“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”
Part One
The narrator recounts his encounters with Jacques Austerlitz, a man he first meets in the 1960s at the Antwerp Central Station. Austerlitz, an architectural historian, is fascinated by the station’s grandeur and begins sharing his life story in fragments. He describes his childhood in Wales, where he was raised by Calvinist foster parents, the Elias couple, after being sent from Prague on a Kindertransport to escape the Nazis. Austerlitz has no memory of his early years or his real parents.
Part Two
Austerlitz delves deeper into his past, recalling his academic career and his growing obsession with uncovering his origins. He visits Prague and discovers traces of his mother, Agáta, a former opera singer who was deported to Theresienstadt. He also learns about his father, Maximilian, who fled to Paris and likely perished. Austerlitz becomes fixated on architectural spaces—train stations, fortresses, and libraries—as metaphors for memory and loss.
Part Three
In his later years, Austerlitz suffers a mental breakdown, overwhelmed by the weight of his discoveries. He travels to Theresienstadt, where he finds a film clip of his mother in the Nazi propaganda film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. The book ends with Austerlitz wandering through London’s Liverpool Street Station, haunted by the ghosts of history and his own unresolved past.
Key Ideas
- The fragility and unreliability of memory.
- The psychological impact of historical trauma.
- Architecture as a vessel for collective and personal history.
- The search for identity amid displacement.
- The persistence of the past in the present.
Who should read this book?
- Readers interested in Holocaust literature and historical memory.
- Those who appreciate meditative, philosophical narratives.
- Fans of Sebald’s unique blend of fiction, biography, and photography.