Until recently, Vienna didn't have much to commemorate Vienna-born Hollywood diva and inventor Hedy Lamarr: an honorary grave at the Central Cemetery, for which her son Anthony Loder fought for 14 years, and a path in the 12th district. That will soon change, as a new project is being built on Mariahilferstrasse that will bear Hedy Lamarr's name: A luxury department store, in the best tradition of the Jewish department stores of the late 19th century such as Rothberger or Zwieback, planned and implemented by Ellen van Loon of the architectural firm Rem Kohlhaas OMA. An interactive museum café dedicated to Hedy Lamarr will be built in the building that operates the KadeWe, a creative space where visitors will not only learn about the life and diverse work of Hedy Lamarr, but where there will also be film screenings, performances and workshops on a variety of topics. It was with great pleasure that I was allowed to develop and implement this project.
Hedy Lamarr will not only be honored within the entire department store, but the publicly accessible park on the roof will also bear Hedy Lamarr's name. Next to the garden area, there will be a sculpture of Hedy Lamarr.
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in 1914 into an upper-middle-class Jewish Viennese family. Growing up sheltered in Döbling, she was discovered for the stage by Max Reinhardt in the late 1920s. She played her first major role alongside Hans Moser and Heinz Rühmann in the 1931 film "Man braucht kein Geld." She achieved widespread fame in 1933 when, at the age of barely 18, she played the first nude scene in film history in the movie "Ekstase". A short time later she married the arms producer Fritz Mandl, from whose golden cage she soon broke out and moved to Hollywood. The "most beautiful woman in the world," as which MGM studio founder Louis B. Mayer marketed her as, she made thirty films, the best known of which is probably "Samson and Delilah" from 1949. Lamarr retired from the film business at the beginning of the 1960s. Since her youth she was active as an inventor, in the midst of the Second World War she conceived the frequency hopping method for torpedo control, which still serves today as the technical basis for mobile radio, Bluetooth and WLAN. She passionately opposed National Socialism and managed to rescue her mother from Vienna.
Hedy Lamarr was married six times, made headlines in later years with botched plastic surgeries and shoplifting, and withdrew completely from the public eye. A life worthy of a movie, but only with a late happy ending - even in her beloved Vienna. In 1999, on her 85th birthday, she was honored with an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien and a retrospective by the Filmarchiv Austria. For the theater stage, Peter Turrini, among others, memorialized her in his play "Seven Seconds of Eternity," and numerous documentaries such as "Calling Hedy Lamarr" by Georg Misch and "Bombshell" followed. An exhibition at the Jewish Museum Vienna was dedicated to her in 2019. And in July 2022 a new album by Johnny Depp was released, it starts with a tribute "This is a song for Miss Hedy Lamarr". Now she is finally getting a big monument in Vienna, too. It will be opened on her 110th birthday in November 2024.