CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Jeitler, Constanze |
|---|---|
| Title | "The Bethlehem of the German Reich," Remembering, Inventing, Selling and Forgetting Adolf Hitler???s Birth Place in Upper Austria, 1933-1955 |
| Summary | This thesis is an investigation into the history of the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the Upper Austrian village Braunau am Inn. It examines the developments in the period between 1933 and 1955. During this time high-ranking Nazis, local residents, tourists and pilgrims appropriated the house for their purposes by creating various narratives about this space. As unimportant as the house might have been to Hitler himself from the point of view of sentimentality and childhood nostalgia, it had great propaganda value for promoting the image of the private Führer. Braunau itself was turned into a tourist destination and pilgrimage site during the Nazi period—and beyond. This thesis traces how people engaged and interacted with the house where Adolf Hitler was born, how they attributed narratives to it, how they commercialized and sacralized it. It furthermore transcends the temporal boundaries and historic watersheds of the Anschluss in 1938 and the end of the war in order to point out continuities in the strategies of remembering and forgetting history in Austria. This thesis takes cues from memory studies, Austrian historiography, the history of everyday life under National Socialism as well as other ambivalent sites associated with National Socialism in order to unsilence the history of this contested space. |
| Supervisor | Petö, Andrea; Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/jeitler_constanze.pdf |
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