Katya Krylova Knihy

The exploration of Austria's Nazi past is at the heart of this work, sparked by the Waldheim affair. Krylova analyzes contemporary literary texts, films, and memorials that confront Nazism and the Holocaust, highlighting the impact of a new generation of artists and intellectuals. Key discussions include the cultural remnants of pre-Anschluss Austrian-Jewish life, responses to 1990s xenophobia, Elfriede Jelinek's radical portrayal of the Rechnitz massacre, and Robert Schindel's historical novel on the Waldheim affair. The book culminates in an examination of recent memorial projects in Vienna and their implications for Austria's memory politics.

&ltB>This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies.&ltBR> The post-war landscape of Europe is unthinkable without the voices of the Austrian writers Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989). Their work, coming after the devastation wrought by the Second World War and the Holocaust, is rooted in a specifically Austrian context of repression of this traumatic historical legacy. In post-war Austria, discourse on the recent past may have been dominated by silence, but the legacy of this past was all too apparent in the country's ruined and speedily reconstructed cityscapes. &ltBR> This book investigates Bachmann's and Bernhard's treatment of two fundamental aspects of the Austrian historical legacy: the trauma of the war and the desire to return to an ideal homeland, known as 'Haus Osterreich'. Following a methodology based on Freud and Benjamin, this comparative study demonstrates that the confrontation with Austria's troubled history occurs through the protagonists' ambivalent encounter with the landscape or cityscape that they inhabit, travel or return to. The book demonstrates the centrality of topography on both thematic and structural levels in the authors' prose works, as a mode of confronting the past and making sense of the present."

This volume brings together contributions arising from papers originally presented at the Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture International Conference held at the University of Nottingham in April 2015. It examines trends in contemporary Austrian literature, film and culture, predominantly over the past thirty years. This period has been one of great transformation in Austrian society, with the Waldheim affair of 1986–1988 marking the beginning of a belated process of confronting the country’s National Socialist past. The sixteen chapters of the volume analyse literary texts, films, memorial projects and Austria’s musical heritage, considering works by cultural practitioners operating both within and outside of Austria. The collection offers a multi-perspectival view on how contemporary Austria sees itself and how it is, in turn, seen by others from various vantage points.