Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Austerlitz

London

Hamish Hamilton

2001

"I also recollect now that as I went on down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with ever forward step the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier."

[...] Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions--Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store, and Museum--the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken--and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time--as if they were the mortal frames of those who lay in that darkness. I also recollect now that as I went on down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with ever forward step the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier. [...]
(pp. 24-5)

Plant::Root

Reading

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001)

05/18/2011