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Mapping Babel:

Language and Exile in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Jessica Dubow and Richard Steadman-Jones

W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz is about an existence in exile: the story of a

man without a place in the world and without a location in the self.1 It is also

about a life among languages: a story of how experience nds form through

the recalcitrant medium of speech. The pairing of exile and language is notcoincidental. In a book that deals with a past which cannot simply be narrated

back into being, language becomes the very mark of the exile’s condition.

However, Austerlitz—the product of a late twentieth-century German con-

sciousness and of a certain vein of postwar thought—is not about the “failure”

of language or the problem of translation. On the contrary, as readers follow

Austerlitz’s journeying from place to place (always returning, never arriving)

and work their way into an assemblage of allusions (faint, oblique, and rest-

less), Sebald constantly presents them with the impossible necessity of lan-

guage and the burden of at least trying to speak.

Two Accounts of Origin

Austerlitz rst appears in the salle des pas perdus at Antwerp Central Sta-

tion. A historian of European architecture, he is documenting the structure

New German Critique 115, Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter 2012

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-1434488 © 2012 by New German Critique, Inc.

3

We wish to thank Geoff Eley, Martial Staub, and Sue Vice for their helpful comments on earlier

drafts of this essay.

1. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002); hereafter cited as A.

New German Critique

Published by Duke University Press





Jessica Dubow and Richard Steadman-Jones 5

haunted by an unknown history. But sometimes they emerge through tangents

of literary and philosophical association. Prompted by Austerlitz’s comments

on the art of military architecture and siege craft, the narrator travels to Breen-

donk, a chain of fortresses to the southwest of Antwerp, which was built in

1906 and used as a German prison and transit camp between 1940 and 1944.

Here he recalls Jean Améry’s account of his arrest and torture at the hands of

the Belgian Gestapo, and this, in turn, leads him to Claude Simon’s novel Le

jardin des plantes, which includes “the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone

Novelli.”2 Known in the postwar period primarily as a visual artist, Novelli

had been arrested for his involvement in the Italian antifascist movement and

had suffered the same form of torture as Améry.3 It is this associative link that

momentarily brings him to the narrator’s mind, but the particular story thatSebald goes on to tell, borrowing from Simon, is the curious, and perhaps

unreliable, tale of Novelli’s sojourn in South America after his liberation from

Dachau:4

For some time Novelli lived in the green jungle with a tribe of small people

who had gleaming, coppery skins and had emerged beside him as if out of

nowhere one day, without moving so much as a leaf. He adopted their cus-

toms, and to the best of his ability compiled a dictionary of their language,

consisting almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless

variations of intonation and emphasis, not a word of which, Simon writes,

had yet been recorded by the Linguistic Institute in São Paulo. ( A, 35)

Sebald thus introduces Novelli as someone in whom the condition of survivor-

ship and the possibility of the aesthetic are intimately bound up with language.

For when Novelli returned to Europe and began to paint,

his main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and composi-tions . . . was the letter A, which he traced on the coloured ground he had

applied . . . in ranks of scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together

and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves,

rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream.

2. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella D. Rosenfeld (Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press, 1980); Claude Simon, Le jardin des plantes (Paris: Minuit, 1997).

3. Novelli’s career as an artist ran from the 1950s until his death in 1968. For an overview, see

Maria Bonmassar, “Nota biograca,” in Gastone Novelli, ed. Flaminio Gualdoni and Walter

Guadagnini (Milan: Skira, 2006), 219–21.

4. Although Simon claims that Novelli was imprisoned in Dachau, it is more likely that he was

held in an Italian prison. See Brigitte Ferrato-Combe, “Simon e Novelli: L’immagine della lettera,”

in Gualdoni and Guadagnini, Gastone Novelli, 45.

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6 Mapping Babel

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ( A, 36)

Whether the transcription of a “primitive” preliterate utterance or the expres-

sion of an unsayable trauma, the excessive repetition of the letter A and its

total emptiness of sense is an essential counterpoint to the problems of origin

raised by Austerlitz’s uency in French and his struggle with English. Here

in this book about exile and the unearthing of Austerlitz’s true biography, to

talk of “origin” is not just to speak of a birthplace that has been lost, forgot-

ten, and destroyed, or of the hidden histories that in principle connect theexile to that place. It is also to talk of a state of being outside the disasters of

history, a moment of existence that has never been lost precisely because it

has never actually existed, a vision of what redemption from the wastes of

time might consist in. Novelli’s primal, mesmeric cry does not appear in the

text as a fragment from Austerlitz’s personal narrative. On the contrary, if

the book’s structure follows the gradual uncovering of Austerlitz’s story,

essaying back and forth between present and explanatory past, then the

“AAAAAAA” interrupts the line of discovery and with it the kind of tem-

porality fashioned by historicist thought. With its echoes of eighteenth-century

“origin-of-language” texts—a framework of allusion that we shall come to—

Novelli’s story is the rejection of a language ravaged by history and an attempt

to begin again.

Throughout Austerlitz Sebald repeatedly plays off and makes proximate

the two characterizations of language that we have sketched so far: on the one

hand, as it relates to the particularities of history (which language did Auster-

litz learn rst?), and on the other, a vision of it as either primal or perfected,

as radical origin or impossible desire (what could “AAAAAAA” possiblymean?). To think these two alternatives together—their dissimilarity and their

dialectic—is part of what Austerlitz demands of its audience. Throughout the

book it is increasingly clear that Austerlitz has a strange relationship with lan-

guage and this, his disuency and sometimes even aphasia, is symptomatic of

his status as an exile. However, Sebald refuses any normative assumption

that to belong to place is to be assimilated into the realm of the intelligible

and communicable. It is thus not on any territorial or identitarian basis that

language carries its nominal adequacy or inadequacy. While not aficted bythe kinds of extreme pessimism that would view language as inherently disor-

dered, he suggests that there is nonetheless an anxiety that haunts it—one that

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8 Mapping Babel

names as rst that which strikes one rst.”7 If this (the “naming” and “striking

rst”) refers to the confusing world of things—the sense data that surprise the

phenomenal body and retard cognition—then la clarté is most properly the

realm that brings structure to sensation.

