The Names They Chiselled Off

The Julius-Popp-Hof is named after one of the founders of Austrian social democracy, a man who started out as a poor apprentice and later came to manage the party's funds, and that name was set here in stone from the day the building was finished.

 

That lasted until February 1934. When the government banned the party, the names vanished from the façades of dozens of municipal housing blocks, courtyards were renamed after saints or after neutral streets, and fourteen years of history were wiped away with a chisel and a new nameplate.

 

After the war the old names came back, and that is why the lettering on many of these buildings is younger than the brickwork beneath it.

 

It points to something you can't see in the blocks themselves, namely that for fifteen years this district was the battleground of two visions of what a city is, and that in the end the fight was settled not with votes but with weapons.

 

We turn off the Gürtel, the broad ring road, and head down the street behind the blocks, towards a courtyard named after a murdered Italian.