Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

AUSTERLITZ
A Book of Lamentations
W. G. Sebald
A critical paper by
Louise Mooney

 

W.G. Sebald was born in 1944, the very year, as Cynthia Ozick reminds us, that “Mengele stood on the ramp at Auschwitz, lifting the omnipotent gloved hand that dissolved Jewish families: mothers, babies and the old to the chimneys, the rest to the slave labor that temporarily forestalled death.” Last week, in an uncanny Sebaldian moment, that chilling scenario was recalled in a NY Times oped quoting Auschwitz survivor Eva Fahidi, testifying in the trial of the so-called ”Auschwitz accountant,” Oskar Groening. “The infamous doctor waved her to one side and her mother and sister to the other.” The killing side, that is. (NYTimes, April 21, 2015)

Sebald recounts his first encounter with his country’s shameful history, when in grammar school, his class was shown a documentary on the Bergen Belsen camp. No discussion followed. The film was left hanging in vague isolation, inexplicable, a haunting interlude in a childhood spent among shadows, silence, and secrets, not unlike the entire country, according to Sebald, the son of a soldier in Hitler’s army, in whose presence the Holocaust was never mentioned, who took his son to the bombed-out cities of Germany and walked among their rubble and ruins as if strolling through a natural landscape.

The soldier’s son did not forget. 

As critic Michael Gorra observes, the Holocaust is a ghost in everything Sebald writes. That ghost and the moral impoverishment and willed forgetfulness of his fellow Germans are the fires that ignite Sebald’s literary passion. Along with Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Italo Calvino, Isaac Bashevis Singer and many, many others in Europe, our own country (Nathan Englander and Nicole Krauss esp) and the world over, Sebald strips that exquisite glove from Doctor Mengele to expose the murderous hand within. A character in The Emigrants explains that a writer’s obsession with the Holocaust is “like one of those evil German fairy tales in which once you are under the spell you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks with whatever work you have begun – in this case, the remembering, the writing, and reading.” And the haunting, which is the literary terrain over which Sebald heaves his weighty plow. He is a scrupulous plowman, examining every up-turned stick and stone for message and meaning until we, his readers, may sometimes wonder whether this field will ever ripen and bear fruit.

Critics and others easily spot Sebald’s literary progenitors. Most often they mention Proust, Nabokov, Borges, Kafka, Mann, and Thomas Bernhard. To that list I add the TS Eliot of “Burnt Norton.” Disclosing Jacques Austerlitz’s fictional antecedents is more challenging. Perhaps Hawthorn’s mysteriously veiled and remorseful ministers would be a good start. Like them Austerlitz is a silent, brooding, darkly clothed figure, stealthily wandering by night and day through graveyards, prisons, rail stations and public buildings. Elsewhere, with his ubiquitous rucksack slung over his shoulder and camera always at hand, he is the kind of character who might have emerged as a minor comedic player in, for instance, a Chekov play, a Gogol short story, or as the town eccentric whom bratty children chase and throw pebbles after. Such a character is impossible in Sebald’s retelling of the Holocaust. Austerlitz is a tragic presence on whose sloped shoulders the weight of 20th century history has settled.

 
The poet Robert Penn Warren writes, “We live in time so little time.” But that is true only in the chronological time between between birthdate and death date – the measurable time that Austerlitz observes on the great clock of the Antwerp Centraal Station, each moment “slicing off one-sixtieth of an hour from the future.” Time in the Sebald world is unquantifiable; it seamlessly and menacingly knits events of the past into the fabric of the present. In a scene tellingly set in the Greenwich Royal Observatory, Austerlitz recalls Newton: Time is a river that flows underground and overruns its banks. Or we might ask: is it a mobius strip that a mere twist here and a twist there can give an illusion of the other side – the past and present are so inseparably merged?

