Sent East
James Wood
writes about W.G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz'
IN the
summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author
W.G.
Sebald is visiting Belgium. At the Central Station in Antwerp, he sees
a fellow
traveler, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking
boots,
workman's trousers made of blue calico and a well-made but antiquated
jacket.
He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques
Austerlitz.
The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station
restaurant and
talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholar - he explicates
the
slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by
Antwerp's
Central Station, and talks generally about the history of
fortification. It is
often our mightiest projects, he suggests, which most obviously betray
the
degree of our insecurity.
Austerlitz
and the Sebald-like narrator meet again a few months later, in
Brussels; then,
later still, on the promenade at Zeebrugge. It emerges that Jacques
Austerlitz
is a lecturer at an institute of art history in London, and that his
scholarship is unconventional. He is obsessed with monumental public
buildings,
such as law courts and prisons, railway stations and lunatic asylums,
and his
investigations have swollen beyond any reasonable raison d'être,
'proliferating
in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based
entirely on
his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings'. For
a
while, the narrator visits Austerlitz regularly in London, but they
fall out of
touch until 1996, when they happen to meet again, this time at
Liverpool Street
Station. Austerlitz explains that only recently has he learned the
story of his
life, and he needs the kind of listener that the narrator had been in
Belgium,
30 years before.
And so
Austerlitz begins the story that will gradually occupy the rest of the
book:
how he was brought up in a small town in Wales by foster parents; how
he
discovered, as a teenager, that his true name was not Dafydd Elias but
Jacques
Austerlitz; how he went to Oxford, and then into academic life. Though
clearly
a refugee, for many years he was unable to discover the precise nature
of his
exile until he experienced a visionary moment, in the late 1980s, in
the
Ladies' Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed
for
perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be
demolished,
to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the
space
contains 'all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and
extinguished
fears and wishes I had ever entertained'. He suddenly sees, in his
mind's eye,
his foster parents, 'but also the boy they had come to meet', and he
realizes
that he must have arrived at this station a half-century ago.
In the
spring of 1993, having suffered a nervous breakdown in the meantime,
Austerlitz
has another visionary experience, this time in a Bloomsbury books hop.
The
bookseller is listening to the radio, which features two women
discussing the
summer of 1939, when, as children, they had come on the ferry Prague to
England,
as part of the Kinder-transport: 'Only then did I know beyond any doubt
that
these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well,' Austerlitz
tells
the narrator. The mere mention of 'Prague' impels Austerlitz to the
Czech
capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny, Vera Rysanova,
and
uncovers the stories of his parents' abbreviated lives. His father,
Maximilian
Aychenwald, escaped the Nazis in Prague by leaving for Paris; but, we
learn at
the end of the book, he was eventually captured and interned in late
1942, in
the French camp of Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His mother,
Agata
Austerlitz, stayed on in Prague, insouciantly confident, but was
rounded up and
sent to the Terezin ghetto (better known by its German name of
Theresienstadt)
in December 1942. Of the final destination of Maximilian and Agata, we
are not
told, but infer the worst: Vera tells us only that Agata was 'sent
east' from
Terezin, in September 1944.
This short
recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism
to
Sebald's novel, and I offer it only in the spirit of orientation. It
leaves
out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to
offer an
ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how
Sebald makes
Austerlitz's story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader
must
impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader, is involved
in a
journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate
frustration of
detection, the perpetuation of an enigma. By the end, we certainly know
a great
deal about Jacques Austerlitz - about the tragic turns of his life, his
family
background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdowns but it
can't be
said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not
a self.
He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and
indeed
seems to leave the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered
it.
Sebald
deliberately layers his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to
get close
to. Jacques tells his story to the narrator, who then tells his story
to us,
thus producing the book's distinctive repetitive tagging, a kind of
parody of
the source attribution we encounter in a newspaper: almost every page
has a
'said Austerlitz' on it, and sometimes the filters of narration are
denser
still, as in the following phrase, which reports a story of
Maximilian's, via
Vera Rysanova, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: 'From
time to
time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the
tale of
how once, after a trade-union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of
1933 ..
.' Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas
Bernhard,
who also influenced Sebald's diction of extremism. Almost every
sentence in
this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: 'As usual
when I
go down to London on my own,' the narrator tells us in a fairly typical
passage, 'a kind of dull despair stirred within me on that December
morning.'
When Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay
where they
are, clinging to a wall, never moving 'until the last
breath is out of their bodies, and indeed
they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after
death.' In
Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from
comic,
ranting rage, and a tendency to circle obsessively around madness and
suicide.
