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Vienna lives with Hitler's air defence towers, but in denial
Sixty years after Vienna was liberated from the Nazis in April 1945, six of Hitler's massive air defence towers still cast a shadow over the city and nobody knows quite what to do with them.
Sixty years after Vienna was liberated from the Nazis in April 1945, six of Hitler's massive air defence towers still cast a shadow over the city and nobody knows quite what to do with them.
Not that there is a lack of suggestions.
They range from the whimsical, like the artist Christo who wanted to "wrap" the towers like he had done with the Reichstag building in Berlin, to the more utilitarian proposal of transforming them into a high-security data bank.
But none of the ideas have found favour with the Austrian government or the Vienna municipality, and the towers are glaringly absent from events Austria is planning this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
"Nobody wants to take responsibility for these towers because they are part of the past which has been repressed and become taboo" because of Austria's complicity with the Nazis, said Ute Bauer, the author of a book about the towers.
"There is no agreement here as to whether the towers should serve as a commemoration of the liberation of Vienna or of the Allied bombings, or as a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich," she added.
A spokesman for the municipality admitted that the 50-metre (160-foot) fortresses, were considered a "delicate subject".
The Nazis began building the towers in 1942 to house the air defence units (Flak) of the Third Reich that were trying to ward off the Allied bombers, and intended them to stand as monuments once Hitler had won the war.
But they towers never served either purpose.
By the time they were completed by forced labourers in 1944, Britain's fighter plane were flying at an altitude that put them safely out of reach of the Flak.
In the end the towers served as bunkers for the Austrian population during the heavy bombardments of March and April 1945.
With walls up to six metres (19 feet) thick, the towers are said to be impossible to implode without destroying the surrounding neighbourhood.
The only alternative would be to tear them down brick by brick, at an estimated cost of 300 to 500 million euros (387 to 645 million dollars) each.
The towers rise like massive iron fists over the city's Art Noveau and neo-Baroque landscape.
Two of them are situated in the flower-filled Augarten public park, and have been invaded by flocks of birds. Only one has found a formal function in housing Vienna's biggest acquarium.
None of the "Flaktuerme" bear any inscription explaining their history and they do not feature on most of the city's tourist routes.
"The time has come to ask ourselves what these fortresses mean for us," said Peter Noever, the director of the Museum of Applied Art (MAK) in Vienna.
He wants to see one of the towers turned into a studio where artists can produce works putting into perspective the history of Vienna.
Datencenter Vienna (DCV), a private company, is ready to spend 80 million euros to transform another one of the towers into a high-security databank and hope the city could one day approve the project.
"Since September 11, more and more big companies are anxious to keep their facts and figures in a secure environment. The very structure of these towers make them ideal because they will be able to withstand almost any form of attack, including a plane crash," Datacenter's director Wolfgang Bleim said.
Gerhard Steffel, an architect who has been working on the design for the proposal, told AFP he was itching to tackle it for real as it is "challenge to bring worth to something that is nothing but the remains of a war machine."
In early April, Italian artist Antonio Riello tried a symbolic approach to dealing with Hitler's heritage.
He built a copy of an air defence tower from a ton of sugar cubes and invited the Viennese public to demolish it with hammers. But the happening sparked little interest among the locals.
