Book Review Article
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated from the German
by Anthea Bell (Modern Library—Random House, 2001), 298 pp.
Doppelgängers
In the early pages of the book, in the year 1967, the
narrator visits the Antwerp Nocturama. There he comes upon a woebegone raccoon who
“sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the
same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing,
which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the
unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its
own.”
The raccoon pokes his snout into the story shortly before
the title character, Austerlitz, appears for the first time, but this haunted
animal is perfectly emblematic of the confused and bewildered hero. Of course,
the narrator himself—whose name is not given—also appears prior to the
appearance of Austerlitz. We never learn much about him except that he is
German, but, like the scene with the raccoon, his appearance at the start also
adumbrates that of Austerlitz, in that the two characters much resemble one
another.
The narrator reveals that he has an interest in unusual
architecture, that he often is oppressed by a strange malaise. Like Austerlitz,
he is a wanderer in a solitary world, apparently a bachelor, feeling ever apprehensive
and guilty. He tells us that after a fire in Lucerne he has “an uneasy, anxious
feeling which crystallized into the idea that I had been to blame, or at least
one of those to blame, for the Lucerne fire.” He appears not to know exactly
who he is or what he is doing. He travels repeatedly from England, where he
lives, to Belgium, “partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which
were never entirely clear to me.” Always unsettled, not at ease within his own
skin, he returns to live in his native Germany at the end of 1975, and, “scarcely
a year later,” he is back in the UK. Why? We are not told.
This narrator may be an alter ego of the writer Sebald, but probably
that is too easy a correlation to make in such an extremely complex novel. He
is, at any rate, a sort of doppelgänger of Austerlitz, and the two
dopplegäng
their way together all through the narration. Not that they travel together,
but in their aimless wanderings across Europe they keep running into one
another. Or, as the narrator writes, “our paths kept crossing, in a way that I
still find hard to understand” (27). Yes, strange, otherworldly forces propel
the narrative action of this novel, make things happen, bring people together.
They meet by chance, they look at buildings, they talk, and,
eventually, they become not exactly friends, but close acquaintances. At one
point they do not see each other for twenty years—from 1976 to 1996—at which
time they renew their friendship, “which had been both a close and distant
one,” well, which was it?
When they meet again in London—already forty-three pages
into the book—Austerlitz picks the narrator as the man to whom he wishes to
relate his life’s story. Austerlitz is a novel that goes out of its way
not to tell a story in any way resembling the traditional straight narrative. A
novel told the traditional way would begin with the sentence we do not get to
until page 44: “Since my childhood and youth I have never known who I really
was.”
Austerlitz talks, the narrator listens; Austerlitz relates
all the particulars of his life, while the narrator reveals practically nothing
about his. There are grounds, in fact, for asserting that the narrator does not
really exist, that the weird, neurotic Austerlitz has himself written this book
about his life, but is too fearful to narrate the story directly. So he invents
this intermediary figure, this double character to get the story told not
directly, but obliquely. If so, the fact that he makes his narrator German is
one of the supreme ironies of the book. For Austerlitz, above all, pronounces
a quiet blanket anathema upon the German people, for all the depredations they
visited upon Europe in the time of the Second World War.
So it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, that
Austerlitz himself is both principal protagonist and narrator—or it would be if
the novel were originally written in the language in which I read it, English.
But Austerlitz could not have written this book, since the original is in
German, a language he barely knows at all, has resisted ever learning.
d
Trains
Going Everywhere and Nowhere, Details Run Amuck
On the first page the narrator comes chugging into Antwerp on a
train, into one of the many, many railway stations that show up in the novel.
The book, in fact, could be titled, Trains Going Here, There, and
Everywhere, but, Ultimately, Nowhere. We learn later that as a little boy
in Prague, Austerlitz loved watching trains, and the central event of his
life—an event that threw his psyche out of kilter for all time—was a train
journey from Czechoslovakia, across Germany, to England, on a children’s
transport that saved his four-year-old Jewish life.
