Jöchl Alexander, Hermann Lohninger, Chris Müller- 2003

Reading history on dark granite

From the nearby quarry in Mauthausen, which was connected to the concentration camp, the building material for the “Führer’s Youth City – Hitropolis” was quarried.

Misused for the representative architecture of the Nazi regime, the building blocks of social madness and their associated history lie buried under everyday oblivion and ignorance. What remains of the monumental redesign plans include the so-called bridgehead buildings and their dark granite arcades. In the floor of the arcades, laid by concentration camp prisoners, word combinations were arranged on eight granite fields around equilateral triangles (angles), the sign of the criminalized and detained, by means of stone conservation.

The aim of this temporary intervention was to irritate passers-by walking through the passage with the signs on the floor, to encourage them to read, and to refer to the context via the words and signs, thereby opening up access to a part of history and remembering the circumstances of the creation of this floor.