Linz keeps its past in awkward layers: a Roman fort wall inside Austria's oldest church, an emperor's heart in a parish urn, and the imperial capital Hitler meant to build here. Three days of walking the evidence, in the city and beyond it.
Austria's oldest church surviving in near-original form, first documented in 799 and raised directly on the wall of the Roman fort Lentia. Inscribed Roman stones sit reused in the outer masonry, plainly visible from Römerstraße.
The city parish church of 1286 holds the heart of Emperor Friedrich III in a red marble urn. He died in 1493 in the Kremsmünstererhaus a minute away in Hofgasse, where a memorial room marks the room of his death.
Friedrich III's residence castle, rebuilt after the 1800 fire and extended in 2009 with a glass south wing. Four floors run from Hallstatt-era bronze weapons and Roman finds through Gothic panel painting to the arms halls.
The Jesuit church of 1669–1683 served as Linz cathedral from 1785 to 1909. Anton Bruckner was organist here from 1856 to 1868, and the Chrismann organ he played still stands under the pink stucco-marble vault.
The granite-quarry camp above the Danube, 25km east, held more than 190,000 prisoners and killed at least 90,000. The stone Stairs of Death, the barracks rows, the sick quarters and the gas chamber all survive on site.
Gusen killed more people than the main camp, then was sold off as building land after 1955 and covered with bungalows. Only the crematorium survives, inside a memorial funded by survivors' families and opened in 1965.
The steelworks opened in 1938 as the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, built partly with camp labour and bombed to rubble in 1944–45. The visitor centre also covers the LD oxygen-steel process invented on this site in 1952.
The two colonnaded blocks flanking the 1940 bridge are the only completed piece of Hitler's plan to rebuild Linz as his personal capital. The east wing now holds the University of Art; the planned sculptures were never carved.
A Maximilian defence tower of 1832 on the edge of Leonding, the village where Hitler spent his school years from 1898. The museum addresses that inheritance head-on; the family grave in the churchyard opposite was dissolved in 2012.
The city museum occupies a 1607 Jesuit boarding house on Dametzstraße and runs changing exhibitions on Linz itself — Nazi-era planning, postwar reconstruction, industrial labour and everyday life along the Danube.
The Augustinian abbey 18km south, rebuilt in baroque between 1686 and 1751 over the grave of a martyr drowned in 304. Bruckner sang and played here as a boy and lies in a sarcophagus directly beneath his own organ.
Rebuilt in 1968 on the site of the 1877 synagogue burned in the November 1938 pogrom. A plaque records the destruction, and Stolpersteine along Bethlehemstraße and Landstraße name members of a community of roughly 650 people.