Austerlitz was the fourth and final work of prose fiction by German author Winfried Georg Sebald, appearing shortly before his death at the end of 2001. The work depicts the tormented present and fragmented past of Jacques Austerlitz, and his painstaking quest to recover an identity lost to him upon his exile to Britain from Prague as a young child on the Kindertransport. In so far as the book dwells on memory, history, trauma, and the resounding human cost of war and social upheaval, Austerlitz is in keeping with the concerns of the rest of Sebald's fiction oeuvre. It is especially close, thematically, to Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants, 1993], which is about four émigré Jewish m…
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Citation: Behrendt, Kathy Anne. "Austerlitz". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 July 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8945, accessed 24 November 2024.]
