One thread in the exhibition “The Other Russia. MEMORIAL” leads all the way to Innsbruck. In one of the showcases lies “Peter’s New Songbook for the Eastern Zone”, a self-made booklet by author Peter Demant featuring songs from Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera”. Demant was born in Innsbruck in 1918, was baptised as a Protestant and grew up in Czernowitz in Romania. Following the Soviet occupation of Bukovina under the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he was caught up in the machinery of repression. After his detention and before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he was deported to Siberia. He was accused of espionage and was sentenced to ten years in labour camp and five additional years of exile. Ultimately, he was forced to stay in the Stalinist Gulag for about eight years. He was not legally rehabilitated until 1991. Demant leaves behind extensive writing in Russian through which he also processed his time in the camp. His own translation of the work, completed in the early 90s, was published posthumously in Innsbruck. Demant entrusted his songbook to the organisation Memorial in 2003. Upon the city’s invitation, Peter Demant visited Innsbruck for the first time, in 2005, one year before his passing,
Kurt Scharr
Historian, University of Innsbruck, Editor of “Schaufeln – Schubkarren – Stacheldraht. Peter Demant – Erinnerungen eines Österreichers an Zwangsarbeitslager und Verbannung in der Sowjetunion” (Shovels – Wheelbarrows – Barbed Wire. Peter Demant – An Austrian’s Memories of Forced Labour Camps and Exile in the Soviet Union) (2014)
