Publications

Strom der Erinnerung – Zeitzeugen und Zeitzeuginnen erzählen über eine zerstörte jüdische Gemeinde Wiens

Director: Ursula Henzl
Publisher: Verein coobra, Vienna
Content: 2 DVDs
Year: 2013

Twenty historical witnesses talk about the suburban Jewish community of their childhood in today’s 15th district of Vienna. The interviews were conducted in 2007 and 2008 in Israel, some in Vienna. They are full biographical interviews not confined to the period of Nazi persecution. They dig into the intact Jewish community before 1938, its places, culture and forms of living, follow the refugees to the places where they started new lives and investigate the relationships they and their families sustained to their former home country.

The interviews are edited in chapters according to the main topics, regathering the voices of a dispersed community, for instance when 14 people speak about the former community building in Herklotzgasse, but also recollecting a great  variety of experiences and responses to the Holocaust and its aftermath. Last but not least, they reconstruct an important aspect of Vienna’s local socio-historical fabric that had been totally forgotten until the project’s activities.

The DVD production is the concluding part of the larger project “Herklotzgasse 21. The Spaces of a Suburban Jewish Community” (www.herklotzgasse21.at), which has been supported by ERSTE Foundation throughout.

This publication is available at ERSTE Foundation Library.

Florian Bauer

Director Social Finance, Sustainability and Innovation
Since 2023, Florian Bauer has been responsible for social finance, sustainability and social innovation at ERSTE Foundation. Prior to this role, Florian worked in the NGO & Social Entrepreneurship sector for more than 13 years. He led the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), an international multilateral NGO that works to accelerate market-based deployment of renewable energy and energy efficient systems in developing countries, and was Managing Director & COO of the Impact Hub Vienna. From 2020-2023, Florian established strategic alliances with key partners and helped to create innovative semantic technology solutions at Semantic Web Company (SWC), a leading IT company in semantic AI solutions.