Cemetery of the Nameless

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The cemetery of the nameless

The Cemetery of the Nameless is a graveyard of the homeless in the 11th Viennese district of Simmering . It is located in the Albern district near the Albern harbor . Strictly speaking, there are two cemeteries, of which only one can be recognized as such today.

First cemetery of the nameless 1840 to 1900

1873 as a cemetery for Drowned mapped
Cemetery of the Nameless , drawing based on nature by Wilhelm Grögler (1839–1897) on the occasion of All Souls Day in 1886

The first burial of an unknown body of water from the Danube took place here in 1840 . In the past, a vortex of water drifted ashore at this point (river kilometer 1918.3) in addition to flotsam and the bodies of drowned people, often decomposed beyond recognition. Identification was usually not possible. A regular burial was denied to these corpses (not least because many of them were people who put an end to their own lives in the Danube); This is how the first cemetery was created, and it was flooded again and again. The cemetery was in those days (overridden with "resting place") through a wooden gate to enter, was also made of wood, the corpses reserved recording house with a waiting for the occasion case casket. The entrance gate and death chamber, both badly damaged by an ice rush in spring 1893 , were renovated that same year; The living fence at the boundaries of the cemetery was found to be in good condition , until then the final resting place for 200 victims of the Danube River. As early as 1895 the gate and fencing had to be repaired again due to the flood.

As part of the expansion of the port area and flood protection, this part of the cemetery was cleared and leveled in winter 2012/2013. As part of the work, the Viennese urban archeology recovered any remains of former burials. The memorial cross, which once marked the location of the old cemetery, has also been removed and is intended to remind of the old cemetery in a new location.

Second cemetery of the nameless 1900 to 1940 (until today)

Every year after All Saints' Day the nameless water corpse is commemorated with a raft of flowers and wreaths

It is thanks to the Simmering District Chairman, Albin Hirsch , that in 1900, with the voluntary participation of Simmering craftsmen, a second cemetery was set up behind the flood protection dam on a piece of wood that the municipality of Albern had leased from the City of Vienna for a recognition interest is maintained and accessible.

In November 1918, the cemetery had to be closed until further notice, as wooden crosses and excavated coffins were looted due to the lack of fuel.

In 1935, the cemetery was at reinforcing work on the levee a stone enclosure and one of architect Karl Franz Eder (1904-1978) designed consecration chapel ( "Resurrection Chapel") that on October 9, 1935 as part of the formal completion of flood control works by Cardinal Theodore Innitzer ordained was . When the Albern harbor and grain silos were built in 1939 , the flow conditions in the Danube river changed and no more corpses were washed ashore. A total of 104 water corpses were buried here, 43 of which could be identified, the other crosses say “unknown”.

According to official information, the last burial took place in 1940, but a grave cross with the year 1953 can be found. Since Albern was annexed to Vienna in 1938 (before that it was an independent local parish), unknown dead from the Danube have been buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery since 1940 at the expense of the City of Vienna . That is why part of the Nameless Cemetery was left empty.

In the existing cemetery of the nameless, each dead person was buried in a wooden coffin donated by a carpentry shop. Nobody was buried “just like that”. The port company tried earlier to use the cemetery area for the expanding port. This could be avoided and is no longer an issue today. From 1957 the cemetery was under the care of the cultural department of the City of Vienna; the chapel was restored in 1987 with the support of Wiener Hafen GmbH .

The former honorary gravedigger Josef Fuchs (* March 4, 1906, † April 2, 1996) looked after the cemetery with great care until his death and contributed significantly to its preservation and its present-day appearance. He placed simple iron crosses with white figures of Christ on the graves. He was honored for his work with the Golden Medal of Merit of the State of Vienna . His descendants continue to look after the cemetery voluntarily and without public support.

Every year the Albern fishing association holds a memorial ceremony. On the afternoon of the first Sunday after All Saints' Day , the members of the association launch a raft they built and decorated with wreaths, flowers and burning candles and bring it to the middle of the Danube with the help of a barge . On the raft there is a symbolic tombstone with the inscription The Victims of the Danube and the request, written in German, Czech and Hungarian, that the raft should simply be pushed on if it got stuck on the bank.

