The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.19 (2015): 88-105

Thresholds of Remembrance:
A study of the Freudian uncanny in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
SUZUKI Yoshiko

Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo

1. Introduction: Key Aspects of W. G. Sebald’s Works
I would like to discuss in this paper some remarkable arts dealing with memory by theGerman author, W. G. Sebald, with reference to the visual images included in his works. W. G.
Sebald is known as one of the most important authors who were engaged with the question of
how to describe histories and memories in the post-Holocaust period. His works deal with the
problem of how to retrieve memories of survivors who suffer from trauma and memories of thedead. He was born in 1944 in Allgäu, Germany during the War. He can be regarded as one of socalled 1968 generation, or ‘Nachgeborene’ in German. In
the late 1960’s, he migrated to England, and settled in1969 in East Anglia, where he lived until his death in
2001. His major works, sometimes referred to as ‘prose
fiction’, are characterized by his peculiar textual style,that is, by a kind of hybrid blending of novel, essay,
memoir, and travel writing. Sebald inserts images suchas photographs or reprinted images into these prose
works. He wrote four works of prose fiction in all: Vertigo(in German, Schwindel. Gefühle.) published in 1990, The
Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) published in 1992,

fig. 1The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn) published in
1995, and Austerlitz published in 2001.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of thevisual images in his prose fiction is that they have no captions, except very rare and special cases. Therefore, especially in his fiction, no rational or precise correspondence
is assured between text and images. Thus, the black andwhite pictures like old photographs seem sometimes
shadowy, as if they contain secrets. He usually uses one
image per page, or sometimes a combination of a few
images. Occasionally, one finds double-page spreads. In
this study, to give you, the reader, an impression of hiswork, I will show only two pictures of his prose fiction[fig. 1, A63][fig. 2, A207] [1]. There is a visual analogy
between the images, even though they are placed so far

fig. 2

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apart from each other in the book and hardly have any relation with each other in the story.

2. Thresholds of Remembrance
Now let’s move on to Section 2. In this paper, I engage in Sebald's fourth and last work ofprose fiction, Austerlitz. Here, I want to emphasize two points. First, images of closed doors andwindows appear repetitively. Second, they become at the same time a threshold or a passage,
through which lost memories return to us.
In Austerlitz, the narrator ‘I’ is a listener and the writer of protagonist Jacques Austerlitz’s—
the Jewish title-character’s—narrative. ‘I’ runs into Austerlitz at a bar in the old station hotel next
to Liverpool Street Station in London after about twenty years since their first encounter at
Antwerp Central Station in Belgium. Austerlitz confesses to the narrator his life story. He wassent from Prague to England at the age of four by ‘Kindertransport’, in English the ‘RefugeeChildren Movement’, which occurred shortly before
the outbreak of the Second World War. At that time,
little Austerlitz arrived at Liverpool Street Station. In
all his adult life, Austerlitz forgets his mother tongueand loses his childhood memories from his life in
Prague. In the early 1990’s, some years before heturns sixty, he travels to Prague, following a clue froma dim memory of the long abandoned past. In Prague,
he reunites with his old babysitter, Věra, and helearns the truth about his parents and his childhood.
He then visits Terezín, where the Theresienstadt
concentration camp, also referred to as the Ghetto,
was set up and which functioned as a transit point to
Auschwitz. His mother Agáta was transported to the
Theresienstadt concentration camp, and from there,
she was finally sent to Auschwitz.
Let us examine some of the photographs insertedin Austerlitz. These pictures taken in the 1990’s,
probably by the Author, Sebald himself, show imagesof Terezín [fig. 3, A269 above] [fig. 4, A271] [fig. 5, A272
above] [fig. 6, A272 below] [fig. 7, A273] [fig. 8, A274][fig. 9, A275]. Images of closed doors and windows offig. 3 (above)run-down, ruinous houses appear one after another.
The following quote corresponds to these images:
What I found most uncanny of all, however, were
gates and doorways of Terezín, all of them, as I
thought I sensed, obstructing access to a darkness never yet penetrated, […]. [2]fig. 490

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fig. 5 (above), fig. 6 (below)

fig. 7

fig. 8

fig. 9

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fig. 10

According to Freud, because things hide something behind them, they are uncanny. A series ofsimilar type images, the images of closed doors and windows represent a function of hiding or
screening. Directly after this sequence of closed doors and windows, a contrasting type of image
is presented, one that provides a strange contrast. That is some photographs of display windowsof an antique shop, ‘ANTIKOS BAZAR’ in Terezín. Austerlitz tells the narrator ‘I’ that the insideof the shop was supposed to be deep, where nobody appeared, and a pile of junk was heaped.
Through these display windows, we can see only a very small part of the junk [fig. 10, A276–277].
To quote from the text:
And then [inside the display window] there was the stuffed squirrel, already moth-eaten
here and there, perched on the stump in a showcase the size of a shoebox, which had its
beady butten [‘gläsern’ in the German original, which means ‘glass’] eye implacably fixed onme, and whose Czech name —veverka— I now recalled like the name of a long-lost friend. [3]The closeup photographs of these windows distinctly show the optical reflection and transmissionof the glass [fig. 11, A278][fig. 12, A280]. Namely, the display windows are optically transmissive
and now we can see forgotten things inside. Here is found another function of photographs in
Sebald’s works. Through an analysis of all these images of doors and windows, I argue that thefig. 11

fig. 1292

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photographs set in Austerlitz operate as covering images that prevent us from remembering
memories and generating historical insights. But I also argue that they simultaneously function
as thresholds or doorways through which something forgotten and repressed returns.

3. Imagery and the Return of Things Repressed
In this section, I’d like first to examine a certain group of the images emerging in Austerlitz
and their visual resemblances. From beyond the display window in Terezín, the glass eyes of the
stuffed animal have been fixed on the protagonist. In a traditional analogy to the body, thehuman eye is compared to the window. The photographs of the antique shop’s display windowsthat appear after the sequence of closed doors and windows have, in a sense, now opened likeeyelids, showing us the insides. And now, a set of photographs is inserted at the beginning ofAusterlitz as a kind of frontispiece to the universe of the story. When we turn over the first pageof the book, we notice that the eyes of animals and of humans gaze at us, the readers [fig. 13, A7].
Just like the glass eyes of the stuffed animal in the display window, the images now gaze back at
the subject viewing them. To add a little more detail, the first two pictures show the eyes ofnocturnal animals in ‘Nocturama’ of Antwerp Zoo. The person in the last picture is Jewish
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is said to bear a resemblance to the protagonist,
Austerlitz. Figure 14 [A15 above] shows the dome of Antwerp Central Station in Antwerp,

fig. 13

fig. 14 (above), fig. 15 (below)

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fig. 16
fig. 17

Belgium which was built in the nineteenth century. The
concept of this dome comes from the Pantheon in Rome.
At the level of the story, the eyes of living things and thedome of the station are independent from one another.
Despite this, when we look at the picture of the dome
shortly after we gaze at the pictures of the human andanimal eyes, the dome does give off the peculiar
impression that it is actually gazing back at us. For on
the top of the great dome is an oculus open. The word
‘oculus’ means the round window, and literally, the eye.
Through this oculus, the light penetrates into the dome,
just as the light streams through the pupil into the cupolaof an eye socket. To the image of the dome of Antwerp
Central Station is attached, as a kind of footnote, apicture of a fire in Lucerne Station, showing its domed
building sending up volumes of smoke [fig. 15, A15
below]. After several pictures, including one of the
fig. 18
Vauban Fortress, Saarlouis [fig. 16, A22], and one of the
Law Courts of Brussels which also has a massive dome [fig. 17, A42], we now see the high glassdome in the Great Eastern Hotel [fig. 18, A62] next to Liverpool Street Station in London. Thisis the station where Austerlitz arrived from Prague by ‘Kindertransport’. An eyespot of the glassdome looks at the reader, as do the oculus of the dome at Antwerp Central Station or the eyes of
the animals at the beginning of the book. Halfway through the story, Austerlitz visits Prague, in94

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fig. 20

fig. 19order to find his lost memories and the tracesof his family. Figure 19 [A208] shows the glassceiling of the octagonal cupola of the Central
State Archive in Prague, which Austerlitz visits
immediately upon arrival at Prague, searchingfor clues to his past. Here he gets an importantfig. 21piece of information about his mother. Onceagain, the glazed oculus looks down at thereader. Figure 20 [A217] shows a mosaic on the floor at the entrance to his old home in Prague.
This mosaic has an eyespot like the nocturnal animals we have just seen in the previous pictures.
Moreover, this eyespot is surrounded by pointed petals and it bears some structural resemblance
to the Vauban’s star fort [fig. 16, A22]. Figure 21 [A331] is a picture of the flower bed of a nursery
garden in Romford, London, where Austerlitz undergoes therapy after being discharged from a
hospital where he receives treatment for physical injuries sustained in an accident caused byposttraumatic stress. The picture shows seedlings with rosette leaves. These leaves look like therosette mosaic in the previous picture. The image of seedlings gives us a sense of healing, if weread its corresponding section of the text. In the original German text, the equivalent for theword ‘seedling’ is ‘Auge’, which primarily means ‘eye’, and also derivatively, ‘oculus’. When weturn over this page, we suddenly come across a double-page spread of the layout of‘Theresienstadt Ghetto’, an old star fort with pointed bastions [fig. 22, A332–333]. In shape, it isanalogous to the mosaic and the seedlings I have just mentioned. (Here, it should be pointed outthat the star-shaped fortification of Saarlouis [fig. 16, A22] is a precursor to or prefiguration of
the image of Theresienstadt.) But this figure of a plan of Theresienstadt with eerie black of stains,
now covers our entire field of vision. The eye of ‘Theresienstadt Ghetto’ now opens and gaze backat the reader/spectator. In other words, the rosette leaves, the rosette mosaic and the star-shaped95

