Austerlitz (novel)

Austerlitz is a novel by W. G. Sebald from the year 2001. He appeared as the last work of the author before his death. Content is central to the life of the Jewish scientist Jacques Austerlitz, who discovers his origin only after his academic career, and begins with the exploration of his fate.

Content

The England-based first-person narrator met in 1967 during a stay in the waiting room of the Antwerp Centraalstation (Belgium ) said there in public working with sketches and a camera art historian Jacques Austerlitz. The architecturally interested narrator speaks at Austerlitz, and the two get into a first of many conversations, which - take place over a period of 30 years, in which they both random - with a 1975 incipient break of almost 20 years meet by appointment in Antwerp, Liege, Zeebrugge, London and Paris.

The talks are first and always the of Austerlitz expertly en passant analyzed examples of the " style of the capitalist era " - from the Antwerp Centraalstation on the Brussels Palace of Justice to the initiated by François Mitterrand new French National Library, whose " family resemblances " Austerlitz examined. Although he initially reveals nothing about his person and his life, a teacher -student relationship develops between him and the narrator. But until very late revealed to him Austerlitz his now discovered the origin and fate of trace, which he studied meticulously herauszulesen from the visible evidence.

One focus of the analyzes are stations that Austerlitz Although early on as a " lucky and unlucky places at the same time felt ", but rises their significance for his life was only in a memory flash in the early 1990s in London's Liverpool Street Station: In this station he was been in the summer of 1939 arrived at the age of four and a half years in England and passed his foster parents. Its been consuming displaced by him throughout his life origin can no longer be Austerlitz Now release: Following a first mental breakdown and parallel to a hospital stay, he starts to reconstruct his biography in the context of European history and his mother, the aged half a century girlfriend in Prague and the fate places of his childhood visit.

He finds out that it was his Jewish mother in 1939 managed to bring him on a Kindertransport from Prague to safety in England, where he grows up in an always perceived by him as foreign minister couple in Wales and in a boarding school. His mother is later visited in December 1942 to Theresienstadt, the Austerlitz, and placed in the east from there in 1944 for the murder. His Jewish father, who was able to save first to France, will eventually interned in a camp in the Pyrenees, where previously losing all further instructions.

Austerlitz decides nevertheless to follow the trail of his father. He gives his students and first-person narrator, the key to his house in London, and thus access to its large collection of photographs, with whom he has always documented his art and cultural critical observations and the late reconstruction of his life. This legacy uses the narrator to show the report of their thirty-year friendship with a selection of approximately 80 photographs and drawings after the final disappearance of Austerlitz.

Narrative

The story rises from the rich to appositions and subordinate clauses sentence structures that run as chains of association of the figures on their topics. An outstanding example is a sentence that stretches over nine pages, and reports in an oppressive manner of events in the Theresienstadt concentration camp ( in the German edition pp. 335-345, in between a one-sided book page copy with a list of special instructions, as well as the picture of Terezín parcel post mark). This complex structure is formed by the weighed spontaneity of the talks is their report of this novel. A first striking feature is that the narrator usually only the discussions of Austerlitz narrator reflects, in turn, cited in many places his interlocutors. Approximately twenty times repeated the author's formula, " ... told me (...), said Austerlitz ," - and the reader may add: "reports the narrator ." The perception of reality of the figures is to thoroughly declined in the third dimension of reporting: The "I - I - I - narrator " moves the sources of information about the real structure of the world in a dimension extreme hearsay.

That which goes beyond the official and unofficial interpretations of architecture and social history is disclosed by the figures only in the telling and alive only in listening. For in experienced by the characters reality is the historical movement almost impossible to decipher: " The stories that stick to the countless places and objects which themselves have no capacity for memory, ( be ) heard of anyone ever recorded or retold. "Because of Austerlitz and the narrator determining fundamental skepticism history and its release to be truth can only describe as " assert Chinese whispers ".

The impact of the loss of real substance to work against the about 80 photos and drawings that give the story its grounding and reality infusion. In this report scissors of reports and photographic evidence opens the space for " thinking tests " of Jacques Austerlitz that fascinate his pupil so.

A second compositional strategy ties in the topics and by the duration of narrated about 30 years time so widely separated sections together: Without even an approach to a small talk put the two main characters, Austerlitz set after each interrupt his monologue continues - even after their 20 -year-old communications pause: " So Austerlitz also has this evening in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, without losing even a single word about our after such a long time purely coincidental Done meeting, the conversation more or less taken up there again, where it once was canceled. " This evaporation to the thematic core of the novel, the renunciation of all detours and adjuncts to the thread causes an extraordinary intensity of the text.

A third strategy unfolds on the textual level by individual scenes (eg, losing, offense and canceling or detention and remembering ) run through the plant and give it its coherence.

Interpretation

The work is a novel: it combines found and invented. It is a biography: it reconstructs the long, disturbing self-enlightenment of Jacques Austerlitz and documented them with a variety of data and image sources. And it is a contribution to a theory of sensory perception, aesthetics. By the work one presents in the other, it exceeds usual limits and will be the subject of technical debate.

One of its subjects is indicated at one point Austerlitz ' method, the " metaphysics of history", as the narrator. What is meant is an intellectual process, which represents the architectural structures in the social context of their (eg sound Bertolt Brecht questions a reading worker to ), then analyzes the predetermined by their size and investment behavior of its viewers and users and the associated associations, feelings and dreams logged. This social history of the objects and the operations they individual emotional reactions integrating aesthetics will be demonstrated in more than a dozen object complexes or their photos or drawings.

The figure of his family and his time taken away from Jews Austerlitz complements this process of finding the dimension of the Holocaust, which reinterprets the objects in the context of persecution and murder. Thus, the train stations, but also the new French National Library in Paris win an additional space of meaning. These themes shift away accentuated by the exclusive art-historical understanding of the world as a viewing history of suffering that tracks the pain tracks " pull in countless fine lines through history " itself.

Sebald hereby arises in the context of an out by Brecht, Walter Benjamin and other cultural political discourse that transcends the narrow understanding limits of the "Res Gestae " not only in the past but also in the sense knowledge: "Our study of the history (...) was a preoccupation with always pre- engraved in the inside of our heads images to which we stared continuously while the truth lies somewhere else in a no man yet discovered offside. " Sebald occurs also in an elective affinity to Peter Weiss, whose plant The aesthetics of Resistance carry out the joint effort in the title.