An Invisible Artwork Reminds Austria of Its Nazi Past

“It’s so interesting in this busy square, so subtle,” said Peter Larndorfer, 34, a passer-by, shortly after the work was unveiled Monday. “But maybe it’s just what we need on such fraught ground.”

The Nazis’ propaganda footage of Hitler’s triumphant speech to jubilant Austrians is infamous, and today is accepted as a realistic portrayal of the public mood at the time. But it took the country until the early 1990s to officially concede that Austrians had been willing perpetrators of Nazi crimes; after the war, the country was often spoken of as Hitler’s “first victim.” For many “the Anschluss,” as the incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich is known, remains a tricky subject.

“The first transport to Dachau took place two weeks after the speech,” Philipsz, who won the Turner Prize in 2010, said on her way to a final sound check on March 9. “I wanted to remember all those who had disappeared, to give them a voice,” she said, adding, “They say the sound of glass is most like the sound of the human voice.”

“The Voices” was commissioned by the House of History Austria, a planned museum that will tell the history of Austrian democracy (and its interruptions). It is scheduled to open in November, around the centennial of the Austrian republic’s birth from the horrors of World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.

Monika Sommer, the museum’s director, said that the “subtlety and fragility” of “The Voices” matched how her museum wanted to help the country look at the past: “We don’t want any finger-pointing,” she said. “We want to take a sober look at Austrian history.”

But she added that the task of doing that was getting harder. “We are seeing anti-Semitism, and xenophobia more generally, becoming more widespread again.”

In December, the conservative People’s Party and the far-right Freedom Party formed a government in Austria. They were elected on an anti-immigration agenda in reaction to Europe’s refugee crisis. The parties’ coalition agreement officially states that Austria was a perpetrator of Nazi crimes, and denounces anti-Semitism. But a Freedom Party politician quit in February in a scandal over an anti-Semitic songbook used by his old university fraternity, and Facebook followers of the party’s leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, recently criticized him for speaking about Austria’s complicity in Nazi rule.

Pointedly, the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has reserved judgment about whether it will keep financing the House of History — initiated by the left-leaning Social Democratic Party after decades of debate — when the museum’s current budget runs out in December 2019. “The ongoing discussion about the future of the museum shows it’s still difficult to talk about and reappraise the country’s history,” Sommer said. “Susan’s art isn’t overtly political, but that doesn’t mean it’s unpolitical,” said Kasper König, a German museum director and curator who advised the museum about the installation. Philipsz said that she never expressly set out to be a public artist. Having sung in a choir as a child and trained as a sculptor, she said that she was interested “in what happens when you project sound into a space” — what happens to the person projecting, the space, and the listener.

Some of her most notable works — like “Lowlands,” placed under bridges in Glasgow in 2010; “Study for Strings” at the main railway station in Kassel, Germany, as part of the 2012 Documenta art exhibition; and “War Damaged Musical Instruments” at London’s Tate Britain in 2015-16 — have used voices or instruments to evoke a sense of loss and separation in public spaces.

“Your feelings of longing or melancholy are often battling ambient sounds,” she said. “And it’s exactly through these ambient sounds that you become very aware of where you are and who you’re beside.”

Philipsz praised the museum for dealing with the behind-the-scenes politics and letting her get on with her work. She first visited the site in October and quickly struck upon the lead crystal motif, in part thanks to some imposing chandeliers in the palace.

The museum wanted a work of art to make the public reflect on Hitler’s speech from the balcony, but was wary of putting a sculpture there. Commissioning a sound artist solved the problem, but the museum’s original idea of placing all the speakers where Hitler spoke did not work for Philipsz, as it kept too much attention on the balcony.

“That felt wrong — I didn’t want this to be about Hitler, but about the voices of all the people who had gathered there over the decades.” So she also had speakers placed on the other side of the square. This, however, meant “The Voices” could be heard only for 10 minutes twice a day, at 12:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., in deference to the neighbors.

“I personally find the work a bit underwhelming, but it would have been unimaginable in Austria until the 1990s,” said G. Daniel Cohen, a historian from Rice University in Houston currently in Vienna to write a book about attitudes toward Jews in postwar Europe. “Such attempts at national reflection have at the very least forced the far right to accept the existence of a taboo against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”