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fig. 22

fortification of ‘Theresienstadt Ghetto’ contain astark visual analogy. Owing to this last image, theother two come to take on opposing senses ofhealing and violence. The image of the seedling,which assumes a sense of healing, suddenly turns
over to an image of the concentration camp. Thissudden turn in meaning and moral value instils in
the reader/spectator a shock, for such a turn breaks
out regardless of semantic contents or certain moral
codes. The last image I want to show in this paper isthe face of an anonymous actress, believed to be hislost mother, Agáta [fig. 23, A357]. Austerlitz finds
this clipping among old documents in an archive inPrague. But even through this female figure hecannot restore his damaged memory of his mother.
The shadowy picture gazing at the reader/spectator
resonates with the images of eyes of animals and of
humans placed at the beginning of the book. This
picture taken from a piece of archival material
functions as a covering image that intercepts
Austerlitz’s remembrance, in the same way as theclosed doors and windows I have analysed in the

fig. 2396

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preceding section. But now in her eyes we see feeble spots of light. This picture operates at a
psychic level, that is to say, also as a kind of screen onto which something returns from darknessof the history, from oblivion; just as the light penetrate into the domes from the outside throughan oculus.

4. Austerlitz and Freud’s Analysis in ‘The “Uncanny”’
Austerlitz’s mother, Agáta was an opera- and operetta singer and played ‘Olympia’ on her
first stage in his hometown, Prague in the autumn of 1938. ‘Olympia’ is a notorious female
automaton who appears in The Tales of Hoffmann, an opera by Jacques Offenbach, after whom
Jacques Austerlitz is named [4]. The original story of the Act of ‘Olympia’ is based on ‘The
Sandman’, a famous German novel written by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. It is not byaccident or fancy that Sebald chose the character of Olympia for Agáta: Austerlitz searches for awoman wearing the costume of Olympia as a sign of his mother—whose face he cannot
remember—by scrutinizing a Nazi propaganda film shot in Theresienstadt concentration camp:Terezin: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area (1944), directed by Kurt Gerron,a German Jewish actor and film director [5], because Austerlitz has read a book in which theauthor, H. G. Adler, one of the survivors, writes that The Tales of Hoffmann was acted out in
Theresienstadt as part of a ‘beautification campaign’ [6]. From this context, one can understand
why Agáta must have played the role of Olympia. But I think furthermore that the choice ofOlympia for Agáta by Sebald has a immanent necessity for the construction of Austerlitz.
Originally, Olympia is an automaton in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
introduces the concept of the ‘uncanny’ in his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919), and there theanalysis of ‘The Sandman’ is one of cores. In what follows, I argue that Austerlitz fits eerily into
the concept of the uncanny by Freud, and then speculate its reason. Now, what is the uncanny?
According to Freud, the uncanny is something old and familiar which has been forgotten throughthe process of repression.
[…]we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its
opposite, das Unheimliche[…]; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, butsomething which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become
alienated from it only through the process of repression. [7]Freud also says that ‘[…]we can trace back to infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such
similar recurrences’ [8]. And he tells:[…] it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion torepeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very natureof the instincts —, a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending
to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in
the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of thecourse taken by the analysis of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for theThresholds of Remembrance

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discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as
uncanny. [9]‘Such similar recurrences’ are caused by the inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ [= repetition
compulsion], which is a primitive function of the human mind and which has power over thepleasure principle. Then, would it be possible to believe that the eye images in Austerlitz serveas ‘such similar recurrences’, caused by the repetition compulsion? Freud argues in this essaythat E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ is a typical example to explain how the childhood trauma
represses a person perpetually, and how something repressed returns to the person as theuncanny. In ‘The “Uncanny”’, Freud finds the theme of eyes and optical wears that appears
repetitively in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’. I give you some examples. First, the eyes of theprotagonist, ‘Nathanael’. He is haunted by his traumatic childhood memory, possibly thenightmare in which ‘Coppelius’ violently bent and twisted his limb like a doll’s; Nathanaelregards Coppelius as the avatar of the Sandman, an evil character from a nursery rhyme. Since
then, Nathanael seems to unconsciously obsess that his eyes might be enucleated by the evil
Coppelius/Sandman. Second, the glass eyes of the female automaton ‘Olympia’ in ‘The Sandman’whom Nathanael falls in love, and whose role Austerlitz’s mother plays in Prague. Third, atelescope, in German ‘Fernglas’, which Nathanael buys from a strange peddler named ‘Coppola’.
Fourth, a group or a variation of images of the eye. ‘Coppelius’ and ‘Coppola’ are the names of
the characters whom Nathanael fears and identifies as the same person. According to Freud, thename ‘Coppelius’ comes from ‘coppella’ which means the crucible in Italian. And it comes also
from ‘coppo’ which means the eye socket in Italian [10]. I add one more variation to these Freud’s
indication: ‘Coppa’ means the cup. Coppola sounds somehow like ‘Kuppel’ in German for thedome, and is etymologically related to the word ‘cupola’ (i.e. a dome-shaped structure on the topof a dome or larger roof; dome-shaped organs like the eye socket). From these four points in the
Freud’s essay, I would like to examine the photographs of human and animal eyes as well as glass
windows contained in Austerlitz. It is important, likewise, that the domes and their glasses
appear repeatedly. Further, in Austerlitz, there are several mentions of optical gear such as eye
glasses, a camera or a telescope. It is noteworthy that in the story, the narrator ‘I’ meets Austerlitz
by sheer accident, about twenty years after their first meeting, at the bar in the Great Eastern
Hotel next to Liverpool Street Station (See Figure 18 [A62], which shows an eyespot on the glassdome of the station), as the narrator, who has suffered from eye trouble, is on his way home after
visiting a Czech eye doctor. The structure of Austerlitz—built from the levels of the narrator andthe protagonist—is similar to that of ‘The Sandman’, which is typical of the frame story genre of
the nineteenth century. It is the narrator ‘I’ who arranges Austerlitz’s photographs, edits
Austerlitz’s narrative and reconstructs his entire story, as the narrator does in ‘The Sandman’.
The narrator ‘I’ discovers or possibly highlights for the reader the recurrence of certain types ofimages by laying out Austerlitz’s photos while he relates them to episodes and details inAusterlitz’s narrative. It is necessary to clarify, however, that, unlike with ‘The Sandman’, it is
not Austerlitz but the narrator ‘I’, who is anxious about the loss of his eyes. If we compare ‘The
Sandman’ and Austerlitz, it becomes clear that in Austerlitz, various images related to the eye
emerge one after the other in a similar way that Freud pointed out in ‘The “Uncanny”’. That is,

