Austerlitz is the fourth of W.G. Sebald’s great quartet of novels of fractured memory and soul-searching experienced by Germans in the second half of the 20th Century. An unnamed narrator acts as auditor and transcriber of the eponymous character, Jaques Austerlitz. Austerlitz proves to be an uncommonly prolix and illuminating conversationalist. And this lengthy narrative reflects the speaker’s (Austerlitz’s) doubts, haunting memories, and fractured soul. It’s extraordinary, an impressive, nearly overwhelming exhibit of one man’s struggle to piece together his ruined past: it has been splintered—demolished—by one of history’s most ghastly traumas.
The plot’s basic terms have Austerlitz sent to Wales in 1939 at the age of 4, to escape the Anschluss when it extended—illegally—into the Czech territory of Bohemia. The little boy goes to live with a minister named Elias and his sickly wife. In his adopted family he proceeds through his elementary school years, learning English along the way. As his gifts become evident, he is prepared for and goes to a public school to board and prepare for his university education.
As his primary school masters prepare him for this transition, the boy, having grown to the cusp of adolescence as an Anglophone named Daffydd Elias, is told that his name is really Jacques Austerlitz and he was shunted to the UK as part of the Kindertransport, the emergency humanitarian operation to preemptively rescue Jewish children as Nazi Germany annexed vast parts of Europe in the opening days of the war. This new information unmoors the young man, who struggles with his identity and vague, spotty memories which crowd in on him at odd times.
Austerlitz is a novel about this wandering, nearly identity-less soul whose memory and psyche have been shredded by his early history. He suffers breakdowns along the way, passes months in institutions without anything in his memory—it’s utterly blank, until slowly and hauntingly, it returns to him. He clearly stands in for every child and every Jew whose life was shattered by the Holocaust. He travels to what remains of the ghetto where his mother, an opera singer, was imprisoned, and from which she never emerged. His visit, like much of the rest of his travels, is unsatisfactory, and only adds to his disorientation and disillusion.
This feels like Sebald’s other novel/memoirs on the paroxysm of mid-century Europe (Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn) except Austerlitz contains fuller recapitulations of the atrocities of persecution and mass murder than any of the other three. His books rightly belong in the genre of fiction, but certainly contain elements of memoir and autobiography. Taken as a whole this quartet forms a clear and comprehensive rendering of the Holocaust in both symbolic and graphically accurate form. They’re stunning reading, and Austerlitz vies with The Emigrants as chief among them. Do yourself the honor of reading each and immerse yourself in this master’s classic oeuvre.
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