Mauthausen Memorial: Each name matters

The liberation of the former Mauthausen concentration camp by the US army on 5 May 1945 is a key date and the final point of the many years of Nazi terror that cost the lives of 90,000 people in the Mauthausen concentration camp system.

In collaboration with Ars Electronica Linz, and with the support of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, all names known of the dead from the Mauthausen concentration camp system to date will be projected onto the outer wall of the former Mauthausen concentration camp and read out in an elaborate video projection shown from 4-6 May 2021, from 8 pm to midnight each day. “We want to give the victims, who were nameless at the time, their identity and dignity back – that is an incredibly vital component of our remembrance work at the memorial site. At the same time, we want to enable people all over the world to silently commemorate them by using a social media campaign entitled #eachnamematters, and inviting people to share their thoughts and memories with us," says Barbara Glück, Director of the Mauthausen Memorial.

16.6 million pixels cover the 120-metre-long outer wall and transform it into a digital projection surface. The names of the dead are formed from a continuously bubbling source of letters and flow in groups, unceasingly, like endless waves, down the outer wall. It takes a full 12 hours for all the names of the victims of the Mauthausen concentration camp recorded in the "Room of Names" to appear.

“The objective when designing it was not only to make the names visible in terms of their statistical size, but to give each name an individuality, its own space within which it could move, in order to remember the people behind each individual name and not just the inconceivable number of victims. It was very important to us to make every single name visible", explains Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director of Ars Electronica Linz.

Room fo Names
The starting point for the collaboration with Ars Electronica Linz was the “Room of Names” at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial, where all known names of the victims are displayed in a striking yet at the same time dignified way. In addition to this, there is the "Virtual Room of Names". Relatives and interested persons can search for biographies in the digital book of remembrance of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial.