The German author and academic W. G. Sebald is cited as one of the greatest contemporary authors. Especially the combination of words and images, for example found in Austerlitz, fascinates. In Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz and his fate. In the 1940s, Austerlitz, a jewish refugee from Prague, arrives in the UK where he is welcomed by his future Welsh foster family. In the course of the novel, Austerlitz tries to reconstruct his biography, which he suppressed for a large part of his life. Architecture (especially railway stations) and photographs play a central role in the attempt to recollect memories. At first glance, the images found in the novel appear as common illustrations. They seem to be an accessory, which illustrates what is discussed in Austerlitz. However, the illustrations exceed the banal illustration function. They serve as a replacement and authentication for the text. Moreover, they provide impulses for the narrative. The illustrations and photographs serve as a leitmotiv. They are closely linked to the themes memory and trauma. The relation between the illustrations and the text are dialogical. Occasionally, the text feels incomplete without the inserted images. On the other hand, there are such big gaps between text and image in some parts of the novel, that the relation between text and image seems random and incomprehensible. Especially in the first part of Austerlitz are a few images, such as the first illustration of the novel, that rise the question on how they integrate into the context of the novel. The first illustration depicts two pairs of animal eyes and two pairs of human eyes.



First, it seems to be enigmatic what those eyes might represent. In the course of the narrative Austerlitz is compared to Wittgenstein. With this comparison in mind, the images make sense. The eyes of Wittgenstein are included in the illustration that depict eyes. The narrator compares the eyes of animals with the ones of researchers and philosophers, who use intuition and thinking to chase away the darkness, a parallel to Austerlitz. His desire to chase away the darkness serves as a motive for the plot of the storyline.

In the attempt to visualize the past, images play a key role. The photographs are a kind of memorandum, a document to authenticate the text. The protagonist wants to collect evidence. Images have a different objective than words, as they are not determined solely by associations, but by their materiality. The literature by Sebald creates a tension between fact and fiction. Sebald found the photograph of a rugby team, that also depicts Austerlitz, on a fleamarket. Another example of the unclear borders between fiction and reality represents the photograph of a shop window, that reflects the photographer. The question rises, if the person portrayed in the photograph is Austerlitz, Sebald or another person. Sebald tests the limits of representation while using the faith of recipients in the authenticity of visual evidence.

The separation of refugee children from their families and their life in a foreign country weren’t traditionally classified as traumatic, but as a rescue. According to theories, children younger than four were too young in order to remember something. Their situation was classified as lucky because they would hardly have memories to suppress. Recent research takes a different opinion. Saved children suffer from trauma despite the lack of memory. Austerlitz suppresses most of his childhood memories. Moreover, he seems to suffer from the so-called survivor’s guilt, which is not an unusual feeling for Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the horrors of the Second World War describes this guilt vividly. She feels guilty because another person died in her place. Austerlitz feels the same guilt. As a child, he stays awake for hours while trying to imagine the faces he left because of his own fault, as he fears.

Austerlitz enthusiasm for architecture seems to be a replacement and a suppressing mechanism. Austerlitz always tried to remember as little as possible of his origin. He forms a kind of immune system against memories. His collection of knowledge and photographs serves as a compensatory memory. However, the photographs also seem to help him to remember things occasionally. According to theories, photography can encourage the access to repressed memories. In the early trauma theories of the 19th century, the trauma is described as an impression of an overwhelming reality on the mind, which leads to a deformation of the memory. Traumatic experiences cause a disturbance of memory. Just like a camera repeats mechanically what actually can not be repeated, a trauma is produced by experiences that are recorded as impressions of reality. It is photographically recorded without involving a semantic memory. The question rises whether the reconstruction of the past is relevant to the healing process, as the memory is connected with the painful question of the true identity. There are findings suggesting that the life quality of child survivors, who have lost their identity, is lower than the one of those who were able to preserve their identity. The Holocaust survivor Flora Hogman stresses, that the memory is important to allow grief work. For Austerlitz, the remembrance process doesn’t seem to be a cure. He suffers several mental breakdowns, which he describes as a hysterical epilepsy.

