A Longing for Peace
80 Years since the End of the War in Linz – 1945/2025
Playground at Volksgarten, 1951 
Franz Glaubacker, Lakeshore and barracks, 1948
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.
| Date | Title | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 18.09 | Opening: A Longing for Peace 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. | 7:00 pm–10:00 pm |
| Fri 03.10 | We open the box: Thinking the end from the beginning II. Franz Stelzhamer’s nationalism, his anti-Semitic fantasies of extermination and his memorial in the Volksgarten in Linz With Ludwig Laher, Germanist, author and board member of the IG österreichischer Autorinnen & Autoren, and Andrea Hubin, art historian and art mediator Research excursion to the Volksgarten in Linz (weather permitting), meeting point and input at Nordico | 3:00 pm–5:00 pm |
| Thu 06.11 | We open the box: Thinking the end from the beginning III: Richard Wagner’s redemptive anti-Semitism and its consequences With Sven Friedrich, Director of the Richard Wagner Museum Bayreuth | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm |
| Thu 04.12 | We open the box: The end is not the end I. Fraternities, their tower and their ideology in Linz With Andreas Peham, Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance, and the artists Anna Pech and Moritz Matschke, University of Art and Design Linz | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm |
| Thu 08.01 | We open the box: History of remembrance I. How does Linz talk about itself and National Socialism? With Niko Wahl (freelance curator), Johannes Kaska (Director of the Archive of the City of Linz), Andrea Bina (art and cultural historian, Director of the Nordico City Museum) and Sebastian Piringer (historian and project manager of “A Longing for Peace”) | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm |
| Thu 26.02 | We open the box: History and remembrance II: Of final strokes and victim myths With Monika Sommer, historian and founding director of the House of Austrian History | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm |
| Fri 20.03 | We open the box: History and memory III: A grotto railroad, a bridge, two main squares With Birgit Kirchmayr, contemporary historian, Johannes Kepler University Linz; research excursion from Linz’s main square via the Nibelungen Bridge to the Grottenbahn; meeting point: Trinity Column, main square | 3:00 pm–5:00 pm |
| Thu 16.04 | We open the box: The end is not the end II. Peace City Linz and what next? With Gerda Forstner, Head of the Linz Culture Department | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm |