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large the fortifications became, we’re told, they drew
attention to their weakest point and so invited attack.
A metaphor, probably, for this kind of reticent novel.
As the story continues through ever new digressions,
the weakest point is always its own purpose. Aren’t
we missing something? we ask.
No reader of the book can be unaware that the narrator
of Austerlitz has a similar background to the author
himself. Indeed, in Sebald’s three previous novels, the
narrator is much the same sensitive yet dour person.
Sebald is a 57-year-old Bavarian long established as
a professor of German literature in East Anglia, and
the unnamed narrator is an academic who travels
throughout Europe on research. He admits there are
other reasons for his travelling but, he says, they are
“never entirely clear” to him. On a visit to Antwerp, he
visits one of the forts used by the Nazis as a detention
centre for Resistance fighters during the occupation.
As he walks slowly down its sinister tunnels, he recalls
tortures described by two actual writers, Jean Améry
and Claude Simon, the former having been tortured
in the very same fort, the latter having written about a
fictional character who suffered like Améry. Again one
is tempted to understand this as an indirect reference
to what is going on, particularly once the eponymous
character of Austerlitz appears.
Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on
one of the narrator’s travels. He was a five-year-old
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
refugee during the Second World War. His parents
sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague.
They didn’t escape. He ended up in provincial Wales,
living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn’t until
his school days, just before he took some exams, that
he was told his real name and origin. Although the
narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz
to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novelist
would use a character. Most of the words in the
novel are Austerlitz’s, with the narrator adding the
occasional “said Austerlitz” to remind us. For the rest
of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means
the story of his search for the story of his life: “I have
never known who I really was” he says.
He tells the narrator that it wasn’t until he had met
him that he was able to approach his past. Before then,
he says, “an agency greater than or superior to my own
capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations
somewhere in my brain, had always preserved
me from my own secret”. With the narrator there to
listen, the brain’s mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz
is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual
need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there
seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the
narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the
two. Although this is a common enough thing in reading
novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened
because one is not convinced of the distinction.
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