The most self-evident territory had become a point of reference more incomprehensible even than the most foreign region. The homeland was now for him the paradigm of irreality.
(“Verlorenes Land” 141)
A question mark and a capital A for Austerlitz.
(Austerlitz 117E, 174G)
A is for Austerlitz. We need to start at the beginning. A is for Austerlitz and so many other names besides: for Agáta Austerlizová,1 his mother, and for Tereza Ambrosová,2 the archivist who brings him back to her, almost. A is for the family name of Maximilian Aychenwald, his father. We need to start at the beginning of an alphabet in which it is established that B follows A, as assuredly as beta its alpha, and as certainly as Buchenwald follows Aychenwald.3 We need to take as our point of departure those signs on which we depend to read, an alphabet that phonetically encodes and recapitulates the spoken word and promises other far-reaching powers of ordering as well. We need to relearn our A, B, Cs, to return to childhood, to bring it back from the shadows, to relive even earlier moments in which speaking began or at least to the time of an originary mother tongue, however squirrely that grasp of language might be. Isn’t this the point of W. G. Sebald’s book, as some of his readers insist: an account of “recovered memory” that retells the life story of Jacques Austerlitz?4
Better to start with this. Better to start from point A, ground oneself in a sense of progress, even though our first outright encounter with that letter completely sidesteps Jacques Austerlitz, the focal point of the story. For we read, rather, of another Holocaust victim. Tortured by the Nazis at Breendonk, at the close of the war he chose to shuffle the letters of his patronym, Mayer, to shake his Austrian homeland and become Jean Améry.5 And we read of Claude Simon’s Le Jardin des plantes in which the similarly tortured Gastone Novelli tries to forget the so-called civilized beings of Europe by living with a South American tribe:
To the best of his ability [he] compiled a dictionary of their language, consisting almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis. Later Novelli returned to his native land and began to paint pictures. His main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and compositions . . . was the letter A which he scratched in . . . in rows crowding closely together and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
(Austerlitz, 27E)6
Novelli tries to remember or rather to register that nightmare of his pain. But what does it mean to paint a picture, to form an image? How shall we understand the scarcely readable ciphers, huddled together, always and yet never the same, in paintings that, rather than layering color, violently gouge a series of As into an inarticulate scream?
Still, Sebald’s story does and does not belong to Novelli, to Simon, to Améry. Let us forget this byway of the errant alphabet that destroys memory as it also creates it. A is for Austerlitz. On first hearing that name, his name, in April of 1949 at the age of fifteen, Austerlitz says that in relation to the word Austerlitz he couldn’t imagine anything (Austerlitz 67E, 102G). “I couldn’t think how the name would be spelled, and read the strange, it seemed to me secret password three or four times, syllable by syllable, before I looked up and asked: excuse me, Sir, but what does it mean?” (Austerlitz 68E, 104G).
Unlike the long drawn-out scream of Novelli’s A s, it means that Austerlitz has found the password to his childhood, that, spelling the name, one can spell out the past. It means, as he has always suspected, that “my name alone . . . ought to have put me on the track of my origins” (Austerlitz 44E, 68G).7 For, in rapid succession, many years later, as the culmination of a year-long crisis in relation to language, in a bookstore presided over by Penelope Peacefull (Austerlitz 140–42E, 207–9G), a voice on the radio speaks to him of the Kindertransport and of “PRAGUE.” With no trouble to speak of, this Odysseus,8 who up till now could simply have traveled with an unknown destination and for an unpredictable period of time, suddenly leaves the British Isles and makes his way directly home: only two pages later, at the state archives in Prague, the dead center of Sebald’s meandering text, he tells Tereza Ambrosová that he has come to the conjecture that he had been brought to Great Britain with the Kindertransport; that he believes “that I had left Prague at the age of four and a half, in the months just before the war broke out, on one of the so-called children’s transports departing from the city at the time, and I had therefore come to consult the archives in the hope of seeking out, with their addresses from the registers, people of my surname living here between 1934 and 1939, who could not have been very numerous” (Austerlitz 147E).9 To which Ambrosová replies—in a fairy-tale-like no sooner said than done—“that the registers of those living in Prague at the time in question had been preserved complete, that Austerlitz was indeed one of the more unusual surnames, so she thought there could be no particular difficulties in finding me the entries I wanted by midday tomorrow” (Austerlitz 148E).10 All thanks to the archive and its alphabet.11 Six pages later, Jacques Austerlitz finds himself at the door of his childhood apartment in conversation with Vera, who had cared for him in his earliest years.12
And at this, surely the most touching, most critically emotional moment of the book, Vera’s first words are “Jacquot . . . est-ce que c’est vraiment toi?” (“Jacquot . . . is it really you?” Austerlitz 153E, 224G). How can one not hear here the echo of that other Jaco: the ash-gray parrot that his school friend Gerald so often took out of his cardboard sarcophagus? He too, like his namesake, with “a whitish face, as one might imagine, marked by deep grief,” he too having lived his life out in Welsh exile, imitating “most fondly of all . . . the voices of children” and who, like Austerlitz, had reached the great age of his sixties (Austerlitz 82–83E, 125–26G).13
Over eighty pages Vera retells Austerlitz’s past, says Austerlitz. It comes to us in a rhythm of said-said, said Vera, said Austerlitz.14 And during that parroting, at once marked by the distancing of a triple narration: said Vera, said Austerlitz (said the narrator), and the apparently unproblematic path of verbal repetition, almost all at once, miraculously, not only memory returns but also the mother tongue. For just as Vera speaks of how they would shift from French to Czech at the evening meal, just in the middle of this remark: “Vera herself, quite involuntarily, had changed from one language to the other, and I, who had not for a moment thought that Czech could mean anything to me . . . now understood almost everything Vera said, like a deaf man whose hearing has been miraculously restored” (Austerlitz 155E).15
The wonder of understanding is that of the reader as well. Eighty pages of clarity in a text which, for reasons we have yet to trace, has not always been easy to follow, in which our own powers of recapitulation are rendered precarious. Suddenly, here, a chronological laying out of events: how Agáta met Maximilian; how Vera came to care for her Jacquot; how, one after another, Maximilian, Jacques, and Agáta were forced to leave Prague; and how Vera was left behind to remember. A retracing of social as well as family history: an account of German Nazi enthusiasm in 1933, the Nuremberg welcome of Hitler at the National Socialist Party rally in 1936 (Austerlitz 222E, 321G), the “collective paroxysm on the part of the Viennese crowds” (Austerlitz 170E, 248G), and the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1939 (Austerlitz 171E, 250G), the inevitable Kindertransport (Austerlitz 173E, 253–54G), the edicts progressively laid out against the Czech Jews, one after another (Austerlitz 172–73E, 251–52G), and the deportation of Austerlitz’s mother (Austerlitz 177E, 258ffG).
TEREZÍN
With his newly gained knowledge in hand, Austerlitz takes the train as did his mother before him, from Holešovice station to Terezín. The alphabetic archive has brought him back to his Vera and to his verity: has it convinced this wanderer, after all, that it is possible to go from point A to point B? For never, he tells us, has the feeling been stronger than on that evening with Vera in the Šporkova “as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all” (Austerlitz 185E, 269G). As he travels to Terezín he cannot imagine “who or what I was.” The tracks of the train seem to run “away into infinity on both sides” (Austerlitz 185E, 269–70G). And yet he feels “as if I had been traveling for weeks, going further and further east and further and further back in time” (Austerlitz 186E, 270–71G).
Terezín has two scenes in store for him, a junk shop whose doors remain closed to him, the ANTIKOS BAZAR, and then the Ghetto Museum—the intricate ambiguities of a window display and the simplicity of a museum exhibit. In a sense, one might take them as paradigmatic of the double experience of Austerlitz, displaying as they do a pattern of alternation that both disrupts and drives the flow of the narrative. The one he sees from the outside, the other from within; the first leaves him with questions, the second has pretensions of offering explanations.
The streets are deserted but for a ghostly figure of infirm old age and a madman babbling in broken German (“swallowed up by the earth”; Austerlitz 189E, 274–75G), in a town whose facades are dumb and whose windows are blind Austerlitz 189E, 275G). The photographs of its forbidding doors progressively assume the appearance of the gas chamber ovens (Austerlitz 190–93E, 276–79G). It is in these streets that Austerlitz comes upon the town square. Here he is overwhelmed by the “power of attraction” (Anziehungskraft; Austerlitz 195E, 282G) of the ANTIKOS BAZAR.16 That is the easiest way to tell it, but it is not what Austerlitz and Austerlitz relate to the reader. For we arrive at this last site only by way of the narration of a dream. “Not long ago, on the threshold of awakening, I looked into the interior of one of these Terezín barracks. It was filled from floor to ceiling with layer upon layer of cobwebs woven by those ingenious creatures. I still remember how, in my half sleep, I tried to hold fast to . . . the trembling dream image and to discern what lay hidden in it, but it dissolved all the more and was overlaid by the memory, rising up in my consciousness at the same time, of the flashing panes of the display windows of the ANTIKOS BAZAR” (Austerlitz 190–94E, emphasis mine).17
As Austerlitz tells it, he stands on the threshold of waking, a half-conscious state in which, while occupying the more material threshold of a barracks building, he has “looked into the interior.” The webs of spiders fill the space from floor to ceiling, layer upon layer, in a half-sleep vision (Traumbild) that fails to grant knowledge of what is hidden within. This is an image of which he cannot catch hold. For this dream of layering is overlaid (überlagert) in turn by something else that is not quite the store itself, nor simply its memory, but the memory of its glittering panes of glass (die blinkenden Schaufensterscheiben), the next to nothing that stands between Austerlitz and what is inside. This is no doubt what Evan spoke of, “says Austerlitz,” when he observed: “nothing more than such a piece of silk separates us from the next world” (Austerlitz 54E, 84G), something like the “invisible border” (Austerlitz 41E, 64G) of which the narrator had earlier written. Ever caught up in “[der] Baugeschichte,” both as the history of architecture and also as the story of the vain hope that we might fully enter, inhabit, much less plan and understand any construct, this is the dreamlike tale that Austerlitz will tell over and over. It is a tale of layering and shifting ground, of webs that do not catch hold, of nets of interrelation that tantalize with the ever receding horizon of system and from which we can never escape.18 “Of course, I could see only what was set out for display in the windows. . . . But even these four still lifes obviously composed entirely at random, which appeared to have grown quite naturally into the black branch-work of the lime trees standing around the square and reflected in the glass of the windows, exerted such a power of attraction on me that it was a long time before I could tear myself away, and, my forehead pressed against the cold window . . .” (Austerlitz 194–95E).19 Meaning, hidden secrets, an oracular utterance (Austerlitz 195E, 283G), these are the siren songs whispered in the chaos of the unfathomable interrelations (unerforschliche[n] Zusammenhänge; Austerlitz 285G)20 of which Austerlitz too becomes part: “I was now able to perceive among them, weak and hardly recognizable, my own shadow image” (Austerlitz 197E, 285G), the phantom silhouette we the readers can (barely) find in the photo of “Austerlitz”-as-photographer, overlaid on a porcelain figure whose allegory we suddenly all too easily fathom: “the ivory-colored porcelain group of a hero on horseback turning to look back, as his steed rears up on its hindquarters, in order to raise up with his outstretched left arm an innocent girl already bereft of her last hope, and to save her from a without doubt cruel fate not revealed to the observer” (Austerlitz 197E).21 Without doubt, the wishful saga of Jacques and Agáta.