Given this, the narrator’s chance remark that “it was almost impossible

to talk to [Austerlitz] about anything personal” and that “neither of us knew

where the other came from” nds its place within a broader frame of under-

standing ( A, 42). The project of la clarté is concerned with projecting logical

structure onto the outside world, prioritizing the external and bypassing

whatever in the immediacy of life may exceed its grasp. Since Austerlitz has

spent his life thus far resisting the facts of his own biography—shutting out

all evidence of his origin, refusing the illogic of trauma—it makes sense thatit is the language of la clarté which he adopts as his own. Although he grew

up in Britain and might be expected to favor English,8 Austerlitz remains an

exile, a gure with no territorial commitment for whom the myth of clarity is

a way to manage the crises of history. Moreover, it forces one to take seri-

ously the strangeness of Novelli’s “AAAAAAA,” the cry that holds to the

condition of crisis—its illogic and its persistence.

In “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language,” an essay published

in 1962 as the introduction to a catalog of the artist’s work, Simon empha-sizes the signicance of the single letter A.9 Not so much the sign of founda-

tion or rst principle, the A is rather rudiment, “bare life,”10 degree zero: it is

as if in Europe after 1945 the vestige were all that remained, the only thing

left to work with.11 In Le jardin des plantes Simon again constructs the A as

just such a rudiment—the mark of trauma, of utter reduction, and of the min-

imum condition—by telling the story of Novelli’s encounter with a “primi-

7. Antoine de Rivarol, L’universalité de la langue française (Paris: Arléa, 1998), 72. The origi-nal reads: “Cet ordre, si favorable, si nécessaire au raisonnement, est presque toujours contraire aux

sensations, qui nomment le premier l’objet qui frappe le premier.” The translation is ours.

8. By implying a contrast between French and English, Sebald echoes Rivarol’s comparison.

See ibid., 46–71.

9. Claude Simon, “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language,” in Gastone Novelli: Paint-

ings, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Alan Gallery, 1962), n.p.

10. Understood best as “life exposed to death,” the phrase refers to Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical

paradigm in which exclusion from the polis, as a distinctive form of human life, is at once the original

form of the political and the exemplary state of the camp. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign

Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

11. The single letter A relates interestingly to Georges Perec’s W , which in his quasi-autobiograph-ical work, W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975), is the name of an imaginary island. If

the A in our account refers to the notion of “bare life,” Perec’s double-ve functions as a pun on the

phrase double-vie (“double life”).

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tive” South American language, which, as Sebald has it, “consist[s] almost

entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations.” But, while

the story allegedly relates a real event that happened after Novelli’s liberation

from Dachau, it is not without a deeper genealogy.

In his essay “On the Origin of Language,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau devel-

ops a speculative account of the beginnings of human language that is remark-

ably similar to Simon’s description of the idiom that Novelli learned “in the

green jungle.” Rousseau’s essay constitutes an intervention in the larger Enlight-

enment debate over how humans at the beginning of history could have emerged

into linguistic, social, and cognitive modernity.12 For thinkers like Rousseau,

language was the product of both an ascendant reason and a developing social-

ity; it could therefore not have existed in its contemporary form within theoriginal state of nature. How, then, did the earliest languages come into being

and what form might they have taken?

For Rousseau, “the rst language” originated not in need or method

but in passion: “It is neither hunger nor thirst but love, hatred, pity, anger,

which drew from them their rst words.”13 He goes on to develop a narrative

in which the economy of reason reorganized this language of passion into a

distinctively modern form, and in this he is not too distant from the philo-

sophical and political consensus of the age. Unlike many of his contempo-raries, however, Rousseau sees this development as regressive and charts its

advancements within a temporality of loss:

To the degree that needs multiply, that affairs become complicated, that

light is shed, language changes its character. It becomes more regular and

less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It no longer speaks to the

heart but to reason. Similarly, accent diminishes, articulation increases.

Language becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller and

colder. This progression seems to me entirely natural.14

That Novelli’s “AAAAAAA” is a contemporary voicing of Rousseau’s pri-

mal language becomes clear in the specic material that Sebald appropriates

from Simon. Enlightenment “origin-of-language” texts frequently adduce

12. For an overview of the “origin-of-language” debate, see Raffaele Simone, “The Early Mod-

ern Period,” in Renaissance and Early Modern Linguistics, vol. 3 of History of Linguistics, ed.

Giulio Lepschy, trans. Emma Sansone (London: Longman, 1998), 149–236.

13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Origin of Languages,” in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, ed. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode, trans. John H. Moran (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1966), 12.

14. Rousseau, “Origin,” 16.

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10 Mapping Babel

evidence from the speech of “primitive” peoples—especially the indigenous

inhabitants of the Americas15—and the details of Novelli’s story clearly allude

to this body of literature. Moreover, that it “consist[s] almost entirely of vow-

els” makes the language of Novelli’s “tribe of small people” akin to that of

Rousseau’s “rst men,” whose speech he imagines as uncomplicated by con-

sonants, those “modications of the tongue and palate” that require so much

“attention and practice.”16 Their vocalic utterances display, as Sebald puts it,

“countless variations of intonation and emphasis,” just as Rousseau’s language

distinguishes its words through alterations of rhythm and pitch, giving it the

quality of song rather than speech.17

If Novelli’s cry has its mythical source in Rousseau’s account of the

origin of language, it derives its urgency from a more proximate history. It isa history that does not so much declare a crisis in language as compel one to

write, read, and think along with trauma, within failure, summoning under-

standing and setting it against itself. The “AAAAAAA,” in this sense, is a

doubled motif and a particular mode of remembrance: it returns one to a

scene of origin when language had not yet been claimed by reason and simul-

taneously speaks from a more contemporary moment in which language has

fatefully become the cacophonous degradation of that very reason. To explain

this doubleness, we might also refer to Walter Benjamin, a persistent spectralpresence in Sebald’s oeuvre, whose essay “On Language as Such and on the

Language of Man” (1916) bears some afnity to Rousseau’s essay in its regres-

sive account of human language.

