Austria Vern Amy October 11th

Today we visited this museum opened especially for us by the creator Gerhard Strassgschwandtner ( there’s a name for you!) The film Noir picture The Third Man, was the hook, if you will, and well documented in the museum. What Gerhard wanted to highlight through the film is the atrocities unleashed on the Jews, as Hitler co-opted the country, and set loose anti-Semitic hate. The Third Man was set in the post world war 2 period and served as a backdrop to the rest of the museum’s documentation of the allied defeat of Germany, the bombing of Vienna, and the post war jockeying for partitioning the country up among our erstwhile ally, the Russians. Gerhard and his wife built up the museum over a 26 year span and it is truly a remarkable gem of a museum.

Gerard explaining the allies partioning of Austria after Germany’s defeat

This Zeiss film projector is in working order and Gerard showed a brief excerpt from the film to us.

After the visit to the Third Man Museum we went to the Belvedere Museum, which has a collections of paintings from the Secession Movement, a 19th century group of artists who wanted to depart from more tradional painting styles. The collection is housed in one of the many Hapsburg palaces

Below are some of the collections’s art by Klimt. The Golden Woman is one of his most famous.

One Monet below

The Grounds outside the Hapsburg Palace where the Belvedere Museum is now hosted

Our next stop was this incredible church, The Votivkirche

One of the glass mosiac panels depicted the Crucifixion of Jesus but when you look below there are victims of the Holocaust being marched to their death by a Nazi guard. This is a very disturbing panel and it is mportant that a church, in Austria, also culpable in the war of such atrocities, as they were early on incoporated into The Third Reich, chose to represent this horror.