THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MEMORY IN W. G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MEMORY IN W. G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ

Summary/Abstract: The paper, which is an aferthought of a previous study on Time, Memory and Narration in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, investigates the interconnectedness between space and memory, between the places of private memory and the heritage of cultural memory in the same novel. Sebald is preoccupied with the relationship between the collective experience called history and the dramas inherent in personal fates. What survives past traumas becomes, in the best case, a place of cult, of obligatory memory. Austerlitz, the spatial reference of the eponymous hero of Sebald’s last novel, is such a place: the scene of the Battle of Austerlitz is now a place of cult, blurring personal traumas and pushing them back into a never again namable past. The protagonist’s quest for the self and for the traces of his effaced past reveals places (railroad stations, buildings, institutions) that connect space and time, serving as chronotopes of memory. Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris (Austerlitz also associating Auschwitz), the traumatic place, the living wound on the body of Europe, will stand as a memento, as the place of memory, not in the sense of cultic, ceremonial recollection, but in that of profound personal involvement and awareness of the ethical responsibility of remembering.

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