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human and animal eyes are transformed into the oculus of domes such as those in Antwerp
Central Station, the station hotel next to Liverpool Street Station and Central State Archive inPrague; into that eyespot of the mosaic; into the rosette leaf seedlings (In the German originaltext is used the word ‘Auge’ that means the eye); and finally into the star-shaped Theresienstadt
Ghetto. Freud contended that the repetition compulsion in Nathanael’s life is exerted by his
castration complex, and that images of the eye emerge as the displacement of the male genitalorgan. If we were to apply Freud’s theory literally to the images of the eyes in Austerlitz, it could
be said that Austerlitz’s perpetual anxiety, his behavioural patterns and the recurrence of eye
motifs are caused precisely by his castration complex. According to Freud, an eye socket
represents castration. For instance, when Austerlitz has a hysterical epilepsy seizure, he iscarried to Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris where he temporarily suffers from memory loss. Right
before his seizure, he sees an ‘Indo-Chinese woman with an alarmingly thin face and eyes sunk
deep in their sockets’ [11]. Austerlitz’s disempowerment which is associated with the hollow eye
sockets of the woman can be interpreted as the displacement of castration. In Freud’sinterpretation of ‘The Sandman’, he mentions that the castration complex results in a splittingof the ‘father imago’. Austerlitz also seems to contain such a splitting: the ambivalence of a good
father (Austerlitz’s real, long-lost father) and an evil symbolic father who rules over and destroys
his own family, that is, the Nazi regime. In these regards, Freud’s castration complex seems to
be an idea with great relevance for the interpretation of Austerlitz. However, does such arecurrence of the eye-motif in Austerlitz even arise in the very same way as Freud claims in ‘The
“Uncanny”’, namely, only due to a castration complex? Freud says in the ‘The “Uncanny”’:
It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about
the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former
Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a timeand in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a
man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place
is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s
genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch,familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-’] is token of repression. [12]Freud considers the female genital organs as the object of the Eros. However, the matter is notquite as simple as he suggests. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), Freud proposes his
hypothesis of the ‘death drive’, which became one of major turning points of his theories. ‘The
“Uncanny”’ and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ are intimately linked: In the course of writing‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud began to rewrite the old version of ‘The “Uncanny”’ andcompleted it. In fact, ‘The “Uncanny”’ was published in the autumn of 1919, before ‘Beyond thePleasure Principle’. According to Freud, the death drive that causes a repetition compulsion is‘the most universal endeavour of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the
inorganic world’ [13]. The death drive, owing to a primitive mechanism in the mind, expresses
itself as aggressiveness, and if it turns inward on the self, it will manifest as self-destructive
impulses. Freud even refers to ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in ‘The “Uncanny”’. Therefore,

