Word: austerlitz
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...response to this philosophical proposition is at once local, in telling the story of one man’s struggle to prevent his own history from “lapsing into oblivion,” and metaphysical, in challenging our assumptions about the linear nature of time. Perhaps, says Austerlitz, “all the moments of time have co-existed simultaneously… past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them...
...past events are to be as present now to us as they once were, Austerlitz discovers, we must also apprehend the sufferings of those who have lived before us. And while his own sense of personal integrity depends urgently upon this historical exercise, it engenders, paradoxically, “disintegration of the personality...
...against this background that Austerlitz realizes “that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world,” and undergoes his journey through Europe: travelling from the Czech Republic to England via Germany by train, tracing the route of the Kinder-transport which spirited him from Prague as a five-year old boy in 1939. After learning that his mother was interred at a camp in Terezín in 1942, he visits the town’s Ghetto Museum, and is henceforth tormented by images...
From the moment we learn that Austerlitz was evacuated to England, the Holocaust haunts almost every page of the novel, but the novel never lapses into hysteria. This is partly attributable to Sebald’s deliberate prose style—described by critic James Wood as “densely agitated”—which renders even the most psychologically disordered states with forensic lucidity: “reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement...
Moreover, the genocide in which we presume Austerlitz’s mother was murdered (this is never stated explicitly) is manifest in the fragments of evidence that Austerlitz finds in archives and books, and in the unattributed photographs that punctuate the pages of the novel. This is clearest towards the book’s end, in an extended description of a film made by the Nazis on the occasion of the Red Cross’s inspection of Theresienstadt in 1944, mendaciously depicting the prisoners of the camp enjoying life in what resembles a holiday resort. Austerlitz slows the film...