In this blog post, I analyze how the loss of memory and spatial arrangements are intertwined to reveal individual identity and collective trauma through the works of W. G. Sebald, particularly ‘Austerlitz’.
Life
“Literature as a form of memory. Is great literature still possible today? What does a noble literary act actually look like? Readers will find the answer to these questions in the works of W. G. Sebald.” This review by Susan Sontag aptly illustrates Sebald’s literary orientation.
W. G. Sebald (Winfried Georg Sebald), regarded as a literary critic and one of the leading prose writers of the postwar era, is an author who is actively studied in German literary circles today. Although his work was first brought to attention in the United States by Susan Sontag and was accepted somewhat later in Germany, it is now discussed more vigorously than that of any other author.
Born in 1944 in the small town of Bertach in the Argovia region to a family of glassmakers, he studied at the University of Freiburg, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and in the United Kingdom. He later worked as a teacher in St. Gallen and lectured at the University of Manchester. After moving to the UK in 1970, he taught European literature at the University of Norwich until his death in a traffic accident in 2001. He described himself as an “emigrant” (Auswanderer).
Seewald began writing in the 1980s, producing works that straddled the boundaries between non-fiction, essays, and fiction. His writing is characterized by a hybrid nature that blends fictional elements with actual records, fictional characters with real-life figures, and facts from art history and natural history; his profound knowledge of literary and art history plays a significant role throughout his work. For example, his collection of essays on Austrian writers, ‘Chronicle of Misfortune: From Adalbert Stifter to Peter Handke“ (1985) attempted a unique biographical analysis grounded in literary history, while the poetry collection ”According to Nature: Origin Poems” (1988) revealed early signs of an intertextual approach to citation. In 1997, he was awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize.
His essay “Air Raids and Literature” (1999) caused a major stir by arguing that postwar German literature had not sufficiently addressed the issue of Allied air raids, and his novel “The Migrants” (1992) is regarded as a work in which a first-person narrator with autobiographical elements recounts Jewish suffering and collective memory. “The Rings of Saturn: A Pilgrimage to England” (1995) is a cultural-archaeological travelogue that displays Sebald’s characteristic melancholy and exploratory narrative.
“Austerlitz” (2001), regarded as his final and most representative work, is the story of a man searching for his Jewish identity, sensitively addressing the Holocaust and the issue of survivor identity. To preserve memory, Sebald conducted thorough research, including reviewing documents, interviewing eyewitnesses, collecting photographs and records, and visiting sites. Through this meticulous work, he created poetic prose that straddles the boundary between reality and fiction.
Although he left almost no personal records, making a humanistic approach difficult, the records stored in numerous boxes and his personal library of over 1,200 books allow us to trace his intellectual journey. Gaining even greater fame posthumously, he has become the subject of reevaluations, exhibitions, and academic conferences worldwide, and has been posthumously awarded numerous prizes.
Work Commentary
The Correlation Between Memory and Space in “Austerlitz”
In his posthumous work “Austerlitz,” Sebald deeply explores the process of an individual’s loss of memory and its restoration decades later. In the fall of 1939, when the persecution of Jews was at its peak, Austerlitz—then four years old—was sent from Prague to England via a British rescue organization’s children’s evacuation program. After arriving at the home of a Calvinist minister in Wales, he gradually loses his name and his native language.
Having lived in a foreign environment under a foreign name, he is burdened by the fundamental problem of not knowing who he is. The protagonist, who had always been called David Elias, learns his real name at the age of fourteen, but he had never heard anything about the war or the past in his adoptive parents’ home. For him, history has effectively stopped in the 19th century.
Memories severed at this juncture render him a restless soul, unable to settle anywhere, despite his extraordinary sensitivity and exceptional intellectual abilities. Despite a lifetime of scholarly research and exploration, certain memories remain unresolved, driving him forward with a dark impulse. The more he wanders through unfamiliar streets and cities, the more the novel’s spatial structure becomes entangled like a labyrinth.
