Austerlitz (novel)
Austerlitz is a novel by WG Sebald from 2001 . It appeared as the author's last work before his death. Central to the content is the life of the fictional Jewish scientist Jacques Austerlitz, born in Prague in 1934, who only discovered his origins after completing his academic career and began to research his fate.
The English translation of the novel won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize . In 2015, this novel was voted one of the most important works of the early 21st century in a BBC ranking .
content
The first-person narrator, who lives in England, meets the art historian Jacques Austerlitz, who works there in public with sketches and a camera, while staying in the waiting room of the Antwerp central station . The narrator, interested in building history, approaches Austerlitz, and the two get into the first of many conversations that - with a break of almost 20 years beginning in 1975 - drag on over a period of 30 years, during which they meet both by chance and by appointment meet in Antwerp , Liège , Zeebrugge , London and Paris .
Public aesthetics
The content of the conversations is first and foremost the examples of the “ architectural style of the capitalist era ” that Austerlitz has expertly analyzed en passant - from the Antwerp central station to the Brussels Palace of Justice to the new French national library initiated by François Mitterrand , whose “ family resemblances” Austerlitz examined. Although he initially does not reveal anything about himself or his life, a teacher-student relationship develops between him and the narrator. But it was only very late that Austerlitz revealed to him the origin and traces of his fate that he had now discovered, which he meticulously sought to read from the visible evidence.
Transit locations
One focus of the analyzes are train stations, which Austerlitz felt early on as “ places of happiness and unhappiness at the same time ”, but whose significance for his life only dawned on him in a flash of memory in the early 1990s at Liverpool Street Station in London : he was in this train station arrived in England in the summer of 1939 at the age of four and a half and was given to his foster parents. Austerlitz can no longer let go of his origins, which he had elaborately repressed throughout his life: After an initial psychological breakdown and in parallel to a stay in a clinic, he begins to reconstruct his biography in the context of European history and in which his mother's friend, who has aged by half a century, begins Visiting Prague and the fateful places of his childhood.
Look for the parents
He finds out that in 1939 his Jewish mother managed to get him to safety on a Kindertransport from Prague to England, where he grew up with a pair of preachers in Wales and in a boarding school that he always regarded as alien . His mother was taken to Theresienstadt in December 1942 , which later visited Austerlitz, and from there in 1944 was taken to the east to be murdered. His Jewish father, who was initially able to escape to France , was finally interned there in a camp on the Pyrenees , where all further information has so far been lost.
Austerlitz nevertheless decides to follow the trail of his father as well. He gives his pupil and narrator the keys to his house in London and thus access to his large collection of photographs, with which he has always documented his art and culture-critical observations and the late reconstruction of his life. After the final disappearance of Austerlitz, the narrator uses this legacy to back up the report of their thirty years of friendship with a selection of around 80 photos and drawings.
Narrative
The narrative arises from the sentence structures, which are rich in appositions and subordinate clauses, which run over their themes as chains of associations between the characters. An outstanding example is a sentence that stretches over around nine pages and reports in an oppressive manner about events in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . This complex structure reproduces the balanced spontaneity of the conversations that this novel is the report of.
Hearsay and photo evidence
A first noticeable feature is that the narrator mostly only reproduces the discussions of the narrating Austerlitz, who in turn quotes his interlocutors in many places. About twenty times the author repeats the Inquit formula " ... told me (...) said Austerlitz " - and the reader can add: "reports the first-person narrator". The characters' perception of reality is thus declined into the third dimension of reporting: the “I-I-I narrator” shifts the sources of information about the real construction of the world into a dimension of extreme hearsay.
Anything that goes beyond the official and semi-official interpretations of the history of architecture and society is only passed on by the characters when they tell stories and only come to life when they listen. Because in the reality experienced by the characters, the historical movement can hardly be deciphered: “ The stories that adhere to the countless places and objects that themselves have no ability to remember (are) never heard, recorded or passed on by anyone. “Because of Austerlitz and the narrator's fundamental skepticism about the story and its pronouncements, truth can only assert itself as“ silent mail ”.
The 80 or so photos and drawings counteract the impression of a loss of real substance, giving the narrative its grounding and infusion of reality. In this scissors of report reports and photographic evidence the space opens up for Jacques Austerlitz's “thought experiments” that fascinate his pupil.
Chronological compression
A second compositional strategy ties together the sections, which are so far apart in the individual themes and over the duration of about 30 years , the two main characters continue their monologue after each interruption - without even a small talk after a 20-year break from communication: " So Austerlitz more or less resumed the conversation there that evening in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, without even saying a word about our meeting that happened purely by chance after such a long time. where it once broke off. “This evaporation of the thematic core of the novel, the renunciation of all detours and additions to the central theme, causes the text to be extraordinarily intense.
