As the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész expresses it, in Eastern Europe people are silent in a different way about the Holocaust, and talk about it in a different way (if one can simply not avoid talking about it) than is the case in Western Europe. »Since the end of the Second World War the Holocaust has consistently been seen here, right up until the present day, as what one might call a ›sensitive‹ topic shielded through protective walls of taboos and euphemisms from the ›brutal‹ process of establishing the truth«.² The situation is not terribly different in Austria. Political discourse externalises the National Socialist past of the Austrians and Hungarians by projecting these onto the Germans. Austria deftly succeeded in taking cover behind the notion of its victim role. Society was educated to place a taboo on the trauma and memories of the actual victims.

Over the last sixty years Austria has been guilty of many omissions. Despite the commemorations marking the 50th and 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust, along with international commemorative tourism associated with this, and despite the public debate in the Eighties concerning Federal President Kurt Waldheim’s SA past, people today still have to make a great effort of will to engage with the topic. »People were afraid of having anything to do with the issue … For example, a fear of speaking to the people in my village about this subject. We had been working on the audio route for months before these conversations became possible …..it sounds like the easiest thing in the world. Talking to the neighbours and people from the village, what’s it like living there?« explains christoph mayer chm., describing his observations on the process of working in Gusen.

Gusen is a normal place in Upper Austria – embedded in a green, slightly hilly, neither spectacular nor breathtakingly beautiful landscape, in other works an absolutely run-of-the-mill Upper Austrian landscape, the kind that are two-a-penny in this part of the world. Berlin-based artist christoph mayer chm. grew up in the neighbouring village, St. Georgen an der Gusen, and in a chance conversation with someone sitting next to him at village festivities when he was around 14 or 15 found out about the local history of the Second World War, the concentration camp and the armaments facilities there, »Bergkristall«. Nearly as many years went by before mayer chm. was able to find a way of expressing the blotted-out history of the place: in an audio piece, an »acoustic memory for Gusen«, a journey into this past. The 96-minute acoustic portrait is made up of fragments of interviews with former prisoners held in the Gusen concentration camp, with perpetrators, those who colluded and with the people who live in Gusen today, and unfurls a precise topography of the terror and horror of the two camps in Gusen, which, in their role as twin camps to Mauthausen, were supposed to vanish from history. Anyone who hears it once will remember the place – and carry the shadow of history with them.³

The village would have done an almost perfect job of concealing local memories if it had not been for the initiative of a group of Italian former detainees in the camp, who purchased a plot of land and in the Sixties created a monument, with strikingly high-quality concrete modernist architecture by B.B.P.R, right in the middle of the scattered buildings making up the settlement. The oven of the crematorium from the former concentration camp survives at the centre of the monument. In 2004 a small museum in something resembling a Portakabin was placed next to it.

After the end of the Second World War, most of the barracks from the Gusen I and II camps were razed to the ground immediately, and in the Fifties a further step was taken towards »normalisation« when the land where the two camps had stood was divided up into plots and cheap land prices enticed prospective purchasers – mainly from the Oberer Mühlviertel, on what was then the border with Czechoslovakia, isolated right up against the Iron Curtain –to come and settle here. It is rumoured that purchasers were not informed about Gusen’s past but found out about its history little by little from survivors who came to this traumatised place to commemorate the dead and keep the shared memory of their experiences of suffering alive. In the course of these meetings, survivors asked the inhabitants where the camp in Gusen had been. When they heard that the two camps had stood on the spot where the smart detached houses had been built, the people who lived there and their children had to come to terms with being asked: how can anyone bear to live on that ground?

This retrieval of knowledge happened during a period when it was still just in time for survivors, eyewitnesses of the events and indeed those who had committed the crimes to be able to have their say too. Aleida Assmann ascribes a memory to places, she believes that even today many people still cling to what happened in days gone by. Through the precisely stipulated directions in the audio route, today we also experience how two worlds can be perceived at the same time – the present of contemporary Gusen and the past of the concentration camp. christoph mayer chm. has managed a precise reconstruction of the camp. Like a blueprint the barracks of the camp are superimposed in our minds on the houses in the scattered settlement. Over and over again you sense how impossible it is to grasp the events whilst in your imagination – as a wanderer between eras – you are walking through the cruel reality that began in this place 68 years ago. On the other hand you feel uneasy, as a misplaced intruder walking in the present day between the houses and surveying their quotidian life. As a proclaimed witness (discreet iPod, but large earphones) you embody a counterpart to the acts of repressing history, forgetting, not really wanting to know, wanting to put an end to this commemoration business and to the wish to give a free rein to normality and the excessive desire of the present that the repressed should become so repressed that it will not bubble up to the surface again.

The voice of the woman speaking the commentary on the audio route is confusingly good, a young, full female voice that leads visitors through the camp. Confusing because at the outset she narrates in the first person, talking about emotions as a child in the neighbouring village, about the air, the sense of familiarity, how she walks over the bridge with her mother holding on to the wooden handrail. For a brief moment one hesitates, for these biographical details would also apply to the artist. The steps to be taken are also indicated with great precision by the sound design, in the background you hear a scarcely perceptible clicking, so that you keep pace with the rhythm of the narrative whilst looking and walking, and the houses that you see turn into the barracks one after another. The former entrance to the Gusen concentration camp, the »Jourhaus«, looks like it did back then, a little dolled-up with arches and balconies, but easy to identify. You stand outside it, gawping in and try to understand how the situation today relates back to the camp. The audio route is divided into 18 stations in terms of topographical reference points: forecourt: memorial, »Jourhaus« (main entry building) – Danner & Co, on the left »Jourhaus«/on the right barracks + »Führerheim« (SS accommodation) – road privately owned by Danner, brothel, outside the prisoner brothel, Lagerstraße (camp road) – Untere to Obere Gartenstraße, block 10 (on the left) – Untere Gartenstraße No. 6, block 11 (on the right) – Obere Gartenstraße Nr. 6, »Appellplatz« (square where the roll-call was held), crematorium – Obere Gartenstraße, »Revier« (sick bay)/block 27, dentist – Obere Gartenstraße/ corner of Parkstraße, industrial facilities yard/intermediate space, Gusen II, crossing Große Straße, route of »Schleppbahn« railway, bench/view over the flood meadows, Bergkristall_ PROLOG, »Schleppbahn« railway bridge, farmhouse, gate.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben views the concentration camp as a »nomos of modernity«, in which law and deeds, rules and exceptions, life and death become indistinguishable: »The camp is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized: this is what counts in the last analysis, for the victims as for those who come after.«⁴ Without disputing the »unsayable nature« of the camp, Agamben, following in Primo Levi’s footsteps, poses the question of the witnesses’ authority: how can those who were saved speak for those who perished? How can they report on an experience that they have not undergone themselves to the bitter end? »I is neither a concept nor a substance and in speaking the act of saying does not correspond to what is said, but to the mere fact that it is said, in other words, the – by definition ephemeral – speech event as such«, as Agamben puts it.⁵ Couldn’t one generally apply this sentence to the fact of remembering?

The voices of Gusen’s survivors, with their wounds etched deep into their bodies and souls, are of enormous importance on the audio route; their memories generate the camp in the mind of each individual and become fixed in place, allow something like authenticity to come into being through their presence. The interviews with people from the housing estate and the village testify to the dilemma colouring the relationship to homeland, to commemoration, as well as revealing the dislocation of normality: where insouciance once prevailed, prohibitions were later pronounced. Older interviewees say that they kept silent about that period. Some survivors also did not tell their relatives what they had »been through«. »That was because I couldn’t understand it myself.«

Now this whole business of remembering is not so straightforward. Looking at the big picture, it might be possible for »Holocaust products to be developed for Holocaust consumers« (Kertész), but what is the situation specifically with reference to the »Holocaust canon«, »Holocaust taboo system« and the »ceremonial linguistic universe« that goes with them? »Who does Auschwitz belong to? «, asks Imre Kertész, »who holds the intellectual property rights to the Holocaust?«⁶ If I analyse christoph mayer chm.’s audio route in this respect, then some might find that some taboos had been violated in the narrative strands. Allowing perpetrators to comment is in the eyes of the witnesses and their offspring probably an incomprehensible rapprochement, utterly unreasonable in ethical terms. It was not easy either for the artist to gain access to perpetrators. As a result of lengthy processes to establish contact and special methodological approaches adopted from perpetrator hunts, two individuals, a former member of the SS and a former member of the Luftwaffe, were prepared to talk to him. Overall christoph mayer chm. conducted interviews with 25 people, nine of whom were survivors from the Gusen I and II camps, as well as with 14 inhabitants of Gusen or St. Georgen an der Gusen. The way that sexuality is spoken about is also striking: the desire of local girls, who had developed a crush on dashing SS men, does not seem to be a topos revealed all too frankly in commemorative literature. Making reference to this too – and, as with all the other details, empathetically and circumspectly, being neither preachy nor know-all nor emotionally incriminating – is one of mayer’s merits. What makes this work so crucially important is the way in which it collects this knowledge in the form of an artwork and makes the information gleaned from the pieces of the puzzle accessible to a broad audience.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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