For nine years I lived in Vienna, and for much of that time I felt something in the city I could not name. A heaviness between people. A pull on the tram between strangers, a hesitation in doorways, a quiet that was not peace but the absence of it. Slowly I came to call it shame — not the private shame of this or that person, but something that seemed to live in the space between people, invisible and yet pressing on what neighbours could say to one another and what they could not.
I kept reaching for one image in particular: dark matter. Astronomers cannot see it, yet they know it is there because of the pull it exerts — it is the unseen mass that holds galaxies together. Something like that seemed to be holding Vienna, something the city would not look at directly. During the war, neighbours had handed neighbours to the Gestapo. The people who did those things were long dead, but the moral residue of their acts had outlived them and settled, eighty years on, into the place itself — a fine sediment of mistrust carried by people who had no personal memory of any of it. The shame no longer belonged to anyone in particular. It had moved into the walls.
To make sense of what I was feeling, and of what I would eventually try to do about it, I leaned on the work of John Paul Lederach. Lederach is an American peace scholar — a professor at the University of Notre Dame — but he is first of all a practitioner: for decades he sat in rooms with people on opposite sides of brutal conflicts, from Nicaragua and Colombia to Northern Ireland and Somalia, helping enemies find a way back to one another. Out of that lifetime of mediation he wrote a book called The Moral Imagination, and in it he describes something he calls “web watching.” It is not about building new relationships from scratch. It is about paying patient attention to the web of relationships that is already there — including the threads you cannot see. The task of peace, he writes, is to find “the soul of place.” That phrase is gentler than what it asks. Finding the soul of a place means getting past the noise to the voices beneath it, noticing the patterns hidden under the obvious problems, feeling the rhythm of a place beneath the racket of its daily life. Two questions, Lederach says, follow the watcher everywhere — Who am I? Where am I? — and they never settle into final answers. And the work rests on three quiet disciplines: stillness, humility, and the readiness to perceive with the senses.
I will start with stillness, because that is where it began for me, and because stillness is the easiest of the three to misunderstand. It does not mean doing nothing. Lederach means something more demanding: being fully present without rushing to move. It is the ground that makes real listening and real seeing possible. The history of a place lives in its walls, its rooms, its squares — and it matters, morally, what once happened there, because what happened keeps shaping what is still possible now. If you can truly become still, you become able to receive what occurred where you are standing.
This is not a theory for me. While I was training in Waldorf education in the Tilgnerstraße — a quiet street in Vienna’s fourth district — I was struck one ordinary afternoon by a perception I had not gone looking for: something had happened in this house. Nothing in the room said so. The walls were bare, the floor polished, the light unremarkable. But the sense of it arrived with a clarity I could neither shake off nor explain. So I started to dig.
The digging led to the archives, and the archives are where Lederach’s other two disciplines became real to me. To read those files is to slow down to the smallest scale. A name. An address. A note of property seized. A date of deportation. The archive does not argue; it simply records. It teaches humility, because the work cannot be rushed and cannot be lumped together — each name asks to be met on its own. And it sharpens the senses, because everything is in the material detail: the ink, the handwriting of a clerk who wrote down what he was doing, the typed inventory of confiscated furniture, the flat bureaucratic tone that makes the violence harder to look at, not easier. Slowly you begin to feel the world that produced these documents.
What the records finally revealed still seems to me rare. From this one building in the Tilgnerstraße, eight Jewish families were deported. Vienna’s deportations were carried out address by address across the whole city, but eight families from a single house is an unusual concentration. One of them was the Schechner family — and by the terrible arithmetic of those years, they were among the more fortunate of the eight. All three Schechner children survived: two reached what was then British Mandate Palestine, where they went on to raise families of their own; the third found refuge in England. Both parents were murdered. The loss here was not between brothers and sisters but between generations — the children saved, the parents lost, a household carried into its next generation and cut off from the one above. That is what “fortunate” meant in the Tilgnerstraße in those years.
But reading is not yet meeting. What changed everything was the day the descendants of those families accepted an invitation to come to the house. The gathering held for them on 21 September 2025 — the first Friedensimpuls, the first “peace impulse” — was not an exhibition about the past. It was the past being addressed, in the present, in the very place where it had happened. Documents from the archive were laid out. The names were read aloud. And the Jewish families who had once been taken away bei Nacht und Nebel — “by night and fog,” in secret — were finally given the farewell, the Verabschiedung, that no one had given them in 1938. The philosopher Hannah Arendt had a word for the space that opens between people when they truly appear to one another: she called it the world, the in-between. For one afternoon, in one room, that in-between was allowed to begin mending — between people who owed each other nothing and had no earlier reason to trust.
