Austerlitz

Austerlitz, Sergei Loznitsa, Alemania, 2016, 94’, OV with Spanish subtitles, DCP

There are landscapes in Europe that are part of the painful memory of the past. We are talking about the horror factories where human beings were turned into ashes. Those places are today centers of commemoration and pilgrimage, open to the public and visited by thousands of tourists every year. This documentary film is an observation of the people who visit one of those places of memory, a former concentration camp. Why do they go there? What are they looking for?

The title refers to the novel of the same name, written by W.G. Sebald, dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust.

“I never thought that I would come here. Passing by I saw the sign and turned off. The passage leads alongside the road and turns to the side. The buildings are arranged in a semi-circle: houses where people live, normal people in normal houses. Cars are lined up in the parking area. It is a quiet and hot summer day. Nothing unusual.

Do these buildings belong to the territory? To the right, to the left, downwards, there is a fence and the entrance is built in perfect symmetry. People walk around behind the fence – tourists. All of them follow a strict logic. From one area filled with charcoal and framed with white stones to the next. A sign, a barrack number, next sign, next barrack number, infirmary, a barn.

People walk around alone or in groups. They look into windows and doors, stand at the information desks. People are interested in everything – each rock, every inscription.

This is the place where people were exterminated; this is the place of suffering and grief. And now, I am here. A tourist. With all the typical curiosities of a tourist. Without any notion of what it was like to be a prisoner in the concentration camp having a number, every day waiting for death, clinging to life. I stand here and look at the machinery for the extermination of the human body. Traces of life, sometime ago, long ago, here and now.

What am I doing here? What are all these people doing here, moving in groups from one object to another?

The reason that induces thousands of people to spend their summer weekends in the former concentration camp is one of the mysteries of these memorial sites. One can refer to the good will and the desire to sense compassion and mercy that Aristotle related to tragedy. But this explanation doesn’t solve the mystery. Why a love couple or a mother with her child goes on a sunny summer day to look at the ovens in a crematorium? To try to come to grips with this, I made this film”.

Sergei Loznitsa