As the narrator enters the railway station in Antwerp, he “begins
to feel unwell,” and “this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my
visit to Belgium.” He walks the streets of the inner city; like all of the
streets of so many cities and towns in this novel, they are meticulously named
for the reader. Everything, in fact, is described with a thoroughness of
detail. The very narration of the book is drowning in detail, much more detail
than any reader could possibly need. Here is the narrator, travelling by train
to London to see an ophthalmologist:
“I looked out at the flat, almost treeless landscape, the vast
brown expanse of the plowed fields, the railway stations where I would never
get out, the flock of gulls which makes a habit of gathering on the football
pitch on the outskirts of Ipswich, the allotments, the crippled bushes
overgrown with dead traveler’s joy on the embankments, the quicksilver mudflats
and channels at Manningtree, the boats capsized on their sides, the Colchester
water tower, the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, the empty greyhound track at
Romford, the ugly backs of the terraced houses past which the railway line runs
in the suburbs of the metropolis, the Manor Park cemetery and the tower blocks
of flats in Hackney, sights which are always the same and flit past me whenever
I go to London, yet remain alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the years
that have passed since my arrival in England” (36).
I love the “crippled bushes overgrown with dead traveler’s joy”;
there’s a detail that belongs in this novel reeking in apprehension and
malaise. The cited passage above is long, but constitutes only a small part of
the entire description, which goes on and on and on, as do so many similar
descriptions throughout the book, those of the narrator and those of
Austerlitz. There is a certain deliberate “Germanness” in the way the whole
novel is written, as if the author wishes his very narrative style to embody
the way Germans have to have things thoroughly catalogued. Later on, when we
come to the heart of the story—the tale of the Holocaust—attention to petty
detail is a constant: emphasis on the German “mania for order and purity,”
descriptions of how the Germans plundered the personal belongings of the Jews
they arrested, made endless listings of all the household items, how they kept
detailed accounts of all activities in the concentration camps, how efficiently
and ruthlessly they murdered innocent people, crossing them off their lists,
one by one.
d
Architecture
Returning now to the beginning of the book. The narrator arrives
in Antwerp on a train, begins his solitary amblings about—uneasily, in a steady
malaise—and this perambulation continues, on the part of the narrator, or on
the part of his main character, Austerlitz, throughout the rest of the novel.
After contemplating the raccoon with his piece of apple, the narrator makes his
way to the Central Station, marvels at the fantastical architecture there, goes
into the Salle de pas perdus, which the waiting room is called—it helps
to know French if you want to read this book—and meets by chance, for the first
time, the man named Austerlitz, who is sitting there making notes on
architecture in that “Waiting Room of Lost Steps.”
At their first encounter—this is the early summer of 1967—the two
men talk about architectural history and the history of the building of this
railway station. If you are interested in odd bits and pieces of facts about
architecture, you’re in for a treat in reading the rest of the novel. If you,
however, have no such interests, you are in for some hard slogging. Railway
stations galore, how and when they were constructed, complete with photographs
of them inserted into the text. Monumental buildings, the monstrosities of
European architecture, the soullessness of so many buildings, the most gruesome
of architectural eyesores (concentration camps and ghettos), the building
holding the archives in Prague, where Austerlitz goes in an attempt to learn
about his past.
A book full of buildings, and very few of them described as models
of grace and beauty. While in Belgium at the beginning of the novel, the
narrator visits the fortress of Breendonk, and the novel ends when he makes
another visit there, to this “monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness.”
Why do we build useless, outsize buildings? There is a hint that we do this
because we anticipate their crumbling into ruins, and we like the idea of
destruction embodied in the ruins. Breendonk is also salient in the novel in
that it is here that the narrator first imagines the travails of people in
concentration camps—the most important theme in the book—and here that he looks
in his imagination at the German guards and remarks, tellingly, “I had lived
among them until my twentieth year.” Had he been born just a bit earlier, the
narrator may be surmising, he himself could have been one of those guards.
We learn that Austerlitz—who makes his living as a professor in a
university—has been studying architecture for years—not as a student or
professor of architecture, but on his own. He wishes to put all his fragmentary
studies together into a huge book, but at such time as he is ready to begin
writing that book he is suddenly repulsed by all of his own research. He ends
up publishing nothing on architecture, and has the first of several nervous
breakdowns. He seems to implicate the very style of buildings in the
unconscionable behavior of the human beings who built them. The architectural
style of the capitalist era embodies “the compulsive sense of order and the
tendency towards monumentalism, evident in law courts and penal institutions,
railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums.” Human
beings are guilty of beastly behavior, and our buildings are accomplices in our
acts of beastliness.
d
The Novel
of User-Unfriendly
Returning, for the last time, to the beginning of the book. We
have reached page 14, only to see our collocutors—the narrator and
Austerlitz—ambling about discussing architecture, blending in some discussion
on the existence, or nonexistence of time, when Austerlitz suddenly goes off on
another tangent: the construction and architecture of fortifications. This
business trudges on for several more pages, and the puzzled reader finds
himself wondering what in the world this book is going to be about.