Beside the documents stood two tables. They had been built by Pius Kaufmann and Johannes Nigsch, two carpenters from Vorarlberg who had run a workshop together for seven years and had come through a hard stretch between them. They made the tables together as a working symbol of Brüderlichkeit — brotherliness, the plain trust that lets people stand alongside one another. Their own reconciliation was not separate from the history the gathering was facing; the two belonged together, because what had been broken in the Tilgnerstraße in 1938 was not only the lives of eight families but exactly that — the brotherliness of the place, the everyday trust that lets neighbours be neighbours. The tables now stand in the Café Alt Wien, where anyone can sit at them: a piece of the city’s furniture quietly carrying the gesture. I do not want to romanticise this. A pair of tables does not undo a deportation, and that was never the claim. But together — the tables, the documents, the descendants, the farewell — they made a setting in which the “dark matter” of the place could, for the length of an encounter, become visible. It could be named. It could be looked at. And once something can be looked at together, it can no longer do its old work in quite the same way.
I did not heal Vienna. What I can say is smaller and more exact: an impulse passed through us — a Friedensimpuls — that I was fortunate enough to be part of, and in it something carried in silence for generations was, for one afternoon, allowed to speak. Lederach’s two questions — Who am I? Where am I? — had been mine to carry into the house; in that encounter they stopped being mine alone. Descendant and host alike had to answer them again, out loud and in each other’s presence, in the one place where neither answer could stay abstract. The Austrian shame did not dissolve. The mistrust did not lift from the city. The dark weight that the Holocaust had gathered at this address did not vanish. But it could be lit up. It could be spoken to. And the difference between a buried wound and one that has been addressed is, in my experience, the whole difference between a place that holds its people hostage to its past and a place that slowly begins to let them go.
This is what I now understand as the soul of the house being touched — and through it, perhaps, a fragment of the soul of the city. Peace does not begin with reconciliation. It begins with creating the conditions under which reconciliation even becomes thinkable. My doctoral supervisor, Professor Martin Leiner, calls this the Momentum Approach.
Those conditions are practical, not just fine words. The ethicist Nikolaus Knoepffler argues that human dignity becomes real only when it is brought down from the level where it is declared to the level where it is done — where you stand in a room with another person and treat them, in your actions, as a full human being. What gets done in a Friedensimpuls is a particular way of paying attention that Alexander Schaumann called Menschenbetrachtung — literally, the beholding of a human being. It is a shared practice in which one person is described, slowly and without judgement, in three respects at once: their body, their inner life, and what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the noëtic dimension — the level of meaning and spirit that cannot be reduced to the other two. You keep at it until the observers find themselves genuinely seeing, and the person being described feels herself seen. In the Tilgnerstraße I shifted that same discipline of attention from a person to a place, and to the people who had gathered in it. When attention like that is sustained, something becomes possible that the sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls Resonanz — resonance: the moment a relationship stops being a means to an end and the world answers back. Two communities — descendants who had every reason to refuse, and Austrian hosts who had every reason to look away — looked together at what had divided them. The looking itself was the work.
The work does not end with one house. The Friedensimpuls travels. In the autumn of 2026 it moves to Morocco, with members of Jewish families returning to the Mizrahi roots that, in Israel, they have often been asked to hide. In 2027 it comes back to the Tilgnerstraße for a first Friedenskongress, a peace congress. In 2028 it goes to Jerusalem, where a Palestinian violin-maker and an Israeli carpenter will work together on a single sculpture under the theme of Gleichheit — equality. And in 2029 it becomes a piece of theatre, in which everything the earlier gatherings set in motion can take dramatic shape under a third theme, Freiheit — freedom. The sequence is deliberate. Brotherliness, equality, freedom: these are the three parts of a social vision that goes back to Rudolf Steiner, and the soul disciplines I learned from Lederach find their match in them. The Tilgnerstraße is where the whole architecture began.
Was the soul of Vienna changed? That asks more than any single act could deliver. What I can say is that a fragment of Vienna’s soul — one house, one circle of people, one afternoon — was allowed, briefly, to remember itself as something other than the sealed container of a buried shame. And once that is possible in one place, it is no longer entirely impossible in the city.
Lederach writes that the person who watches the web can never see the whole of it. You feel part of it before you can see it. You follow a single thread, gently, knowing that a clumsy move can destroy the very thing you most want to protect. I think that is what I tried to do. Not to change Vienna — only to stand still long enough in the Tilgnerstraße to feel what had happened there. To follow the thread into the archive. To make a room where descendants could be received and the deported could be addressed. And to learn, in the doing, that the history of a place is not behind us but in the walls — and that the walls can, on rare and disciplined occasions, become open to what they have been holding.