Austerlitz by W G Sebald, Part 1

If I said that I had been very cast down by reading these gloomy ramblings, it would be true, but I do want to see that this book is worth reading and thinking about. Firstly, the tone is never at all jocular or witty, which is difficult for me, but it is always neutral, and if I find the style gloomy it is my personal response to the prose. The book is translated from the German and it may be that even in German the style is old-fashioned and "high". And the story could best be described as discursive, so for example, when we have Austerlitz's friend's uncle telling us about the life cycle of moths one sighs a bit and feels led up the garden path. However:

The narrator, and the Austerlitz of the title, travel to several European cities in the course of this narrative, and the story is an international one, about the history of Europe in the age of capitalism. The writer describes a number of buildings and engineering works that illustrate the idea that history is all around us (just as the Rings of Saturn are decayed and destroyed moons of Saturn.)

The narrator is interested in buildings and the first pages he describes his visit to the fort at Breendonk in Belgium. In WWII the Nazis used it as a prison camp and it is preserved - as a memorial - as it was when the Germans vacated it in 1944. It includes a torture chamber.

Having read the book and understanding a little about what it is about - it is about the mass-murder of the Jews by the Nazis but it is also about the history of Europe - I am going back through it again to try to understand what is meant by the buildings that are featured in the novel. We start with the beautiful railway station in Antwerp and its grandiose ambitions . This is where the narrator first meets Austerlitz, an architectural historian who studies in London.

Exterior of station

Interior. Really, it's so beautiful I don't care how sinister are the implications of its monumentalism.

Austerlitz then talks about his explorations of the labyrinth inside the Palais de Justice in Brussels, a building in which there are so many corridors and storeys, so many stairways and doorways, that  many rooms are mysteriously half furnished and unused.

Palais de Justice in Brussels
"contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere"

Inside the Palais de Justice

"the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident..."

Then the narrator meets Austerlitz again in the Great Eastern Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station. I don't have any personal experience of this station or this hotel, but perhaps I should! Here is the station:

 And here is the hotel:

Great Eastern Hotel

And here  is the Masonic Temple inside the hotel - is this significant, I wonder, in Austerlitz's thesis of monumental architecture?

Austerlitz describes this: "a hall with walls panelled in sand-coloured marble and red Moroccan onyx, a black and white chequered floor, and vaulted ceiling with a single golden star at the centre emitting its rays into the dark clouds all around it."

Austerlitz had been brought up in a very gloomy and silent home by Lake Bala in Wales.

Lake Bala. As Austerlitz's childhood was grey and silent I have chosen this grey evening photo.

His adoptive father was a fire and brimstone preacher whose own family home was a village called Llanwddyn, which was drowned when the valley was flooded to create an enormous reservoir needed to supply water to Liverpool. So the creation of the lake Vyrnwy , like the buildings described earlier, sacrificed small scale domestic lives to the greater good - or rather, of very large conurbations created by the forces of capitalism.

Have a look at these wonderful pictures of Victorian engineering.

Lake Vyrnwy

When he was told about his father's lost home, Austerlitz felt something approaching empathy with his adoptive father, because he knew nothing about his own early years: they too were buried, but buried in his mind. The father's childhood places were deeply submerged in water but sometimes he can see his village through the water - as we can sometimes see the past in what is existent.

Luckily Austerlitz makes friends with another boy at his boarding school with whom he can spend his holidays as his "mother" dies of a mysterious fading away, and his father ends his days in an asylum.

View of Arthog Estuary near the house where Austerlitz spent his holidays.

On this bridge Austerlitz, Adela and Gerald sat at twilight, looking out to sea.

After this Austerlitz discourses on the subject of time, and I shall write about that in the next post.

NOTE: by using these illustrations I have made Sebald's book more attractive. The illustrations he himself chose are black and white, and lend themselves to historical meditation about time and place more than admiration for the places he describes.