Stories to Prevent Easy Forgetting

In his film Reminiscenes of a Lost Country, director and cameraman Manfred Neuwirth went in search of traces and images of a previously unknown piece of Austrian history: A ‘blank space’ for a long time (on the map as well as in the knowledge of its not exactly uplifting past), the Lower Austrian military training area of Allentsteig has only come to the attention of a wider public in the course of last year's efforts to remember.

Only a short time after Hitler's takeover, the area around Döllersheim became an extensive military site. More than 40 villages were destroyed and 7,000 people resettled. After 1945, the area came under Soviet administration and was taken over by the Austrian army in 1957 in almost the same size. Since then, the resettlement of the local population has been as unsuccessful as the provision of adequate compensation for the farmers who were resettled at a later stage.

The memories of those affected are at the forefront of the film – a telling of stories that ultimately results in a correction of official historiography. Without additional commentary and through restrained editing, director Neuwirth gives the floor to the former evacuees, some of whom are very old. In this way, the voiceless in public are at least granted a kind of belated rehabilitation.

Memories of a Lost Country is not a maudlin collection of memories, however; no late tears of sorrow or anger are shed: for most of them, the resettlement is a thing of the past. It is the joy of reminiscing that is tangible; it is the numerous, colourful descriptions of the past that drive the film forward. ‘Back then, you could demolish an entire farmhouse for a bottle of schnapps for the occupying power,’ says one man, alluding to the flourishing black market in building materials after the war.

The summary, ‘We had the Germans, we had the Russians, but the Austrians were the biggest bastards,’ once again outlines the entire development of this landscape – because of the manoeuvres of the Austrian army (‘shooting was enjoyed there’), it finally came ‘into the grip of cultivation’, as a troop trainer puts it in the film.

The film also adopts the fragmentary nature of the stories and skilfully combines them into a chronology of events. Each conversation thus takes on an exemplary character. One may be offended by the fact that Reminiscences of a Lost Country has primarily become a ‘spoken’ film and largely dispenses with the use of filmic means.

In fact, the cinematic narrative conveys its most poignant message in the scene in which a contemporary photograph is literally made to dance by means of a sophisticated montage sequence, thus revealing the context of the adaptation of the indigenous population and their appropriation by the Nazis.

The film should be understood first and foremost as an almost ethnographic document that does not see itself as a ‘film against the army’ or as a film that threatens with an ecological index finger. With the advantage of distance from the officious commemoration hype of last year, Neuwirth's film has become one of the few truly remembering memories. And that is no small thing.

Constantin Wulff, Der Standard

Reminiscenses of a Lost Country

Manfred Neuwirth has found a very personal approach to the topic of the Anschluss. For his Memories of a Lost Country, he researched a historical event that had remained hidden for a long time.

In 1938, the area around Allentsteig and Döllersheim in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria became the scene of a tragedy. Almost seven thousand people had to leave their villages, the Nazis set up a military training area here. ‘Many died of homesickness,’ says one of those affected fifty years later in an interview with Neuwirth's team, which uses ‘oral history’, with conversations, to give colour to an empty, ruin-strewn spot on the map.

No theatrical finger is pointed at the victims. There is no polemic, in a multitude of interviews with dramaturgically meaningful insertions of images from the past, facts speak and clarify the memories of those who are still waiting for their property, their farms and houses, to be returned. Because today the Austrian army is training in this area.

Peter Illetschko, Die Furche