narrative identity and trauma: sebald’s memory landscape
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee At Martin]On: 02 October 2014, At: 08:39Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The European Legacy: Toward NewParadigmsPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’sMemory LandscapeSimona Mitroiua
a Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences, AlexandruIoan Cuza University, Lascar Catargi 54, 700 107 Iasi, RomaniaPublished online: 30 Sep 2014.
To cite this article: Simona Mitroiu (2014): Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s MemoryLandscape, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2014.965525
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.965525
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s MemoryLandscape
SIMONA MITROIU
ABSTRACT Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples,
ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s
or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective
identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collec-
tive traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable
people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-cen-
tury traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s char-
acters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal
narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal
forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and
sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.
INTRODUCTION
In this essay I explore some of the changes that occurred in the European collective
identity in the wake of World War II by analyzing their expression in two of W. G.
Sebald’s novels, Austerlitz and The Emigrants. Memory is a complex phenomenon, so it
may be useful to think of it as consisting of specific sites or reference points on a map
with which we create and recreate our narrative identity. But memory or remembrance
also consists of dynamic and performative acts. Narrative identity is thus based on a few
stable points in the past that are used as lieux de memoire and defined as places “where
memory crystallizes and secretes itself.”1 These places often refer to mental or physical
elements that a society identifies as being representative of its past and therefore as rep-
resentative of its identity. Viewed as fixed sites, these lieux de memoire brim with ideol-
ogy and national signification, and, as scholars have suggested, we conceive of them as
sites of memory that are constantly changing and gaining new meanings.2 While draw-
ing on this definition, I also extend it by adopting Pim den Boer’s definition of a new
kind of loci memoriae—the personal rather than collective sites of memory, which are
based on personal, family, and community experience, and are much less influenced by
Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Lascar Catargi 54, 700 107 Iasi,
Romania. Email: [email protected]
© 2014 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
The European Legacy, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.965525
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
ideology or politics.3 Maintaining the distinction between memory and history, Pierre
Nora suggests that lieux de memoire come into being because of the absence of milieu de
memoire or “real environments of memory.”4 I extend this insight by attempting to
show that personal lieux de memoire are not limited to the individual but are shared by a
community and because these memories can be transferred from the individual to a col-
lective identity, they in fact help to sustain it. These sites of memory correspond to den
Boer’s call for new loci memoriae that need not only recall the past and its traumas but,
more importantly, can teach us about the role of forgiveness and about the future.
The first point I need to clarify is why I have chosen the works of W. G. Sebald
as particularly representative for an analysis of the European collective identity. It
appears from the literature that official symbols and emblems have very little capacity
for promoting cultural cohesion, but that shared memories can unify and offer a stable
ground for a collective European identity. Sebald’s novels focus primarily on what is
known as the “old Europe” and its cultural and historical identity after World War II.5
His works can help us understand the process of identity construction partly because
of their lack of nostalgic views and antiquarian interests. Sebald attempts to offer a sort
of “critical historiography” in which important events are not the only things that
determine our lives, but rather where “every little bit is an evolutionary down-scaling
process upon which we come along in the end.”6 His main themes are presented in a
“multi-faceted literary form,”7 and focus on memory and forgetting, on their perme-
ability, and on the permeability of life and death.
As a starting point I therefore use Sebald’s topographical method of searching the
past “as a metafictional and intermedial model for overcoming amnesia on a cultural
level.”8 My assumption is that this archaeological search of memory, in which memory
is given spatial form, is closely related to identity and collective narrative. The two
novels I focus on—Austerlitz and The Emigrants—explore how different characters are
affected, directly or indirectly, by the “great absent,” that is, the Holocaust, which is
almost never “mentioned directly” and only barely suggested,9 and by the reconfigura-
tion of the European geographical and cultural map after World War II. The relation-
ship between narrative identity and trauma forms the core of these novels and is
thematized in various forms. On the one hand, it entails the search for the truth about
the past in order to bring to light repressed memories and a distorted or dissimulated
identity. On the other hand, it entails assuming responsibility and guilt for a shameful
past, even at the transgenerational level.10 The past, as Sebald points out, is what we
carry with us, and if we want to know our future narrative we need to find “the force
lines of the past energies.”11 Sebald also underlines the fact that the past can be ambiv-
alent, a refuge of sorts; this is because even if the pain is over, or just no longer as
acute, its weight can be overwhelming.
A TRAUMATIC PAST AND A ‘FROZEN IDENTITY’
What is trauma? Can we speak of a traumatic past at the individual as well as at the
collective level?12 Trauma is commonly defined as the impact of a shocking experience
on a person, one that affects his or her physical and mental life.13 Sebald’s novels are
2 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
centered not on trauma as the outcome of a physical wound but on traumatic experi-
ences that are the outcome of mental processes that follow major historical and per-
sonal events. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma is caused by “an encounter that is
not directly perceived as a threat to the life of the organism but that occurs, rather, as
a break in the mind’s experience.”14 What causes this breach in the mind, insists
Caruth, is not the injury itself but the lack of preparedness for a stimulus that surprises
us; the mind recognizes this stimulus too late as being a possible danger. This break in
time in the mind’s experience results in what I will elaborate on as a “frozen identity.”
