Lost and Found:

Disorientation, Nostalgia,
and Holocaust Melodrama in
Sebalds Austerlitz1

John Zilcosky

Bianca Theisen and I began discussing the then still-somewhat-mysterious expatriate German writer, W. G. Sebald, in 2001, just before
the publication of his final book and his untimely death. In these
conversations, we kept circling back to the sense of never having
read anything quite like him. His insertion of images into fiction
was not new,2 but we, like so many others, still sensed something
peculiar in Sebalds form: the way he relentlessly pushed genre
borders, especially by continually and ostentatiously placing himself
into his books. Were these works facts or fictions? And, what is more,
were they autobiographies, novels, short story collections, collages,
or travelogues? This latter possibilityseeing Sebald as a writer of
traveloguesfascinated us most, not least because of the apparent
high/low contradiction: the relentlessly erudite writer of intellectual
fiction loved the relatively degraded genre of the travel essay. Sebald,

1
A much shorter, German-language version of this article will appear almost simultaneously in Text + Kritik (2006).
2
In his use of images, Sebald follows the German documentary-literature writers of
the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Alexander Kluge. For the use of montage in the
1960s and 1970s travel writings of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Hubert Fichte, see Bianca
Theisen, Prose of the World: W. G. Sebalds Literary Travels, The Germanic Review 79:3
(Summer 2004): 16379 (here, 165).

MLN 121 (2006): 679698 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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JOHN ZILCOSKY

we discovered, was a travel writer of sorts. As Susan Sontag had written a year earlier, travel was the generative principle of mental
activity in Sebalds writings.3
But what kinds of travels, we asked? And in what ways were Sebalds
travels not just journeys through countries but also journeys through
books? His voyages often followed explicitly the footsteps of others
(Stendhal, Kafka, Casanova), and sometimes took place only in his
head, when he read the travel stories of Conrad, Diderot, and Grillparzer. We started to delineate precisely how Sebalds travels fit into
this tradition of travel writing he so richly evoked, and we went on
to publish, almost simultaneously, two essays focusing on Sebald and
travel. Whereas Bianca concentrated on Sebalds highly stylized reinscribing of German literary journeys to Italy, I examined Sebalds
fascination with what may well be travel writings master tropethe
fear of getting lost and the desire to find ones wayin his early 1990s
travelogue triptych: Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), and The Rings
of Saturn (1995).4 As I argued there, Sebald obsessively returned to
this ancient paradigmwhere literary travelers since Odysseus got lost
and found their way back homein order to undermine it, but not
as we might expect: he did not claim that we are all hopelessly lost
and unable to return to our origins. Rather, he demonstrated how
our disorientations never lead to new discoveries, only to a series of
uncanny, intertextual returns. This claim went against the grain of
what had already become a recurring argument in Sebald criticism:
that Sebalds heroes were postmodern nomads desperately lost at
the turn of our 21st century.5 I maintained thatin these early 1990s
narrativesSebald sustained a decidedly modernist (not postmodernist) tension within this model of lost-and-found. Instead of providing

3
Susan Sontag, A Mind in Mourning (2000), in Where the Stress Falls (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 4148 (here, 46).
4
Theisen, Prose of the World; John Zilcosky, Sebalds Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald: A
Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2004), 10220.
5
For Claudia Albes, Rings of Saturn cites all sorts of postmodern writers and thinkers.
For Eshel, Sebalds prose is emblematic[ally] postmodern. Albes furthermore names
disorientation and the Deleuzian rhizome as Sebalds master tropes. Claudia Albes,
Die Erkundung der Leere: Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebalds englischer Wallfahrt Die
Ringe des Saturn, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 46 (2002): 279305 (here, 295,
289, 291; see also 280, 281); Amir Eshel, Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of
Suspension in W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz, New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 7196
(here, 90; see also 76, 80, 93).

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accounts of nomadism, Sebalds stories presented subjects who could

never become sufficiently uprooted, never lose their way at all. Like Freud,
Kafka, and Thomas Mann, Sebald viewed modern travel as primarily
uncanny. Emblematic was the title of Sebalds essay collection from
the same period, Unheimliche Heimat, whose word-play closed the gap
between traveling and dwelling, producing the sensation that the traveler, no matter how far away he journeyed, could never really leave his
home.6 In the present essay, I will examine Sebalds last long fiction,
Austerlitz (2001), arguing that it turns back toward a more conventional
postmodern model of lost-and-found, and leads us to consider the
aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Holocaust representation.
I. Uncanniness and the Impossibility of Lostness:
Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995)
Beginning with Greek epic and myth and running through to Romantic fairy tales, heroes have traditionally dreaded losing their way:
Odysseus held on desperately to his nostos; Theseus unrolled carefully Ariadnes thread behind him; and Hansel and Gretel dropped
pieces of bread to guide them safely home. Getting lost signified the
end of ones homecoming as well as mortal danger: being turned
into swine, devoured by a Minotaur, and eaten by a witch. But these
narratives were only initially about getting lost; they were also always
about the triumphant moment of re-direction, the topographical
aha! experience, the right turn toward home. This lost-and-found
story became a literary trope in the Romantic era, in fairy tales and
also in Goethes late eighteenth century journeys through Venice
and Flauberts mid-nineteenth century wanderings through Cairo.7
These Romantic narratives exemplified a modern fort/da game, in
which the voyager substituted his own body for the toy-spool that the
child in Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle hurled behind the drape

6
Unheimliche Heimat discusses writers (such as Kafka, Jean Amry, Gerhard Roth and
Peter Handke) who all find it impossible to escape their Austrian Heimat. See, for example, Sebalds remarks on Amry, who even changed his name (from Hanns Mayer)
in a vain attempt to break away from Austria (Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur
sterreichischen Literatur [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995], 141).
7
For a more detailed description of Goethes and Flauberts lost-and-found stories,
and their relation to Freuds fort/da game, see John Zilcosky, The Writer as Nomad?:
The Art of Getting Lost. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6 (2004):
22941 (here, 23134).

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JOHN ZILCOSKY

and then triumphantly retrieved.8 By throwing his body behind the

foreign citys curtain and then reclaiming it, the traveler prevented
the real trauma of possible self-loss. This fort/da game served as
the travelers insurance policy. He underwrote his own worst anxiety
by making it to come true. By getting lost on purpose, the traveler
could not do so by accident. This Romantic lost-and-found game
repeated itselfhowever subtlyin postmodern figurations of travel.
Even though Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris early 1970s urban
nomadism claimed to resist all forms of return and recuperation,
postmodern literary travelogues,9 such as Roland Barthess LEmpire des
signes (1970), revealed nomadisms Romantic legacy.10 Barthes claimed
that the goal of his Tokyo wanderings was to disturb his person, but
he, like Goethe in Venice, got lost ultimately in order to discover the
travel writer in himself: his Tokyo disorientations eventually afforded
him a situation of writing.11 In a twist revealing the nostalgia within
some postmodernisms, Barthes got lost in order to find his writing
nomad within.12
How did Sebalda travel writer acutely aware of contemporary
literary theorycounteract this neo-Romantic, postmodern conceit?13

8
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) (1920), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 18: 764 (here, 15).
9
Deleuze and Guattari spearheaded this valorization of nomadism and nomad
thought in, respectively, Lanti Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972) and (by Deleuze alone)
Pense nomade, in Nietzsche aujourdhui? ed. Pierre Boudot (Paris: Union Gnrale
dEditions, 1973).
10
Correctly pointing out that poststructuralism is most concerned with modernist
(not postmodernist) literature, Andreas Huyssen argues for disconnecting postmodern
practice from poststructural theory. In the case of nomadism, however, poststructural
theorizations (Deleuze/Guattari, Paul Patton, Rosi Braidotti) correspond precisely
to postmodern travel writing: both attempt to invent mobile stories that no longer
depart only in order to return (see Zilcosky, The Writer as Nomad?, 230). In this
instance, I agree with Fredric Jamesons claim that poststructuralism is also a subvariety of the postmodern, or at least proves to be that in hindsight. Andreas Huyssen, Poststructuralism: Modern or Postmodern, in After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 20616; Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 1991), xvi.
11
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982 [1970]), 4.
12
Andreas Huyssen similarly identifies the nostalgic aspect of some poststructuralist
theory: Isnt the death of the subject/author position tied by mere reversal to the
very ideology that invariably glorifies the artist as genius? (Huyssen, After the Great
Divide, 213).
13
For Sebalds awareness of poststructuralist theory, see Albes, Die Erkundung der
Leere, 29596.

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In his early 1990s books, Sebald destabilized this attempt to turn the
margin into a new center (and make disorientation a new form of
orientation) by destructing the traditional opposition between home
and away. More disturbing than the fact that we might be always
lost was, for Sebald, the fact that we might always know where we are,
whether we like it or not: when we find ourselves in the same hotel
in a city we once visited long ago; when we become disoriented only
to keep circling back to the same spot; when we move away from our
homes only to see our pasts creeping in everywhere around us. This
persistence of the familiar, this unheimlich inability to lose ones way,
haunted Sebalds early travel narratives. To give just one example
from each work: in Vertigo, the narrator wandered aimlessly through
the streets of Viennahoping to disorient himself along goalless
[ziellose] pathsonly to discover disappointedly that not one of his
journeys had taken him beyond a precisely defined area in the city
center; Ambros Adelwarth (from The Emigrants) traveled to Istanbul
but caught sight there of mountains that for one awful heartbeat
resembled his German home and later, in Jerusalem, hallucinated
a group of lepers who terrifyingly resembled inhabitants from his
hometown; in The Rings of Saturn, the narrator wandered through an
especially thick patch of overgrown scrubland onlyto his astonishment, not to say horrorto find himself back again at the same
tangled thicket from which [he] had emerged about an hour before.14
The Romantic fort/da game thus gave way in Sebalds early work to
an uncanny paradigm: the subject did not get lost (with the implied
hope of getting found); rather, he incessantly returned against his
will to hauntingly familiar places.