And yet there are also a hundred other remnants of former lives on the other side of the glass. These and Austerlitz along with the branchwork (Astwerk) behind him, which the play of reflections leaves at once outside and within, not to mention that difficult nodal point, the camera he holds to his face, the instrument of documentation through which Austerlitz sees (as do we), from which perspective he reports, the invisible image maker and his reflected image: it is impossible to disentangle them all, to find their precise space, or even to find a proper train of thought that might lead to an unequivocal answer about them: “[I studied] the hundred different things . . . as if from one of them, or from their relationship to one another, an unequivocal answer might be deduced to the many impossible to think through questions that moved me” (Austerlitz 195E, emphasis mine).22 Let us remember that phrase, hold it fast, if we can: “from one of them, or from their relationship to one another,” for we are on to something here in the choice, if there is one, between the certain presence and specificity of the one and the relation-to the other.
And yet again, as a counterpart to the interwoven branchwork (Astwerk) from one side, appears the branch stump (Aststummel) from the other, a broken fragment perhaps, but an escape from the reflected labyrinthine confusion: “the stuffed squirrel, already moth-eaten here and there, perched on the stump of a branch in a showcase the size of a shoebox, which had its beady button eye implacably fixed on me, and whose Czech name—veverka—I now recalled like the name of a long-lost friend” (Austerlitz 196E).23 Thus might we not read here, perhaps also too easily once again, the serendipitous access to the mother tongue but also, embedded, the name of that friend for so long lost: the Vera in the somewhat stammered version of veverka? “I also asked Vera about the Czech word for a squirrel, and after a while, with a smile spreading slowly over her beautiful face, she answered that it was veverka” (Austerlitz 204E, 294G).
Still another, not entirely unambiguous answer branches off from Austerlitz’s question, for Vera herself adds another, less direct explanation: the unsettling questions are not at an end. Reading aloud to the child from his favorite book about the change of seasons: “And Vera said, said Austerlitz, that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? . . . How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?” (Austerlitz 204E).24 Less the happy return to the mother tongue, the recognition of veverka reminds, rather, of a possible dead end to knowledge, or, at best, that recognition immediately brings us to the knowledge discovered of an end and death. For Vera immediately follows it by the report of Agáta’s second deportation, from Terezín—“to the East” (Austerlitz 204E, 295G).25
And that grim reality of the factual past, of course, is what the Ghetto Museum, the second vignette of Terezín, confirms. It is here, for the first time, that Austerlitz is presented with “some idea of the history of the persecution” (Austerlitz 198E, 286G). Every detail of the “origins and places of death of the victims,” the clearest of documents: “I saw balance sheets, registers of the dead, lists of every imaginable kind, and endless rows of numbers and figures, which must have served to reassure the administrators that nothing ever escaped their notice” (Austerlitz 199E, 287–88G).26 Yet, rather than offering a solid ground of certainty, this historical account in all its precision “far exceeded my comprehension”: “I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it” (Austerlitz 199E, 287G).
Two scenes, then, in Terezín: In the haphazard jumble of the shop-window: where no answers can arise, where no questions can be formulated, where the endless overlappings of individual pasts and of past and present, inside and out, photographer and photographed, Austerlitz and the ghostly but recognizable figure of W. G. Sebald posing as Austerlitz lie—all these things, apparently distant from one another, are patiently engraved and linked together in a web (“im geduldigen Gravieren und in der Vernetzung . . . weit auseinander liegender Dinge”; Campo Santo 200E, 244G).27 Still there arises a clear allegory of redemption, a promise of something that might be caught there, of the recuperation of the mother tongue, a hint of Vera and her verity, perhaps even the alpha-betical order in the B follows A of Antikos Bazar. And yet again, in the brutal unrelenting certainty of the Ghetto Museum’s order, and alongside the strangely gentle tones of reason’s promise, lies a threat to understanding.
BETWEEN PRAGUE AND HOEK VAN HOLLAND
This back and forth is also the lesson of the journey that follows: the attempt to replicate the summer of 1939. Austerlitz had studied “the maps of the Greater German Reich” at the Ghetto Museum on which he traces the railway lines running through it (Austerlitz 198E, 286G). He returns then to Prague, himself to take up one of those lines from the main train station on the Wilsonova to Hoek van Holland. This is a train (and a train of narrative) that never quite reaches its destination but rather gets lost in Germany. It is a trip we mentioned earlier in “a nameless land without borders and entirely overgrown by dark forests” (von finsteren Waldungen; Austerlitz 224E, 324G), in which, nevertheless, the Buchen (beech trees), in good alphabetical order—as B might follow A—do indeed follow the Eichen (oaks)—if not quite the Aychen (Austerlitz 324G)28—and this is “the original” “of the images that had haunted [him] for so many years,” Austerlitz tells us (Austerlitz 224E, 324G).
The renovated Wilsonova station itself “did not correspond in the least to the idea I had formed of it from Vera’s narrative” (Austerlitz 217E, 314G). But as the train leaves Prague, it dawns on Austerlitz “with perfect certainty that I had seen the pattern of the glass and steel roof above the platforms before . . . and in the same half-light” (Austerlitz 219E, 316G). And as they cross the Moldau: “Then it really was as if time had stood still since the day when I first left Prague” (Austerlitz 219E, 318G,). What does it mean that time might stand still for Austerlitz, as he looks out of the corridor window of his train? This is no pane of the display window of Terezín, with all the complications brought on by its layered reflection: the pane of glass, here, does not stand between him and the object of his view. But if time seems at first to stand still, Austerlitz surely does not. He repeatedly shifts his ground on just how time functions.29 He passes at first through scenes that bring the past back or him back to the past. But then, with the eye of the architectural historian, he notes that, passing through the valley of the Rhine, “it is difficult to say even of the castles standing high above the river . . . whether they are medieval or were built by the industrial barons of the nineteenth century” (Austerlitz 226E, 326G). What this train races through, its stations so to speak, are first the identity of the self’s past with its present (“as if time had stood still”; Austerlitz 219E, 318G); then a neutral, matter-of-fact indeterminacy—of architectural historical periods in the objects outside the train; from this Austerlitz shifts rapidly to an entanglement of periods in his own experience: “At least, I no longer knew in what period of my life I was living as I journeyed down the Rhine valley” (Austerlitz 226E, 326G).
Time between Prague and Hoek van Holland does not stand still: it is maddeningly on the move. It has jumped from the still stand of present with past to the jumble of historical eras to the multiplicity of personal pasts. “Even today . . . when I think of my Rhine journeys, the second of them hardly less terrifying than the first, everything becomes confused in my head: my experiences of that time, what I have read, memories surfacing and then sinking out of sight again, consecutive images and distressing blank spots where nothing at all is left” (Austerlitz 226E).30 What he has lived and what he has read, the Wales of his childhood memories alongside the images made centuries earlier by Victor Hugo and Joseph Mallord Turner, his memories and those of others. No barriers, none, between now and then, self and other, art and life. The journey to a particular point in the past branches out uncontrollably in dimensions of time-space impossible to take in at a glance. It is no coincidence, then, as we learn, that the narration of this journey takes place among the decaying gravestones of Tower Hamlets and on the border of St. Clement’s Hospital, a no-man’s-land between the place for the dead and their monuments and the place for the mad and their memories. At the outset of the trip is the experience of an absolute and almost reassuring certainty of repetition, a perfect coincidence of the past and the present. The narrative shifts over the next pages to the sense of rediscovery, a return to an original whose images had always haunted (heimgesucht). This gives way to an absolute certainty (absolute Gewißheit) of the way in which the past had made his childhood unheimlich—and then the horror of the second experience becomes as great as that of the journey it repeats. He loses all sense of his current temporal place so that in the present everything is jumbled about in his head until finally all these temporal loci become thoroughly entangled with the way others have portrayed the scenes. It makes sense that the story is interrupted by a shift into the present telling of the tale by Austerlitz as he and the narrator walk from Alderney Street to the cemetery of Tower Hamlets. A map of London tells us that they pass by St. Clements where mental breakdown has a home (Austerlitz 226–27E; 325–28G). Where Austerlitz heads on that train is no particular point of his past, but to breakdown: perpetual regression toward increasingly diverging, varied, and impenetrable ramifications (“immer mehr sich verzweigenden und auseinanderlaufenden Aufzeichnungen”; Austerlitz 371G). Like the branching footnotes he researched in the Bibliothèque Nationale on the rue de Richelieu, like the tracks of a railroad that run with great precision from A to B, and yet with an impulse not really understood (Austerlitz 33E, 52G), he gets lost in a fantastic nightmare of an unsystematic network of space and time.
