Recollective Processes and the “Topography of Forgetting” in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
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Abstract
Recollective Processes and the “Topography of Forgetting” in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
Employing recent conceptualizations of cultural memory (Assmann, Huyssen, Crewe), the article examines the poetics of remembering and forgetting in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001). Displaced from his native Prague with one of the Red Cross “Kindertransporte” of 1937/38, Sebald’s protagonist leads a life that is characterized by geographical displacement as well as by suppressed and inaccessible childhood memories. Horstkotte reads Austerlitz’ search for his past and the novel’s topographic and archaeological view of memory as a metafictional and intermedial model for overcoming amnesia on a cultural level.