The Graz Town Hall Facade (1939/1962)
Wilhelm Jonser, Plan for the Graz Town Hall Facade (1962)
The architecture of Graz’s town hall, one of the city’s landmarks, underwent several ideological reinterpretations, some of them contradictory. The current hall was built in the 1890s in an “old German” style, with references to the Nuremberg Renaissance and German Baroque ornaments. It erased the neoclassical building of 1807, which was standard, Pan-European, and bureaucratic. At the time of Graz’s self-imposed “Germanization,” this was not considered national enough. In the Third Reich, the Germanized facade was strongly criticized for its “architectonic fragmentation.” A “calm monumental edifice” in the Nazi neoclassical style was proposed in 1939 but never built.
In 1962, during a period of tentative modernization, there were attempts to revise the problematic Germanness of the castle-like town hall. The facade was stripped of sculptures to make it “cleaner,” and a competition for its redesign was announced. Its winner was Wilhelm Jonser (1897–1986), who once again suggested an allegedly neutral international neoclassical version. However, it was rejected in a referendum as either too simplistic or possibly too close to the Nazi proposal, still in living memory. Since then, the fictitious Germanness of the 1890s facade (to which the statues returned) has been embraced as 100 percent “Styrian.”
Graz Town Hall: photo of the existing building and sketch of a new facade, 1939
From: Heinz Reichenfelser (ed.), Kunstausstellung Graz: Architektur, Plastik, Malerei, Graphik und Handwerk (Graz: Kameradschaft steirischer Künstler, 1941)
Wilhelm Jonser
Plan for the Graz Town Hall Facade (1962)
Print on paper, 58.4 × 97.3 cm
Stadtarchiv Graz