The presentation of the new governing coalition between the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in December 2017 served as a reminder of how greatly the self-perception of Austrian elites has changed in recent decades. In 2000, the furious response of the first ÖVP-FPÖ coalition government to international protests suggested a defensive admission of the legitimacy of those protests. For many abroad, the FPÖ represented Austria en miniature: it had not satisfactorily addressed its National Socialist past, and it could not be treated as a full partner in the European Union. When some European Union member countries, led by France, imposed bilateral sanctions on Austria in 2000, the ÖVP-FPÖ Schüssel government answered by closing the Austrian Cultural Institute in Paris. From that standpoint, 2000 resembled the Austrian response to the international backlash following the election of the National Socialist scandal–tainted Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986. Asked on Austrian State Television (ORF) whether the Americans grasped the consequences of placing Waldheim on a watch list that prevented him from entering the United States, the apoplectic Washington ORF correspondent Klaus Emmerich replied, channeling equal parts Hollywood and Jesus, “There was an American film: for they know not what they do.” When the Austrian National Socialist past resurfaced in 2017, it was different. The New York Times titled its election editorial, “Austria's Nazi Past Raises Its Head,” and Israel announced that it would not meet with new FPÖ ministers. In a nod to those and other rebukes, Sebastian Kurz declared in his first speech to parliament as prime minister that Austria would fight resolutely against antisemitism; in Jerusalem, a month later, he said of the Holocaust, “Austria has looked away far too long, and has fulfilled its historical responsibility too late.”

Attitudes have changed across Austria. But as Katya Krylova explains, the consequences of National Socialist rule from 1938 to 1945, and the delayed reckoning of Austria with its complicity in National Socialism, have cast a “long shadow” over the postwar period. Through a series of close readings, her book explores how Austrian artists have entered into a creative and critical dialog with this shadow. Not all the works presented here are “confrontations,” if by that, one means that they challenge postwar myths; nor are all these works “responses,” if by that one means that they single-mindedly address the legacies of World War II. But the artist works examined in The Long Shadow of the Past are, by and large, all shaped by the catastrophic loss inflicted upon Austria during the years of National Socialist rule, together with the postponed Austrian reckoning with Austria's own role in that loss. What lent authority to that postponed reckoning is, of course, the 1943 Moscow Declaration, a document signed by Nationalist China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. According to that declaration, Austria had been “the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression.” After the war, the Second Austrian Republic seized upon this phrase as a way to evade legal and moral responsibility for its own considerable contribution to wartime aggression. Austria, the wartime ally of Germany, became the first victim of fascism.

Existential loss figures as one of the primary tropes in the artistic dialog with the long shadow of the past. This sense of loss may be understood, as Krylova explains, through the Freudian concept of “melancholy,” a “coping mechanism of cathecting … a lost object's characteristics in one's own ego in order to cope with its loss” (25). Three films by the Vienna-based, Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, as chapter one shows, offer a glimpse of melancholy and object cathexis at work. Each film, Wien retour (1983), Die papierene Brücke (1987), and Homemad(e) (2001), represents a personal attempt to reestablish a connection to an Austrian-inflected Jewish culture and tradition destroyed in the Holocaust. As the films record this personal attempt, the present begins to recede, and the interwar years begin to fill its place. Here, the object becomes cathected, but for Krylova the melancholic artist does not abandon critical distance. In Die papierene Brücke Beckermann travels to the historic Bukovina region, the birthplace of her father, Salo Beckermann, to reencounter the sites of family memory. A nostalgic image emerges, Krylova writes, while “uncritical forms of nostalgia are constantly undermined” (29). One reviewer of Die papierene Brucke observed that Salo Beckermann resembles a character from the novels of Joseph Roth. Indeed, in Die papierene Brücke, as elsewhere in Beckermann, the loss of the Jewish community doubles for the irretrievability of the Danube monarchy. Loss structures the story work. In the film Homemad(e), as well, that which once existed is made to shine through the shadowed present.

