In collaboration with the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies and the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the ACF DC welcomes Austrian author Martin Prinz for a reading in English of The Last Days (Original: Die letzten Tage), followed by a panel discussion with historian James Loeffler and filmmaker Bernadette Wegenstein. During the event, an exclusive clip from the upcoming documentary The Archives, directed by Bernadette Wegenstein, will be shown.
The war was almost over, but the killings continued. Set in April 1945 near Vienna, The Last Days (2025) reconstructs a Nazi society that enables these crimes in Austria, where a summary court sentenced people to death for alleged defeatism and desertion. Written in the restrained language of court records, Martin Prinz’s book examines individual responsibility, arbitrary power, and the long silence that followed these crimes.
In The Last Days, shortlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2025, Martin Prinz reenacts the events of April 1945 in a valley of the Austrian Eastern Alps, where innocent people were arbitrarily tried and executed by Nazi summary courts, among them the granddaughters of Arthur Schnitzler’s muse Olga Waissnix. In these final 41 days of the war, more people were murdered in Austria than in the previous seven years. Two years later, the main perpetrators appeared before a people’s court, insisting on the legality of their actions and invoking obedience to a state that had already ceased to exist. Drawing on trial records and contemporary documents, the book presents these events with sober precision and reflects on individual responsibility under extreme conditions and on literature as a form of remembrance.
PROGRAM
WELCOME by David Živković (Interim Director ACFDC)
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS by Bernadette Wegenstein (Filmmaker, Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University)
BOOK READING by Martin Prinz (Author of The Last Days)
PANEL DISCUSSION with Martin Prinz, Bernadette Wegenstein, and James Loeffler (Felix Posen Professor in Modern Jewish History and Director of the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University)
Q&A with the audience
The evening will conclude with an Austrian wine reception.
PANELISTS
Martin Prinz grew up in Lilienfeld and now lives in Vienna. He writes travel stories, screenplays, and novels, including “The Robber and The Last Princess”, and has received numerous awards, among them the screenplay prize at the Gijón International Film Festival. ABOUT THE LAST DAYS: A valley opening in the Eastern Alps, April 1945—the days of the “Tausendjährigen Reiches” are numbered. In the blink of an eye, it has shrunk to nothing. District leader Johann Braun establishes his own personal court-martial, a private regime of murder. People are sentenced arbitrarily. Martin Prinz recounts the monstrous events with sobriety and a commitment to the facts. A harrowing documentary novel about a unique case in Austrian contemporary history.
Bernadette Wegenstein is a US-Austrian documentary filmmaker and author. Bernadette has produced and directed several documentary features and shorts. Devoti tutti (2023), which premiered at Biografilm Bologna and won multiple film awards, including Best Documentary and Audience Awards. The Conductor (2021) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, played at over 100 festivals, and won five Best Documentary awards. It aired on PBS “Great Performances” and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. The documentary music short, See Me: A Global Concert, produced during the pandemic, won numerous Best Music Film and Best Editing awards, including the Firenze Corti Premio Rive Gauche. Her intimate breast cancer documentary, The Good Breast, premiered at the Geena Davis Gender Institute’s Bentonville Film Festival. She has recently won a grant to develop Fidelio and the Unjust Incarceration, a multimedia performance piece that combines Beethoven’s Fidelio with newly created music and text. Find more on Bernadette Wegenstein’s website.
James Loeffler is Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He writes widely on modern Jewish history from antisemitism to Zionism, with a focus on the overlooked ties between the Jewish past and the global present in politics, law, and culture. His new upcoming book, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America”, argues that, in a moment of democratic crisis, antisemitism has become an ideological obsession – and offers an argument for re-thinking how to reconcile free speech and equal rights in American law. Find more on Jim Loeffler’s website.
© Images: Martin Prinz, Book Cover Die letzten Tage by Martin Prinz (published by Jung und Jung), Bernadette Wegenstein, James Loeffler