Research Overview
Turnertempel memorial, Vienna
© Katya Krylova
CURRENT RESEARCH
The legacy that Austria's past continues to exert on its present constitutes my principal research interest. My research is highly interdisciplinary and may be situated within German studies, literary studies, film studies, memory studies, and visual studies. I recently completed my second monograph as well as an edited volume, arising out of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2012-2015, held at the University of Nottingham). The research project, entitled 'The Treatment of the Past and Austrian Identity in Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture', focuses on Austrian literature, film and culture since the 1980s, when the Waldheim affair of 1986-1988 sparked a long-overdue process of coming to terms with the country’s Nazi past. The Waldheim affair saw a young generation of artists and intellectuals lead a protest movement against the presidential candidate, who had lied about his involvement in the Nazi war machine. The works of this second postwar generation of writers, artists and filmmakers, who came of age in the 1980s and who continue to dominate the Austrian cultural landscape, is marked by an unrelenting attention to the long shadow that Austria’s past continues to exert on the country’s present. My project undertakes a number of close-readings of key literary texts, films, and memorials in order to examine the diverse ways in which the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust is treated in contemporary Austrian literature, film and culture. My analysis concentrates particularly on literary texts by Robert Schindel, Elfriede Jelinek and Anna Mitgutsch, documentary films by Ruth Beckermann, Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne, as well as recent memorial projects in Vienna, examining what these reveal about the changing memory culture in contemporary Austria. My second monograph, arising out of this project and entitled The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017), was published in June 2017. The book has been widely reviewed, received a CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title Award, and the paperback edition was published in February 2020.
As part of the dissemination activities for my project, I organised an international conference on Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture, which was held at the University of Nottingham on 13-15 April 2015. An edited volume arising from the conference, entitled New Perspectives on Contemporary Austrian Literature and Culture, was published by Peter Lang Oxford in September 2018. For more information about the conference please visit the conference website, blog and Twitter pages. Please see this blog post for a short report about the conference.
My current research project ‘Evolving Austrian Memory Culture in Literature and Film’ is concerned with depictions in contemporary Austrian literature and visual culture of Austria’s progression with regard to confronting its Nazi past. The depiction of Austrian Wehrmacht deserters in particular forms a key aspect of my work. My article, published in the Journal of Austrian Studies, on the treatment of this topic in Hanna Sukare's 2018 novel Schwedenreiter, is available open access here: https://abdn.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/unsere-mutigen-feiglinge-remembrance-of-austrian-wehrmacht-desert
PAST RESEARCH
The research I undertook for my PhD in German Literature (funded by the AHRC and completed at the University of Cambridge in 2011) applied a topographically-orientated approach towards the works of the seminal post-war Austrian writers, Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. My thesis investigated the authors' treatment of two fundamental aspects of the Austrian historical legacy. The first of these is the trauma of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the second is the desire to return to the 'House of Austria', an ideal of homeland or nationhood. Following a methodology based on Freud and Benjamin, my comparative study demonstrated that the confrontation with history in Bachmann's and Bernhard's prose proceeds through the protagonists' ambivalent encounter with landscapes and cityscapes, and illustrated the centrality of topography on both thematic and structural levels in the authors' prose works. A monograph based on my PhD research, Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, which was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies, was published by Peter Lang, Oxford, in 2013.
Between 2010-2012 I worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna, an interdisciplinary research institute specialising in biographical research, where I contributed to the Institute's edited volume on the biographical reception of Ingeborg Bachmann (Mythos Bachmann: Zwischen Inszenierung und Selbstinszenierung). I also wrote a chapter for a topographically-structured biography on the Austrian modernist writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Entitled Hofmannsthal: Orte, the biography was produced in a cooperation between the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt, which houses Hofmannsthal's literary estate.
The legacy that Austria's past continues to exert on its present constitutes my principal research interest. My research is highly interdisciplinary and may be situated within German studies, literary studies, film studies, memory studies, and visual studies. I recently completed my second monograph as well as an edited volume, arising out of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2012-2015, held at the University of Nottingham). The research project, entitled 'The Treatment of the Past and Austrian Identity in Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture', focuses on Austrian literature, film and culture since the 1980s, when the Waldheim affair of 1986-1988 sparked a long-overdue process of coming to terms with the country’s Nazi past. The Waldheim affair saw a young generation of artists and intellectuals lead a protest movement against the presidential candidate, who had lied about his involvement in the Nazi war machine. The works of this second postwar generation of writers, artists and filmmakers, who came of age in the 1980s and who continue to dominate the Austrian cultural landscape, is marked by an unrelenting attention to the long shadow that Austria’s past continues to exert on the country’s present. My project undertakes a number of close-readings of key literary texts, films, and memorials in order to examine the diverse ways in which the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust is treated in contemporary Austrian literature, film and culture. My analysis concentrates particularly on literary texts by Robert Schindel, Elfriede Jelinek and Anna Mitgutsch, documentary films by Ruth Beckermann, Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne, as well as recent memorial projects in Vienna, examining what these reveal about the changing memory culture in contemporary Austria. My second monograph, arising out of this project and entitled The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017), was published in June 2017. The book has been widely reviewed, received a CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title Award, and the paperback edition was published in February 2020.
As part of the dissemination activities for my project, I organised an international conference on Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture, which was held at the University of Nottingham on 13-15 April 2015. An edited volume arising from the conference, entitled New Perspectives on Contemporary Austrian Literature and Culture, was published by Peter Lang Oxford in September 2018. For more information about the conference please visit the conference website, blog and Twitter pages. Please see this blog post for a short report about the conference.
My current research project ‘Evolving Austrian Memory Culture in Literature and Film’ is concerned with depictions in contemporary Austrian literature and visual culture of Austria’s progression with regard to confronting its Nazi past. The depiction of Austrian Wehrmacht deserters in particular forms a key aspect of my work. My article, published in the Journal of Austrian Studies, on the treatment of this topic in Hanna Sukare's 2018 novel Schwedenreiter, is available open access here: https://abdn.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/unsere-mutigen-feiglinge-remembrance-of-austrian-wehrmacht-desert
PAST RESEARCH
The research I undertook for my PhD in German Literature (funded by the AHRC and completed at the University of Cambridge in 2011) applied a topographically-orientated approach towards the works of the seminal post-war Austrian writers, Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. My thesis investigated the authors' treatment of two fundamental aspects of the Austrian historical legacy. The first of these is the trauma of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the second is the desire to return to the 'House of Austria', an ideal of homeland or nationhood. Following a methodology based on Freud and Benjamin, my comparative study demonstrated that the confrontation with history in Bachmann's and Bernhard's prose proceeds through the protagonists' ambivalent encounter with landscapes and cityscapes, and illustrated the centrality of topography on both thematic and structural levels in the authors' prose works. A monograph based on my PhD research, Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, which was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies, was published by Peter Lang, Oxford, in 2013.
Between 2010-2012 I worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna, an interdisciplinary research institute specialising in biographical research, where I contributed to the Institute's edited volume on the biographical reception of Ingeborg Bachmann (Mythos Bachmann: Zwischen Inszenierung und Selbstinszenierung). I also wrote a chapter for a topographically-structured biography on the Austrian modernist writer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Entitled Hofmannsthal: Orte, the biography was produced in a cooperation between the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt, which houses Hofmannsthal's literary estate.