The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017)​

​My second monograph, The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture was published in June 2017. Please visit this Camden House webpage (which also includes a Google Books preview) to order the book or to request a review copy. Please see below for further details, including a 25% discount flyer. ​
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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 up a 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 in Vienna, 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 engaged in 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.

The Long Shadow of the Past was included in CHOICE's 2018 Outstanding Academic Titles. The list, published annually by CHOICE (the journal of the American Library Association), is "used by librarians to identify the most innovative and valuable titles for collection" (http://choice360.org/librarianship/outstanding-academic-titles).


​Reviews:

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"Krylova has produced a timely, informative, engaging, and well-written treatise on Austria’s ongoing memory struggles. Her monograph would be informative and digestible reading for students in a course on the topic, and should be of interest to all scholars concerned with how Austria and other nations confront the long shadow of the past."
Sharon Weiner, The German Quarterly  

"Katya Krylova’s excellent new book was completed between the presidential and national polls. [...]  Krylova’s introduction gives an excellent overview of the diverse strands of activity; her five chapters offer detailed analyses of particular works.[...] Krylova is able to develop a fascinating narrative."
Joachim Whaley, Journal of European Studies 

"Krylova's carefully researched The Long Shadow of the Past is a must-read for Austrian memory study scholars. It captures profoundly interconnected worlds of memory, trauma, and repression of the past with politics, culture, history, and family histories; it recognizes both progress and setbacks in Austria's reckoning with its past; and it invites an open dialogue about cultural memory." 
Eva Kuttenberg, Journal of Austrian Studies

"[A] fascinating study [...]. This book provides an outstanding analysis of the most important aspect of contemporary Austrian cultural and literary identity, which focuses on the remembrance of crimes committed by the Nazi regime [...]. Any scholar interested in understanding Austria's cultural identity today has to read this book to understand how important this work of remembering is for Austria to move forward.  [...] a must read for all scholars interested in Austrian literature, film, and culture." 
Joseph W. Moser, Gegenwartsliteratur 

"[F]ew studies of contemporary literature and culture can match The Long Shadow of the Past for its command of the relevant scholarship. Krylova masterfully handles subject matter ranging from the renaming of street names to the Austrian presidential politics of 2016. On aesthetics, history, and politics after 1986, she appears to have read everything. . . . [Krylova] devotes [her] final chapter to memorials and memorial projects . . . . A fascinating study of these memorials, and post-Waldheim artistic engagement in Austria, [this book] is also a tribute to the artists who continue to find new ways to make the past an irritation to the present."
Michael Burri, Austrian History Yearbook
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"Krylova’s book is a timely and welcome addition to various fields of study, among them, memory studies, Holocaust studies and Austrian cultural studies. Krylova’s analyses demonstrate what happens when trauma and repressed national history continue unresolved."
Nicole Calian, The Independent Scholar

"Krylova's essays are thoroughly researched, lucidly written, and should be of interest to students of cultural studies and history."
Edward T. Larkin, German Studies Review

"This is a well-considered study of Austrian Holocaust denial and the ways in which film, literature, and memorial images have led the nation toward a complete understanding of its share of guilt in the events of WWII. [...] Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."
E.G. Wickersham, Choice