Sebald takes some of Bernhard's wildness, and estranges it -first, by
muffling
it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: 'Had I realized at the time that
for
Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other
hand his
whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration,
I would
probably have waited more patiently.' Second, Sebald makes his diction
mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Note the slightly
quaint,
Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: 'until the last breath
is out
of their bodies ... the place where they came to grief'.
In all his fiction,
Sebald works this archaic strain (often reminiscent of the 19th century
Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange and seemingly
impossible
composite: a mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His
characters and
narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in
gloomy,
inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where 'not a living soul
stirred'.
Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness,
dread
and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness is past-haunted; the text is
constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool
Street
Station, Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is
built on the
site of Bedlam: 'I felt at this time,' he tells the narrator, 'as if
the dead were
returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with
their
strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.' In Wales, the young
Jacques
had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler
had told
the boy of those dead who had been 'struck down by fate untimely, who
knew they
had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life'.
These
ghostly returnees, Evan said, could be seen in the street: 'At first
glance
they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their
faces
would blur or flicker slightly at the edges.' In the curiously empty
village of
Terezin, not far from Prague, Austerlitz seems to see the old Jewish
ghetto, as
if the dead were still alive, 'crammed into those buildings and
basements and
attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down the stairs,
looking out
of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and alleys,
and
even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air,
hatched
with grey as it was by the fine rain'.
This is both
a dream of survival and a dread of it, a haunting. To bring back the
dead,
those 'struck down by fate untimely' - Jacques's parents, say, or the
victims
of Theresienstadt - would be a miraculous resurrection, a reversal of
history;
yet, since this is impossible, the dead can 'return' only as mute
witnesses,
judging us for our failure to save them. Those resurrected dead at
Terezin,
standing in 'silent assembly', sound very much like a large court,
standing in
judgment on us. Perhaps, then, the guilt of survival arises not just
from the
solitude of success (the 'success' of having been lucky, of having
outlived the
Nazis), or the irrational horror that one's survival involved someone
else's
death (an irrationality Primo Levi explores in his work). There is also
guilt
at the idea that the dead are at our mercy, that we can choose to
remember or
forget them. This is finely caught in a stray passage by Adorno, in an
essay on
Mahler written in 1936: 'So our memory is the only help that is left to
them
[the dead]. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is
like
someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone
whose life
they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.'
Saving the
dead - that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz, and
it is
both Austerlitz's quest, and Sebald's too. The novel is like the
antique shop
seen by Austerlitz in Terezin; it is full of old things, many of them
reproduced in the photographs in the text: buildings, an old rucksack,
books
and paper records, a desk, a staircase, a messy office, a porcelain
statue,
gravestones, the roots of trees, a stamp, the drawing of a
fortification. The
photographs of these old things are themselves old things - the kind of
shabby,
discarded picture postcards you might find at a weekend flea market,
and which
Sebald greatly enjoyed collecting. If the photograph is itself an old,
dead
thing, then what of the people caught- frozen - by it? (Flickering
slightly at
the edges, as Evan the cobbler describes the dead.) Aren't they also
old, dead
things? That is why Sebald forces together animate and inanimate
objects in his
books, and it is why the inanimate objects greatly overwhelm the
animate ones
in Austerlitz. Amid the photographs of buildings and gravestones, it is
a shock
to come upon a close-up of Wittgenstein's eyes, or a photograph of the
rugby
team at Jacques's school. The human seems to have been reified by time,
and
Sebald knowingly reserves an entire page for his shocking photograph of
skulls
in mud (supposedly skeletons found near Broad Street Station in 1984,
during
excavations). Towards becoming these old things, these old headstones
in mud,
we are all travelling. (In the North, a cemetery used to be called a
'bone
yard', the phrase somehow conveying the sense of our bones as mere
lumber or
junk.)
Yet some are
travelling faster than others, and with more doomed inevitability, and
here is
surely a distinction between, on the one hand, the photograph of
Jacques's
rugby team, and on the other, the photograph of his mother, or the
photograph
(itself a still from a film) of the imprisoned inhabitants of
Theresienstadt.
Barthes says in Camera Lucida, a book
with which Austerlitz is in deep dialogue, that photographs shock us
because
they so finally represent what has been. We look at most old
photographs, and
we think: 'That person is going to die, and is in fact now dead.' We
shudder
over photographs, Barthes writes, as over a catastrophe that has
already occurred:
'Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this
catastrophe.' This effect is surely heightened when we look at
photographs of
victims of the Nazis - whether being rounded up, or just walking along
a street
in a ghetto. In such cases, we think: 'They know they are going to die,
and
they are certainly already dead, and there is nothing we can do about
it.' As
the stolid rugby players do not, these victims seem to be looking at us
(even
when they are not directly looking at the camera), and asking us to do
something. This is what gives the photograph of young Jacques a
particular
intensity. The boy in his party cape, with the wedge of unruly fair
hair, looks
out at the camera not imploringly but confidently, if a little
skeptically. Yet
understandably, Austerlitz, looking at this photograph of himself, from
a time
when he was still in Prague and still had parents and had not yet been
put on
the train to London, tells the narrator that he feels 'the piercing,
inquiring
gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting
in the
grey light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge
and avert
the misfortune lying ahead of him'. Austerlitz was rescued by the
Kinder-transport, and so did indeed avert the misfortune lying ahead of
him.
