Marko-Feingold-Steg

This guide to the Marko-Feingold-Steg in Salzburg opens with fifteen thousand padlocks vanishing from this railing in a single spring morning, snipped off by city workers. It traces the superstition behind them, of couples locking a promise to a bridge and throwing away the key, and turns to the footbridge's other history: renamed in 2020 from the painter Hans Makart to Marko Feingold, who survived four concentration camps, lost his family in the Holocaust, and spent decades telling Salzburg's teenagers what he had lived through. Look at the railing in front of you and consider which of these two histories it actually carries.