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Radio Palladio1 is back. With a new programme: TOP C (the elevation of the “C” of HTC) – a focus on architectural criticism. In the winter term of 2021/2022, the show will be dedicated to the instrumentalization of architecture in Austria and Germany in relation to a critical past. “National Socialism lives on!” Theodor Adorno postulated in 1959 in a radio feature entitled “Was heißt Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (What does it mean to come to terms with the past?)2 Adorno urgently pled for the memory of the Holocaust to be preserved, because its destruction would be a betrayal of the victims of the Nazi crimes, who in this way would be deprived even of their memory. The word “Erinnerungskultur” (culture of remem brance) is originally related to an emphasis on the perspective of the victims, which Adorno thus demanded and introduced.3 From the beginning, spaces, places, architectures and monuments have played a central and sometimes fatal role in this context: as instruments, as expressions, as media to promote memories of a completely different kind. Under the guise of dealing carefully with the past, efforts are increasing – especially in Germany, but also in Austria – to use architecture in order to reconstruct a seemingly unsullied past by harking back to a time before the Nazis. On the one hand, this has led to the recent emergence of a peculiarly pulpy mainstream architecture that seems to come from a neo-rational, neoclassical set of building blocks, allowing for interpretations ranging from “modern” to “fascistoid”. The sig nificance of buildings such as the new Weimar Bauhaus Museum by Heike Hanada, the Marbach
Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the Humboldt Forum
IKA W2021