And so haven’t we captured it, understood what Sebald is about? Haven’t we found an image at least of his mode of writing or several—too many—perhaps: as Sebald puts it in another context—“Snapshots he took with his equally sympathetic but ice-cold eye.”31 Might we develop and print these snapshots taken by the author’s restless eye, fix in place this squirrely writer who, that restlessness notwithstanding, fixes us from the first, or so it seems, with a glassy button-eye relentlessly directed at us (Austerlitz 196E, 284G)? Austerlitz, one wants to say, is a “trembling dream image” (erschauernde[s] Traumbild; Austerlitz 194E, 281G) impossible to hold fast, with both completely arbitrary juxtapositions (like the still lifes that are “vollkommen willkürlich [zusammengesetzt]”) as well as seemingly natural intergrowths (naturhaften [Hineinwachsungen]; Austerlitz 195E, 282G) that refuse entry to what lies hidden within (Austerlitz 195E, 281G); it is the flashing pane of a display window (blinkende Schaufensterscheibe; Austerlitz 194E, 281G) we try to gaze through, while it reflects both the gazer and creator without. And, laying out for us in cold facts and statistics, one by one, a reality we would perhaps rather not view, Austerlitz is also a museum of sorts,32 a house of documents, reason, and order, setting in motion the train of thought of a perfect (if perfectly conventional) restitution that nevertheless exceeds by far our capacity to comprehend (Austerlitz 199E, 287G).
CAMPO SANTO—STUTTGART
And is Austerlitz not there in order to answer the query: A quoi bon la littérature? (What’s the good of literature? Campo Santo 204E, 247G), to which Sebald, having posed the question in Campo Santo, responds: “Perhaps only so that we remember, and learn to understand that there are strange connections that cannot be grounded in a causal logic” (“An Attempt at Restitution,” Campo Santo 204E, 247G). And, he continues, “There are many forms of writing; but only in the literary form is it a question, over and above the mere registering of facts and over and above scholarship, of an attempt at restitution” (“An Attempt at Restitution,” Campo Santo 205E, 248G).
Austerlitz lays these unsteady, flickering images out, layer on layer, as a spider a web, in the uninhabited space of a dream, in a dream house of sorts, our Zuhause, which welcomes everything in but ourselves. If we follow this thread in another text, if we turn to another train ride, we might recognize the spider. In 2001, shortly after the publication of Austerlitz, Sebald writes of a visit to the artist Jan Peter Tripp in Stuttgart, when he, like the narrator of Austerlitz,33 returns to Germany in the mid-seventies. “At the time Tripp gave me a present of one of his engravings, and on this engraving, on which the mentally ill judge Daniel Paul Schreber with a spider in his skull is to be seen—what can there be more terrible than the ideas always scurrying around in our minds?—on this engraving much of what I later wrote goes back, even in my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together in a network apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life” (“An Attempt at Restitution,” Campo Santo 200E).34
The interruption of the remark enclosed in dashes, the repetition of the phrasing, all this mimics the path of the scurrying spider. What Sebald later wrote is also in the manner of the spider in the skull, that creator of, that embodiment of the ceaselessly scurrying and recurring thoughts that traverse Austerlitz to our distraction. As we might say in German, Sebald spinnt; which has all the senses of weaving a web, spinning a tale, being a bit mad. When we faced the display window of Terezín, “an unequivocal answer” seemed deducible from one or another of the hundred things “or from their relationship to one another” (Austerlitz 195E, 283G, emphasis mine). The dilemma is that of choice. It distracts us between “adhering to an exact historical perspective,” with its promise of conventional recuperation, and “linking together in a network [of] apparently disparate things” (“der Vernetzung . . . anscheinend weit auseinander liegender Dinge”), the interrelationship among the multiple, open to no simple procedure of representation. And yet, in Campo Santo, as we read, literature goes “over and above the mere registering of facts and over and above scholarship,” beyond the recapitulation of the singular. Literature, insofar as it might offer a horizon of restitution, does so in relationships (Zusammenhänge[n]; “Ein Versuch der Restitution,” Campo Santo 247G) that cannot be grounded in a logic of causality. We come to terms with this concept of literature as relationship, it seems, in a time that eludes the present: it takes place either insofar as “we remember” in the past or in the projected future of a “learn[ing] to understand” (daß wir begreifen lernen; Campo Santo 204E, 247G). The basis of this concept of literature is not as the success of but as the “attempt [Versuch] at restitution” (Campo Santo 205E, 248G): it is not grounded in the realm of knowledge.
PARIS—ELYSÉES
The alphabetic archive brings Jacques Austerlitz back to his past without detour, but it goes without saying how much in Austerlitz speaks the disturbance of that order and also the danger it brings, asking us, lulling us, to read over the vocabulary of interconnection (Zusammenhang, Vernetzung)35—the interconnection of terms one nevertheless trips over at every turn of this volume, which will ultimately lead to the more radical and unreadable version of those multiplying lines.
Thus it should be no surprise: Prague, Terezín, and the retraced trajectory of the Kindertransport return Austerlitz to his childhood but deliver him as well to yet another in a series of mental collapses. For, as miraculously as the Prague archive had done its work, “It was obviously of little use that I had discovered the sources of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation that was now pouring forth out of me” (Austerlitz 228E).36
The collapse on the return from Prague comes, of course, and is only one in a long history of fainting fits. Long before this he had experienced “the first of the several fainting fits [he] was to suffer, causing temporary but complete loss of memory” (Auslöschung sämtlicher Gedächtnisspuren; Austerlitz 268E, 381G).37 A disturbing branching (Verzweigtheit) was involved with, if not quite the single root of, the first such crisis. It is 1959: on those long weekends when his friend, Marie de Verneuil, set off in another direction, which always left him in a fearful mood, the young student living in Paris took off by himself for the outskirts of the city. It is a train, of course, that brings him there. At Maisons-Alfort he comes upon the Veterinary Museum, with its revolting celebration of pathological deformity. The “trees of bronchial tubes, some of them three feet high, their petrified and rust-colored branches” (more literally translated, branchedness, Verzweigtheit; Austerlitz 266E, 378G) are preserved in turn by Sebald, who gives this image of grotesque branching the honor of a full-page photograph. Unlike the other photos with branchwork in Terezín, those too taken by Austerlitz, this one is marked, not with “[his] own shadow image” (Schattenbild; Austerlitz 197E, 285G) but with his trace as obliteration. It takes the form of the camera’s flash of light on the pane of the “glass-fronted cases reaching almost to the ceiling” (Austerlitz 265E, 377G).
“Monstrosities of every imaginable and unimaginable kind” (Austerlitz 266E, 378G) fill the glass cases (Glasschränke and Vitrinen; Austerlitz 377–78G),38 says Austerlitz. Their place of display behind the glass as well as one of its objects recall a more benign counterpart in the display window of the ANTIKOS BAZAR. For, long before encountering the porcelain horse and rider of Terezín (in 1993), that white knight allegory of redemption and of the possibility of turning back, Austerlitz had found another rider and another horse, this one charging forward rather than rearing backward, in a scene that speaks not of salvation but rather of decomposition and in other grotesque colors. “Far and away the most disgusting, however, so said Austerlitz, was the exhibit in a glass case at the back of the last cabinet of the museum, the life-sized figure of a horseman, most artfully flayed . . . by the anatomist and dissector Honoré Fragonard, . . . so that in the colors of congealed blood every strand in the tensed muscles of the rider and his horse, which was racing forward with a panic-stricken expression, came forth clearly along with the blue of the veins and the ochre yellow of the sinews and ligaments” (Austerlitz 266–68E, emphasis mine).39 What Fragonard lays bare are the individual sinews, ligaments, and every strand in the muscles of horse and rider, setting out to view the striations of bodies we would far more comfortably view as contained and whole. And mustn’t we think these in connection to that other place of “skulls and skeletons,” muscles, nerves, and sinews, namely the poverty-stricken quarter on which, in the late nineteenth century, the northeast train stations of London were built? It is a place where Sebald had forced us once before to confront the monstrosity of bodily display: “Before work on the construction of the two northeast terminals began, these poverty-stricken quarters were forcibly cleared and vast quantities of soil, together with the bones buried in them, were dug up and removed, so that the railway lines, which on the engineers’ plans looked like muscles and nerve strands in an anatomical atlas, could be brought to the outskirts of the City” (Austerlitz 132E).40 This is preceded by a ghastly full-page photo of a skeleton with broken skulls and is followed by a full-page, unsettling, image of the railway lines—which we now cannot fail to regard as muscles and nerves (Austerlitz 131E, 193G, 133E, 195G). One can hardly read Sebald, one can hardly read Austerlitz, without being drawn to, distracted to another passage. The spider is spinning its terrible, forever scurrying thoughts (Campo Santo 200E, 243G) everywhere. The strands we are following from Fragonard’s work place at Maisons Alfort to the subterranean burial grounds under the streets of London, strands of muscle and nerves and train lines, are rather arbitrary juxtapositions and thus a choice of one out of many paths we as readers might take, to keep us going, if not quite straightforward at least with a struggle to make sense, in scenes that portend a certain mental collapse. In Sebald collapse and interconnection (Zusammenbruch and Zusammenhang) are never far from, and always implicate, one another.
In 1959, at the site that precipitates his first collapse, the Veterinary Museum of Maisons Alfort, Austerlitz tells of Honoré Fragonard: “Fragonard . . . must . . . have been bent over death day and night, surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, and, apparently driven by the desire, in transforming its so readily corruptible substance into a miracle of pure glass, to secure for the frail body, by means of a process of vitrification, at least some participation in eternal life” (Austerlitz 268E, emphasis mine).41 Fragonard’s process, seems, however facetious the narrator may be here, an endeavor to secure an eternal life. Surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, does not Fragonard, this descendent of “the famous family of Provencal Parfumiers” (Austerlitz 268E, 380G), rather revel in the scent of corruption around him, forcing the viewer to come to terms with the decomposition of the one to the many while merely gesturing toward keeping the body intact?
And that gesture has much to do with vitrification and the miracle of glass here. At the ANTIKOS BAZAR the panes of the display windows present the still lifes within only as a quivering, flickering (erschauernden, blinkenden) nonlocus of sorts for the entanglements of viewing and reflection (Austerlitz 194–97E, 281–82G). Here the glass cases of the veterinary museum, with a sense of utter transparency, pitch one, if not blindly then thoughtlessly, into the space of their contents. But the glass of Fragonard is something else again: his process of vitrification, literally a transformation (Umwandlung) into glass, makes it the medium for a fixing in place that speaks of eternity. Still, it performs that glassy miracle by way of an all but unbearable violation of the body, striating what should remain one and whole, reminding us all too palpably of the frailty of the biological body—perhaps of the textual body as well.
Glass has a place in Sebald’s world. He makes this clear when he writes of Bruce Chatwin. “The closed glass cabinet (Glasvertiko) with its enigmatic things became . . . the central metaphor both for the content and also for the form of Chatwin’s work.”42 For Sebald, too, the glass display cases and windows become a central metaphor for what he has to say and how he says it—even though, as we have seen, just how glass functions may change from passage to passage. Nowhere is this clearer, if difficult to get a handle on, than in the following lines. The narrator continues shifting his stories of vitrification about. For, just when he ceases to speak of Fragonard’s method of turning flesh into glass, he turns to describing the way in which Austerlitz tells his story. Glass appears, here too, although we are almost blind to it. It is Fragonard, then, who wishes: “in transforming its so readily corruptible substance into a miracle of pure glass, to secure for the frail body, by means of a process of vitrification, at least some participation in eternal life. In the weeks following my visit to the museum of veterinary science [thus Austerlitz {casting his glance to the boulevard outside} continued his story], it was impossible for me to remember anything of what I have just told” (Austerlitz 268E, emphasis, parentheses, and brackets mine).43 Sebald draws a blank here—perhaps two. While speaking of the continuity of the story (“thus Austerlitz . . . continued his story”), the narrator forgets to mention the windowpane that interrupts the narrative, through which Austerlitz gazes (“casting his glance outside to the boulevard”).44 He also speaks of a total loss of memory. What we have read as narration, “what I have just told,” was to him a total blank. The sentence is structured to include a double frame within. The narrator interrupts his report with “thus Austerlitz . . . continued his story” and ruptures that phrase in turn with a description of Austerlitz’s gesture: “casting his glance outside to the boulevard.” A double window, one might say, flung open in the continuation of Austerlitz’s words, so deftly inserted we hardly notice. The first, “thus Austerlitz . . . continued his story,” pulls us back from the content of Austerlitz’ narrative to the form of its telling. The second is more difficult to locate. We must remember where we are. Austerlitz casts his glance “outside to the boulevard.” Sixteen pages earlier the narrator gave names to that locus, names that, by way of their sounds, give one a sense of the glass and the blank to come: the interlocutors meet “in the Bistrobar Le Havane on the Boulevard Auguste Blanqui, not far from the Metro station La Glacière” (Austerlitz 255E, 363G). Thus as Austerlitz casts his glance outside it must pass through a glass window that is left unmentioned.45
And indeed what Austerlitz silently narrates with this gesture (as he both continues [seine Geschichte fortsetzt] and interrupts his story) is both a hint of and a threat to consciousness. This is akin to the various and unregulated, understated, ways we have seen glass function in the passages we have read. “In the weeks following my visit to the museum of veterinary science [thus Austerlitz {casting his glance to the boulevard outside} continued his story], it was impossible for me to remember anything of what I have just told you, for it was in the Métro on my way back from Maisons-Alfort that I had the first of the several recurring fainting fits I was to suffer, with a temporary erasure of all traces of memory” (Austerlitz 268E, parentheses and brackets mine).46 The “erasure of all traces of memory” is the continual experience of reading Austerlitz. It echoes Austerlitz’s sense of obliteration on his return from Prague. It leaves us uncertain if Sebald’s narrator displays the past or splays it out and displaces it.
If the interconnections (Zusammenhänge) are perversely intricate, paradoxically the collapses (Zusammenbrüche) are more lucidly telling. They bring us at least to some common places, perhaps also commonplaces about this text. In 1959, in the train coming back from Maisons-Alfort, Austerlitz falls unconscious. “I did not return to my senses until I was in the Salpêtrière, to which I had been taken and where I was now lying . . . somewhere in that gigantic complex of buildings where the borders between institutions of healing and punishment have always been blurred, and which seems to have grown and spread of its own volition over the centuries until it now forms a universe of its own between the Jardin des Plantes and the Gare d’Austerlitz” (Austerlitz 269E).47 And is this not also the place of Sebald’s Austerlitz, somewhere between that other Jardin des Plantes, that appears in the opening pages (the narrative of Claude Simon about Gastone Novelli and his paintings of A s), as we must also remember, and the Gare d’Austerlitz, which, given a book so obsessed with both trains and its title character, inevitably becomes Austerlitz’s final point of departure (Austerlitz 290ffE, 409ffG). And is Austerlitz, too, not a place in which the border between healing and punishment remains uncertain, in which any healing implicitly promised also recapitulates previous suffering.
Austerlitz continues his story: “In the semi-unconsciousness in which, for days, I found myself there, I saw myself wandering around a labyrinth of mile-long passages, vaults, galleries and grottoes [Gängen, Gewölben, Galerien und Grotten] in which the names of various Métro stations—Campo Formio, Crimée, Elysée, Iéna, Invalides, Oberkampf, Simplon, Solferino, Stalingrad—. . . .” (Austerlitz 269E, 382G). Here the letter makes a comeback in Austerlitz. Austerlitz stammers in Gs of architectural spaces that alternate passageways (Gänge, Galerien) and the more dubious, open spaces of possible arrival (Gewölbe and Grotten), followed by an alphabetical arrangement of métro stations48, almost all names of battles or with resonances of war.49 Unlike the conspicuously absent name (Gare d’) Austerlitz (also the name of a significant battle), about which the boy of fifteen had asked “but what does it mean?” (Austerlitz 68E, 104G), the place of these metro stations seems a given.
As though wishing to struggle against the maze of the Paris metro map, a web that pervades the subconscious of every Parisian inhabitant, Austerlitz organizes the stations into an orderly alphabetic progression. The final stop is something akin to, but not quite the same as, the Elysian Fields. Austerlitz continues his story: “Solferino, Stalingrad—and certain discolorations and flecks in the air seemed to indicate that this was a place of exile for those who had fallen on the field of honor, or lost their lives in some other violent way” (Austerlitz 269E, 382–83G). The heroes of Austerlitz’s story find their place, finally, among flecks in the air (Flecken in der Luft), the small and indefinable marks to which we return, which continually come back to us (as black flecks and even snowflakes), and which we never escape, not only in this the crisis of his student days but also at the close of Austerlitz’s final breakdown after his return from Prague.
As Austerlitz narrates it: having visited Prague, it nevertheless was of little use to him that he had found the source of his distraught state of mind (Austerlitz 228E, 330G). He, the historian of architecture, becomes like the burnt out walls of a roofless and broken house.50 “I walked around in this place . . . up and down the corridors, staring for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery, where we are standing now, and felt nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain” (Austerlitz 230E, 332G). Repeatedly overwhelmed by a horrific terror: “All of a sudden my tongue and palate would be as dry as if I had been lying in the desert for days, more and more I had to fight harder for breath . . . and everything I looked at was veiled by a black hatching. I felt I had to scream but could bring no sound across my lips.” (Austerlitz 228–29E, 331G). Without the capacity to cry out, much less speak, as though lost in the desert, Austerlitz is surrounded by a black hatching (Schraffur), not unlike the flecks (Flecken) in the air of his first collapse.
LONDON
Let me leave that thread hanging here to scurry first to a more than obvious family likeness between the narrative voice and that of Austerlitz. For the narrator, too, has his breakdowns, also related to childhood, to memory, to the possibility of seeing straight. It is 1967. We are told of the early encounter with Austerlitz who has concluded an elaborate discussion of those fortresses built to defend Antwerp with a description of Breendonk, “the last link in the chain” (Austerlitz 18E, 31G). The narrator ventures out there the following day, the first of a series of museums in Austerlitz. Like Austerlitz at the Ghetto Museum in Terezín, he is overwhelmed by the monstrosity of the experience.
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head, was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbürste, which was a favorite of my father and which I had always disliked, that black striations began to quiver before my eyes, and I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty, covered with bluish spots [Flecken], and seemed to me covered with cold beads of sweat.
(Austerlitz 25–26E, emphasis mine)51
Posed like Austerlitz, who, in the stairwell of his childhood house, “had to lean his head against the wall” (Austerlitz 151E, 223G), or like Austerlitz with his “forehead pressed against the cold window pane” (Austerlitz 195E, 282–83G) at the ANTIKOS BAZAR,52 and like Austerlitz in his moments of crisis with black hatch marks before his eyes, the narrator prefigures Austerlitz and gives us again the strange language of their connection to one another (Bezug zueinander; Austerlitz 195E, 283G): hatching, striations, flecks: Schraffur (Austerlitz 35E, 55G), Gestrichel (Austerlitz 25E, 37G), Flecken (Austerlitz 25E, 41G). We remember and learn to understand that these are strange relationships that cannot be grounded in causal logic (Campo Santo 204E, 247G). This, after all, is literature.
And so it should be no surprise, given that their paths keep crossing in a manner impossible to understand (Austerlitz 27E, 44G), after a twenty-year hiatus when yet another completely chance encounter takes place between Austerlitz and his scribe (Austerlitz 41E, 64G), isolated snowflakes float by,53 another recurring version of the flecks in the air. And, as with Austerlitz before him,54 a black hatching returns to also define the perspective of the narrator (Austerlitz 35E, 55G). It is December of 1996. Taking up his long-neglected writings coincides with taking up once again the relationship to Austerlitz, which had been equally close and distant (Austerlitz 34E, 54G), and coincides as well with another crisis. “I was in some anxiety at the time because I had noticed, looking up an address in the telephone book, that the sight in my right eye had almost entirely disappeared overnight, so to speak. Even when I glanced up from the page open in front of me and turned my gaze on the framed photographs on the wall, all my right eye could see was a row of dark shapes curiously distorted above and below—the figures and landscapes familiar to me in every detail having resolved indiscriminately into a black and menacing crosshatching [Schraffur]” (Austerlitz 34–35E).55 What does it mean that the narrator, as in the story of Austerlitz he will soon come to know, has lost the familiar figures and landscapes that usually surround him? Lost them at least with one eye.56 What does it mean that the perspective from which the tale of Austerlitz’s childhood will be told is veiled by black hatch marks (von einer schwarzen Schraffur; Austerlitz 229E, 331G). How does this way of seeing define the perspective of Austerlitz, become the condition of possibility less of what it says (perhaps the left eye accounts for this) than of what it performs? Less a threat than that which enables a new form of sight. “I kept feeling as if I could see with undiminished clarity on the edge of my field of vision, and had only to look sideways in order to make what I took at first for a merely hysterical weakness in my eyesight disappear” (Austerlitz 35E, 55G).