For Benjamin, the inaugural scene is not primitive but prelapsarian, and

the genesis of an ideal language not a matter of passion but a kind of divine

gift. Here, although language is brought into existence in man’s naming of

things, the act of naming does not produce an inventory of arbitrary signs (lan-

guage as “means”) but is an expression of the “mental being” of man in his

proximity to God and his immersion in the life of the object named (language

as “medium”):18

15. On the use of “evidence” from Native American languages in the “origin-of-language”

debate, see Rüdiger Schreyer, “Deaf-Mutes, Feral Children, and Savages: Of Analogical Evidence

in Eighteenth Century Theoretical History of Language,” in Anglistentag 1993 Eichstätt, Proceed-

ings XV , ed. Günther Blaicher and Brigitte Glaser (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 70–86.


17. Ibid., 15.

18. Interestingly, in the Talmudic tradition, the word as name, davar, is not distinct from thething it names but designates both word and life, representation and reality. See Elizabeth Grosz,

“Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness,” New Formations, no. 12 (1990): 77–88.

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Man is the namer, by this we recognize that through him pure language

speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself

in language, and so nally in man. Hence he is the lord of nature and can give

names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he gainknowledge of them from within himself—in name. God’s creation is com-

pleted when things receive their names from man.19

If this Adamic state is what Benjamin describes as “language as such,” then

the “language of man” comes with the loss of Eden, that is, with the onset of

modernity, in which the momentum of technological progress—for Benja-

min, “the enslavement of things”—overwhelms the bonds of metaphysical

unity to produce arbitrary signs in place of names and so make man abstract

and nature mute.20 And with this “begins [another] muteness”: for the Fall is

not just the abandonment of imminent communication but also the birth of a

language so chaotic as to be inseparable from speechlessness.21 This is the

story of Babel and the condition of linguistic confusion, as told in the elev-

enth chapter of Genesis. After the Flood the people of the earth went east to

the Plain of Shi’nar and there built a tower and a city reaching to the heavens,

which provoked divine wrath such that humankind was scattered abroad and

the original singular language broken up into incomprehension:

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one lan-

guage; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from

them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there con-

found their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So

the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:

and they left off to build the city. (Gen. 11:6–8)

Like the biblical story, Benjamin’s history of language is not to be read liter-

ally. Rather, the loss of linguistic mimesis, understood here as the identity ofname and thing, is itself an allegory of the fall into history. Indeed, Benjamin’s

magical account of the increasingly arbitrary relationship between signier

and signied may be taken to exemplify the atrophy of experience made sys-

temic and the atomization of a language pressed into service as “means.” As

such, while his metaphysics owes much to the tenets of German Romanticism

and its Rousseauesque imprints, it is at heart a critique of modernity. In an age

19. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in One-Way Street ,trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 111.

20. Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 121.

21. Ibid.

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12 Mapping Babel

without prophets, it foreshadows the crises of contemporary Western history.

And the converse is also true: even in humanity’s present “fallen” condition,

there perhaps remains the echo of what has been lost. If this double movement

is a part of Benjamin’s thesis of language, it is also—in an analogous sense—a

key to the deep mystery of Sebald’s “AAAAAAA.” At once a trace of Rous-

seau’s “rst language” and of Benjamin’s Adamic naming, it is also the tor-

tured scream of Améry and Novelli. Indeed, as the sound of a time before

history when language knew nothing of reason, at history’s limits it is the only

utterance that makes sense: neither revelatory nor redemptive but a primordial

response to present unreason.

From Babel to BalaIf, for Benjamin, Babel is the story of language made complex and unmanage-

able, then, in Sebald’s text, it has its narrative corollary in a place called Bala,

the small town in North Wales where, in 1939, the ve-year-old Jacques Auster-

litz was fostered after arriving on the Kindertransport to escape the coming

catastrophe. Like all of Sebald’s apparently arbitrary geographies, there is

something about the choice of Bala—both the place and the place-name—that

is quietly allusive. And, again, language is the key to this: Bala in the 1930s and

1940s was a predominantly Welsh-speaking community, and the Welsh lan-guage itself was then and is now the site of a struggle involving painful ques-

tions of identity and genealogy that speak to the dilemma of Austerlitz’s biogra-

phy and, indeed, to a broader condition of exile. Sebald develops this problematic

through a contrast between two Welsh-speaking characters: Elias, Austerlitz’s

adoptive father, an austere nonconformist preacher and former missionary,

and Evan, a local tradesman and storyteller. This rhetorical doubling—two

fathers, two traditions, two varieties of the same language—is important. For if

they are doubled, then Austerlitz is split. What binds them all, however, is a

particular experience of the ghostly and the revenant, that generalized sense of

Unheimlichkeit that is the distinctive Sebaldian mark.

The connection between Welsh and the spectral is rst made in an epi-

sode that takes place on the banks of Llyn Efyrnwy. A large reservoir to the

north of Bala, this articial lake was created in the late nineteenth century

when the head of the Vyrnwy Valley was ooded and the village of Llanwd-

dyn completely submerged. It was in that village, the reader learns, that Elias

once had his family home, now lost “a hundred feet under the dark water”

along with “at least forty other houses and farms, . . . the church of St John of

Jerusalem, three chapels and three pubs, all of them drowned when the dam

was nished in the autumn of 1888” ( A, 71). Together with the more obvious

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allusion to the Old Testament, the reference here to the vocabulary of Primo

Levi’s study The Drowned and the Saved once again splits Sebald’s imagery

between myth and modernity, the allegorical and the historical. The young

Austerlitz imagines Elias, his new father, as “the only survivor of the deluge

which had destroyed Llanwddyn” and, with his traumatized imaginary, is

haunted by the image of “all the others—[Elias’s] parents, his brothers and

sisters, his relations, their neighbours, all the other villagers—still down in the

depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, but unable to speak

and with their eyes open far too wide” ( A, 73). And so Levi, Austerlitz, and

Elias form their own associative chain: three refractions of the same gure,

survivors who have escaped the deluge but whose subsequent lives are never-

theless “submerged in that dark water” where, “like the poor souls of Vyrnwy,”they have to keep their eyes wide open “to catch a faint glimmer of light far

above” ( A, 74), not fully alive but surviving. Of all of this, Elias refuses to

speak. And so Austerlitz goes to Evan, Elias’s double, who has a “reputation

for seeing ghosts” and who, through the medium of Welsh, can give him details

of those “struck down by fate untimely” ( A, 74).

