Praise for
W. G. SEBALD AND AUSTERLITZ
“With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W. G. Sebald’s writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that makes his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory. Each book seems to be something that surely was impossible, and each (upon every re-reading) is unique and astonishing.”
—W. S. MERWIN
“With W. G. Sebald’s haunting new book, Austerlitz, we are transported to a memoryscape—a twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past .… [Austerlitz] serves as the perfect introduction to Mr. Sebald’s work for readers unfamiliar with his ouevre while standing on its own as a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times
“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Sebald is the Joyce of the twenty-first century. His tale of one man’s odyssey through the dark ages of European history, which synthesizes a canon of Continental thought and literature, is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world.”
—The Times (London)
“W. G. Sebald is a monster—a gorgeous and unwaveringly assured writer, a bold formal innovator, and a man always plunging into the core of identity, singular and national. In Austerlitz, he’s created his richest and most emotionally devastating story.”
—DAVE EGGERS
“One emerges from a Sebald novel shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed.”
—ANITA BROOKNER
“A remarkable writer—a sort of Teutonic Borges domiciled in England.”
—SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
“One of the most original new voices to have come out of Europe in recent years.”
—PAUL AUSTER
“If you thought literary modernism was dead, guess again. The spirit of such masters as Kafka and Borges lives on in the novels of W. G. Sebald. For Mr. Sebald, not only do ‘big questions’ still exist, but so do the desire and the will to answer them.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
First Page
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
JAMES WOOD
In the summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author W. G. Sebald, is visiting Belgium. At the Centraal Station in Antwerp, he sees a fellow traveler, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking boots, workman’s trousers made of blue calico, and a well-made but antiquated jacket. He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques Austerlitz. The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station restaurant, and continue to talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholar—he explains, to the book’s narrator, about the slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by Antwerp’s Centraal Station, and talks generally about the history of fortification. It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.
Austerlitz and the Sebald-like narrator meet again—a few months later, in Brussels; then, later still, on the promenade at Zeebrugge. It emerges that Jacques Austerlitz is a lecturer at an institute of art history in London, and that his scholarship is unconventional. He is obsessed with monumental public buildings, like law courts and prisons, railway stations and lunatic asylums, and his investigations have swollen beyond any reasonable raison d’etre, “proliferating in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based entirely on his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings.” For a while, the narrator visits Austerlitz regularly in London, but they fall out of touch until 1996, when he happens to meet Austerlitz again, this time at Liverpool Street Station. Austerlitz explains that only recently has he learned the story of his life, and he needs the kind of listener that the narrator had been in Belgium, thirty years before.
And so Austerlitz begins the story that will gradually occupy the rest of the book: how he was brought up in a small town in Wales, with foster parents; how he discovered, as a teenager, that his true name was not Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz; how he went to Oxford, and then into academic life. Though clearly a refugee, for many years Austerlitz was unable to discover the precise nature and contour of his exile until experiencing a visionary moment, in the late 1980s, in the Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed for perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be demolished, to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the space contains “all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained.” He suddenly sees, in his mind’s eye, his foster parents, “but also the boy they had come to meet,” and he realizes that he must have arrived at this station a half century ago.
It is not until the spring of 1993, and having suffered a nervous breakdown in the meantime, that Austerlitz has another visionary experience, this time in a Bloomsbury bookshop. The bookseller is listening to the radio, which features two women discussing the summer of 1939, when, as children, they had come on the ferry Prague to England, as part of the Kindertransport: “only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well,” Austerlitz tells the narrator. The mere mention of the name “Prague” impels Austerlitz to the Czech capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny, Vera Ryšanová, and uncovers the stories of his parents’ abbreviated lives. His father, Maximilian Aychenwald, escaped the Nazis in Prague by leaving for Paris; but, we learn at the end of the book, he was eventually captured and interned in late 1942, in the French camp of Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His mother, Agáta Austerlitz, stayed on in Prague, insouciantly confident of her prospects, but was rounded up and sent to the Terezín ghetto (better known by its German name of Theresienstadt) in December 1942. Of the final destination of Maximilian and Agáta we are not told, but can easily infer the worst: Vera tells us only that Agáta was “sent east” from Terezín, in September 1944.
This short recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism to Sebald’s beautiful novel, and I offer it only in the spirit of orientation. It leaves out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader too, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate frustration of detection, the perpetuation of an enigma. By the end of the novel, we certainly know a great deal about Jacques Austerlitz—about the tragic turns of his life, his family background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdowns—but it can’t be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to quit the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it.
Sebald deliberately layers and recesses his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to. He tells his story to the n
arrator, who then tells his story to us, thus producing the book’s distinctive repetitive tagging, a kind of parody of the source-attribution we encounter in a newspaper: almost every page has a “said Austerlitz” on it, and sometimes the layers of narration are thicker still, as in the following phrase, which reports a story of Maximilian’s, via Vera Ryšanová, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Treplitz in the early summer of 1933 …” Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: “As usual when I go down to London on my own,” the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, “a kind of dull despair stirred within me in that December morning.” Or, for instance, when Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay where they are, clinging to a wall, never moving “until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death.” In Thomas Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from the Austrian author’s comic, ranting rage, and his tendency to circle obsessively around madness and suicide. Sebald takes some of Bernhard’s wildness and estranges it—first, by muffling it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.” Second, Sebald makes his diction mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Notice the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: “until the last breath is out of their bodies … the place where they came to grief …”
In all his fiction, Sebald works this archaic strain (sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange, and seemingly impossible composite: a kind of mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His characters and narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in gloomy, inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where “not a living soul stirred.” Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness, dread, and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness amounts to a Gothicism of the past; the text is constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool Street Station, Jacques Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is built on the foundations of Bedlam, the famous insane asylum: “I felt at this time,” he tells the narrator, “as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.” In Wales, the young Jacques had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler had told the boy of those dead who had been “struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life.” These ghostly returnees, Evan said, could be seen in the street: “At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges.” In the curiously empty village of Terezín, not far from Prague, Austerlitz seems to see the old Jewish ghetto, as if the dead were still alive, “crammed into those buildings and basements and attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down the stairs, looking out of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and alleys, and even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air, hatched with gray as if it was by the fine rain.”