Austerlitz is written in an original literary style that combines a form of memory
writing, travelogue, history, biography, and fiction. The story centers on Jacques
Austerlitz who is in search of his identity. Austerlitz, who is a Jew, is a lecturer at an
institute of art history in London. He was sent to England as a child—one of the
Kindertransport—in 1939. Subsequently, he lost all contact with his family and was
raised in Wales by strangers who were unable to provide an emotionally safe environ-
ment for him. Austerlitz, like other of Sebald’s novels, begins with a description of one
of the trips made by the narrator from England to Belgium. On one such trip, the nar-
rator meets Austerlitz in the Salle des pas perdus at the Antwerp train station. Their
meeting in a train station is full of meaning, suggesting not only Austerlitz’s deep iden-
tity trauma but also his future search for a place he can call “home,” the place he had
lost as a child once he was sent to England.15 Another issue that surfaces in the novel,
if only by allusion, is the survivor’s sense of guilt at the transgenerational level, since
for a great many war victims the train and the train journey represented their last jour-
ney. The journey itself thus became an identity reference at both the personal and the
collective level, as, for example, in the formation of the collective Jewish identity. The
preoccupation with trains and stations also characterizes Paul Bereyter, in The
Emigrants, whose lifelong obsession with trains becomes the instrument of his death:
“Railways had always meant a great deal to him—perhaps he felt they were headed
for death.”16
Austerlitz’s first recollected memories are associated with his bewilderment at
being called by a new name and having a new social identity. His clothes were
replaced with English clothes, and his entire life was turned upside down in an entirely
new social and cultural environment. In fact, his full name, Jacques Austerlitz, is
revealed to him only when he is already an adolescent, by his high-school master and
solely for administrative reasons. For Jacques, his surname is first of all related to the
historical battle of Austerlitz in 1805, and this association becomes all the more real
when the history teacher teaches the class about the famous battle:
The more often Hilary mentioned the word Austerlitz in front of the class, the more
it really did become my own name, and the more clearly I thought I saw that what
had at first seemed like an ignominious flaw was changing into a bright light always
hovering before me, as promising as the sun of Austerlitz itself when it rose above
the December mists.17
But Austerlitz, of course, is also the name of a famous train station in Paris. Jacques’s
attraction to train stations is determined by the symbolical representation of a place
that serves as a synonym for departure or even deportation; it also symbolizes the futil-
ity of being torn apart from his family and leaving behind his past life. The train station
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 3
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
thus represents a “gate” to the past, a point of connection between past and present. It
is no wonder that Austerlitz’s memories of the past surface at the waiting room of
Liverpool Street Station, as it was through this very station that he passed when he first
arrived in England. At the time, he felt as though the waiting room contained his
entire past life, his “suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes.”
Jacques Austerlitz uses a constant form of self-censorship to deal with the trauma
of losing his family and all connections with his former life. His memories are
“locked” at the unconscious level to prevent him from suffering. This suppression
requires a tremendous mental effort that causes a paralyzing disequilibrium of his entire
personality:
It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threaten-
ing to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me
and would gradually paralyze my entire system. I already felt in my head the dread-
ful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had
neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life
had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the
world. (123)
The memories of his childhood journey to England are physically transposed to his
journey in the opposite direction, to Prague. For Austerlitz, reclaiming physical space
means trying to reclaim memories of his family and details of his past, before the
moment of separation. It thus means recovering personal sites of memory and bringing
to life repressed memories. In this way, the circle of memory is complete. Vera, a good
friend of the Austerlitz family, has kept all the family’s belongings exactly as they were,
in the same place, thus preserving the identity of his missing family. She lives sur-
rounded by memories, and her home becomes a personal site of memory. It is to this
state of stagnation, of keeping objects and memories intact in time and space, that I
apply the terms “frozen identity” and “fragmented identity.” The concept of “frozen
identity” is associated with the responsibility of remembering and the guilt feelings of
surviving the death of loved ones. The feeling of guilt is so strong that it interrupts,
disrupts, and even suspends one’s narrative identity. In his introduction to Austerlitz,
James Wood argues that the survivor’s guilt arises not only from the chance to escape
death, or from the irrational idea that one’s survival means another’s death, but also
from the idea that the dead rely on the living to remember them. However, I believe
that if this is the case, our guilt feelings condemn the dead to a double oblivion: we
forget their presence as well as their absence, which translates into their death. Max
Ferber (Aurach), the artist in The Emigrants, for example, reveals his “frozen identity”
when he confesses why he never returned to Germany. He describes Germany as “a
country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place, inhabited by
people whose faces are both lovely and dreadful. All of them are dressed in the style of
Thirties” (181). These lines are a fitting description of Ferber’s response to his trau-
matic past. His identity is crippled, turned into stone, without the possibility of
change; it is static and frozen in time. Ferber’s identity trauma is so powerful that all
future developments are erased, leaving only his impossibility to surpass his identity
crisis, a state that is translated into physical space:
4 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that
everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further
should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously
fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the
world. ... There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he
never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed. (161)
Austerlitz, in contrast, is trying to recreate his parents’ “fragmented identity.” To
recover the past, especially traumatic moments in the past, and regain control over
repressed memories implies bringing together the various fragments of past lives and
transferring them from the register of “frozen identity” to that of “fragmented iden-
tity.” Through the process of transference, one can restore what was lost and thus
regain important identity references. The journey from the present to the past also
brings back the dead, saving them from oblivion, and this process is partly accom-
plished by saving the material fragments that remain from those who have perished—
old photographs, personal items, books—all of which are essential for reconstructing
their narrative stories and “[rescuing] something out of that stream of history that
keeps rushing past.”18 Items that have been recovered from the past become symbolic
of one’s recollected memory, a sort of identity reference, especially when the bonds
with the collective memory have been severed and its social frames, such as the family,
have been erased:
I came to realize how isolated I was and always have been, among the Welsh as
much as among the English and French. It never occurred to me to wonder about
my true origins, said Austerlitz, nor did I ever feel that I belonged to a certain social
class, professional group, or religious confession. (125)
Austerlitz, for example, is very attached to his old rucksack, which he carries with him
everywhere; this bag is an item from his past and thus defines his identity. However,
we should note that this particular object is from a period in Austerlitz’s past that is
not problematic. When the original identity references are missing, they are replaced
by new ones, even if these are not representative, because they are necessary for con-
structing an identity, even if it is only a pseudo identity. Austerlitz’s old rucksack thus
indicates the identity trauma of those who are incapable of clearly defining themselves
and their identity. The object can be a very common object, not at all unique in itself,
and it may recur in various contexts with different people and different identities. Thus
for the narrator, Austerlitz’s rucksack evokes the image of Wittgenstein. This potential
variability of response suggests that the absence of identity references, when it is deter-
mined by a repressed past, discloses the “floating” nature or the “fluidity” of identity.19
This implies an identity without clear borders, fluctuating and permeable, but also
fragmented and fractured. The permeable and fluid nature of this kind of identity is
not a matter of an ongoing process nor merely the features of a final product, but the
result of the lack of identity references for those who were uprooted from a familiar
environment and have lost contact with the main producers of a collective memory.
