A Child Refugee in London: On W.G. Sebald's Novel Austerlitz 

Winfried Georg Sebald was born in 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, a rural German Alpine village soon to be part of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany. When he finished school, he went to study German literature in Freiburg im Breisgau. Keen to leave a country which had failed, as he saw it, to come to any kind of meaningful terms with its past, he went on to obtain a first degree in Switzerland and in 1966, took up a post as Lektor - tutor of German - at university in Manchester, where he encountered a bizarre, almost derelict post-war cityscape which features importantly in his writing. Sebald eventually settled at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he had a distinguished career in literature, literary translation and creative writing until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001. 

Sebald published academic works, poetry and occasional prose and essays, as well as four major literary prose works in German. His writing has found popular and academic acclaim and he is amply recognised today as a major voice in world literature. Sebald is praised for his sheer originality - no-one seems to have written quite like him before - and his compassion for his subjects, the neglected figures and victims of history. Key themes which readers have recognised in this work include melancholy, the weight of the Nazi past, response to the Holocaust, the corrosive pressures of Modernity, travel, history and literary heritage. Commentators are fascinated too by Sebald's innovative use of visual images, his play with disturbing coincidence, the curious subjects of his writings and his eye for the extraordinary in everyday life and in history. And unusually for a German author, Sebald has been especially well-received in English. This reception is partly due to the early, authoritative English translation of his work by expert translators in collaboration with the author. In addition, readers are tickled by his portrayal of British ways, as for example in The Emigrants (1992) and its descriptions of candlewick bedspreads and a Teasmade as they appear to a bemused narrator arriving for the first time from Germany in the 1960s. That is, Sebald seems to offer an outsider's view of the British Isles, while working on an expressly cosmopolitan canvas. Austerlitz for example weaves a complex pattern of connections between locations as far apart as South America, South Africa and Russia, as well as the scholarly institutions and bookshops of Bloomsbury, of London's Liverpool Street and East End, and Merionethshire in North Wales. This multiple perspective is one reason why Austerlitz occupies a striking position in our reading, for it looks simultaneously at and away from these islands and so links us to the rest of the world. 

The first of Sebald's major works was Vertigo, a book of four long narratives about Alpine journeys. Two of these fictional journeys are undertaken by well-known writers, namely the French novelist Stendhal and Franz Kafka; and the others by a first-person narrator who seems to resemble Sebald himself and suffers a series of disturbing experiences in Northern Italy. These events, which seem to be linked, albeit in unfathomable ways, include losing his passport under bizarre circumstances, being terrified by a spate of murders and seeing twin doubles of Kafka on a bus. The Emigrants followed, another volume of four subtly interconnected stories about continental European men who become emigrants or exiles through choice or force. In three of these haunting cases, the men are Jewish, and three commit suicide in old age. The Rings of Saturn (1995) describes a walk across East Anglia, and contains essay-like meditations on death, nature, history, destruction, silkworms and herrings. 

Finally, Austerlitz appeared in 2001. The novel is staged as a series of extensive conversations, taking place from the late 1960s to the 1990s, between an anonymous first-person narrator and the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz who tells him the story of his life. Austerlitz gradually reveals that he grew up as Dafydd Elias in Y Bala in North Wales, the only child of a Methodist minister and his wife, and in great emotional hardship. As a teenager, he discovers from a schoolmaster, to his bafflement, that he is a foster child and that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz. That name only begins to make sense to Austerlitz when, in late middle age, he realises that he may have come to Britain on a Kindertransport from Nazi-occupied Europe. This intuition proves to be right, for Austerlitz eventually discovers that he was sent from Prague to Britain in 1939, aged four-and-a-half, and that his foster parents sought to efface all traces of his former life. While by a melodramatic twist of fate he is reunited with his former nanny in Prague, he learns from her that his parents, both Jews, are lost, almost certainly murdered in the Holocaust. While such a summary might sound reasonably straightforward, the story is significantly complicated by its narrative techniques. For example, the entire novel is mediated through the mysterious narrator, and the whole text is shot through with self-consciously literary references and visual images whose relationship to the text remains mysterious. 

Austerlitz has been hailed as a great novel for our century and has taken a place in public life. It has been credited, for example, with bringing to public consciousness in significant ways the mass Nazi processing of goods stolen from Holocaust victims near the site of the present-day Bibliothèque nationale de France, or French National Library, in Paris. In London, we can read the novel, amongst other things, as a reminder of the arrival of some 10,000 children on the Kindertransports of 1938-40. Many of them, like Austerlitz, came to Liverpool Street Station. Similarly to Flor Kent's and Frank Meisler's sculptures, installed at the station in 2003 and 2006 respectively, Austerlitz can be understood as an attempt to commemorate the Kindertransports - albeit one which is in, its own way, complex and fraught.

Yet there cannot be an entirely 'right' or 'wrong' way to read Austerlitz. Instead, we will seek in our event to find multiple ways into (and out of?) the novel. One of these points of access will be that of the natural history museum, for our event takes place in the extraordinary setting of UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology. This choice of venue was neither arbitrary nor driven by whimsy, or simply an allusion to the fact that Austerlitz spends his working life as a Bloomsbury academic. Rather, it seems to me that the setting of this museum frames the novel in essential and thought-provoking ways. 

This Museum of Zoology was founded in 1828 and is the last of its kind in London, being the city's last university zoological collection. Amongst its 68,000 specimens, it has specimens from such extinct creatures as the dodo and quagga. So as a setting, it chimes in powerful ways with key motifs in Austerlitz: the romance of spaces which are redolent of the past, and losses of all kinds incurred through the passage of time. 

More specifically too, museums and natural history exhibitions are central in the novel. At the very start, the narrator is both troubled and moved by the sight of nocturnal animals in an exhibition in Belgium. By contrast, the most utopian location of Austerlitz's life in exile is Andromeda Lodge, a glorious, decaying country estate in North Wales, the family home of his only schoolfriend Gerald Fitzpatrick. Andromeda Lodge is distinctive in part for its natural history collections, both living and dead, curated by generations of Fitzpatricks. These collections offer Jacques and Gerald astonishing insight into the vivid plurality and magic of the natural world. Simultaneously, they reveal the double-edged character of the study of natural history, for while the boys observe live moths with wonder in the night, the house is full also of cases of moths on pins, killed to order. Austerlitz's home in the East End of London too is the grave of moths, described in remarkable, poetic passages. Thus, while the natural history collection represents a certain glamour for Austerlitz as a boy, as he ages, he sees in it the ambiguity of Modernity and its quest for knowledge. In traditional allegory, the moth stands for the human soul, and so Austerlitz, the trained historian, intuits, too what it says about our own vulnerability and mortality. 

At our event, we wish to think, also, amongst many other things, about the symbolic resonances of the squirrels observed by Austerlitz in Prague; and what a vast collection of exotic birds, like that in Andromeda Lodge, might be telling us about the history of Wales in particular and the writing of history in art in general. It is our hope that these thoughts will link to other ideas about the novel and to a film made by Zoltán and graduate students David Anderson and Henrietta Williams which we look forward to showing. We welcome your participation in these reflections.

• Mererid Puw Davies is a Senior Lecturer in German at the UCL School of European Languages Culture and Society (SELCS).
• Book your ticket for the event here