14
The Sebald citations are from: Vertigo (New York: New Directions, 1999), 334
(Schwindel. Gefhle [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994 (1990)], 3940); The Emigrants
(New York: New Directions, 1996), 131, 142 (Die Ausgewanderten: vier lange Erzhlungen
[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994 (1992)], 193, 210); The Rings of Saturn (New York:
New Directions, 1998), 171 (Die Ringe des Saturn: eine englische Wallfahrt [Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1997 (1995)], 204). English translations are all by Michael Hulse.
The only moment in these early works when Sebalds narrator seems to want to go
home is figured ironically: an extravagant Italian title (Il ritorno in patria) towers over
his journey to an insignificant village in Allgu (section 4 of Vertigo). The ostentatious
Italian title deliberately puts the narrators patria in question. Is it in Allgu? Or is it
in England, where he now lives and whither he finally returns in the final pages? Or
is it in Italy (as patria suggests), the spiritual homeland of the German writer-in-training from Goethe onward? (Vertigo, 257; Schwindel. Gefhle, 280; see Zilcosky, Sebalds
Uncanny Travels, 106).

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Sebalds precursors here were neither the Romantics nor the

postmodernists but the modernists. Gustav Aschenbach, in Thomas
Manns Death in Venice (1912), for example, followed Tadzio through
Venices labyrinthine alleys, eventually losing his bearings, but never
gaining the triumphant feeling of going off-course and then finding
his way back; instead he inexplicably appeared in exactly the same
forsaken square he had sat in weeks earlierthis time finishing the
tainted strawberries that would bring on his death. Similarly, Sigmund
Freud journeyed in 1919 to a town in Italy where he lost his way, only
to keep returning against his will to the same spot. Kafkas Josef K.
from The Trial (191415), too, got lost in the attics behind the painter
Titorellis bed, only to find these attics leading inexorably to the
all-too-familiar hallways of the Courts. In each of these cases, disorientation led not, as in Goethe and Barthes, to the excitingly strange,
but rather to the unsettlingly known. Sebalds early travel narratives
repeated this uncanny modernism, but from a self-reflexive, 1990s
post-postmodern perspective, in which, from Sebalds standpoint,
lostness became impossible again.15
II. Uncertain Forms or Novels?
The 199095 Narratives versus Austerlitz (2001)
Does Sebalds final fictional narrative, Austerlitz, carry forth this postpostmodern, uncanny structure? Before considering this question,
let us examine how much Austerlitzs general literary form differs
from that of the earlier works. Although scholars tend to group all
of Sebalds fictions together under the author-function Sebald,16 it
is important to remember that Austerlitzs earliest critics emphasized
the last books stylistic differencesfor better or for worsefrom his
earlier writings. Wieland Freund claimed (positively) that Austerlitz was
Sebalds least biographical work; it was closest to a novel, even if
Sebald refuses to use this etiquette, and the main character, Jacques
Austerlitz, was more clearly a fictional figure than Sebalds earlier
protagonists. Richard Eder claimed (negatively) that Austerlitz lacked
See Zilcosky, Sebalds Uncanny Travels, 104.
To cite just two of many possible examples: Julia Hell views all of Sebalds works,
from Vertigo through Air War and Literature, as a part of a gendered drama articulating
the illegitimacy of post-Holocaust authorship, and Amir Eshel sees an overall poetics
of suspension running through Sebalds oeuvre from After Nature to Austerlitz ( Julia
Hell, Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship, New German Critique 88
[Winter 2003]: 936 [here, 35]; Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 90).
15
16

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the buoyant variety of the previous works. Andreas Huyssen claimed

(neutrally) that Austerlitz was Sebalds first real novel.17 These critics
all pointed toward Austerlitzs more traditionally novelistic structure:
despite the long sentences, the lack of paragraph and section breaks,
the persistent digressions, and the concentric narration, Austerlitz
was more easily identifiable as a novel than the earlier three fictions,
which all wandered along the borders between travel diary, memoir,
collage, and short story.
What makes Austerlitz more like a real novel? The major factor is
Austerlitzs de-emphasis of the peculiarly Sebaldian confusion between
memoir and fiction, so central to the earlier works. For example, the
name Sebald is never mentioned, and we never stumble across a
startling photograph of the real author, as we did in Vertigo and The
Rings of Saturn (see figures 1 and 2). Even The Emigrants, Austerlitzs
closest literary relative, defies novelistic unity through its four distinct
long narratives and preserves throughout a scrupulous uncertainty
between fiction and documentary: whereas Jacques Austerlitz is a fictional amalgam of two or three, or perhaps three-and-a-half real-life
figures (a somewhat normal ratio for fiction),18 Max Aurach was so
clearly a replica of a living artist, Frank Auerbach, that Sebald had
to change the name for the English edition (to Max Ferber).19 The
Emigrants photographs, moreover, were almost all authentic and
had a more alienating effect than those in Austerlitz.20 In the former,
17
Wieland Freund, Belgische Begegnungen, Rheinischer Merkur, 24 March 2001;
Richard Eder, Excavating a Life, New York Times, 28 October 2001; Andreas Huyssen,
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2003), 177n40. Also, Thomas Wirtz claims (negatively) that the powerfully alienating
role of the Sebaldian I is weakened in Austerlitz (Thomas Wirtz, Schwarze Zuckerwatte: Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebald, Merkur 55 ( June 2001): 53034 (here, 534). For
a good summary of early Austerlitz criticism, see Mark McCulloh, Understanding W.G.
Sebald (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2003), 13237.
18
Sebald names explicitly two of these people: a colleague of his (a historian of architecture) and a woman, Susie Bechhofer, who was brought to England as part of the
Kindertransport. Andreas Huyssen speculates that this residual half person is Sebald
himself. Sebald, second interview with Maya Jaggi, The Last Word, The Guardian, 21
December 2001, 22834; Andreas Huyssen, Gray Zones of Remembrance, in A New
History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
2004), 97075 (here, 972).
19
Although Sebald tells Maya Jaggi that his Mancunian landlord also contributed to
the character of Aurach (I found out hed skied in the same places as I had), the
resemblance to Auerbach was primary and real enough for Auerbach to insist on
the name change. See Maya Jaggis first interview with Sebald, Recovered Memories,
The Guardian, 22 September 2001.
20
According to Sebald, nearly all of the images [from The Emigrants] were historic
and authentic artifacts from the represented biographies; in Austerlitz, on the other