I’ve seldom encountered a novel made deliberately so difficult to
read. Mired in a discussion of fortifications reminds me of something . . . Ah, yes,
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, how Uncle Toby got his wound in the groin. But
I never made it all the way through that book. And here, on page 14, it begins
to appear that I won’t make it through this one either. The relentless
narrative plods on inexorably, providing no breaks for separate chapters,
seldom even for paragraphs. The reader swims through the dense high waves of
prose, finds no purchase for a temporary rest. Only the occasional em-dash intrudes,
and you grab onto it when you can, rest there briefly and tenuously, before
breast-stroking off again, though lengthy sentences rife with detail. Help,
help, somebody throw me a life preserver!
A page full of dialogue is faster and easier to read than a page
crammed with narrative. Most novels use direct speech to give the reader a
break from long narrative descriptions. Not this one. How about throwing in a
bit of humor, to ease the strain? Nope. You won’t find a good laugh in the
whole of Austerlitz. What is the point of making the reading of a book
so unaccommodating for the reader? I can only assume that since the subject
matter concerns man’s inhumanity to man, Sebald wants to get a feel for this
subject into the very narrative style of the book. Austerlitz lives a life of
agony, the Jews suffered unspeakable things, so here, reader, in your face:
here’s a touch of how oppressive life can feel.
Another oddity about the style. The narrative is persistently
oblique, as if the neurotic Austerlitz cannot bear to have it told directly.
The narrator listens to Austerlitz and relays to the reader what Austerlitz
says, but he also sometimes relays what Austerlitz says in reporting what other
characters say. Here is a passage in which the blanket condemnation of Germany
and Germans is conveyed by having Austerlitz’s father Maximilian speak through
Vera through Austerlitz through the narrator to the reader: “Maximilian, in
spite of the cheerful disposition which he shared with Agáta, had been
convinced ever since I knew him, said Vera, so Austerlitz told me, that
the parvenus who had come to power in Germany and the corporate bodies and
other human swarms . . . had abandoned themselves from the first to a blind
lust for conquest and destruction . . . Nonetheless, said Vera, Austerlitz
continued, Maximilian did not in any way believe that the German people had
been driven into their misfortune; rather, in his view, they had entirely
re-created themselves in this perverse form, engendered by every individual’s
wishful thinking and bound up with false family sentiment . . . so Vera
recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how . . .
etc., etc., etc.
All the italics above are mine. Weird writing, this. In his
review in the London Review of Books, James Wood mentions “all the ways
in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital.” Austerlitz was published twenty years ago. Given the
notorious deficiency of reader skills here in the year 2020, I can imagine
practically no reader nowadays making it all the way through it, especially
considering that the book demands at least a second reading—before you can
begin to realize how it is put together.
d
Upon
Second Reading
A short time into your second reading of the book—if you are a
diligent reader—you begin to notice that the jumbled mess of narrative in the
early pages is not a mess at all. The “I” narrator, while obscure, has an
important role in the book, as doppelgänger of Austerlitz and for his
Germanness. The theme of railway stations and railways jibes with the central
story of the oppressed Jews, shunted off to concentration camps by railway, and
with the story of a lost little boy, separated from everything and everyone he
has ever known and shipped off by train from Prague to the UK in 1939. Even the
clock at the Antwerp Station foreshadows the theme of time throughout the
novel. The structure of the book consists of little action, but a lot of
colloquy between characters, who tell each other life stories from the
past. And sprinkled in amidst the
colloquy of the first few pages are adumbrations of major themes that are
developed later on. Things only appear disorganized; in fact, the book is
highly organized, masterfully written and structured. Maybe there should be
some kind of announcement on the title page: NOTE TO THE READER. You may
find this book hard going at the beginning, but slog on, persevere, gentle
reader, and your efforts will be rewarded.
Periods in
The Life of the Hero Austerlitz
(1)
His first four years in Prague. Austerlitz has
little recollection of these years, at least not until he returns to
Czechoslovakia some sixty years after he was sent West on a children’s
transport.
(2)
Arrival in Wales in the summer of 1939; here
he lives a gloomy life of isolation with the Protestant clergyman Elias and his
equally distant wife.
