*zilcosky, disorientation, nostalgia and holocaust melodrama in austerlitz 2006

8/10/2019 *Zilcosky, Disorientation, Nostalgia and Holocaust Melodrama in Austerlitz 2006

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Lost and Found:Disorientation, Nostalgia,

and Holocaust Melodrama inSebalds Austerlitz1

John Zilcosky

Bianca Theisen and I began discussing the then still-somewhat-mys-terious expatriate German writer, W. G. Sebald, in 2001, just before

the publication of his final book and his untimely death. In these

conversations, we kept circling back to the sense of never havingread anything quite like him. His insertion of images into fiction

was not new,2 but we, like so many others, still sensed something

peculiar in Sebalds form: the way he relentlessly pushed genre

borders, especially by continually and ostentatiously placing himself

into his books. Were these works facts or fictions? And, what is more,were they autobiographies, novels, short story collections, collages,

or travelogues? This latter possibilityseeing Sebald as a writer of

traveloguesfascinated us most, not least because of the apparent

high/low contradiction: the relentlessly erudite writer of intellectualfiction loved the relatively degraded genre of the travel essay. Sebald,

1A much shorter, German-language version of this article will appear almost simul-

taneously in Text + Kritik(2006).2In his use of images, Sebald follows the German documentary-literature writers ofthe 1960s and 1970s, most notably Alexander Kluge. For the use of montage in the1960s and 1970s travel writings of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Hubert Fichte, see BiancaTheisen, Prose of the World: W. G. Sebalds Literary Travels, The Germanic Review79:3(Summer 2004): 16379 (here, 165).

MLN121 (2006): 679698 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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we discovered, was a travel writer of sorts. As Susan Sontag had writ-

ten a year earlier, travel was the generative principle of mental

activity in Sebalds writings.3

But what kinds of travels, we asked? And in what ways were Sebaldstravels not just journeys through countries but also journeys throughbooks? His voyages often followed explicitly the footsteps of others(Stendhal, Kafka, Casanova), and sometimes took place only in hishead, when he read the travel stories of Conrad, Diderot, and Grill-parzer. We started to delineate precisely how Sebalds travels fit intothis tradition of travel writing he so richly evoked, and we went onto publish, almost simultaneously, two essays focusing on Sebald andtravel. Whereas Bianca concentrated on Sebalds highly stylized re-inscribing of German literary journeys to Italy, I examined Sebaldsfascination with what may well be travel writings master tropethefear of getting lost and the desire to find ones wayin his early 1990stravelogue triptych: Vertigo(1990), The Emigrants(1992), and The Ringsof Saturn (1995).4As I argued there, Sebald obsessively returned tothis ancient paradigmwhere literary travelers since Odysseus got lostand found their way back homein order to undermine it, but not

as we might expect: he did not claim that we are all hopelessly lostand unable to return to our origins. Rather, he demonstrated howour disorientations never lead to new discoveries, only to a series ofuncanny, intertextual returns. This claim went against the grain ofwhat had already become a recurring argument in Sebald criticism:that Sebalds heroes were postmodern nomads desperately lost atthe turn of our 21st century.5I maintained thatin these early 1990snarrativesSebald sustained a decidedly modernist (not postmodern-ist) tension within this model of lost-and-found. Instead of providing

3Susan Sontag, A Mind in Mourning (2000), in Where the Stress Falls (New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 4148 (here, 46).

4Theisen, Prose of the World; John Zilcosky, Sebalds Uncanny Travels: The Im-possibility of Getting Lost, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald: ACriticalCompanion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2004), 10220.

5For Claudia Albes, Rings of Saturncites all sorts of postmodern writers and thinkers.For Eshel, Sebalds prose is emblematic[ally] postmodern. Albes furthermore names

disorientation and the Deleuzian rhizome as Sebalds master tropes. Claudia Albes,Die Erkundung der Leere: Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebalds englischer WallfahrtDieRinge des Saturn,Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft46 (2002): 279305 (here, 295,289, 291; see also 280, 281); Amir Eshel, Against the Power of Time: The Poetics ofSuspension in W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz, New German Critique88 (Winter 2003): 7196(here, 90; see also 76, 80, 93).


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accounts of nomadism, Sebalds stories presented subjects who couldnever become sufficiently uprooted, never lose their way at all. Like Freud,

Kafka, and Thomas Mann, Sebald viewed modern travel as primarilyuncanny. Emblematic was the title of Sebalds essay collection fromthe same period, Unheimliche Heimat, whose word-play closed the gapbetween traveling and dwelling, producing the sensation that the trav-eler, no matter how far away he journeyed, could never really leave hishome.6In the present essay, I will examine Sebalds last long fiction,Austerlitz (2001), arguing that it turns back toward a more conventionalpostmodern model of lost-and-found, and leads us to consider theaesthetic and ethical dimensions of Holocaust representation.

