Activity
conference paperDescription
Post-war Austrian memory culture has infamously been characterised by its belatedness with relation to the nation accepting responsibility for its participation in the Nazi war machine and in the Holocaust. However, in the nearly four decades since the Waldheim Affair, there has been a palpable shift in Austria to a more progressive understanding of the country’s true role during 1938-1945.This has not least been reflected in Austrian film production. My paper will examine several Austrian films, released since 2018 (the last Erinnerungsjahr) and dealing with the Nazi period in Austria. I will analyse how these recent mainstream films, symptomatic for a nation with ever-increasing distance to the National Socialist period as well as significant developments in its remembrance culture, are able to reflect the full range of Austrian experience during the Nazi era, as well as comment on previous missed opportunities to reckon with the Austrian Nazi past. Examples for this include Christian Frosch’s historical trial film Murer (2018), which implicitly reflects on the failure to bring an Austrian Nazi war criminal to justice in the 1960s, as does Thomas Roth’s Schächten (2022). Nikolaus Leytner’s 2018 film adaptation of Robert Seethaler’s Der Trafikant cinematically renders the novel’s broad spectrum of characters, from Communists and Jewish protagonists subject to persecution following the Anschluss, through to bystanders, eager denouncers, and perpetrators. Finally, Gabriela Zerhau’s Ein Dorf wehrt sich (2019) presents us with a similar range of resisters through to ‘Nazis made in Austria’ (to quote the international title of Barbara Necek’s 2022 documentary Le nazisme, une aventure autrichienne). Extrapolating from these recent trends and drawing on Rothberg’s concept of ‘the implicated subject’ (2019), I will argue that future Austrian cinema will continue to be characterised by an ongoing breaking of the postwar silence surrounding the Austrian Nazi past.
| Period | 20 Jun 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The Future of German Screen Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | St Andrews, United KingdomShow on map |