(3)
Years in a private school, Stower Grange,
where he is sent at age 12. The is the usual dismal sort of place, a kind of
British institution mired in stupidity and cruelty, but for Austerlitz anything
is better than life with Elias; here at the school he meets the boy, Gerald
Fitzpatrick, who is to become his best friend for life, and he finds almost a
second family in Gerald’s family. This relatively happy period in his life ends
several years later, when Gerald dies in a plane crash, and Austerlitz
“withdraws into himself.” This withdrawal dominates the rest of his life—which,
as described in the novel, involves his sense of being perpetually lost,
searching for his real self.
(4)
A climactic moment comes when the adult
Austerlitz wanders as if by chance into the Liverpool Street Station in London
and there experiences a moment of recollection: “it must have been to this same
waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago.” “When I saw the boy sitting on the bench [a
vision of his younger self] I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the
destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a
terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive,
or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death” (137).
(5)
On another occasion Fate seems to place him in
a bookstore, where he overhears two women on the radio, describing their trip
to Western Europe on the Kindertransport and realizes that on precisely that
same train was riding his self as a child. Fate, by the way—or, rather, ghostly
presences, with which the narrative is rife—play a huge role in Austerlitz,
constantly setting things up so that the hero wanders into the perfect place to
receive enlightenment about his past.
(6)
Next, he, already on old man, returns to
Prague, visits the city archive to search out possible relatives, people with
his unusual surname, and, with amazing ease—again, as if supernatural forces
were guiding his steps—finds the apartment of his old nanny, Vera, his mother’s
best friend, who relates to him the story of his parents, both exterminated by
the Nazis, and of his younger self.
(7)
Having discovered who he is, Austerlitz might
have returned satisfied to his life as a professor in England, but the
revelations about his past in Prague drive him to seek out information on his
dead parents. While in Prague he visits the city of Terezín, site of a
notorious ghetto where his mother had been sent, before being sent on,
apparently to Auschwitz.
(8)
Austerlitz decides to take the same train
journey as his younger self had taken, riding a nightmare train across Germany
to England. He gets off the train and wanders the city of Nurenburg, his first
time ever setting foot in Germany, a country about which he knows nothing,
having his whole life shielded himself from any knowledge of the country or its
people. The hordes of Germans he encounters spook his nervous sensibility, and
the train journey leads to another nervous breakdown, several of which
Austerlitz suffers in the course of the narrative.
(9)
As the novel ends—or rather peters out—Austerlitz
is in Paris, hoping to find some trace there of his dead father, who had
managed to flee Prague before the Germans arrived, but who was later rounded up
in France and exterminated.
d
Austerlitz,
the Name
The boy who goes by a Welsh name, Dafydd Elias—the surname is that
of his adopted parents—learns his true name, Jacques Austerlitz, only as an
adolescent, while a student at the private school of Stower Grange. At first it
strikes him as odd and alien: “I could connect no ideas at all with the word .
. . I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was
convinced that no one else bore that name.” Much later he learns by chance that
Fred Astaire’s real name was Austerlitz, and he runs across the name a few
other times. In school his favorite history teacher, Hillary, makes much of the
Battle of Austerlitz (1805), also called “The Battle of the Three Emperors,”
and featured in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The boy begins taking pride in
the name.
On his visit back to Prague almost sixty years after he left
there, he goes to the municipal archives and finds out the names of all the
Austerlitzes who were living in the city in 1938. Their professions—one is a
rabbi—reveal the name as strictly Jewish. With the list of names and addresses
in hand, Austerlitz sets out to track down his relatives, and he is led
immediately to his own old address, where he finds Vera, the woman who was once
his nanny and the best friend of his mother.
Later we learn that in Paris, where Austerlitz has studied and
lived, there is a gare d’Austerlitz—how appropriate that in a book
teeming with railway stations one has the same name as the hero of the book—and
a quai d’Austerlitz. Most telling of all, there is also in Paris the
Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot, known to the prisoners during the Nazi
occupation as Les Galéries d’Austerlitz, where all the personal
possessions looted from arrested Jews were stored, and where Nazi grandees
would browse with their wives, “choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald
villa, or a Sèvres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano.” Some
reviewers of the book have also pointed out the resemblance in sound between Austerlitz
and Auschwitz, a word whose very sound evokes horror, and the camp where
the mother of the hero presumably dies.
d
Time and
the Living Dead
A recurrent theme throughout the novel is the theme of time. At
their first meeting (p. 8-9) the narrator and Austerlitz encounter a concrete
manifestation of time—later called “the most artificial of all our
inventions”—in the image of the “mighty clock” in the buffet where they sit.
