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.

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  

"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

"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." Choice