Austerlitz Part 3

Austerlitz, having had a nervous breakdown, is now in a state of mind where he can begin to remember his life before he came to Wales. Prior to this time he had gone to some lengths to keep away from contemporary history, to remain ignorant of it.

He becomes endearingly obsessed with a longing to see an image of his mother.

Austerlitz himself is almost the embodiment of post-Holocaust trauma.  So affected is he by the fate of his parents and family that he lives an isolated life, unable to turn from his acquired memories – for his parents fate has become his own.  His alienation from other people is now so complete that he is unable to form relationships with other people.  

The Common Reader blog

It seems that Sebald may be saying that we must not deliberately forget something that happened, not long ago, in Europe, and if we do, it will give us a collective nervous breakdown like that which  Austerlitz suffers in this novel. Is this something he aims particularly at the German nation, or at everyone? In Nuremberg, Austerlitz says: "I was troubled to realize I could not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the corners of the houses or on the gables, the window frames of the sills, not was there any other trace of past history."!! In the Germans' defence this town was bombed to rubble in the war and they could hardly put destroyed medieval timbers back again, and also, there is a massive memorial and museum just a bus ride away.

The account of the Theresienstadt Ghetto/camp we are given, in one long sentence, contains no adjectives as the facts speak for themselves. The evil of the intent and the thoroughness put into ensuring its enactment are bewildering.

At the end of the book Austerlitz is in Paris looking for evidence that his father was there. At one time he decides to do some research in the Biblioteque nationale de France.

This is it. All four of those towers form the Grande Biblioteque.

Inside the box framed by the four towers are fully-grown trees.

Austerlitz describes how difficult it is to get in to this building and how unfit for purpose it seems. Once again, the grand scheme defeats and humiliates the individual and doesn't respond to his/ her needs. We seem to have learned nothing.

"The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its near ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past."

And there commences an account of the theft of all the belongings of the Parisian Jews who were interned prior to their transport to the east - and on the site of the warehouses used to store all their stolen cutlery and clothes - stands this biblioteque.