The slim volume published in the series canadiana oenipontana, in which a substantial collection dedicated to the cultural and knowledge transfer between Austria and Canada appeared as early as 2003 (ed. Ursula Mathis-Moser), assembles a number of essays originally read at a conference convened in Vienna in 2014. Its editors include several additional essays offering further glimpses of the literary relations between Austria and Canada and combine them with some comparative articles illustrating the different handling of (positive and negative) national myths in literature.

After the bilingual introduction, the book opens with articles analyzing narrative and lyrical texts by individuals who as young Jews were forced to leave Vienna following the Anschluss and, subsequent to their internment as enemy aliens and their graduation, achieved senior academic positions in Canada. One essay (by Hermann Patsch) addresses the complex way in which Hans Eichner, the distinguished expert on Friedrich Schlegel, in the autofiction of Kahn & Engelmann draws on the memory of his ancestors’ move from Hungary to Vienna and captures the brutal destruction of Jewish culture in Vienna in the Holocaust, also apparent in the autobiographical chronicles of two other members of the same cultural cohort (Egon Schwarz and Ruth Klüger). A second article (by David G. John) explores haunting images in Eichner's early poetry reflecting this painful experience, but also illustrates from Eichner's still uncollected poetry the idyllic mood in texts from his later Canadian phase. Eugen Banauch, the author of a substantial monograph (Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada 1940–2006 [Heidelberg, 2009]), revisits Henry Kreisel's representation of Viennese Jewish culture in the interwar years in The Rich Man and shows how Kreisel dealt with the perception of guilt in connection with the Holocaust and an attempt at revenge in The Betrayal. Banauch also recalls the problems of Holocaust survivors in some of Carl Weiselberger's stories. Yvonne Völkl complements these articles on Austrian exiles in Canada with a study (in German) of Monique Bosco's autofiction Un amour maladroit, which ushered in Bosco's productive career as a writer in Quebec, her permanent home after 1948. This novel echoes Bosco's traumatic experiences in her family's exile in the south of France during the Vichy regime, resulting in the lack of self-confidence and extreme shyness ascribed to her semi-autobiographic protagonist.

A critical perspective on Vienna and the failure of its inhabitants to acknowledge the burden of the past recurs in some of the roughly thirty short poems in a wide range of poetic forms in German and English composed by Renee van Paschen, a bilingual native of Canada, at home on both sides of the Atlantic. Her transatlantic stance, apparent in some personal impressions from scenes in Canada, serves as a tenuous bridge to the second part of this hybrid collection. It opens with a short essay by the distinguished constitutional lawyer Joseph Eliot Magnet on the Canadian myths of partnership between the two founding nations, the development of Canadian constitutional law through the adoption of multiculturalism, the delayed acknowledgment of the rights of indigenous nations, and the consequences for public policy and cultural productivity. In a wide-ranging essay in German, F. Peter Kirsch contrasts the Austrian Heimatroman, exemplified first in Peter Rosegger's nineteenth-century depiction of childhood memories of the losing battle of small farmers as victims of industrial modernization, and the roman de la terre thriving in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century, with its recurrent narrative of the struggle of farmers clinging to the soil in the face of the inevitable appeal of urban life. Kirsch distinguishes the complex rendition of village life in more recent Quebecois fiction from its Austrian correlate, which, because of the historical burden of the genre in German-speaking countries, was for a long while only feasible in the form of the Anti-Heimatroman. Some features of the latter mode appear in Thomas Bernhard's artist novel Der Untergeher, a complex analysis of whose various layers rounds off the volume with its diverse approaches. The juxtaposition of the brilliant Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and two Austrian pianists, by comparison with their fictional friend mere dilettantes, one of whom is the eponymous figure, is linked to the broader cultural contrast between the two continents. Gould's “Idea of the North,” here expanded to include parts of the United States, is contrasted with the “Idea of the South,” embraced by the second Austrian pianist, the narrator, who has resigned himself to being merely a “Lebenskünstler” and has emigrated to Spain from what Bernhard not surprisingly exposes as the unfavorable climate of Austria. Thus, this concluding essay is in tune with the others in this hybrid collection, which take a largely critical angle on Austria for its historical burden.