Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial

The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, unveiled in October 2000 after a delayed and contested planning process, was designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread as a cast concrete volume whose outer surfaces are library shelves turned inside out — book spines facing inward, invisible, so the titles of the volumes and thus the specific stories they'd tell remain permanently unknown. It commemorates the roughly 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered during the Nazi era, their names inscribed instead on the surrounding pavement's bronze plaques listing the concentration camps where they died.

The memorial, also called the Nameless Library, sits on Judenplatz directly above the excavated remains of a medieval synagogue destroyed in a 1421 pogrom, now viewable at the adjoining Museum Judenplatz — a deliberate layering of medieval and 20th-century Jewish tragedy on the same small square.