Returning to Vienna

Photo by Nok Lek

I wanted to dramatise a return that I had made multiple times in my childhood, which itself had been made by my father before me, and which involved a sense that no amount of returning could ever actually bring you to the place you wanted to find. The return was, in my childhood, an annual extended visit to the city of Vienna from the United States, where I lived.

We undertook this return because my father was a painter, and he painted from life. He painted from reality. We would be transported by plane and then by train to the city of Vienna each year in order for him to make paintings in the landscape, usually with myself, my sister and my mother in tow. We would all walk through the landscape.

Performing the return

This was an unusual thing to do. Just the idea of plein air painting was a kind of a dead art. He pursued it absolutely obsessively. I ended up painting just to pass the time. As I was by his side, painting these scenes that he would choose – sometimes I knew what he was going to choose, sometimes it was unexpected – it occurred to me, of course: why are we always doing this? Why are we going back to Vienna?

Now, I knew that my father had left Vienna when Hitler came in 1938. I knew that his parents had not been able to escape, and his brother hadn’t been able to escape. Although we didn’t discuss it, we performed this return not only through the kind of longing that my father clearly had for his childhood and his birthplace, and the complex way he was turning that longing into enigmatic paintings, but we also ended up living just one block away from the apartment where he had lived as a child.

The inability to go back

It was always represented to us as accidental. It just happened that this apartment opened up on the right, more or less across the street. It was also very strange, uncanny, for me as a kid because I could look back from the window. We had very little to do because there was no television. It was a tiny apartment. So, one looked out the window a lot; it was a Viennese thing to do.

I would look out the window back towards where his house was – though, again by accident, it didn’t exist anymore. It had been blown up in April 1945, and there was an ugly modern building in its place. Yet, that idea that there was some spot that I couldn’t go see physically because it didn’t exist anymore, that my father didn’t see – he never even talked about it as being particularly interesting – somehow I felt that motivated us in our activities. That inability to get back into that spot was some deep energy fuelling this obsessive return: the painting, the walking, all the stuff that went on in the family.

Viennese architecture and the beautiful home

Photo by douglasmack

I decided to make a film that would be both a story of just one of these returns – my own return as I come along the Danube from the west, as we always did, from Germany down the Danube into the city of Vienna – but that I would braid this story of return together with the longer history of Viennese architecture, which has as its central core two things.

One is the obsession with the beautiful home, the obsession with a space set off from the world that would be private: a sanctuary which no one could enter except the denizens of that world. I wanted to get a sense of how that came about, that remarkable and ultimately fatal idea of the beautiful home, because I knew it was from the beautiful homes of the Viennese Jews that they were taken and sent to death camps. My grandparents, who loved their beautiful home and stayed in Vienna because they thought they’d be safe in it – that beautiful home has a longer history that has to do with Viennese Modernism and what Viennese Modernism tried to do as fundamentally an architecture about domestic space.

But I was also quite interested in the fact that some of the great Viennese architects – and really the father of Viennese architecture – were very interested in the movement of transport, of trains and of waters moving through the city: the art of Otto Wagner.

The Burning Child

I had the problem of how to make a film that would be both this movement through the city, along all its lines of transit – water, trolleys, trains – and also a psychic adventure using some of the actual subterranean waters that flow under Vienna’s surface, as a way of getting to this impossible-to-get-to interior.

I was helped by the fact that my father had painted a painting of that interior in 1943 when he didn’t have word yet of the fate of his parents. This painting had always sat in my own bedroom and acted as a kind of beacon. So, the film tries to make that line, and because it can’t actually enter that interior, it has to find that interior in the form of the painting.

That is ultimately the challenge of the film: how do people return home? What does it mean to return home if you can’t return home? And also, how do we deal with a work of art which stands in for the home, in the form of either a painting or a built environment, like a beautiful Viennese apartment? Woven through the narrative is also the story of what happened to these Viennese apartments of Viennese Jews. That’s quite a remarkable chapter in the history of the Holocaust.

