Austerlitz & The Great Library
W.G. Sebald's novel, Austerlitz, and memory
Austerlitz, the final novel written by W.G. Sebald (2001),1 won many literary awards.2 It was named among the 100 best books of the 21th century by both the New York Times and the Guardian.3 Edwin Frank, in his assessment of the 20th century novel Stranger than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel chose Austerlitz as the final novel of the twentieth century.4 It has been translated into many languages.5 It has been the subject of study by many scholars.6
Austerlitz (summary)
A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers' stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald's unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz's ongoing efforts to understand who he is, a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.-- Publisher description7
Sebald explores the ways in which collections of records, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France entomb memories.
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) The Great Library and the three work camps that operated from July 1943 through August 1944 in the heart of Paris.
Writing of Sebald’s description of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz, James Cowan observes:
“With Sebald's treatment of the new Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, The Great Library) in the closing pages of Austerlitz questions about fact and fiction, authenticity and verification, concern nothing less than a metaphysics of history, with complications arising from the changing historical context in which the "facts" appear. In addition is the question of how a work of literature can contribute to historical memory. This "Great Library" episode occupies most of the second of three conversations Austerlitz has with the narrator. … Austerlitz engages in a devastating critique of the library's design, impracticality, and organization. His description…can be verified by the personal experience of a visit, by documentary evidence such as photographs like that published in Austerlitz), or on the BnF's own website. A few pages later, however, when the librarian Henri Lemoine tells Austerlitz of how the library now stands on the site of a labor camp where goods looted from Jewish apartments in Paris had been processed by Jewish prisoners brought in from the transit camp at Drancy… the reader is in a different epistemological region altogether: unlike the grand rafle or the "Vel' d'hiver," Lemoine is relating a history that was little known to anyone at the time Austerlitz was first published, and virtually unknown at the time Lemoine was supposed to have reported it. Here, verification requires the curious and skeptical reader to engage in research, which in fact reveals the passage in question to be a fascinating mixture of fact and fictional invention.8
The camp did exist, but not at the exact site of the library, (which) creates a tension between historical details themselves and the resonance they achieve through the network of cross-relationships and symbolic associations within the literary structure of the work. Furthermore, the historical claims of Austerlitz must be confronted with the historical changes that have occurred since its publication: the growing knowledge about the camp, the urban development in the area surrounding the site of the camp, and its own changing role in preserving the historical memory of the camp.9
Three work camps operated from July 1943 through August 1944 in the heart of Paris. They were named Austerlitz, Lévitan, and Bassano.10 The task of the internees in Austerlitz, Lévitan, and Bassano (technically sub-camps of Drancy)11 was to unload, sort, and crate for shipment to Germany property the Germans pillaged from Jewish apartments in Paris and (to a lesser extent) other cities in France.12
W. G. Sebald reading from his novel Austerlitz at 92nd Street Y. October 15, 2001, just two months before his death.
W. G. Sebald. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2001. Biography: Schütte, Uwe. 2018. W.G. Sebald. Liverpool, [London?]: Liverpool University Press on behalf of Northcote House Publishers Ltd. ; British Council.
Smith, Dinitia (12 March 2002). "National Book Critics Circle Honors 'Austerlitz'". The New York Times; "Posthumous honour for author". BBC News. 12 April 2002.
"The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. 21 September 2019; "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century". The New York Times. 8 July 2024.
Frank, Edwin. 2024. Stranger than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
To name a few:
Sebald, W. G. 2013. Austerlitz. . Translated by Patrick Charbonneau. Arles [France]: Actes Sud.;
Sebald, W. G., and James Wood. 2018. Austerlitz MộT cáI TêN : TiểU ThuyếT. . Translated by Mạnh Hùng Dương. Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Hội Nhà Văn;
Sebald, W. G., and Wojciech Nowicki. 2020. Austerlitz. . Translated by Małgorzata Łukasiewicz. Wydanie pierwsze. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Ossolineum.
W.G.제발트 지음 ; 안미현 옮김., W. G. Sebald, and W.G. Chebalt’ŭ chiŭm ; An Mi-hyŏn omgim. 2009. 아우스터리츠 = Austerlitz. Ch’op’an. Sŏul-si: 을유 문화사.
Hanssen, Ken R. “W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Problems of Representation.” Journal of modern literature 48.1 (2024): 162–177;
Kovac, Leonida, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Ilse van Rijn, and Ihab Saloul. W. G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies Memory, Word and Image. Bloomington: Amsterdam University Press (2023)
Oesmann, Astrid. "Sebald's Melancholic Method: Writing as Ethical Memory in Austerlitz." Monatshefte, v. 106, no. 3, 2014, pp. 452-470.
Wilson, Mary Griffin. "Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz." Contemporary Literature, v.. 54, no. 1, 2013, pp. 49-76.
Straus, Nina Pelikan. "Sebald, Wittgenstein and the Ethics of Memory." Comparative Literature, v.. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. 43-53.
Eshel, Amir. "Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz New German Critique, v.. 88, 2003, pp. 71-96.
Cowan, James L. “W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I.” Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. : 1946) 102.1 (2010): 51–81; Cowan, James L. “Sebald’s ‘Austerlitz’ and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part II.” Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. : 1946) 102.2 (2010): 192–207.
Cowan, James L. “W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I.” Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. : 1946) 102.1 (2010): 51–81.
Nazi Labour Camps in Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, July 1943–August 1944, Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 180 pp.