Requiem A review — guilt and grief in Vienna on VE Day
Not surprisingly, VE Day has more conflicted connotations in Vienna than it does in London. In 2013 the Mauthausen Committee Austria — established to preserve the memory of that horrific Nazi concentration camp near Linz — started a 'Fest der Freude', an open-air festival of joy, on May 8 each year in the vast Heldenplatz in central Vienna. The committee's reason was chilling: it feared that the Heldenplatz (notorious as the square where Hitler publicly announced the Anschluss of Austria to Germany in March 1938) was being taken over by what it called 'right-wing extremists' intent on turning May 8 into a day 'when the Nazi defeat is mourned'.
Instead, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was invited to give a free annual concert, always ending with
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