Monumentti, raunio, rakennustyömaa

menneisyyden esittämisen etiikka W.G. Sebaldin romaanissa Austerlitz

• Kaisa Kaakinen Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74658

Abstract

Ruins, monuments, construction sites - W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Ethics of Remembering

This article analyzes how the German writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) used architecture in his final novel Austerlitz (2001) to represent time, history and memories. Sebaldt novel tells a story about Jacques Austerlitz, who as a small child was sent from Prague to Britain in one of the so-called Kindertransports that saved children from Central Europe occupied by the National Socialists. He gradually remembers his Jewish parents, who have most likely perished in Nazi concentration camps. The article shows that by studying architectural images in the novel, it is possible to achieve a better understanding of the subtle way in which the novel treats the topic of traumatic memories. Architecture connects different moments in history and Austerlitz’s story as well as the multiple threads of the novel's theme. Buildings function as palimpsestic spaces that point toward different layers of individual and collective memories.

Secondly the author studies the ethical problem posed by this idea of interconnected moments and experiences. This problem is already brought to the forefront by the fact that Austerlitz story is told by an anonymous narrator, Austerlitz's interlocutor, who listens to and records Austerlitz's story. Through an analysis of architectural representations in the novel, the author demonstrates how Austerlitz highlights a sense of singularity and inaccessibility to memories of an individual, while also stressing the necessity - and therefore a certain kind of possibility- of passing these memories on to another person. The last part of this article is dedicated to studying the implications of Sebald's poetics for representing a historical trauma. Through commenting on some recent studies on Sebald, the author develops a reading which stresses the ambivalence inherent in Sebald's view regarding history and historiography. Writing history does appear to be impossible, because it is never completed as a fixed monument. The past is always something absent and constantly rewritten in the present. In the context of the historical trauma of the Holocaust, the novel reveals the limits in approaching somebody else's memories while also stressing the importance of staying aware of their past existence. Thus, Austerlitz shows the need to recognize the inevitable absence of the past as well as distance from the experiences of others. Equally important, however, is the refusal to stop narrating the past: Sebald's novel stresses the necessity to preserve the sites of the past, which carry silent traces of vanished life. The poetics of Austerlizt, reflects the paradox of the simultaneous impossibility and indispensability of writing history. The coexistence of traumatic narrowness and of the infinity of history is reflected in ambivalent buildings, which are also shown to be able to both cover and preserve memories.