The End of the Neubacher Project
"How to Love My Mother"
by Claudia Witzmann
Marcus J. Carney has arrived. In February, the renowned Museum of Modern Art in New York presented its highly acclaimed documentary The End of the Neubacher Project. It was a very special moment for the native American who says he "learned" to become an Austrian. It's a tremendous honor for any young filmmaker to be showcased at the MoMA. For Marcus J. Carney, whose father is from New York, the presentation in the USA is a brilliant finale to an intensely emotional personal and cinematic odyssey many years in the making.
The End of the Neubacher Project documents the disturbing history of Carney's own family. It is the story of a typical Austrian family that still struggles with its Nazi past. At the beginning of the documentary, the young director characterizes this behavioral pattern as an Austrian disease - morbus Austriacus. For Marcus Carney, it is a "problematic, extremely disjointed approach to reality" in a country where authoritarian obedience and wholesale denial of historic guilt still go hand in hand.
The film is not conceived as a personal reckoning with the filmmaker's family. "Ultimately, it's not so important that it's about me, my mother, my family, but that it's part of a problematic Austrian history that many Austrian families are involved in," said Marcus in an interview.
Carney's ancestors include several prominent Austrian National Socialists. His grandfather Eberhard Neubacher was the director of the Lainzer Tiergarten wildlife preserve from 1938 to 1945. His great uncle Hermann Neubacher was the National Socialist Mayor of Vienna in the first three years after the Anschluss. In the idyllic wedding photographs of Carney's grandparents, a swastika flag waves prominently in the background. In the Nazi era, the Neubachers, most of them passionate hunters, used to go hunting with Hermann Göring. The shotgun that Carney's uncle proudly uses in the pursuit of his hobby to this day was a gift from Goering to the family.
At a decisive moment in the film, Carney's uncle is asked to comment on the fate of the Jewish population during the Nazi era. His uncle first expresses doubt about the number of Holocaust victims and then stubbornly remarks that he had no reason to be ashamed of anything a Neubacher ever did. By this point, if not earlier, it becomes clear what Marcus J. Carney is holding against his family and indirectly against Austria.
But then the film increasingly turns to the member of the family who is closest to Marcus Carney: his own mother. She, too, always suffered from her family's Nazi attitude, but never seems to have spoken about it. Her inability to mourn haunts her throughout her life. But in the film she learns to address the subject and to articulate uncomfortable truths. The film clearly had a cathartic effect for mother and son. For Carney, the real subject of the film becomes "How to love my mother."
Several unforeseen events occurred during the documentation process. In the course of an interview with Carney's American father in September 2001, the World Trade Center happens to be burning in the background. And the film takes a truly dramatic turn when both his grandmother and later his mother die during the shooting of film and their death is documented on camera.
Marcus J. Carney collected material for more than eight years - less like a hunter in the family tradition than like a gatherer. What started as the project of a film student gradually evolved into a big documentary film that has since been screened at numerous international festivals. The End of the Neubacher Project put an end to a literally morbid family tradition of silence. At the same time, the film is a beacon of hope for every young generation that is prepared to make a radical break with false traditions.