This clock has “a hand some six feet long traveling round a dial which had once
been gilded, but was now blackened by railway soot and tobacco smoke. During
the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time
went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement
of that hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting
it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour
from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s
heart almost stopped.” More evidence here that the doppelgängers of the
narrative are meant to be a double representation of Austerlitz himself—in that
it is difficult to conceive of two men who have just met having this rather
strange mutual perspective on the movements of a clock’s hand.
Austerlitz avoids the whole conception of time, battles against it
throughout the novel. He refuses to wear a watch, rebelling against the idea
that time can run his life, “keeping myself apart from so-called current events
in the hope, as I now think, that time will not pass away, has not passed away,
that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it
once was.”
While a student at Oxford Austerlitz goes with his old history
teacher, Hillary, to visit various dilapidated country houses. In one of them,
Iver Grove, they come upon a billiards room in desuetude for years. “It was as
if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if
the years behind us were still to come, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that
when we were standing in the billiards room of Iver Grove with Ashman, Hillary
remarked on the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a
room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the
succession of the generations.”
It is precisely this state of time held in abeyance that
Austerlitz searches for in his quest for his dead parents. He wants desperately
to believe that they still exist somewhere, and that if he can find the seam
that exists somewhere in time, he can be back at one with them. “I feel more
and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking
according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the
living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I
think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal
in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric
conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can
remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality,
as if I were not there at all.” Another good title for this book: The Man
Who Was Not.
While searching for some trace of his father in Paris, Austerlitz
sometimes imagines that he could still be alive, and still walking the streets
of the city, “just waiting, so to speak, for a good opportunity to reveal
himself. Such ideas infallibly come to me in places that have more of the past
about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and
look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades,
I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the
gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all moments of our
life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only
waiting for us to find our way to them at last . . . that we also have
appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone on before us and is for the
most part extinguished, and we must go there in search of places and people who
have some connection with us on the far side of time.” More good titles for
this book: (1) The Far Side of Time; (2) The Gravitational Field of
Oblivion.
Austerlitz’s perpetual sensation of the fluid boundaries of time,
and of himself attempting to cross those boundaries, is also tied in with his
constant sensation that he is not really alive, or that he is living someone else’s
life instead of his own. “At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made
a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life. Later, on a walk through the
deserted town— [Marienbad in this case, in 1972, but the novel is full of
deserted towns, where ghostly characters promenade]—and up to the fountain
colonnade, I kept feeling as if someone else were walking beside me, or as if
something had brushed against me.” Of course, only later does he discover that
as a small boy he had been in Marienbad with his parents and nanny (in 1938), so
that the presences brushing against him on his second trip there are the ghosts
of his relatives and his younger self.
Ghosts
The tormented Austerlitz believes in ghosts. Late in the novel he
mentions “the suspicion I had always entertained that the border between life
and death is less impermeable than we commonly think.” In the early pages,
describing his life as a boy in Wales, he describes the Welsh cobbler Evan, who
tells him ghost stories, “tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate
untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due them and tried to
return to life.”
Although the boy does not make the connection, later on there is
no doubt that such ghosts include his own dead parents, deprived of their lives
by the Nazis. Austerlitz always has the feeling as a boy that something has
been hidden from him: “Sometimes it was as if I were in a dream and trying to
perceive reality; then again I felt as if an invisible twin brother were
walking beside me, the reverse of a shadow, so to speak.” Much later in the
book (224-25), in reprising the train journey he made as a boy from Prague,
across Germany, to England, he mentions “another idea which had obsessed me
over a long period: the image of a twin brother who had been with me on that
long journey, sitting motionless by the window of the compartment, staring out
into the dark . . . whenever I thought of him I was tormented by the notion
that towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed
in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings.” In this case the twin
could be his younger self, whose memories of Prague he has repressed, but the
idea of the twin also suggests the theme of the doppelgänger (see above) and
the narrator, a kind of twin to Austerlitz.
