Strong, specialised, female: women's power for cathedral and bell

Women played an important part in the reconstruction of St Stephen’s Cathedral, not only doing supposedly ‘men’s jobs’ but also taking on leadership roles. The photographer Lucca Chmel documented the burned-out cathedral, creating iconic images with her spectacular shots taken from extreme perspectives. Her photographic work had been mandated as ‘atonement service’ for her membership of the Nazi Party. In the first months after the fire, the architect and chartered builder Helene Buchwieser took charge of clearing the rubble from the huge building site as the representative of the cathedral architect.

The tinsmith Angela Stadtherr was commissioned to produce the copper weathercock. In August 1950 the ‘giant bird’, which weighed several hundred kilos, was mounted at a height of 70 metres. Her supervision of its installation on the roof of the cathedral attracted a great deal of media interest – especially as she was the only woman in an otherwise male-dominated profession. A female apprentice roofer photographed at dizzying heights on the steep roof truss also made headlines. Finally, Getrude Stolz did the engravings for the decorations on the Pummerin. She was the only female employee at the famous St Florian bell foundry in Upper Austria.