A Haunting Magnum Opus

“Our concern with history… is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” Transcending these images is a dangerous prospect. By staring beyond the stills of history, we risk destabilising not only our ideas about the past but also our own place within that narrative. Despite this, W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz” stages such a staring contest, in which we—along with the protagonist—are challenged not to look away when those images dissolve, as devastating as the truth might turn out to be.

The novel follows Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who sets out to uncover his origins and early childhood—a curious void in his memory—after suffering a mental breakdown. His journey leads him to confront the dark heart of European history. In this, his final novel, author W.G. Sebald synthesizes multiple literary genres: “Austerlitz” is at once autobiography, history, travelogue, and meditation. It’s publication in 2001—mere months before his death in a car accident—echoed the sentiment of closure, or the struggle for some semblance thereof, after a century of bloodshed and horror in Europe.

The book is structured around the encounters between an elusive narrator and Austerlitz, to whom Austerlitz tells his story in instalments, “speaking not so much to me as to himself,” says the narrator. So marginal is the narrator’s presence in the text that his voice is absorbed by his interlocutor’s story, which is reported without quotation marks, so that the two figures become virtually indistinguishable over the course of the narrative. Their chance meetings—in a Belgian cafe, on a ferry crossing the English Channel, in a London hotel bar—are marked by an eerie sense of inevitability: “our paths kept crossing,” says the narrator, “in a way that I still find hard to understand.”

These meetings, and the scenes of Austerlitz’s story, often take place at twilight, or to use Sebald’s favourite phrase, in “the gathering dusk.” We are reminded of Henry James’s preference for that time in the day when shadows begin to lengthen—what he called “the divine dusk.” But while for James this atmosphere was one in which history glimmered, offering up its inspiration, for Sebald, the impending darkness serves as a metaphor for the inscrutability of the past and the impossibility of self-knowledge. The narrator first realises this during his visit to the Breendonk fortress in Belgium, which was transformed into a concentration camp by the Nazis: “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 every 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.”

Sebald’s response to this philosophical proposition is at once local, in telling the story of one man’s struggle to prevent his own history from “lapsing into oblivion,” and metaphysical, in challenging our assumptions about the linear nature of time. Perhaps, says Austerlitz, “all the moments of time have co-existed simultaneously… past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them.”

But if past events are to be as present now to us as they once were, Austerlitz discovers, we must also apprehend the sufferings of those who have lived before us. And while his own sense of personal integrity depends urgently upon this historical exercise, it engenders, paradoxically, “disintegration of the personality.”

It is against this background that Austerlitz realizes “that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world,” and undergoes his journey through Europe: travelling from the Czech Republic to England via Germany by train, tracing the route of the Kinder-transport which spirited him from Prague as a five-year old boy in 1939. After learning that his mother was interred at a camp in Terezín in 1942, he visits the town’s Ghetto Museum, and is henceforth tormented by images of “the bricks of the fortification walls… the endless lists of names… the grass growing between the cobblestones.”

From the moment we learn that Austerlitz was evacuated to England, the Holocaust haunts almost every page of the novel, but the novel never lapses into hysteria. This is partly attributable to Sebald’s deliberate prose style—described by critic James Wood as “densely agitated”—which renders even the most psychologically disordered states with forensic lucidity: “reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement,” says Austerlitz, describing his most serious breakdown.

Moreover, the genocide in which we presume Austerlitz’s mother was murdered (this is never stated explicitly) is manifest in the fragments of evidence that Austerlitz finds in archives and books, and in the unattributed photographs that punctuate the pages of the novel. This is clearest towards the book’s end, in an extended description of a film made by the Nazis on the occasion of the Red Cross’s inspection of Theresienstadt in 1944, mendaciously depicting the prisoners of the camp enjoying life in what resembles a holiday resort. Austerlitz slows the film down, and attempts—unsuccessfully—to identify his mother among the groups of prisoners. It is the muteness of these historical documents—the disparity between their silence and the horror which they record—that induces psychological torpor in Austerlitz, and allow us, as readers, to comprehend the meaning of his trauma.

Shortly after “Austerlitz” was published, Sebald died in a car crash, aged 57. At the time, he was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements, including the meditative travelogue “The Rings of Saturn,” and “The Emigrants,” which tells the story of four individuals who—like Austerlitz—managed to escape the Holocaust but were forever haunted by the fate of those who did not.

But while “Austerlitz” shares these works’ fixation on uncovering the histories of forgotten people and places, its odyssey is a darker, more troubling one, and its construction more deliberate. The novel is preoccupied with the line that separates being from non-being, a line that blurs and trembles when we realize the contingency of our present existence on the now-invisible events of the past. For this reason, it is tempting to read “Austerlitz” as Sebald’s swan song, haunted, as it is, by one man’s apprehension of the inevitable obliteration of all things by time. But it is more certainly his masterpiece.