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Figure 1. W.G. Sebald, from Vertigo, first published in Germany under the original
title Schwindel. Gefhle by Eichborn AG, Frankfurt/Main 1990. Reproduced with the
permission of the Estate of W.G. Sebald.

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Figure 2. W.G. Sebald, from The Rings of Saturn, first published in Germany
under the original title Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt by Eichborn AG,
Frankfurt/Main 1995. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of W.G. Sebald.

the images interrupted the narrative, estranging the reader from

the story through apparent authorial intrusions; they seemed to be
placed into the text by the author himself as documentary proofs. The
photographs in Austerlitz, conversely, do not alienate because they fit
smoothly into the books fictional device: Jacques Austerliz carries a
camera with him and takes pictures on his journeys. These details
combine to make Austerlitz more novelistic, which, in itself, does not
say anything good or bad. Freund, for example, finds Austerlitz better
than Sebalds earlier works precisely because it is less biographical.21
But this turn toward more conventional fiction does weaken Sebalds
claim that Austerlitz, like his earlier works, is a prose book of uncertain form.22 With the exception of the photographs, there is little
to distinguish it stylistically from a likewise concentrically-narrated
Thomas Bernhard novel.

hand, only about half of the images issued from the real lives of his models. Sebald,
interview in Der Spiegel, Ich frchte das Melodramatische (12 March 2001).
21
Freund, Belgische Begegnungen.
22
Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.

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III. Lostness: Austerlitz (2001)

How does this shiftfrom the uncertain form of Sebalds early 1990s
books to the more novelistic structure of Austerlitzrelate to the trope
of disorientation? If the earlier books portrayed a post-postmodern
impossibility of lostness, does Austerlitz return to a Romantic (and
postmodern) model of lost-and-found? Whereas lostness was next
to impossible in the 199095 books, it is ever-present in Austerlitz. If
Sebalds earlier characters could never get lost, Austerlitz can only
get lost, at least at the outset. And this lostness is dangerous, leading
toward madness, as it did in a rare moment of disorientation from
Vertigo: the narrators friend, Ernst Herbeck, was permanently committed to a mental institution because of his aimless wandering through
the streets of Vienna.23 Herbecks peregrinations were precisely what
deemed him mad, enforcing a long-standing linguistic connection
between disorientation and insanity: der Irre (the madman) goes
into die Irre (loses his way). Although Vertigo eventually developed a
different relation to lostnessSebalds narrator actually tries, unsuccessfully, to lose his waythis early scene set the stage for Austerlitz,
in which disorientation suddenly becomes the protagonists defining
characteristic.
Disorientation looms large in Austerlitz from the early scenes onward,
beginning with young Jacques Austerlitzs discovery of his real name.
Known throughout his childhood as Dafydd Elias, he originally has
no connection at all to this strange term, Austerlitz, until he hears
his history teacher recounting the story of Napoleons 1805 battle
against the Austro-Russian Alliance.24 According to this teacher, this
battle was decided by a strategic moment of getting lost. The French
forces were severely outnumbered by the Alliance, which had amassed
90,000 men and stretched nine miles along the Pratzen heights. But
when the Allied forces made their way down the mountain to attack,
they were met by a dense fog that limited their vision and made them
increasingly unsure of where they were going. Eventually they found
themselves wandering around aimlessly[Sie sind] an den Abhngen
und in den Wiesengrnden herumgeirrtwhile the French charged up
to the now-abandoned heights to attack the Alliance from the rear (Ae

Sebald, Vertigo, 38; Schwindel. Gefhle, 45.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 68;
Austerlitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003 [2001]), 104. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Ae (English) and Ag (German).
23
24