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these two essays can be considered as counterparts. In ‘The “Uncanny”’, Freud seems to thinkthat this ‘homing’ desire to return to the mother’s womb results from the Eros. Namely, themother is the object of the Eros in the context of the castration complex. Freud’s discourse in‘The “Uncanny”’ focuses primarily on the castration complex that arises in the Oedipal period.
However, when put into the context of the repetition compulsion in ‘Beyond the Pleasure
Principle’, the ‘homing’ desire to return to the mother’s womb can also be considered as an
instinct-excitation towards death, viewed from the perspective of the death drive. Therefore, the‘mother’ can be interpreted not only as object of the Eros from the Oedipus complex but also as
object of death drive, namely, as symbol of the death. Otto Rank (1884–1939), one of Freud’s
outstanding pupils, focused on the early mother-infant relationship in the pre-Oedipal period;
he argued that childhood anxieties and neuroses stem from the traumas of the mother-infant
separation at birth. Freud firmly opposed Rank’s theory, which was published as The Trauma ofBirth (1924) [14], because he was afraid that his own theory of the Oedipal complex was, in asense, castrated by Rank’s theory. The book drove a wedge between master and pupil. The lastexcerpt from ‘The “Uncanny”’ written about the uncanniness of female genital organs can be seen
as a presage that his theory of the Oedipal castration complex suffocates and overpowers Rank’s
pre-Oedipal mother-infant relationship theory. Therefore, we cannot naively link the images ofthe eyes, the stars, and the domes in Austerlitz solely to the castration complex; instead, we alsoneed to analyse these images from the perspective of the death drive towards the maternal body.
In this case, the interior spaces of the domed buildings in Austerlitz can be interpreted as womblike areas in which the Eros and the death drive are in conflict, and where the former functions
under the rule of the latter. (For descriptions of domed buildings in Austerlitz that have a womblike character, please refer to my other paper [15].) Even though he has long forgotten this, fouryear-old Austerlitz was held in his mother’s arms under the dome of Prague Main railway stationright before he left for London; he was separated from her and from the domed station—in asense, delivered. Therefore, each domed railway station in the metropolises of Antwerp, London,
Prague and a circus near Austerliz Station in Paris are associated with imageries of the hollow
eye socket and the womb, and they might well be called ‘uncanny homes’ (‘unheimliche Heimat’[16]), forgotten through the process of repression.

5. Intrinsic Characteristics of Visual Images in Austerlitz
In the previous sections, we considered the recurrence of specific types of images inAusterlitz and drew a comparison with Freud’s theories. But we cannot overlook one important
aspect: Freud constructs a textual analysis of ‘The Sandman’, while we intensively analyse thevisual images used in Austerlitz. The visual image has a unique power in that sheer visual
analogies among images have the power to cancel out even semantic contents or moral codes
which each image carries, as shown through the sets of photographs, for example, the seedlings
and the plan of the Ghetto in Section 3. The Rhyme has a similar characteristic, creating asequence of acoustic analogy, overpowering word meanings and violating the flow of textual
meaning. Similarly, the pictures in Austerlitz rhyme visually, linking with each other throughtheir analogies. This raises the following question: how do such visual images function per se100

