The writer Jörg Mauthe called it the "most absurd and beautiful square in the world" - Vienna's Heldenplatz is indisputably the main square of the Republic of Austria and of modern Austrian history. It is the site of political monuments and the scene of important state political ceremonies. However, the memory of Adolf Hitler's acclaimed "Anschluss" speech from the balcony of the Hofburg on 15 March 1938 is overwhelmingly powerful on Heldenplatz: to this day, as Peter Stachel shows, it stands in the collective memory of Austrians for the moral capitulation to National Socialism.