| Chapter : | Introduction |
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not only for telling our own traumatic stories to the world but also for telling the devastating stories of the dead.
In the novel Austerlitz, Austerlitz is a man with no memory of where he comes from or of how he has gotten his name. He knows only that his teacher told him one day that he is now called Jacques Austerlitz because it appears to be his real name.32 His forgotten past holds the key not only to his own identity but also to the suffering of Jews during World War II. Fear of forgetting compels Austerlitz to wander the dark streets of London, obsessed by the architectural details of train stations, remaining a hostage of melancholia and insomnia.
One day he unexpectedly steps into the now-abandoned ladies’ waiting room of Liverpool Street Station and suddenly remembers himself as a small child who had just arrived in London alone, and that the couple whom he now knows as his parents had just come to meet him. These bits of memory that Austerlitz experiences are, as Pontalis instructs us, the screen that hides the past from him while simultaneously revealing to him glimpses of his past—what Sebald terms “the scraps of memory”:
As so often, said Austerlitz, I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand.…A terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death.33
Austerlitz’s lacking the words to describe his feelings and not understanding the language spoken to him parallels his having neither the memory of his origins nor the memory of the near erasure of his people. His precarious chance encounter of the abandoned waiting room attests to the fragility of his existence and identity—not only of the personal kind but, more importantly, of the collective kind: that of an ethnic group