According to Freud, the hysterical state of mind is dominated by unconscious ideas. Hysteria is created by failed suppression and trauma is the confusion of memory and time. For this reason Freud uses the camera as a metaphor. Each mental activity leaves a memory trace as a negative in the subconscious. Whether this negative enters the consciousness is decided by the management of defence and resistance. Furthermore, Freud explains that the difference between preconscious and unconscious mental activity is only made later, after the defense has come into play. The push of fragments of memory of traumatic experience to the consciousness occur often as a reminder of a particular scene. The traumatized person doesn’t associate the scene with the actual experience.

In Prague, the place of his childhood, his former nanny confronts Austerlitz with a photograph depicting two unidentified people, a woman and a man, on a theatre stage. The nanny initially assumes that these figures are the parents of Austerlitz, but negates the assumption later on.



While it seems easy for Austerlitz to remember everyday things, such as the Czech language or details, like the streets of Prague, the memories of his parents are still unavailable to him. The attempt to use the photograph to remember his parents fails. Nevertheless, the image still has a memory function. It can be argued, that Austerlitz uses those characters as substitutes for his parents to find an expression for the traumatic fate. Proust describes photography as a medial memory, which is connected with the risk of loss. Owning a photographic image of a person causes the merge of the real person and the image of the person. But without having a photographic image of the person, the memory might get lost. Photographs support the memory. Memory is therefore not only dependent on photography but is also shaped by it.

After discovering that his mother had been interned in Terezín, Austerlitz begins to search a photograph that depicts his mother. In addition to photographs, he also instrumentalizes the medium film. He tries to find his mother in the documentary “Der Fuehrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt”. Austerlitz is led by the hope to regain his mother by possessing an image of her. According to Walter Beniamin the portrait is a main subject of photography for a reason. In the cult of the memories of the distant or deceased loved ones, an image is the last refugee. Sebald extends this conceptual model. Austerlitz is directed not only by the hope that he will find his mother in the documentary or a photograph, he also tries to put himself in the living conditions of his mother through the medium of film. This conceptual model extends the findings of Ulrich Baer, who investigates the parallels of photography and trauma. According to Baer, photography, as well as trauma, records things that are not necessarily perceived by the consciousness. Sebald goes one step further. In Austerlitz photographs are also substitutes for traumatic experiences that support the attempt of Austerlitz to deal with the incidents which he has not experienced by himself. Photography is crucial for the study of the repressed traumatic experiences, not because it absorbs what is normally excluded from consciousness, but because it is a substitute for these experiences which allows the recipient to review the incidents that he has not experienced. Austerlitz hopes to find the reality of the life of his mother in Terezín. The camp theme plays a role in the unconscious mind of Austerlitz already in his childhood. The camp of the Israelites depicted in a Welsh bible which is illustrated on a double page in Austerlitz, is reminiscent of a concentration camp. Austerlitz himself thinks that he sees himself among the tiny figures that populate the camp and that the camp appears to him closer than his life in Wales.

Architecture and architecture illustrations play a big role in the novel. Over 30 photographs depict architectural structures that are often threatened by physical deterioration. Decay and destruction are allegories of transience and forgetfulness. Ruins play an important role, as they emphasize the need for remembrance. Important counterpart to Terezín is the fortress Breedonk, where the Nazis erected a prison as well. Sebald added a series of photographs that depict Breedonk. While Breedonk visualizes the collective fate of the victims of the 3rd Reich, Terezín personalizes the fate, because it is where Austerlitz mother was interned. The search for his personal past leads Austerlitz to his personal misfortune and trauma. The collective historical trauma of the Holocaust, which reveals loss, alienation and homelessness is attached to it.

After Austerlitz watched the documentary about Terezín several times, he discovers a woman, who, as he believes to be, is his mother. This almost obsessive consumption of the image finds an analogy in the childhood of Austerlitz, where he obsessively studied photographs of the population of Llanwddyn, who fell victims to a flood. While Austerlitz felt close to the images of Llanwddyn, the portrait of his mother remains alien to him. Austerlitz finally finds an authentic image of his mother in a theatre archive. This image presents the ambivalent character of photographs. His mother is dead. She is a victim of the Nazi regime. But in the photograph, she is still present.