Again, a palimpsest of associations allows one to think of Evan as articu-

lating a mythological voice in which language becomes a “medium” in Benja-

min’s sense of the term: what attempts to make absence present and is the locusof communion with the lost and the dead. On the one hand, Sebald’s reference

here is clearly drawn from the repertoire of Welsh folklore: thus Evan tells

Austerlitz the tale of a ghostly funeral procession in which “dwarsh” gures

carry a bier draped with a black veil along the roads from Frongastell to Pyrsau

and reminds the boy (something that Austerlitz is never to forget) that “nothing

but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world” ( A, 75–76). On the

other hand, the proximity of the apparent and hidden worlds that is so central to

the Celtic oral tradition is also the key to Austerlitz’s “historical metaphysic,”

the sense in which for him time has no real substance and there exist only inter-

connected dimensions of space between which past and present, the dead and

the living, can pass and accidentally meet one another.22 That Evan’s stories

speak for Austerlitz’s own unspeakable history allows one to understand why,

as a boy, he nds Welsh so easy to acquire. It is in tales where ghostly proces-

sions walk among the dwellings of the living that Austerlitz nds a language

that might give expression to his own story—if only he knew what that was.

22. For a related discussion of Sebald’s understanding of historical process, see Jessica Dubow,

“Case Interrupted: Benjamin, Sebald, and the Dialectical Image,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007):

820–36.

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14 Mapping Babel

But in Sebald no language is sufcient to history, no words adequate to

the traumas of experience. And so it is that Welsh, like Austerlitz himself, is

double-bound between the compulsion to express and the mechanisms of its

repression, between what tries but cannot (yet) be spoken and what will not let

it speak. It is a division that in Austerlitz is instantiated not just through the

contrast between Evan and Elias—one a storyteller, the other opposed to “such

things”—but also through the history of the language itself, specically in the

struggle between the spoken, dialectal Welsh of the folkloric tradition and the

written, standardized Welsh of the translated Bible. Even as he is nding his

tongue through Evan’s mythological tales, Austerlitz is also learning by heart

the children’s edition of the Welsh Bible, memorizing “the chapter about the

confounding of the languages of the earth” ( A, 76). If it is here that Austerlitzreads about Babel—and about the Exodus from Egypt—both of which might

have given him access to an identicatory vein of exilic narrative, it is clear

that Elias’s reading of the Bible disavows the wanderings of scripture and com-

mits it rather to the ties of territory. As the adult Austerlitz tells it, he was, even

as a child, aware of two hermeneutic alternatives—one potentially liberating,

realizing a therapeutic association between text and personal experience, the

other constrained to the literal, an exercise in grammatical construal: “I sus-

pected that some meaning relating to myself lay behind the Bible stories I wasgiven to read in Sunday school from my sixth birthday onwards, a meaning

quite different from the sense of the printed words as I ran my index nger

along the lines” ( A, 76). However, the treatment of the Bible as an object lesson

in Welsh grammar—Austerlitz is rewarded for “reciting it correctly and with

good expression” ( A, 76)—is not merely a rejection of an exilic alternative, of

an originary spatial mobility that might afrm Austerlitz’s own experience of

displacement and dislocation. For ever since the publication of William Mor-

gan’s translation in 1588, the Welsh Bible has played a crucial role in dening

the standardized national language and, in this sense, has been a key term in

the discourse of nation building. And if Austerlitz interprets the story of the

drowned village of Llanwddyn in mythological terms, imagining Elias as the

sole survivor of a quasi-biblical cataclysm, then historically the ooding of

Welsh valleys to supply English cities with water has also become a focus of

nationalist rhetoric, the point being that both oods and language have cohered

within a narrative of loss that itself animates autochthony and the sanction of a

distinct nationhood.

Austerlitz is alive with coincidence, the accidental collision of the dis-

parate and nonidentical. Indeed, coincidence, for Sebald, seems to be the

very thing that marks history with the signature of the uncanny, that unset-

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tling phenomenon which disturbs all security of order and sense by slipping

the boundaries of what is inside and outside, habitual and unknown. Because

Sebald is so successful at convincing the reader that Austerlitz is an authentic,

if idiosyncratic, document composed of memoir, biography, archival scraps,

and philosophical annotation, it is easy to forget that the book’s coincidences

are the result of artice.23 The choice of Wales as Austerlitz’s adopted home

perfectly exemplies this Sebaldian conceit: it is a choice made to seem coin-

cidental precisely to expose coincidence as the nature of history itself. Thus

the silencing of folklore, so dramatized by Elias’s refusal to speak of the

spectral dead, is not just an image that stands for the uncanniness of Auster-

litz’s perceptions but is “coincidentally” connected to the very narrative of

Welsh modernity.In 1847 the British government published the “Blue Books” Report into

the State of Education in Wales. The report attacked Welsh society, character-

izing its ostensible underdevelopment as a direct result of its language:

Superstition prevails. Belief in charms, supernatural appearances, and even

in witchcraft, sturdily survive all the civilisation and light which has long

ago banished these remnants of the dark ages elsewhere. Little or none

of such light has as yet penetrated the dense darkness which, harboured

by their language, and undisturbed by availing efforts of enlightenment,

enshrouds the minds of the people. (emphasis added)24

The report provoked a massive outcry, particularly among those communi-

ties of nonconformist intellectuals whose rejection of Anglicanism and iden-

tication with the Welsh-speaking working classes made them particularly

threatening to an extant cultural and religious elite. Unsurprisingly, their fre-

quently polemical responses used the category of language as the vehicle to

assert an oppositional politics within the broader framework of an emergentnationalism. Thus a prominent nineteenth-century defender of Welsh non-

conformity writes that

we now walk in the light. Fairies and ghosts have vanished. The mighty fab-

ric of superstition, reared by the industry of ages, lies scattered in dismal

23. As Sebald acknowledges, the account of Austerlitz’s childhood owes much to the story of

Suzi Bechhofer as documented on British television and in her autobiography, Rosa’s Child (Lon-

don: Tauris, 1996). That Sebald retains the Welsh setting is not simply a matter of citation but isessential to the book’s thematic.

24. Jelinger C. Symons, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in

Wales, pt. 2 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Ofce, 1848), 306.