In describing his wanderings around London in a state of nervous
breakdown, Austerlitz writes in part: “I thought several times that among the
passengers coming toward me in the tiled passages, on the escalators plunging
steeply into the depths, or behind the gray windows of a train just pulling
out, I saw a face known to me from some much earlier part of my life, but I
could never say whose it was. These familiar faces always had something
different from the rest about them, something I might almost call indistinct,
and on occasion they would haunt and disturb me for days on end. In fact, at
this time . . . I began seeing what might be described as shapes and colors of
diminished corporeality through a drifting veil or cloud of smoke, images from
a faded world . . .”
Wherever he goes Austerlitz encounters crowds, swarms of people,
like drops of water in a river, all flowing somewhere, into some ultimate
nullity, as, e.g., in Liverpool Street Station, “one of the darkest and most
sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the underworld,”: “a muffled
babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people
passed in great tides, disembarking from the trains or boarding them, coming
together, moving apart, and being held up at barriers and bottlenecks like
water against a weir.” A major theme of the novel: how our dead refuse to die; the
hordes of ghostly presences in all the crowd scenes suggest the return of the
murdered innocents of the Holocaust, wandering, floating about in their own
grievous nonexistence, in their refusal to accept how their lives were
mercilessly terminated.
Photographs,
Paintings, Schema
Another unusual aspect of the book’s narrative is the way graphic
images are scattered about the text. Already on the second page photographs
begin appearing. Who has taken them? Well, the hero Austerlitz wanders
throughout the whole novel, constantly taking snapshots, but here, at the very
beginning, he has not yet appeared. His alter ego, the narrator, writes of the
“strikingly large eyes” of animals he has seen at the Nocturama, and “the
fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers”; later he mentions
the similarity in looks of Austerlitz and Wittgenstein. So we can only assume
that it is he who inserts into the text (on page 4) the photo of the eyes of a
lemur and an owl, and (on page 5) two photos of a man’s eyes (identified by
some critics as Wittgenstein’s).
Several pages later there are pictures of the Lucerne railway
station and the fire there in 1971. These again, presumably, originate with the
narrator, as do the photographs of the fort at Breendonk and the schema of the
ground plan of the fort. The narrator visits Breendonk twice, once at the
beginning of the novel and again at the end; Austerlitz never visits the place.
The narrator and Austerlitz first meet in 1967, in the waiting
room at Antwerp Centraal Station, and Austerlitz is busy taking photographs at
the time, many of them in connection with his plan to write a book on the
architecture of European buildings. As we are informed on page 7, he has
entrusted “many hundreds of pictures, most of them unsorted,” to the narrator
soon after they meet again in the winter of 1996, and near the end of the book (293)
the narrator comes into possession of Austerlitz’s whole collection of
snapshots. So we can only presume that most of the photos and schema inserted
into the text originate with Austerlitz.
Many of the photographs are rather pointless, and one would think
the book could do just as well without them. Such is the picture of what is,
apparently, the rucksack that Austerlitz always carries, and that of unknown
British aristocrats, one with a parrot on his shoulder—this one takes up two
complete pages in the middle of the book (86-87)—and the photo of two billiard
balls, also encompassing two pages (106-07). At one point a Turner watercolor
is discussed briefly; apparently this is what is reproduced (110)—so blurred as
to be hardly visible (but maybe the blurriness of the figures is the point, in
a book where ghosts are as real as people in flesh).
More congruent with the central themes of the book are snapshots that
Austerlitz takes as he wanders about in search of his dead parents and his own
lost past. Among these are photos of the room where the files are kept in Terezín,
a morose picture of the garbage cans at that former ghetto, and pictures of the
outside of the archive building in Prague—where Austerlitz receives the
information that allows him to rediscover his dead childhood. The main
protagonist of the novel also loves to traipse around cemeteries, constantly
reinforcing his feeling that he is perhaps more at home with the dead than the
living. A gruesome photograph of skeletons appears on p. 131, apparently
depicting what workers found at Broad Street Station, during excavations made
in 1984.
You find yourself wondering where, in actuality, did all of these
pictures and illustrations come from. Did Sebald himself visit all the many
places where scenes in the novel are set, taking photographs? And to what
extent are the photos really of buildings and places of which they purport to
be? Or does it really matter? For, after all, what we are reading is a fiction,
and within a fiction, one supposes, the interpolated graphic images have a
right to be fictitious as well.