I. Uncanniness and the Impossibility of Lostness:

Vertigo(1990), The Emigrants(1992), The Rings of Saturn(1995)

Beginning with Greek epic and myth and running through to Ro-mantic fairy tales, heroes have traditionally dreaded losing their way:Odysseus held on desperately to his nostos; Theseus unrolled care-fully Ariadnes thread behind him; and Hansel and Gretel dropped

pieces of bread to guide them safely home. Getting lost signified theend of ones homecoming as well as mortal danger: being turnedinto swine, devoured by a Minotaur, and eaten by a witch. But thesenarratives were only initially about getting lost; they were also alwaysabout the triumphant moment of re-direction, the topographicalaha! experience, the right turn toward home. This lost-and-foundstory became a literary trope in the Romantic era, in fairy tales andalso in Goethes late eighteenth century journeys through Veniceand Flauberts mid-nineteenth century wanderings through Cairo.7These Romantic narratives exemplified a modern fort/da game, inwhich the voyager substituted his own body for the toy-spool that thechild in Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principlehurled behind the drape

6Unheimliche Heimatdiscusses writers (such as Kafka, Jean Amry, Gerhard Roth andPeter Handke) who all find it impossible to escape their Austrian Heimat. See, for ex-ample, Sebalds remarks on Amry, who even changed his name (from Hanns Mayer)

in a vain attempt to break away from Austria (Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zursterreichischen Literatur[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995], 141).

7For a more detailed description of Goethes and Flauberts lost-and-found stories,and their relation to Freuds fort/da game, see John Zilcosky, The Writer as Nomad?:The Art of Getting Lost. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies6 (2004):22941(here, 23134).


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and then triumphantly retrieved.8By throwing his body behind theforeign citys curtain and then reclaiming it, the traveler prevented

the real trauma of possible self-loss. This fort/da game served asthe travelers insurance policy. He underwrote his own worst anxietyby making it to come true. By getting lost on purpose, the travelercould not do so by accident. This Romantic lost-and-found gamerepeated itselfhowever subtlyin postmodern figurations of travel.Even though Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris early 1970s urbannomadism claimed to resist all forms of return and recuperation,postmodern literary travelogues,9such as Roland Barthess LEmpire dessignes (1970), revealed nomadisms Romantic legacy.10Barthes claimedthat the goal of his Tokyo wanderings was to disturb his person, buthe, like Goethe in Venice, got lost ultimately in order to discover thetravel writer in himself: his Tokyo disorientations eventually affordedhim a situation of writing.11In a twist revealing the nostalgia withinsome postmodernisms, Barthes got lost in order to find his writingnomad within.12

How did Sebalda travel writer acutely aware of contemporaryliterary theorycounteract this neo-Romantic, postmodern conceit?13

8Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) (1920), TheStandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey(London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 18: 764 (here, 15).

9Deleuze and Guattari spearheaded this valorization of nomadism and nomadthought in, respectively, Lanti Oedipe(Paris: Minuit, 1972) and (by Deleuze alone)Pense nomade, in Nietzsche aujourdhui?ed. Pierre Boudot (Paris: UnionGnraledEditions, 1973).

10Correctly pointing out that poststructuralism is most concerned with modernist(not postmodernist) literature, Andreas Huyssen argues for disconnecting postmodernpractice from poststructural theory. In the case of nomadism, however, poststructuraltheorizations (Deleuze/Guattari, Paul Patton, Rosi Braidotti) correspond preciselyto postmodern travel writing: both attempt to invent mobile stories that no longerdepart only in order to return (see Zilcosky, The Writer as Nomad?, 230). In thisinstance, I agree with Fredric Jamesons claim that poststructuralism is also a sub-

variety of the postmodern, or at least proves to be that in hindsight. Andreas Huys-sen, Poststructuralism: Modern or Postmodern, in After the Great Divide: Modernism,Mass Culture, Postmodernism(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 20616; Fredric

Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke Univ.Press, 1991), xvi.

11Roland Barthes,Empire of Signs(New York: Hill & Wang, 1982 [1970]), 4.

12Andreas Huyssen similarly identifies the nostalgic aspect of some poststructuralisttheory: Isnt the death of the subject/author position tied by mere reversal to the

very ideology that invariably glorifies the artist as genius? (Huyssen, After the GreatDivide, 213).

13For Sebalds awareness of poststructuralist theory, see Albes, Die Erkundung derLeere, 29596.


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In his early 1990s books, Sebald destabilized this attempt to turn themargin into a new center (and make disorientation a new form of

orientation) by destructing the traditional opposition between homeand away. More disturbing than the fact that we might be alwayslost was, for Sebald, the fact that we might always know where we are,whether we like it or not: when we find ourselves in the same hotelin a city we once visited long ago; when we become disoriented onlyto keep circling back to the same spot; when we move away from ourhomes only to see our pasts creeping in everywhere around us. Thispersistence of the familiar, this unheimlichinability to lose ones way,haunted Sebalds early travel narratives. To give just one examplefrom each work: in Vertigo, the narrator wandered aimlessly throughthe streets of Viennahoping to disorient himself along goalless[ziellose] pathsonly to discover disappointedly that not one of hisjourneys had taken him beyond a precisely defined area in the citycenter; Ambros Adelwarth (from The Emigrants) traveled to Istanbulbut caught sight there of mountains that for one awful heartbeatresembled his German home and later, in Jerusalem, hallucinateda group of lepers who terrifyingly resembled inhabitants from his

hometown; in The Rings of Saturn, the narrator wandered through anespecially thick patch of overgrown scrubland onlyto his astonish-ment, not to say horrorto find himself back again at the sametangled thicket from which [he] had emerged about an hour before.14The Romantic fort/da game thus gave way in Sebalds early work toan uncanny paradigm: the subject did not get lost (with the impliedhope of getting found); rather, he incessantly returned against hiswill to hauntingly familiar places.

