Sebald's punctum awakening to holocaust trauma in austerlitz

Abstract

This article takes up W.G. Sebald's melancholic preoccupation with the missing origins of memory. Sebald's repetitive melancholic style facilitates his engagement with modern German history as trauma. In particular, it is Sebald's focus on Austerlitz's quest for his origin that situates Sebald in the place of the historical trauma of the extermination of the Jews during World War II. Sebald's intimate relation to Austerlitz enacts Caruth's idea that one's own trauma is always imbricated with the trauma of another. Austerlitz approaches the mOther, his lost Thing, his constitutive lack and thereby guides the Sebaldian narrator to the real history of Germany's persecution of the Jews. This encounter is the result of a transmission of Austerlitz's melancholic tale, established around an inherent impossibility, that the narrator then conveys to us, as it is engorged with the reality of Nazi atrocity, in a style suffused with the message of Barthes's ‘that has been!’ In a double Agambenesque move, Sebald thereby locates Nazi atrocity in a non-site between the living and the dead and, yet, simultaneously avoids mystifying it. Austerlitz enables a transfer of Holocaust atrocity, an intimate transfer in Kristevan terms insofar as the novel transmits – from its central character to the Sebaldian narrator and in turn to its reader – death, timelessness, and the Negativity necessary to renewal.