W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Penguin Books, 2002; ET Anthea Bell)

The premise is simple. An unnamed narrator recalls his meetings and conversations, over many years in many places, with Austerlitz, a historian of architecture who has a special interest in railway stations. Austerlitz recalls his life, or rather what he did not remember of his life, and has had to learn from others. As the years advance so does Austerlitz’s knowledge, and he discloses to the narrator, in the piecemeal way in which he has learned it, what he has uncovered about his origins in Europe before World War II and the destiny of his family. Austerlitz does not only relate his journey, he engages with its meaning, exploring the significance of the details of his past and the ways in which he perceives and processes them.

Memory is the major concern of Sebald’s oeuvre, and Austerlitz is an exercise in the recovery of memory. It is a working out of the question he posed in his 1997 poetics lectures in Zürich, later expanded into the essay On The Natural History of Destruction - the voluntary amnesia of the German people concerning their own sufferings in World War II. Austerlitz’s forgetting, or rather the non-practice of memory, has been a deliberate act of resistance; recalling with difficulty a visit to Marienbad in 1972 he ventures, ‘I know that I often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the rest rooms, which did me good in one way but in another way had weakened the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory’ (pp. 300-01).

But memory emerges nevertheless, in response to places, objects, banalities, Proust’s cakecrumbs in a spoonful of tea. Austerlitz comes to know his history not as a series of confrontations with revelation but as a journey of realisation, a becoming aware of sense memories, becoming mindful of images submerged just beyond reach; artefacts whose tactility is so tenuous that recollection, and the expression of it, are inevitably fallible. Austerlitz decides to assemble a book by rewriting old essays and fragments, but is struck by the futility of trying to recapture the immediacy of his original inspiration (p. 171). Language itself fails:

All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us. The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence – the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility – now seemed to me nothing but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise. (p. 175)

When a visit to a derelict waiting room in Liverpool Street station evokes a significant memory Austerlitz is unable to articulate his reaction: ‘As so often, said Austerlitz, I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending in me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand.’ (pp. 193-94).

If the apparently concrete medium of language fails us, how reliable is a memory mediated through hearsay? We see a history constructed from memories within memories, transmitted first, second, third hand: ‘From time to time, so Věra recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once…’ (p. 237) The narrator tells us what Austerlitz recalled of what Věra recalled of what Maximilian recalled, a chain of increasingly weaker links. How firm can be the identity constructed on such fallibility?

Sebald is a master of the beautifully-constructed sentence. I found myself reading the following over and over:

How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. (p. 172)

And while writing this piece I have been doing it again. But the joy one derives from examples like this is almost incidental to the overwhelming impression of flow. The narrator records ‘the drift of [Austerlitz’s] ideas and the nature of his observations and comments.’ (p. 170). This discourse does not conveniently fall into conventional patterns of division; it simply streams, from episode to episode without interruption, so that if the reader looks for conventional divisions they will find that the book is composed of only four paragraphs. The sentences have the flow of conversation, and assume the concentration, the aptitude for listening, that one takes (or should take) into these encounters. Sebald’s ability to maintain clarity over a long sentence constructed of many clauses is virtuosic. Several times I found myself getting to the end of a sentence with a sense of surprise and pleasure that he had not let me lose the thread in spite of the interpolations. Try this:

When Austerlitz had brought the tea tray in and was holding slices of white bread on a toasting fork in front of the blue gas flames, I said something about the incomprehensibility of mirror images, to which he replied that he often sat in this room after nightfall, staring at the apparently motionless spot of light reflected out there in the darkness, and when he did so he inevitably thought of a Rembrandt exhibition he had seen once, many years ago, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where he had not felt inclined to linger before any of the large-scale masterpieces which had been reproduced over and over again, but instead stood for a long time looking at a small painting measuring at most nine by twelve inches, from the Dublin collection, as far as he remembered, which according to its label showed the Flight into Egypt, although he could make out neither Mary and Joseph, nor the child Jesus, nor the ass, but only a tiny flicker of fire in the middle of the gleaming black varnish of the darkness which, said Austerlitz, he could see in his mind’s eye to this day. (p 169)

And the most virtuosic is his description of the ghetto created by the Nazis for the Jews in Theresienstadt during the war, a single sentence extending over twelve pages (pp. 331-42). (Take that, Proust!)

Perhaps to overcome the fallibility of language, Sebald illustrates his novels with photographs, maps, diagrams and other graphic material. At first glance I rejected the pictures as an interesting but supplementary exercise. I am accustomed to text, and would rather have a map to place everything in relation than an image to conflict what I already see in my mind. But… Sebald wants us to understand, and because language cannot convey everything, he tries to engage us at a non-linguistic level. Take for instance one of Austerlitz’s discursions on architecture:

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At first we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which is in itself a form of dawning horror… (p. 23)

Some pages later, to illustrate its ‘singular monstrosity’, Sebald blesses us with a photograph (p. 35). And I recognised the building, and I remembered seeing it while cruising into Brussels station on the Thalys, and feeling repelled by its Speerian massiveness, and thinking that the graffiti by the railway tracks was far more attractive and that the scaffolding around the tower was an act of grace by the city masters to protect the sensibilities of visitors. And I understood Sebald’s point completely.