Out from the Shadows

Literature and films created by women in Austria since 1945 are directed towards social and ethnic consciousness-raising. They are conceived as the writers' responsibility to tell the truth. The texts written in the 1950s and early 1960s went largely unrecognized and remained hidden within the shadows of the body of art by men. The socio-political implications of these works were only understood by the women writers as well as by filmmakers who came of age during the women's movement in the 1960s. During the 1970s the literary and film texts of the younger generation which slowly emerged from the shadows of Austria's male-dominated artist milieus strongly assert feminist views and pleas. Another decade later, in the wake of the Waldheim affair, reactivating memory became central to many women authors and filmmakers in Austria's society, caught up with forgetting and repressing.