Who Is Afraid of Hitler's Town? A House and the Past Within Us

“Initially, I wanted to accompany a fascinating re-polling process on film: I had discovered that the social institution Lebenshilfe was planning to take over the house where Adolf Hitler was born. [...] The originally simple project turned into a multi-layered, long-term documentary film that took five years to shoot.

During this long development process, it gradually became clear to me that the stigmatization of Hitler’s birthplace as a ‘brown city’ and the institutional treatment of it ultimately results in an unwelcome, but nevertheless apt metaphor for the failure to come to terms with our Austrian history of perpetrators. For even though much has been done in our country in recent years for the victims of Nazi terror, there is no real coming to terms with our history of perpetrators. [...] I am referring here to the fact that the majority of us in Austria are descended from perpetrators and tolerators or those who were brought up in the Nazi state, and not from victims. Instead of looking into one’s own family history, the guilty are always sought and found outside. Thus Braunau undeservedly becomes a ‘brown city’ and is found guilty in the process. And as a result, an old house in which baby Adolf spent merely a few months, is elevated to the ‘birthplace of evil’. [...]”

 Günther Schwaiger