Due: December 1, 2016.

Your Austerlitz assignment will be based on our semester-long discussions of W.G. Sebald's, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2002).  

During our readings of the witness literature and our viewing of the films, we will be attentive to different modes of representing the Holocaust and the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Sebald's novel will provide us with another remarkable model - narrative fiction- for our consideration.

Many have suggested that there are challenges to writing about (or making films about) the Holocaust. They speak of the difficulty, even the impossibility of representing the "unrepresentable," or the unimaginable nature of the loss and the suffering. Sebald's main character actually evokes this challenge of representing the unrepresentable as he speaks often of the difficulty of remembering and writing about the past. At the same time, the main character provides remarkably detailed accounts of people, places, events and buildings, thus enacting a paradoxical relation between the impossibility of representing and the painful event of that very representation. We will address these and other questions raised by the book periodically throughout the semester.

In your paper you are to discuss Austerlitz's difficult search for his identity. Due to the Holocaust, Austerlitz has lost his identity and is in the process of trying to recover his past and reconstruct himself over the course of the novel. At first his efforts are unsuccessful and painful. Eventually, quite by accident, he seems on the way to discovering the truth about his own past as well as that of his family. While successful in one sense, the process continues to be psychically painful. Is it possible for him to succeed in discovering the past, or his is character precisely a narrative portrayal of the painful impossibility of such a quest?  We have identified an "arc of discovery" in the novel in a number of classes, with a description of the moments of discovery and psychological collapse as well as the page numbers in the case of each passage.

Nota Bene: You are required to discuss the role played in the novel by Austerlitz's "rucksack" (depicted on page 40). When we first meet Austerlitz, we learn that he is carrying a rucksack (p. 7). When they meet again in London, twenty years later, the narrator recognizes Austerlitz by his rucksack (p. 39). Initially, rucksack provides Austerlitz with an unconscious connection to his past. Later in the course of his discoveries he sees himself wearing the rucksack in his hallucinations and memories. His nanny Vera tells him that when he left for England on the kindertransport he had food for the journey in a rucksack (p.173). So the rucksack is both part of his impossible relation to his lost past, in sense that he clings to the rucksack for most of his life without any conscious knowledge of its true meaning, and it becomes part of the arc of discovery of his identity.

Your paper must be a minimum of four pages and a maximum of six pages, typed and double-spaced with conventional margins. Use a standard font and size such as Times, 12 point.