[aha] [Fwd] World Premiere of the documentary film HOME SWEET HOME

[lo|bo]

The Jewish Theater of Austria presents:



HOME SWEET HOME

documentary film, 52 min.

Concept, Interviews, Editing: Alexandra Reill

Camera: Thomas Königshofer, Alexandra Reill

Production: kanonmedia, Wien 2008



World Premiere:

Tuesday Nov. 11th, 2008, 20 pm

Admiral Kino, 1070 Vienna, Burggasse 119

Reservations: reservierung at admiralkino.at




Photo Sources: see below


Greetings and Introduction: Thomas Blimlinger, Head of the District of 
Vienna Neubau, Warren Rosenzweig, Jewish Theater of Austria

HOME SWEET HOME is the [auto]biographic tracking of fascist history 
inherited by Viennese mainstream society following the Second World War. 
As a child of the first post-war generation who was raised in Vienna in 
the 60's and 70's, filmmaker Alexandra Reill compares the evidence 
discovered in her own family history with the memories of other children 
of the first four post-war generations of the "society of majority".

What myths of denial still exist, even today, in the identity of 
mainstream Austrian society? To what extent do they contribute to the 
collective conditioning of character, self-knowledge, daily experience, 
action, and memory? How are they represented by oral tradition in the 
family? How do four generations of the children of a war society, once 
overrepresented by the perpetrators of Nazi crime and opportunism, bear 
up to the responsibility of this dark legacy? What conditions are 
necessary to assume responsibility for history and its consequences today?

Following the screening, a public discussion with: Filmmaker Alexandra 
Reill, Eva Brenner, Projekt Theater Studio Wien, Warren Rosenzweig
Moderation: Ulli Fuchs, Project Coordinator of Remembering for the 
Future (Erinnern für die Zukunft)
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A Family Story
Alexandra Reill is the daughter of a German woman who grew up in a 
stronghold of the Nazis - Nuremberg - and who married the son of a 
Viennese lawyer during the Second World War. The film maker's mother met 
the blond and attractive young man when she was 20 and working as a 
nurse in a battlefield hospital at Tegernsee in Southern Germany. Soon 
after having moved into the parents-in-law' flat in Richtergasse in the 
Seventh District of Vienna she had to see her young husband flee from 
Vienna, taking with him her typewriter - this symbol for somehow being 
able to secure existence during the ar as even then she could earn 
little money with typing - and his mistress. In a letter the husband 
left behind he explained to her that the wedding had been harum-scarum. 
Out of love - as Reill's mother always used to say even in her late days 
- she finally agreed to divorce.

When Reill's mother was in her thirties she met the father of the film 
maker and for many years became his mistress. When she fell pregnant the 
father did not accept the "illegitimate" baby. So, as a single parent 
she had to be a sole wage earner and could not take care of the baby. 
She brought the little girl to a working class family in Kagran where 
the girl spent her first six years - in a Socialist family. Only when 
school started the child was taken back to the "city" and from then on 
together with her mother lived in a large and at that time fairly 
bourgeois flat on Mariahilfer Straße which in the meantime the mother 
had succeeded to rent. Also, the woman made sure that the girl was 
enrolled in a Catholic convent school to receive good education.

Every day when the after-school care club of the convent school closed 
at 5 pm, the little girl was the last one waiting in the checkroom to be 
picked up. Every day the mother had to work overtime and could not pick 
up her child on time. But every day the foster grandfather from Kagran - 
a grandpa out of a fairytale book and dearly beloved by the child - took 
the tram No. 25 to spend one hour for travelling from Kagran to Neubau 
to pick up the girl on time. Every day equipped with sweets or a 
sandwich for the child he took care of her until the mother - tired from 
work - came home in the evening. Then he took the No. 25 again to travel 
back home which took him another hour. It was like a world-tour - not 
only because of all the long hours he invested every day but also 
because it was a tour between two completely different worlds.

The 70ies and thus the youth of Alexandra Reill include the memories of 
a clique of girls not stopping to ask the mother reproachful questions 
about the lack of resistance against the Nazis. Again and again they 
asked. The standard reply was "We did not know, nobody knew". This 
answer never ever was believed by the girls and because the same answer 
was repeated again and again and as if set in stone the teenagers became 
furious, stayed furios for quite some time until finally they decided 
that they were not prepared to to hear anything about the whole story 
any more - claiming that they were not part of the war generation, that 
they were born later and therefore do not have to assume responsibility 
for the atrocities which had taken place during World War II.

