Austerlitz

Austerlitz is a historical novel by W. G. Sebald first published in 2001. Sebald was a German writer and academic who wrote mainly about the loss of memory and the Holocaust. Austerlitz, Sebald’s final novel, centers on an architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz, who is tormented by his repressed past as a Jewish child evacuated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. The book was an international bestseller and won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

This guide refers to the eBook version of the 2011 Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition.

Plot Summary

The main character is Jacques Austerlitz, called Austerlitz throughout the novel, who tells his life story to an unnamed narrator in installments. Now a middle-aged architectural historian, Austerlitz fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 because it wasn’t safe from Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Austerlitz’s story begins: Upon his arrival in England as a child refugee, he is sent to live with a Welsh couple, Emyr and Gwendolyn Elias, a Methodist minister and his wife. They’re an older couple who aren’t in great health, and Austerlitz tries to cause them as little trouble as possible.

Together, they live in a Welsh market town, and Austerlitz’s new family sends him to a private school. They want him to have a comfortable upbringing, and they do what they can to make him happy. However, they never discuss his past, because they want him to settle into his new identity. Given the outbreak of World War II, they believe it’s safer if he forgets the past and assimilates into Welsh culture.

Austerlitz has a new name—Dafydd Elias­—and learns only as a teenager that this isn’t his birth name. His foster mother is sickly and his foster father is quiet and withdrawn, so he doesn’t feel he can ask them about his past or where he came from. He tries to stop thinking about his origins because he knows he’ll never learn the truth.

Later, Austerlitz earns a place at Oriel College, part of the University of Oxford, where he specializes in European architecture. He also meets a woman, Marie, with whom he falls in love. After the death of his foster parents and the dissolution of his relationship, he struggles with his mental health. He’s lost without his foster family, and he can’t help feeling like he should have asked them more questions about his birth family.

As part of his recovery, Austerlitz decides to travel. He knows he might find answers about his past in Prague, so he journeys there. Although he is of Czech descent, Prague doesn’t feel like home to him because it’s part of a life that he barely understands. His goal is to learn everything he can about his parents and what happened to them.

Austerlitz meets a woman, Vera, who was a close friend of his mother’s. He learns his mother was a talented actress and opera singer who often traveled around Europe, and Vera looked after Austerlitz when she was gone. As Austerlitz spends time with Vera, his earliest memories return to him and he remembers some of the phrases she uses and places she mentions.

Austerlitz discovers that his mother was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which was the largest concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. He goes looking for any information he can find on the camp. He goes to Germany, which is very traumatic for him, given what the Nazis did to his mother. While in Germany, he finds a propaganda film for Theresienstadt that’s designed to make the camp look humane and industrious. Worse, the Nazis made a Jewish actor film the video before killing him.

Austerlitz thinks he recognizes his mother in the film. Vera, however, reassures him that it’s not his mother. Instead, she identifies his mother in a picture from the Prague opera. This gives Austerlitz some sense of comfort, and it’s the closest he’s felt to his birth family. Now with some closure about his mother’s fate, he decides to learn more about his father.

For Sebald, the story isn’t about Austerlitz discovering his father’s identity; it’s about his grueling search for information. He must trawl through many records—pictures, recollections, propaganda, and censuses—to find answers. What’s important is how Europe chooses to remember World War II and how impossible it is to ever know the truth, no matter how much source material is available.

Austerlitz ends without ever disclosing the father’s identity, though Austerlitz journeys to France to continue his search. This reminds the reader that there is so much information about history that will always remain just beyond reach, no matter how hard the search for answers.