continuity - Krems macht Geschichte

Introduction

KremsMachtGeschichte invites you to learn about and engage with the history of National Socialism in Krems. As you move through the city you connect various historical sites with each other. A simple stroll creates a personal narrative that brings the places, themes and histories into the present and enables you to keep the past alive in your critical memory.

What does it mean to “make history”? In 1938 Krems became the capital of the Gau, or Nazi administrative district, of “Lower Danube”. This was a time when Krems was making history, but history of a kind many would like to forget today. Today, when we remember, when we name perpetrators and tell the stories of victims, when we make resistance visible and point out continuities, we’re participating in the writing of history in our society. History isn’t just written in schoolbooks and by historians and at universities; it’s continually being produced by our everyday actions. History happens in the here and now.

24 historical sites, marked by green pennants, form the stations of the KremsMachtGeschichte tours. Every site stands for a different event that has something to tell us about destruction, persecution and crime, as well as about responsibility, solidarity and resistance. Some roads lead to memorials that glorify the past and that today need some historical correction. Prominent positions in the cityscape are taken up by the court and the prison, places where Nazi violence was once inflicted but that today contribute to the functioning of democracy. Many sites of past events are unrecognisable as such today; only through your imagination can they come back to life.

The information about each place can be called up with any smartphone by using the QR codes on the pennants. Texts and images can also be found in the catalogue which is displayed at various places in the city. By taking a walk through the city, you’re already making some history. En route from site to site, the historical picture gradually becomes more intricate. Common themes emerge, each of which groups the sites in a new way and connects them with our contemporary world. The themes include “on Jewish life”, “on resistance”, “on persecution and punishment” and “on remembering”. The short texts under these titles give some initial ideas that you can question and add your own stories to on the empty pages of the catalogue.

After the National Socialist regime met its end, fascistic thinking still remained alive in Austria. In the years following 1945, many people who had held office under the Nazis were able, following a brief interruption, to resume their work. One particularly striking example of this kind of continuity in Krems is Max Thorwesten, who was mayor of Krems for five years after the socalled “Anschluss”, or annexation of Austria to Germany, in 1938. In 1969 he was re-elected and took office for another seven years.

To speak of continuity also means to discuss the prehistory of Nazism – and Krems as a central site for the preparatory work for Nazi rule in Lower Austria. For example, after the local elections of 1932, Krems was the first Austrian city to have an NSDAP mayor. In March of the following year, Engelbert Dollfuß began ruling as Chancellor without Parliament. His Austrofascist dictatorship refused to annex itself to Nazi Germany and, after an attack by paramilitaries from the Nazi SA on Austrian auxiliary policemen in Alauntal, near Krems, prohibited the Nazi Party throughout Austria. For Austrian Nazis, this ban became a pretext for violence, acts of terror and later attempted coups. During this period Josef Leopold, who would later become Nazi Gauleiter of Lower Austria, coordinated the party throughout Austria from Krems. In March 1938, when the Nazis seized power, Krems was designated “Gau capital” of Lower Danube.

Some continuities can take complicated routes. One of this is the Julius Raab monument at the edge of the city park. In place since 2016, this statue honours the “State Treaty Chancellor”, who is presented in military uniform. The monument is close to the Sappers and Pioneers Memorial, in front of which Julius Raab, then in his capacity as leader of the Heimwehr militia, once stood and threatened the destruction of the Social Democratic movement. This newly erected statue, through the simple fact of its proximity to this site, makes visible continuities in the careers of politicians beginning under Austrofascism and active again in the postwar Second Republic.

Through monuments like this, through street names and even through places that have been made invisible or destroyed, history lives on into the present. The comprehensive destruction of the station district, for example, remains tangible today because almost all the buildings there date from the postwar period. At other sites, the persistence of fascist thought can be detected in public space, and engaging with these makes it possible to document, analyse and actively counteract this continuity through the work of critical history.