But he could not avert the misfortune lying ahead of his parents, and
so, even
in middle age, he is forever frozen in the attitude of that picture,
always
waiting to avert misfortune. He resembles the little porcelain horseman
that he
saw in the window of the antique shop in Terezin, a statuette of a man
rescuing
a young girl, arrested in a 'moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever
just
occurring'. Is Austerlitz the rescuer, or the one awaiting rescue?
Both,
surely.
There is, of
course, a further dimension to Sebald's use of photographs: they are
fictional.
In the very area of historical writing and historical memory most
pledged to
the sanctity of accuracy, of testimony and fatal fact, Sebald launches
his
audacious campaign: his use of photographs relies on, and plays off,
the
tradition of verity and reportage. We are lulled into staring at these
photographs, and saying to ourselves: 'There is Jacques Austerlitz,
dressed in
his cape. And there is his mother!' We say this in part because
photographs
make us want to say it, but also because Sebald mixes these photographs
of
people with his undeniably accurate and veridical photographs of
buildings (for
instance, the photograph of the Breendonk fortress, in Belgium, where
Jean Amery
was tortured by the Nazis, and which the narrator visits, is a
photograph of
the actual building). On the other hand, we also know, perhaps
unwillingly,
that Jacques Austerlitz is a fictional character, and that therefore
the
photograph of the little boy cannot be a photograph of him.
Sebald's
photographs of humans in this book can be said to be fictional twice
over: they
are photographs of invented characters; and they are often photographs
of
actual people who once lived but who are now lost to history. Take the
photograph of the rugby team, with Austerlitz supposedly sitting on the
front
row, at the far right. Who are these young men? Where did Sebald get
hold of
this faded group portrait? And is it likely that any of them are still
alive?
What is certain is that they have passed into obscurity. We don't look
at the
portrait and say to ourselves: 'There's the young Winston Churchill, in
the
middle row.' The faces are unknown, forgotten. They are, precisely, not
Wittgenstein's famous eyes. The photograph of the little boy in his
cape is
even more poignant. I have read reviews of this book that suggest it is
a
photograph of the young Sebald - such is our desire, I suppose, not to
let tl1e
little boy pass into orphaned anonymity. But the photograph is not of
the young
Sebald; I came across it in Sebald's literary archive at Marbach,
outside
Stuttgart, and discovered just an ordinary photographic postcard, with,
on the
reverse side, 'Stockport: 30p' written in ink. (Sebald once told me, in
an
interview, that about 30 per cent of the photographs in The Emigrants
had an
entirely fictitious relationship to their supposed subjects.) The boy's
identity has disappeared (as has the woman whose photograph is shown as
Agata,
the boy's mother), and has disappeared - it might be said - even more
thoroughly than Hitler's victims, since they at least belong to blessed
memory,
and their murders cry out for public memorial, while the boy has
vanished into
the private obscurity and silence that will befall most of us. In
Sebald's
work, and in this book especially, we experience a vertiginous
relationship to
a select number of photographs of humans: these pictures are explicitly
part of
the story that we are reading, which is about saving the dead (the
story of
Austerlitz) j and they are also part of a larger story that is not
found in the
book (or only by implication), which is also about saving the dead.
These
people stare at us, as if imploring us to rescue them from the banal
amnesia of
existence. But if Austerlitz certainly cannot save his dead parents, we
certainly cannot save the little boy. To 'save' him would mean saving
every
person who dies, would mean saving everyone who has ever died in
obscurity.
This, I think, is the double meaning of Sebald's words about the boy:
it is
Austerlitz, but it is also the boy from Stockport (as it were) who
stares out
asking us to 'avert the misfortune' of his demise, which of course we
cannot
do.
If the
little boy is lost to us, so is Jacques Austerlitz. Like his
photograph, he has
also become a thing, and this is surely part of the enigma of his
curious last
name. He has a Jewish last name, which can be found in Czech and
Austrian
records; Austerlitz correctly tells us that Fred Astaire's father was
born with
the surname Austerlitz ('Fritz' Austerlitz was born in Austria, and had
converted from Judaism to Catholicism). But Austerlitz is not primarily
the
name of a person but of a famous battle, and a well-known Paris train
station.
