Siegfried's head
The Siegfriedskopf is a memorial to the fallen by the sculptor Josef Müllner , which was erected on November 9, 1923 in the auditorium of the main building of the University of Vienna . As part of the redesign of the auditorium, the long-controversial property was given a new, less prominent location in the rear area of the arcade courtyard. The type of reorganization “Under the glass lintel” also emphasizes the artistic approach to this. " We did not want to re- erect the Siegfriedskopf one-to-one, but rather subject it to a more thorough historical analysis, " emphasized Rector Georg Winckler during the installation in 2006.
The monument was erected by the then anti-Semitic and anti-democratically oriented German student body at the University of Vienna. It was intended to commemorate the students and teachers of the university who died in the First World War . According to critics, it alluded to the Siegfried mythology and implicitly to the stab in the back legend . Fraternity members were the main defenders of the traditional role of the monument . The historian Adam Wandruszka , who himself comes from the right-wing political camp, referred to the paradoxical fact that the Jewish doctor Georg Politzer was the model for the head of the Germanic heroic youth.
The university's academic senate had already decided on June 28, 1990 to relocate it to the arcade courtyard, but initially failed because of the objection by the Federal Monuments Office . The glass covering of the head serves both to protect the plastic damaged a few years ago and to distance it. The protective glass lintel consists of several cubes. It also serves as a carrier for text contributions and photographs. On the outermost cube there is an autobiographical memorial text by the Jewish Germanist, educator and writer Minna Lachs .
literature
- Erwin A. Schmidl: Habsburgs Jewish soldiers, 1788–1918. Böhlau, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-205-79567-4 , especially p. 131.
- Ulrike Davy, Thomas Vašek : The Siegfried Kopf: a dispute about a monument in the University of Vienna. WUV Universitätsverlag, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-85114-060-5 .
Web links
- Representation by the University of Vienna
- Report on damage to the monument in 2002
- Report from Contextxxi
Individual evidence
- ^ Daily newspaper Die Presse , Vienna, July 27, 1990, p. 16
- ^ University of Vienna: "Siegfriedskopf" changes location. orf.at, July 13, 2006, accessed September 12, 2014 .
Coordinates: 48 ° 12 '48 " N , 16 ° 21' 35.5" E