 Jacques Austerlitz is a restless, tormented man, traveling through life in a brumous haze. Inexplicable images bedevil him even in his childhood, when “I never shook off the feeling that something very obvious, very manifest in itself was hidden from me.” Or when he discovers that a whole town has been flooded and fantasizes that the eyes of drowned men and women and children are looking up through the waters, watching him, for the dead, he says are always watching us. Terrifying memories emerge “in the middle of the night” like photographs submerged in developing fluid, “darkening again if you try to cling to them.” Or like the moths that die clinging to a wall and will remain steadfast in their death pose until their decayed bodies detach, fall off, and must be swept away like Gregor Samsa. Or like the millions buried in mass graves throughout eastern Europe.

In an earlier century, doctors would have labeled Austerlitz a “melancholic.” A veritable model for Durer’s “Melancholia.” As it happens, melancholia is not so far off the mark:  Austerlitz, we learn, has had two breakdowns, two lengthy hospitalizations. His mind is beset by a “constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time.”

The clearest picture Sebald gives of Austerlitz’s confounding public image comes from the words of Marie de Verneuil.* The pair, on the brink of love, have gone to take the waters at Marienbad. The visit is disastrous for both of them. Marie cannot shake him from his despair, and he cannot explain to her that “there are mysterious signs and portents all around” and that “the silent facades of the buildings knew something ominous about me.” In their parting,  Marie tells him, “When we wake up tomorrow, I shall wish you every happiness, and it will be like telling a machine working by some unknown mechanism that I hope it will run well. Can’t you tell me the reason . . why you remain so unapproachable?” That is the face Austerlitz offers the world. To borrow a line from a Hardy poem: a face that is “the deadest thing  / alive enough to have  the strength to die.” 

Fortunately, there is to be an awakening, a recovery of time past. It happens gradually following Austerlitz’s first breakdown when, visiting a music store he hears two women on the  store radio describing their experiences as children sent from Germany to London on a Kindertransport train. Shortly after, in the Liverpool Street Station, he recognizes himself in a vision of a small boy:

         He was sitting on a bench by himself over to one side.  His legs, in white     knee-length          socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small rucksack he         was holding on his lap I   don’t think I would have known him . . . and for    the first time in as far back as I can          remember I recollected myself as a    small child, at the moment when I realized that it          must have been to this    same waiting room that I had come on my arrival in          England over half a century ago.

Overtime Austerlitz will learn that he arrived as a five-year-old in London from Prague in 1939, sent by his mother Agata Austerlitz on a kindertransport in an effort to save her son from the fate she and his father, Maximilian Aykenwald, will suffer: Agata, deported first to Theresienstadt and then to the ovens of Auschwitz; Max, interned in occupied France, first at Drancy and then at Gurs, presumed dead.

The boy is brought from London to Wales by a Calvinist minister, Emyr Elias, and his wife, Gwendolyn, to a house on a desolate hill, where there were rooms that were never unlocked, windows that were never opened, and doors that were sealed shut. In winter frost coated the stone floors; birds froze on the branches of trees and fell to the ground. School was the Bible; religion was a lesson in divine retribution. And Jacques Austerlitz, now named Dafydd Elias, no longer a Czech, learned to speak Welsh, learned to cultivate silence, and perceived that he was not in his true home but “very far away in some kind of captivity.”

His escape from captivity will begin when the couple dies, as Austerlitz says, “from the chill in their hearts.” Sent off to a boarding school, Dafydd will recover his birth name, find his first friendship in a boy much like himself, and be taken under the wing of a compassionate teacher, who will direct him to university and a career as an architectural historian and art professor.

Readers first meet Jacques Austerlitz in 1967 in the waiting room of the Antwerp Centraal Station where he is discovered by a man as strange and curiously outlandish as himself: the nameless person whom Sebald has appointed to tell Austerlitz’s story, a convention the author employs in The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, where the narrative is recited second-hand by a Greek chorus of one.

The two men are well met. Both are solitary outliers; both have histories of mental instability, both share the same plangent sensibilities, and both, like Keats, are “half in love with easeful death.” The narrator has just emerged from the dark and unreal world of a Nocturama in a state of confusion brought on by the sorrowful features he detects in the night-time animals dislocated and marooned in their artificial habitats. Does it not seem that Austerlitz is waiting for him as  he stares fixedly into – and tries to photograph – the interiors of heavily ornamented mirrors? (Surely a Sebaldian touch: the attempt to capture an incorporeal reflection of corporeality.)

