Concept
"Encounters and personal conversations with scientists who had been persecuted and forced to flee Austria had a profound impact on how I viewed the lives and careers of these figures, and on my understanding of the Holocaust."
Anton Zeilinger
President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2013-2022)
As a young scientist I worked at MIT in Boston, where I kept meeting people who spoke to me in Viennese German. These experiences, these encounters and personal conversations with scientists who had been persecuted and forced to flee Austria had a profound impact on how I viewed the lives and careers of these figures, and on my understanding of the Holocaust. I have found that while history may be “learned”, we are more deeply affected and moved by a one-to-one conversation with someone who lived through those times.
This is the thinking behind the idea for the film "The Class of '38. Exile & Excellence". In it we hear from 16 outstanding scholars who experienced National Socialist persecution in childhood and were forced to leave Austria. They all had a lasting effect on their fields of research, some of them having been awarded a Nobel Prize.
The film opens up the experiences and fates of these people and through personal interviews, we are given first-hand insights into the experience and aftereffects of flight and displacement. The film seeks to reserve these accounts, also for future generations. The film project was researched and managed by Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl and Frederick Baker directed the film. It is dedicated to the 16 people who made it possible in the first place, as well as to their families and descendants.
Project
With the film "The Class of '38. Exile & Excellence", the Austrian Academy of Sciences wants to record the experiences of excellent scientists of Austrian descent who have one thing in common – all having experienced persecution, displacement, escape and exile. As children or adolescents, they experienced the National Socialist reign of terror in Vienna; as Jews they had to leave Austria and ultimately found their homes in Israel, England and the USA. The aim of the film project is to investigate the connection between traumatic childhood and youth experiences and scientific excellence, between biographical disruption and innovative research and a thirst for knowledge.
Special thanks go to the 16 personalities who have placed their trust in us and shared their experiences with us. They decided on the location and language of the interviews. They were interviewed not primarily as eyewitnesses, but as exceptional scientists who were influenced by a common background of experience. The title of the film – The Class of '38 – aims to reflect this.
Anton Zeilinger, President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is to thank for the idea behind the film. For the creation of the film, the British-Austrian filmmaker and scientist Frederick Baker (deceased 2020) was enlisted. He conducted the interviews in 2015-16 together with Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl, historians at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who were responsible for scientific project management.
The film wants to honor its protagonists individually and as a group – through a memento that can also be used as a source of knowledge and inspiration in the future.
Frederick Baker | Johannes Feichtinger | Heidemarie Uhl |