Katya Krylova – författare

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 TitleThe 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.

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 TitleThe 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.

This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies.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. 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 Österreich’. 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.