Austerlitz

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no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice in the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” Trevor Dupuy attended West Point, graduating in the class of 1938. During World War II he commanded a U.S. Army artillery battalion, a Chinese artillery group, and an artillery detachment from the British 36th Infantry Division. He was always proud of the fact that he had more combat time in Burma than any other American, and received decorations for service or valour from the U.S., British, and Chinese governments. After the war Dupuy served in the United States Department of Defense Operations Division[1] from 1945 to 1947, and as military assistant to the Under Secretary of the Army from 1947 to 1948. He was a member of the original Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) staff in Paris under Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Matthew Ridgway from 1950 to 1952. Deprived of his past by the cataclysmic turns of history Jacques Austerlitz – a historian of architecture – tries desperately to regain what has gone forever… And he is morbidly obsessed with the illusory qualities of time…

if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? E.G.Sebald her eserinde beni şaşırtmaya devam ediyor. Asla kendini tekrarlamıyor. Bu kez 4 paragraflık bir kurgu ile birbirine son derece yumuşak geçiş yapan upuzun cümlelerle öykülerini bir anlatıcı (kendisi ?) ağzından, bir romana ismini veren kahramanımız Austerlitz’in ağzından anlatıyor. Tabii kendi tanımıyla hiçbir hayvanlar ansiklopedisinde anlatılmayan özel bir hayvan türü olan “insanı” odağına alarak. Yazarın çocukluk travması olan savaşın yıkımını bu kez Austerlitz’in gözünden okuyoruz. This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.***** And I have read few books that provide such an intense sense of place and the relationship of buildings to their history, including, for example, a hypnotic description of how Austerlitz discovers the streets where he was born, as well as of particular places, from Antwerp railway station to Tower Hamlets cemetery. Sebald saw a programme on BBC television about the Kindertransport entitled Whatever Happened to Susi? In 1939, 3-year-old twins Lotte and Susi Bechhöfer arrived in London on a Kindertransport evacuating Jewish children from Germany. Adopted by a childless Welsh minister and his wife, they were given a new identity to erase all traces of their previous existence. Only fifty years later, after Lotte's death from a brain tumour at the age of 35, did Susi Bechhöfer discover that their parents were Rosa Bechhöfer, a young Jewish woman who was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Otto Hald, a soldier in Hitler's army. The discovery of her real identity propels Susi on a painful and courageous quest in search of her past and the surviving members of her natural family. In the course of her search, she confronts dark secrets from her own past and urgently needs to reappraise her life. In 1999, Susi published a memoir, Rosa's Child: One Woman's Search for Her Past and a film has been made from it titled Susi's Story. Sebald told Joseph Cuomo in an interview that he tried to obtain a copy of the BBC programme, but the BBC would not release it. [3]

Book contents

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece. There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes? The scenes of the Battle of Austerlitz itself are some of the best written on the Battle, and this is nearly a 60 year old book. Manceron's description of the climactic Cavalry duel between the French and Russian Imperial Guard horse made for genuinely exciting reading. I was immediately hypnotised by the curious prose style, so flat and ostensibly inconsequential, which describes a kind of meditative interior monologue, not at all the world as it is seen and described by an ordinary person, but a view of the world seen through a glass darkly and refracted through the strange and sometimes uncomfortable imagination of a dyspeptic and exceptionally knowledgeable, middle-aged professor of German literature, whom one presumes has never been married and who decides to take a long and entirely purposeless walk round the shores of East Anglia meditating on aspects of its history and what he sees en route. Austerlitz si muove per l’Europa e nella sua memoria: racconta con parole cariche di malinconia e angoscia, parla al narratore, ma è un lungo monologo che sembra ininterrotto, non interrotto né dall’ascoltatore né dal tempo.

A medida que Austerlitz narra la búsqueda de sus orígenes perdidos en las ruinas de un continente arrasado por la guerra, la novela se mueve, de un modo delicado y sutil, entre lo trascendente y lo cotidiano, entre la realidad y la ficción. Los acontecimientos históricos relatados por Sebald están dotados de una dimensión irreal, casi de cuento de hadas. Episodios como el campo de trabajo de concentración de Terezín y la película de propaganda que los nazis filmaron allí para mostrar al mundo que centros de exterminio y guetos eran agradables lugares de retiro para trabajadores judíos y sus familias, son mucho más difíciles de creer que las historias imaginarias con las que comparten página. Al mismo tiempo, los personajes ficticios son tan reales que, aunque es poco probable que Austerlitz haya existido fuera de la mente del autor, el lector se niega a creerlo. A fusion of the mystical and the solid ... His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher aim' Evening Standard To load a bad meal in a small English town with so much morbid imagery takes a certain confidence. But so hypnotic were Sebald's sentences, and so suggestive the connections he kept making between his depressed narrator's minor wanderings and whole galaxies of grim forgotten history, that it was easy to go along with the book's relentless melancholy. At times, it was delicious; the text even came with attractively faded photographs of ruins and wintry beaches.

Summary

Austerlitz has a distinctive hallucinatory feel about it, its seeping, overflowing pain making it both subdued and unforgettably compelling. You feel this narrative – its undercurrent of the most inextinguishable emotions of humankind – more so than reading it. Translated from the French into English, with a very well done translation that can make or break a good book, this was an incredibly readable, if not entirely scholarly, look at the War of the Third Coalition. Although Claude Manceron is indeed quite French, he is not a Bonapartist, nor a Republican over much, but an honest, largely unbiased observer, which is what a historian should be. (Admittedly, I was expecting a bit of Bonapartism going into this one, silly American expectations and all).