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70; Ag 107). The result was over 25,000 Allied casualties, the end of the
Holy Roman Empire, and, more importantly for the young Austerlitz,
the first connection between himselfthe story of his nameand the
mortal dangers of losing ones way.
Shortly after this, Austerlitz again relates disorientation to death, this
time through his sympathy for moths, which seem to have a human-like
fear of getting lost. Austerlitz explains how, in the warmer months of
the year, these nocturnal creatures stray into his houseder eine oder
andere [verirrt sich] zu mir herein; when he wakes up in the morning,
he finds them clinging desperately to his wall. Austerlitz attributes to
these moths a lethal, human fear: I believe, said Austerlitz, that they
know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again
carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last
breath is out of their bodies (Ae 93; Ag 140). As in the story of his
name, this is not merely Austerlitzs observation of an outside event
but also a moment of identification. He, too, is without a home and
a past, and empathizes with creatures who die of fear because they
do not know where they are: Sometimes, seeing one of these moths
that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and
pain they feel while they are lost [was fr eine Art Angst und Schmerz
sie in der Zeit ihrer Verirrung wohl verspren] (Ae 94; Ag 141). Here, getting lostVerirrungimplies much more than just losing ones way
topographically. The reflexive verb, sich verirren, describes someone
who has lost his way morally and spirituallyas in the lost sheep
(verirrtes Schaf ), who, in the Gospel of Matthew, strays from the way
of God.25 Moreover, sich verirren calls to mind its substantive, Verirrung,
which means going astray, aberration, wandering, and mistake.
As Sebald probably knew, Verirrung etymologically connects traveling
(Reisen) with madness (Irrsinn) through the Indo-European root,
er[e]s, which means to move rapidly, impetuously, or aimlessly. Not
knowing where one is implies not knowing who one is.
These stories of Verirrungtinged with mad fear and deathcontinue throughout the first half of Jacques Austerlitzs life but, in the
name of brevity, I will note only one more example here. Almost midway through his story, Austerlitz recalls the friendship he has rekindled
with his old prep school pal, Gerald. Like Austerlitz, Gerald is obsessed
with pigeons because of their superb navigational abilities. Gerald tells
25
See Matt. 18:12, where the reflexive verb, sich verirren, is used. Verirrungwhich
refers to the literally and metaphorically lost sheepappears throughout the Luther
Bible (for example, in Ezek. 34:12 and Ps. 119:176).

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Austerlitz, You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle

of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will
infallibly find its way home. This ability to find ones way home is,
for Austerlitz, a mystery and a marvel: To this day no one knows how
these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their
hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the
vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin
[den Ort ihrer Herkunft] (Ae 11314; Ag 16869). Austerlitz imagines
that these pigeons, like the moths, experience mortal Angst when they
lose their way, and he goes on, in his description of Geralds life, to
directly link disorientation with death. Inspired by his beloved pigeons,
Gerald eventually becomes a pilot and then dies when his plane
crashes into the Alps. For Austerlitz, Gerald dies not so much from
a plane crash as from an inability to complete an Odyssean nostos.26
Unlike the pigeons, Austerlitz claims, Gerald simply fail[s] to come
home. This story holds great symbolic meaning for Austerlitz, who,
at this point in the story, understands his life as a failure to get back
to his own Ort der Herkunft. Geralds death accordingly catalyzes a long
period of Austerlitzs own decline (Ae 117; Ag 17273).
This decline culminates in Austerlitzs 1992 nervous breakdown,
which he describes, like his first breakdown in the 1950s, as a form
of mental lostness. In the 1950s, Austerlitz hallucinated that he was
wandering errantly [herumirren] around a maze of long passages,
and, during his 1992 breakdown, he feels like a man who had been
abroad for a long time and cannot find his way through [the] urban
sprawl anymore, who can see no connections anymore, only
disjointed signs (Ae 269, 124; Ag 382). In this second breakdown,
Austerlitz begins, like Herbeck, to wander aimlessly through London
at night. In the labyrinthine Liverpool Street Station he loses his
way and experiences delusions, suddenly realizing that his madness
was brought on by a deliberate attempt to suppress his own history:
to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related
in any way to my unknown past (Ae 139). Through his great erudition, Austerlitz realizes, he has created a substitute or compensatory
memory, a digressionIrrwegthat determines his entire mode of
storytelling. Over and over again, the narrator tells us that Austerlitzs
story took another direction: toward a discourse on stag horns;
toward a painting of Wilhelm Tell; toward the lonely pair of squirrels
26
Eshel also remarks on the Odyssean aspects of Austerlitzs journey (Against the
Power of Time, 78).

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inhabiting the courtyard of the Bibliothque Nationale, etc (Ae 140,

264). These digressions can only be straightened out, Austerlitz imagines, by returning to his origins. Following a coincidental discovery
in a bookstore owned by an Odyssean Penelope, Austerlitz begins
an instinctualalmost pigeon-likejourney toward Prague, where
he discovers that he was one of the Jewish children sent to England
on the Kindertransport following the 1939 Nazi invasion (Ae 141). He
discovers there the streets into which he was born, the apartment in
which he lived, and the old (Odyssean) nursemaid who cared for him.
In the end, he learns about the exhibition hall from which his mother
was transported to Theresienstadt, discovers a longed-for image of his
mother, and even hallucinates the presence of the murdered Jews of
Theresienstadt who now emerge, alive, before his eyes (see figure 3;
Ae 179, 200, 253).
IV. Lost and Found: Nostalgia and Holocaust Melodrama
Through this journey to Prague, Austerlitzs finds a home that is
relatively intact: his nursemaid, his old apartment, his mothers photo,
his lost Czech language (which miraculously returns to him), and the

Figure 3. Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald translated by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton,

2001), the Estate of W.G. Sebald, p. 253. Reproduced by permission of Penguin
Books Ltd. and the Estate of W.G. Sebald.