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16 Mapping Babel

and ignominious ruins. . . . From the highest peak in the land to the lowest

valleys, they have studded the country with chapels and school-rooms. . . .

There is no spot within the Principality where the Welsh is spoken, where

the people perish for lack of knowledge. (emphasis added)25

This, in quite a literal sense, is Elias’s position. But, in the “coincidences” of

Sebald’s histories, it is also the perfect analogue for Elias’s demand that Auster-

litz live unimpeded by the ghosts of the past, that in the cold forbidding manse

over which the silent preacher presides, the young boy keep buried far away

from thought, memory, and speech all the events that led him there. Indeed, if

Sebald’s drama of repression is played out as a story of language learning, then

Austerlitz’s forgetting is a matter of language disappearing:

I myself cannot say what my rst few days in Bala with the Eliases really felt

like. . . . Recently I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying

away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think

lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching

or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent

whenever one tries to listen to it. ( A, 195)

Aphasia and “A Letter” Although words are always uncanny for the young Austerlitz because of their

association with what is opaque and forgotten, it is only many decades later,

when he is nally on the brink of recovering fragmentary memories of his

childhood, that language becomes the site of a full-blown crisis. A total psy-

chic breakdown—what Austerlitz describes as a “paralysis” of his “entire

system”—takes the form of a creeping but insistent disintegration of all pow-

ers of reason and expression: “The entire structure of language, the syntactical

arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and nally even

the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.

I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I

could understand that least of all” ( A, 175). As a character whose extraordi-

nary facility for synthetic thought and linguistic precision so impressed itself

on the narrator, Austerlitz is now almost entirely aphasic: “I could see no

connections any more, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of sepa-

rate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs,

and those signs into a blue-grey trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted

25. Cited in Trefor M. Owen, The Customs and Traditions of Wales (Cardiff: University of

Wales Press, 1991), 104.

New German Critique





and left behind by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly

lled me with feelings of horror and shame” ( A, 175–76). In the terms that

we have argued so far, this radical falling apart constitutes a Rousseauesque

“origin-of-language” story but, crucially, one that happens in reverse. For while

eighteenth-century accounts frequently start with raw vocalizations, which

are then differentiated as nouns and verbs and at last arranged into syntacti-

cal patterns, Austerlitz in his crisis nds the narrative spooling backward. It

is thus with “horror and shame” ( A, 176) that he comes to see all “purposeful

intelligence” as “nothing but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise” ( A,

175). Alternatively, one can read the passage against the Benjaminian account

of language, in which the severing of name from thing is at once the prelude

to Babel and a symptom of the regress into progress, or history as such. It isas if the luminousness of an Edenic comprehension, the almost divine unity

of word and world, had been shut out and shrouded by the very “impenetra-

ble fog” that is Austerlitz’s distress.

But with language here implicated so thoroughly in the intimacy of a

personal breakdown, Sebald also invokes a key document of early twentieth-

century Sprachkritik : Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ctional letter, supposedly

written by Philipp, Lord Chandos, to Francis Bacon in 1603 and known in

German simply as Ein Brief . A “canonical portrayal of a crisis of language,”as Eric L. Santner has it, the letter is an excruciating account of a writer’s

descent into wordlessness.26 Hofmannsthal’s choice of addressee is impor-

tant here. In the Novum Organum (1620), especially in the section “Idols of

the Marketplace,” Bacon warns his readers about the potential deceits and

misinterpretations that can arise from the imprecision of natural language,

an empiricist’s equivalent to the rationalists’ conception of la clarté .27 But if,

for Bacon, the problem of mapping words onto things calls simply for a meas-

ure of vigilance, for Hofmannsthal, speaking with the voice of Lord Chandos,

the problem has amassed the full weight of late nineteenth-century anxiety.

No longer is a critique of language accompanied, as in Bacon, by recommen-

dations for its correction. In Hofmannsthal’s Vienna, as the century turns,

the possibility that language might ever be reformed has been superseded by

the almost psychopathological fear of its absolute failure. Indeed, in explain-

ing to Bacon why he has written nothing for so long and believes that he

26. For a comment on the connection between Austerlitz and Hofmannsthal’s “Chandos letter,”

see Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006), 109n16.

27. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Works, ed. and trans. Basil Montague, 3 vols.

(Philadelphia: Parry and Macmillan, 1854), 3:343–71.

New German Critique




18 Mapping Babel

never will again, Chandos writes with a vertiginous paranoia characteristic

of Hofmannsthal’s circle: “Everything came to pieces, the pieces broke into

more pieces, and nothing could be encompassed by one idea. Isolated words

swam about me; they turned into eyes that stared at me and into which I had

begun to stare back, dizzying whirlpools which spun around and around and

led into the void.”28 But Chandos does not experience his loss of language

entirely as despair. It also opens him up to a “nameless” joy in which the voice-

less existence of isolated objects in the world “can become the source of [a]

mysterious, wordless, innite rapture” and in which the incapacitated writer

nds himself capable of “thinking in a medium more direct, uid, and pas-

sionate than words.”29 Indeed, at this moment of collapse Chandos even imag-

ines some kind of language—not unlike Novelli’s “AAAAAAA”—which isboth primal and fully commensurate with the moment of catastrophe, or with

what Karl Kraus famously calls “the last days of the end of the world”:30 “The

language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to

write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a

language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things

speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself

someday.”31 If, for Chandos, wordlessness simultaneously makes available

something more primitive and liberatory, Austerlitz’s predicament appearswithout any redemptive potential. As he wanders the night streets of London,

always seeming to gravitate toward Liverpool Street Station, the scene is

utterly bleak. Unlike Chandos’s state, Austerlitz’s aphasia is not accompa-

nied by any hope that within silence lives a language not yet seized, a revela-

tion still to come. On the contrary, that the allusion to Hofmannsthal’s age of

anxiety appears so often in the work of a writer for whom being “born after”

the Holocaust (nachgeboren) carries its own ethical and aesthetic injunctions

cannot be divorced from the dilemmas of bearing witness—and the impos-

sibilities of doing that.

