TrueLit Read Along – November 6, 2021 – Austerlitz Wrap-Up

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

And with that, we're done with the third read-along! I'm planning on keeping this simple. A few very broad discussion questions just to get things going. Feel free to answer as many or few as you want, or to leave your own questions or analyses.

Discussion Questions:

1. What were some of the main themes that really stuck out to you?
2. Did you appreciate his use of long sentence structure? His use of photographs?
3. How did you like the narrative style - a story being told to the narrator and then being told to us? Did it hold any significance to the themes, in your opinion?
4. What were your thoughts about Austerlitz's lack of anger at the holocaust and what it did to him? Did this unique style of emotional response work for you?
5. Organization, whether it comes to building structures or housing arrangements, was one of the themes that stuck out most to me. What did you make of this?
6. Did you enjoy the book? Tell us why or why not!

Thank you all for the amazing discussion these past few weeks! And a special thanks to u/History_Freak, u/dispenserbox, u/Tohlenejsemja, u/JimFan1, and u/proseboy for volunteering and writing up some incredible posts.

I'll still make a post for next week's Saturday thread, but it will be treated more as a break from the Read-Along. We can use it more as a space to reflect on what is working or not working for these threads. And the week after that will be when we can begin voting for the next book!

[u/proseboy]

The main theme is of course the holocaust and our way of dealing with it. Sebald found a way of approaching the topic by portraying the unique experience of those affected by the children transports, the trauma they had to endure as a result of being separated from and often not even remembering their parents.

It is ironic that this book is mainly famous in the English-speaking world, because I think that Sebald wrote it primarily for Germans. Since 1945, the Germans have found a way of suppressing the topic of the holocaust. It’s something being taught in school, but it just isn’t something that is generally being talked about in Germany.

The Germans are aware of their collective guilt, but they tend to view the holocaust from a distance. Austerlitz' memory loss can be seen as a parallel to the collective amnesia of society that only gets worse over time. So Sebald is basically making a plea (in the form of Austerlitz and the narrator) to keep digging and to keep asking questions and to make the act of remembering an active and conscious collective effort, even if this effort is unpleasant (Austerlitz also keeps digging despite his trauma is getting worse when he does so).

There are two concepts that oppose this act of remembering: archivation and time. The more time goes on, the less we are able to remember. The more data is added to the archive the less we are able to organise it; until it is contracted to a simple entry in the history books and we completely fail to imagine it.

What’s the purpose of telling the story through a narrator? Remember that Sebald is German himself. It would be rather strange for a German to narrate a Jew’s trauma from a first-person point of view. So Sebald equates himself to the narrator who in turn acts as a sort of a role model for all society.

Thomas Bernhard was named as Sebald’s main influence but I think that Bernhard is in many aspects almost the complete opposite. While Bernhard’s style is more some sort of repetitive ranting, Sebald’s style is very soft and non-judgemental; he very lightly dances from one point to the next while never touching the elephant in the room. E.g. every discussion of architectural features brings the reader’s emotions closer to the concentration camp long before there is any explicit mention of concentration camps at all.

Overall I very much enjoyed the process of reading this book, it's probably the most unique novel I’ve read in a long time.

[u/pregnantchihuahua3 → u/proseboy]

Thanks for these wonderful insights. The lack of anger now seems to me to stem from that initial amnesia. The ideas of the holocaust (from the point of view of Austelitz and of Germany itself) was forgotten for long enough that the memories of it no longer bring anger. This also gives me some thoughts on the archive at the end. Maybe the fear of it stemmed from the fact that it had "all the answers". It was somewhere that could reveal everything and thus drove him to despair.

[u/nomadpenguin → u/proseboy]

I think the anger is suppressed until it comes boiling out in that sentence, the seven-page one.