14The Sebald citations are from: Vertigo (New York: New Directions, 1999), 334(Schwindel. Gefhle[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994 (1990)], 3940); The Emigrants(New York: New Directions, 1996), 131, 142 (Die Ausgewanderten:vier lange Erzhlungen[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994 (1992)], 193, 210); The Rings of Saturn(New York:New Directions, 1998), 171 (Die Ringe des Saturn: eine englische Wallfahrt[Frankfurt amMain: Fischer, 1997 (1995)], 204). English translations are all by Michael Hulse.

The only moment in these early works when Sebalds narrator seems to wantto gohome is figured ironically: an extravagant Italian title (Il ritorno in patria) towers over

his journey to an insignificant village in Allgu (section 4 of Vertigo). The ostentatiousItalian title deliberately puts the narrators patria in question. Is it in Allgu? Or is itin England, where he now lives and whither he finally returns in the final pages? Oris it in Italy (as patria suggests), the spiritual homeland of the German writer-in-train-ing from Goethe onward? (Vertigo, 257; Schwindel. Gefhle, 280; see Zilcosky, SebaldsUncanny Travels, 106).


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Sebalds precursors here were neither the Romantics nor thepostmodernists but the modernists. Gustav Aschenbach, in Thomas

MannsDeath in Venice (1912), for example, followed Tadzio throughVenices labyrinthine alleys, eventually losing his bearings, but nevergaining the triumphant feeling of going off-course and then findinghis way back; instead he inexplicably appeared in exactly the sameforsaken square he had sat in weeks earlierthis time finishing thetainted strawberries that would bring on his death. Similarly, SigmundFreud journeyed in 1919 to a town in Italy where he lost his way, onlyto keep returning against his will to the same spot. Kafkas Josef K.from The Trial (191415), too, got lost in the attics behind the painterTitorellis bed, only to find these attics leading inexorably to theall-too-familiar hallways of the Courts. In each of these cases, disori-entation led not, as in Goethe and Barthes, to the excitingly strange,but rather to the unsettlingly known. Sebalds early travel narrativesrepeated this uncanny modernism, but from a self-reflexive, 1990spost-postmodern perspective, in which, from Sebalds standpoint,lostness became impossible again.15

II. Uncertain Forms or Novels?

The 199095 Narratives versusAusterlitz(2001)

Does Sebalds final fictional narrative, Austerlitz, carry forth this post-postmodern, uncanny structure? Before considering this question,let us examine how much Austerlitzs general literary form differsfrom that of the earlier works. Although scholars tend to group allof Sebalds fictions together under the author-function Sebald,16itis important to remember that Austerlitzs earliest critics emphasizedthe last books stylistic differencesfor better or for worsefrom hisearlier writings. Wieland Freund claimed (positively) that AusterlitzwasSebalds least biographical work; it was closest to a novel, even ifSebald refuses to use this etiquette, and the main character, JacquesAusterlitz, was more clearly a fictional figure than Sebalds earlierprotagonists. Richard Eder claimed (negatively) that Austerlitzlacked

15See Zilcosky, Sebalds Uncanny Travels, 104.

16To cite just two of many possible examples: Julia Hell views all of Sebalds works,from Vertigothrough Air War and Literature, as a part of a gendered drama articulatingthe illegitimacy of post-Holocaust authorship, and Amir Eshel sees an overall poeticsof suspension running through Sebalds oeuvre from After Nature to Austerlitz (JuliaHell, Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship, New German Critique 88[Winter 2003]: 936 [here, 35]; Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 90).


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the buoyant variety of the previous works. Andreas Huyssen claimed(neutrally) that Austerlitzwas Sebalds first real novel.17These critics

all pointed toward Austerlitzs more traditionally novelistic structure:despite the long sentences, the lack of paragraph and section breaks,the persistent digressions, and the concentric narration, Austerlitzwas more easily identifiable as a novel than the earlier three fictions,which all wandered along the borders between travel diary, memoir,collage, and short story.

What makes Austerlitzmore like a real novel? The major factor isAusterlitzs de-emphasis of the peculiarly Sebaldian confusion betweenmemoir and fiction, so central to the earlier works. For example, thename Sebald is never mentioned, and we never stumble across astartling photograph of the real author, as we did in Vertigoand TheRings of Saturn(see figures 1 and 2). Even The Emigrants, Austerlitzsclosest literary relative, defies novelistic unity through its four distinctlong narratives and preserves throughout a scrupulous uncertaintybetween fiction and documentary: whereas Jacques Austerlitz is a fic-tional amalgam of two or three, or perhaps three-and-a-half real-lifefigures (a somewhat normal ratio for fiction),18Max Aurach was so

clearly a replica of a living artist, Frank Auerbach, that Sebald hadto change the name for the English edition (to Max Ferber).19TheEmigrants photographs, moreover, were almost all authentic andhad a more alienating effect than those in Austerlitz.20In the former,

17Wieland Freund, Belgische Begegnungen, Rheinischer Merkur, 24 March 2001;Richard Eder, Excavating a Life, New York Times, 28 October 2001; Andreas Huyssen,Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,2003), 177n40. Also, Thomas Wirtz claims (negatively) that the powerfully alienatingrole of the Sebaldian I is weakened in Austerlitz(Thomas Wirtz, Schwarze Zucker-

watte: Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebald, Merkur55 (June 2001): 53034 (here, 534). Fora good summary of early Austerlitzcriticism, see Mark McCulloh, Understanding W. G.Sebald(Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2003), 13237.