This is both a dream of survival and a dread of it, a haunting. To bring back the dead, those “struck down by fate untimely”—Jacques’ parents, say, or the imprisoned victims of Theresienstadt—would be a miraculous resurrection, a reversal of history; yet, since this is impossible, the dead can “return” only as mute witnesses, judging us for our failure to save them. Those resurrected dead at Terezín, standing in “silent assembly,” sound very much like a large court, standing in judgment against us. Perhaps, then, the guilt of survival arises not just from the solitude of success (the “success” of having been lucky, of having outlived the Nazis), or the irrational horror that one’s survival involved someone else’s death (an irrationality that Primo Levi explores in his work). There is also guilt at the idea that the dead are at our mercy, that we can choose to remember or forget them. This is finely caught by Theodor Adorno, in an essay on Mahler, written in 1936: “So the memory is the only help that is left to them [the dead]. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.”1
Saving the dead—that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz, and it is both Jacques Austerlitz’s quest, and W. G. Sebald’s too. This book is like the antiques shop seen by Jacques in Terezín; it is full of old things, many of them reproduced in the photographs in the text: buildings, an old rucksack, books and paper records, a desk, a staircase, a messy office, a porcelain statue, gravestones, the roots of trees, a stamp, the drawing of a fortification. The photographs of these old things are themselves old things—the kind of shabby, discarded picture postcards you might find at a weekend flea market, and which Sebald greatly enjoyed collecting. If the photograph is itself an old, dead thing, then what of the people caught—frozen—by the photograph? (Flickering slightly at the edges, as Evan the cobbler describes the dead.) Aren’t they also old, dead things? That is why Sebald forces together animate and inanimate objects in his books, and it is why the inanimate objects greatly overwhelm the animate ones in Austerlitz. Amidst the photographs of buildings and gravestones, it is a shock to come upon a photograph of Wittgenstein’s eyes, or a photograph of the rugby team at Jacques’ school. The human seems to have been reified—turned into a thing—by time, and Sebald knowingly reserves an entire page for his shocking photograph of skulls in mud (supposedly, skeletons found near Broad Street Station in 1984, during excavations). Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling. (In the north of England, a cemetery used to be called a “boneyard,” the phrase somehow conveying the sense of our bones as mere lumber or junk.)
Yet some are traveling faster than others, and with more doomed inevitability, and there is surely a distinction between, on the one hand, the photograph of Jacques’ rugby team, and on the other, the photograph of Jacques’ mother or the photograph (itself a still from a film) of the imprisoned inhabitants of Theresienstadt. As Roland Barthes rightly says in his book Camera Lucida, a book with which Austerlitz is in deep dialogue, photographs shock us because they so finally represent what has been. We look at most old photographs and we think: “that person is going to die, and is in fact now dead.” Barthes calls photographers “agents of death,” because they freeze the subject and the moment into finitude. Over photographs, he writes, we shudder as over a catastrophe that has already occurred: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”2 This effect is surely heightened when we look at photographs of victims of the Nazis—whether being rounded up, or just walking along a street in a ghetto. In such cases, we think: “they know they are going to die, and they are certainly already dead, and there is nothing we can do about it.” As the stolid rugby players do not, these victims seem to be looking at us (even when they are not directly looking at the camera), and asking us to do something. This is what gives the photograph of young Jacques (reproduced on the cover of this book) a particular intensity. The boy in his party cape, with the wedge of unruly fair hair, looks out at the camera not imploringly but confidently, if a little skeptically. Yet understandably, Jacques Austerlitz, looking at this photograph of himself, from a time when he was still in Prague and still had parents and had not yet been put on the train to London, tells the narrator that he feels “the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page bo
y who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.” Jacques Austerlitz was rescued by the Kindertransport, and thus did indeed avert the misfortune lying ahead of him. But he could not avert the misfortune lying ahead of his parents, and so, even in middle age, he is forever frozen in the attitude of that picture, always waiting to avert misfortune. He thus resembles the little porcelain horseman that he saw in the window of the antiques shop in Terezín, a small statue of a man rescuing a young girl, arrested in a “moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring.” Is Jacques Austerlitz the rescuer, or the one awaiting rescue? Both, surely.
There is, of course, a further dimension to Sebald’s use of photographs: they are fictional. In the very area of historical writing and historical memory most pledged to the sanctity of accuracy, of testimony and fatal fact, Sebald launches his audacious campaign: his use of photographs relies on, and plays off, the tradition of verity and reportage. On the one hand, these photographs sear us with the promise of their accuracy—as Barthes says, photographs are astonishing because they “attest that what I see has existed”: “In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.” We are lulled into staring at these photographs and saying to ourselves: “There is Jacques Austerlitz, dressed in his cape. And there is his mother!” We say this, in part because photographs make us want to say this, but also because Sebald mixes these photographs of people with his undeniably accurate and veridical photographs of buildings (for instance, the photograph of the Breendonk prison, in Belgium, where Jean Améry was tortured by the Nazis, and which the narrator visits, is a photograph of the actual building). On the other hand, we know, in our heart of hearts (and perhaps unwillingly?), that Jacques Austerlitz is a fictional character, and that therefore the photograph of the little boy cannot be a photograph of him.