Saturday, April 11, 2009

The House of Sigmund Freud

B"H

The Tel Aviv Film Festival is taking place from April 11 - April 30, 2009. One of the main subjects are Austrian movies and one really good documentary seems to be the one about the "House of Sigmund Freud" (Vienna, Berggasse 19). Kurt Mayer succeeded in interviewing many of the former neighbours of Freud; as well as talking to the new inhabitants of the building.

In Sigmund Freud's days, about 80 Jews used to live in the building of whom the majority was deported and killed in concentration camps. The Israeli daily MAARIV interviewed Kurt Mayer and he claimed that the vast majority of Austrians in those days knew exactly that the Jews were being killed.

Freud’s Lost Neighbors (Austria 2006)
Dir: Kurt Mayer

The film traces the history of Sigmund Freud’s neighbors from 1938 to today. While Freud and his closest relatives managed to leave Vienna in time, more than 80 of his immediate Jewish neighbors were deported to extermination camps between 1939 and 1942. Before they were deported, they stopped off at several locations in Vienna. This very special film about Vienna starts off at Berggasse 19 and heads for these places, thereby tracing the routes which were used in the course of “Aryanization” right under the eyes of the Viennese people. Therefore the house in Berggasse 19 – a fixed point in any visitor’s program of Jewish Vienna – is not only the “birthplace of psychoanalysis”. It also is a cinematic point of reference for an additional identity-creating culture of remembrance which tries to overcome the post-war consensus of “repression”, a concept first described by Freud himself. The Director will be present at the screening.
(90 min., Ger., Eng.& Heb. Sub)

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