18Sebald names explicitly two of these people: a colleague of his (a historian of ar-chitecture) and a woman, Susie Bechhofer, who was brought to England as part of theKindertransport. Andreas Huyssen speculates that this residual half person is Sebaldhimself. Sebald, second interview with Maya Jaggi, The Last Word, The Guardian, 21December 2001, 22834; Andreas Huyssen, Gray Zones of Remembrance, in A NewHistory of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,2004), 97075 (here, 972).

19Although Sebald tells Maya Jaggi that his Mancunian landlord also contributed to

the character of Aurach (I found out hed skied in the same places as I had), theresemblance to Auerbach was primary and real enough for Auerbach to insist onthe name change. See Maya Jaggis first interview with Sebald, Recovered Memories,The Guardian, 22 September 2001.

20According to Sebald, nearly all of the images [from The Emigrants] were historicand authentic artifacts from the represented biographies; in Austerlitz, on the other


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Figure 1. W.G. Sebald, from Vertigo, first published in Germany under the originaltitle Schwindel. Gefhle by Eichborn AG, Frankfurt/Main 1990. Reproduced with thepermission of the Estate of W.G. Sebald.


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the images interrupted the narrative, estranging the reader fromthe story through apparent authorial intrusions; they seemed to beplaced into the text by the author himself as documentary proofs. Thephotographs in Austerlitz, conversely, do not alienate because they fitsmoothly into the books fictional device: Jacques Austerliz carries acamera with him and takes pictures on his journeys. These details

combine to make Austerlitzmore novelistic, which, in itself, does notsay anything good or bad. Freund, for example, finds Austerlitzbetterthan Sebalds earlier works precisely because it is less biographical.21But this turn toward more conventional fiction does weaken Sebaldsclaim that Austerlitz, like his earlier works, is a prose book of uncer-tain form.22With the exception of the photographs, there is littleto distinguish it stylistically from a likewise concentrically-narratedThomas Bernhard novel.

hand, only about half of the images issued from the real lives of his models. Sebald,interview inDer Spiegel, Ich frchte das Melodramatische (12 March 2001).

21Freund, Belgische Begegnungen.22Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.

Figure 2. W.G. Sebald, from The Rings of Saturn, first published in Germanyunder the original titleDie Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt by Eichborn AG,Frankfurt/Main 1995. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of W.G. Sebald.


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III. Lostness:Austerlitz(2001)

How does this shiftfrom the uncertain form of Sebalds early 1990sbooks to the more novelistic structure of Austerlitzrelate to the tropeof disorientation? If the earlier books portrayed a post-postmodernimpossibility of lostness, does Austerlitz return to a Romantic (andpostmodern) model of lost-and-found? Whereas lostness was nextto impossible in the 199095 books, it is ever-present in Austerlitz. IfSebalds earlier characters could never get lost, Austerlitz can onlyget lost, at least at the outset. And this lostness is dangerous, leadingtoward madness, as it did in a rare moment of disorientation from

Vertigo: the narrators friend, Ernst Herbeck, was permanently commit-ted to a mental institution because of his aimless wandering throughthe streets of Vienna.23Herbecks peregrinations were precisely whatdeemed him mad, enforcing a long-standing linguistic connectionbetween disorientation and insanity: der Irre (the madman) goesinto die Irre(loses his way). Although Vertigoeventually developed adifferent relation to lostnessSebalds narrator actually tries, unsuc-cessfully, to lose his waythis early scene set the stage for Austerlitz,in which disorientation suddenly becomes the protagonists definingcharacteristic.

Disorientation looms large in Austerlitzfrom the early scenes onward,beginning with young Jacques Austerlitzs discovery of his real name.Known throughout his childhood as Dafydd Elias, he originally hasno connection at all to this strange term, Austerlitz, until he hearshis history teacher recounting the story of Napoleons 1805 battleagainst the Austro-Russian Alliance.24According to this teacher, thisbattle was decided by a strategic moment of getting lost. The French

forces were severely outnumbered by the Alliance, which had amassed90,000 men and stretched nine miles along the Pratzen heights. Butwhen the Allied forces made their way down the mountain to attack,they were met by a dense fog that limited their vision and made themincreasingly unsure of where they were going. Eventually they foundthemselves wandering around aimlessly[Sie sind] an den Abhngenund in den Wiesengrnden herumgeirrtwhile the French charged upto the now-abandoned heights to attack the Alliance from the rear (Ae

23Sebald, Vertigo, 38; Schwindel. Gefhle, 45.24W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 68;

Austerlitz(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003 [2001]), 104. Hereafter cited parentheti-cally in the text as Ae(English) and Ag(German).


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70; Ag107). The result was over 25,000 Allied casualties, the end of theHoly Roman Empire, and, more importantly for the young Austerlitz,

the first connection between himselfthe story of his nameand themortal dangers of losing ones way.

