorial by Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, this square once carried a message aimed straight at Austria’s darkest decades. The design—unveiled on 24 November 1988—was erected on the initiative of Mayor Helmut Zilk during Vienna’s “year of reflection” in 1988, dedicated to all victims of war and fascism. But the ground here had already been scarred. Until 1945, this site held the Philipphof, a major Gründerzeit residential building destroyed in a bombing on 12 March 1945. Hundreds of people sheltering in cellars were killed; only 180 bodies were recovered, and the rest could not be excavated. The ruins were levelled in 1947. Hrdlicka’s sculpture framed that history with symbolic violence: the “Gate of Violence” is granite, said to be dragged by thousands of prisoners over the “death stairs” at the Mauthausen concentration camp. …
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