One of two official European Capitals of Culture for 2009, this picturesque city on the Danube is reconsidering its past and turning to the future.

A city of about 200,000 on the banks of the Danube River, Linz reached its heights in the 15th century when it briefly served as the de facto center of the Hapsburg Empire during the reign of Friedrich III, but it is best known today for its associations with Hitler. The dictator intended for the city, his childhood home, to be the cultural center of the Third Reich. While he realized plans for the city’s industrial infrastructure, the majority of the planned civic buildings were thwarted by World War II. Yet despite extensive war-time bombing, the period kick-started the development that still marks Linz as an industrious, successful city with several impressive cultural hubs.

In 2009, Linz will become a different kind of cultural center, as an official “European Capital of Culture” of the year, along with Vilnius, Lithuania. The distinction, meant to show off the European Union’s cultural diversity and foster collaboration between member states, was first awarded in 1985 to Athens. Since then, one or more cities have been recognized each year, and between 2005 and 2019, each EU nation will have a turn to show itself off; each country is designated a year, and cities within that country compete to represent their country and gain national and EU funding. Linz’s run is being supported by €1.5 million ($2 million) in funding from the EU, and €20 million each from the regional government, the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art, and Culture, and local private donors, along with further corporate gifts.

Over the course of 2009, Linz will present more than 200 performances, exhibitions, concerts, and other cultural events, as well opening a brauhaus where culture and beer will both be on tap. Notable among the Linz09 offerings are several installations and exhibitions that acknowledge and re-examine the National Socialists’ ambitions for the city; events that highlight the sound landscape and noise pollution in a contemporary city; and artworks that question strategies of surveillance and protest. Here is a selection of visual art highlights: German video artist Hito Steyerl tackles the city’s Nazi history head-on with an installation in the arcades of the Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead buildings), which were part of a Nazi architectural project meant to show off Linz as a city of formal grandeur. Using research by historian Sebastian Markt, Steyerl has created a sound installation called Unter Uns (Among Us) that examines architecture as an expression of power; for the duration of 2009, the long-silent buildings will “speak” about their construction, largely through the use of forced labor, in pre-war Austria.

The “Best of Austria” exhibition at the striking Lentos Art Museum on the Danube also presents a vision of grandeur: a fictitious national collection, begged and borrowed from state, private, and corporate collections such as those of the Albertina, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art (MAK), the Salzburg Museum, and T-Mobile Austria. Stella Rollig, director of the Lentos Museum, has created a wish list of both home-grown and foreign talents, including Austrians Egon Schiele, Valie Export, Erwin Wurm, Markus Schinwald, and the contemporary collaborative group Gelitin, and outsiders Olafur Eliasson (Denmark), Franz Gertsch (Switzerland), and Anselm Kiefer (Germany). Later in 2009, the museum stages a major show of works by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman called “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies” from February 13 to April 19; and from August 28 until the end of the year, the exhibition “See This Sound” explores what happens when image and sound are mixed in contemporary art.

Joining the Lentos along the Danube this year is the Ars Electronica Center, which recently opened in a €29.7 million building by Austrian firm Treusch Architecture; at night the spectacular structure, like its neighbor, lights up the riverbank with its illuminated facade. The Ars Electronica Festival of art, technology, and society, founded in 1978 to underscore the emerging digital revolution, puts Linz on the contemporary map not just this but every year. The new, self-styled “Museum of the Future” contains 32,000 square feet of exhibition space, plus another 11,000 square feet for research and development. Visitors can check out exhibits such as “New Views of Humankind,” which explores biotechnology, robotics, brain imaging, and the future of design, and they can also consult an archive of every Ars Electronica Festival.