Sixty years after Vienna was liberated from the Nazis in April 1945, six of Hitler's massive air defense towers still cast a shadow over the city and nobody knows quite what to do with them.
Not that there is a lack of suggestions.
They range from the whimsical, like the artist Christo who wanted to "wrap" the towers like he had done with the Reichstag building in Berlin, to the more utilitarian proposal of transforming them into a high-security data bank.
But none of the ideas have found favor with the Austrian government or the Vienna municipality, and the towers are glaringly absent from events Austria is planning this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
"Nobody wants to take responsibility for these towers because they are part of the past which has been repressed and become taboo" because of Austria's complicity with the Nazis, said Ute Bauer, the author of a book about the towers.
"There is no agreement here as to whether the towers should serve as a commemoration of the liberation of Vienna or of the Allied bombings, or as a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich," she said.
A spokesman for the municipality admitted that the 50m fortresses, were considered a "delicate subject."
The Nazis began building the towers in 1942 to house the air defense units (Flak) of the Third Reich that were trying to ward off the Allied bombers, and intended them to stand as monuments once Hitler had won the war.
But they towers never served either purpose.
By the time they were completed by forced laborers in 1944, Britain's fighter plane were flying at an altitude that put them safely out of reach of the Flak.
In the end the towers served as bunkers for the Austrian population during the heavy bombardments of March and April 1945.
With walls up to 6m thick, the towers are said to be impossible to implode without destroying the surrounding neighborhood.
The only alternative would be to tear them down brick by brick, at an estimated cost of 300 million to 500 million euros (US$387 million to US$645 million) each.
The towers rise like massive iron fists over the city's Art Noveau and neo-Baroque landscape.
Two of them are situated in the flower-filled Augarten public park, and have been invaded by flocks of birds. Only one has found a formal function in housing Vienna's biggest aquarium.
None of the "Flaktuerme" bear any inscription explaining their history and they do not feature on most of the city's tourist routes.
"The time has come to ask ourselves what these fortresses mean for us," said Peter Noever, the director of the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna.
He wants to see one of the towers turned into a studio where artists can produce works putting into perspective the history of Vienna.
Datacenter Vienna, a private company, is ready to spend 80 million euros to transform another one of the towers into a high-security databank and hope the city could one day approve the project.
"Since Sept. 11, more and more big companies are anxious to keep their facts and figures in a secure environment. The very structure of these towers make them ideal because they will be able to withstand almost any form of attack, including a plane crash," Datacenter's director Wolfgang Bleim said.
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