When it comes to the pictures supposed to be of actual people, the
fictional quality of the photographs is obvious. In the photo of a rugby team (75),
the blond boy at the far right on the first row—a very German-looking boy, the
ideal of Hitler youth—is identified as Austerlitz in his days of playing rugby
at the private school in Wales. God knows what rugby team this really is. You
wonder if some reader of Sebald’s book in Yorkshire might some day widen his
eyes when he comes to that page and exclaim, “Wait, wait, that’s our Sowerby
Bridge side from 1955, and that blond boy on the right is me.” The point
is that the photo is fictional, as is the photo that Austerlitz finds of his
mother Agáta in the Prague theatrical archives. Once his mother’s best friend,
Vera “immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, as she said, recognized
Agáta as she had been then.” So here we have a real picture of a real, i.e.,
fictitious character in a novel, but who that woman in the photograph really is
remains unknown.
Central to the narrative is the photograph of a boy—young
Austerlitz at age three or four, with an inscription on the back in Czech, in
his grandfather’s hand: “Jacquot Austerlitz, page boy to the Rose Queen.” This
picture, which also serves as the image on the cover on my paperback, depicts
our young hero in February, 1939, about to accompany his mother, an opera
singer, to a masked ball. In staring at the image, Austerlitz, now almost
elderly, feels “the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy 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.” As
if to say: Here I am, looking at you. It’s me, your younger self; now don’t
let this awful thing happen to me, and to my parents. Or if it has already
happened, go back in time and make it NOT happen.
“As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always
felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I
never had the impression more strongly than on that evening when the eyes of
the Rose Queen’s page looked through me.” One more photo appears in the cover
art of Austerlitz, this one on the back of my paperback: a photo of W.G.
Sebald, the author. In viewing the picture of the boy on the front cover and
the author on the back, some readers have jumped to the conclusion that the
writer has fictionalized his own family photographs for use in his book. The
page boy is young Sebald, as is the German-looking rugby player. Not so, says
the critic James Wood, who has worked in Sebald’s literary archive and who
identifies Wittgenstein’s eyes on p. 5. Wood discovered the actual photo of the
page boy in the archive and attests that this is not Sebald. The identity of
the boy has not been established, and may never be. For the purposes of his re-creation
of a world, Sebald has taken an unknown boy and fictionalized him. From now on
the boy in the picture can only be Jacquot Austerlitz.
d
Loss
One major theme of Austerlitz is that of loss. The book
details human lives of loss and loss of human lives. There is so much loss on
earth that it extends, improbably even to the colors of nature, which are
fading away. “Alphonso once told his great-nephew [Gerald] and me that
everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors
had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the
submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” The main
protagonist of the novel, Austerlitz, has lost not only his parents;
paradoxically, he has lost his life in the process of saving it.
Had his mother not sent him on a children’s transport out of
Prague in 1939, he would have perished along with her at the hands of the
Germans. But, despite being saved, he feels lost for the rest of his life,
never knowing exactly who he is, fearful even of finding out about his past,
never able to make social connections. He arrives in England speaking Czech,
then never hears it spoken again. Soon he is speaking English and Welsh, but
his native language is moribund. Here is how he describes its desperate
struggle to survive, comparing the Czech language to a small creature in a
cage: “the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds
which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up
and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and
falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.”
Austerlitz, by the way, is a novel rife with languages.
The protagonist speaks English, Welsh, French, and Czech—which, miraculously,
comes alive again years after it has died, when Vera begins speaking it to him
in Prague. There are passages in the novel in all of these languages, plus in Dutch
and German. Of course, the biggest irony about the book—which reads as a
virulent condemnation of the German people and of everything German—is that it
was written in German. As part of his lifelong efforts to save his sanity,
Austerlitz has avoided learning anything about Germany and cannot read German.
Notwithstanding that, he forces himself to read a long book in German by H.G.
Adler on the Theresienstadt ghetto (Terezín) near Prague, where his mother had
been sent. Learning all the horrific details about the ghetto is already a
nightmare for him. But his struggles with the language, with the long compound
words, “not listed in my dictionary,” could be a self-imposed travail, as if
forcing himself to suffer as did the inmates in the concentration camps. Once again
we recall the suffering reader, to whose number you and I, readers of
Austerlitz, also belong.