Thus the fluidity of identity is correlated with one’s incapacity to define oneself, or so
Austerlitz would say: “I’m Austerlitz, but I could be Wittgenstein, and many others.”
What is even more significant is that the narrator sees Wittgenstein as Austerlitz:
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 5
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
I recollect that before approaching him I had been thinking at some length about
his personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the horror-stricken expression
on both their faces. I believe it was mainly the rucksack, which Austerlitz told me
later he had bought for ten shillings... describing it as the only truly reliable thing in
his life... Wittgenstein always carried a rucksack too... and now, whenever I see a
photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Auster-
litz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him
the disconsolate philosopher, a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical
thinking as into his confused emotions, so striking is the likeness between the two
of them. (40−41)
Austerlitz and Wittgenstein share a capacity for logical thinking—”the makeshift orga-
nization of their lives”—and an inclination to travel with very few possessions. Many
critics have observed that even if Austerlitz succeeds in telling his story, the final
message of the novel is “the sense of the essential inexpressibility of the trauma of his-
tory.”20 Interestingly, this echoes the final sentence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Wittgenstein
is a source of inspiration for some other of Sebald characters: Max Ferber, in The
Emigrants, for example, comments that in 1944 he lodged in Manchester in the same
house Wittgenstein had lived in as a young engineering student in 1908, which gives
him a sense of brotherhood with the philosopher, though he adds, “Doubtless any ret-
rospective connection with Wittgenstein was purely illusory.” And yet,
he sometimes felt as if he were tightening his ties to those who had gone before;
and for that reason, whenever he pictured the young Wittgenstein... he was aware
of a sense of brotherhood that reached far back beyond his own lifetime or even the
years immediately before it. (166−67)
Similarly, Paul Bereyter, in The Emigrants, also shares something in common with
Wittgenstein: both had been primary school teachers. There is yet a further similarity
between Bereyter and Sebald himself, who, in 1968, had taught for one year at an ele-
mentary school in St. Gallen, Switzerland. We know, in addition, that Bereyter used
to read a lot about writers, “almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives
or had been close to doing so.” Wittgenstein, of course, was one of those writers.
Many critics have also noted Sebald’s interest in the theory of language, particularly in
Wittgenstein’s work on “the principle of the inadequacy of language.”21 Martin
Klebes, for example, links Sebald’s “episodic, de-centralizing narrative operations to
Wittgenstein’s reflections on family resemblance that would group objects and persons
into families without specifying necessary conditions of group membership,”22 and
defines their shared characteristic as “mnemonic skepticism.”
So Austerlitz, lacking a clear identity and lost in “the midst of a ghostly multipli-
cation,”23 carries with him the burden of a multi-referential name, a synonym for both
a historical event and a train station (Gare d’Austerlitz). This mixture of semantic fields
is present throughout the novel and even seems to proliferate: Austerlitz, hoping to
find more information about his father, goes to La Bibliotheque Nationale, the house
of “national memory,” which was built on the ruins of a wartime warehouse known
as the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot, where the Germans stored all the items they
had seized from Jewish homes.
6 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
The meetings between Austerlitz and the narrator are akin to those between a
patient and a psychoanalyst, revealing, step-by-step, the depth of Austerlitz’s identity
trauma. All direct witnesses are missing, except for Vera, which explains why the nar-
rator “acts as a secondary witness who is asked to testify not to the events themselves
but to a mediated reconstruction of traumatic memories.”24 In her study, Ana-Isabel
Aliaga-Buchenau discusses the symptomatology of his post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), though I believe she misinterprets its cause when she attributes it to his
“experience of persecution and flight during the Third Reich.”25 I do not think he
suffers from a persecution trauma as he was just a little boy at the time of his flight,
and moreover because there are no signs of an experience of persecution in the novel.
Rather, it is his journey with the Kindertransport that appears to be at the root of his
traumatic past, along with the loss of his familiar childhood environment, and finding
himself in a completely new social and cultural context that is unconnected with his
former experiences and identity. This is why I see his trauma as the shock caused by
the loss of his familiar milieu, which results in his “frozen identity.” Austerlitz is a
complex story of trauma, and trauma appears to be the essential experience in Sebald’s
works. For here we witness the traumas of those who did not directly experience the
Holocaust but who were touched indirectly by its power of dehumanization. As Katja
Garloff observes: “By invoking the experience of trauma but taking it out of the con-
text of individual pathology, Sebald transforms the symptoms of illness and methods of
treatment into a poetics of history.”26
Austerlitz as well as the main characters in The Emigrants try to repress disturbing
memories, because these repressed memories, as John Wylie writes, are always “haunt-
ing” them.27 Or, as we read in the Emigrants, “certain things, as I am increasingly
becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.
… And so they are ever returning to us, the dead” (23). Lucy Landau, who remained
by Bereyter’s side during the last period of his life, shows the narrator an album. The
album contains photographs of Bereyter at different times in his life, again invoking
the presence of the dead, as confessed by the narrator: “looking at the pictures in it, it
truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were
on the point of joining them” (46). Sebald’s novels thus seem to focus on the relation
between repressed memories, the cost of this repression, and that later moment in life
when a person’s protective strategies start to fail, gradually revealing what had been
repressed from memory.
