We already encountered W.G. Sebald with his The Rings of Saturn, and today I’d like to bring you his last novel, Austerlitz, published in 2001. The story follows a man named Jacques Austerlitz while he slowly uncovers the truth about his origins and his traumatic past, and it’s a meditation on the Holocaust, memory, identity, and time.
On top of that, Jacques Austerlitz is an architectural historian, and Sebald is very precise about what he chooses to specialise in: not architecture generally, but what he calls the buildings of the capitalist era‘s “compulsive sense of order and tendency towards monumentalism”. This means law courts, penal institutions, railway stations, stock exchanges, opera houses, lunatic asylums, worker’s housing that looks more like prisons than shelters.
He can speak for hours, with total command, on the construction history of a fortress or a station concourse.
He cannot remember his own mother’s face.
These two facts sit next to each other in the novel for a very long time, because Austerlitz himself has arranged his entire intellectual life so that they never have to touch.
The novel eventually reveals why: Austerlitz was a Kindertransport child, sent from Prague to Wales as a small boy to escape deportation, raised under a different name by foster parents who told him nothing of his origins, and it’s only in adulthood, well into his career as a scholar of exactly the kind of buildings that processed and imprisoned people like his own parents, that he begins to find out who he actually is. He admits to a specific and telling suppression: railway stations fill him with something he calls the agony of leave-taking, a feeling he’s never been able to shake, but he adds immediately that “such thoughts were not part of architectural history proper.” That sentence is doing enormous work. He has built an entire professional discipline, rigorous, objective, genuinely knowledgeable, around structures that are quietly re-enacting his own unprocessed history every time he studies them, and the discipline itself — its insistence on staying proper and scholarly — is what lets him keep not noticing.
This is a considerably more unsettling relationship between architecture and memory than anything else this month has proposed, because it inverts the assumption running under most of this week’s other texts: that documentation, expertise, and careful record-keeping are on the side of memory, doing memory’s work. Austerlitz’s scholarship isn’t failing to remember: it’s succeeding spectacularly, at a very specific and narrow kind of remembering — dates, dimensions, construction techniques, the exact gilt hands of a station clock blackened by soot — precisely so that a much larger, much more dangerous kind of remembering never has to start. Expertise, in his case, functions as a fortress in the most literal sense the novel keeps returning to: a structure built to keep something out, expertly engineered, and eventually revealed to be no defence at all against what it was actually built to hold off. For the first time, we’re recognising the other side of our coin: that architecture can be trauma.
The line that belongs at the centre of this, though, isn’t about Austerlitz’s personal defences. It’s a broader claim the narrator makes about buildings generally: “the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.” A structure cannot remember. A fortress doesn’t know what happened inside it; a station platform holds no record of who stood on it and why. And yet it’s ingrained in its structure in way that cannot be escaped: a prison looks like a prison and its building usually reflects the trauma inside. Form and function.
Austerlitz becomes whole, at the end of the book, not by learning more architectural history, of which he already had a professional’s command, but by finally forcing himself to ask what all that precisely documented monumentalism had actually been used for, and who had been inside it, and what it had cost them to leave.
Think about that, next time you have architectural delusions of grandeur.
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