German original: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000130164434/oesterreich-verabschiedet-sich-in-auschwitz-spaet-vom-opfermythos
Since 1978 Austria presented itself as a victim of National Socialism at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial. Now the exhibition has been modernized.
Markus Rohrhofer October 4, 2021, 15:39
Distance: It's not far from Vienna to Oświęcim. It takes about four hours to get to the Polish city. A good 390 kilometers away. The same as on July 17, 1942. The train with about 1,000 people departs from Vienna - directly to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Precisely the place, where people were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. Up to 20,000 Austrians were deported to the extermination camp and murdered there. More than 1.1 million people in total. Snatched out of the center of life. Those people were brutally "removed."
Auschwitz: Today, the name is equivalent to misery and mass murder and became synonymous with the Holocaust.
In addition to the permanent exhibition on the history of the concentration and extermination camp, today the so-called country exhibitions tell the stories of those countries from which people were deported to the camp complex. The Austrian section was opened March 19, 1978 in Block 17 of the memorial - and remained unchanged ever since.
But over the years, critical voices became louder and louder. Above all, the point that Austria consistently portrayed itself as a victim at the memorial generated discontent. In the 2000s, the first efforts to redesign the memorial began to arise. The investigations and analyses begun in 2006 and finally resulted in a final project report funded by the National Fund. In 2009, the government gave the official go for a museum redesign. However, the actual realization was yet to take another twelve years.
Opening with a state visit
On Monday, the assembled heads of state, including Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen, alongside National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP) as well as Second National Council President Doris Bures (SPÖ) and numerous ministers traveled to Auschwitz to open the new Austrian national exhibition "Distance - Austria and Auschwitz."
The fully redesigned exhibition intendeds to commemorate the victims in Auschwitz in the future, but also to show for the first time Austria's complicity and responsibility in the crimes of National Socialism. In doing so, the rupture between the reality of living and dying in Auschwitz-Birkenau at that time and the frame of reference in Austria before or outside the camp will be scrutinized.
"More room for reflection"
National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka tells the STANDARD that with the new exhibition "more room and more possibility for reflection has been created." Sobotka: "The designers have done a great job. The exhibition space is no longer so crowded." A particular challenge, he says, was the monument conservation: "There was an extensive renovation of the building itself."
But the real obstacle was probably the new approach to the subject. Long meetings were necessary in order to decide whether to create another exhibition of victims - or, as it was ultimately decided, to deliberately include Austrian perpetrators in the exhibition.
Perpetrators from Austria
In his speech, Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen reminded the audience that "racism and anti-Semitism did not appear from nowhere". Van der Bellen: "The concentration and extermination camps did not appear from nowhere either. Auschwitz did not appear from nowhere." Anti-Semitism and racism had been "very present" in Austrian society even before March 1939, he said." The ground had been prepared, the seed sown - and the seed took root."
Even though Austria no longer existed as a state, but had been part of the so-called Third Reich as the "Ostmark," "many people from our country were among the perpetrators, some in leading positions, in this extermination program."
Van der Bellen: "We all know the history, and yet for a long time the state doctrine stated that Austria was the first victim of National Socialism." This was also reflected in the 1978 exhibition, he said. "It is now being replaced by an exhibition that will keep the memory alive of the fate of Austrian victims and the resistance of Austrian prisoners and at the same time depict the involvement of people from our country as perpetrators." In his speech, the head of state warned that justice would only be done to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust "if we ensure that contempt for human kind, scapegoating and violence are never used as political instruments again." (Markus Rohrhofer, 10/4/2021)