Similarly, throughout his adult life, Austerlitz practiced a form of aggressive
repression. For him, the world ended in the late nineteenth century, and only
physical illness made him recognize that he had deliberately repressed some memo-
ries, replacing them with an “accumulation of knowledge,” which he used as “a
substitute or compensatory memory” (140). Unfortunately, his psychological
wounds prove to be too deep, making him feel like he had “no place in reality.”
Thus, even though most of Sebald’s characters did not directly experience the Nazi
terror, its indirect impact clearly affected their narrative stories. Sebald’s narrative
dramatizes the capacity of evil to propagate and to affect lives at the transgenera-
tional level, not only in terms of one’s personal identity but in terms of one’s
collective identity as well.
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 7
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE MEMORY LANDSCAPE
Every landscape, which denotes both a material place and a pictorial representation,28
carries historical and cultural meanings and values, for, as Wylie explains, “places are
not merely reminiscent of the past” but exist in a continuous space where memories
are active and continuously “taking place.”29 According to Sebald, the “primal land-
scape” is the place of one’s birth and childhood; this landscape, he says, determines “a
good deal” of a person’s “make-up” and the way in which he/she reacts.30 Identity is
therefore constructed by a process in which the memories of one’s internal geography
are translated into spatial forms. The result of this process is a change in one’s focus
from internal references to external traces and the use of memory as an archive. This,
as noted earlier, is what happens with Austerlitz’s lack of past references which he can
only resolve by finding the archival collective memory, the only memory he can
retrieve.
As noted by critics, Sebald’s peripatetic style of narrating the past tracks his own
journeys,31 revealing its secrets as the narrator moves from one place to another:
“walking is writing; walking is reading.”32 The process of remembering is like an
archaeological excavation, as it was for Walter Benjamin, where one sifts through dif-
ferent layers of time and space, sifting through the debris of civilization. Sebald con-
ceives the act of remembering in spatial terms, creating sites of memory,33 and
combines the two types of sites, the personal and the collective. Thus the official,
national sites of memory, charged ideologically and susceptible of political manipula-
tion, are reinforced and also counterbalanced with personal sites of memory, such as
the childhood home and streets and pavements of Sebald’s characters. Ann Rigney
suggests that collective sites of memory encapsulate “multifarious experience in a lim-
ited repertoire of figures,” thus enabling their inter- and trans-generational transfer.34
Sebald, I suggest, offers an alternative in the form of personal, highly meaningful, sites
of memory. This alternative personal route to the past is a new modality for regaining
control over the repressed past, not through the mediation of political agents but
through direct contact with the stories of the dead. It is reminiscent of the Jewish cus-
tom of placing a stone on a person’s gravestone as a sign of respect, remembrance, and
commemoration.35
Every journey reveals a fragment of the past, and almost all of Sebald’s novels
include the voyages and journeys of his characters that reveal the “ruins of history.”36
Sebald’s stories are written in a particular rhythm, as if echoing his characters’ move-
ments from one place to the other, from the present to the past, as “[e]very journey is
a retracing, the foreign is the shadowed, the self at the edges of its boundaries.”37 His
stories are a mixture of life histories, autobiographical literature, photographs and other
images, and travel writing. So Sebald’s characters are constantly in motion, and the past
is not simply the past but also the present; the line separating the two is as thin as that
between life and death. His characters are haunted by strange ideas; they are inspired
by their author’s life and observations on the curious relationships of facts and events.
Sebald, for example, was born in May 1944, the same month in which Kafka’s sister
was deported to Auschwitz. Although Sebald was raised in a small town in Bavaria—
Wertach im Allgau—far from the horrors of World War II, his novels and interviews
show that he could not escape the feelings of shame, responsibility, horror, and even
8 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
guilt for the Nazi past. He always felt that it was important to know what really hap-
pened during that time, and he believed that if your family was even tacitly involved
with the Nazi horror, you could not deny your own involvement, whatever its
nature.
For Sebald’s characters, the journey they choose to take in search of the past as a
way to deal with the past trauma implies recreating the past. In Austerlitz’s case, how-
ever, there was no closure; he was always travelling in search of his past without ever
being able to fill the identity gap, not even after he discovered the truth about his sup-
pressed origins. In the first traumatic journey that was forced on him as a child, he was
torn apart from his family and collective identity, which experience transformed him,
as Wylie writes, into an “eternal traveler” who was “never at home,” facing “the
opening of an open-ended trauma of lost origins and dislocating histories.”38 Similarly,
the four stories in The Emigrants also deal with the experience of dislocation, of not
finding the right place. They show that dislocation surpasses geography as it enforces a
cultural, economic, and political dislocation as well. The four characters—Dr. Henry
Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber—are therefore representa-
tive figures of Europe as a whole, which during the Second World War suffered one
of the most devastating periods of population displacement in its history.
THE MOSAIC OF MEMORY
In his writing Sebald uses the technique of montage, combining text and photographs
in what has been called a “bricolage of cultural memory,”39 which reveals traces and
fragments of memory. Fragments present the past very differently from historical
reconstructions, and may produce a sort of rupture, requiring the reader to pause and
reconfigure the story. They can, however, be more valuable than the whole, because
they provoke many questions and more effectively direct the process of remembering.
As Salman Rushdie has observed, the debris of memory may be particularly meaning-
ful because it is made up of fragments; they almost become symbols, and their discon-
tinuity allows for greater creativity. The fragmentary perception of things, he writes, is
specific to human beings:
We are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured
perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice
we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance
remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.40
In The Emigrants, for example, it is the narrator who creates the montage by recount-
ing the stories of the four characters. As a narrative technique, montage (which is also
used in non-literary genres) indicates the permeability of borders, the lack of certitudes
and clear rules, and the excessive presence of fragmentation. The narrator stands for
“memory”; he becomes the symbol of the dynamics of remembrance and the recon-
struction process, which is not always faithful to the past. Thus the image of the past
has to be recomposed through a process of reinterpretation and the use of personal
references.
