Adi Wimmer Knihy

Australia has a film industry that pre-dates ‘Hollywood’ by over a decade, and yet it was in constant danger of extinction. Public subsidies launched the Australian film Revival’ of the 1970, which surprised the world with movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock or Gallipoli, Shine or The Piano. In order to thrive, Australian film making – more so than other national film industries – had to focus on narratives presenting its own land, culture and fabled identity. Postmodernism pluralized and problematised all of the above. In the 21st century, some genres - multiculturalism, Aboriginality and the presentation of an increasingly problematic rural life being the most conspicuous without breaking the original frames. These themes continue to produce rich narratives anchored in a collective discourse of the national, although the growing dependence of Australia’s film industry on Hollywood suggests that a new leaf is about to be turned.

In March 1938, Hitler's troops invaded Austria, wildly cheered by thousands of spectators. Following the consequent annexation, a Greater Germany plebiscite recorded a 99 percent support for Austro-German unification under Hitler. By 1942, however, Allied leaders at Yalta had declared the annexed country the first victim of Nazi aggression, laying the groundwork for the suppression of Austria's collaboration in the Holocaust and establishing a grossly deficient culture of memory. Among the forgotten were the 130,000 Austrian Jews who escaped the work camps and gas chambers only to find themselves in unfamiliar lands among unsympathetic people. This book, rising out of Austria's Year of Recollection in 1988, contains the narratives of 27 ex-Austrian Jews who were forced into exile following the Anschlusz. Translated from the German by poet Ewald Osers, the book includes accounts of anti-Semitism before Hitler, the annexation, flight from the homeland, and life in exile.