This anthology's contributors provide a comprehensive history to a key site in Austrian consciousness: the Heldendenkmal (Heroes’ Memorial) housed in the Äußeren Burgtor (external palace gate), the entry point to the old imperial palace grounds and to the city center itself. For something fixed in stone, this memorial-in-gate has certainly proven to have fluid, shifting, and transitory meanings. In that regard, the Heldendenkmal and Äußeren Burgtor also serve as two additional key points of entry: first, into Austria's nuanced, contested, and pluralized pasts, and second, into Austria's nuanced, contested, and pluralized ways of remembering those pasts. As such, the conversation offered here traces multidimensional discourses about historical (ab)uses of the past, reminding us that it is always with us. Indeed, attempts to reckon with, honor, or condemn the past often reflect and generate new conversations, and new histories along with them. In that sense the book itself comes to resemble the transitional gateway it seeks to study: examining the nebulous, liminal relationship between the past as such and past instrumentalizations of it.
This collection is so successful because it masters that double conversation about both Geschichte (history) and Geschichtspolitik (politicization of history). The contributors went above and beyond to reconstruct complicated historical contexts to inform their respective analyses. In so doing, they collectively guide the reader along the past two centuries of Austria's changing leaders, regimes, political cultures, and expectations. There are also transnational, transborder, and interstate stories contained in this narrative, with some design submissions for the gate drawing on classical antiquity and Italian architectural models. Included here are also design comparisons to similar sites in Munich and Berlin, including the more (in)famous Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate), a narrative that encapsulates the simultaneous affiliation and rivalries among German-speakers in different German states and urban centers. The transborder inspirations and comparisons surrounding such national monuments thus reveal the regional variances on the broader German theme. And the historians here deconstruct these architectural manifestos down to their blueprints to reconstruct them in ways that expose the tensions and contradictions that permeate their very foundations.
But where the work truly shines is in its unrivaled erudition. Not a stone of this monument is left under-studied, under-researched, or under-analyzed. Case in point, a singular chapter has over 250 detailed footnotes. And the contributors’ painstaking attention to detail crosscuts disciplinary divides, from history to architecture, urban planning, cityscapes, preservation practices, memory studies, and aesthetic analyses. Their resulting tome is also as breathtaking as it is comprehensive. The full-page (sometimes double-page) images are sharp, sweeping, and thoroughly explained, both enhancing and enhanced by each accompanying chapter. They are also beautifully organized and presented, curating for the audience a vast array of visual sources, from architectural schematics to city maps to recent photographs. The anthology also illuminates the darker side of these histories, with deep dives into paramilitary medals and standards—including those of the notorious Frontkämpfervereinigung—and official military ceremonies from across regimes, including the Austrofascist state and, of course, the Nazi government. The contributors also capitalized on their chronology in a refreshing way: given that the Heldendenkmal crypt was planned and built from 1933 to 1934, the authors were able to reprioritize our focus onto the Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime. While the Nazi years receive detailed attention in this book, it is vital that we have such works to help us take thorough stock of the “Geschichtspolitische Legitimierung der ››Ständestaat‹‹-Diktatur” (roughly: “the legitimization of the ‘Corporatist-State' Dictatorship by means of politicizing history” [191]).
The scholars also tease out the relationality of the gate to other contested sites in the vicinity, such as the Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square), Hofburg Palace, state museums, and parliament, in addition to memorials to peoples persecuted by the very regimes that commemorated the Heldendenkmal in its contested crypt. The resulting juxtaposition of overlapping histories and legacies leaves the reader with an impression that the gate, like all portals, is rather Janus-faced: ushering us forward to some redemptive meaning for Austria's Second Republic, while constantly pointing us back toward shadows of its own making. The staying power of this anthology is its ability to help us embrace such ambiguities. What's more, it provides a strong foundation for us to start making sense of them.
