Curated by Giovanni Boscolo, Andrea Caspani, Giorgio Cavalli, Giuseppe Emmolo, Luca Frigerio, Rachele Gatti, Samuele Sanvito, Emmanuele Silanos, Danilo Zardin
In collaboration with Daniele Bonvicini, Rodolfo Casadei, Elena Mancini, Markus Merz, Emanuele Rampa

The story of Franz and Franziska Jägerstätter is a tale of love and struggle of two farmers in the small Austrian village of Sankt Radegund in the early 20th century. It is the story of a young man with great hopes for whom drinking with friends, motorcycle races, dance parties, and adventures with local girls meant everything until he met Franziska. It is also the story of their encounter with Christ, the discovery of the beauty of married life, and the joy of a faith lived as the fullness of life. The advent of Nazism and Hitler’s war would overwhelm all this.

But Franz and Franziska, who understood the anti-Christian nature of Nazism, decided to swim against the current towards the source of the joy they had come to know as the ultimate meaning of their lives. Franz was led to the guillotine, but their union was stronger than death, and Franziska defended his memory until she was 100 years old, witnessing his beatification in 2007. Their luminous experience provokes us to ask what is truly essential for our lives.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, recounting the lives of Franz and Franziska through texts, historical photos from the Diocesan Archive of Linz, parts of Terence Malick’s film “The Hidden Life,” and a final video created specifically for the exhibition with interviews with their daughter Maria, biographer Erna Punz, and the Bishop of Linz, Postulator of the Beatification Cause. The heart of the exhibition is the reconstruction of the couple’s home, the hearth to which the Jägerstätters looked as a point of light and hope.