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Provenance and Memory: Re-reading Sebald’s Austerlitz
May. 13th, 2025 01:54 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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I always knew that I would choose a book by W.G. Sebald for my 15 Books Project. In 2022, the fifteenth anniversary of this blog, Vertigo, I decided to re-read and write about fifteen titles that had really stood out to me during the past fifteen years of reading. I didn’t realize at the time that it would take so long to fit fifteen books into my already packed reading time. Nevertheless, here we are, three years later and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) will only be the eleventh title in my re-reading project (although my tenth “book,” David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, was actually a quartet of volumes).
I chose Austerlitz for the simple reason that it was the Sebald title that I had read the fewest times, so it deserved another reading. And I was right. Not only did I find it richer and more complex this time, but, not surprisingly, I saw that some of my memories of it were off. I have written nearly sixty posts that are tangentially about Austerlitz, but I have never written any kind of personal literary examination of the book as a whole. And I’m not going to now. Austerlitz is probably one of the most closely examined novels of the twenty-first century. Instead, I am going to offer a very modest post about one of several themes in the book that intrigued me. It’s a theme about how the provenance of objects helps to determine the kind of memories they can generate.
Jacques Austerlitz, after learning that he had been part of the Kindertransport program in which thousands of mainly Jewish children were sent by their parents from Nazi-controlled countries to England for safekeeping in the years leading up to World War II, returned to Prague to see what he could learn of his mother’s fate during the War. There, he discovered that his childhood nanny, Vera, was still alive. She had lived next door to young Jacques and his mother when he was sent to London on the Kindertransport program. When he entered her flat, he immediately saw that “everything was just as it had been almost sixty years ago” when he was a four-year old boy. He noticed many familiar items around her flat, including “a masked Meissen china Pulcinello” and “the fifty-five small volumes of the Comédie Humaine bound in carmine red.” He marveled that “all this had stayed in the same place.” Why? Because “once she had lost me and my mother, who was almost a sister to her, she could not bear to alter anything.”
Austerlitz’s description of Vera’s flat is very similar to the definition of a house museum, which is usually a residence of historic significance that has been preserved with its original furnishings intact. Vera may not be a historic figure, but her flat had tremendous importance to Austerlitz, who was desperate to find traces of his mother again. And there was a reason that Sebald name-checked Balzac beyond being an admirer of the author of the Comédie Humaine. Austerlitz’s mother had tucked two photographs inside one of its volumes, apparently after borrowing the book from Vera. Vera would find those photographs years later and show them to Austerlitz when he visited her. One is an image of Austerlitz’s mother, who had been an actress, in costume on stage. The other is the now iconic portrait of a flamboyantly dressed Austerlitz as a young boy that appears on the front cover of every first edition of the book. Sebald is reminding us that the very fact that Vera kept “everything was just as it had been almost sixty years ago” means that the furniture and objects there formed a home and the photographs, when discovered, could there reveal images of Austerlitz’s childhood.
After spending several days in Prague, during which he visited Vera regularly and learned more about his mother, Austerlitz went off to visit the place where he was told that his mother had died. He made the short trip to the nearby town of Terezín, the site of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which is where Czechoslovakia’s Nazi-occupiers had sent his mother.
But after getting off the bus at Terezín, to get to the camp Austerlitz had to first walk through the town, where his attention was captured by a shuttered antique store, the Antikos Bazar. Its display windows were stuffed with a wild array of goods which “exerted such a power of attraction on me that it was a long time before I could tear myself away from staring at the hundreds of different objects. . . as if one of them or their relationship with each other must provide an unequivocal answer to the many questions I found it impossible to ask in my mind.” As his eyes roamed the sometimes ordinary, sometimes fantastical objects on the other side of the glass, he kept asking himself “What was the meaning of. . .” “What secret lay behind. . .” “What might be the significance of. . .” He pointed his camera into one window and decided that “these ornaments, utensils, and mementoes stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them.”
If the furniture and objects from Vera’s flat had instead been found in the Antikos Bazaar, they would have been completely severed from their history. They would have been merely objects of nostalgia at most. Would Austerlitz have even have recognized the photograph of his mother or the one of his four-year-old self if he found them laying in a dusty box of old photos in the Antikos Bazaar?
Some eighty pages later, while researching in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale for traces of his father’s life during the war, a librarian pointed out to Austerlitz the neighboring area “where there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehouse complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.” More than fifteen hundred removal men had moved the contents of thousands of apartments—”everything our civilization has produced, whether for embellishment of life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests of drawers, Meissen porcelain, Persian rugs and whole libraries, down to the last salt cellar and pepper mill.” As all these items accumulated, more than “five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers, and couturiers” sorted and itemized everything. “More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich.” Rather than ending up as items of curiosity and nostalgia in an antique store like the Antikos Bazaar, these items were plunder, intended for the benefit of those who thought they would be the victors.
It was no coincidence that Sebald began this episode in the Bibliothèque Nationale by having Austerlitz once again remember the “the fifty-five small volumes of the Comédie Humaine bound in carmine red” and that the list of objects housed in the Nazi warehouse in Paris included Meissen china. Sebald wants to make sure we remember that Vera had Meissen china in her flat from the pre-War days, and that she only found and could identify those two precious photographs because she preserved everything from the time when Austerlitz lived next door. As long as everything remained in her flat, everything still had a clear provenance. Whereas the contents of his father’s apartment, no doubt, went the way of the removal men, dispersed forever, unable to tell any tale.
