Die Jägerinnen (The Huntresses) is a scenic intervention that engages with the so-called Führerzimmer in Vienna’s Volkstheater – a space installed after Austria’s annexation for the possible visit of the Führer. When director Michael Schottenberg removed the room’s wooden paneling in 2005, the act provoked a dispute with the Austrian Federal Monuments Office and ignited a long-delayed debate around Austria’s (in)ability to remember.

Situated between the nursery and the forest, the intervention asks: what do spaces remember, and what do they narrate? It interrogates the role of trees as witnesses, as well as the ways in which German fairy tales have sustained the cultural imaginary of the forest. In this context, the tale of Snow-White and Rose-Red articulates the figure of the “other” against the “own,” while invocations of the Wiener Baumschutzgesetz (Vienna Tree Protection Act) and Raumschutzgesetz (Space Protection Act) underscore juridical attempts to delimit and preserve what is deemed valuable.

At stake is the enduring alliance between Austrian identity and the forest—an alliance that underpins collective narratives and concepts of national belonging. Die Jägerinnen thus situates itself at the intersection of fairy tale, myth, and (hi)story, examining how cultural memory is constructed, protected, and contested.

The work was developed in dialogue with the Volkstheater, engaging with Gerhard Roth’s Eine Reise ins Innere von Wien (A Journey to the Inside of Vienna).