In 2004, Dr. Karen Frostig, a Women's Studies Research Center Scholar, discovered a box of letters written from her grandparents to her father during the Holocaust. The letters inspired her journey to memorialize the names of others, who, like her family members, had been forgotten as victims, casualties and as Austrian citizens. This mission would be realized four years later, in what Frostig calls "The Vienna Project."
As a resident scholar at Brandeis, Frostig has been a part of a Holocaust study group on campus. She has been a guest speaker for many courses on campus and is a member of various committees at the Women's Study Research Center. In addition to being an art therapist for many years, she has worked on many activist art projects, confronting social issues by creating public rituals and performance art. Her work has dealt with traumatic experiences and ideas of silence and resistance.
The Vienna Project, which has been the subject of her focus for the past seven years, serves as a de-centralized memorial that has no one base or site, but rather spans over 38 sites in Austria. Frostig serves as the artistic director of the memorial.
The project includes a six-month-long series of displays such as video projections and live performance artists. There is also an education program, which includes oral history interviews, site interviews, student audio interviews, thematic guided tours and a blog.
Prior to the conception of The Vienna Project, there was never a memorial in Europe that represented multiple victimized groups. "Even though camps have the list of names that represents different populations and different countries, they don't necessarily identify the victims by group, so that it's often just a name," Frostig said in an interview with the Justice.
At the time of inheriting the letters, Frostig had only been to Austria once before in 1969 with her father. She wasn't quite enamored by what she saw. "I thought it was a very scary, racist place," she said. "I don't feel that now, but when I went back in 2006, I had those memories and I was quite frightened about going there."
Frostig's project aims to confront uncomfortable issues in a way that respects and integrates Austrian citizens. "My project really is about calling Austrians to the carpet," Frostig said, suggesting that there needs to be more accountability on their part. Though there have been three public apologies made formally for the crimes committed by Austria during the Holocaust, Frostig explains that there is a feeling that "[Austrian citizens] are hedging the past of it and that it's not a fully transparent acknowledgment of crimes committed."
The project kicked off with an opening night on Oct. 23, three days before Austria's National Day. The event featured a series of video projections, aimed at opening a dialogue about the "psychological health of memory and how memory integrates the past and present" and the "consequences to not remembering," said Frostig.
The next day, Frostig and her crew began a series of sidewalk sprays across thirty-eight sites in Vienna, with the words "What happens when we forget to remember?" in 12 different languages.
The different sites were chosen based on intensive research and usually shared a common tragic history of murder and persecution during the Holocaust under the regime of National Socialism. Many of the sites have been reclaimed and transformed for the good of Austrian citizens.
One of Frostig's main tasks has been to collect the names of the different Austrian citizens that were murdered during the Holocaust using databases for people of many different groups including homosexuals, Jews and Slovenians.
Silent witness vigils and artistic performance will take place at the sites as well, followed by pedestrian interviews at the sites next spring.
The project also features a virtual map of these sites on a Smartphone app that ties in her research of the different sites of oppression and transgression across Vienna. The app mimics the actual tours taking place across the sites, so that people can stand at the site and see how it has transformed since the Holocaust and engage in an interactive conversation in response to what they learn.
The project is taking place at a very critical time, as it is the 75th anniversary of "the last significant date of when survivors are still alive... and it also marks a time, coincidentally, of when many databases have been compiled," said Frostig. In other words, the stars are aligned for Frostig's work with memory; this may be the last opportunity we have to speak with survivors of the Holocaust, and we now have the developed technology to access more information that was not formerly available.
Frostig has developed a board of American and Austrian historians to help her with this project, including many influential individuals, such as Elie Wiesel, Stuart Eizenstat and Walter Kohn. Despite the positive turnout of the opening event, she has been met with much resistance from Austrian historians and the gatekeepers of these databases.
Another challenge for Frostig has been trying to include all Austrian citizens in the project, without completely extracting the Jewish narrative. "I think people have felt oppressed by the exclusive historic record of just Jews talking about Jews," she said "[but] to take the Jewish narrative out of the Holocaust, which is also what's happening in Europe is very worrisome to me ... so the design of this project is to include multiple groups, but to not erase identities."
A crucial point that separates this project from other memorials is its focus on engagement and participation. The wide geographic span of the project naturally lends itself to this direct engagement. Frostig points out that many past attempts to revitalize Holocaust memory have failed because they've been designed as "a project that's a static, fixed site of memory and that doesn't engage the public. ... This is a project in which education is a part of the design of the project and part of the conceptual underpinnings," she said.
The project will conclude May 8, which marks Victory Day in Europe, and thus the conclusion of World War II.