Austerlitz

Austerlitz searches for this lost film for months, thinking only it can give him a true sense for life in Theresienstadt. Finally, he obtains a copy of the film—entitled Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City)—through the Federal Archives in Berlin. At first watch, the rapid stream of strangers shown leading ostensibly regular lives overwhelms Austerlitz:

[B]ooks being borrowed from the library by gentlemen of soigné appearance […] kitchen gardens neatly laid out where several dozen people were raking the vegetable beds [...] whilst at the end of the day […] many of them just [took] their ease at their windows, arms folded, in a way once common at the onset of dusk (262).

Austerlitz is devastated when the film ends after only 14 minutes—it appears incomplete. He tries to examine every face in it in search of his mother, but the film moves too quickly, so he has a slow-motion copy made. The slowed version transforms the images, fraying the outlines of the inmates’ bodies and weighting them as they work, making their tasks look much more laborious. The sound is also transformed: A merry polka becomes a grotesque dirge, and the narrator’s forced tone becomes a growl reminiscent of the ceaseless roars of the lions and tigers in the Paris zoo.

During a section of the film showing the performance of a piece of music composed in the camp—Pavel Haas’s “Study for String Orchestra”—Austerlitz spots a young woman in the crowd resembling his mother. The woman (pictured)—who appears for only four seconds near the corner of the frame, partly obscured by the timestamp—wears a high-necked dress with a three-string necklace and a white flower in her hair. Austerlitz thinks he both recognizes her and doesn’t. He rewatches the four seconds repeatedly, “the hundredths of a second flash[ing] by so fast that you cannot read and capture them” (266).

Back with the narrator, after falling into a long silence (which happens often), Austerlitz continues his narrative as the two walk from the cemetery to Liverpool Street Station. A year before this meeting with the narrator, Austerlitz returned to Prague for the second time, where he established a pension fund for Vera. He and Vera walked to a star-shaped house in the middle of a game park in Liboc that used to be the summer residence of Archduke Ferdinand and was one of Agáta and Maximilian’s favorite places to visit outside Prague.

At Liverpool Street Station, Austerlitz gives the narrator a photo portrait of Agáta (pictured) that he found in the Prague theatrical archives. Austerlitz plans to return to Paris to search for traces of his father. He also hopes to remember the time he lived there, when, despite having escaped his oppressive life in England, he still felt he didn’t belong—in Paris or anywhere else on earth.

A few months after the narrator’s trip with Austerlitz to the Liverpool Street Station, he receives an invitation to visit Austerlitz at his new address in Paris.

The narrator arrives in Paris during a heatwave that traps a dome of leaded gas fumes over the city. He meets Austerlitz at a bistro, in which a giant TV displays clouds of ash stifling Indonesia. Austerlitz is renting an apartment on the same street as his father’s last-known address. (In the text, there appears a full-page photo of a small apartment building with a faded advertisement on its exterior.) Austerlitz is frustrated because he has failed to find anything about his father’s last days in Paris. He tells the narrator that, when he walks the streets, he has the persistent feeling his father is going to appear around a corner.

Austerlitz wonders if his father was rounded up during the first police raid in Paris, in August 1941, or the second—called Le Grande Rafle—in July 1942, when the French gendarmes abducted 13,000 Jewish citizens, over 100 of whom died by suicide before they could be taken. Austerlitz also imagines his father still in Paris, by some miracle.

Austerlitz sometimes feels time distort when he sees a secluded courtyard that appears untouched by time on one of his walks through Paris: “the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion” (273). When this happens, the present no longer appears to separate the past from the future; instead, the present, past, and future appear to exist simultaneously. Austerlitz wonders whether, just as events in the future draw us to them (such as when we arrive at an appointment), the past also exerts a gravitational pull, whether “we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time” (274).

To illustrate this point, Austerlitz recalls visiting the Jewish section of the Cimetière de Montparnasse. There, he found a mausoleum belonging to the family of his Parisian landlord from his student days, Amélie Cerf. In the cramped mausoleum, he traced her lineage from her ancestor, Hippolyte Cerf (né Hippolyt Hirsch), to her parents Hugo and Lucie, who died after being deported in 1944. Austerlitz now wonders whether Amélie was the last of her family—whether there was no one left to memorialize her.