A third strategy unfolds on the textual level, in that individual motifs (e.g. losing, passing away and extinguishing or holding on and remembering) run through the work and give it its coherence.
interpretation
The work is a novel : it unites found and invented. It is a biography : it reconstructs the long, disturbing self-enlightenment of Jacques Austerlitz and documents it with a multitude of data and image sources. And it is a contribution to a theory of sensory perception, an aesthetic . By showing one thing in the other, the work transcends the usual boundaries and becomes the subject of specialist debates.
One of her subjects is the " metaphysics of history ", as the narrator describes Austerlitz 'method at one point. What is meant is an intellectual process that places the architectural structures in the social context of their creation (e.g. Bertolt Brecht echoes questions from a reading worker ), then analyzes the behavior of their viewers and users, predetermined by size and layout, and the associated associations , Feelings and dreams logged. This aesthetic, which integrates the external description of the objects, the social history of the objects and the individual emotional reactions they trigger, is demonstrated on more than a dozen object complexes or their photos or drawings.
The figure of the Jew Austerlitz, who was torn from his family and his time, complements this process of knowledge with the dimension of the Holocaust , which was not only silent in post-war Germany and interprets the objects in the context of persecution and murder. In this way, the train stations, but also the new French national library in Paris, gain additional meaning. This shift of topics away from the exclusively art-historical consideration accentuates an understanding of the world as a story of suffering that tracks down the traces of pain that “ run through history in innumerable fine lines ”.
With this, Sebald places himself in the context of a cultural-political discourse led by Brecht, Walter Benjamin and others, which transcends the narrow limits of understanding of the “ Res Gestae ” not only in historical but also in sensual knowledge: “ Our preoccupation with history (... ) is a preoccupation with already prefabricated images engraved into the inside of our heads, at which we stared constantly while the truth lies somewhere else, in an offside that has not yet been discovered by anyone . "Sebald also has an elective affinity to Peter Weiss , whose work The Aesthetics of Resistance leads the common effort in the title.
literature
- WG Sebald, Austerlitz . Hanser, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-446-19986-1
- WG Sebald, Austerlitz . Fischer TB Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-596-14864-2
- Lothar Bluhm : Origin, Identity, Reality. Remembrance work in contemporary German literature. In: Ulrich Breuer, Beatrice Sandberg (Ed.): Autobiographical writing in contemporary German literature . Volume 1: Limits of Identity and Fictionality . Munich 2006, pp. 69-80.
- Anne Fleischhauer: Visitation - Figurations of the Traumatic in WG Sebalds Austerlitz . Scientific term paper to obtain the academic degree of a Magister Artium from the University of Hamburg. Hamburg 2009.
- Florian Lehmann: Reality and Imagination. Photography in shared flat Sebalds Austerlitz and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up . University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg 2013. ISBN 978-3-86309-140-8 .
- Christoph Parry: The two lives of Mr. Austerlitz. Biographical writing as a non-linear historiography at WG Sebald . In: Edgar Platen, Martin Todtenhaupt (Hrsg.): Borders - Border Crossing - Border Dissolutions. For the presentation of contemporary history in contemporary German literature . Munich 2004, pp. 113-130.
- Wolf Wucherpfennig: WG Sebald's Roman Austerlitz . Personal and social memory work . In: Wolfram Mauser, Joachim Pfeiffer (Ed.): Erinnern . Würzburg 2004, pp. 151-163.
Edits
Austerlitz . Radio play based on the novel of the same name by WG Sebald. 83 minutes. MDR 2011. With Ernst Jacobi , Ulrich Matthes and Rosemarie Fendel . Editing and direction: Stefan Kanis. ISBN 978-3-86717-842-6
Austerlitz documentary based on the novel of the same name by WG Sebald. 90 minutes. Director: Stan Neumann , France 2014, broadcast on ARTE (German) 2015.
Web links
- Review notes on Austerlitz at perlentaucher.de
- With Jacques Austerlitz in Prague
- Film "Austerlitz" by Stan Neumann
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 52, 176.
- ↑ This horror, captured in the long sentence, can be found in the first German edition on pages 335–345, in between a one-page book page copy with a list of the special instructions and the image of the Theresienstadt parcel post stamp.
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 39
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 64
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 23
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 22, 392 ff.
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 24
- ↑ Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 109
- ↑ Programm.ard.de: Austerlitz. In: programm.ard.de. November 6, 2015, accessed January 21, 2017 .