“The Origin Is the Goal”

In typical Sebaldian fashion, where time is layered as a series of lapses and

in which events do not so much illuminate as expose to shock, Austerlitz

28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, trans. Joel Roten-

berg (New York: New York Review of Books Publication, 2005), 122.

29. Ibid., 126–27.30. Karl Krauss, The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts, abridged and trans. Alex-

ander Gode and Sue Allen Wright (New York: Ungar, 1974).

31. Hofmannsthal, Lord Chandos Letter, 127–28.

New German Critique





32. The aphorism in this section’s heading belongs to Karl Krauss (from The Dying Man) and

is famously adopted as the motto of Benjamin’s fourteenth historical-political thesis (Theses on the

Philosophy of History), where it alludes to the subversion of historicist linearity and the vision of aredeemed (if forever deferred) future based on a circuitous rediscovery of the prelapsarian. If for

Krauss the scene of this theological recognition is the language of poetry, for Benjamin it is the

dialectic of history and nowtime.

learns that his story might have begun in Prague.32 However, the journey

back to Czechoslovakia neither settles nor territorializes him. For if language

in Austerlitz has any real value, it resides neither in its totemic relationship

to territory nor in any claim to expressive identity. For Sebald, its value lies

rather in its ability to gure the break in a psychic structure and describe a

condition that might properly be called exilic. Thus, in an extraordinary coup

de théâtre, Austerlitz is reunited with the only living person from his early

childhood and realizes that buried deep under layers of trauma he retains a

native speaker’s knowledge of Czech—a language that, until now, he has

been unaware of knowing:

I, who had not for a moment thought that Czech could mean anything tome, not at the airport or in the state archives, or even while learning by

heart the question which would have been of scant use to me addressed to

the wrong quarters, now understood almost everything Věra said, like a deaf

man whose hearing had been miraculously restored, so that all I wanted to

do was close my eyes and listen forever to her polysyllabic ood of words.

( A, 219)

If Austerlitz nds temporary comfort in the wash of his childhood language,

his relief turns to distress just a few pages later, when he travels to present-dayTerezín (Theresienstadt), close by the camp where he has learned that his

mother died. As he walks the “straight, deserted streets,” past the sealed win-

dows and blank facades of the once again “ordinary town” ( A, 266), his eyes

are drawn to the window display of an antiques bazaar, and as he stares at “the

hundreds of different objects,” his forehead “pressed against the cold window”

( A, 274), he sees something there that transxes him with the shock of linguis-

tic recognition: “And then there was the stuffed squirrel, already moth-eaten

here and there, perched on the stump of a branch, in a showcase the size of ashoebox, which had its beady button eye implacably xed on me, and whose

Czech name—veverka—I now recalled like the name of a long-lost friend” ( A,

275–76). The recollection of the word veverka is not just an insurgence of

memory into the real. It is also a confrontation with crisis as a problematic of

time. The objects stranded in the window—a painting of a landscape with a

New German Critique




20 Mapping Babel

river, the stuffed squirrel, a small porcelain sculpture of a man on horseback—

have all “outlived their former owners” and “survived the process of destruc-

tion” ( A, 277). Thus they ought to function as meaningful signs, mementos

from a forgotten realm that appear to those in the present rich with the signi-

cance of their rescue. Stuck in a perpetual impassivity, suspended in a time

outside time, however, these objects have no such capacity:

What, I asked myself, said Austerlitz, might be the signicance of the river

never rising from any source, never owing out into any sea but always back

into itself, what was the meaning of veverka, the squirrel forever perched in

the same position, or of the ivory-coloured porcelain group of a hero on

horseback turning to look back, as his steed rears up on its hindquarters, in

order to raise up with his outstretched left arm an innocent girl already

bereft of her last hope . . . ? ( A, 276)

In this passage, Sebald blurs the distinction between word and object: “what

was the meaning of veverka [the name], the squirrel forever perched in the

same position [the thing]?” The result is that the Czech language itself—such

words as veverka, which Austerlitz dredges up from childhood—come to

seem as incapable of communicating any organic connection between past

and present, as the mute remnants in the window. Indeed, to draw a parallelbetween Austerlitz’s Czech and the out-of-time presence of the still life and

nature morte is also to name the particular quality of melancholia or, rather,

the form that melancholia takes here: placeless and timeless, dislocated yet

immemorial, both are signs of what has been lost but cannot nd its resting

place. In short, Austerlitz might have recovered his mother tongue, but what

does the recovery mean and how might it release him from the trauma of loss?

The question is unanswerable, and for Sebald, as dedicated melancholic, it

needs to stay this way. For what is dangerous about recollecting a buried lan-guage, he suggests, is not that it provokes anxieties about the past but precisely

that it gives the illusion of having settled them.

Indeed, warning the reader not to infer from the “mother tongue” any

real guarantee of identity, Sebald also takes care not to present Austerlitz’s

recuperation of Czech as a reconciliation in the manner of a national return.

And, in a book that continually suggests that any singularity in language is a

historically invested aspiration and thus does not contain the material truths of

history, Sebald’s specic choice of Czech here is signicant. For when František

Palacký and his generation of Bohemian intellectuals sought the legitimation

for a modern nation-state in the mid-nineteenth century, it was Czech that

became the focus of their political mobilization. Following Josef Jungmann’s

New German Critique





33. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Contrasting Ethnic Nationalisms: Eastern Central Europe,” in

Language and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Stephen Baker and Cathie Carmichael (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), 210.

proclamation that “our nationality is in the language,” they argued that any

state that had its center in Prague should be a homogeneous community of

Czech speakers, a characterization that involved declaring the region’s Ger-

man speakers “a permanent alien element.”33 It is perhaps with knowledge of

the specic linguistic imperatives of Czech nationalism that Sebald thwarts

any unproblematic sense of return by revealing that Austerlitz was, in fact,

brought up bilingually. Rather than make him resemble Kafka, however—that

literary revenant and exemplar of the archive of European modernity whom

Sebald frequently invokes—he bypasses the politics of Czech-German rela-

tions by making Austerlitz’s other language not German but French. Indeed,

much is made of the fact that Věra, the woman who now reveals to Austerlitz

the hidden history of his childhood, had been a student of Romance languageswith his mother at Prague University and had spoken French to him as they

spent their days walking in the city’s boulevards, parks, and gardens.