What if a certain clarity can be maintained only on the edge of our field of sight—what if we must learn, as the narrator does in time, to make do with this new perspective of clarity at the limits and black hatching at dead center? What if hatching itself becomes a new way of viewing and writing, the network on the pupil left by a spider in the skull, perhaps? We have already begun to see that. What if Sebald’s text comes to us like a suitor to a young woman on whose retina (die Netzhaut), as was the custom, “a few drops of liquid distilled from belladonna, a plant of the nightshade family, [were placed] . . . whereby her eyes shone . . . but she herself could perceive next to nothing” (Austerlitz 35E, 56G)? Can we accept this, in order all the better to read? These are the conditions under which he writes: the power of sight of the right eye opens out on a row of distorted forms, not unlike the rows of Novelli’s A s, while the left eye remains temporarily as it was before, though continually threatened with a certain impairment of sight.
The narrator takes a train to London, to visit a Czech ophthalmologist with the name of Zdenek Gregor.57 The visit accomplishes no cure. It is, rather, the scene of describing and measuring the disturbance: “There was a considerable uncertainty, said Zdenek Gregor. All that was really known was that it occurred almost exclusively in middle-aged men who spent too much time reading and writing. After the consultation, in order more precisely to determine the defective area in the retina,58 yet another . . . series of photographs of my eyes or rather . . . of the back of the eye through the iris, the pupil and the vitreous humor [Glaskörper] needed to be made” (Austerlitz 38E).59 Here, too, one sees through (something that reads like) glass.60
And indeed this middle-aged man, too much devoted to reading and writing, has come to the (non)knowledge offered by Gregor by first flitting his way through a strange concatenation (eigenartige Verkettung; Austerlitz 34E, 54G) of thoughts. Taking the train to London, a few isolated snowflakes were floating down. The falling of snowflakes reminds him of a childhood fantasy in which his whole village might be buried in snow; while in the waiting room he thinks of a poem he leaves unidentified that brings him to thoughts of a city thus over-fallen, a London that takes on all the character of the crisscrossing and furrowing we have come to expect in this text:
I imagined that out there in the gathering dusk I could see the districts of the city of London crisscrossed by innumerable streets and railway lines, crowding ever more closely as they marched east and north, one reef of buildings above the next and then the next, and so on . . . and that now on this huge outcropping of stone the snow would fall . . . until everything was buried and covered up . . . London a lichen mapped on mild clays and its rough circle without purpose . . . It was a circle of this kind with its edge going over into the approximate that Zdenek Gregor drew on a piece of paper as he attempted . . . to illustrate to me the extent of the gray zone in my right eye.
(Austerlitz 37E)61
The drawing of the eye, which no doubt the narrator’s right eye cannot directly observe, follows from a poem that branches out from the imaginings of a snow-laden London with their origin in a childhood fantasy. And are not these unpredictable leaps and starts, the “gap for clarity” of which Stephen Watts writes, the poet whose name is omitted in the lines we have read? For the full opening lines of the poem “Fragment,” which Sebald does not identify, and of which he gives us, so to speak, only the edge, go like this:
And so I long for snow to
sweep across the low heights of London
from the lonely railyards and trackhuts
—London a lichen mapped on mild clays
and its rough circle without purpose—
because I remember the gap for clarity
that comes before snow in the north . . .62
Having left the world of ophthalmology behind, the narrator waits at the Salon Bar of the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street for the next train home (Austerlitz 39E, 61G). And here on the periphery of his vision, at the edge of the crowd, he notices a solitary figure who can only be Austerlitz whom he has missed all these twenty years (Austerlitz 39E, 61–62G). Yet another of the marvelously coincidental meetings between Austerlitz and the narrator: “And when he now met me here in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, which he had never before entered in his life, it was, contrary to all statistical probability, according to an astonishing, positively imperative inner logic” (Austerlitz 44E, 68G). The logic of the story, however (were causal logic that which drives literature), is that only because the narrator has problems with his sight does his path cross that of Austerlitz. This is the inverse of Austerlitz finding Vera by way of the perfectly maintained archive.
Some eighty-five pages later, at three in the morning, as the narrator records it, he retreats to a room in the hotel and sits down at a poorly lit desk in order to write down as much as possible, in notes and disconnected sentences, of what Austerlitz had just told him (Austerlitz 97E, 146G). It is not that his sight is miraculously cured: only that, we are given to understand, writing with a “gap for clarity” as Watts puts it, from the perspective of the “rough circle without purpose” of his right eye, with clarity at the edge and hatch marks at the center, is simply the way in which Austerlitz must be conceived.63
Nowhere do we get a clearer sense of this than when Austerlitz recalls an encounter with another text, long before Stephen Watts. Before we shifted to the edge of the story, and to that of the narrator, we had traced the way in which Austerlitz had been haunted by flecks in the air and black hatching. And Austerlitz had said of his most severe attack, in 1993, that he felt as though he had lain in the desert for days (Austerlitz 228–229E, 331G). The return to Prague and to his identity had brought this about. Still, there was another moment of wandering in the desert, a milder sense of where he really belonged, that reassuringly overtook him in earlier childhood, another image whose lines of connection are at once both tenuous and compelling and in which the hatch marks have an oddly different role to play.
Brought to Great Britain from Prague on the Kindertransport at the age of four and a half (Austerlitz 147E, 216G), his early years are a captivity of sorts in the arid home of a Calvinist preacher and his timid wife (Austerlitz 44–45E, 69G). He spends his childhood and the decades that follow lost in a wilderness, living the life of a nomad, without his mother tongue, housed, so to speak, in only the most provisional of architectural forms that punctuate (also visually) the story of his life.64 But “after long years in the desert [he will] finally [find] the path to the promised land” (Austerlitz 169E, 248G) of a restored past.65 The two-page illustration from the Welsh children’s Bible (Austerlitz 56–57E, 86–87G) had always testified to this. In a sense this image anticipates his encounter with Vera, for in these pages he had already begun to understand his origins, to find his rightful place, long before setting out for the state archives in Prague.
Further on in the story of Moses, said Austerlitz, I particularly liked the episode where the children of Israel cross a terrible wilderness. . . . I . . . immersed myself, forgetting all around me, in a full-page illustration showing the desert of Sinai looking just like the part of Wales where I grew up, with bare mountains crowding close together and a gray-hatched background, which I took sometimes for the sea and sometimes for the air above it. And indeed, said Austerlitz on a later occasion when he showed me his Welsh children’s Bible, I knew that my proper place was among the tiny figures populating the camp. I examined every square inch of the illustration, which seemed to me uncannily familiar. I thought I could make out a stone quarry in a somewhat lighter patch on the steep slope of the mountain over to the right, and I seemed to see a railway track in the regular curve of the lines below it. But my mind dwelt chiefly on the fenced square in the middle and the tent-like building at the far end, with a cloud of white smoke above it. Whatever may have been going on inside me at the time, the children of Israel’s camp in the wilderness was closer to me than life in Bala, which I found more incomprehensible every day, or at least, said Austerlitz, that is how it strikes me now.
(Austerlitz 55–58E)66
Long before the discovery of his obliterated name and his subsequent return to Prague, there is a possible escape from a life that, with each passing day, becomes more and more incomprehensible. Leave aside the very evident ironic details suggesting a quarry that echoes the toil of the prisoners at Breendonk; leave aside the echo as well of the layout of the concentration camps and the infamous crematoriums with their smoke stacks. That escape from Bala is made possible by the examination (Durchforschung) of the image before him.67 Still, if we, with Austerlitz, sense his belonging to the “Camp of the Hebrews,” it is not simply because of the biographical fact of the Kindertransport. Lager der Hebräer speaks of the biblical liberation of the Jews to whom God sent the pillar of clouds to show the way out of slavery (Austerlitz 55E, 85G), but the camp of the Jews speaks as well—no one can fail to hear the echo—of another “camp.” Austerlitz’s sense of belonging is as ominous and ambiguous as it is reassuring.
What punctuates the biblical illustration are a number of soon-to-be-familiar terms that flicker in and out of Austerlitz’s description. As we follow his lead and investigate every square inch of the three-hundred-page text at hand, the reiterated traces, the ever recurrent topoi that float in and out, return to haunt us, their fine lines drawn and redrawn throughout the entire extended narrative (Austerlitz 14E, 24G): not only the tents but also the miniaturized figures, the train tracks, the cloud of white smoke. And, above all, behind all, or rather constituting most everything, the hatch marks, the scratchings. For those marks that sometimes merely fill in the ground of a delineated line, also, just as often, create the figures we are sure we see. They do this not by outlining a figure (how could they?) but by the juxtaposition of different slants to the stroke. It is hatch marks, then (which in other passages threaten with an impending madness), that in the biblical scene create the semblance of heaven and earth, air and sea—and, yet again, we read, also make them interchangeable. Those scratchings give us the sense, though hardly with certainty, that we too might find the quarry or the regularly curved lines suggesting the tracks of a train. Thus the critical term here, even though it disappears into the background of Austerlitz’s description, is, of course, gestrichelt (hatched), the unobtrusive kin of the flecks in the air at the Salpêtrière and the black hatching of his 1993 collapse. For Austerlitz is really a haunted text in which our mode of understanding, were understanding the appropriate concept, wavers between the simple recovery of the well outlined past, the very heart of the plot that Sebald offers up, and a mode of writing (with its requisite reading) that quivers before our eyes and forces us to read outside any certain perspective.
