Hainburg



The far oversized machinery of the construction companies was looking for the next victim at the Danube: the dam wall of Greifenstein was just to be finished, the next source of profit had to be sacrified, by building a dam wall near the little town of Hainburg. Konrad Lorenz, Austria's late Nobel laureate (for founding the behavioral research), was already an old man, but with open eyes, when he supported the people's petition against this dam project with all the weight of his name. It was a form of loss anyway to the area - the need for a permanent protection led to a big PR machinery, attracting more than 10 times the capacity of people than before. The over-strained key word "national park" arose, to be found within a short time in tourist brochures greeding for further bus loads of tourists to shuttle in. Some foresters converted to businessmen for catering and supply rental. The increasing "furnishing" of the wilderness by tourist platforms, instruction trail trumpery, and even pedestrian bridges over once quiet water arms have to be seen now as alarming signals for the approach of another form of destruction.


The handicapped ones are those people who had maintained a soft approach for decades with joyful hiking, cycling and boat rides. All this is now under severe restrictions, so finally the area more or less was gone anyway, - at least not for a straight direct destroying... And at least the national park status should mean a certain form of stronger protection. But the original danger is not gone anyway today, still the questionable argument "water power = clean energy" (instead of nuclear power) is spooking around, mixing up the better alternative of small ecology-based dam areas supplying new habitates with those monstrous destroyment projects. Another form of threat shows how inferior obviously even the protection status of a national park seems to be: since years ago a weak Austrian government lied it's population into the membership of a part-European community, their toadyism together with the community's centro-burocratic dirigism means nothing good to the Vienna part of this great nature area - "freedom of traffic" counts much more than one of the last fragments of a partly untouched nature and wilderness, - the plans for a major highway connection around and through this nature paradise can only be seen as the obviously continuing chain of unscrupulosity, madness and profiteering. More roads implicate just more traffic - and this means far too often an unnecessary heavy load traffic, shifting goods from one country to another and backwards - just to gain a few subsidy bucks more for the own pocket. CAM 3001 was on location in both aspects. For more than a decade already, in the earlyer days of filmmaking, the great landscape was covered in an extensive, rather contemplative way. The dramatical events 1984 in the Hainburg area had changed the approach completely - what seemed to be a paradise forever, suddenly became frightingly fragile. The escalation to the battle of Hainburg between the non-violent demonstrators and the violent police forces seemed unevitable, similar like in the drama of an ancient Greek tragedy. The resulting film, Human Dates, is dedicated to Konrad Lorenz, with his kind appreciation and estimation of the work, sadly just 3 weeks before his death. The film was recently re-versioned on DV and is now published on VHS in English and in German language.

The handicapped ones are those people who had maintained a soft approach for decades with joyful hiking, cycling and boat rides. All this is now under severe restrictions, so finally the area more or less was gone anyway, - at least not for a straight direct destroying... And at least the national park status should mean a certain form of stronger protection.

But the original danger is not gone anyway today, still the questionable argument "water power = clean energy" (instead of nuclear power) is spooking around, mixing up the better alternative of small ecology-based dam areas supplying new habitates with those monstrous destroyment projects.
Another form of threat shows how inferior obviously even the protection status of a national park seems to be: since years ago a weak Austrian government lied it's population into the membership of a part-European community, their toadyism together with the community's centro-burocratic dirigism means nothing good to the Vienna part of this great nature area - "freedom of traffic" counts much more than one of the last fragments of a partly untouched nature and wilderness, - the plans for a major highway connection around and through this nature paradise can only be seen as the obviously continuing chain of unscrupulosity, madness and profiteering. More roads implicate just more traffic - and this means far too often an unnecessary heavy load traffic, shifting goods from one country to another and backwards - just to gain a few subsidy bucks more for the own pocket.

CAM 3001 was on location in both aspects. For more than a decade already, in the earlyer days of filmmaking, the great landscape was covered in an extensive, rather contemplative way. The dramatical events 1984 in the Hainburg area had changed the approach completely - what seemed to be a paradise forever, suddenly became frightingly fragile. The escalation to the battle of Hainburg between the non-violent demonstrators and the violent police forces seemed unevitable, similar like in the drama of an ancient Greek tragedy.

The resulting film, Human Dates, is dedicated to Konrad Lorenz, with his kind appreciation and estimation of the work, sadly just 3 weeks before his death. The film was recently re-versioned on DV and is now published on VHS in English and in German language.