What does it mean to return home?

By nature of the way in which the actual apartment was destroyed, but in a deeper sense by the fact that there would be no going back after such a trauma, I had a very strong sense that what my father was doing, by bringing us home in a way that couldn’t actually ever return, was to substitute a form of repetition for a form of homecoming.

It’s in the recursive, the repetition of the failed attempt to return home that one would undertake what Freud – a figure who plays a great role in Viennese history and in the film, and in the question of the beautiful home – understood as the ways in which the psyche works through. The film would never be able to go up to that room and film in that apartment, and even if it could, of course, it would be another world. So, instead, I tried to layer on historically the different homecomings, the different attempts to get home, including where the film begins, which is the strange station designed by Otto Wagner for Emperor Franz Joseph to step onto the train and use modern transport to come to his palace at the centre of the city.

I wanted that kind of movement as a beginning of this movement from the outskirts of Vienna to its centre but also the story of my father in 1946, the story of myself as a child. Then the film itself would be another iteration of the same desire or love of the wondrous beauty of the city, coupled with a sense that, in the end, you leave empty-handed but hopefully changed in the process.

The legacy of Viennese Modernism

Photo by Karl Allen Lugmayer

For me, the core mystery and the most fascinating feature of Modernist Viennese architecture is the fact that the Viennese architects and artists – including Klimt and Schiele, writers like Schnitzler, composers like Mahler, and then Freud in his writing – were all passionate about homemaking. They were passionate about creating this space that would be somehow cut off from the world and also somehow expressive of themselves.

Of the clients for this dream of the home, of the clients who developed this idea and wanted an expression of the beautiful home, Jewish Vienna really stands at the centre. This was a group of people coming from elsewhere; assimilating themselves to a new urban culture; finding a place for themselves; and trying to shape a spot, safe from the increasing violence of the city, that would be self-expression through art, through beauty – not necessarily religious, but a kind of religion of the interior life, both subjective and built architecture. It’s this group of people for whom Viennese Modernism was keyed, who experienced the most radical, traumatic end.

Vienna and the Final Solution

It was in Vienna when Hitler marched from Germany into Austria to annex the country. It was in Vienna where there was a kind of local wellspring of excitement about Hitler, which immediately, on that evening of his arrival, turned into violence against the Jewish neighbours. Overnight, a huge proportion of Jewish Viennese people, citizens, were effectively evicted from their homes, and that eviction was never overcome.

Ultimately, within a few years, all Jews would lose their apartments, taken over by the Gentile neighbours or used as gathering points to send people to concentration camps and death camps in the east. This, by the way, was not an invention that was already cultivated in Germany. It was based on a kind of grassroots enmity between neighbouring individuals in Vienna, of Christian neighbours going against their Jewish Mitbürger.

It was this displacement of Jewish Vienna into what are called Sammelwohnungen, collective apartments; then from the Sammelwohnungen to a collective station; and then from these stations, via the very railroads which I documented as bringing people into the city – Otto Wagner’s trains, myself coming in, those very railroads sending the Viennese people to their death in places like Minsk and Maly Trostenets.

That helped shape the idea of the Final Solution, which was to remove people from the German-speaking world, to remove Jews and exterminate them in places that couldn’t be reached either by news reports or even by rumour. So, that fundamental stepping stone towards the Holocaust happens as an integral part of the story of the Viennese interior, of Viennese Modernism. It’s that dream and that total nightmare of displacement.

Discover more about

Vienna and the Holocaust

Koerner, J. L., & Bruun, C. D. (Directors). (2019). The Burning Child [Film]. Andrew M. Mellon Foundation; Harvard University.

Koerner, J. L. (2019) Maly Trostinets. Granta 149, Europe.

Buchloh, B. H. D. (2018) On The Burning Child: A Conversation with Joseph Koerner. October, 166. The MIT Press.