Audioweg Gusen
/5
- Audiowalk Gusen
- Audioweg Gusen
- 2007
- video installation, 34 min
Using interviews with a total of 25 witnesses to that period, including nine individuals who survived the camps Gusen I and II, as well as 14 present-day residents of Gusen and the neighboring community of St. Georgen, Christoph Mayer reconstructs not only the history of the camp—repressed and physically obliterated by other buildings—but also the way in which the Second Austrian Republic dealt with its Nazi past: following the war’s conclusion, most of the two Gusen camps’ barracks were demolished, and the 1950s saw the site’s “normalization” go so far that the property was parceled out and sold to homebuilders at rock-bottom prices. Many of these homebuilders were new arrivals who had decided to relocate in order to escape the economic isolation affecting communities on the border with communist Czechoslovakia, and often (as in Mayer’s own case), they only learned of their lots’ histories through conversations with survivors. G.S.