18 May 2010

Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial

My dropping-off-to-sleep listening is often The Essay on Radio 3 -- and I "listen again" in the morning if it (or rather, the beginning) was particularly interesting. This week the series is Christopher Rix talking about some poems (and the first one, Young and Old, was excellent) - but last week it was Michael Goldfarb looking for "ghosts" in cities that once had large Jewish populations, also an excellent series. "Because of the Holocaust, most of these ghosts have been forgotten, because the community that might have remembered them no longer exists," says the website.

Which brings us to Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in Vienna. The photo on the BBC website is beautiful
but ordinarily this major piece of sculpture isn't lit up. It represents a library of unread, unwritten books - very poignant.

Here it is by day - up close -
and in its wider context -

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