Susan Sontag argues, that all photographs are Memento Mori and Roland Barthes states, that every photograph causes the recipient to shudder about a disaster that has already taken place. Ulrich Baer claims that the fascination for photography lies in the promise to stop time. Each photograph preserves the appearance of the people depicted but underlines the fragility of the assertion at the same time. Death is seen as an invisible negative in each photograph ever since. This proximity to death in the documentary about Terezín is not only to be understood in a metaphoric way. After the completion of the documentary, the actors were deported to Auschwitz. As previously mentioned, Sebald mixes fiction and reality. Death is also present in the photograph found in the theater archive, stylistically illustrated by the chiaroscuro contrast. The photograph survived the mother of Austerlitz. What remains is the blurred memory. The portrait of the mother is a picture of the past. It is not only evidence of the past but can also be used as a stimulation for memory, a souvenir of the irretrievably past.

Another image presented in the book, that can’t provide access to the person it depicts, is the photography of the page, as seen on the cover of the book. Austerlitz can’t remember his younger self. While acknowledging his hairline, he can’t remember anything else. The child remains as alien as his mother to him. In terms of the trauma and memory discourse, the image of the page is highly interesting. The disaster, that happened not only to Austerlitz family but the whole of Europe, is indirectly anticipated to the possibly broken arm of the page. In addition, Austerlitz memory loss is illustrated through the blurred spot on the head of the boy. In this context, Sebald points out the elements of forgetting and suppressing through the stylistic device of blurriness. Through the photograph it becomes apparent, that the medium doesn’t always help to break through darkness. Roland Barthes provides a similar hypothesis. In his opinion, photographs don’t refresh memories. The relationship between photography and memory is negative. The process of remembering is affected by photographs in a negative way.

In Austerlitz, photography cannot bring back the memory of the past reality. The extinction of his childhood repeats itself in the photograph of the page. The structure of the trauma is even intensified by the photograph because the recipient of the photograph (Austerlitz) is simultaneously the motive of the photograph. Austerlitz looks into the face of his ignorant and lost former self. Not only that the photograph doesn’t provides access to his suppressed memories, as in the photographs of his mother, the photograph of himself seems to disturb him. Austerlitz doesn’t dare to touch the photograph first and is met with blind panic when he thinks about the page.

The failure of the memory can be compared to Marcel Proust model ,Memoire Volontaire’, which can be explained as the reproduction and identical repetition of already remembered. Proust compares the experience of remembering a past that is isolated from all contexts with the medial fixation of the visible through photography. In this comparison, the act of photography and its difference to the unmediated record, play a big role. Contrary to the human sight, the camera registers the environment objectively. This model fails in Proust’s novel “In Search of the Lost Time”. Every time the protagonist tries to remember his childhood, his memory is full of distorted images that are not suitable to resurrect his former past. According to Proust, the past can’t be captured randomly. It can only emerge spontaneous. The model also fails in Austerlitz, visualised through the photographs. It becomes clear that photography and the attempt of conscious remembering are linked to the failure and the latency of memory.

In the beginning of the novel, Austerlitz is portrayed as a photographer. His photographs appear as a symptom of his lost memory. However, in the course of the narrative, they become part of his memory work. Austerlitz photographs to collect himself and chooses motives, that trigger a reflex of recognition. Austerlitz photographs objects that he will find later on in Prague and will recognize as part of his childhood. Austerlitz creates photographs as substitutes for the not remembered. It is a compromise between remembering and forgetting. The photographs act as a compensatory replacement memory. The building fronts which Austerlitz describes during his Terezín visit are highlighted through a photographic series that depict mainly deserted streets, buildings and closed doors.



