Film Screenings

Vienna

Liberation! New beginnings? Life After the Concentration Camp
Christoph Huber, Austrian Film Museum

The liberation of the concentration camps by the Allies in 1944/1945 marks a key moment in the history of the 20^th century. In a joint film series running from February to June 2025, the Mauthausen Memorial and the Austrian Film Museum turn the spotlight on this historical event and its aftermath 80 years after the fact. What did a new beginning mean after the horrors of mass extermination? Five outstanding films explore the social and individual dimensions of this question.

The opening film, Henri Calef's L'heure de la vérité (1965), is a neglected masterpiece of Holocaust cinema: Karlheinz Böhm plays a former camp commandant who has assumed the identity of one of his Jewish victims and started a new life in Israel. Alfréd Radok's Daleká cesta (1949) is a visionary and pioneering work on the subject: while her family is being transported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish doctor from Prague escapes deportation – for the time being – because she has married a Christian. In the gripping noir thriller The Glass Wall (1953), Vittorio Gassman plays a concentration camp survivor who goes underground as a refugee in New York and flees from the police to the top of the newly built UN headquarters. The drama Lebende Ware (1966) reconstructs the events surrounding the introduction of the eight-member Judenrat (‘Jewish council’) in Budapest in 1944, which was supposed to help enforce the German measures for the ‘final solution’. The final film is Francesco Rosi's La tregua (1996), based on the memoirs of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (played by John Turturro), one of the most important authors on the Holocaust.

All films will be shown in their original version with subtitles in 35mm on selected Sundays at 3:00 pm at the Austrian Film Museum (Augustinerstraße 1, 1010 Vienna). Admission is free and the programme includes an introductory talk:

• 16.02.2025: L’heure de la verité (The Hour of Truth, dir.: Henri Calef, France/Israel, 1965). Opening of the film series and introduction by Christoph Huber (Austrian Film Museum)
• 16.03.2025: Daleká cesta (Distant Journey, dir.: Alfréd Radok, Czechoslovakia, 1949). Introduction: Elisabeth Streit (Austrian Film Museum)
• 13.04.2025: The Glass Wall (dir.: Maxwell Shane, USA, 1953). Introduction: Gregor Holzinger (Mauthausen Memorial)
• 18.05.2025: Lebende Ware (Living Wares, dir.: Wolfgang Luderer, GDR, 1966). Introduction: Elisabeth Streit (Austrian Film Museum)
• 15.06.2025: La tregua (The Truce, dir.: Francesco Rosi, Italy/France/Germany/Switzerland, 1996). Introduction: Tom Waibel (Austrian Film Museum)

Ticket reservations can be made online at the Austrian Film Museum (www.filmmuseum.at) or by phone (01/5337054) once the respective monthly program has been published.

Mauthausen

Mauthausen Film Retrospective: 80 Years Since Liberation! Freed from the camp – the trauma remains…
Elisabeth Streit and Tom Waibel (Austrian Film Museum), curators of the Film Retrospective

When the liberation of the camps by Allied soldiers began, the rescuers were confronted with unimaginable scenes of horror. The survivors could not forget the suffering they had been subjected to and post-war society wanted to disavow the past as quickly as possible. The open-air film retrospective 80 Years Since Liberation! Freed from the camp – the trauma remains... at the Mauthausen Memorial from 20 to 23 August 2025 explores the traumatic memories of survivors and their efforts to bear witness to the horrors they experienced.

Four films from six decades deal in different and haunting ways with the overwhelming trauma of the experience and with the feelings of guilt that arose from being among the survivors when millions died. The protagonists in these films remain deeply scarred by their experiences, be it in the form of repeated flashbacks to the horror of the camps or be it in finding the courage to journey to the places of their past. For they all know what it means to be tainted with shame despite the atrocities committed against them.

‘The future fills us with fear, the past with shame,’ Elie Wiesel once said, ‘and both events and feelings are closely linked, like cause and effect.’ He later added: ‘I remember, and when I am supposed to say what I remember, I tremble. So let us rather talk about what needs to be done.’ In view of the past, Elie Wiesel’s words raise urgent questions for us today: What would we have done at the time? What should we do today? The survivors of the camps have given us enduring answers and, to quote Primo Levi, their common starting point is: ‘Silence is a mistake, almost a crime.’

Wed 20 – Sat 23 August 2025, from 8:00 pm outside the Visitor Centre.