The lost object acquires a more palpably physical form in Haus der Kindheit (2000), the novel of Anna Mitgutsch, to which Krylova turns in chapter two. In that text, the protagonist Max Berman is “infected” with his Austrian mother's melancholy for the Old World, the loss represented by the expropriation of the family house during the Holocaust. Drawing upon the work of Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, Krylova finds in the narrative development of Berman an exemplary behavioral adjustment toward loss. For Boym, there are two distinct types of nostalgia. The first is “restorative” nostalgia, which seeks a return to origins and “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” The second is “reflective” nostalgia, a form of longing that “respects that the past cannot be returned to,” while maintaining both a melancholy attachment to the past and a wish to preserve “shattered fragments of memory” (51). As the novel opens, Berman is gripped by a restorative nostalgia that seeks to make present the original house, an object he knows only through a photograph that belonged to his mother. For Berman, to regain the house acquires equivalence with restoring a picture-perfect past, in which the magic of his own childhood will be fused with that of his mother. After overcoming a myriad of challenges, not least skillful local obstruction, Berman does succeed in having the house returned, and he rebuilds it. But he soon discovers that, through property, the past cannot be made present again. Nevertheless, as the novel progresses, Krylova argues, he is able to develop a meaningful sense of reflective nostalgia that replaces restorative nostalgia. The melancholic quest is not without purpose.

With case studies that range from the early 1980s (Wien retour) in chapter one to two works on the Rechnitz massacre in chapter three—the film Totschweigen (1994) and the Elfriede Jelinek drama Rechnitz (2008)—The Long Shadow of the Past casts a wide chronological net. With chapter four addressed to Der Kalte (2013), the Waldheim roman à clef by Robert Schindel, the book is bravely poised on the leading edge of contemporary criticism. Of course, over the span of three decades, Austrian artists have themselves remade aesthetic form as they have responded to ever-changing attitudes toward knowledge, history, and authority. Or, to use the old critical language of Russian Formalism, artistic works have changed because certain ways of storytelling, specific kinds of narrative authority, and particular modes of provocation have become too “familiar” to resonate aesthetically or socially. Rechnitz (Würgeengel) is written by Jelinek as a single, unbroken text, and her play lacks conventional dramatis personae; in Totschweigen, filmmakers Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne stretch the documentary film genre by emerging from behind the camera to search for the unlocatable mass grave in Rechnitz (65).

And yet, the dynamic evolution of aesthetic form is not a primary concern of The Long Shadow of the Past. Its artists generally engage in dialog with the “long shadow of the past.” They do not engage in a critical or agonistic dialog with one another on contentious issues of representation, discourse, or the position of the artist, even if these issues are far from settled. In the rare instance where the book does present a direct confrontation between one artist and another, in the case of Ruth Beckermann polemical retrofitting of Alfred Hrdlicka's Vienna “monument against war and fascism” with LED screens, one is mildly surprised to discover that artists do think about, and respond to, other artists’ works. But these responses are part of what drives aesthetic innovation. And conflicts over the “who,” “what,” “where,” “how,” and “why” of representation matter for an explanation of where Austrian artists find themselves in 2018. Nevertheless, few 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.

The Long Shadow of the Past devotes its final chapter to memorials and memorial projects, surely the form of artistic engagement with the past that is most responsive to public opinion. Indeed, located in public spaces, memorials and memorial projects are “symptomatic for how a nation or group of people perceives its past at a given moment in history” (96). Looking at this triangulated circuit of public opinion, past, and artist work, Krylova concludes that increased historical consciousness regarding the Holocaust and the impacts of National Socialist rule have led to an increased desire to commemorate their victims. The “Vienna Project” (2013–14) of Karen Frostig, a US-based artist, commemorated these victims, in part, using thirty-eight stencil sprays at historically significant sites. These sprays posed the question “What happens when we forget to remember?” Two other “decentralized” memorials—Julia Schulz's Schlüssel gegen das Vergessen and Elisabeth Ben David-Hindler's Steine der Erinnerung—remind those who walk down the everyday streets of Vienna that these streets are also sites of violence and expropriation. Here, as in many of the post-2000 memorials or memorial projects, the answer to Frostig's question about “what happens when we forget to remember” is that “artists will do their best to make us remember.” “To irritate,” the byword of these new memorials, constitutes an intensified provocation, a provocation tailored to an age in which the “provocation” of authentic survivor testimony is less and less available. A fascinating study of these memorials, and post-Waldheim artistic engagement in Austria, The Long Shadow of the Past is also a tribute to the artists who continue to find new ways to make the past an irritation to the present.