Brigitte Mary and Michael Omasta in conversation with Manfred Neuwirth

Your film was the only one of last year's Austrian productions that pleasantly surprised. It deals with one of the largest military exclusion zones in Europe, the military training area Allentsteig.

From my local history studies I knew about this beautiful blank space at the top of the map, but until two years ago I didn't really know anything about the subject. At school we never heard that it also has a history, that between 1938 and 1942 about 40 villages were resettled.
Thanks to the historian Fritz Polleross, I was spared a lot of research. He had an exhibition at the ‘Waldviertel Academy’, already knew many people and enjoyed their trust. We then did a large part of the interviews with him (as an interviewer), which helped a lot. But it should also be said that we did twenty interviews, twice as many as are in the film now. Each one lasted between three and four hours.

It's very nice that the interviews in the film are not edited, but mounted using black frames.

I like to quote Wildenhahn as a method, who wrote a longer essay about film in comparison to jazz: It was important to me to find exactly this rhythm, with the running titles as points of reassurance, as a juxtaposition of past and present, but still maintaining my own technical means and improvising. During the first few interviews, we didn't always film, because older people have a very different way of telling stories, especially those from the Waldviertel region (dialect) with their expansive manner. But I hadn't expected these people and their stories to dominate the film so much.

But they also interviewed politicians and a historian.

Withalm and Spannocchi are consciously used only as contemporary witnesses and not in their specific positions. Withalm, who was a minister and leading member of the Austrian People's Party at the time, was essential to show what the Republic did with the military training area after the end of the Soviet occupation. We were surprised by the openness of his criticism of the military. It was an attempt to introduce the political level via a contemporary witness and not as a commentary. The short running texts that structure the film were only intended to provide contextual assistance.
For me, a kind of moral-historical argument is at the forefront: that the National Socialists had started something that was later taken over by the 2nd Republic. On the one hand they wanted the advantages for the army, but on the other hand they never considered that most of the displaced people would have still been entitled to compensation. More than 700 people submitted applications later on, but once it was clear that the army would be re-established, the issue was quickly dropped.
Some time ago there was a scandalous ‘Austrian image’ on the subject, but where the world from 1955 was as intact as never before; with the army as an economic engine and with tanks in front of the sunset... therefore, and because the region is still characterised by the military training area, the little morality in the film.

When did you have the opportunity to shoot?

At first it wasn't certain whether we would be allowed in at all. It was only possible on the occasion of a resettler commemoration day, when people were carted in military buses to their old settlements. We took the opportunity to at least show what kind of ruins are there.
It is a perverse constellation: if you ask why the army needs such a large area, then – since there are misfires – the argument is that it is for the ‘security of the population’. But they shoot much further than the area is large. So they drive 20 kilometres out and shoot into the military training area from there!
Half of the area is a hunting ground, the other half is leased out at a bargain price. The film only shows the latter as a beautiful landscape. Of course, there are also bombed-out areas, but they were simply declared off-limits.

One sequence in the film about Julius Scheidl remains somewhat unclear.

It is a good case for reflection when you see how the daughter reacts: ‘Yes, we always told him not to get so worked up, you can't do anything against such a system.’ The point was not to glorify the resettlers who were telling the story as resistance fighters, because the first ones were very well compensated and actually hardly resisted the loss of their homeland.
Even at the Aussiedler meeting (1988), no monument was erected for Scheidl, who died in a concentration camp, but only for those who fell at the front. So how do we deal with someone who paid such a high price in a historical way and in our memories?

Falter 13/89