This is both a dream of survival and a dread of it, a haunting. To bring back the dead, those “struck down by fate untimely”—Jacques’ parents, say, or the imprisoned victims of Theresienstadt—would be a miraculous resurrection, a reversal of history; yet, since this is impossible, the dead can “return” only as mute witnesses, judging us for our failure to save them. Those resurrected dead at Terezín, standing in “silent assembly,” sound very much like a large court, standing in judgment against us. Perhaps, then, the guilt of survival arises not just from the solitude of success (the “success” of having been lucky, of having outlived the Nazis), or the irrational horror that one’s survival involved someone else’s death (an irrationality that Primo Levi explores in his work). There is also guilt at the idea that the dead are at our mercy, that we can choose to remember or forget them. This is finely caught by Theodor Adorno, in an essay on Mahler, written in 1936: “So the memory is the only help that is left to them [the dead]. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.”[1]
Saving the dead—that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz, and it is both Jacques Austerlitz’s quest, and W. G. Sebald’s too. This book is like the antiques shop seen by Jacques in Terezín; it is full of old things, many of them reproduced in the photographs in the text: buildings, an old rucksack, books and paper records, a desk, a staircase, a messy office, a porcelain statue, gravestones, the roots of trees, a stamp, the drawing of a fortification. The photographs of these old things are themselves old things—the kind of shabby, discarded picture postcards you might find at a weekend flea market, and which Sebald greatly enjoyed collecting. If the photograph is itself an old, dead thing, then what of the people caught—frozen—by the photograph? (Flickering slightly at the edges, as Evan the cobbler describes the dead.) Aren’t they also old, dead things? That is why Sebald forces together animate and inanimate objects in his books, and it is why the inanimate objects greatly overwhelm the animate ones in Austerlitz. Amidst the photographs of buildings and gravestones, it is a shock to come upon a photograph of Wittgenstein’s eyes, or a photograph of the rugby team at Jacques’ school. The human seems to have been reified—turned into a thing—by time, and Sebald knowingly reserves an entire page for his shocking photograph of skulls in mud (supposedly, skeletons found near Broad Street Station in 1984, during excavations). Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling. (In the north of England, a cemetery used to be called a “boneyard,” the phrase somehow conveying the sense of our bones as mere lumber or junk.)
Yet some are traveling faster than others, and with more doomed inevitability, and there is surely a distinction between, on the one hand, the photograph of Jacques’ rugby team, and on the other, the photograph of Jacques’ mother or the photograph (itself a still from a film) of the imprisoned inhabitants of Theresienstadt. As Roland Barthes rightly says in his book Camera Lucida, a book with which Austerlitz is in deep dialogue, photographs shock us because they so finally represent what has been. We look at most old photographs and we think: “that person is going to die, and is in fact now dead.” Barthes calls photographers “agents of death,” because they freeze the subject and the moment into finitude. Over photographs, he writes, we shudder as over a catastrophe that has already occurred: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”[2] This effect is surely heightened when we look at photographs of victims of the Nazis—whether being rounded up, or just walking along a street in a ghetto. In such cases, we think: “they know they are going to die, and they are certainly already dead, and there is nothing we can do about it.” As the stolid rugby players do not, these victims seem to be looking at us (even when they are not directly looking at the camera), and asking us to do something. This is what gives the photograph of young Jacques (reproduced on the cover of this book) a particular intensity. The boy in his party cape, with the wedge of unruly fair hair, looks out at the camera not imploringly but confidently, if a little skeptically. Yet understandably, Jacques Austerlitz, looking at this photograph of himself, from a time when he was still in Prague and still had parents and had not yet been put on the train to London, tells the narrator that he feels “the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.” Jacques Austerlitz was rescued by the Kindertransport, and thus did indeed avert the misfortune lying ahead of him. But he could not avert the misfortune lying ahead of his parents, and so, even in middle age, he is forever frozen in the attitude of that picture, always waiting to avert misfortune. He thus resembles the little porcelain horseman that he saw in the window of the antiques shop in Terezín, a small statue of a man rescuing a young girl, arrested in a “moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring.” Is Jacques Austerlitz the rescuer, or the one awaiting rescue? Both, surely.
There is, of course, a further dimension to Sebald’s use of photographs: they are fictional. In the very area of historical writing and historical memory most pledged to the sanctity of accuracy, of testimony and fatal fact, Sebald launches his audacious campaign: his use of photographs relies on, and plays off, the tradition of verity and reportage. On the one hand, these photographs sear us with the promise of their accuracy—as Barthes says, photographs are astonishing because they “attest that what I see has existed”: “In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.” We are lulled into staring at these photographs and saying to ourselves: “There is Jacques Austerlitz, dressed in his cape. And there is his mother!” We say this, in part because photographs make us want to say this, but also because Sebald mixes these photographs of people with his undeniably accurate and veridical photographs of buildings (for instance, the photograph of the Breendonk prison, in Belgium, where Jean Améry was tortured by the Nazis, and which the narrator visits, is a photograph of the actual building). On the other hand, we know, in our heart of hearts (and perhaps unwillingly?), that Jacques Austerlitz is a fictional character, and that therefore the photograph of the little boy cannot be a photograph of him.
1
“Marginalia on Mahler,” in Theodor W. Adorno,