Conclusion: Living with Shadows

Summary

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence …

—Thomas Hood, “Ode: Autumn”

THIS BOOK HAS TREATED a number of case studies, taken from the past three decades of Austrian cultural production, to examine the diverse ways in which Austrian writers, filmmakers, and artists have treated Austria's multiple historical legacies, foremost among them the legacy of the Nazi past. At the same time, we have seen that the political changes, which have swept Austria since the mid-1980s, have not failed to leave their mark on the country's cultural production, with writers, filmmakers, and artists responding to such turning points as the Waldheim affair, and the 1999 elections, in their work. It is this dual concern of an intense preoccupation with the country's past, coupled with a keen focus on documenting and reflecting the present, that dominates the work of the writers, filmmakers, and artists explored in this study.

The early films of Ruth Beckermann, examined in chapter 1 of this study, continually oscillate between the present and the past. The melancholy journeys to the past, whether this be to interwar Vienna in Wien retour, the historical area of Bukovina in Die papierene Brücke, or Vienna's historical textile quarter in Homemad(e), are always allied, in Beckermann's films, with explicit or oblique commentary on present-day Austria. Her films, while insistently concerned with the past, specifically with the legacy of the Holocaust in Austrian culture, are simultaneously a documentary chronicle of contemporary Austria, whether this be the culture of silence around Austria's Nazi past, which predominated up until the late 1980s (Wien retour); the Waldheim affair of the late 1980s (Die papierene Brücke); or the 1999 elections, which saw the Austrian Freedom Party enter the coalition government (Homemad(e)).

Similarly, Anna Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit, dealing with the topic of Nazi-era “Aryanization,” continually reflects the legacy of this past in the present, indirectly commenting on political developments in Austria in the area of restitution, which became an increasingly prominent issue at the turn of the twenty-first century, when Mitgutsch's book was published.