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 9
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
Since memories can be invented, they may be unreliable, as happens with docu-
ments and photographs. This is why narrative identity is an ongoing process of crea-
tion, as we see in Sebald’s use of montage where a series of images is assembled from
historical and biographical facts and fragments of the past, such as train schedules, pho-
tographs, maps, and newspapers. While this narrative technique attempts to give the
story a solid foundation, it also casts subtle doubts about the real identity of the charac-
ters. Carol Bere claims that about ninety percent of the photographs in The Emigrants
are authentic, and were obtained from photo collections of real people, as was also
attested by Sebald himself. According to Bere, the photographs are not “add-ons, but
serve as an integral part of the narratives, ‘talking’ across the frames, documenting his-
tory, commenting on and perhaps questioning the reliability of individual memories,
contributing to what Sebald refers to as a level of “mutedness.”41 The narrator seems
to be telling us that in this created world, the Self and the Other cease to be separated
by distinct borders, and their identity becomes fluid. Stephen Clingman also sees the
self as a compound reality that exists in both space and time. To him the differences
between the self and others become the “foundation of identity as a kind of meaning—
but meaning considered always as navigation, exploration, transition.”42
In his novels, Sebald turns to the past, a past that is condemnable but in which
he, as well as the characters created by him, hopes to find “meaning and relevance.”
This mental journey through the past, which represents both the characters’ and the
narrator’s physical journeys, symbolizes a pilgrimage to different sites of memory. The
fragmentary narration, even if discontinuous, also functions as a means of bringing
back the past as repressed memories. As Mark McCulloh points out, whereas Proust,
in his search for the past, was able to present it in its totality, Sebald superimposes faces
and moments from the past onto the present to highlight the vividness as well as the
incompleteness and the variability of memory. Thus even some of the most vivid
memories show up their flaws of composition—such as anachronistic details of some-
one wearing the wrong hat or uniform in recalling a particular battle.43
Similarly, the photographs, in Austerlitz, help to create a coherent image of the
past, as Austerlitz crisscrosses Europe in search of his narrative identity. These photo-
graphs, which function as “frozen fragments of time and space,”44 are parts of the laby-
rinth of memory, with each photograph corresponding to a fragment of the past that is
at the same time an access to a narrative identity. Yet do these photographs indicate a
presence or merely an absence? Are they a reference to an entire image of the past, or
do they present fragmentary visions of the past? Stephanie Harris argues that a photo-
graph not only invites us to mourn the loss of the past but also asserts our own death,
confronting the viewer with the specificity of the loss, revealing not only what can be
shown but also what can no longer be seen.45 One such example, which appears in
The Emigrants (“Max Ferber” story), is the aerial photograph of Manchester city cen-
tre, in which the absence of the old Jewish center immediately becomes a presence,
exemplifying the permeability of borders. Another example is the photograph of the
synagogue in Max Ferber’s town, Kissingen, which was destroyed in the Kristallnacht
and replaced by an office building, indicating both the presence and the absence of the
synagogue, an element from the past that was forgotten, physically erased, and in dan-
ger of being lost forever. Similarly, in his search for the past, Austerlitz obtains a still
image of his mother from a film that was made in Theresienstadt (an image captured
10 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
on film from 10:53 to 10:57 minutes). What is the meaning of this image? Can it indi-
cate the presence of his mother’s traumatic existence, or does it represent her absence
from Austerlitz’s life? Further, what does it communicate? Is it a testimony of the
whole story, or is it another example of a “lagoon of oblivion”? According to Harris,
the photograph has a special relation to death and memory and “exceeds the symbolic
mode of the linguistic text in which the images are embedded.”46
It is clear that the dead, from Sebald’s perspective, are “haunting” us, and the nar-
rator’s role is to tell their story before they fall into oblivion. The pilgrimage is there-
fore a way to recreate images of the past, a journey in a landscape of memory where
the photographs can be interpreted as milestones on a memory map. In terms of recre-
ating the past, there is an obvious analogy between memory and photographs, as both
can be manipulated and both can point to only one side of a larger reality:
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the
moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the
exposed paper, as the memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if
you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath
too long. (77)
As Sebald stresses in his interviews, images serve to authenticate; however, he also
admits that some of the photographs in his novels are intended to create uncertainty
and to question the text’s reliability. Photographs create a blurred image of the past
because they are no more than images of memories, parts of one specific memory, and
not the memories themselves. Thus the imagination inevitably comes into play in the
process of remembering, interpreting and reconstructing the past, which become more
important than the reality of the past. The process of remembering is based on differ-
ent layers of interpretation and information that are continuously added in time,
revealing the difference between the event and its remembrance.
NARRATIVE AND CULTURAL MEMORY
While photographs are one means Sebald uses to re-enact the past, his primary means
of recreating memories is his use of language. Austerlitz is also the story of losing one’s
place in an “inner grammar,” where Austerlitz’s psychological illness is described as his
“exit from language.” This episode is related to his initial trauma of losing his native
language, which had given him a sense of security, and explains why he feels alienated
from the English language. This episode of the “breakdown” of his language confirms
Freud’s view that trauma is the breach between the mind and memory.47 When he
tells the story of his mental decline, Austerlitz realizes that what disappeared first was
his capacity to write. Everything seemed flawed: like a tightrope walker who has for-
gotten the art of walking, he felt the “ground” of language move beneath him. This
suggests that his crisis is closely related to the fact that his personal identity has no sta-
ble ground but stands on repressed memories alone. “I sensed that in truth I had nei-
ther memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had
been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world”
(123). After losing his capacity to write, he also loses his ability to read. The story thus
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 11
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
reaffirms the connection between memory and language and the transformations of
memory into spatial coordinates: Austerlitz imagines language as a complex city—with
old streets, squares, and places that are full of meaning for its inhabitants though they
lack any special significance to those who are lost on these streets, with an entire struc-
ture of language that refuses to be deciphered.
