An English Pilgrim

Abstract

Abstract If, as Salman Rushdie has written (in an essay on Günter Grass), ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century’, then Chapter 4, ‘An English Pilgrim:?Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz’, explores how Sebald depicts spaces scored by both his own migration to England and that of the Jewish refugees he encounters there. Placing Sebald’s work into dialogue with itself (polemical texts like On the Natural History of Destruction) and with regional history texts like Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1969), this chapter examines how Sebald’s East Anglia becomes an exemplary setting for his saturnine account of the ‘natural history of destruction’ as well as his problematic depiction of ‘heritage’ spaces in The Rings of Saturn (1995). It goes on to show how Austerlitz (2001) frames its depictions of England within a network of other locations including Brussels, Prague, Paris, Marienbad (Czech Republic), and North Wales, cultivating a thickened sense of space and place by way of the profound and moving friendship that it recounts between Sebald’s narrator and the fictional Jacques Austerlitz.