Author: Horstkotte, Silke

Source: Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, Diaspora and Memory - Figures of Displacement in Contemporary literature, Arts and Politics. Edited by Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen , pp. 193-202(10)

Publisher: Rodopi

Abstract:

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 over-coming amnesia on a cultural level.

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2006-11-01

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