But French is not presented here as a language that would delimit iden-

tity. As suggested earlier, it has always registered a form of cosmopolitan inter-

nationalism. In the imaginations of Austerlitz’s parents, who “both had a spe-

cial fondness for all things French” ( A, 217), the language seems to have

promoted a kind of productive mobility, an attachment to movement itself

against any rationalizing relation to territory. While for his mother, a provin-cial actress and enthusiastic reader of Balzac, France seems to have repre-

sented a “colourful” world of aesthetic experiment and pleasure, his father, as

Věra tells him, was “a life-long republican, and had dreamt of making Czecho-

slovakia an island of freedom in the midst of the tide of Fascism then inexora-

bly spreading throughout Europe” ( A, 217–18). Thus, by presenting the young

Austerlitz as bilingual, Sebald refutes the idea that the Babel of his later life,

his existence within various states of linguistic complexity, is merely the reex

of historical catastrophe. It is also a prescription that has to be taken seriously:

indeed, in a text that revisits a world in which the concept of cosmopolitan-

ism was to become a byword for the “degenerate” and Jewish, the valuing of

bilingualism itself functions as a symbolic commitment to the double and the

divided, to what cannot be readily reduced to the politics of propaganda.

It is clear from the outset, however, that the ultimate reduction has

already happened. As if in a grotesque parody of Edenic plenitude, a disaster

fueled by a ready-made, self-speaking language has produced the ultimate

New German Critique




22 Mapping Babel

34. Theodor W. Adorno, Negat ive Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,

1973), 362.

35. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft; Geschichte,

Soziologie, Psychologie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004).

36. For an extensive discussion of Nazi jargon, see Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third

Reich, LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook , trans. Martin Brady (London: Athlone,

2000).37. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A

Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press, 2003), 146–62.

equivalence of word and thing, and, with it, what Theodor W. Adorno calls the

ultimate ratio of “pure identity as death.”34 Indeed, it is with a dead inevita-

bility that Austerlitz goes to H. G. Adler’s monumental work, Theresienstadt,

1941–1945,

a scrupulously detailed account of the establishment, infrastruc-

ture, and social organization of the Czech ghetto.35 It is in the German of

Adler’s text that Austerlitz for the rst time comes across the almost indeci-

pherable language of Nazi administration, “the pseudo-technical jargon gov-

erning everything in Theresienstadt” ( A, 330). It takes Austerlitz a very long

time to make any sense of the “long compounds” that permeate this adminis-

trative register and have “to be unravelled syllable by syllable”: “ Barackenbe-

standteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstätte,

Menagetransportkolonnen, Küchenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihen-untersuchung, and Entwesungsübersiedlung” ( A, 330). That Austerlitz strug-

gles so with these words, battling to disassemble them, is of course a most

painful irony. The neologisms of Nazi technical bureaucracy were invented,

after all, to produce an illusion of transparency, a clarity motivated by the need

to obscure what was taking place in the semidarkness.36 They are words whose

saturation in detail and strategic negotiation between the abstract and the con-

crete functioned to foreclose thought, and with it any access to the conceptual.

Here language, to use Adorno’s formulation, not only expressed a totalizingsystem but gave “asylum” to its simmering irrationality. And in this it con-

rmed the outcome already pregured in the rise of systemic representation

itself, that words should seem to assign meaning with no resistance, no remain-

der, no debt, and no matter what.37

“After Terezín”

But Sebald’s text does not end by diagnosing the fate of rational, communica-

ble language after trauma or by invoking the symbolic equivalents of that lack.

For while the death of Austerlitz’s mother is still hidden behind blind win-

dows and a fortress of compound nouns, and while the effects of Věra’s testi-

New German Critique





mony fall short of any decathectic release, Austerlitz still seems driven to

search for a possible language that for now, at least, lies on the far side of pres-

ent impossibilities. How, then, can Austerlitz end? How can the narrative stop

if Austerlitz’s recovered memory does not allow him to relinquish trauma but

only reunites him with sorrow—and, beyond this, with the old malady of chas-

ing a language that is never attainable and always elsewhere? Sebald’s decision

is to dramatize the process whereby Austerlitz nds it within himself to live on

and leave the frame of the reader’s attention.

Back in Paris, Austerlitz suffers a second breakdown and is hospitalized

in the famous Salpêtrière (the refuge, too, of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte Lau-

rids Brigge, another scholar-hero, lost traveler, and subject of high modernist

anxiety). The symptom of Austerlitz’s new crisis is not the clinical stupor ofaphasia but a hysterical “babbling . . . in various languages” ( A, 377), his inabil-

ity to assimilate the past expressed now as linguistic excess, speech driven to

the level of panic. If Austerlitz’s verbalizations, his babblings, are still too

unstable to coagulate into signs, however, Sebald offers him a moment in which

his imaginary may live, if only provisionally. Walking about the city, Auster-

litz encounters a small traveling circus and watches the performance. The cir-

cus ends with a piece of music, strange to his ears, which originates, he thinks,

“somewhere very distant” yet whose melody also recalls something moreproximate: “a long-forgotten Welsh hymn . . . , the revolutions of a waltz, a

ländler theme, or the slow sound of a funeral march” ( A, 383). Extraordinarily,

it is here that Austerlitz, for the rst time, uses the word happiness:

I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me . . . ,

nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain

or expanding with happiness for the rst time in my life. Why certain tonal

colours, subtleties of key and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind

is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never under-stand. ( A, 383–84)

Austerlitz has spent his life searching for a language that might hold the weight

of unbearable experience, and it is signicant that Sebald uses an encounter

with music to suggest that this search characterizes the state of the survivor.

Novelli’s “AAAAAAA” is again important here. For Sebald, the sound issues

from the torture cells of Breendonk: what gives form to the distress of the

inexpressible. But it is also the language that Novelli learns in South America:

a speech free of reason and therefore proper to a history that reason cannot

measure. In short, the “AAAAAAA” at once articulates the desire and the

New German Critique




24 Mapping Babel


39. Ibid., 68, 72.

40. This section’s heading is taken from Michael Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,”in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald , ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New

York: Seven Stories, 2007), 83.

capacity to respond and points to the vacuity of any claim to signication. The

music that Austerlitz hears at the circus alludes to this.

