W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Had German writer W.G. Sebald not died in 2001 at the age of 57, he might well have won the Nobel Prize. He was widely admired by serious literateurs and especially by two subtypes: the kind who value distinctive prose above all else and the kind who can't get enough of the Holocaust.

I just finished Austerlitz, one of his most famous novels (2001, translated by Anthea Bell). The plot is very simple. The anonymous narrator meets, in a train station in Belgium, a peculiar man named Austerlitz who studies architectural history, especially train stations and forts. Over 30 years, from the 1960s to the 1990s, they meet at various places across western Europe and tour buildings while Austerlitz relates his life story. Austerlitz arrived in Britain in 1939 at the age of 4 1/2, and at first he remembers nothing from before his drab life in Wales with a dissenting minister and his wife. His foster parents managed to die before ever telling him anything about his past, although he does find out his real name. Austerlitz has an unconscious aversion to all things German, so he has managed to reach adulthood without really knowing anything about the Holocaust. Of course he eventually figures out where he must have come from, and he then begins to study Nazism and search for his parents. This search induces in him bouts of madness during which he completely forgets who he is, and he is hospitalized at least twice for extended periods. Then the book just sort of ends.

The writing really is remarkable. Sebald's meandering sentences induce a dreamy, hypnotic state and take us into Austerlitz's mind as he tries to remember or forget or both:

Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies' Waiting Room at Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light,and which seemed to go on and on for ever. In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time. . . .

All of Sebald's books are illustrated with grainy black and white photographs that sometimes illustrate the story and sometimes comment on it obliquely, and I thought this was very well done. I was also impressed by the use of train stations and forts as recurrent settings and symbols. Austerlitz has studied the ever more elaborate fortifications Europeans built around their cities or on their borders from the age of Vauban to World War II, noting that they rarely did any good. The massive concrete constructions of the 20s and 30s hardly delayed the Wehrmacht at all in 1940. Instead the forts were taken over by the Germans as military posts for their occupying army, and some were used by the Gestapo as prisons or by the SS as processing stations for Jews on their way to Auschwitz. Here the narrator reflects on the Dutch fort of Breendonk, one of those used by the SS:

My memory of the fourteen stations which the visitor to Breendonk passes between the entrance and the exit has clouded over in the course of time, or perhaps I could say it was clouding over even on the day when I was in the fort, whether because I did not really want to see what it had to show or because all the outlines seemed to merge in a world illuminated only by a few dim electric bulbs, and cut off for ever from the light of nature. Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions -- Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store, and Museum -- the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with ever extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken -- and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time -- as if they were the mortal frames of those who lay there in that darkness. 

Austerlitz, in my reading, is at first crippled and stunted because he cannot remember his past, but when he discovers the truth he is driven insane.

A powerful story, rendered in remarkable words. But why? I have to say that I am a little puzzled by the need to revisit the Holocaust in novelistic form. The question of what and how to remember from the past looms very large for European intellectuals, and for some the foremost crime of the totalitarians was their attempt to rewrite the past: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (Milan Kundera). Thus, I suppose, one way to retroactively oppose the Nazis is to remember their crimes and their victims. And I have nothing against that. In fact I have devoted my professional life and much of my spare time as well to learning about the past, never shying away from the horrible parts. Perhaps that is why I see studying Nazism as just something that one does, not an existential problem that has to be worked over in a hundred different metaphorical, novelistic ways. What does a novel offer in the way of Holocaust remembrance that a visit to the actual Breendonk would not?

So I don't think I will be looking for any of Sebald's other books. But if you want to read a novel about the Holocaust and spend a melancholic afternoon contemplating the difficulty of remembering or understanding the horrors of the past, by all means read Austerlitz. The people who ponder this have ranked Sebald with Primo Levi as the foremost memorialists of the Holocaust, and he was certainly a remarkable writer.