Austerlitz’s act of recollection operates by tenaciously tracking the spaces he experienced in childhood. His memories appear and vanish in every corner of the city like shadows of reality; fragments of memory are scattered across the spaces of various cities, and the protagonist wanders in pursuit of those traces. He attempts to reconstruct his childhood by piecing together these scattered fragments like a puzzle.
For Sebald, time is organized according to the principle of spatial arrangement rather than linear sequence. Disjointed and erased time fails to organize or activate memory, and unstructured memory or knowledge cannot function as a valid point of reference for reality. If memory or knowledge is not properly situated within space, it ultimately descends into chaos and, ultimately, into a state of oblivion.
The records of Austerlitz and the architectural history research are nothing more than an endlessly growing pile of papers because they lack an appropriate spatial arrangement and sequence. His act of ultimately burying his manuscript in the ground demonstrates that his work has already transcended the limitations of being confined within the limited space of a research paper.
Anja K. Johansen refers to this structure as a “boxed structure.” The traces of memory in ‘Austerlitz’ sometimes take the form of a labyrinth and at other times that of stacked boxes. Some are entangled in chaos, while others are confined within closed spaces cut off from the outside world.
In Zewald’s text, space takes precedence over time, and space can be discussed in two main dimensions. One is the fact that the protagonists are beings who cannot settle in one place and are constantly on the move. Their fixation on train stations and the act of observing them as symbols of departure and being “on the way” (Unterwegs), as well as their wandering through various European hotels, reveal that the protagonists have no fixed place to call home.
These trajectories of movement serve as a medium for memory. The main routes Austerlitz traces are Terezin in the Czech Republic, where his mother was interned; Paris, where his father went missing; and the path from his childhood in Prague through Hoek in the Netherlands to Howitch in England. He retraces these routes in reverse to gather scattered memories.
Descriptions of space—the empty rooms of the parsonage, the shuttered windows and pervasive chill, winter landscapes, the Barmouth coast idealized as a paradise, and the Fitzpatrick family’s Andromeda villa—occupy a significant portion of his text. These spatial landscapes are deeply imprinted on the protagonist’s memory, and his psyche is closely connected to and influenced by them.
His reflections on architectural history are not unrelated to Austerlitz’s field of study. He surveys, sketches, and photographs urban structures and buildings, and conducts archival research by visiting museums, archives, and libraries. He views modern urban spaces, developed since industrialization, as having emerged atop the ruins and remains of the past, with railway and road networks traversing them and operating amidst the debris where individual fates and historical events are layered upon one another.
His exploration of various urban structures—such as fortresses, courthouses, hospitals, underground bunkers, prisons, cemeteries, and zoos—along with the associated transportation, sanitation, and surveillance systems, labor mobilization regimes, and mechanisms of killing, reveals recurring human desires, errors, and historical ironies. The example of an 18th-century star-shaped fortress demonstrates how the combination of power and architectural technology ultimately becomes obsolete.
His analysis of space is crystallized in his repeated visits to Theresienstadt. Built as an 18th-century fortress but used as a ghetto during the Nazi era, this city reveals itself as a space of death and destruction through its morgues, mass graves, and the exhibits at the Ghetto Museum. By confirming his mother’s death, Austerlitz’s work of remembrance reaches a definitive conclusion.
The reason Zeewald fixates on a single alley, a single pillar, a single corner, or a single paving stone is that traces of memory can endure within them over the long years. Trivial objects or spaces serve as clues that evoke memory, and this is a process of filling in the gaps of memory one by one, like a mosaic.
For example, the middle-aged couple and small backpack he saw in the waiting room at Liverpool Street Station become a crucial clue for reconstructing a scene. His meticulous observation of these minor interior spaces functions as a clue to evoke lost memories.
The fates of many people rescued through child evacuation operations like the one at Austerlitz reveal traces of trauma and loss of identity. In many cases, they were unable to reunite with their parents, or even if they did, they could not establish normal relationships; this was followed by survivors’ guilt, depression, social anxiety, and distrust. Therefore, individual memory intersects with collective memory, and collective memory greatly influences the restoration of individual memory.
