Ausstellung “Kinder des Krieges – Aufwachsen zwischen 1938 und 1955”

About the exhibition

They witnessed bombing raids, flight, persecution, and the loss of family members. Under the Nazi regime, they grew up with the utopia of the “Volksgemeinschaft”—either as part of it or excluded from it. Their fathers were often absent: as soldiers at the front and in captivity. They were indoctrinated at school, in the Hitler Youth, and in the League of German Girls, and were a welcome motif for the propaganda of the “Third Reich.” As Jews, they experienced the inhuman hardships of concentration camps and forced labor. The children of the war generation had to grow up early and take on responsibility. Their opportunities were limited – and yet they made use of them in their own way.

The exhibition focuses on contemporary witnesses and their memorabilia. This makes the different childhoods of that era immediately comprehensible. Children from victim families as well as children from perpetrator families. Children from rural areas and from the city, from different social milieus and from different backgrounds. The exhibition covers the last months of the Schuschnigg dictatorship, the “Anschluss” to Nazi Germany in 1938, the beginning of the war in September 1939, the end of the war in 1945, and the occupation period that lasted until 1955. Childhood during this period was marked by uncertainty and deprivation, but after 1945 also by the first signs of a new beginning.

The special exhibition is also aimed specifically at today’s children and young people. It gives them a personal and understandable insight into the world of the past.

Scientific directors: Christian Rapp (House of History Lower Austria) and Barbara Stelzl-Marx (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War)
Curators: Martina Zerovnik and Barbara Stelzl-Marx
Project duration: 2024 – 2026
Project collaboration: Lukas Schretter, Philipp Lesiak

The project is being realized in collaboration between the House of History at the Museum of Lower Austria and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War.