AUSTERLITZ

Novel by W.G. Sebald, 2001

W.G. Sebald's final novel, Austerlitz, published in German and in English translation in 2001, tells the story of a Jewish child who escapes the Holocaust by being part of a children's transport to Britain. He thus gains his life by circumventing the Nazi occupation, but he loses his identity when his foster parents withhold his real name and origin. As an adult, in his quest for self-knowledge, Austerlitz recounts his stark childhood in Wales, his adolescence in boarding schools and college, his work as an architectural historian, and finally his wrenching search for his identity in Europe.

In 1939 four-and-a-half-year-old Jacquot Austerlitz is put aboard a children's transport by his mother, Agáta Austerlitzová. She acts out of fear and love, desperate to save him from the Nazis. Leaving behind his mother and his mother's best friend, Vera Ryšanová, who has been his loving nanny, Austerlitz travels by train with the other children. They pass through the German Reich and The Netherlands to Holland, where they board the ferry Prague. In England his journey continues, by train again, to London where, surrounded by strangers whose words he does not understand, young Austerlitz loses his past among the omnipresent shadows of a strange land. His foster parents, Emyr Elias, a Calvinist preacher, and his timid wife take Austerlitz to their home in Bala, Wales, a cold setting that is physically and emotionally isolated. Austerlitz begins life over as their child, with a new name, Dafydd Elias, and a new language. During his 12th year, when his foster mother dies, Austerlitz enters a boarding school, where the activity and opportunities to learn stimulate his physical and intellectual life. Eventually he makes a close friend, Gerald, whose mother and uncle provide a sense of family during Austerlitz's remaining years of adolescence. It is also at this time that Austerlitz learns his true name.

As Austerlitz goes through adulthood, he shuns efforts to trace his origins. Apart from friendships with Gerald and a teacher who encourages him in his studies, Austerlitz never forms close relationships. He avoids thinking deeply about his identity and cannot express his emotions to the one woman in his life, Marie de Verneuil. When Gerald dies, Austerlitz's emotional health begins to decline until, in 1992, he suffers a total breakdown and finds himself hospitalized. Finally he hears a broadcast about children's transports prior to the war, and they arouse fleeting memories. In particular the narrative of a woman from Prague inspires him to embark on a journey of self-discovery. In Prague he finds his aged caregiver, Vera, whose tales reconstruct the story of Austerlitz's mother, Agáta, and the secret of his own origin. Austerlitz discovers that Agáta was sent from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1941 and then to her death in 1944. He also learns that his father, Maximilian Aychenwald, had gone to Paris before its occupation but that Agáta had never heard from him again. Austerlitz then travels to decrepit Terezín, where his mother spent her final years as a prisoner in the Nazi-constructed ghetto. Using books and a Nazi propaganda film about Terezín, Austerlitz investigates the circumstances of his mother's fate. As the novel ends, he plans to learn more about his father and to find Marie, the woman whose love Austerlitz could not accept earlier in his life.

Austerlitz's life resembles the lives of characters from Sebald's The Emigrants (1996). As in that work and others by Sebald, characters who physically avoid the Holocaust do not manage to escape it emotionally. There are further similarities between this and other works by Sebald in style. Similar to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Sebald's novels make use of details from the present to develop the characters' past lives. The minutiae of observations trigger feelings of uncertainty and hazy recollections in Austerlitz throughout his life until his odyssey brings him back to the city of his birth. The haphazard odyssey, comprised of several journeys, provides a narrative structure for the novel, which utilizes the characteristics of memoir and travel book.

All of these events in Austerlitz's life are recounted by a nameless narrator whose meetings with Austerlitz, some random and some planned, take place 20 years apart. Similar to the intent listener on the ship in Elie Wiesel's The Accident, the narrator provides catharsis for the estranged Holocaust victim. But unlike the unwilling repository of painful memories in Wiesel's work, Sebald's listener relishes every word that Austerlitz speaks and desires to hear more. The meetings occur internationally, in keeping with the travel motif established as part of Austerlitz's life, whose work as an architectural historian takes him to cities throughout Europe. Many times on his journeys Austerlitz has a sense of déjá vu without realizing that, on his childhood journey from Prague to London, he had actually seen the sights that stir his memory. Austerlitz describes each of these locations in explicit detail to his acquaintance who, in turn, writes about their conversations in memoir fashion. The stories of Austerlitz's youth weave in and out of the descriptions of the places he has been and the intriguing accounts of books he has read, museums he has visited, natural phenomenon he has studied, and existential thoughts he has had about the passing of time.

As a further distinguishing trait, the book includes photography that illustrates places and people Austerlitz has described. These photos have been included, ostensibly, because as Austerlitz embarks on the last segment of his quest he hands the narrator the key to his London home and offers him access to the photos he has acquired of all the places he has been. The narrator then uses these photos to document Austerlitz's life and to support recollections of the conversations. Their effect is to add such validity to the work that a reader could believe he is reading a nonfiction memoir or a travel book. They also engage the reader so that, by the end, Sebald has succeeded in extending to the reader the narrator's fondness and hope for Austerlitz.