The bond between language and memory is also revealed through Dr. Henry
Selwyn, in The Emigrants, who, once he changed his name from Hersch Seweryn to
Henry Selwyn, immediately noticed a decrease in his ability to learn. Another such
example is Ambros Adelwarth who felt at “home” in any language: he “learnt French
to perfection, or rather, he absorbed it. ... [H]e had the special gift of acquiring a for-
eign language, without apparent effort... solely by making [a] certain adjustment... to
his inner self” (78). His ease of transitioning from one language to another (French,
German, English, and even Japanese), like an actor who plays different roles while
maintaining his/her true identity, raises the question: who in fact is Ambros
Adelwarth, the man who deliberately submitted to shock treatment and thus commit-
ted a form of suicide? Ambros, in the end, simply disappears from our sight, his physi-
cal disintegration being merely the external manifestation of his inner fragmentation, as
noted by Dr. Abramsky: “I could see from Ambrose’s face that he was now destroyed,
all but a vestige of him” (116). Uncle Kasimir’s impression of Ambros is the same: “it
was as if his clothes were holding him together” (88). Similarly, the fate of Paul
Bereyter, who gradually loses his sight until all he can see is a “mouse-grey” world,
demonstrates how external reality conforms to the disintegrating inner self that can no
longer hold the fragments of identity together.
In Sebald’s novels the narrator is always on the move, searching for witnesses to
the past. When communicative memory is missing, as is often the case, he appeals to
cultural memory as a register that is “exteriorized, objectified and stored away in sym-
bolic forms.”48 The archive register, according to J. J. Long, is central to Sebald’s
works, which are centered on knowledge systems, as seen by the time his characters
spend in institutions of memory (libraries, museums, galleries, archives, etc.). “They
are obsessed with processes of archivisation and with the places where the past has
deposited traces and fragments that have been preserved and in many cases systema-
tised, catalogued, or indexed.”49 His characters are interested not only in “written his-
tory” but also in “lived” history. However, they cannot reconstruct an absent “lived”
memory because they have no way of integrating the past into their own self-narrative.
This deprives them of an inner life, as is the case with Austerlitz, whose knowledge is
only archival and as such is totally systematized. Because he fails to integrate any exter-
nal data into his self-narrative he is unable to bring to life the archival element. Thus
according to Long, Sebald’s characters lack an internal memory and a stable, authentic
subjective interiority.50
The archival element is included at the level of the writing process. Writing,
argues Jan Assmann, has two functions: storage and communication: it is “the exterior-
ization of our memory, enabling us to recall data which would soon escape us without
its aid. In the case of communication, it amounts to an exteriorization of our voice,
enabling us to address people who are distant in time and space.”51 The narrator’s
work takes place in this intermedial space between storage and communication, find-
ing fragments of different identities and trying to increase their power of
12 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
communication. In The Emigrants Luisa Lanzberg’s diary, which the narrator received
from her son, Max Ferber, documents the stages of an ordinary life: childhood, school,
and the stability of a family in a safe world. However, it also documents an absence—
that of the Nazi horror—which is felt but not stated throughout the diary. Concealing
and revealing, repressing and bringing to life, like Ferber’s method of painting,
Lanzberg’s diary reveals the workings of the memory, its strengths and weaknesses as
of “an unreliable, mercurial friend.”52 Luiza wrote her diary as if she wanted to pre-
serve her identity, as if the present could not be integrated into her self-narrative.
Since the present does not offer real episodes that can be assimilated, the narrator is
transformed into the spokesman of those who have been forgotten, for the memories
inserted in the archive register.53 This is a form of temporal remembering, for we can-
not exclude the possibility that these memories will again fall into oblivion, perhaps
forever. The narrator thus acts as their savior, even if only temporarily.
TRANSMIGRATION AND IDENTITY
Sebald’s work, according to Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, is characterized by its “deep
sense of displacement,” the inevitable result of the profound experience of “the disrup-
tion entailed by the dissolution of the stable categories of space, time, history, identity,
and language.”54 The recurring theme in his novels is the loss of one’s “place” in a
fragmented, collective identity. Austerlitz is not only out of place but also out of time:
“for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his
whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration” (64). Both
Austerlitz and the characters in The Emigrants try to adopt a strange identity in the
course of their lives, becoming something they are not. Despite this, Sebald affirms
that the “primal landscape” is crucial to narrative identity, and he finds it almost
impossible for them “to be reborn into national or cultural contexts other than their
own.”55 His recurring motifs range from moths, metamorphosis, and death, the still-
ness and fluidity of life and death, memory and oblivion, and the self and the other.