Shortly after this, Austerlitz again relates disorientation to death, thistime through his sympathy for moths, which seem to have a human-likefear of getting lost. Austerlitz explains how, in the warmer months ofthe year, these nocturnal creatures stray into his houseder eine oderandere [verirrt sich] zu mir herein; when he wakes up in the morning,he finds them clinging desperately to his wall. Austerlitz attributes tothese moths a lethal, human fear: I believe, said Austerlitz, that theyknow they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out againcarefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the lastbreath is out of their bodies (Ae93; Ag140). As in the story of hisname, this is not merely Austerlitzs observation of an outside eventbut also a moment of identification. He, too, is without a home anda past, and empathizes with creatures who die of fear because theydo not know where they are: Sometimes, seeing one of these mothsthat have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and

pain they feel while they are lost [was fr eine Art Angst und Schmerzsie in der Zeit ihrer Verirrung wohl verspren] (Ae 94; Ag 141). Here, get-ting lostVerirrungimplies much more than just losing ones waytopographically. The reflexive verb, sich verirren, describes someonewho has lost his way morally and spirituallyas in the lost sheep(verirrtes Schaf), who, in the Gospel of Matthew, strays from the wayof God.25Moreover, sich verirrencalls to mind its substantive, Verirrung,which means going astray, aberration, wandering, and mistake.As Sebald probably knew, Verirrungetymologically connects traveling

(Reisen) with madness (Irrsinn) through the Indo-European root,er[e]s, which means to move rapidly, impetuously, or aimlessly. Notknowing whereone is implies not knowing who one is.

These stories of Verirrungtinged with mad fear and deathcon-tinue throughout the first half of Jacques Austerlitzs life but, in thename of brevity, I will note only one more example here. Almost mid-way through his story, Austerlitz recalls the friendship he has rekindledwith his old prep school pal, Gerald. Like Austerlitz, Gerald is obsessedwith pigeons because of their superb navigational abilities. Gerald tells

25See Matt. 18:12, where the reflexive verb, sich verirren, is used. Verirrungwhichrefers to the literally and metaphorically lost sheepappears throughout the LutherBible (for example, in Ezek. 34:12 and Ps. 119:176).


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Austerlitz, You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middleof a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will

infallibly find its way home. This ability to find ones way home is,for Austerlitz, a mystery and a marvel: To this day no one knows howthese birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, theirhearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of thevast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin[den Ort ihrer Herkunft] (Ae11314; Ag16869). Austerlitz imaginesthat these pigeons, like the moths, experience mortal Angstwhen theylose their way, and he goes on, in his description of Geralds life, todirectly link disorientation with death. Inspired by his beloved pigeons,Gerald eventually becomes a pilot and then dies when his planecrashes into the Alps. For Austerlitz, Gerald dies not so much froma plane crash as from an inability to complete an Odyssean nostos.26Unlike the pigeons, Austerlitz claims, Gerald simply fail[s] to comehome. This story holds great symbolic meaning for Austerlitz, who,at this point in the story, understands his life as a failure to get backto his own Ort der Herkunft. Geralds death accordingly catalyzes a longperiod of Austerlitzs own decline (Ae 117; Ag 17273).

This decline culminates in Austerlitzs 1992 nervous breakdown,which he describes, like his first breakdown in the 1950s, as a formof mental lostness. In the 1950s, Austerlitz hallucinated that he waswandering errantly [herumirren] around a maze of long passages,and, during his 1992 breakdown, he feels like a man who had beenabroad for a long time and cannot find his way through [the] urbansprawl anymore, who can see no connections anymore, onlydisjointed signs (Ae 269, 124; Ag382). In this second breakdown,Austerlitz begins, like Herbeck, to wander aimlessly through London

at night. In the labyrinthine Liverpool Street Station he loses hisway and experiences delusions, suddenly realizing that his madnesswas brought on by a deliberate attempt to suppress his own history:to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which relatedin any way to my unknown past (Ae 139). Through his great erudi-tion, Austerlitz realizes, he has created a substitute or compensatorymemory, a digressionIrrwegthat determines his entire mode ofstorytelling. Over and over again, the narrator tells us that Austerlitzsstory took another direction: toward a discourse on stag horns;toward a painting of Wilhelm Tell; toward the lonely pair of squirrels

26Eshel also remarks on the Odyssean aspects of Austerlitzs journey (Against thePower of Time, 78).


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inhabiting the courtyard of the Bibliothque Nationale, etc (Ae140,264). These digressions can only be straightened out, Austerlitz imag-

ines, by returning to his origins. Following a coincidental discoveryin a bookstore owned by an Odyssean Penelope, Austerlitz beginsan instinctualalmost pigeon-likejourney toward Prague, wherehe discovers that he was one of the Jewish children sent to Englandon the Kindertransport following the 1939 Nazi invasion (Ae141). Hediscovers there the streets into which he was born, the apartment inwhich he lived, and the old (Odyssean) nursemaid who cared for him.In the end, he learns about the exhibition hall from which his motherwas transported to Theresienstadt, discovers a longed-for image of hismother, and even hallucinates the presence of the murdered Jews ofTheresienstadt who now emerge, alive, before his eyes (see figure 3;Ae179, 200, 253).

IV. Lost and Found: Nostalgia and Holocaust Melodrama

Through this journey to Prague, Austerlitzs finds a home that isrelatively intact: his nursemaid, his old apartment, his mothers photo,

his lost Czech language (which miraculously returns to him), and the

Figure 3. Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald translated by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton,2001), the Estate of W.G. Sebald, p. 253. Reproduced by permission of PenguinBooks Ltd. and the Estate of W.G. Sebald.