Hatch work can create the image, but, alternately, it challenges the sight and sanity of the viewer, just as the inconsistent hauntings of given images, their multiple appearances, promise us understanding while bewildering us with their nonsystematic difference. Thus the white tents in the Egyptian wilderness reappear on a postcard that Austerlitz sends the narrator signed with a (tent-shaped) “A for Austerlitz.” “But at any rate, one day my mail included a picture postcard from the 1920’s or 1930’s showing a camp of white tents in the Egyptian desert, a picture taken during a campaign now remembered by no one, the message on the back saying merely Saturday 19 March, Alderney Street, a question mark and a capital A for Austerlitz” (Austerlitz 117E).68 And they reappear once again from the bird’s-eye view of a Nazi propaganda film that looks down at a party rally. As though to remind us that such wanderers in the desert often go astray, this is also the image that Maximilian, Austerlitz’s father, uses for the Germans who come to see the Führer: “No, said Vera, Maximilian told us that a bird’s-eye view showed a city of white tents extending to the horizon, from which as day broke the Germans emerged singly, in couples, and in small groups, forming a silent procession and pressing ever closer together as they all went in the same direction, following, so it seemed, some higher bidding, on their way to the Promised Land at last after long years in the wilderness” (Austerlitz 169E).69
Later it is the suppliant readers who find a place in the desert in a description of the visitors to the new Bibliothèque Nationale:70 “these figures crouching close to the ground, some by themselves and some in small groups, have alighted here on their way through the Sahara or the Sinai peninsula in the last glow of the evening” (Austerlitz 278–80E, 396G).71 What does it mean that Sebald can thus align the Hebrews wandering in the desert in the illustration from Austerlitz’s childhood Bible with the Germans in Maximilian’s description? How to compare the Hebrews in the Bible with Nazis in the Fatherland on their way to a rally with Hitler, Hess, and Himmler; and these in turn with supplicant readers at the present-day library monstrosity of Paris? What happens to our instincts of thematic reading or of repetition with regard to a text of fiction? How are we to find our moral compass with such unexpected, unpredictable, ungodly interconnections? And what does this have to say about Sebald’s practice of ethics and textuality?
Faced with the disturbing ambiguity of intertwining strands, we, like Austerlitz, might wish to obey the not fully understood impulse that draws him to a fascination with organized totality, say “with the idea of a network, such as that of the entire railway system” (Austerlitz 33E, 52–53G). It gives a sense of control and of mapped comprehension.72 Yet in similar figures we encounter the menacing branchings of the oversized trees of bronchial tubes of Maisons-Alfort or the railway lines in the engineer’s plans for the Northeast terminals, similarly monstrous once we are told they resemble the sickening strands of muscles and nerves. We might assume that a cluster of recurring images wink at us from a textual heaven of sorts, that they might form a constellation in which recognition is made possible. Still, there is nothing strictly systematic about them. And, as Austerlitz puts it, it is precisely in its familiarity that the uncanny appearance of the image resides (Austerlitz 58E, 84G). Like the nomadic phrase “camp of the Hebrews,” or like the image of the tent in its several variations whose portent and meaning will not hold still, the most familiar of Sebald’s repeated images are signs that lead us on with rather uncertain guidance.
GREENWICH TIME
Perhaps we can nevertheless learn something from the inconsistency of such repeated gestures. Perhaps we can see something in the recurring encounter with hatch marks that both create the images, making reading possible, and menace our ability to understand. The challenge in reading Sebald’s disturbingly labyrinthian prose is to orient oneself with respect to an ever branching, ever shifting subject matter. It is not possible for literature to work out complicated chaotic patterns in a systematic way (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 187), Sebald once said. Can we as readers, at least, step back, then? Can we gain the critical distance that first makes possible what is “acceptable in literary scholarship” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 147)?
After a cautionary note on the illusions of alphabetical organization, the sections of this chapter are grounded in place names. Prague, Terezín, and the subsequent journey that Austerlitz undertakes from Prague to Hoek van Holland are designations that follow the path of Austerlitz. A side step then—to the Stuttgart of Campo Santo and the tale of Sebald’s visit to Jan Peter Tripp. Back to Paris (by way of Maisons-Alfort) and Austerlitz’s brush with madness; then on to London and the narrator’s crisis with seeing things straight on. The actual thread is a shifting theoretical meditation on the complexities of Sebald’s prose, but the stamp of geographical locations (which continues almost till the end of the chapter) seemed more likely to create a sense of stability and a mnemonic link to particular passages.
Along with place, also time, of course, is the inevitable guidepost of narrative progress: both are endlessly disturbed by Sebald’s writings. In this monumental text the stories that Sebald’s narrator passes on to us are interwoven with the stories of the changing places of their telling. Also the dates of the telling flow in and out of the dates of the events told.73 While the menace to consciousness has been couched in spatial terms in the many passages we have been tracing until now (hatch marks, branchings, mazes, spiderwebs), the reader of Austerlitz frequently endures a similar sense of vertigo, caught in the force of a temporal whirlpool. Every moment of the past has the potential of opening out onto others of another time.
It is 1996 as Austerlitz engages us with the tale of his last visit to the home of his closest childhood friend (Austerlitz 109–12E, 161–64G). Both of Gerald’s uncles have died within days of one another. The funeral procession moves in the direction of the cemetery of Cutiau. The dark figures, the trees, the light, the water, the massif: these are the elements of the double burial in Wales that Austerlitz describes. Our thoughts are rooted with him in 1957, when he tells us he discovered those same elements again a few weeks ago (1996) in watercolor sketches of Turner’s Funeral at Lausanne the artist had made in 1841, toward the end of his life, out of his memory, as he tries to hold on to the fleeting visions of his past. Our thoughts have leapt back from 1957 to 1996 and then to Turner in 1841. But what really draws Austerlitz to the scene at Lausanne is not only his memories of the funeral at Cutiau but also those of his last walk with Gerald in 1966 near Lake Geneva. But, then again, in studying Turner, Austerlitz discovers that Turner, in turn, or out of turn, had himself in 1798 traveled through the same corner of Wales at precisely the age that Austerlitz had attended the funeral at Cutiau: 1996–1957–1996–1841–1966–1798–1957. The network of nominally different moments of time belies our conventional sense of progressive history, here in two pages, to be sure, but also relentlessly throughout Sebald’s volume in a more or less overwhelming manner.
Moreover, alongside the frequent entanglements of specific historical frames, we are asked to take in a series of theorizations about time that cannot necessarily be reconciled with one another. This is particularly obvious in Austerlitz’s long disquisition on time as he and the narrator walk through the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Home to Greenwich Mean Time, the prime meridian, and standard measures of length, the Royal Observatory stands as a monument to a belief in the reigning powers of time and space. With an irony the reader glimpses only in retrospect, the narrator first tells of their stroll to Greenwich: it takes place always in relation to a river and its flow. “As we walked down to the river through Whitechapel and Shoreditch he said nothing for quite a long time. . . . Only on the river bank, where we stood for a while looking down at the gray-brown water rolling inland, did he say . . .” (Austerlitz 98E, 147G).74 We take for granted the description of the river as the two men make their way together. The narrator writes of the natural landscape, and the reader, understandably, fails to take special note. We hardly notice that it is only on the bank that Austerlitz speaks. That moment of conversation takes place at the side of and to the side of the river as they glance down: what they have to say is as yet untouched by it. Here, with language mapped onto objective reality in a conventional and unproblematic way, it is like seeing with the left eye of the narrator.
Inside the observatory, however, it is another story. To be sure, here too we read another lengthy piece of description. It too regards a river and it too has much to do, not only with what one says but also with the way in which one speaks. This is Austerlitz’s “disquisition on time,” of which, the narrator writes, “much has clearly remained in my memory [Erinnerung]” (Austerlitz 100E, 149G). Austerlitz criticizes Newton’s insistence that time is like a river. As he speaks, even beyond his particular fixation with Newton’s metaphor, images of water and its flow overtake all Austerlitz wishes to say. If time is not like the linear, contained river, that Newton suggests, still Austerlitz will offer his own definition of time by in turn immersing himself in the image of water.
If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water . . . glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so what, seen in those terms, what are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia?
(Austerlitz 100E)75
Several things are taking place concurrently here: first a rejection of a metaphor which has time move in an even unidirectional flow, with an origin and a destination, defined by banks that enclose it along the way; then a rejection of time conceived as divisible into regulated units of measure. Austerlitz, who proudly announces that he has never owned an alarm clock, pocket watch, or wristwatch, much less a pendulum clock (Austerlitz 101E, 151G), calls time the most artificial of all our inventions: an arbitrary calculation based on the movement of the earth, and the calculation of an imaginary average measure of sunlight each day. Time, he says, might just as well be based on the growth of trees or the disintegration of limestone (Austerlitz 100E, 149–50G). Isn’t much of the earth, then, ruled by that which cannot be so regulated? And is not human life thus ruled “by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity [Gleichmaß], does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction?” (Austerlitz 101E, 151G)
Austerlitz may reject Newton’s metaphor of the river, but, in contrast to the narrator who had them standing calmly by the banks of the Thames and observing with detachment its gray-brown water rolling along, Austerlitz’s language takes another turn. In describing and resisting Newton’s river of contained, regulated, progressive time, Austerlitz’s speech is inundated by its own fluid subject matter, with eddies and backups and the proposal that things might be “immersed in time” (Austerlitz 100E, 150G). Austerlitz rejects the linear, standardized units of measure, as though time were a uniform thing that language might describe, itself undisturbed, from the outside, as though time might escape a relation with subjective experience (say that of the sick or the dying) or escape a relation with language. If time is not like an evenly flowing river, Austerlitz still wonders about the specific characteristics of time that might correspond to or even converse with those of water. How does time find its linguistic counterpart in water? How does Austerlitz’s language change its form to correspond with that which it speaks of? This is what Austerlitz surreptitiously asks. His answer is a sense of time that becomes immersed in the watery possibilities he lists.
This linguistic gesture is the countercurrent to the impositions of controlled, unchanging, regulated measure celebrated at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. And, given the opening scene in the Antwerp station, Austerlitz’s resistance to regulated time is also a resistance to political violence and power.
And Time, said Austerlitz, represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among all these emblems. The clock is placed about twenty meters above . . . the stairway . . . just where the image of the emperor was to be seen in the Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht. The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to bring their activities into line with its demands.
(Austerlitz 12E)76
But these are hardly the only alternatives to mark time as we encounter it in Austerlitz: on the one hand the conventional, regulated time of the Greenwich Observatory along with the ominous clocks at the Antwerp Centraal Station and on the other the whirlpools, eddies, dammings, and overflows that actually more closely approximate human experience. Sebald’s volume is populated with theories of time, explicitly expressed, or elegantly performed, not so much conflicting with one another as floating about and unpredictably surfacing in the back and forth of the text.
THE SCHELDE
Already at the very beginning of their relationship, there was another river, this time the Schelde, and another conversation that falls to the incomprehensibility of time. Austerlitz’s thoughts flow among the temporary conclusions at which he seems to arrive.
