Austerlitz

Austerlitz, the final novel written by German-English author W.G. Sebald. Published in 2001, Austerlitz, like all Sebald’s works, explores themes of the Holocaust, memory, time, and identity. It received several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who had left Prague as a young child as part of the Kindertransport and was brought up as Daffyd Elias by an austere Welsh minister and his wife. After discovering that he is actually the son of Jews from Prague, Austerlitz sets out to explore his roots in Europe. The book opens with a chance encounter in a railway station in Antwerp, Belgium, between its unnamed narrator and Austerlitz. The ensuing discussion between the men at the station, focusing on the relationship between architecture and historical time, lasts for several hours, and then is rejoined as the two meet up repeatedly, and always by chance, over some 30 years. Their relationship remains somewhat distant, however, until Austerlitz decides to tell the narrator his life story, a story that he is still in the process of discovering and remembering.

The novel combines fiction, documentation, and photographs and proceeds in a nonlinear narrative full of digressions. It lacks chapter breaks and paragraphs, and its sentences sometimes continue for several pages. It seeks, like Austerlitz himself, to reclaim a time lost in the shadows of World War II—a time made inaccessible by the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. For Austerlitz, the recovery of these memories begins when he wanders into a disused room in London’s Liverpool Street Station and has a vague feeling that he has been there before. He realizes that the general feeling of desolation that plagues him in his daily life might come from being cut off from his origins and that it is necessary for him to learn and uncover his past. The novel ends when Austerlitz leaves the narrator for the last time and moves to Paris in an attempt to learn more about his father, so that Austerlitz’s journey of discovery continues past the end of the story. The narrative style performs with an uncanny fidelity the process of remembering, of diving into the darkness of repressed personal and cultural memory.

Austerlitz was translated into English in 2001, the same year it appeared in German. It has been ranked by critics as among the best books of the 21st century.