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resuscitated Jews of Theresienstadt. The Sebaldian archive, normallyso withholding, now bursts open. The unreachable fragmentary pasts

from The Emigrantsgive way here to what Thomas Wirtz calls totalreconstruction.27Wirtz overstates the case, of course, forgetting thatSebald, in Austerlitztoo, gestures toward the ultimate unrecoverabilityof history: Austerlitz realizes that he is like a squirrel that has buried itsnuts in the fall and cannot find them in the winter (How indeed dothe squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember,and what is it we find in the end?) (Ae 204). But in Austerlitz, unlikein the earlier texts, this gesture appears only as a gesture. If history isso unrecoverable, then why has Austerlitz just been able to discoverall the major details of his past? Despite the nod toward historical in-determinacy, Austerlitzhas in fact just proven the opposite: returninghome in the Ancient/Romantic paradigm is still possible.

One might counter this argument by pointing out that, at the endof Austerlitz, the hero heads off toward the south of France, searchingfor his father (whom the Nazis had interned in the Pyrenean foothills)(Ae290). Does this not exemplify, as one critic claims, a postmodernopen-ended exploration and a deferral of all notions of arrival?28

On the surface, Austerlitz exemplifies precisely this postmodernnomad who is on the road again.29Bearing in mind Austerlitzs totalrecovery of his history in Prague, however, Austerlitzs open-endednesscomes into question. Can one not assume that Austerlitz will makea similar series of revelations in southern France: family friends, il-luminating old photographs, and the revivified dead? Austerlitzsfinale is postmodern and open-ended only in the sense that itsopen-endednessas in LEmpire des signesreproduces the possibilityof closure. Consider, in this regard, the relation of Austerlitz to the

text that it sometimes cites, The Odyssey. One often forgets that theconclusion of the The Odyssey, too, is relatively open-ended: Odysseusis on the battlefield again (not resting beside Penelope in their bed),

27Wirtz, Schwarze Zuckerwatte, 53334.28Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 80, 79.29Austerlitz and the narrator are in fact both fascinated with desert imagery, mention-

ing it at least six times, and Austerlitz explicitly compares the readers in the Bibliothque

Nationale to nomads: they resemble members of a wandering tribe encamped hereon their way through the Sahara or Sinai desert in the last glow of the setting sun (Ae27880; see also 117, 228, 254, 287, 296). Karin Bauer considers nomadism to be

Austerlitzs essential characteristic in The Good European: W. G. SebaldsAusterlitzasNomadic Narrative, in W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, ed. Scott Denham andMark McCulloh (New York: Walter de Gruyter), forthcoming.


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barely held back from starting another war.30Open-endedness, here,is part of the larger structure of the nostos: the new journey allows for

the new possibility of coming home; fort/da all over again. Far fromundermining a nostalgic narration, Austerlitzs journey south only setsthe stage for another homecoming (Ae 292).31

How does Sebalds nostalgic (nostos+ algos) turn relate to Austerlitzsprimary subject matter: an historical journey toward Nazi-occupiedPrague and, eventually, Theresienstadt? More than just Sebalds firstreal novel and his first story of lost-and-found, Austerlitz is also hisfirst Holocaust novel.32The melodramatic dangers of writing aboutthe Holocaust were well-known to Sebald, who, from the beginningof his fiction writing career, hinted at the possibility of a Holocaustnovel but never wrote one until Austerlitz.33The problem for Sebaldwas not moralistic (whether a non-Jewish German writer can writeabout the Holocaust) but rather stylistic: a question of how, not whether.Sebald accused other non-Jewish German authors of writing in thewrong way about the Holocaust. But does Sebald ultimately do it theright way? The majority of critics claim that he does, agreeing withSebalds self-defense: that he avoids melodrama by, first, depicting

only a Holocaust-in-absence (on the model of Lanzmanns Shoah)and, second, using only mediated narration (said Agta, said Vera,said Austerlitz).34

30Odysseus charges ahead on the battlefield, loosing a savage cry until blazing-eyed Athena wheeled on Odysseus, crying, / Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, masterof exploits, / hold back now! (Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles [New York:

Viking, 1996] Book 24, lines 59096).31Stuart Taberner makes a similar argument, albeit with a completely different con-

clusion: Whereas I see this likely homecoming in southern France as Sebalds inadver-tent narrative nostalgia, Taberner views it positively, as signalling a moral redemptivepotential. Stuart Taberener, German Nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish Lifein W. G. SebaldsDie Ausgewandertenand Austerlitz, The Germanic Review79.3 (Summer2004): 181202 (here, 195).

32Critics have correctly pointed out that the Holocaust appears, however fleetingly,in Sebalds earlier works: the gypsies from Vertigo; the image of Bergen-Belsen from TheRings of Saturn; and, more substantially, the stories of Paul Bereyter and Max Aurachfrom The Emigrants. But even in The Emigrants, which is often misread as a Holocaustbook, only two of the four stories concern victims of Nazi aggression (and one ofthese victims is three-quarters Aryan). Cf. Mark Anderson, The Edge of Darkness:

On W. G. Sebald, October106 (2003): 10321 (here, 105).33Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.34In his first, September 2001 interview with Maya Jaggi, Sebald described his attempt

not to focus on the horror of the Holocaust and praised Lanzmanns Shoah. RichardEder claimed shortly thereafter that Sebald depicted a Holocaust-in-absence; Mark

Anderson echoed this sentiment in 2003. Sebald defended his periscopic style as an


