Along with Vilnius in Lithuania, Linz is this year's European Capital of Culture, a role Adolf Hitler also had in mind for the Austrian city of his boyhood. But Linz has so far failed to take its chance to address its Third Reich past and links with the Fuhrer, writes
Derek Scally
IN THE GREY morning mist a strangely familiar flag flutters against the facade of the Linz Palace Museum, perched on a hill above the River Danube. The red oblong material has at its centre a white circle with a black shape inside. Isn’t that . . . ? A closer look reveals that it isn’t a swastika flag, just a clever reworking of the banners that once bedecked Linz after the Anschluss in 1938, when Adolf Hitler made a triumphant return to the city he called home.
Although he was not born here, the dictator spent nine years of his childhood in Linz. His emotional ties to the place were so strong that the failed painter-turned-politician promised to make Linz the cultural capital of his thousand-year Reich. And so, at the start of its year as European Capital of Culture, Linz felt it would be remiss to ignore that chapter of its history.
"The Führer's Capital of Culture"is the biggest draw so far in a busy year of shows and events. By the end of the year, Austria's third-largest city hopes to have attracted visitors normally drawn to the bigger cities of Salzburg or Vienna, just 90 minutes away.
The Danube is centre-stage in the celebrations, its banks home to two extraordinary modern glass buildings: the bridge-shaped Lentos Kunstmuseum that is itself a gleaming work of art and, across the water, the slanting facades of the spectacular Ars Electronica centre, a science museum with huge hands-on appeal.
Details of all cultural activities are available online and at the information centre in the pretty main square, home to the 16th-century city hall and the cathedral where Anton Bruckner once served as organist. There are countless musical events to honour the composer, while other famous former residents celebrated this year will be philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and astronomer Johannes Kepler. But the city’s most notorious son is the star of the moment, in “The Führer’s Capital of Culture”. The quotation marks in the exhibition’s title give an indication of what to expect.
What could have been welcome attempt to address the city’s Third Reich past is instead an expensive whitewash, an extraordinary example of how to hide in full view.
THE EXHIBITION BEGINS with Hitler’s arrival in the city as a boy, his middling education record and mediocre artistic efforts. Then, after a sentence or two about pro-German feeling in the region, things move swiftly on to the absorption of Austria into the Third Reich, marked by Hitler’s homecoming in 1938 to packed streets and, as one contemporary photo caption notes, “cheering without end”.
The stories of the people cheering, and what they did when the cheering stopped, are not told. Instead, the exhibition does a good job telling the what-might-have-been story.
Like Berlin, Hitler planned to remodel Linz entirely, along his favoured lines, as one of five “Führer cities”. The Danube riverbanks would be concreted over with monumental administrative and cultural buildings, while a new boulevard would link the train station to the Nibelungen Bridge across the river. The bridge, bookended by massive statues of Wagnerian warriors, was one of the few elements of the plan realised. Today, the statues are long gone. It’s a similar story in the exhibition: what’s most striking is what’s not there.
There is nothing in it about everyday life in the Führer city, about collaborators or resistance. The personal in the exhibition is hard to find: hidden behind a wall, for example, are biographies of a handful of artists who were murdered by the Nazis or who fled the country.
In a corridor, curators have installed one-person video cabins showing snippets of interviews with well-known artists who have tackled the Nazi “burden”. But most visitors stroll past the cabins into the second part of the exhibition, an overview of Austrian art during the Nazi era, including a dark portrait of the dictator addressing the people of Linz from the town-hall balcony.
There is a look at music and literature under the dictatorship which, though interesting, fails to make clear to visitors any points the curators presumably intended to make about the distortion of art by the dictatorship.
“I didn’t know Hitler was so interested in culture,” remarks one woman, a Linz native in her early 60s, clearly impressed and apparently without irony. Waving towards plans for an opera house, she adds that “the design is more to my taste than the one they’re building now”.
Asked about Linz during the Nazi years, she says her mother told her there was huge enthusiasm for the Nazis because the building projects “wiped out unemployment overnight”.
And any negative side?
“My father was a soldier and fell when I was five,” says the woman’s husband. “Losing him to that system, those people, is the biggest negative.”
And what about those who put up the banners visible in 1938 photographs welcoming the Führer to his home town? Presumably, thanks to Hitler’s patronage, there was a thriving Third Reich tourist industry in Linz. Who profited?
And why the quotation marks in the exhibition title? Because the cultural capital plans were never realised or, as a visit to the exhibition suggests, because there is a startling emotional disconnect in Linz between then and now? It’s one mystery after another in this elegant memory hole.
The most interesting tale in the exhibition is of the “special commission” authorised by Hitler to assemble the ultimate collection of stolen art. The booty assembled would then have gone on show in a new Linz gallery which, though never built, haunted Hitler to the end.
“I never collected my paintings for personal use, but always for the gallery in my home town, Linz,” he wrote in his April 1945 will. “That this legacy is realised would be my greatest wish.”
It wasn’t to be. In 1945 the Allies went to work returning the art found in “special commission” depots. For works whose owners could not be identified, the city of Linz claimed a “moral entitlement” in 1951.
The exhibition’s curators conclude drily that one of history’s greatest art robberies has “created much work for experts, politicians and historians” and that “the journey of many works that began in 1938 continues to this day”.
JUST DOWN THE hill, the Lentos Kunstmuseum holds a perfect example of that journey. One of its best-known works, not in the gallery's current Best of Austriaexhibition, is the unfinished Gustav Klimt work, Portrait Ria Munk III. One of three posthumous portraits of Munk, who committed suicide aged 24 in 1911, it was looted by the Nazis from the family villa near Salzburg after Munk's mother and sister were deported in the 1940s.
The Lentos museum says there is no proof that its work is the one from the villa. But last year a grandson of the villa’s caretaker testified to seeing the Lentos painting there before it vanished.
After years of lobbying by the Munk heirs, a report due next month is likely to recommend that the Klimt work, worth an estimated €7.8 million, be returned to them.
But as in the case of the other five Klimt works restored to their owners in the last two years, it is likely that the return of Ria Munk to her heirs will not be seen in Austria as delayed justice but as a “loss” to the city and the country.
It has only just begun, but Linz’s year as European Capital of Culture is already burdened by the wilful disconnection of city officials from the lingering crimes of a culture-loving dictator.
