Hitler House for sale, 2016
The survival of Adolf Hitler’s birthplace after the war proved problematic for the Austrians. The house attracted neo-Nazi fanatics making annual pilgrimages to the site. The Austrian government seized the property from its original owner in 2016. A twelve-member council was assigned the task to determine what social function the house would serve going forward, including an option to demolish the site. I submitted an installation proposal. The interior rooms of the house would contain monitors, displaying video clips capturing authentic conversations with the townspeople of Braunau Am Inn, discussing their transformative process of historic reconciliation with the past. The installation would conclude with a short video displaying a visual narrative of the Third Reich, projected onto the facade of the house--a few moments duration. The video would conclude with the demise of the regime coordinated with a controlled demolition of the historic building. The proposal was declined. I revised the concept to display only images retrieved from the city’s archives by the town’s designated historian. This could be developed as an interim experience. The building could even be preserved. Again, no thank you.
Hitler House 1938. (2017). Proposal: prepared a series of archival photos for projection on to the original house.
Photo of Hitler's birthplace, Braunau Am Inn. (2016). Photo: Karen Frostig
Hitler entering Austria. (2016). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Austrian Jews forced to scrub the streets. (2016). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
The Gates of Auschwitz. 2016). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Braunau Am Inn family gathering, 1942. (2017). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Braunau Am Inn, musical group, 1942. (2017). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Hitler house, 1943. (2017). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
US planes bombing Germany. (2016). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
US soldiers making "I was here" statements on the interior walls of Hitler's house. (2017). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Demolishing Hitler and his house. (2016). Digital drawing, proposal for projection.
Postcript
The proposal that won approval, turned the building into a police station. Architects proposed a new facade. Protestors appeared, claiming the police station was nothing more than a sanitized repackaging of what had previously existed at the site.
I submitted a third proposal, this time adding a modest public inscription positioned onto the new façade of the police station. I selected a quote from Franz Jägerstätter, a local farmer who was the only conscientious objector of this period, living in the region. He was imprisoned in Germany and guillotined on August, 9, 1943. The inscription read: “I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war.”—Franz Jägerstätter, 1943. Again, the proposal was rejected.
I believe it is important to offer up an alternative solution, even in the form of a website posting, especially when the chosen path is so transparently flawed