The transformation from one stage to another, from pupa into butterfly, for example,
is merely an external transformation, without redemption. In other words, this trans-
formation is not followed by an inner transformation or the possibility of transcending
the traumatic stage of a “frozen identity.” The past is deeply inscribed in the self, and
the self can never escape it or leave it behind. Like Penelope’s web, the past is what is
woven by day and destroyed by night.56
The constant transition from one historical time to another, the amalgam of his-
tories, and the combination of literary forms and materials in his novels are representa-
tive of his characters’ perpetual wandering and lack of stable identities. The journeying
through geographic space, which is at the same time a mental journey, is essential for
narrative identity, because identity references are fixed not only externally but also
internally. Thus Austerlitz travels through cultural and geographical spaces just as
Ambros moves through different language spaces. Both types of movement reveal the
permeability of borders between countries, memories, and identities. However, neither
of them can find a place where he feels at home or find closure or reconciliation,
despite the attempt to work through the many layers of memory and of European
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 13
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
history. Displaced and disconnected from the collective identity, Sebald’s characters
are condemned to move from place to place in a state of permanent inner exile, expe-
riencing “existential” loneliness or the loneliness of a “fragmented identity.”57
Austerlitz, who is disconnected from his cultural heritage, therefore represents the
new type of the homeless European. Unlike the postmodern nomad celebrating his
heterogeneity and multiplicity, he is the damaged subject who is unable to come to
terms with the past. This post-Auschwitz European is no longer connected to the
hope of overcoming boundaries and borders, of mixing and creating a productive
“new synthesis.” While Austerlitz appears to move effortlessly from one country to
the next, what emerges from the novel is not a vision of a future integrated Europe
but of a Europe united by its history of barbarism.58
Unlike the flaneur or the Romantic dandy, these characters do not appear to
choose their condition of permanent wandering so as to escape, reinterpret, or re-eval-
uate the world; instead, their wandering is part of their need to find and shape a
coherent narrative identity. And although the places through which they wander are
all part of rebuilt, post-World War II Europe, they cannot reconstruct a collective
European identity. As readers, we perceive exactly this fragmentation. Thus, although
Sebald does not mention borders (except in the case of Max Ferber), when his charac-
ters pass from one country to another, the sense of fragmentation and trauma is even
more deeply engraved. The impression produced by the external borders that fence in
European territory, as John Wylie suggests, is that of caged animals almost in a state of
dementia, with Europe appearing as a “trap or prison, the boundaries of which the
narrator and those he encounters are condemned to forever pace out.”59 I do not
think that it is the continent as such that provokes this state of being, but rather the
condition of a traumatic and fragmented identity or the absence of an adequate “iden-
tity home.” Sebald’s characters feel alienated, “without a place” of their own, con-
demned to compulsive movements, just like caged animals. The question that arises,
then, is how can the identity of the new Self/Other be constructed in a world that has
been shaken to its core. It may be helpful to recall a practice Sebald describes in Campo
Santo (2003): most Corsicans bury their dead in their own land, to uphold their histor-
ical bond to the land. It follows that we should be at home even in death, which again
connects us to the past and to those who have died. While this suggests a strong,
locally-bound group identity, the supranational concept of a collective European iden-
tity seems all the more vague and abstract.
Although Sebald’s works offer some insights into the problems of personal iden-
tity, they mainly deal with collective identity and memory. As I have tried to show,
he does not try to restore memory as a form of collective commemoration but rather
to recover the memory of a traumatic and repressed past.60 The fundamental question
Sebald raises thus concerns the possibility of reconstructing a collective identity when
what is left is only the debris of the past. Chiara Bottici has proposed “collective
remembrance” as a useful term for understanding European identity as the narrative of
the “Europe born out of war.”61 I cannot help but wonder about the implications of a
collective identity that is based solely on this traumatic past. For, even if we cannot
correlate past abuses with the generations that were not involved in them, “identity” is
a social construct that cannot avoid social frames of reference. This is why when it
comes to identity the past is always involved in the present. The Enlightenment
14 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
concept of “humanism” collapsed when confronted with the traumatic reality of the
war and its consequences, as Max Ferber comments about the Nazi parades: “It was as
if a new species of humanity, one after another, was evolving before our very eyes”
(182). This partly explains why all the characters in The Emigrants are “haunted by
intense melancholy and homesickness, loss, exile and, eventually, suicide.”62 They
have no home and are deprived of the possibility of having a “coherent identity.” This
also finds expression in the narrator’s empathetic understanding of Austerlitz: “he did
not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world” (254). The same
kind of utter alienation characterizes Aunt Theres (in The Emigrants): “before she died,
she had walked around for months as if she were a stranger to the place” (73).
CONCLUSION
Why, then, is the past given such importance? It seems that for Sebald, to “save” the
dead means to allow them to speak again, before they are sent, perhaps forever, into
the “archive;” but it also means repositioning them on the memory map. The identity
of Sebald’s characters is closely related to the European collective identity, which has
suffered various mutations and has been marked by the traumatic experiences of two
world wars. It would seem that the national and institutional acts of commemorating
the past often fail to offer proper solutions that can help people to overcome their
own traumas, and are therefore left with “fragmented” or “frozen” identities. Thus we
should find ways of joining the acts of public commemoration with the personal and
unique ways of integrating the fragments of the past into the narrative identity. In her
study of the Spanish Civil War as an example of forgetting and remembering, Aleida
Assmann describes how the postwar generations broke the pact of silence by demand-
ing remembrance and insisting that the names of the dead be known and their corpses
found, so that they could be “reinstated in [the] familial, social and national
memory.”63
What this shows is that we must always retain our interest in the past, in what
Charles S. Maier calls “hot memory,” the memory of Nazi terror. This memory,
he argues, implies our responsibility, not because of our association with the shame-
ful past but because of our lack of association, individual or collective, real or imag-
inary, with the antifascist movements.64 In Austerlitz and The Emigrants, as I’ve
shown, Sebald tries to relocate the fragments of life that are threatened by oblivion
by extracting them from the memory archive and including them in personal and
collective narratives. More importantly, he does not try to reconstruct the past but
to integrate the lives of the dead in a collective identity map. Standing at Lily
Lanzberg’s grave (in “Max Ferber” story, The Emigrants), the narrator performs the
Jewish ritual of placing a stone on the gravestone, and “the living and the dead
touch through a mark of respect across the boundary of a massive and irredeemable
horror. They touch for a moment through their metonymic link of memorial, a
stone.”65 Through this gesture, the national acts of remembrance and commemora-
tion, in which individual fragments have no place of their own, are replaced with
an individual act of empathy and remembrance that genuinely acknowledges the
humanity of the Other.
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 15
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
NOTES
1. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26(Spring 1989): 7.