The beloved grandfather died in the early 90ies, contact with the foster 
family got looser but every year around Christmas the grandchildren and 
Reill as the foster grandchild meet for coffee and cake and take a look 
at old photos.

Christmas 2007 - about 20 years after the death of the grandfather: in 
her hand Alexandra Reill holds photos shot during the Second World War. 
She is wondering how neatly dressed her grandmother, a tailor born in 
the working class neighbourhood Ottakring, and her daughter were. The 
daughter's coat even had a fur collar. Poverty was huge ..., the family 
never had been a rich family, on the contrary .... How hard must it have 
been for the tailor to be able to make such neat clothes for the 
daughter ....

Her - if they were relatives it would be her - older sister says that 
the family was not suffering poverty during the War and that the 
grandfather always sent parcels back home when serving on the Russion 
front as a soldier. How could he manage? Well, he had been a commercial 
traveller by profession before the war, you have to be smart in such a 
job, he probably knew how to be smart during war times also, so ....

A faded document ... Reill's sister - in the meantime already in her 
50ies and needing glasses for reading which she can't find ... Reill 
helps her to decipher the old stamp and the Kurrent fonts: official 
notice of denazification.

The grandfather was exculpated of having been a SA-Scharführer but he 
was not exculpated of having been a SA-Rottenführer.

Documented. Proven. SA-Rottenführer.

Her beloved grandpa, the fairytaile grandpa, the socialist. This is the 
reason why he could send parcels, this is the reason why such neat 
clothes were available. This is what the answer meant he always gave 
when she was asking questions about the war when she was a child: "Don't 
ask, it was very cruel, just don't ask". Never he said anything else.

Whom should she exculpate more now? The mother who as a "good" German 
"who had never known about anything" or the fairytale grandpa where no 
such denial ever occured but who now - in the biography of the film 
maker and long after his death - only then - turned out to have been an 
SA-man?

Now she is in the role of the committer - how can she handle her child's 
love embracing the best grandpa in the world now that she knows that he 
was a SA-man? How does this love of a child change? What are the changes 
now? What needs to be changed through this terrible fact?

Coming from a Vienna mainstream society of active committers of crime 
and Nazi opportunists and being a child of the first post-war 
generation, Alexandra Reill tries to reflect her identity. This tracking 
of traces is compared with the memories of other members of post-war 
mainstream society in Vienna. Which oral tradition has been handed down 
by parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? The interviews prove a 
collectively ongoing tradition to maintain myths of denial - myths which 
are just of the same kind the film maker knows from her own family. The 
comparison of memories reveals a common spoken way of phrasing, common 
myths and records in peoples' minds of which they think that they are 
personal family memories, that they are individual - without realizing 
that the vast majority of these memories often literally is the same 
like in all the other families with such oral tradition. These memories 
are not individual memories, they form the framework for a society's 
identity and they come from the myths of denial created by a vast 
majority of committers and opportunists in the Vienna mainstream society 
of the 30ies and 40ies. And still today, most of them are fully present 
in daily life.



Press Contact

Alexandra Reill, kanonmedia, call: 06991 820 70 03

Download press material: http://www.kanonmedia.com/portfolio/films/wmw.html



Support

The film and its world premiere is supported by the Municipality of 1070 
Vienna/Department of Culture of the City of Vienna, the Jewish Theater 
of Austria, Admiral Kino and the project Erinnern für die Zukunft of the 
Municipality of 1060 Vienna. kanonmedia also would like to express its 
thxs to all interview partners having contributed with their memories 
and oral family traditions to this film.

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kanonmedia
ngo for new media

alexandra reill

call: ++43[0]6991 820 70 03
mailto: alexandra.reill at kanonmedia.com
visit: http://www.kanonmedia.com
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Photo Sources in the info mail

Left: mother of the filmmaker when serving in a camp hospital during 
World War II, photographer

Middle: Alexandra Reill, still frame out of HOME SWEET HOME, Camera: 
Thomas Königshofer

Right: Alexandra Reill as child in front of a Christmas tree, 
photographer: Louise Spitzer

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