By the time Austerlitz reconnects with his nanny Vera in Prague
she is an old woman, but her life has been held in abeyance since the arrest of
her best friend, the mother of Austerlitz, by the Nazis. Since the boy Jacquot
and his mother Agáta had departed her life, Vera “had not truly breathed” and
could barely be said even to be alive. She is a walking, living ghost, like so
many other human beings who drift through the pages of the novel. “Only in
books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint
idea of what it might be like to be alive.” Austerlitz is a novel
treating the loss imposed on innocent people by the Nazi machine, and about the
wraithlike survivors who still walk the streets but whom the Nazis destroyed
years earlier.
The early dislocation of the main hero has made for another great
loss: he has so little self-possession that he constantly wavers on the verge
of a nervous collapse. His first big breakdown comes when he tries to write his
book on architecture and discovers that writing—once his favorite occupation in
his professorial world—no longer is a possibility. Over a period of ten pages
(121-140) comes the best and most convincing description of a nervous breakdown
that I’ve ever read in a novel. Eventually the writer’s block is exacerbated;
not only can he not write, but “even the smallest talk or duty, for instance,
arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power.” One other quotation:
“Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the
other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood,
stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole
gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding
lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the
depths.”
Another breakdown, with severe anxiety attacks, comes after
Austerlitz reprises the long train journey that he had made as a boy from
Prague to London. Parts of the journey include passage through Germany, and
after Austerlitz leaves the train to meander briefly through Nurenburg, another
collapse is inevitable.
d
A Sexless
Novel
For the doppelgängers of the narrative—the narrator and
Austerlitz—not a hint is there of close family attachments over the course of
the whole book. Both apparently are bachelors, and if either of them has ever
had sexual congress with woman or man, the chaste pages of this novel are not about
to be besmirched with a description of that congress. There is a long interlude
describing Austerlitz’s friendship in Wales with Gerald Fitzpatrick, his visits
with Gerald’s family, his becoming almost one of the family—the closest he ever
gets to a family connection. This covers some forty-five pages, replete with
superfluous details on moths, on Gerald’s scientific research, and discussion
of Gerald’s relatives.
This lengthy friendship with Gerald ends when he, as an adult,
dies in a plane crash that devastates Austerlitz. Was this a homosexual
connection? Although Gerald too is never described as having a wife or
children, there is not even a faint hint—in this novel so thoroughly purged of sexuality—that
the friendship was homosexual.
In 1968 Austerlitz first meets the Frenchwoman, Marie de Verneuil,
who, it appears, has a romantic interest in him, and he in her, but nothing
comes of their relationship, due to his total inability to open himself up to
another human being. In reference to their early days together he says, “I
could not bring out the words I should have spoken then.” In the summer of 1938
he travels with Marie, at her invitation, to Marienbad, but in his subconscious
is the buried memory of his trip there with his parents in 1938, and this keeps
him in a state of near collapse throughout the vacation. There is a vague
implication that they slept together in their room at the Palace Hotel, but if
Austerlitz is even capable of the sexual act, we never are told. He explains to
the narrator, “I must be alone, in spite of my longing for her.” Later he
mentions “Marie, whom I lost entirely soon afterwards, by my own fault” (never
explained).
d
The
Fade-Away Ending
As James Wood has written, Austerlitz “seems to leave the book as
randomly and unexpectedly as he enters it.” At the end he is still searching
for traces of his father in Paris. As he tells the narrator, “I am going to
continue looking for my father, and for Marie de Verneuil as well.” A
continuing search for two ghosts, one dead, one living. Although Austerlitz is
gone in the final scenes of the novel, he is, in a sense, still in the book,
since his twin brother, the narrator, perpetuates the same anxious perambulations
characteristic of the hero. At the end of the book the narrator brings the
narrative full circle. He stops off in Antwerp again, to visit the Nocturama.
Is the raccoon with the piece of apple still there? He also makes a second
visit to Breendonk.
Just like Austerlitz he forces himself to look again at one of the
dark places of the Nazi past. Just like Austerlitz he has bad dreams, is
oppressed by the brutality of the buildings. He takes out and reads a book that
Austerlitz has given him. Written by a man named Dan Jacobson, it describes how
this man’s life was saved by emigration in 1920. He, like Austerlitz, returns
to Europe (Lithuania) in search of traces of his dead relatives. Two men whose
lives were saved as children, one (Austerlitz) having nonetheless, lost that
life and lived on as a ghost, the other (Jacobson) having, apparently, made
good use of his lucky break and lived out a successful life in South Africa.
The book’s final irony.
