Hohenems museum examines what societies choose to forget

The Jewish Museum Hohenems has opened an exhibition exploring how forgetting shapes personal and public memory. The show, “Everything forgotten”, was reported by ORF and runs until October 3, 2027.

Organised with the Jewish Museum Vienna, the exhibition considers what people forget, what they must remember and what they may need to leave behind. Director Irene Aue-Ben-David said memory is an individual issue as well as a social and political one. Curated by Daniela Pscheiden and Dinah Ehrenfreund, the show looks at forgetting through cultural history.

One exhibit is a box marked “6.7.55”, found in 2005 in the evidence room of the Bregenz district court. With all documentation lost, the history of the objects inside, which have Jewish connections, remains unclear.

The history of Hohenems’ Jewish community is also reflected in the exhibition. In the 1950s, the town used the former synagogue as a fire station. A foundation plaque on the building, now on display, made no mention of its earlier use. A memorial plaque was installed only in 2004.

The exhibition gives considerable space to the Nazi era, including book burnings. A list of banned literature is shown alongside a photographic negative bearing burn marks from Auschwitz. In the final days of the war, SS members burned evidence there, but prisoners saved about 39,000 negatives. For some inmates, these are the only traces that remain.

An X-ray image of a picture of Andreas Hofer shows a hurried layer of paint covering a portrait of Hitler. The exhibit reflects the desire after 1945 to suppress memories of Austria’s role in Nazi crimes. The curators say efforts to confront that history began only with the Waldheim affair in 1986. Kurt Waldheim’s military service record is on display, and they warn of renewed attempts to move on from history rather than engage with it.

Artworks include a memory game by Gali Yudilevich depicting houses occupied by Arab Palestinian families until 1948, and changing self-portraits by the American painter William Utermohlen, who had Alzheimer’s disease. The exhibition also features Dani Gal’s video work “Night and Fog”, which recreates the scattering of Adolf Eichmann’s ashes in international waters, and Maya Schweizer’s “Sans histoire”, about the end of civilisation.

The exhibition, previously shown in Vienna and expanded with objects from Hohenems, opened on November 15, 2026.