Leaving his tale of the station behind, the narrator understands that it is Austerlitz’s mode of speaking that above all calls out for attention. “From the first I was astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked, forming perfectly balanced sentences out of his distractedness, so to speak, and the way in which, for him, the narrative imparting of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of metaphysics of history, bringing that which was remembered back to life” (Austerlitz 12–13E).77 It is by storytelling that Austerlitz, his scribe, and Sebald as well offer to approach a meditation on history and also story (Geschichte). But do Austerlitz’s sentences bring the past back to life? If the name Austerlitz stands for anything, we will eventually learn, it is for the uncertainty that language, art, and even history might ever perfectly recapture the past. Thus while Austerlitz is trying to make sense of his newly acquired name (the more often the word was spoken, the more it seemed to become the young boy’s name; Austerlitz 72E, 110G), his teacher Hilary proves to his students that no account of the past can begin to replicate lived life. He does this by describing at length the Battle of Austerlitz: “Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but nonetheless it was his opinion that he had to cut everything much too short in his presentations, because, were one to really report what happened on such a day . . . it would take an endless length of time” (Austerlitz 71E, 108G).
The narrator’s optimism about bringing the past to life is placed in ironic proximity to an elaborate scene by the Schelde River. What Austerlitz’s narrative communication brings back there is not a lived moment but a canvas of the sixteenth-century painter Lucas van Valckenborch. It pictures ice skaters on the frozen river. “Pointing to the broad river sparkling in the morning sun, he spoke of a picture painted . . . towards the end of the sixteenth century . . . showing the frozen Schelde from the opposite bank. . . . And there on the river now before us some four hundred years later, said Austerlitz, the people of Antwerp are amusing themselves on the ice” (Austerlitz 13E).78
Something has happened to the flow of time: the icy moment depicted from the sixteenth century is made one with that of the two conversationalists standing on a summer’s day in the late 1960s on the river bank: there on the frozen river the people are amusing themselves. And that moment is not simply one of happy coincidence, the coming together of the sixteenth-century past of the painter with that of the twentieth-century present, nor of the simple preservation of a moment by the painter’s hand. “In the foreground, close to the right-hand edge of the picture, a lady has just fallen. She wears a canary-yellow dress. . . . When I look out there now, and think of that painting and its tiny figures, it seem to me as if the moment depicted by Lucas van Valckenborch had never come to an end, as if the canary-yellow lady had only just fallen over or swooned . . . as if the little accident [Unglück], no doubt unnoticed by most viewers, were always happening over and over again, would never cease, and nothing and no one could ever remedy it” (Austerlitz 13–14E).79 It is a moment that has never come to an end, or is, at least, ever again repeated, still, also a moment that has just happened and has thus just slipped into the past and a moment that is the outcome of fall, accident, chance, unconsciousness, and pain. It does not simply make the remembered come alive again, as the narrator would have liked to have it (Austerlitz 12–13E, 22–23G.) The incident on canvas is that which usually escapes perception. Rather than bringing the past to life, it reminds of the frailty of the moment, a frailty endlessly repeated and a past that simply cannot be made whole again.
Time on the Schelde is accident, blankness, and loss, and also an ever repeated moment, but elsewhere the narrator will speak of his friend’s entire life as a blind spot without duration: “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” (Austerlitz 117E, 173G). And yet again, all moments present and past, Austerlitz will also seem to imply, have such endless capacity for duration that time as a concept might well rather give way to space.
It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive at a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?
(Austerlitz 257–58E)80
THE PLACE OF TIME
And yet again, so much of the temporal imagination of Austerlitz is structured, rather, not by interlocking spaces, much less a single shared space, but by the most simple of spatial relations: a layering of sequential eras of time such as one might find recorded in an archaeological dig. Thus beneath the site of Broadgate Station in London one finds the overcrowded burial grounds thick with human bones, piled over one another, whose disinterment Austerlitz chose to photograph (Austerlitz 131E, 193G). At the site of the other northeast terminal, Liverpool Station, were marshy meadowlands, once spread out and subsequently drained to make way for fish ponds, trees, and gardens. Here the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem stood, as well as the infamous Bedlam hospital for the insane (Austerlitz 129E, 191G). The Great Eastern Hotel now has its place there—with the Liverpool Station just adjacent. Having narrated the striations of history at this spot, Austerlitz tells of his critical, almost mystical rediscovery, the return of the memory of his arrival in London at the age of four and a half, his wretched displacement by the Kindertransport, and the strange apparitions of the wrong people who had stood in for his parents all those years.
Thus also the new Bibliothèque Nationale is built on the same ground where, in 1959, the young student had been so moved by the melancholy Eastern music of the Bastiani family circus and their snow-white goose who seemed to understand its fate and that of the others (Austerlitz 272–75E, 387–90G). As Austerlitz looks out on the inner courtyard of the library, where its stone pines are caught by the winds, that circus enters his reverie; “In the daydreams in which I fell in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I sometimes felt as if I saw circus acrobats climbing the cables slanting up from the ground to the evergreen canopy, placing one foot in front of the other as they made their way upwards with the ends of their balancing poles quivering” (Austerlitz 281E, 397G).
That performance, we read a few pages later, as Austerlitz is told by Henri Lemoine, was in turn at the site of the Austerlitz-Tolbiac depot during the war (Austerlitz 288–89E, 407–8G). The Bibliothèque Nationale, unusable storehouse of knowledge, which Austerlitz so loathes, had been built on the storehouse of the stolen possessions of the murdered Jews of Paris.81
Sometimes, said Lemoine, said Austerlitz, he seemed to feel up here the streaming of time around his temples and brow, but probably, he added, that is only a reflex of the awareness formed in my mind over the years of the various layers which down below have grown over one another on the ground of the city. Thus, on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Pont de Tolbiac where this library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.
(Austerlitz 287–88E)82
It is perhaps this layering of the site, the almost obliteration of one era by the next,83 at once brutal and melancholy, that contributes to the progressive dissolution of our capacity to remember and the collapse of the institution once vaunted as maintaining toute la mémoire du monde (the entire memory of the world).84
Maintaining perfect memory of the world, of course, is hardly Sebald’s thing. Austerlitz seems rather an extended and bewildering exercise in how one might differently conceive the relations between periods. Different moments of individual, subjective time as well as the apparently more matter-of-fact dates of history, are intertwined with one another not unlike the branchings and webs of which we have read before. Still, the conventions of Newtonian time and Cartesian space never lose their stability of reference altogether, just as the left eye of the narrator seems to hold its own. Thus, at the close of Austerlitz’s long disquisition on time in Greenwich, the narrator has this to say. “It was around three-thirty in the afternoon and dusk was gathering as I left the Observatory with Austerlitz. We lingered for a while in the walled forecourt. Far away, we could hear the hollow grinding of the city, and the air was full of the drone of the great planes flying low and as it seemed to me incredibly slowly over Greenwich from the northeast, at intervals of scarcely more than a minute, and then disappearing again westwards towards Heathrow” (Austerlitz 101–2E).85 This reassuring if ultimately absurd passage that reintroduces conventional clock time follows on a rejection of Newtonian time and the performed insistence that the language theorizing temporality must be immersed in the object of its description. The passage comes in the wake of envisioning time as a whirlpool rather than a unidirectional, regulated, measured flow, in the wake of leaving behind a concept of time coupled with the omnipotent brutalities of political dominion, judgment, and power.
Still time, we have read, might not be the brutal move toward the future as death, like the slicing off of “the next sixtieth of an hour” (Austerlitz 9E, 17G) in the movement of the minute hand at Antwerp Centraal Station. Time might rather consist of moments that “never come to an end” or that happen over and over (Austerlitz 14E, 24G). If certain moments seem to have no beginning and no end, an entire life, on the other hand, might also be a blind spot with no duration whatsoever (Austerlitz 117E, 173G). Yet again, we might conceive time such that all moments of any individual life occupy the same space (Austerlitz 257E, 367G) so that we might make our way to both past and future, if only we know how to find the path. But then time might also be spatialized as layers in which one era builds on top of and buries what came before, though this leaves us haunted, to be sure, by the ghosts of past suffering.
Sebald’s prose both theorizes and performs all these possibilities, leaving the reader to be tossed about by its narrative eddies and whirlpools. Nevertheless, the narrator keeps an eye out for what might be remembered, for what should not be forgotten, for how time comes to us, and we to time, for how we speak the language of memory and history and how we misspeak it. There is nothing perfect here and nothing entire.
FIGURE 5.1 Time piece in three parts. Copyright © W. G. Sebald. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC Austerlitz 99).
Perhaps this is what the single photograph from the Royal Observatory is meant to convey. Something of a counterpoint to the museum at Maisons-Alfort with its monstrous, unimaginable anomalies behind glass, the observatory is filled with “ingenious observational instruments and measuring devices, quadrants and sextants, chronometers and regulators, displayed in the glass cases [Vitrinen]” (Austerlitz 98E, 148G). Unlike the clocks in the Antwerp Centraal Station, each with its single, omnipotent eye surveying, ruling, and judging all in their domain, the single measuring device we encounter as image leaves us uncertain about what we have before us.
The two round pieces cite the pairs of eyes, some human, some animal, in the opening pages of Austerlitz. Or they come to us like a pair of glasses in which one lens lies strangely darkened, perhaps like the right eye of the narrator. In the image, actually, three pieces are laid out carefully for display. On the right we see what looks like the face of a pocket watch, but with three unfamiliar, single dials, each occupied by a single hand. In contrast to this white-faced instrument, on the left lies a smaller piece. One wants to believe it the movement that, if properly placed in the other’s casing, might drive those hands of measure. Their juxtaposition seems to promise that we might make time work, even if we fail to understand how the various dials function and whether they are calibrated to that which we can comprehend. Between them sits a crank of sorts in the shape of a sideward z. Its function is elusive, the face of the timepiece, after all, already has the traditional knob with which to wind and set it. Might the z-shaped piece serve to connect the two? Why does it provocatively figure as something of an approximation sign (~) between the round pieces? On the face of it, they are neither the same nor of a piece, and yet, nevertheless, we sense the insistence on their relationship.