Both also share an interest in architecture: the narrator’s interest is more general; Austerlitz’s research focuses on the “capitalistic structures” of the 19th century, those edifices built by the lords of industry and mining who have exploited the earth’s mineral resources and impoverished the laboring underclasses for generations: train stations, prisons, libraries, and hotels with special focus on the terrain that these buildings have replaced. For, like Mengele’s glove, many of these giant monuments hide their own sinister histories. The Great Eastern Hotel, for instance, is built  over the ruins of Bedlam; beneath the Broad Street station lie the remains of generations of linen workers; the entire city of London is undergirded by ancient strata of corpses upheaved from their graves, and, of course, the Liverpool Street Station encases Austerlitz’s own bleak history. Sebald/Austerlitz reserves special ire for the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, erected where once the Germans stored, cared for, catalogued, and classified the household goods of 40,000 Ashkenazi families. For Austerlitz and for Sebald, it is always the skull beneath the flesh. that compels attention.

The narrator and Austerlitz meet several times in 1967 but do not correspond again for 30 years, when in 1997 the narrator joins Austerlitz in London. By then, he has journeyed to Prague and met with Vera Rysanova, a woman who as a young student took care of him when his parents were at  work. With her help he has recovered his lost language and most of his lost history. He has traveled to Theresienstadt  in search of some phantom of his mother and repeated the journey from Prague to Holland to London that he took as a boy. By the time of his reunion with the narrator, he has emerged from two breakdowns, retired from teaching, destroyed his research, and is living alone in a cluttered apartment on Alderley Street next to a Jewish cemetery. He has asked to meet with the narrator because he wishes to entrust him with the history he has uncovered in their long years apart.

But who is this man whom Austerlitz has chosen as the depository of his life story? Is he his alter ego, is he the twin Austerlitz sometime dreams is following him, is he the creation of a deluded mind? Is he Sebald himself. Or is he merely the intermediary that Sebald has chosen to maintain authorial distance from subject matter that, like the Gorgon’s head, is too dreadful to look at up close?

Except for one long, passionate 10-page, unpunctuated sentence three quarters through the book, I believe that Sebald has been successful in maintaining his emotional distance in the purest, most eloquent, almost matchless prose his generation has produced. In that lengthy and overwrought sentence he has unraveled the hideous interior of Theresienstadt, its pseudo-technical jargon, its deadly “organizational plan regulating all functions and responsibilities . . . with [the] crazed administrative zeal” that was necessary when you consider the thousands of prisoners arriving every day who must be stamped, catalogued and tattooed, the four naptha-fired incinerators that must be kept firing day and night in cycles of 40 minutes each, the carts that must collect and transport the bodies, and the coffins that must be nailed together to accommodate the stacks of corpses – sometimes as many as 500 layered against the wall – all this “comprehensive system of internment and forced labor” that. . . “was ultimately directed . . . solely at the extinction of life.”

In that one passionate, exhausting 10-page sentence in which the author may have lost his way to a heart on the verge of bursting, he summons the reader to a judgment on her fellow human being that is too difficult to pronounce. We are left bewildered like Gwendolyn on her deathbed asking her husband ,“What was it that so darkened our world?”

*As it turns out, “Marie de Verneuil” is the name of a character in a Balzac novel, Les Chouans. Sebald was a great admirer of Balzac and the Balzac connection in Austerlitz is worthy of pursuit. It is within the pages of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert that Austerlitz discovers the photograph of himself dressed as an  18th-century page. The novel’s Colonel Chabert, presumed to have perished in one of the  Napoleonic battles, is not dead at all and returns, inconveniently, a ghost-like figure, to find his wife remarried, himself near forgotten, and the apartments of others believed deceased occupied by strangers. Is there a word or line of Austerlitz that is not weighted with the memory of the Holocaust?

LFM