Depicting Austria's Wartime History for a Worldwide Audience: Terence Malick's 'A Hidden Life' (2024 IBC Lecture)

Speaker: Katya Krylova

A Hidden Life (dir. Terrence Malick, 2019) offers a fictionalised depiction of the life of Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who was executed in 1943 for his refusal to serve in the Wehrmacht and beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007. In his film, the American auteur-director presents Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl) as a timeless model for the importance of taking a moral stand in totalitarian regimes, thereby creating a work of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg, 2009). Malick has brought Jägerstätter to a new generation previously unfamiliar with his story. Examining the film’s use of music, depiction of the Austrian landscape, and citation of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), as well as bringing A Hidden Life into dialogue with Axel Corti’s earlier film treatment of Jägerstätter’s biography in The Refusal (1971), the lecture will analyse what is both gained and lost in Malick’s transnational cinematic portrayal.

Katya Krylova is Senior Lecturer in German, Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. Her current research centres on memory culture in contemporary Austrian literature, film, and memorials. She is the author of Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard (2013; winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies), and The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture (2017; 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title). Edited and coedited volumes include New Perspectives on Contemporary Austrian Literature and Culture (2018), Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today (2021), Thomas Bernhard: Language, History, Subjectivity (2023), Reading Bachmann Now (forthcoming 2024).

Image: The stained glass window dedicated to Jägerstätter in the Votivkirche, Vienna (Haeferl via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)

This lecture will be held in person at the University of London Senate House. All welcome. Refreshments will be available. Advance online registration is essential.