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resuscitated Jews of Theresienstadt. The Sebaldian archive, normally

so withholding, now bursts open. The unreachable fragmentary pasts
from The Emigrants give way here to what Thomas Wirtz calls total
reconstruction.27 Wirtz overstates the case, of course, forgetting that
Sebald, in Austerlitz too, gestures toward the ultimate unrecoverability
of history: Austerlitz realizes that he is like a squirrel that has buried its
nuts in the fall and cannot find them in the winter (How indeed do
the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember,
and what is it we find in the end?) (Ae 204). But in Austerlitz, unlike
in the earlier texts, this gesture appears only as a gesture. If history is
so unrecoverable, then why has Austerlitz just been able to discover
all the major details of his past? Despite the nod toward historical indeterminacy, Austerlitz has in fact just proven the opposite: returning
home in the Ancient/Romantic paradigm is still possible.
One might counter this argument by pointing out that, at the end
of Austerlitz, the hero heads off toward the south of France, searching
for his father (whom the Nazis had interned in the Pyrenean foothills)
(Ae 290). Does this not exemplify, as one critic claims, a postmodern
open-ended exploration and a deferral of all notions of arrival?28
On the surface, Austerlitz exemplifies precisely this postmodern
nomad who is on the road again.29 Bearing in mind Austerlitzs total
recovery of his history in Prague, however, Austerlitzs open-endedness
comes into question. Can one not assume that Austerlitz will make
a similar series of revelations in southern France: family friends, illuminating old photographs, and the revivified dead? Austerlitzs
finale is postmodern and open-ended only in the sense that its
open-endednessas in LEmpire des signesreproduces the possibility
of closure. Consider, in this regard, the relation of Austerlitz to the
text that it sometimes cites, The Odyssey. One often forgets that the
conclusion of the The Odyssey, too, is relatively open-ended: Odysseus
is on the battlefield again (not resting beside Penelope in their bed),

Wirtz, Schwarze Zuckerwatte, 53334.

Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 80, 79.
29
Austerlitz and the narrator are in fact both fascinated with desert imagery, mentioning it at least six times, and Austerlitz explicitly compares the readers in the Bibliothque
Nationale to nomads: they resemble members of a wandering tribe encamped here
on their way through the Sahara or Sinai desert in the last glow of the setting sun (Ae
27880; see also 117, 228, 254, 287, 296). Karin Bauer considers nomadism to be
Austerlitzs essential characteristic in The Good European: W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz as
Nomadic Narrative, in W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and
Mark McCulloh (New York: Walter de Gruyter), forthcoming.
27
28

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barely held back from starting another war.30 Open-endedness, here,

is part of the larger structure of the nostos: the new journey allows for
the new possibility of coming home; fort/da all over again. Far from
undermining a nostalgic narration, Austerlitzs journey south only sets
the stage for another homecoming (Ae 292).31
How does Sebalds nostalgic (nostos + algos) turn relate to Austerlitzs
primary subject matter: an historical journey toward Nazi-occupied
Prague and, eventually, Theresienstadt? More than just Sebalds first
real novel and his first story of lost-and-found, Austerlitz is also his
first Holocaust novel.32 The melodramatic dangers of writing about
the Holocaust were well-known to Sebald, who, from the beginning
of his fiction writing career, hinted at the possibility of a Holocaust
novel but never wrote one until Austerlitz.33 The problem for Sebald
was not moralistic (whether a non-Jewish German writer can write
about the Holocaust) but rather stylistic: a question of how, not whether.
Sebald accused other non-Jewish German authors of writing in the
wrong way about the Holocaust. But does Sebald ultimately do it the
right way? The majority of critics claim that he does, agreeing with
Sebalds self-defense: that he avoids melodrama by, first, depicting
only a Holocaust-in-absence (on the model of Lanzmanns Shoah)
and, second, using only mediated narration (said Agta, said Vera,
said Austerlitz).34

30
Odysseus charges ahead on the battlefield, loosing a savage cry until blazingeyed Athena wheeled on Odysseus, crying, / Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, master
of exploits, / hold back now! (Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles [New York:
Viking, 1996] Book 24, lines 59096).
31
Stuart Taberner makes a similar argument, albeit with a completely different conclusion: Whereas I see this likely homecoming in southern France as Sebalds inadvertent narrative nostalgia, Taberner views it positively, as signalling a moral redemptive
potential. Stuart Taberener, German Nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish Life
in W. G. Sebalds Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz, The Germanic Review 79.3 (Summer
2004): 181202 (here, 195).
32
Critics have correctly pointed out that the Holocaust appears, however fleetingly,
in Sebalds earlier works: the gypsies from Vertigo; the image of Bergen-Belsen from The
Rings of Saturn; and, more substantially, the stories of Paul Bereyter and Max Aurach
from The Emigrants. But even in The Emigrants, which is often misread as a Holocaust
book, only two of the four stories concern victims of Nazi aggression (and one of
these victims is three-quarters Aryan). Cf. Mark Anderson, The Edge of Darkness:
On W.G. Sebald, October 106 (2003): 10321 (here, 105).
33
Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.
34
In his first, September 2001 interview with Maya Jaggi, Sebald described his attempt
not to focus on the horror of the Holocaust and praised Lanzmanns Shoah. Richard
Eder claimed shortly thereafter that Sebald depicted a Holocaust-in-absence; Mark
Anderson echoed this sentiment in 2003. Sebald defended his periscopic style as an

