The Federal Monuments Office (BDA; german: Bundesdenkmalamt) is a department of the Federal Chancellery responsible for cultural heritage in

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

History

The BDA was established in 1853 under

Emperor Franz Joseph I Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I (german: Franz Joseph Karl, hu, Ferenc József Károly, 18 August 1830 – 21 November 1916) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and the other states of the Habsburg monarchy from 2 December 1848 until hi ...

, as a central commission for the preservation of

National Heritage Site A national heritage site is a heritage site having a value that has been registered by a governmental agency as being of national importance to the cultural heritage or history of that country. Usually such sites are listed in a heritage regist ...

s. Its duties include the preservation, restoration and cataloging of immoveable cultural heritage. The BDA also monitors the export provisions of the Austrian monument protection act for moveable cultural heritage. The BDA is divided into one central bureau and nine "land conservation districts" in the provincial capitals. At their disposal are the following central departments: *

Historic buildings This list is of heritage registers, inventories of cultural properties, natural and man-made, tangible and intangible, movable and immovable, that are deemed to be of sufficient heritage value to be separately identified and recorded. In many in ...

* Garden architecture ( Historic garden conservation and historic parks) * Restored workshops Baudenkmalpflege *

Industrial heritage Industrial heritage refers to the physical remains of the history of technology and industry, such as manufacturing and mining sites, as well as power and transportation infrastructure. Another definition expands this scope so that the term a ...

(historic factories) * Export licenses for cultural heritage * Archeological sites * Heritage lists * Inventory and Heritage Studies (publisher of the

Georg Dehio Georg Gottfried Julius Dehio (22 November 1850 in Reval (now Tallinn), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire – 21 March 1932 in Tübingen), was a Baltic German art historian. In 1900, Dehio started the "''Handbuch der deutschen Kunstgesc ...

manual) * "Sound monuments" (church bells and organs) * Museums & libraries (excluding national museums) * Legal Matters (conservation law) * Art restoration workshops; namely the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office at the Vienna Arsenal, and the Architectural conservation restoration workshop in the

Mauerbach Charterhouse Mauerbach Charterhouse (german: Kartause Mauerbach), in Mauerbach on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, is a former Carthusian monastery, or charterhouse. Founded in 1314 and rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baroque monastic complex is o ...

. Restaurierwerkstätten Baudenkmalpflege Kartause Mauerbach
, BDA

Art and property restitution

The BDA is also responsible for restitution of some 8,000 objects and works of

looted art Looted art has been a consequence of looting during war, natural disaster and riot for centuries. Looting of art, archaeology and other cultural property may be an opportunistic criminal act or may be a more organized case of unlawful or uneth ...

which Austria in the time of National Socialism had acquired by devious means. Since often the original owners and all of their relatives had been killed during the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

, restitution took place in the manner of auctions for the benefit of the Jewish community or to pay for material restitution of destroyed property, as in the case of the

Jewish cemetery in Währing Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

. Austria first did little to restore property to the damaged owner, but in the late 1940s and 1950s was put under pressure to make more of an effort according to the Moscow Declaration. As access to archives has slowly opened over time for provenance research, new clues and details such as stickers on the backs of auctioned objects that were photographed, have resulted in the discovery of previously "unfindable" owners. A set of such results was published in early December 2008 and exhibited at the Museum of Applied Arts.

Periodicals

* Austrian magazine for art and historic preservation . Verlag F. Berger, 1947ff, ISSN 0029-9626 (quarterly). * Restorers annual magazine. * Studies on conservation and historic preservation. Verlag F. Berger (irregular). * Austrian Art topography . Verlag F. Berger, 1907ff (irregular releases). * Department of Natural Monuments, Hofburg (eds): Fund reports from Austria . Verlag F. Berger, 1920ff, ISSN 0429-8926 (annually, as well as material specifications and special volumes). * Theodor Brückler, Ulrike Nimeth; Federal Monuments Office (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Austrian people Preservation from 1850 to 1990 - 2002. Verlag F. Berger, Vienna 2001, .

Literature

* Walter Frodl : idea and realization. If the state of conservation in Austria. Vienna, Cologne, Graz 1988, Bundesdenkmalamt Vienna (Ed.): Studies on conservation and historic preservation. XIII * Manfred Koller : The History of the Restoration in Austria. In: History of the Restoration in Europe / Histoire de la Restoration en Europe. I, Worms 1991, p. 65-85, Bundesdenkmalamt Vienna (Ed.): Acts of International Congress Restauriergeschichte / Histoire de la Restoration. XIII, Interlaken 1989

References

External links