»The Memorial as a Magnifying Glass : Interpreting the Stalin Plaque in Vienna«

In 1949 the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) dedicated a memorial plaque to Stalin in Vienna. It commemorates his visit to the city while he wrote on the National Question in 1913. This plaque remains there until today. Because the memorial has lost its function in the communist cult of personality, this article offers an analysis of present-day memory culture surrounding the plaque in order to understand its current function as place of memory. My point of departure is journalistic texts discussing the Stalin plaque written in Austria in the twenty-first century. These repeat certain topoi and metaphors from transnational fictional and non-fictional works about Stalin's life and about radicals in Vienna in 1913. I discuss the intertextuality of these texts and interpret their function. Although the plaque has its roots in Stalin's personality cult of the 1940s, most recent texts ignore this aspect. Instead, they recreate the episode of Stalin's life the memorial alludes to. The memorial thus functions as a magnifying glass, exposing details about the year 1913 when Stalin visited Vienna. Present-day writing about the Stalin plaque often leads to discussions about who else lived in Vienna that year and about the fatefulness of the year before World War I