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and affect the reader/spectator?
At the onset, I detail some of the characteristics of pictures used in Austerlitz. First, These
pictures, as well as those used in Sebald’s other prose fiction, are broadly classified into two
major groups: one is composed of photographs from printed matter: newspapers, magazines,
books, brochures, post cards, ephemera etc.; the other is composed of private photographs, forinstance, from albums or Sebald (or someone he knows) has shot. Sebald uses the printed
material more than the private. Second, before Austerlitz was sent for printing, most of thepicture materials were shot in black and white. Through my recent investigation, I have learned
also that many of the images I have taken up in Section 3 were originally used in printed matter.
Here are sources and bibliographic data for these. The first two pictures (of the eyes of nocturnal
animals, in Figure 13 [A7]) come from a booklet published by the Antwerp Zoo that Sebald
possessed, Nocturama [17]. The figure of a lemur is found on page 17 and the owl on page 12 inthis booklet. The face of a man [fig. 13] above Ludwig Wittgenstein’s face was cut from a printed
image of a lithographic self-portrait, Ich, im August (1977) by Jan Peter Tripp (1945 ‒), a German
artist who has collaborated with Sebald, and his countryman. The face of Wittgenstein is Figure449 on page 317 in a German book whose bibliographic data I have not yet identified. Sebald uses
a copy of this Figure 449 for the printing. This photograph is a very famous one which
Wittgenstein’s friend Ben Richards shot on September 1947 in Swansea and which one sees often
in books or on the Internet. Figure 14 [A15 above], the picture of the dome of Antwerp Central
Station, comes from a publication composed of a large-sized 17 colour photographs [18]. Figure
15 [A15 below], the photograph of a fire in Lucerne Station is a reproduction of a figure on page
25 of an exhibition catalogue, Het Centraal Station van Antwerpen, een levend monument [19].
Diese two publications were also in Sebald’s possession. Figure 16 [A22], the picture of Vauban
Fortress, Saarlouis, is a reproduction of a figure on page 690 of an article on ‘Fortification andSiegecraft’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica [20]. Figure 17 [A42], the domed building of the Law
courts of Brussels, is a reproduction of a press photograph in the article: ‘Viele Treppen führen
ins Nichts: Brüssels Justizpalast als Rhetorik der Macht’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [21].
Figure 18 [A62], the image of the glass dome of the Great Eastern Hotel next to Liverpool Street
Station, as well as Figure 1 [A63], a decorative image of Noah’s ark in the same hotel, were takenfrom a book Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station [22]. They are on pages 62 and 63 of thisbook respectively. Figure 22 [A332–333], a plan of Theresienstadt Ghetto comes from a copy fromthe front endpapers of the book by H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945. In contrast, Figure 21[A331], the picture of seedlings, is from a normal colour photograph Sebald possessed (thephotographer and the date are unidentified). I could not find sources for Figure 19 [A208], thepicture of the glass ceiling of the octagonal cupola of the State Central Archive in Prague; Figure
20 [A217], the picture of the mosaic; and Figure 23 [A357], the picture of the woman. However, I
suspect that Figure 23 originates in printed matter, because it is rough textured. It has become
clear from the above that the sharpness or the resolution of his images never matters for Sebald,
and that he presents equally and indiscriminately old and new pictures, and originals andreproductions from printed matter. This approach makes the pictures in his work seems
somehow old, of a historical provenance.
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newspapers, magazines, books, and photographic postcards etc. which constitute part of the
public sphere in the media culture. In what follows, I take up a discussion by a German art
historian, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh about initial panels of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. Then I
compare the visual images in Austerlitz with those in Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg. Finally,
I highlight characteristics of the visual images in Austerlitz, with reference to the concept of the‘flatbed picture plane’ put forth by an art historian and art critic Leo Steinberg.
In his essay ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive’, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (1941–),a German contemporary of Sebald, analyses a number of the initial panels of Atlas (1962‒), whichwere assembled in the 1960s by a German artist, Gerhard Richter (1932–) [23]. Richter’s Atlas
begins with amateur photographs of his own and someone else’s family and of holiday travels;then, Richter introduces a broad variety of clippings from West German illustrated journals in
the post-war period. There emerge on the panels a flood of media images, for example, images
on fashion, travel, pornography and advertising [24]. Buchloh contends that those genres of mass
media image, such as the ones mentioned above, operate independently while simultaneouslyintersecting; this constitutes ‘that complex field of disavowals and displacements, field ofrepression and cover images within which memory is constituted in the register of thephotographic order’ [25]. This complex field conceals ‘the trauma from which compulsion torepress had originated’. Buchloh argues that the pictures of victims in concentration camps thatsuddenly appeared in panels of Atlas rupture this field, because they reveal the links between
referents (victims of the Holocaust) and their images. Buchloh concludes, therefore, that
Richter’s Atlas functions as an ‘image reservoir’ with a ‘perpetual pendulum’ of ‘the dialectics ofamnesia and memory’ [26]. Through an analysis of the images and their layout in the panels in
Atlas, Buchloh aims to capture these dialectics of collective repression and emergence ofmemories of the Nazi era. Similar to those in Atlas, the photographs in Austerlitz function not
only as covering images but also serve as a threshold of remembrance and exposure of the trauma,
as discussed in Section 2. In short, the function of images in Austerlitz and Atlas are similar: tocreate a dialectics of amnesia and memory. However, Buchloh’s argument is not very convincing
in the following respects. Why was it only the photos of the concentration camp victims that
could rupture as a kind of ‘punctum’ the field of ‘repression and cover images’, even though they
were taken from the mass media in the same manner as the photos from other genres in Atlas?
Why could they exclusively represent and reveal the links between the referents, ‘the true
mnemonic objects’, and the images? Let us now think about the characteristics of the visual
images in Austerlitz. What if there is no true mnemonic image behind the covering images? Then,behind the closed doors and windows in Theresienstadt as represented in Austerlitz will be foundthe hidden absence of the true mnemonic images. In other words, Austerlitz’s childhood trauma(on the level of the fiction) and the impossibility of reaching one’s destroyed memories of the
Holocaust (on the collective memory level) are concealed behind them. In Austerlitz, thetraumatic or unconscious manifests itself prominently in the recurrence and the network ofvisual images, formed by their resistance against the flow of the narrative. Conversely, if one
examines the recurrence of visual images and the network of their resemblances, one can tracea rhetorical movement which originates from the textual unconscious.
Richter makes us more conscious of the repressive power of covering images by separating

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them from their original contexts and arranging them on panels. Sebald does the same. In
addition, Sebald’s pictures are shot again in black and white before they are printed in the book.
This process petrifies the pictures, devitalizing their repressive power. Moreover, they become
homogenized; they are now pictures that can stand alone, becoming somewhat like a card. Eachcombination of these image cards functions like a set of tarot cards, that is, a constellation bywhich to approach history’s underlying unconsciousness. With regard to the historical origins
for the use of dialectics of images, we must look to Mnemosyne Atlas (1926–1929) by Aby
Warburg (1866–1929), the originator of ‘iconology’ [27]. Warburg assembled by himself morethan sixty panels of Mnemosyne Atlas. The panels of Mnemosyne Atlas contain various images
from the fields of art history and the humanities, secular manuscripts, as well as clippings ofpress photographs and postage stamps of his time. Warburg and his team shot those materials.
After that, Warburg set each photograph on the panels in his own unique way, akin to somephotomontage works of the 1920s. It is not difficult to find that Sebald and Warburg havesomething in common, regarding the process of shooting. One of major themes in Mnemosyne
Atlas is ‘pathosformel’. Pathosformel means the representation of certain types of gestures andbodily expressions derived from ancient times, expressing the most vehement human emotions.
The semantic connotations of those gestures and bodily expressions often change drasticallydepending on the period in which they appear. By juxtaposing and grouping those black andwhite photographs on the panels of Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg attempts to read latentinterconnections of those images and the historical contexts behind them. With one glance atthe panels of Mnemosyne Atlas, spectators can perceive how a pathosformel emerges on picturesurfaces, beyond time and space. Furthermore, Warburg assumes that the image is a vehicle forthe unconsciousness of each period and society. In this respect, Warburg’s theory resonates
clearly with Freud, his contemporary. Warburg constructs Mnemosyne Atlas in order to showthat collective social memories and traumas are transmitted historically. Therefore Warburg’s
methods on Mnemosyne Atlas, i.e. to duplicate printed matter; to arrange those duplicatedimages according to visual resemblances among them; to read images as symptom originatedfrom unconscious structure of times and societies, might well provide telling clues tounderstanding visual images in Austerlitz.
Next, I deal with the concept of the ‘flatbed picture plane’, put forth by Leo Steinberg (1920–
2011), an art critic and art historian [28]. Steinberg compared a certain new type of 1960s painting
with the flatbed (here specifically the flatbed press) in view of its horizontality. This trend in art
is exemplified in the works of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), who uses junk and/or opaquelayers of common silkscreen. Steinberg terms such picture planes ‘receptor surfaces’. According
to him, the receptor surface receives a large amount of fragmentary information from the urban
landscape; he particularly mentions several of Rauschenberg’s silkscreen works from the early
1960s. Now, let us view the concept of ‘receptor surface’ in the context of Sebald’s works. The
pages of his books can be considered to be a kind of receptor surface, on which piles of images
drift, which have drifted from one time to another and from one page to another. It should be
noted here that the first, limited editions of Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturnwere stereotyped. In other words, the images and letters in these limited editions were literally
placed on real flatbeds.

