Austerlitz (novel)

infobox Book |
name = Austerlitz
title_orig =
translator = Anthea Bell


image_caption =
author = W. G. Sebald
cover_artist = Andy Carpenter
country = Germany
language = German
genre = Historical novel
publisher = Random House, C. Hanser
release_date = 2001
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-375-50483-4

"Austerlitz" is the final novel of W. G. Sebald, published in 2001. It is one of the most significant German language works of fiction for the period since the Second World War.

Plot summary

Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his life history. He arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from a Czechoslovakia threatened by Hitler's Nazis. He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Calvinist preacher and his sickly wife, and spent his childhood in Mid Wales before attending a minor public school. His foster parents died, and Austerlitz learned something of his background. After school he attended university and became an academic who is drawn to, and began his research in, the study of European architecture. After a nervous breakdown, Austerlitz visited Prague where he met a close friend of his lost parents. The elderly lady tells him the fate of his mother, an actress who was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. From Prague Austerlitz traveled to Theriesenstadt. Here we learn about the disappearance of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

The novel shifts to contemporary Paris as Austerlitz seeks out any remaining evidence about the fate of his father. Sebald explores the ways in which collections of records, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France or National Library of France, entomb memories. During the novel we have been taken on a guided tour of a lost European civilisation: a world of fortresses, railway stations, concentration camps and libraries.

In terms of the subject matter, the novel shares some of the concerns of "La disparition" (A Void), a novel by the French writer Georges Perec that also alludes to the Holocaust. The historical aftereffects linking Europe's tragic wartime experiences under the Nazis with those living in the present are also featured in the German novels "Im Krebsgang" (2002) (English translation: Crabwalk), by Günter Grass, and Marcel Beyer's 1995 'Flughunde.'

Formal experimentation

Formally, the novel is notable because of the lack of paragraphing, a digressive style, the blending of fact and fiction, and the inclusion of a set of mysterious and evocative photographs, scattered throughout the book, that enhances the melancholy message of the text. Many of these features characterize Sebald's other works of fiction, including "The Emigrants", "The Rings of Saturn" and "Vertigo".

Editions

* "Austerlitz". Translated by Anthea Bell. New York : Random House, 2001.
* "Austerlitz". München: C. Hanser, 2001.