The name is unfortunate for Jacques, because its historical resonance
continually pulls us away from his Jewishness (from his individuality)
and
towards a world-historical reference that has nothing much to do with
him.
Imagine a novel in which almost every page featured the phrase,
'Waterloo
said', or 'Agincourt said'. Sebald plays with this oddity most
obviously in the
passage when the young Austerlitz first finds out his true surname, at
school.
'What does it mean?' Jacques asks, and the headmaster tells him that it
is a
small place in Moravia, site of a famous battle. During the next school
year,
the battle of Austerlitz is discussed, and turns out to be one of the
set
pieces of Mr Hilary, the romantic history teacher who makes such an
impression
on the young Jacques. 'Hillary told us, said Austerlitz, how at seven
in the
morning the peaks of the highest hills emerged from the mist ... The
Russian
and Austrian troops had come down from the mountainsides like a slow
avalanche.' At this moment, when we encounter the familiar 'said
Austerlitz',
we are briefly unsure if the character or the battle itself is speaking.
Go back, for
a minute, to the headmaster’s reply, because it is one of the most
quietly
breathtaking moments in the novel, and can stand as an emblem of
Sebald's
powers of reticence and understatement. The headmaster, Mr
Penrith-Smith (a
nice joke, because Penrith-Smith combines both an English place-name,
and the
most anonymous, least curious surname in English) has told Jacques that
he is
not called Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz. Jacques asks, with the
enforced
politeness of the English schoolboy, 'Excuse me, sir, but what does it
mean?'
To which Mr Penrith-Smith replies: 'I think you will find it is a small
place
in Moravia, site of a famous battle, you know.' Jacques asks the
question that could
be said to be the question of the entire novel, and the headmaster
refers him
only to the battle of 1805 between the French and the Austrians.
Consider
everything that is omitted, or repressed, from this reply. The
headmaster might
have said that Austerlitz is a Jewish name, and that Jacques is a
refugee from
the Nazis. He might, with the help of Mr Hilary's expertise, have added
that
Austerlitz, near Brno in what was then Czechoslovakia, once had a
thriving
Jewish population, and that perhaps Jacques's name derived from that
community.
He might have mentioned that in 1941 the Germans established the ghetto
of
Theresienstadt, north of Prague (named after Empress Maria Theresa, who
in 1744
issued an edict limiting the number of Jewish families in Moravia), and
that
the remaining Jews of Austerlitz almost certainly perished there, or
later in
Auschwitz, where most of the inmates of Theresienstadt were eventually
taken.
He might have added that Jacques's parents were unlikely to be alive.
But Mr
Penrith-Smith says none of this, and Jacques Austerlitz will spend the
rest of
the novel trying to find his own answer to his own question. Instead,
the
headmaster's bland reply turns Jacques into the public past, into a
date. What
does it mean? The answer Jacques receives is, in effect: '1805, that's
what it
means.' Of all the rescues that the novel proposes, the most difficult
may be
this one: to restore to Jacques Austerlitz the individuality of his
name and
experience, to rescue the living privacy of the surname 'Austerlitz'
from the
dead, irrelevant publicity of the place-name 'Austerlitz'. Jacques
should not
be a battle, or a railway station, or a thing. Ultimately, we cannot
perform
this rescue, and the novel does not let us. The private and the public
names keep
on intertwining, and herein lies the power of the novel's closing
pages. We
helplessly return to the Gare d'Austerlitz, from where Jacques's father
may
have left Paris. In the new Bibliothèque Nationale, Jacques learns that
the
very building rests on the ruins of a huge wartime warehouse, where the
Germans
'brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of
Paris'. It
was known as the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot. Everything our
civilization
produced was brought here, the library official says, and often
pilfered by
German officers - ending up in, say, a 'Grunewald villa' in Berlin.
This
knowledge is like a lateralization of the well-known dictum of
Benjamin’s, that
there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a
document
of barbarism. Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on
top of
history's depository, Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins:
and
again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to
become
simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts
and dates,
not a human being. And throughout the novel, present but never spoken,
never
written - it is the best act of Sebald's withholding - is the other
historical
name that shadows the name Austerlitz, the name that begins and ends
with the
same letters, the name which we sometimes misread Austerlitz as, the
place that
Agata Austerlitz was almost certainly 'sent east' to in 1944, and the
place
that Maximillian Aychenwald was almost certainly sent to in 1942 from
the
French camp in Gurs:
Auschwitz.
+
James Wood
London Review of Books 6 Oct 2011