Schuld und Gedächtnis

Documentary about a small town in Austria.

When Hitler's infamous "Anschluss" annexed Austria to Germany in 1938, the lives of 130,000 Jewish Austrians were placed at risk. Over the next three years, some 30,000 managed to emigrate to the United States, settling mainly in New York City. In Austrian filmmaker Egon Humer's brilliant and moving documentary EMIGRATION N.Y., twelve Viennese Jews -- seven women, five men -- recount their lives as children in Austria, as emigrants, as New Yorkers. Deceptively simple in style, the film gathers striking emotional power as its subjects (who include Amos Vogel, co-founder of the New York Film Festival) offer fresh and often surprising views on their experience of exile and assimilation.

Renate is finishing her trainee year as a social service worker when she is assigned her first patient: The young Alfred Hauser, who was submitted to the psychiatric ward four years ago because of a psychosis. Alfred's anxiety condition is worsening while the hospital staff is lying to him about the possibility of an early discharge. Renate is commited to help him.

When the busses left, the nurse said to the children, 'Today you have to pray a lot, because today you go up the chimney and meet the good Lord.' The children of the area knew these vehicles and said, 'Look, there is another one of these killer busses.' And they said to one another, ' You are not very clever, you, too, are going to end up in the oven in Hartheim, you, too, will be hung up in the chimney.' Hartheim Castle near Linz was one of several places of destruction of 'unworthy life' within the framework of the euthanasia program of National Socialism. Over 30,000 mentally or physically handicapped, psychiatric patients and inmates of concentration camps were gassed in Hartheim between 1940 and 1945. Today Hartheim Castle is rented and inhabited. In a place where 40 years ago thousands if lives were destroyed by industrial methods, today life asserts itself in the trite daily function of living. The documentation is about Hartheim Castle, in the past and in the present.

A flare shoots through the night. "Red brothers" against right-wing extremists; immigrant groups against right-wing "louts"; knives and tear-gas against baseball bats. "WADADENG, WADADENG, listen to my 9 mm go BANG" ... Rap and hip-hop in Vienna.