Today, as a result of the Danube regulation and the Freudenau power station, corpses are rarely washed ashore here. They will be taken over from the nearby central cemetery as soon as they are found. The last documented wash-up case, November 2004, involved a woman's corpse.

On the part of the City of Vienna, the cemetery is listed as closed . The Wiener Hafen company is responsible for managing the cemetery .

The Resurrection Chapel is currently (2016) cared for by the clergyman Silvio Crosina ( Vienna-Wieden ), who celebrates a high mass every first Sunday of the month .

Cultural and media

The cemetery is an insider tip among tourists , to which a sequence in the US film Before Sunrise , which takes place in the cemetery of the nameless, may have contributed. A sequence from an episode of the crime series SOKO Donau also takes place in the cemetery.

In the post-war Austria , spielfilmisch strongly influenced by issues such as gambling , smuggling , black market , prostitution and violence, was the cemetery of the nameless in the taken as a scandal social drama of Kurt Steinwendner , Vienna - Cry for Love (1952), a serving of the threat symbol for a Not far from there, a planned crime in a granary in the Albern harbor .

In the 1994 film Angeschwemmt , shot by director and cameraman Nikolaus Geyrhalter , the gravedigger Josef Fuchs tells in detail about his experiences during his work. The above-described customs around All Saints' Day are also documented and recorded in the film.

The Austrian writer Georg Schmid published his novel Cemetery of the Nameless in 1982 . The cemetery is also one of the locations in the 1999 novel Wiener Passion by the Austrian writer Lilian Faschinger and in the Singspiel Hafen Wien by Ernst Molden . The cemetery of the nameless and one of his graves is also described in Hans Wollschläger's novel Herzgewächse or The Fall of Adam .

The Austrian band L'Âme Immortelle addresses the cemetery in their song nameless . The album of the same name and the follow-up album By Stranger Hand refer to the inscriptions on two grave crosses in the cemetery of the nameless. The text-image volume What remains by the author Thomas Sabottka (who has a collaboration with L'âme Immortelle) has the cemetery as its central theme.

In 1989 the ORF , department “Literature and Features”, produced the audio picture The Cemetery of the Nameless - How the Rescue of Water Corpses Can Make a Big Part of Life , in which the long-time cemetery attendant Josef Fuchs reports in detail on his work. The audio image designed by ORF employee Robert Weichinger and backed up with texts by Ludwig Fels was awarded the Andreas Reischek Prize in 1990.

More views of the Nameless Cemetery

  • Entrance to the cemetery

  • The chapel integrated into the dam

  • The grave of a stranger

  • The old (abandoned) cemetery

See also

literature

  • Werner T. Bauer: Wiener Friedhofsführer. Exact description of all burial sites together with a history of the Viennese burial system . Falter Verlag, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85439-335-0 .
  • Felix Czeike : Historical Lexicon Vienna. Volume 2: De-Gy. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-218-00544-2 , p. 407.
  • Iris Mayer: Cemetery of the Nameless . ( Memento of February 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) In: Wiener Zeitung , May 19, 1998.
  • Renkin, Heribert: nameless. A - also factual - look at the "cemetery of the nameless" in Vienna. Vienna Academic Press, Bad Vöslau 2018, ISBN 978-3-99061-006-0 .
  • Renkin, Heribert: nameless-compact. Handbook for the “Cemetery of the Nameless” in Vienna. Vienna Academic Press, Bad Vöslau 2018, ISBN 978-3-99061-013-8 .

Web links

Commons : Cemetery of the Nameless  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Community affairs. (...) Alluvial corpse. In:  Arbeiter-Zeitung , Morgenblatt, No. 307/1895 (Volume VII), November 8, 1895, p. 5, bottom center. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / aze.
  2. ↑ Little Chronicle. (...) In the inundation area. In:  Die Presse , Abendblatt, No. 196/1890 (XLIII. Volume), July 18, 1890, p. 3, bottom right. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / maintenance / apr;
    Little chronicle. (...) From the Danube. In:  Neue Freie Presse , Abendblatt, No. 9827/1892, January 4, 1892, p. 3, bottom left. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.
  3. ^ The cemetery on the Danube. In:  Neue Freie Presse , Morgenblatt, No. 9408/1890, November 1, 1890, p. 6, center right, f. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.
  4. ↑ Floods and inundations. (...) One reports and from Schwechat (...). In:  Neue Freie Presse , Morgenblatt, No. 9352/1890, September 5, 1890, p. 4, bottom right. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.
  5. ↑ A (uguste) Groner :  feature. From the cemetery of the nameless. In:  Neues Wiener Journal , No. 8/1893, October 30, 1893, p. 1 f. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nwj.
  6. ↑ Little Chronicle. (...) Visiting the grave. In:  Neue Freie Presse , Morgenblatt, No. 10488/1893, November 2, 1893, p. 1, bottom right. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.
  7. ↑ Daily news. (...) Good Friday in the cemetery of the nameless. In:  Neues Wiener Journal , No. 528/1895, April 14, 1895, p. 6, top left. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nwj.
  8. ^ Joachim Riedl: Austria. The last act. In: Die Zeit , No. 47/2008
  9. ↑ Karl Franz Eder. In: Architects Lexicon Vienna 1770–1945. Published by the Architekturzentrum Wien . Vienna 2007.
  10. ↑ A chapel at the Nameless Cemetery. In:  Wiener Zeitung , No. 209/1935 (CCXXXII. Year), July 31, 1935, p. 6, top left. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wrz.
  11. ↑ Solemn conclusion of the flood protection work. In:  Neue Freie Presse , Morgenblatt, No. 25532 M / 1935, October 10, 1935, p. 4, top center. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.
  12. ↑ a b The cemetery of the nameless . In: wien.gv.at , accessed on May 21, 2013.
  13. ^ Cemetery of the Nameless: Where the Danube releases its dead . In: vienna.at , March 13, 2012, accessed on May 21, 2013.
  14. ↑ Cemetery of the Nameless . In: friedhof-der-namenlosen.at , accessed on May 24, 2016.
  15. ↑ Best of Austria. Viennese women - cry for love . In: tv.orf.at , April / May 2016, accessed on May 24, 2016;
    Wienerinnen (1952) in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  16. ↑ ISBN 3-499-25168-X .
  17. ^ ISBN 3-462-02835-9 .
  18. ↑ Ernst Moldens new horror singspiel "Hafen Wien" in the Rabenhof
  19. ↑ ISBN 3-251-00008-X .
  20. ↑ Weichinger, Robert: The cemetery of the nameless or "How the recovery of water corpses can make up a good part of life". In: ORF Hörbilder - A broadcast by the feature editorial team. Austrian Media Library, October 28, 1989, accessed on November 22, 2016 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ 1896 in a method of declaration of death since 1865 a Abgängiger as in the cemetery Bestatteter agnosziert . - See: memories. (...) Joseph Schwarz. In:  Official Journal of the Wiener Zeitung , No. 208/1896, September 8, 1896, p. 346, column 4 above. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wrz.
  2. ↑ Identifiable corpses washed ashore were also buried in the cemetery if no other burial site was found. - See: daily news (...). The Heller sisters. In:  Neuigkeits -Welt-Blatt , No. 75/1895 (XXIII. Year), March 31, 1896, p. 4 (unpaginated) middle. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nwb.
  3. ↑ Foreign workers who had an accident during the construction of the silos found their final resting place in the nearest cemetery of the nameless people. - See: Josef Musil: Cemetery of the Nameless . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna November 13, 1947, p. 3 , middle right ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).

Coordinates: 48 ° 9 ′ 35.1 ″  N , 16 ° 30 ′ 9.6 ″  E