2. See Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).3. Pim den Boer, “Loci memoriae – Lieux de memoire,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Stud-
ies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunnings (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2010), 19−26.4. Nora, “Memory and History,” 7.5. Gerhard Fisher, “Introduction: W. G. Sebald’s Expatriate Experience and His Literary
Beginnings,” Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik 72 (2002): 15−24. See also JohnWylie, “The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald,” Cultural Geographies 14 (2007):171−88.
6. W. G. Sebald and Gordon Turner, “Introduction and Transcript of an interview given byMax Sebald,” in W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and MarkMcCulloh (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 24.
7. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 174.8. See Silke Horstkotte, “Recollective Processes and the ‘Topography of Forgetting’ in W.
G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex & Race 13.1 (2007): 193−200.9. Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau, “Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W. G. Sebald’s
The Emigrants,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 154.10. See Gabriele Schwab, “Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of
Traumatic Loss,” and Gudrun Brockhaus, “The Emotional Legacy of the National SocialistPast in Post-War Germany,” in Memory and Political Change, in Memory and Political Change,ed. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17−33 and34−49, respectively; Jurgen Reulecke, “Generation/Generationality, Generativity, andMemory,” in Erll and Nunnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 119−26.
11. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 23.12. See Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci, eds., Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of
German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (New York: EditionsRodopi, 2011).
13. For a more comprehensive view on trauma, see Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory:Contexts, Politics, Ethics,” Paragraph 30.1 (2007): 9−29, and Ron Eyerman, “Social The-ory and Trauma,” Acta Sociologica 56.1 (2013): 41−53.
14. Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival,” Cultural Values 5.1 (2001):10.
15. For a comprehensive analysis of trauma in Austerlitz using a psychoanalytic approach, seeDora Osborne, “Blind Spots: Viewing Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Seminar: AJournal of Germanic Studies 43.4 (2007): 517−33. For a very detailed analysis see RichardCrownshaw, “The Limits of Transference: Theories of Memory and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Auterlitz,” in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed.Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 67−90.
16. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: The Harvill Press, 1996), 61; hereafter cited in thetext.
17. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 72; hereafter cited in thetext.
18. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 24.19. Mark McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press, 2003), 29.20. Karin Bauer, “The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 250.21. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 23.22. Martin Klebes, Wittgenstein’s Novel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. For a comprehensive
analysis, see chap. 3: “W. G. Sebald: Family Resemblances and the Blurred Images ofHistory,” 87−130. On the connection of the “language games” (Wittgenstein) and Sebald’s
16 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
use of photographs, see Deane Blackler, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006).
23. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 183.24. Silke Arnold-de Simine, “Memory Museum and Museum Text: Intermediality in Daniel
Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Theory, Culture & Society 29.1(2012): 6.
25. Aliaga-Buchenau, “Presence and Absence,” 154.26. Katja Garloff, “The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W. G.
Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 162.27. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 171.28. Daniel Weston, “The Spatial Supplement: Landscape and Perspective in W. G. Sebald’s
The Rings of Saturn,” Cultural Geographies 18.2 (2011): 175.29. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 176.30. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 22.31. See Jay Winter, “Introduction: The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity,”
in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans,Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 11−23.
32. Gray Kochhlar-Lindgren, “Charcoal: The Phantom Traces of W. G. Sebald’s Novel-Mem-oirs,” Monatshefte 94.3 (2002): 373.
33. Karen Remmler, “Against the Integration of Atrocity into Disaster: W. G. Sebald’s Workof Memory,” Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik 72 (2002): 133, 149.
34. Ann Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality andMorphing,” in Erll and Nunnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 345.
35. See Harald Weinrich, Lethe. Art et critique de l’oubli (Paris: Fayard, 1999).36. Carol Bere, “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz,” The
Literary Review 46 (2002): 184.37. Stephen Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the
Boundary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173.38. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 183.39. Weston, “Spatial Supplement,” 178.40. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981−1991 (London: Granta
Books, 1992), 12.41. Bere, “Book of Memory,” 189.42. Cligman, Grammar of Identity, 22.43. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 5, 6.44. Maya Barzilai, “On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Die
Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 209.45. Stephanie Harris, “The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s
Die Ausgewanderten,” The German Quarterly 74.4 (2001): 384, 385.46. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 379. See also Brett Ashley Kaplan, Landscapes of Holocaust
Postmemory (New York: Routledge, 2011), and Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contempo-rary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).
47. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 387.48. See Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Erll and Nunnings, A Com-
panion to Cultural Memory Studies, 109−25.49. J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), 11.50. Long, W. G. Sebald, 161, 171.51. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006),
85.52. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 23.53. See Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Erll and Nunnings, A Companion to Cultural
Memory Studies, 53−71.54. Kochhlar-Lindgren, “Charcoal,” 368.55. Brad Prager, “Sebald’s Kafka,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 107.
Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape 17
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014
56. Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schokens Book, 2007), 202.57. See also Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, “The Calamitous Perspective of Modernity:
Sebald’s Negative Ontology,” Journal of European Studies 41.3–4 (2011): 341–58.58. Bauer, “The Dystopian Entwinement,” 243−44.59. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 178.60. See Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, “Cultural Memory: A European Perspective,” in
Erll and Nunnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 127−37.61. See Chiara Bottici, “European Identity and the Politics of Remembrance,” in Tilmans,
van Vree, and Winter, Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe,334−59.
62. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 383.63. Aleida Assmann, “To Remember or to Forget: Which Way Out of a Shared History of
Violence?” in Assmann and Shortt, Memory and Political Change, 65.64. Charles Maier, “Hot Memory/Cold Memory: The Political Half-Life of Fascism and
Communism,” at: http://www.project-syndicate.org; accessed 7 December 2012.65. Clingman, Grammar of Identity, 169.
18 SIMONA MITROIU
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
enne
ssee
At M
artin
] at
08:
39 0
2 O
ctob
er 2
014