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Let us consider, first, the claim that Sebald depicts a Holocaust-inabsence. Whereas The Emigrants (the only other Sebald fiction where
the Holocaust plays an important role) maps centrifugal attempts to
move away from the historical sites of trauma, Austerlitz centripetally
takes us to the heart of the atrocities, down the narrative road to
Theresienstadt.35 Even if we do not learn exactly how Austerlitzs
mother was killed, we do see, in detail, the places where tens of
thousands were tortured and murdered: the execution room next to
the Prague law courts, where people were hung after ninety-second
trials on an iron rail running along the ceiling down which the lifeless bodies were pushed a little further as required; the more than
five hundred dead bodies stacked in layers on top of each other
in Theresienstadts central morgue next to the four naptha-fired
incinerators of the crematorium, kept going day and night in cycles
of forty minutes at a time; and the tens of thousands of prisoners
left outside by the SS deep into the night in a cold November rain,
drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until finally, driven
to it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town (Ae 175,
241, 242). Sebald comes perilously close here to the melodramatic
impulse toward dramatization and desire to express all36 that he
had scrupulously avoided in the earlier fictions and, what is more,
had criticized in other Holocaust representations such as Schindlers

ethical way of avoiding melodrama in a 2001 Der Spiegel interview, and Todd Presner
agreed: Sebalds periscopic style enacted an ethical refusal to presume to represent
what any victim experienced, felt, or observed. Sebald, interview with Maya Jaggi, Recovered Memories; Eder, Excavating a Life; Anderson, The Edge of Darkness, 105;
Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische; Todd Presner, What a Synoptic
and Artificial View Reveals: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebalds
Realism, Criticism 46 (Summer 2004): 34160 (here, 34950; see also 351).
35
Cf. Thomas Steinfeld, Die Wnschelrute in der Tasche eines Nibelungen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 20, 2001. Although Steinfeld overstates his case by claiming that, in Austerlitz, all roads lead to Theresienstadt, I agree with his discrimination
between The Emigrants and Austerlitz: The Emigrants four discrete and documentary
retellings send the narrative spinning in many different directions, not along Austerlitzs
singular, inevitable path.
36
Related to this melodramatic desire to express everything is acting out, in the
psychoanalytic sense. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995 [1976]), xv, 4,
viii. Cf. Julia Hell, who refers to Sebald as an example of melo-traumatic [] German
non-Jewish authorship (Hell, Eyes Wide Shut, 35, 35n107). Iris Radisch similarly refers to Austerlitz as black kitsch, but her reasons for doing so are primarily moralistic
(Sebald should not juxtapose musings about trivial objects with observations about
Theresienstadt), not based on a poetics of melodrama. Iris Radisch, Der Waschbr
der falschen Welt, Die Zeit, 5 April 2001, 5556.

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List.37 On top of this desire for total expressivity is also melodramas

underlying Manichaeism, which creates narrative excitement by
putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil beneath the
surface of things.38 Consider in this regard the nursemaids memory
of her dramatic final meeting with Austerlitzs mother, in front of
the Nazi deportation center: When we parted she embraced me
and said: Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for me
sometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much. If you look
into the dark water of the pools, perhaps one of these days you will
see my face (Ae 179).
Is melodrama such as this mitigated by the second formal point: that
Sebalds periscopic narration places the melodrama in the perspective of the mother, or the nursemaid, or Austerlitz (not of the narrator
or Sebald)? And does such a mediated narration denote, as Sebald
argues, an ethical modesty, an acknowledgement of the impossibility
of ever knowing the victimized other? This question of the morality
of narrative mediation is too complex to answer fully here, but it is
clear that we cannot uncritically grant ethical status to a literary device,
as Sebald does in his defense of Austerlitz.39 If Austerlitzs periscopy is
deferential, is the same then true for other famous mediated narratives, from James The Turn of the Screw, to Conrads Heart of Darkness, to
Bernhards Der Untergeher? As Chinua Achebe argues in his provocative
essay on Heart of Darkness, periscopy does not guarantee the author an
ethical cordon sanitaire ;40 it does not protect Sebald from the charge
that Austerlitz exhibits a melodramatic desire for total expressivity
related precisely to the ineffability of his subject matter.41
If Jacques Austerlitzs nostalgic journey produces melodrama,
37
Fictional re-creations of the Holocaust, such as Schindlers List, can only become an
obscenity (Sebald, first interview with Maya Jaggi, Recovered Memories).
38
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 4.
39
Mediated narration, according to Sebald, helps to constitute an aesthetic
authenticity that is connected to the ethical (Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das
Melodramatische).
40
Achebes article is notoriously insensitive to the formal complexities in Heart of
Darkness; he goes so far as to claim that Conrad could only have protected himself
against charges of racism by setting up an alternate (presumably enlightened, liberal)
frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.
But Achebes original structural question remains vital: does mediated narration grant
the author a cordon sanitaire ? Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads
Heart of Darkness, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text: Backgrounds
and Sources: Criticism, 3rd edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988),
25162 (here, 256).
41
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 11.

