"Topografie der Erinnerung" is a collection of the brilliant essayist's most striking speeches and articles. They deal with topics as diverse as the massacre of Reichnitz in the last weeks of the war; so-called "Reibepartien" (scrub groups) where Jews were humiliated and forced to scrub the street; the myth of Galicia; Poland and Ukraine's postwar history; or Pollack's own family's entanglement with the Nazis. His investigations are always astute and critical, they are always aimed at keeping memory alive and against false claims of innocence. Time and again he asks the key question of memory politics: How can and must we deal with these memories today?

The official victims of the 20th century are commemorated in memorials. But how do we remember the thousands of nameless, secretly buried victims – Jews, Roma, anti-communists or partisans? How do we in Central Europe live in landscapes tainted by innumerable hushed up massacres: from Rechnitz in Burgenland to Kocevski Rog in Slovenia and Kurapaty near Minsk? Martin Pollack relentlessly, yet diligently draws a new, more honest map of our continent. It is a map in which memory and honest location replace shameful secrets and anonymous graves.

Nach der Ausschaltung des österreichischen Parlaments im März 1933 ging es Schlag auf Schlag. In Engelbert Dollfuß’ Traumgebilde des „autoritären, christlichen Ständestaates“ wurde ein politisch inkonsequenter Schlingerkurs eingeschlagen, der folglich im „Anschluss“ an das nationalsozialistische Deutschland mündete. Doch wie sah das Alltags- und Kulturleben zwischen 1933 und 1938 aus? Inmitten von Prozessionen der katholischen Kirche, Operettenseligkeit sowie Sport- und Technikbegeisterung glänzten die liberale Hochkultur und intellektuelle Mahner. Doch künstlerische Freiräume wurden immer mehr eingeschränkt, Rückzugsgebiete der Zivilgesellschaft eliminiert. Die Kulturgeschichte der Jahre 1933 bis 1938 stellt in einem breiten Panorama dar, wie das scheinbar Widersprüchliche zusammenpasste.

Spring, 1945: caught between the advancing Allied armies, Austria was temporarily transformed into a political no-man’s land. There was chaos, hope and fear. Drawing on the everyday lives of ordinary people, Kurt Bauer vividly explores this tumultuous year. There is the Wehrmacht soldier who takes a long and winding road home; the Jewish emigre forced into exile in 1938, returning to his home town as part of the victorious army—only to find that the old Vienna of his childhood is gone; the Jewish woman who survived the war in Vienna and now wants to get to the USA as quickly as possible … a multifaceted and gripping book.