Examines key contemporary Austrian literary texts, films, and memorials
that treat Nazism and the Holocaust for what they reveal about the
country's contemporary politics of memory.
2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
The process of coming to terms with its National Socialist past has been
a long and difficult one in Austria. It is only over the past thirty
years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has
shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity, prompted by
the Waldheim affair of 1986-1988. Austria's writers, filmmakers, and
artists have been at the center of this process, holding upa mirror to
the country's present and drawing attention to a still disturbing
past.
Katya Krylova's book undertakes close readings of key contemporary
Austrian literary texts, films, and memorials that treat the legacy of
Nazism and the Holocaust. The analysis focuses on texts by Robert
Schindel, Elfriede Jelinek, and Anna Mitgutsch, documentary films by
Ruth Beckermann and by Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne, as well as
recent memorial projects inVienna, examining what these reveal about the
evolving memory culture in contemporary Austria. Aimed at a broad
readership, the book will be a key reference point for university
teachers, undergraduates, and postgraduates engagedin scholarship on
contemporary Austrian literature, film, and visual culture, and for
general readers interested in confrontations with the National Socialist
past in the Austrian context.
KATYA KRYLOVA is Lecturer in German, Film and Visual Culture at the
University of Aberdeen, UK. The Long Shadow of the Past is her second
book.
