W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz: selected passages/sections for discussion.

Narrator’s visit to Austerlitz’s flat in London pp. 117 –

“When I came back from France I bought this house… and then I taught for almost thirty years until I took retirement in 1991, partly, said Austerlitz, because of the inexorable spread of ignorance, even to the universities, and partly because I hoped to set out on paper my investigations into the history of architecture and civilization…” (120)

Austerlitz’s visit to waiting room. pp. 132 – 138.

“In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes that I had ever entertained…  I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago….I felt something rending in me…something inexpressible because we have no words for it…” (136-37)

Austerlitz’s visit to an antiquarian bookshop near the British Museum. pp. 140-141.

“I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer of 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on a special transport……only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well…I merely saw myself waiting on a quay in a long crocodile of children lined up two by two, most of them carrying rucksacks … “ (141)

Austerlitz’s visit to state archives in Prague and Tereza Ambrosová. pp. 143-150.

Austerlitz’s meeting with Vera Ryšanová. pp. 151-184.

“…she first told me about my parents at greater length: their origins so far as she knew of them, the course of their lives, and the annihilation, within the space of only a few years, of their entire existence.” (166)

Austerlitz’s trip to Terezín. pp. 185-200.

“So I went round the exhibition by myself…sometimes skimming over the captions, sometimes reading them letter by letter, stared at the photographic reproductions, could not believe my eyes, and several times had to turn away… having for the first time acquired some idea of the history of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now, in this place, surrounded me on all sides.” (198)

“But I found it impossible to think of myself, my own history, or my present state of mind.” (231)

Austerlitz reading H.G. Adler’s book on the Theresienstadt ghetto. pp. 232- 251.

Austerlitz’s description of François Mitterand Bibliothèque Nationale. p. 278.