These photographs become a new significance with the recurring architectural metaphors in relation to memory. Austerlitz explains, that the doors of Terezín appear sinister. According to him, the doors block the access to a never permeated darkness. In the novel are also doors mentioned, behind which the horrors of Austerlitz childhood hide. Places and objects become the storage of memory in terms of the historical and personal past. Related to the discourse about memory, train stations play a significant role. Austerlitz is fascinated by train stations and the idea of a network. During his university years in Paris, he visits train stations nearly every day. He perceives train stations as a place of happiness and misfortune. Train station trigger emotions of farewell and the fear of the unknown. The interest for train stations seem to be coming out of his unconsciousness. Central to his childhood is the train journey to England, which is also associated with the separation of his mother. Austerlitz seems to have unconsciously deposited the forgotten traces of his traumatic past in his subconsciousness. Everything that has been displaced is subconscious. Nevertheless, according to Freud, the subconsciousness is a permanently acting force and not Pandora’s box, which has only an effect if you reveal the content. Austerlitz has no memory of ever visiting Marienbad. He encounters the place with blind fear, because he actually has visited it as a child before. His memory seems to unconsciously influence his state of mind.

While Belgian and Parisian train stations are mentioned in the first part of the novel, the Liverpool Street Station and the Wilson Train Station play a significant role in the second part of Austerlitz. The two stations are closely intertwined with the past of Austerlitz. Austerlitz is repeatedly drawn to the Liverpool Street Station, where he feels an heartache, which, as he senses, is caused by his past. In one of these visits he discovers the Ladies Waiting Room, of whose existence he did not know before. Coming out of nowhere, he recalls his arrival in England 50 years before, while being in this room. He has flashbacks about waiting in the Ladies Waiting Room as a child and meeting his foster parents. This scene comes close to the illusion of a dream. The past appears not only as a reminder but as reality. This experience coincides with Freud’s theory that repressed remains present in the mind, but in the consciousness latent. Repressed memories switch between the conscious and the unconscious. Repressed memories can be consciously perceived, but then again disappear from the consciousness. The photographically accurate spontaneous appearance of memory repeats itself in the Prague train station. The glance of the roof, which is also displayed photographically in the novel, triggers his memory. Ornamental photographs by Austerlitz have a similar influence on his memory. These photographs are symbols of forgotten things. Photography develops its full meaning as a substitute for experiences that are inaccessible for the conscious mind, that appear from one second to another but disappear as fast as they appear. The recollections of memory by Austerlitz are not triggered by the photography of the page or of his mother, but through random details, such as the Ladies Waiting Room. This concept recalls the Memoire Involontaire, a model developed by Proust. It can be described as an involuntary memory, evoked by sensory experiences.

According to Proust, part of the Memoire Involontaire can only be something that is not explicitly experienced by the consciousness, like a traumatic experience. To elaborate this theory, Proust uses photography as a metaphor. As long as the coincidence of the memoire involontaire fails, the past lies like an undeveloped film in the subconsciousness. Austerlitz memory problems are summoned by the inability to fix those images that lay in his subconsciousness mind. The appearances of memory fragments from one second to another are visualised in a Turner painting, included in the novel. Turner tries to capture visions that melt away right away. The appearance and disappearance of memory like a flash is also approached in the documentary about Terezín. Through reducing the speed of the movie, things that remained hidden before, are now visible in the movie. But at the same moment, things become unsharp and the body shapes dissolve. The description of the development process of photographs makes this theory also evident.

Besonders in den Bann gezogen hat mich bei der photographischen Arbeit stets der Augenblick, in dem man auf dem belichteten Papier die Schatten der Wirklichkeit sozusagen aus dem Nichts hervorkommen sieht, genau wie Erinnerungen, sagte Austerlitz, die ja auch inmitten der Nacht in uns auftauchen und die sich dem, der sie festhalten will, so schnell wieder verdunkeln, nicht anders als ein phtogoraphischer Abzug, den man zu lang im Entwicklungsbad liegenläßt. (W. G. Sebald in Austerlitz)

Sebald parallelizes the process of remembering with the photographic process. Photographs can become blurred as well as memories. Even the images inserted by Sebald in the novel aren’t rich in detail and sharp. They are fragmentary and blurry. The images in Austerlitz represent memory pictures as for Sebald, the process of recollection is an incomplete and fragmented process. The heart of the memory discourse is the inability to hold inner images. What remains is the question how someone reminds and what won’t be discovered.

Literature

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The depicted images can be found in Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.