The two-storey listed building, with its 17th-century facade and half-moon stone transoms, is located in the small town of Braunau-am-Inn in northern Austria on the German border. It will be enlarged and raised but will retain most of its structure. The work – estimated at 20 million euros – should last approximately three years.
It is a minimal transformation: the State – which finances – did not want to change everything or destroy everything (in both cases it did not want to be accused of erasing the past, of “iignoring Austria’s historical responsibility in Nazism” to use the words of the Ministry of the Interior. Its intention is rather to trivialize, to “neutralize” places.
The Hitler family only lived there for a few months in 1889, but the house still attracts tourists fascinated by Nazism. Vienna wanted at all costs to prevent it from becoming a site of far-right pilgrimage.
Obstruction for 40 years
If it took so long, it is because until 2019, the State was only the tenant of the premises. The house belonged to an individual, a woman heir to a family close to the Nazis who for 40 years cashed checks (nearly 5,000 euros per month) and obstructed justice. All of the proposed projects fell through. And the premises have been unoccupied since 2011.
Once it became the owner, there again the State imagined everything. Raze the house, turn it into a reception center for asylum seekers. The police station and training center for police officers finally appeared as the least controversial solution – especially since this training will be centered on human rights.
The project had already been announced three years ago, in 2020. In the meantime there is the Covid, the bill has quadrupled – and it must be said that the Austrians polled on the subject are not frankly in favor of it.
Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, hates being caricatured as the country of refuge for those nostalgic for the Third Reich, but the Austrians have long had difficulty in facing their past. It took until 1989 for the town of Braunau – which incidentally continues to profit from Nazi-related tourism – to decide to erect a monument against war and fascism in front of the building. She is not out of this memory puzzle.