For Rousseau, the original language was sung rather than spoken: “The

rst discourses were the rst songs. The periodic recurrences and measures

of rhythm, the melodious modulations of accent, gave birth to poetry and

music along with language.”38 Austerlitz’s encounter with the circus musi-

cians is evocative of that primal language, but, far from constituting a

redemptive moment, it reunites him with its loss. It is this loss that Rousseau

himself talks about when he asserts that the entry into history resulted in the

separation and hence decline of both language and music, the former becom-

ing the servant of reason and losing the “passionate quality that made it so

singable,” the latter nding itself “deprived of the moral power it had yieldedwhen it was the twofold voice of nature.”39 Austerlitz’s ambiguous response

to the music, the fact that he cannot be sure whether his heart is expanding

with pleasure or contracting in pain, is grounded in this narrative: while

what he hears is reminiscent of the original fusion of speech and music, he

knows that fusion now to be impossible. Neither an afrmation nor a nega-

tion, music here is that strange condition in which Austerlitz endures, caught

in that past-present state of waiting without term, an incessant return, like a

vigil or the state of survivorship.

“At One Remove, at Two Removes”

Language and exile intersect in at least two ways.40 On the one hand, language

is a marker of territory, and so movement across territory inevitably produces

a range of linguistic problems: How does one make one’s life in a new lan-

guage? What happens to memory and identity in a new linguistic space? On

the other hand, language itself has often been seen as exilic: its supposed inad-

equacy, its systemic insufciency, has repeatedly—even paradigmatically—

been seen as involved with the loss of some original “home,” some rupture in

history that has left the human outside, excluded, and beyond. If this is the

imaginary of Babel, it is also a critique that from Rousseau to Benjamin ties

language into the disasters of modernity. In Austerlitz Sebald thinks these

two phenomena together. In a book whose central character has undergone

New German Critique





41. In the original German, a similar stylistic awkwardness means that the question of report-

age becomes a preoccupation of the text. On occasions where one might expect a more transparent

structure—indirect speech marked by the subjunctive or, conversely, direct speech marked with

inverted commas—the use of unpunctuated direct speech forces the reader to work at placing each

speaker in relation to what is said. See, e.g., the long sentence beginning “Es war das Interesse . . .”

in W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), 226.

the emblematic disaster, the inadequacy of language to experience brings

the myth of linguistic failure into the catastrophe of twentieth-century his-

tory. And it is within the eld of this dialectic that Sebald narrates Austerlitz’s

experiences across particular languages. Thus it is not just his aphasia or

desperate babbling but also his confrontations with English, French, Welsh,

Czech, and German—their territories and traditions, their exclusivities and

entwinements—that map Austerlitz’s life in exile. Here the gure of doubling

is key. Throughout the book Sebald forces particular languages into agonis-

tic relations that, in their own terms, replicate and remake the primary strug-

gle between language as it seizes and rationalizes the world and those expo-

sures to trauma of which language can give no account.

But if doubleness is what structures Austerlitz’s history in language, italso bears on the status of the anonymous rst-person narrator, a gure associ-

ated with, but not identical to, Sebald himself. After all, the reader knows noth-

ing of Austerlitz except what has been revealed in his reported conversations

with the “I” who tells his story (as, indeed, Austerlitz knows nothing of him-

self except what he has assembled through the reportage of others). This narra-

tive strategy—the secondhandedness of all that is given—suggests that the

insistent focus on language is as much an obsession of the narrator as a symp-

tom of the protagonist’s condition. That this might be so becomes especiallyplausible in the light of Sebald’s self-conscious prose style, the sense that the

narrator’s own use of language is relentlessly considered and thick with inven-

tion. Readers of the English version will be struck, for example, by the oddness

of the double quotatives that crowd the page whenever the narrator reports the

protagonist’s conversations with others: “I knew him, said Veřa, so Austerlitz

told me” ( A, 236); “None the less, said Veřa, Austerlitz continued” ( A, 236);

“From time to time, so Veřa recollected, said Austerlitz” ( A, 237); “Veřa went

on, said Austerlitz, to tell me” ( A, 237). Against the temporal grain of conven-

tional historicism, this stylistic decision marks the layering of telling to a point

that strains one’s tolerance, imposing a determined awkwardness on whatever

is rediscovered and avowing history while setting it always at two or three

removes.41 In this, it relates to the broader question of what has been called

New German Critique




26 Mapping Babel

42. On Marianne Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory” as it relates to Sebald, see Santner, On Crea-

turely Life, 160–67.

“postmemory”: in this case, how does a German writer, born in 1944 and so

part of a generation for whom the catastrophe has always been a matter of

reportage, attempt either to reconstruct the primary event or to deal with the

mediations that time and its passing have already produced? 42 This, of course,

is Sebald’s condition, and the narrator’s linguistic self-consciousness—the tor-

tuous syntax and relentless foregrounding of second- and thirdhand speech—

can be read as an enactment of this other biography. What is more, by acknowl-

edging such a partial identification, one can read the narrator’s focus on

Austerlitz’s life among languages as itself an allusion to the author’s predica-

ment. Might Sebald’s decision to leave Germany be seen as an enactment of

the state of postmemory: an attempt to translate the original temporal distan-

tiation into a spatial one and make exile the analogue of the Nachgeboren?And might the narrator’s xation on Austerlitz’s linguistic being be seen as an

allusion to the condition of an author writing in self-imposed exile?

Seen in this way, the book’s strange linguistic states take on an added

resonance. They are at once the symptom of Austerlitz’s history and an object

of fascination for the narrator, who, as a Sebaldian gure, is himself caught up

in a linguistic problematic. Indeed, like Austerlitz’s aphasia and babbling, the

narrator’s obsessions are a consequence not only of history but of how the

reader responds, and keeps on responding, to it. Austerlitz does not relinquishthe commitment to speak and, while it suggests that language, like memory,

has to operate at one or two removes, its commitment is precisely to the under-

side of what can be said and heard. Austerlitz is about all that cannot, yet must,

nd its expressive form: a communication without the clear exchange of signs,

a primordial and violent need to speak joined to the impossibility of either

mourning or forgetting—or of knowing directly.

New German Critique

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