Unlike today’s technological methods of information processing, Sebald’s approach to memory is based on oral history, spatial imagery and trajectories, field research, and documentary verification. Such memory does not remain confined to personal experience but connects to the cultural and historical transmission of communities, nations, and humanity.
Consequently, in ‘Austerlitz’, memory is combined with spatial imagery, blending personal recollection with artificially reconstructed memory derived from archival research to reconstruct memories that had been forgotten for decades. This goes beyond the restoration of individual identity; it is an endeavor to revisit specific aspects of European history that have been omitted from official records or consigned to oblivion.
The Writing of ‘Austerlitz’
The protagonist, who has lived in a state of tension after being stripped of language and name, reconstructs the history of Germany—which is in danger of being forgotten—along with the narrative of his own self by telling his story to the narrator. The syntactic features and rhetorical techniques employed here shape the work’s unique style of writing.
Sebald’s text does not guarantee narrative completeness; it takes on the character of a report within a report, being half fiction and half truth. Although occasional contrived coincidences may undermine narrative plausibility, his writing aims to approach historical reality through the work of memory rather than to embellish a story through fiction. A tendency to reject conventional novelistic forms and experiment with new modes of writing is evident.
Sebald referred to his style as a “constructed language” (Kunstsprache) distinct from everyday German. This constructed language exposes the expressive limitations of everyday language—particularly the limitations encountered when attempting to articulate the “unspeakable”—and intentionally creates a distance between the reader and the text. This artificial and unfamiliar linguistic technique is reflected not only at the sentence level but also in the protagonist’s interpersonal relationships.
Enumeration is one of his signature rhetorical devices. For example, the scene in which he meticulously describes the items displayed in a secondhand shop in Theresienstadt presents a catalog of vanished cultural heritage. On a lexical level, the text features a succession of long compound nouns, bureaucratic expressions, and lists of specialized knowledge. Beyond architecture, detailed enumerations of knowledge from diverse fields—including history, astronomy, botany, entomology, ornithology, painting, and medicine—transform the text into a sort of museum of European and natural history. These citations and lists of knowledge function as substitute and supplementary memories.
The long sentences spanning several pages are a deliberate device intended to express the flow of associations and thoughts, reflecting the protagonist’s intention to piece together fragmented memories. Here, the writing does not remain merely descriptive but evokes other layers of meaning, ultimately converging into a shared historical dimension.
The technique of association pierces through the silence that dominated postwar German society, revealing the secrets hidden within that silence one by one. The names that appear in the work (Austerlitz, Auschwitz in Marienbad, etc.) function as devices that evoke words not directly mentioned.
One of the narrative features of this work is its overall oral style. Although the narrator is the writer, he minimizes his own feelings and opinions and focuses on conveying Austerlitz’s words verbatim. The novel is largely composed of Austerlitz’s reports and the statements of others—that is, reports of reports.
Like Vera’s testimony, third-party accounts expand the protagonist’s memory beyond the personal dimension to a collective and historical one. Personal memory is supplemented by the oral accounts of others, photographs, and archival materials to form a collective memory, confirming that even the most private memories are shaped through social interaction.
Sebald’s rhetorical approach is far removed from naturalism, fictional plausibility, or the principle of causality. His artificial rhetorical style, rather than offering comfort to the reader, creates discomfort and urges reflection and awakening regarding history. Whereas the ancient master of memory, Simonides, relied on natural memory, Sebald reconstructs memory with the hand of a collector, drawing on every possible document and source.
The objects of memory that appear in the text—the celestial sphere and constellations, landscapes and urban plans, buildings, trees, clock faces, and instruments of war—bear a close resemblance to the icons of the rhetorical tradition of memory. Zevalt views literature as a medium of memory and revives the tradition of rhetorical mnemonics—which recognizes the preservation and management of collective memory as the writer’s mission—for our time.
However, his memory is not mere preservation but a process of rewriting and revival. Through this, Zevalt sought to reconstruct the history of Europe and the Jewish people, which was in danger of being forgotten.