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103

6. Conclusion
In the last moments before young Austerlitz departed from Prague Main railway station, he
was held in his mother’s arms under the dome of the station and gazed at its ceiling. In this light,
it is not difficult to understand why Austerlitz fixates on the domes and their interior spaces:
Images associated with the eye (and the star shape as a variation thereof) and the dome expose
the intensity of his trauma. For Freud as a psychoanalyst, the repetition compulsion is an evil
force that needs to be subdued. In ‘The Sandman’, the repetition compulsion is felt as an uncanny
effect that runs through the entire text. Sebald differs from Freud in that he takes advantage ofthe recurrence of visual images as a dialectical dynamic driving in his work, namely, the dialectics
between the repression and emergence of memories.
With regard to pictures in his works, Sebald utilizes a tention between two levels in thephotographs; one perceives both levels simultaneously in an automatic manner. At the fictive
level, Austerlitz gives his collection of pictures to the narrator, ‘I’. As I argue in Section 4, therepetition compulsion, from which Austerlitz cannot escape, is then fictively and visually reenacted through the narrator’s arrangement of images. The second level is that of the power ofreference to reality; this level is inherent in the photographs themselves. In addition, many of
the figures I took up in Section 3, associated with the eye, the star and the dome, derive fromprinted matter such as newspapers, magazines, books etc. But Sebald makes it difficult forreaders to distinguish at a glance between these images and the private photographs. In otherwords, Sebald deconstructs the representation- and distribution system for visual images. This
point is crucial to understand the use of these visual images in Austerlitz. the pages of Austerlitz,
as well as Sebald’s other prose fiction works, serve as a kind of plane upon which images drift,
wandering around beyond time and space, just like the junk that lay in a heap in the antique
shop ‘ANTIKOS BAZAR’ in Terezín. The deterioration of these images through their repeatedtransmission also folds together their contexts at each moment or era, leaving them charged ina multi-layered way with collective memories and trauma. Sebald embeds these images in the
narrative of a fictional character. In sum, by tracing Austerlitz’s story and viewing such images
repeatedly, readers are led into innumerable unconscious and anonymous memories of theworld across the layers of time.
In order to slip through the ‘dream-censor’, latent ‘dream-thoughts’ must be distorted
through condensation and displacement of the ‘dream-work’. The universe of Austerlitz is filledwith signs of something that returns repeatedly. The images in Austerlitz connect throughdisplacement and condensation, transforming in shape. In other words, such images can beinterpreted as symptoms of Austerlitz’s trauma and of social collective trauma which, as a whole,remains unknown. In short, Sebald attempts to approach the trauma of the Holocaust throughthis dream-work-like operation. The images in his works function as thresholds which, whencrossed repeatedly, reveal submerged traumas buried deep in the unconscious mind.
Notes
[1]

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Hanser, 2001 (German original). Henceforth cited in the text as ‘A’,

104

[2]

[3]
[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]

[14]
[15]
[16]

[17]