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Let us consider, first, the claim that Sebald depicts a Holocaust-in-absence. Whereas The Emigrants(the only other Sebald fiction where

the Holocaust plays an important role) maps centrifugal attempts tomove awayfrom the historical sites of trauma, Austerlitzcentripetallytakes us to the heart of the atrocities, down the narrative road toTheresienstadt.35 Even if we do not learn exactly how Austerlitzsmother was killed, we do see, in detail, the places where tens ofthousands were tortured and murdered: the execution room next tothe Prague law courts, where people were hung after ninety-secondtrials on an iron rail running along the ceiling down which the life-less bodies were pushed a little further as required; the more thanfive hundred dead bodies stacked in layers on top of each otherin Theresienstadts central morgue next to the four naptha-firedincinerators of the crematorium, kept going day and night in cyclesof forty minutes at a time; and the tens of thousands of prisonersleft outside by the SS deep into the night in a cold November rain,drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until finally, drivento it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town (Ae 175,241, 242). Sebald comes perilously close here to the melodramatic

impulse toward dramatization and desire to express all36

that hehad scrupulously avoided in the earlier fictions and, what is more,had criticized in other Holocaust representations such as Schindlers

ethical way of avoiding melodrama in a 2001Der Spiegelinterview, and Todd Presneragreed: Sebalds periscopic style enacted an ethical refusal to presume to represent

what any victim experienced, felt, or observed. Sebald, interview with Maya Jaggi, Re-covered Memories; Eder, Excavating a Life; Anderson, The Edge of Darkness, 105;Sebald, interview,Ich frchte das Melodramatische; Todd Presner, What a Synopticand Artificial View Reveals: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. SebaldsRealism, Criticism46 (Summer 2004): 34160 (here, 34950; see also 351).

35Cf. Thomas Steinfeld, Die Wnschelrute in der Tasche eines Nibelungen,Frank-furter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 20, 2001. Although Steinfeld overstates his case by claim-ing that, in Austerlitz, allroads lead to Theresienstadt, I agree with his discriminationbetween The Emigrantsand Austerlitz: The Emigrants four discrete and documentaryretellings send the narrative spinning in many differentdirections, not along Austerlitzssingular, inevitable path.

36Related to this melodramatic desire to express everything is acting out, in thepsychoanalytic sense. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995 [1976]), xv, 4,

viii. Cf. Julia Hell, who refers to Sebald as an example of melo-traumatic [] Germannon-Jewish authorship (Hell, Eyes Wide Shut, 35, 35n107). Iris Radisch similarly re-fers to Austerlitzas black kitsch, but her reasons for doing so are primarily moralistic(Sebald should not juxtapose musings about trivial objects with observations aboutTheresienstadt), not based on a poetics of melodrama. Iris Radisch, Der Waschbrder falschen Welt,Die Zeit, 5 April 2001, 5556.


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List.37On top of this desire for total expressivity is also melodramasunderlying Manichaeism, which creates narrative excitement by

putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil beneath thesurface of things.38Consider in this regard the nursemaids memoryof her dramatic final meeting with Austerlitzs mother, in front ofthe Nazi deportation center: When we parted she embraced meand said: Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for mesometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much. If you lookinto the dark water of the pools, perhaps one of these days you willsee my face (Ae179).

Is melodrama such as this mitigated by the second formal point: thatSebalds periscopic narration places the melodrama in the perspec-tive of the mother, or the nursemaid, or Austerlitz (not of the narratoror Sebald)? And does such a mediated narration denote, as Sebaldargues, an ethical modesty, an acknowledgement of the impossibilityof ever knowing the victimized other? This question of the moralityof narrative mediation is too complex to answer fully here, but it isclear that we cannot uncritically grant ethical status to a literary device,as Sebald does in his defense of Austerlitz.39If Austerlitzs periscopy is

deferential, is the same then true for other famous mediated narra-tives, from James The Turn of the Screw, to Conrads Heart of Darkness, toBernhardsDer Untergeher? As Chinua Achebe argues in his provocativeessay on Heart of Darkness, periscopy does not guarantee the author anethical cordon sanitaire;40it does not protect Sebald from the chargethat Austerlitz exhibits a melodramatic desire for total expressivityrelated precisely to the ineffability of his subject matter.41

If Jacques Austerlitzs nostalgic journey produces melodrama,

37Fictional re-creations of the Holocaust, such as Schindlers List, can only become anobscenity (Sebald, first interview with Maya Jaggi, Recovered Memories).

38Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 4.39Mediated narration, according to Sebald, helps to constitute an aesthetic

authenticity that is connected to the ethical (Sebald, interview, Ich frchte dasMelodramatische).

40Achebes article is notoriously insensitive to the formal complexities in Heart ofDarkness; he goes so far as to claim that Conrad could only have protected himselfagainst charges of racism by setting up an alternate (presumably enlightened, liberal)frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.

But Achebes original structural question remains vital: does mediated narration grantthe author a cordon sanitaire? Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in ConradsHeart of Darkness, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text: Backgroundsand Sources: Criticism, 3rd edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988),25162 (here, 256).

41Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 11.


