Peter Freiß

"Guilt and Memory" is a contemporary history about four former high-ranking Austrian Nazis. On the subject of "dealing with memory", Marcel Ophüls writes, "Memory cannot be artificially activated - neither by events nor by censorship ... It has to be a personal act of remembering."

The film focuses on the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. The picture it paints is one which could apply to other parts of Vienna and other European cities, an insight into daily reality revealing how little people know about each other and how thoughtlessly they expect strangers to behave according to their values. We hear the views of Austrians and immigrants, Yugoslavians and Turks who have lived here for twenty years. Their conversations reveal hatred of foreigners and children and prejudices not limited to a social class at all.

The Loiblpass is situated in the mountains between Austria and Yugoslavia: 12km from the village of Neumarktl and 10km from Ferlach in Carinthia. Between 1943 and 1945, political prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp drove a tunnel into the mountains at an altitude of 1200m. To this day, two people have been linked by this tunnel: Janko Tisler was an engineer in charge of the building site in 1944; today he lives in Krize, south of the tunnel. Dr. Sigbert Ramsauer, the SS doctor of the camp at the site then, at the age of 80 still practises in Klagenfurt. Janko Tisler fights against forgetting, Dr. Ramsauer wishes he were forgotten. The history of the tunnel has become theirs as well.

Documentary about a small town in Austria.

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.