IVER GROVE
The puzzle image appears alone, unexplained, unrelated in any clear way to either Austerlitz or the narrator. But perhaps it finds its place less in relation to them or even to its kin in the observatory glass cases than to other images, both visual and linguistic, that soon appear as the narrative continues. Shortly after their visit to Greenwich, Austerlitz tells of his visits to the collapsing houses of the English countryside in his student days. Iver Grove is at once a house doomed like the others to dilapidation and yet a place in which time has been made to stand still. James Mallord Ashman brings his visitors to rooms that had been sealed off for years on end:
And when these partitions . . . were taken down in the autumn of 1951 or 1952, and he entered the nursery again for the first time in ten years, it wouldn’t have taken much, said Ashman, to overset his reason altogether. The mere sight of the train with the Great Western Railway carriages, and the Noah’s Ark with the pairs of well-behaved animals saved from the Flood looking out of it, had made him feel as if the chasm of time were opening up before him . . . and before he knew what he was about he found himself standing in the yard behind the house, firing his rifle several times at the little clock tower on the coach house.
(Austerlitz 108E)86
What does it mean to take aim and kill time, here and elsewhere in Austerlitz, and each time in a different and still more bewildering way? What does it mean that the details of Ashman’s nursery reverberate with the scene of Austerlitz and the narrator some fifty pages earlier and four decades later in 1996? The Great Western Railway of the children’s toy (Austerlitz 108E, 161G) echoes the Great Eastern Hotel (Austerlitz 41E, 65G), each with its respective Noah’s Ark. How are we to make connections in the whirlpools and echo chambers of objects and eras?
The room in Iver Grove that most radically defies the passage of time is the refuge of Ashman’s ancestor who had originally built the structure. At the top of the house is an observatory, we read, dedicated to selenography, the “delineation of the moon” (Austerlitz 104E, 156G). But while the moon was not to be seen, when veiled by clouds—if not hatch marks—the selenographer occupied another space that remained “exactly as it must have been one hundred and fifty years before” (Austerlitz 105E, 157G). “It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that when we were standing in the billiards room of Iver Grove with Ashman, Hilary remarked on the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the succession of the generations” (Austerlitz 108E).87 The still stand of time connects the university days of Austerlitz to the future of his encounter with the narrator.
FIGURE 5.2 Billiard balls or celestial eclipse. Copyright © W. G. Sebald. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC (Austerlitz 106–7E).
Accompanying the tale that speaks of Iver Grove is another unlabeled, uncommented image. Is this the billiards table of Ashman’s ancestor? Is it an eclipse of the moon? Is this an act of selenography in which the one orb might move to stand in place of the other, or billiard balls in place of celestial orbs? Billiards and an eclipse have this in common: one sphere is destined to knock the other out of our field of vision. But this image of two round objects had spoken to us already, of course, in the timepiece from Greenwich broken in two (or three) on which time stood still; also in the orbs of the eyes of the creatures caught in the Nocturama near the Antwerp Centraal Station; in the searching gazes of painter and philosopher that follow the opening pages; and in the ophthalmological descriptions of the narrator’s eye problems.
BREENDONK—LITHUANIA
Can it be any wonder, then, that at the close of Austerlitz a similar figure takes its place? Austerlitz has set off from the Gare d’Austerlitz in search of his father. Austerlitz to Austerlitz. The narrator too doubles back. He returns to Breendonk in Belgium which he had visited shortly after their first meeting in the opening pages, though this time he cannot bring himself to cross the moat to the penal colony. All relations to the past are possible in Austerlitz except sustained, perfect repetition. Instead he takes the book his friend had given him, Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom.88 Jacobson’s book follows the traces of his grandfather, Heshel, a Lithuanian rabbi whose life was cut short in 1920 by a heart attack. “All that came down from Heshel to his grandson was a pocket calendar, his Russian identity papers, a worn spectacle case containing not only his glasses but a faded and already disintegrating piece of silk, and a studio photograph of Heshel. . . . His one eye, or so at least it looks on the cover of the book, is shaded; in the other it is just possible to make out a white fleck, the light of life extinguished when Heshel . . . died of a heart attack” (Austerlitz 296–97E).89 One eye in shadow, the other with a small fleck, this time white and as a sign of life. The double orbs of the spectacles, and then again the eyes of Heshel, one beflecked, are the last in a long line of such figures.90
The closing pages of Austerlitz borrow from chapter 15 of Heshel’s Kingdom in an act of half-citation, the incorporation of the words of another so prevalent throughout Sebald’s publications.91 Those pages speak through the work of Jacobson and ultimately offer a sign of the life of W. G. Sebald found in the writings of yet another.
In 1941 [the Lithuanian forts] fell into German hands, including the notorious Fort IX where Wehrmacht command posts were set up and where in the following three years more than thirty thousand people were killed. . . . Transports from the west kept coming to Kaunas until May 1944, when the war had long since been lost. The last messages from those locked in the dungeons of the fortress bear witness to this. One of them, writes Jacobson, scratched the words Nous sommes neuf cents Français in the cold limestone wall of the bunker. Others left only a date and place of origin with their names: Lob, Marcel, de St. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44.
(Austerlitz 298E)92
The writing returns us to the letters of the alphabet, something like those of Novelli, for these, too, are scratched in: it is no longer the repetition of a single letter that is always the same while never repeating itself, no longer the inarticulate scream, though the attempt is once again to record the same horror. In Kaunas the scratchings are clear and matter-of-fact, a statement of presence past, a precise if minimal record of history. Max Stern of Paris inscribes his name along with the date of that signature. Just how are we to understand the significance of the names and date?93
In the last pages it is no longer Austerlitz’s personal story, but that of the narrator. He chooses Jacobson to speak for him in lines so close to Heshel’s Kingdom it is difficult to say whom we are reading. Yet the citation is not exact. Jacobson writes: “Also, among many others, were ‘Lob, Marcel, Mai 1944’; ‘Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges–Paris, 18.5.44’; ‘Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44.’”94 May 1944 belongs to three of the names: Sebald reserves that date for one alone. As Austerlitz closes, only Max Stern inscribes his name with the date 18.5.44, which is also the day on which Max Sebald was born.95
The identity of dates is and is not an accident. The author of Austerlitz calls on us to take note. The selective citation from Jacobson is a strangely self-effacing and self-announcing culminating gesture. Is it meant to suggest that the stars of Max Stern and Max Sebald are crossed? Does it stand to remind us, as Sebald not unoften does, that he was born only at the end of the nightmare, too late to have borne witness with his own eyes? Still, Heshel’s Kingdom returns us to much we have seen to define the movement of Austerlitz throughout. We might wish to call it Sebald’s vision.
Sebald’s alphabet takes us from A to A (in Novelli’s paintings to begin with and in all the subsequent entanglements), but also from A to Z, as in the name of his book and that of his protagonist. The alphabet fulfills its promise of communication, saves the name of Max Stern, to be taken up in turn by Jacobson and then by Sebald. The alphabet orders the state archives of Prague, brings Austerlitz back to his Vera, his childhood back to Austerlitz, and his mother tongue back to the victim of the Kindertransport. It also salvages the bitter historical facts as found in the Ghetto Museum of Theresienstadt or in the seemingly endless, pages-long, single sentence that gathers together the horror of the ghetto’s organization when Austerlitz recounts his reading of H. G. Adler (Austerlitz 232ffE, 335ffG).96
Both ethical and aesthetic satisfaction elude us here: We cannot align order exclusively with evil and conventional modes of discourse and disorder with the suffering of the victim as well as radical forms of narrative.97 Just as the archive both serves as a restitution of Austerlitz’s past and stands as a sobering reminder of Nazi efficiency in Theresienstadt (Austerlitz 283–85E, 401–3G), alphabetical order cannot definitively be called into service by either the one side or its ostensible challenger.98 This is no less the case for the other forces of organization we have been following, the delineation of both spatial and temporal systems: clarity of sight and form in relation to flecks, branching, webs, and hatch marks—and Newtonian time in relation to the myriad jumbles of different moments.
Newtonian time, Austerlitz tells us, and right from his first conversations with the narrator in the Antwerp Centraal Station, stands as an ally to political, state power of the most ruthless kind. And yet the disturbance of and challenge to that linear, inexorable progress of the clock also marks Austerlitz’s lifetime of suffering with its repeated mental collapses, but then again makes possible his hope of making contact with the past, of one point in time passing into the other. Austerlitz itself gives us the clear narrative of a series of progressive encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz from 1967 to 1997 as well as the dizzying experience of intertwined moments in their conversations reported therein. Something similar might be said of the visual representations of space. In a logical wish to distinguish power and its victims, one might, for example, pit the clear architectural plans of fortifications, say of Theresienstadt (Austerlitz 234–35E, 336–37G) or the “architectural style of the capitalistic era [with its] compulsive sense of order” (Austerlitz 33E, 52G) against the slow-motion version of the Theresienstadt ghetto film, sprinkled with its black flecks,99 out of which Austerlitz, nevertheless, yearns to salvage an image of his mother.100
Still, the narrator’s eye problem, to explain which his Czech doctor offers an unviewable, indistinct outline drawing (Austerlitz 37E, 59G), might show us, once again, how problematic such will to distinction is. He who writes the text, we read, experiences what seems a complete loss of sight in the right eye (Austerlitz 34–35E, 54–55G). He sees only a row of distorted forms, a threatening black hatching. This attack on his sight occurs just when he takes up his long-neglected writing (Austerlitz 34E, 54G). Are we to presume, therefore, that Austerlitz is entirely defined by distorted forms, wayward lines, hatch marks carved into or by the vision of the writer?
On the edge of his field of vision, after all, he apparently sees with a clarity that has not been deeply compromised (Austerlitz 35E, 55G). Moreover, if the right eye, on the one hand, has lost most of it capacity to see while maintaining, peripherally, a hope of clarity, the left eye, on the other hand, seems to maintain the possibility of sight. What else could explain the detailed descriptions of the passing landscapes outside the narrator’s train window as he travels to the ophthalmologist in London? Still in the left eye, too, he senses an impairment of vision. This dance from left to right, between center and periphery, between hatched blindness and clarity of form, this inexorable movement between, so goes the fiction, is what runs through the writing of Austerlitz.
Does Austerlitz, then, in its refusal to rigorously regulate its spatial and temporal forms, betray the certainty of an ethical commitment? How could that be in a life’s work that, from beginning to end, calls attention to the tragic violence and destruction all around us? How are we to think this unsettling failure to fix in place—which is perhaps also, in another sense, a critical triumph? The narrator’s precarious relation to recountability means that the reader is left with a troubling task: decision and reinterpretation, ever anew. This might be an ethics of another order with no self-certainty that we have seen clearly or gotten it right perhaps.