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what about the journey of the aging German narrator, which framesAusterlitzs tale? After Austerlitz leaves the stage, the narrator finds his

way back to another site of catastrophe: a Belgian fortress used by theNazis as a detention camp and a center for deportation to Auschwitz.He reads there a book by a Jewish author, Dan Jacobson, who traveledafter the war to the notorious Fort IX in Kaunus, Lithuania, wheremost of his extended family was either killed or deported to the camps:prisoners were locked in the dungeons there, and more than thirtythousand people were killed and then buried under a field of oatsjust outside the walls. Here again the text is both melodramatic andnostalgic, meticulously expressing the unspeakable while returningus to a site of origins: like Austerlitz before him, Jacobson suddenlydiscovers the names, dates and place of origin of the victims. Repro-ducing the melodramatic (and thoroughly Sebaldian) need for bothdocument and vision and for extrapolation from one to other,42the narrator lists these names documentary-style: Lob, Marcel, deSt. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44(Ae298). This last dateSebalds own birthday, and likely also thatof his narratorsignals a second homecoming, implying that the nar-

rator and the author have also discovered in Jacobsons book theirown places of origin.43 More revealing than the moralizing ques-tionwhether a non-Jewish German writer should engage in suchidentificatory coquetteryis again the formal one: unlike the earliernarratives, Austerlitzpromises the structural possibility of a recuperatedself (Austerlitzs, Jacobsons, the narrators, Sebalds).44

42

Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 9.43Sebald in fact claims that black-and-white war pictures from around his 1944 birthyear repeatedly give him a Heimatgefhl, a sense of coming home. When he seesthese images, he has the completely clear feeling: This is where you come from. Thisis your territory. He thus always returns to the wars atrocitiesthe bombings andthe Holocaustwith a sense of gloomy homecoming: as if he were the wars child, soto speak [als stammte ich, sozusagen, von ihm ab]. Sebald further comes home in thisAusterlitzscene through the initials and name he shares with Max Stern (Maximilliam

was Sebalds real-life third name and Max his preferred nickname). Note how Sebaldhandles a similar scene from The Emigrants in a more rigorously documentary, lessnovelistic, manner: the narrator straightforwardly announces the coincidence of hisbirth date with the death date of Meier Stern (who, as a photograph of his gravestone

shows, was born on May 18th, but in the 19th century!). Sebald, On the Natural Historyof Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 71 (Luftkrieg undLiteratur[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001], 7778); Sebald, interview, Ich frchte dasMelodramatische; Sebald, The Emigrants, 224 (Die Ausgewanderten, 335).

44Andreas Huyssen correctly censures moralizing criticism which blankly claimsthat Sebalds non-Jewish German narrators should not identify with Jewish protagonists


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But Sebald is not so easily caught. Austerlitzs final sentence gives thestory another turn of the screw, suggesting that the narrator has not

come to any closure at all: he keeps reading Jacobsons bookhe wasonly on chapter fifteen!and heads back toward the town, probablyto get on yet another train, headed perhaps for Austerlitzs home inthe Alderney Street or perhaps in some unforeseen direction, towardyet another set of characters and stories. This final motion, however,does not differ significantly from Austerlitzs earlier journey towardthe south of France: the apparent nomadism of both charactersis contained within the preexisting nostalgic structure of lost-and-found.45Austerlitzis indeed a postmodern crypto-Bildungsroman,46but only in the sense that much postmodern disorientation secretlypromises reorientation. As Sebald knew from his earlier works, gettinglost contains within it the seeds of a journey home: in the case ofAusterlitz, toward the historical sites of Nazi crimes. These crimes bothattract and repel Sebald; they bring out in him, through their veryineffability, the melodramatic desire to reveal everything. Austerlitzisthe result of this paradox, and it exhibits melodramatic tendenciesnot present in Sebalds earlier works. Sebald dreads these tenden-

cies, perhaps rightly so. But to dismiss Austerlitzas melodramatic (andthus bad), would be to underestimate the power both of this bookand of melodrama itself. When considering Sebalds melodramaticinclinations, it is important to remember that it is Sebald himself whoconsiders melodrama dread[ful].47Recent theorists insist, conversely,on melodramas own ethical dimension: its heightened capacity forrevealing a hidden yet operative domain of values.48But such work

(Huyssen, Gray Zones of Remembrance, 972). But identifying and/or empathizingwith victims nonetheless remains a serious issue for moral philosophy. Brad Pragertakes up this ethical question in relation to The Emigrantsand Austerlitzin The GoodGerman as Narrator: On W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing, New Ger-man Critique(forthcoming).

45Although some of the narratives of lost-and-found overlap chronologically in theinternal story, the external frame story, from which the narrative voice speaks, retainsa chronologically clear beginning and ending.

46The term comes from Amir Eshel, who does not see the nostalgic aspects of Austerlitzspostmodernism, focusing instead on what he terms Austerlitzs typically postmodern

suspicion of all grand narratives (Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 80).47Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.48Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, viii. The forerunners in the contemporary

discussion about melodrama were Brooks (who first published articles on melodramain the early 1970s) and Thomas Elsaesser, whose landmark essay, Tales of Sound andFury: Observations on the Family Melodrama, appeared in Monogrammin 1972. For


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has focused primarily on realist literature and classical Hollywood films,not yet on representations of the Holocaust. Is Holocaust melodrama

simply too dreadful to consider, as Sebald somewhat melodramaticallydeclares? Or might it, too, have an ethical dimension? Austerlitzopensup this question.

University of Toronto

an introduction to the debates on melodramas aesthetics and ethics, see the prefaceto the second, 1995 edition of Brooks The Melodramatic Imaginationand also Elsaessersforthcoming Melodrama and Trauma: Modes of Cultural Memory in the American Cinema(New York: Routledge), which promises to offer impulses for the theorization of Holo-caust melodrama.

*zilcosky, disorientation, nostalgia and holocaust melodrama in austerlitz 2006

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