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what about the journey of the aging German narrator, which frames
Austerlitzs tale? After Austerlitz leaves the stage, the narrator finds his
way back to another site of catastrophe: a Belgian fortress used by the
Nazis as a detention camp and a center for deportation to Auschwitz.
He reads there a book by a Jewish author, Dan Jacobson, who traveled
after the war to the notorious Fort IX in Kaunus, Lithuania, where
most of his extended family was either killed or deported to the camps:
prisoners were locked in the dungeons there, and more than thirty
thousand people were killed and then buried under a field of oats
just outside the walls. Here again the text is both melodramatic and
nostalgic, meticulously expressing the unspeakable while returning
us to a site of origins: like Austerlitz before him, Jacobson suddenly
discovers the names, dates and place of origin of the victims. Reproducing the melodramatic (and thoroughly Sebaldian) need for both
document and vision and for extrapolation from one to other,42
the narrator lists these names documentary-style: Lob, Marcel, de
St. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44
(Ae 298). This last dateSebalds own birthday, and likely also that
of his narratorsignals a second homecoming, implying that the narrator and the author have also discovered in Jacobsons book their
own places of origin.43 More revealing than the moralizing questionwhether a non-Jewish German writer should engage in such
identificatory coquetteryis again the formal one: unlike the earlier
narratives, Austerlitz promises the structural possibility of a recuperated
self (Austerlitzs, Jacobsons, the narrators, Sebalds).44

Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 9.

Sebald in fact claims that black-and-white war pictures from around his 1944 birth
year repeatedly give him a Heimatgefhl, a sense of coming home. When he sees
these images, he has the completely clear feeling: This is where you come from. This
is your territory. He thus always returns to the wars atrocitiesthe bombings and
the Holocaustwith a sense of gloomy homecoming: as if he were the wars child, so
to speak [als stammte ich, sozusagen, von ihm ab]. Sebald further comes home in this
Austerlitz scene through the initials and name he shares with Max Stern (Maximilliam
was Sebalds real-life third name and Max his preferred nickname). Note how Sebald
handles a similar scene from The Emigrants in a more rigorously documentary, less
novelistic, manner: the narrator straightforwardly announces the coincidence of his
birth date with the death date of Meier Stern (who, as a photograph of his gravestone
shows, was born on May 18th, but in the 19th century!). Sebald, On the Natural History
of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 71 (Luftkrieg und
Literatur [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001], 7778); Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das
Melodramatische; Sebald, The Emigrants, 224 (Die Ausgewanderten, 335).
44
Andreas Huyssen correctly censures moralizing criticism which blankly claims
that Sebalds non-Jewish German narrators should not identify with Jewish protagonists
42
43

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But Sebald is not so easily caught. Austerlitzs final sentence gives the
story another turn of the screw, suggesting that the narrator has not
come to any closure at all: he keeps reading Jacobsons bookhe was
only on chapter fifteen!and heads back toward the town, probably
to get on yet another train, headed perhaps for Austerlitzs home in
the Alderney Street or perhaps in some unforeseen direction, toward
yet another set of characters and stories. This final motion, however,
does not differ significantly from Austerlitzs earlier journey toward
the south of France: the apparent nomadism of both characters
is contained within the preexisting nostalgic structure of lost-andfound.45 Austerlitz is indeed a postmodern crypto-Bildungsroman,46
but only in the sense that much postmodern disorientation secretly
promises reorientation. As Sebald knew from his earlier works, getting
lost contains within it the seeds of a journey home: in the case of
Austerlitz, toward the historical sites of Nazi crimes. These crimes both
attract and repel Sebald; they bring out in him, through their very
ineffability, the melodramatic desire to reveal everything. Austerlitz is
the result of this paradox, and it exhibits melodramatic tendencies
not present in Sebalds earlier works. Sebald dreads these tendencies, perhaps rightly so. But to dismiss Austerlitz as melodramatic (and
thus bad), would be to underestimate the power both of this book
and of melodrama itself. When considering Sebalds melodramatic
inclinations, it is important to remember that it is Sebald himself who
considers melodrama dread[ful].47 Recent theorists insist, conversely,
on melodramas own ethical dimension: its heightened capacity for
revealing a hidden yet operative domain of values.48 But such work

(Huyssen, Gray Zones of Remembrance, 972). But identifying and/or empathizing

with victims nonetheless remains a serious issue for moral philosophy. Brad Prager
takes up this ethical question in relation to The Emigrants and Austerlitz in The Good
German as Narrator: On W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing, New German Critique (forthcoming).
45
Although some of the narratives of lost-and-found overlap chronologically in the
internal story, the external frame story, from which the narrative voice speaks, retains
a chronologically clear beginning and ending.
46
The term comes from Amir Eshel, who does not see the nostalgic aspects of Austerlitzs
postmodernism, focusing instead on what he terms Austerlitzs typically postmodern
suspicion of all grand narratives (Eshel, Against the Power of Time, 80).
47
Sebald, interview, Ich frchte das Melodramatische.
48
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, viii. The forerunners in the contemporary
discussion about melodrama were Brooks (who first published articles on melodrama
in the early 1970s) and Thomas Elsaesser, whose landmark essay, Tales of Sound and
Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama, appeared in Monogramm in 1972. For

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JOHN ZILCOSKY

has focused primarily on realist literature and classical Hollywood films,

not yet on representations of the Holocaust. Is Holocaust melodrama
simply too dreadful to consider, as Sebald somewhat melodramatically
declares? Or might it, too, have an ethical dimension? Austerlitz opens
up this question.
University of Toronto

an introduction to the debates on melodramas aesthetics and ethics, see the preface
to the second, 1995 edition of Brooks The Melodramatic Imagination and also Elsaessers
forthcoming Melodrama and Trauma: Modes of Cultural Memory in the American Cinema
(New York: Routledge), which promises to offer impulses for the theorization of Holo
caust melodrama.