It's the book to which I continually return. I'm often aware of it swirling around in my mind like music, below the level of my consciousness, sombre and profound as a cello concerto.
Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald
Sebald died in a car crash just a month after his masterpiece was published in November 2001. So when we come to its end there is nothing more. The rest is, literally, silence. Unless we return to its beginning, which I do every few years.
Impossible to summarise but I'll try anyway. Jacques Austerlitz, 4 years old, is evacuated from Nazi-controlled Prague on a Kindertransport, never to see his Jewish parents again. His new life is in Wales, raised by a Calvinist preacher, his Jewish identity and all traces of his earlier life overwritten. Only when middle-aged does he come to realise what happened to him and sets off on a search for his former life. That's the plot, such as it is. It's also a book about monstrous buildings in old European cities, their architecture and morality, about the connection between mental illness and authenticity, about friendship and the barriers that prevent us individuals from truly understanding each other. And above all it's about the Holocaust, a shadow that darkens all time and every space, yet only seen obliquely. Sebald said:
I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt well nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this, to write about concentration camps [...] so you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something that is on your mind, but that you do not necessarily roll out on every other page
[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]
That quote comes from a remarkable audio interview with Sebald that was recorded in those last four weeks of his life after the publication of his masterpiece. I found it by chance, and was delighted to hear him speak in sentences as sonorous as his prose.
Sebald is asked about the significance of the moths that feature in several scenes and he refers to a description of dying moths in a work by Virginia Woolf. He says:
[...] her description of a moth, coming to its end, on a window pane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, written somewhere chronologically speaking between the battle fields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. And there is no reference to the battle fields of the Somme in this passage but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got away and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite some way from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern
Virginia Woolf is another author to whom I often return, to her novel Mrs Dalloway in particular, and certain similarities between Woolf and Sebald struck me in this interview. They both weave a novel around an "undeclared concern", seeing it obliquely from a perspective that adds to our understanding of it, shining a light on the seemingly trivial to show that it is anything but. And they do this with prose that is delicate and precise, and so sharp it catches you off-guard and cuts deep.
Each time I read Austerlitz it is a different part of it that leaves the greatest impression on me. I've been haunted by the images of the wide-eyed creatures of the Nocturama at the Antwerp Zoo, and the story of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where Jacques' mother Agata was interned. Somehow it was only on my most recent reading that I was struck by the story of Jacques' best friend, Gerald Fitzpatrick, at whose home Jacques often stayed and whose passion for flying leads to his death, an event that he and we can see on the horizon long before it arrives. Gerald is of Irish stock, and the opening of Yeat's poem "An Irish Airman foresees his Death" fits him well:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
At the novel's conclusion Austerlitz takes his leave of the narrator to continue his search and, in the novel's compressed time where past and present mingle, it seems to me that he may still be searching now, wandering amongst the brooding train stations and fortresses of old Europe that have borne witness to such terrible times.
In another interview Sebald recounted how he had watched a documentary about a real Kindertransport child, Susi Bechhöfer, and used some elements of her story in his novel. She was adopted by a Calvinist minister in Wales and only re-discovered her origins as an adult. She suffered appalling abuse from her step family and her biography is a harrowing read, though most of her story is quite different from that of the fictional Austerlitz. She was unhappy that Sebald used elements of her life in his novel, but his death prevented her from making that known to him.
Perhaps Susi Bechhöfer felt that her identity had been stolen from her for a second time, and that's a thought that upsets me. I felt that on behalf of Sebald the least I could do was to buy her biography and place it on my bookshelf next to my prized first US edition of Austerlitz. So when I next pick up Austerlitz I will also think of Susi, imagine her to life again, and think of her as the person, the little girl, she spent a lifetime seeking.
Rosa's Child: One Woman's search for her Past
by Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhöfer
