DENK-MAL Marpe Lanefesch

Former Jewish prayer house in the Old General Hospital

In 1988 the city of Vienna donated the Old General Hospital (AKH) to the University of Vienna for the creation of a Campus

on its grounds. The complex included a building in courtyard 6 of the Campus that had seen various uses over the years: in 1903, Max Fleischer (1841-1905) had built it as a prayer pavilion for Jewish patients of the General Hospital. During National Socialism it had been desecrated but not destroyed. Then, beginning in the 1950s, it had been used as an electrical transformer building, thereby destroying the interior. In the 1970s, in the course of modernization efforts concerning the transformer, the building’s exterior also had seen drastic changes.

In light of these historic circumstances, the University of Vienna took up its cultural-political responsibility to renovate and maintain the former prayer house. With an artistic reimagining, the art project DENK-MAL Marpe Lanefesch was created. “DENK-MAL” is a play on the word “Denkmal”, “monument”, and the prompt “denk mal!”, “think!”, while “Marpe Lanefesch” is Hebrew and means “healing for the soul”. The name evokes the site’s many-layered meanings: the prayer house as a place of remembrance of its checkered history, pointing towards its cultural meaning through an artistic vision. In October 2005, the former prayer house was opened as an accessible monument and as a “site of remembrance and thought”.