Chloe Paver's Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Fiction and Film takes stock of memorial practices and the academic scholarship on these practices. Beginning with a survey of methodological approaches and canon formation in scholarly reception, Paver recalls studies from the past thirty years and reflects on the need for newer approaches to handle the ever-growing body of literature, film, and memorial sites. First, she questions the narrowness of the criteria and canon of the scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s that venerates moralistic approaches and values a work on its ability to educate and morally move audiences. Next, she demonstrates the potential arbitrariness of scholarly valuation by comparing these studies to the subsequent generation of psychoanalytic approaches, in which the operative value, as initially theorized by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, manifests itself in a text's ability or inability to “mourn” the victims of the Third Reich. Eschewing both perspectives, Paver offers her own position, which draws on Aleida Assmann's work on cultural memory, Pierre Nora's concept of the lieu de mémoire, Marianne Hirsch's notion of “postmemory,” and James E. Young's studies on memorial culture.

The book's first two chapters address widely celebrated and debated works, such as Michael Verhoeven's Das schreckliche Mädchen (1990), toward which Paver adopts a critical stance, asking whether scholarship can get “beyond celebration” of morally educational material. Appearing before and after the fall of the Berlin wall, Peter Schneider's Vati (1987) and Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (1995) elicit more differentiated, but still largely celebratory, responses, according to Paver. After arguing that these texts sustain a dominant masculine narrative, Paver turns in her third chapter to Austrian and German women writers and filmmakers: Helga Schubert's German nonfiction novel Judasfrauen (1990) and two documentary films, Helke Sander's Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (1992) and Ruth Beckermann's Jenseits des Krieges (1997), which Paver argues “share a common concern with the ways in which gender shaped personal experience of the Third Reich and with the way in which it shapes post-war memory”( 52). In the fourth chapter, Paver discusses Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes (1970), Marcel Beyer's Flughunde (1995), and Tournier's novel and its film adaptation as Der Unhold (1996) by Volker Schlöndorff, and offers a complex reflection on language, fiction, film and multinational film productions.

The final chapter is perhaps most relevant to Austrian studies. Here, Paver is most original in her contribution as she discusses two former Austrian concentration camps, Mauthausen and Ebensee, where she considers at length the history of memorialization, as well as the differing groups of victims and changing political climate after the end of the Cold War, which have enabled the Austrians and various groups to revise their own contributions. Because of her archival work and observations, Paver's readings of the public efforts are most detailed and interesting here: She describes the use and reuse of the Austrian colors, first the red to valorize the Socialists after the war and then red and white for the Second Republic. She reflects on the many contradictions of the immediate postwar period, where there is some acknowledgement of Soviet suffering but a rejection of victimhood claims from the erstwhile GDR. There is also abundant evidence of displacement of guilt onto German rather than Austrian perpetrators. Looking at more recent contributions, she shows how these, too, remain open to debate: the uncertainly of how to memorialize those labeled “criminals” by the Third Reich and inclusion of victims not at all related to the Third Reich. Paver praises the curators' highly original efforts to reflect on the historiographical process at Mauthausen's visitor center, but also remarks somewhat unfavorably on actual encounters and performances in other Austrian museum sites. Paver then segues to Christoph Ransmayr's Morbus Kitahara (1995), which she claims shows “the tensions between landscape as national myth and as burial ground” (153).

Paver's critical approach to memorial practices in Germany and Austria remains instructive where it shows how both texts and museums continue to struggle in their efforts to discuss the Third Reich and its aftermath. Yet, in her rigorous efforts to question the moralistic tone of the scholarship that preceded her study, Paver undermines some of the strengths of her own contributions. After all, the Aufarbeitung to which she refers remains specifically a moral enterprise that is continually evolving, as her own work on museums shows. Nevertheless, Paver's study is compelling for its own original insights into Austrian museums and literature, which she treats with skilled textual and critical analysis.