A Longing for Peace
80 Years since the End of the War in Linz – 1945/2025
The exhibition explores the disruptions and continuities taking place in Linz amid the transition from a wartime to a post-war society, the end of the National Socialist dictatorship and the beginning of renewed democratisation. In doing so, it focuses on the question of what significance history holds for us in the present. What came to an end and what is still relevant today? In what places and in what way does remembrance take place in Linz? Who is remembered and who is not?
The exhibition addresses these and other questions from the perspective of the social and political challenges that Linz faced after 1945. The way displaced persons were dealt with and the housing shortage are just as much a focus as denazification and coming to terms with the past as exemplified by Simon Wiesenthal.
The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the ambivalent relationship, which is still palpable today, between collective repression on the one hand and the importance of history for democracy and peace on the other.