<p>Situated between two major refugee routes, Austria has formed a key&nbsp;European transit state in recent years, culminating in late 2015 when 600,000&nbsp;people passed through the country in just four months. Ever since, the&nbsp;Austrian government has sought to push its anti-immigration agenda on the&nbsp;international scene, most recently during its presidency of the Council of the&nbsp;European Union in 2018. Almost twenty years after the first coalition between&nbsp;the conservative Austrian People&rsquo;s Party and the right-wing Austrian Freedom&nbsp;Party in early 2000, Austrian Studies 26 builds on Cultural Studies research&nbsp;on how writers, artists and intellectuals responded to the political shift to the&nbsp;right during the 1990s and 2000s to discuss the contemporary moment. &nbsp;The&nbsp;volume&rsquo;s seventeen interdisciplinary contributions examine cultural responses&nbsp;to forced migration and mass displacement from literary, filmic, musical and&nbsp;photographic perspectives. &nbsp;They document and analyse attempts to find artistic&nbsp;forms for traumatic histories and losses that defy representation, as well as to&nbsp;devise means of testimony which render visible people and experiences all&nbsp;too often excluded from the historical record. &nbsp;The possibilities, as well as the&nbsp;limitations, of the arts in communicating geopolitical persecution and transit&nbsp;are discussed. In a deeply hostile climate, the volume assesses Austria&rsquo;s place in&nbsp;a Europe caught between loudly proclaimed humanitarian tradition and the&nbsp;ever-increasing drive to protect its borders.</p>