2024-01-20 13:51:58
The community of Ebensee is 20 kilometers from Bad Ischl. Here the Capital of Culture builds bridges less to the future than to the past. The Ebensee Contemporary History Museum presents the political history of Austria and the Salzkammergut between 1918 and 1955 in a permanent exhibition. The fact that the carnival archive is right next door is a little irritating given the many documents on the Nazi era, the Holocaust and the resistance.
The anti-fascist resistance in the Salzkammergut is commemorated by themed hikes called “Paths of Resistance,” which lead to various locations in the mountains of the region. From April 26th, the memorial tunnel of the former Ebensee concentration camp will also open for an art installation by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, who was born in Osaka and now lives in Berlin. At the end of the 130-meter-long tunnel, she will attach a labyrinth of red ropes hanging from the ceiling and 25 larger-than-life dresses. “In a place so steeped in history, it is not easy to create a work of art that is worthy of the place,” she is quoted as saying.
“We only allow events here that are thematically appropriate,” says Wolfgang Quatember. The historian has been building the contemporary history museum since the 1980s and is jointly responsible for the fact that the federal forestry authorities gave the operating association of around 400 people one of the tunnels in the 7.6 kilometer underground facility free of charge to use as a memorial site. From 1943 onwards, a total of 27,000 prisoners from 20 countries had to do forced labor to dig tunnels into the rock in this subcamp of the Mauthausen/Gusen concentration camp complex. The planned underground rocket factory was no longer built, but over 8,600 people had to lose their lives in inhumane working conditions in a year and a half.
The first residential buildings were built on the former concentration camp site just a few years following the end of the war. “On the one hand, they wanted to remove the historical traces, and on the other hand, they wanted to use the existing infrastructure,” says Quatember. Today only the cemetery, a memorial built in 2011 with the names of all the victims and the memorial tunnels, reminds us of thousands of suffering and deaths.
Concerts have already been held in the tunnel, which houses an exhibition and a memorial site. A performance by Hubert von Goisern brought 3,000 people here when a “Festival for Democracy” was celebrated in 1995; later the Mozart Requiem and the opera “Emperor of Atlantis” were performed here. In 2009, however, the memorial tunnel made infamous headlines when commemorations were disrupted by young people in combat boots and bomber jackets and concentration camp survivors were shot at with soft guns. “They weren’t neo-Nazis from out of town, but stupid boys from the area,” Quatember remembers. This makes it all the more important to intensify educational and awareness-raising work.
On April 11th, a book by Quatember’s colleague Nina Höllinger regarding “Jewish Families in the Salzkammergut” will be presented in the Ebensee Contemporary History Museum (as well as on April 5th in Bad Ischl and on April 21st in Gmunden). The historian and museum director still has no real idea what Chiharu Shiota’s installation will look like. “I let myself be surprised.”
(S E R V I C E – https://www.salzkammergut-2024.at/)
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