And There We Are, In the Middle

Andi plays the electric guitar and is mad about guns. Michi hopes his Doc Martens show the right political stance. Ramona is looking for an apprenticeship and has her heart set on a lip piercing. These three 15-year-olds live in Ebensee, a village in Austria where in 2009 the annual memorial ceremony at the former concentration camp was disrupted by a group of youths with air rifles. Michi’s computer contains both a traditional folk song about his home village and a heavy punk track. As we see him impersonating Michael Jackson, taking part in a procession in lederhosen and felt hat and brandishing a rattle, or joking about a piece of anti-Nazi graffiti, a trenchant image takes shape of how complicated self-discovery and personality formation can be for adolescents; the distance between the most divergent models for identity is remarkably small.