Heaven over ViennaThe Flak Towers: an Unwanted Architectural Heritage from the Third Reich

by Christine Scheucher

Pics: crystelle

The three Viennese anti-aircraft towers belong to the few monuments that bear witness to Austria´s Nazi past. The towers were originally built to defend against Allied bombings . Nowadays the city of Viennna has to face an urban plannig challenge.

Amorphous concrete giants cast enormous shadows onto the houses in the surrounding area - windowless, grey silhouettes, indestructible, water-tight. The six flak towers which are spread over three Viennese parks form a strategic isosceles triangle around the heart of the city. They belong to the few monuments of Vienna that bear witness to the times of the Third Reich. Built between 1942 and 1944 they originally should have defended against Allied bombings. On the top of the city enormous anti-aircraft towers boys between 14 and 16 had to beat back enemy aircraft attacks with special guns in order to protect the population and the city´s most important cultural-historical biuldings. According to experts the towers never served their purpose very efficiently. The towers could be regarded as psychology turned to stone. Architecture which shows people who were anxious about the the war that something was being done for the public safety. Monoliths that should further mark the dawn of a new era. Hitler wanted to convert the towers into gigantic war memorials after the final German victory. Hitler´s architects planned to clad the hulks in black marble in order to chisel, in gold leaf, the names of all the German soldiers who lost their lives on the battlefield.

Towers which can not escape anybody´s notice, where the script is combined with the stone - the language of the soil - in order to shout Germany´s glory into the town for centuries. Constructed to last for one thousand years these ideological bastions still carve the cityscape after the collapse of Nazism. Scars in the body of the town written into the soil forever just as leaders of the Third Reich had intended. The city of Vienna, at least, doesn´t know what to do with this unpleasant heritage of Austria´s Nazi past. With its steel-reinforced walls up to 10ft thick the towers are supposed to be impossible to blow up. And by the way: social engaged people are even said to have calculated that the mass of concrete steel which was used to materialise Germany´s power could be used to build an apartment for every single Viennese citizien. Since 1945 the Austrian goverment has considered more than a dozen plans for civilian uses of the towers. Several architects have proposed covering the tower´s exterior with luxury flats and shops and using their vast interior for parking lots, theatres or leisure centres. None of these projects have been realized.

_{"History has decided to start once again after 1945"}

And the Viennese people themselves? They seem to ignore the colossuses. Consequently, the discussion about the flak tower´s future stagnated long ago. The younger generation doesn´t even seem to know anything about the history of the strange buildings. They integrate the flak towers into their every-day lives completely naturally - as a climbing wall or canvas for graffitis. Foreign visitors are astonished by this exhibited indifference of the Viennese population towards the town´s anti-memorial. Indeed,dealing with Vienna´s war heritage hasn´t been that relaxed . In the 1950s the towers were part of the confrontation with a past which most Austrians preferred to forget. The Viennese citiziens were ashamed of the ugly concrete blocks that spoilt the world famous townscape with its baroque and fin-de-siècle facades. "History has decided to start once again after 1945.", writes the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek in her novel "Die Ausgesperrten"(„outcasts"). In this spirit the flak towers were touched up on postcards in post war times. Anyway, a very special solution! Finally, tourists who are confronted with the anachronsitic, misplaced monoliths search for the meaning and history of the towers in guidebooks without any effect. Because Vienna that´s something else! There is Saint Stephan´s Cathedral and the Lipizzaner and the Riesenrad and fin-de-siècle buildings and fragile stucco and bombastic "Ringstraßenarchitecture" and Sachertorte and Fiaker. The naked, dark grey concrete of the flak towers balks at Vienna´s picturesque facade culture. And even if one doesn´t want to face the towers, their cold, sterile monumentalism remains a source of disturbance. The towers dominate Vienna´s skyline and as a consequence they are thorn in the side of several preservationists. And that´s excellent: because the mental picture the Viennese citizens have constructed of their town was finally corrected by the townscape itself. If one is conscious of it or not, the flak towers remain important memorials of Vienna.