SUZUKI Yoshikofollowed by the page references. Figures from Austerlitz are cited also as ‘A’, followed by the pagereference.
The citation is from the English version Austerlitz translated by Anthea Bell, Penguin Books, 2002
[first published by Hamish Hamilton in 2001], pp.267f. See also the German original, A272–276. In
the revised Japanese version, translated by Hitoko Suzuki, Hakusuisya, 2012, see p.182.
Austerlitz, Penguin Books, 2002, pp.275f. See also the German original, A279f. In Hakusuisya(Japanese version), p.188.
Actually, Sebald made an inquiry with Jitka Ludvová, an expert in Czech theatre studies, in 1999
regarding which pieces were staged at ‘Estates Theatre’ (where, in the story, Agáta played Olympia
in the autumn of 1938) and ‘New German Theatre’ in Prague in the winter of 1937/38. Receiving areport from Ludvová, Sebald checked the information that Offenbach’s opéra bouffe, Parisian life,
was staged on 25 September 1937 at New German Theatre. Ref. Brief from Dr. Jitka Ludvová,
Divadelní Ústav (Theater Institute) to W. G. Sebald, written in Prague on 26 March 1999; presently
in the possession of the German Literature Archive.
The film is also known as The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. After shooting the film, Gerron andalmost all the cast members were transported to Auschwitz and killed by gas. The film wasdestroyed in 1945, and today, it survives only in fragmentary form. Regarding the film production,
see H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941‒1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft; Geschichte,
Soziologie, Psychologie [Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of an Enforced Community; History,
Sociology, Psychology], J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1955, S.179‒181.
A346; see also Penguin Books (English version), p.343. In Hakusuisya (Japanese version), p.234.
Regarding the performance of The Tales of Hoffmann in Theresienstadt Ghetto, see Adler,
Theresienstadt 1941‒1945, S.584. In this part of the book, however, Adler does not say clearly that
The Tales of Hoffmann was performed in the period of Beautification Campaign.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, tr., ed., rev. James Strachey, 1955, vol.17, p.241. The second brackets in SE.
Henceforth cited as ‘The “Uncanny”’, SE, vol.17, followed by the page references. See also Freud,‘Das Unheimliche’, Studienausgabe, Bd.4, S.Fischer Verlag, 1970, S.264. Henceforth cited as ‘Das
Unheimliche’, SA, Bd.4, followed by the page references. Sebald possessed this SA version. In his
copy he wrote marginal notes and underlined and marked many places.
Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, SE, vol.17, p.238. See also Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, SA, Bd.4, S.261.
ibid. p.238. See also Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, SA, Bd.4, S.261.
Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, SE, vol.17, fn.1, p.230. See also Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, SA, Anm.1, S.254.
Sebald, Austerlitz, Penguin Books, p.375. See also A377f. In the Japanese version, p.256.
Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, SE, vol.17, p.245. The first and last brackets in SE. See also Freud, ‘Das
Unheimliche’, SA, Bd.4, S.267.
Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, SE, vol.18, p.62. See also Freud, ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’,SA, vol.3, S.270. Gesammelte Werke, Bd.13, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Massenpsychologie und IchAnalyse, Das Ich und das Es, hg. von Anna Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E. Kris, O. Isakower,
Imago Publishing Co., 1940, Zehnte Auflage, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, S.68.
Otto Rank, Das Trauma der Geburt: Und Seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse [The Trauma ofBirth], first published by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924.
Yoshiko Suzuki, ‘Spaces of Remembrance in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Architectures and the Art ofMemory’, Saitama University Review (Faculty of Liberal Arts), vol.48 (no.2), 2012, pp.123–147.
It is also clear that Sebald has Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’ in mind, because Sebald published a bookwith the words ‘Unheimliche Heimat’ (uncanny home) in the title: Unheimliche Heimat. Essays
zur österreichischen Literatur, Residenz, 1991.
W. Van den Bergh, S. E. Van Praag, A. Gijzen, J. Tiskens, R. Van Bocxstaele, A. P. Van den Sande,
Nocturama, De National Zoo van Antwerpen, 1974, 68P.

Thresholds of Remembrance

105[18] Text: Herman Welter, photo: Marc Steculorum, photogravure: Photogravure De Schutter,
Antwerpen-Centraal: Een verhaal van tijd und ruimte, Brussels: Willy Van Gestel, 1993.
[19] Patricia De Somer, Gaston De Smet, Het Centraal Station van Antwerpen, een levend monument,
Antwerp, 1986, 64P. [Accompanied an exhibiton in Jordaenshuis, 4‒26 October 1986.][20] Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Edition, vol. 10, 1910–1911, p. 690.
[21] ‘Viele Treppen führen ins Nichts: Brüssels Justizpalast als Rhetorik der Macht’, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 26. 06. 1996, S. 0N6 / Seitenüberschrift: Geisteswissenschaften.
[22] Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, Rosenhaugh Stanhope Developments PLC, 1991, 112P.
[23] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. The Anomic Archive’, October, 1999, vol.88,
pp.117–145.
[24] Buchloh, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas’ p.139.
[25] ibid, p.140.
[26] ibid, pp.143f.
[27] Aby Moritz Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, hrsg. von Martin Warnke, unter Mitarbeit vonClaudia Brink, Gesammelte Schriften, 2. Abt. Bd.2, 1, Akademie Verlag, 2003 [4., gegenüber der 3.
unveränderte Aufl., 2012].
[28] Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University
Press, 1972, especially, pp.82–91.
The Section 1 – 4 of this paper is based on the presentation in the 19th International Congress of
Aesthetics (Cracow, 2013). The Japanese version in: Kallista, no.20, 2013, pp.79–118. This work was
supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research) (C), Grant Number 24520104.
* I wish to thank the German Literature Archive for the help for my research.
* All the images were reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency.