by W. G. Sebald
As I was tormenting myself with such thoughts, distinctly aware, so Austerlitz continued, that my face was being marked by the signs of that anguish which so often assails me, I was approached by one of the library staff called Henri Lemoine, who had recognized me from those early years of mine in Paris when I went daily to the rue Richelieu. Jacques Austerlitz, inquired Lemoine, stopping by my desk and leaning slightly down to me, and so, said Austerlitz, we began a long, whispered conversation in the Haut-de-jardin reading room, which was gradually emptying now, about the dissolution, in line with the inexorable spread of processed data, of our capacity to remember, and about the collapse, l’effondrement, as Lemoine put it, of the Bibliothèque Nationale which is already under way. The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its near-ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past. At a certain point in our conversation, said Austerlitz, and in response to a casual request of mine, Lemoine took me up to the eighteenth floor of the southeast tower, where one can look down from the so-called belvedere at the entire urban agglomeration which has risen over the millennia from the land beneath its foundations, which is now entirely hollowed out: a pale limestone range, a kind of excrescence extending the concentric spread of its incrustations far beyond the boulevards Davout, Soult, Poniatowski, Masséna, and Kellermann, and on into the outermost periphery beyond the suburbs, which now lay in the haze of twilight. A few miles to the southeast there was a faint green mark in the even gray, with a kind of blunt cone rising from it which Lemoine identified as the monkeys’ hill in the Bois de Vincennes. Closer to hand, we saw the convoluted traffic routes on which trains and cars crawled back and forth like black beetles and caterpillars. It was strange, said Lemoine, but up here he always had the impression that life moved silently and slowly down below, that the body of the city had been infected by an obscure disease spreading underground, and I remembered, said Austerlitz, when Lemoine made this remark, the winter months of the year 1959 during which I was studying the six-volume work pointing me the way in my own research, on Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle, which Maxime du Camp, who had previously traveled the deserts of the Orient that are formed, as he said, from the dust of the dead, began to write around 1890, after he was inspired by an overwhelming vision on the pont Neuf, and which he finished only seven years later. From the other side of the belvedere story, said Austerlitz, you looked north over the transverse ribbon of the Seine, the Marais quarter, and the Bastille. An inky wall of stormclouds was building up above the city as it sank into shadow, and soon no more could be distinguished of its towers, palaces, and monuments than the spectral white dome of the Sacré-Coeur. We were standing only a foot behind the glass panels which reach all the way to the ground. As soon as you looked down at the light-colored promenade deck and the darker crowns of the trees emerging from it, the pull exerted by the abyss below took hold of you, forcing you to step back. Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz, he felt the current of time streaming round his temples and brow when he was up here, but perhaps, he added, that is only a reflex of the awareness formed in my mind over the years of the various layers which have been superimposed on each other to form the carapace of the city. Thus, on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris. I believe they cleared some forty thousand apartments at that time, said Lemoine, in an operation lasting months, for which purpose they requisitioned the entire pantechnicon fleet of the Paris Union of Furniture Removers, and an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men was brought into action. All who had taken part in any way in this highly organized program of expropriation and reutilization, said Lemoine, the people in charge of it, the sometimes rival staffs of the occupying power and the financial and fiscal authorities, the residents’ and property registries, the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings, must undoubtedly have known that scarcely any of those interned in Drancy would ever come back. For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time, said Lemoine, remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day. In the years from 1942 onwards everything our civilization has produced, whether for the embellishment of life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests of drawers, Meissen porcelain, Persian rugs and whole libraries, down to the last saltcellar and pepper mill, was stacked there in the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot. A man who had worked in it told me not long ago, said Lemoine, that there were even special cardboard cartons set aside to hold the rosin removed, for the sake of greater cleanliness, from confiscated violin cases. Over five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers, and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indochinese soldiers were employed day after day, in fourteen-hour shifts, to put the goods coming into the depot in proper order and sort them by value and kind—silver cutlery with silver cutlery, cooking pans with cooking pans, toys with toys, and so forth. More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich. Not infrequently, said Lemoine, Party grandees on visits from Germany and high-ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers stationed in Paris would walk around the halls of the depot, known to the prisoners as Les Galéries d’Austerlitz, with their wives or other ladies, choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald villa, or a Sèvres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano. The most valuable items, of course, were not sent off wholesale to the bombed cities, and no one will now admit to knowing where they went, for the fact is that the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque, said Lemoine. The last of the light faded away down on the empty promenades. The treetops of the pine grove, which from this high vantage point had resembled moss-covered ground, now formed a regular black rectangle. For a while, said Austerlitz, we stood together in silence on the library belvedere, looking out over the city where it lay now sparkling in the light of its lamps.
When I met Austerlitz again for morning coffee on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, shortly before I left Paris, he told me that the previous day he had heard, from one of the staff at the records center in the rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, that Maximilian Aychenwald had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camp at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out. Curiously enough, said Austerlitz, a few hours after our last meeting, when he had come back from the Bibliothèque Nationale and changed trains at the gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father.
As I might know, he said, part of the railway network had been paralyzed by a strike last Wednesday, and in the unusual silence which, as a consequence, had descended on the gare d’Austerlitz, an idea came to him of his father’s leaving Paris from this station, close as it was to his flat in the rue Barrault, soon after the Germans entered the city. I imagined, said Austerlitz, that I saw him leaning out of the window of his compartment as the train left, and I saw the white clouds of smoke rising from the locomotive as it began to move ponderously away. After that I wandered round the deserted station half dazed, through the labyrinthine underpasses, over footbridges, up flights of steps on one side and down on the other.
That station, said Austerlitz, has always seemed to me the most mysterious of all the railway terminals of Paris. I spent many hours in it during my student days, and even wrote a kind of memorandum on its layout and history. At the time I was particularl
y fascinated by the way the Métro trains coming from the Bastille, having crossed the Seine, roll over the iron viaduct into the station’s upper story, quite as if the façade were swallowing them up. And I also remember that I felt an uneasiness induced by the hall behind this façade, filled with a feeble light and almost entirely empty, where, on a platform roughly assembled out of beams and boards, there stood a scaffolding reminiscent of a gallows with all kinds of rusty iron hooks, which I was told later was used as a bicycle store. When I first set foot on this platform years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the vacation period, however, there was not a bicycle to be seen, and perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because of the plucked pigeon feathers lying all over the floorboards, an impression forced itself upon me of being on the scene of some unexpiated crime. What is more, said Austerlitz, that sinister wooden structure still exists. Even the gray pigeon feathers have not yet blown away. And there are dark patches, of leaked axle grease, perhaps, or carbolineum, or something altogether different, one can’t tell. Moreover, I was disturbed by the fact that, as I stood on the scaffolding that Sunday afternoon looking up through the dim light at the ornate ironwork of the north façade, two tiny figures which I had noticed only after some time were moving about on ropes, carrying out repair work, like black spiders in their web.—I don’t know, said Austerlitz, what all this means, and so I am going to continue looking for my father, and for Marie de Verneuil as well.
It was nearly twelve o’clock when we took leave of each other outside the Glacière Métro station. Years ago, Austerlitz said as we parted, there were great swamps here where people skated in winter, just as they did outside Bishopsgate in London, and then he gave me the key to his house in Alderney Street. I could stay there whenever I liked, he said, and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life. And I should not omit, he added, to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house, for behind that wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members of the Ashkenazi community had been buried ever since the eighteenth century, including Rabbi David Tevele Schiff and Rabbi Samuel Falk, the Baal Shem of London. He had discovered the cemetery, from which, as he now suspected, the moths used to fly into his house, said Austerlitz, only a few days before he left London, when the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had lived in Alderney Street. Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like woman of perhaps seventy years old—the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out—was walking along the paths between the graves in her slippers.
Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now gray with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid. In the bright spring light shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time. I for my part could not get the story of the cemetery in Alderney Street with which Austerlitz had taken his leave of me out of my head, and that may have been why I stopped in Antwerp on my way back from Paris, to see the Nocturama again and go out to Breendonk once more. I spent a disturbed night in a hotel on the Astridsplein, in an ugly room with brown wallpaper looking out on fire walls, ventilation chimneys, and flat roofs separated from each other by barbed wire at the back of the building.
I think there was some kind of popular festival going on in the city at the time; in any case, the wailing of ambulance and police sirens went on until early in the morning. When at last I woke from a bad dream I saw the tiny silver arrows of airplanes passing at intervals of ten or twelve minutes through the bright blue space above the neighboring houses, which still lay in twilight. On leaving the Flamingo Hotel—such was its name, if I remember correctly—at about eight o’clock, I saw a pale-faced woman of about forty with her eyes turned away lying on a high trolley down by the reception desk, where there was no one in evidence. Two ambulance men were talking out on the pavement. I crossed the Astridsplein to the station, bought myself a coffee, and took the next suburban train to Mechelen, then walking the ten remaining kilometers to Willebroek through the suburbs and the now built-up outskirts of the town. I retained hardly anything of what I saw on my way. All I remember is a peculiarly narrow house, in fact no more than one room wide, built of puce-colored brick and standing in an equally narrow strip of garden surrounded by a tall thuya hedge. A canal ran beside this house, and a long barge laden with cabbages as big and round as cannonballs was gliding along it just as I passed, apparently without any boatman to steer it and leaving not a trace on the black surface of the water. It had turned unusually hot, just as it was thirty years ago, by the time I reached Willebroek. The fortifications lay unchanged on the blue-green island, but the number of visitors had increased. There were several coaches in the car park, while inside the porter’s lodge a troop of schoolchildren in brightly colored clothes was crowding around the cash desk and the small kiosk. Some of them had already gone ahead of the rest over the bridge to the dark gate through which, yet again, I could not bring myself to pass even after long hesitation. I spent some time in one of the hut-like wooden buildings where the SS had set up a printing shop for the manufacture of various official forms and greeting cards. The roof and the walls creaked in the heat, and the thought passed through my mind that the hair on my head might catch fire, as St. Julian’s did on his way through the desert. Later I sat beside the moat surrounding the fortress. In the distance, beyond the penal colony, the fence and the watchtowers, I saw the high-rise blocks of Mechelen encroaching further and further on the fields and the countryside. A gray goose was swimming on the dark water, going a little way in one direction and then a little way back in the other. After a while it scrambled up on the bank and settled on the grass not far from me. I took the book Austerlitz had given me on our first meeting in Paris out of my rucksack. It was by Dan Jacobson (a colleague of his, although unknown to him all these years, Austerlitz had said), and it described the author’s search for his grandfather Rabbi Yisrael Yehoshua Melamed, known as Heshel. All that had come down from Heshel to his grandson was a pocket calendar, his Russian identity papers, a worn spectacle case containing not only his glasses but a faded and already disintegrating piece of silk, and a studio photograph of Heshel in a black coat with a black velour top hat on his head. His one eye, or so at least it looks on the cover of the book, is shaded; in the other it is just possible to make out a white fleck, the light of life extinguished when Heshel died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three soon after the First World War. It was this premature death which made Menuchah, the rabbi’s wife, decide in 1920 to emigrate with her nine children from Lithuania to South Africa, and that was also the reason why Jacobson himself spent most of his childhood in the town of Kimberley, near the diamond mines of the same name. Most of the mines, so I read as I sat there opposite the fortifications of Breendonk, were already disused at the time, including the two largest, the Kimberley and De Beers mines, and since they were not fenced off anyone who liked could venture to the edge of those vast pits and look down to a depth of several thousand feet. Jacobson writes that it was truly terrifying to see such emptiness open up a foot away from firm ground, to realize that there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other. The chasm into which no ray of light could penetrate was Jacobson’s image of the vanished past of his family and his people which, as he knows, can never be brought up from those depths again. On his travels in Lithuania, Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel’s weak heart had preserved his immediate family when it stopped beating. Of the town of Kaunas, where Heshel had his photograph taken all those years ago, Jacobson tells us that the Russians built a ring of twelve fortresses around it in the late nineteenth century, which then in 1914, despite t
he elevated positions on which they had been constructed, and for all the great number of their cannon, the thickness of their walls, and their labyrinthine corridors, proved entirely useless. Some of the forts, writes Jacobson, fell into disrepair later; others served the Lithuanians and then the Russians once more as prisons. In 1941 they fell into German hands, including the notorious Fort IX where Wehrmacht command posts were set up and where more than thirty thousand people were killed over the next three years. Their remains, says Jacobson, lie under a field of oats a hundred meters outside the walls. Transports from the west kept coming to Kaunas until May 1944, when the war had long since been lost, as the last messages from those locked in the dungeons of the fortress bear witness. One of them, writes Jacobson, scratched the words Nous sommes neuf cents Français on the cold limestone wall of the bunker. Others left only a date and place of origin with their names: Lob, Marcel, de St. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44. Sitting by the moat of the fortress of Breendonk, I read to the end of the fifteenth chapter of Heshel’s Kingdom, and then set out on my way back to Mechelen, reaching the town as evening began to fall.
* On looking through these notes I remember that in February 1971, during a short visit to Switzerland, one of the places I visited was Lucerne. After seeing the Glacier Museum I spent some time standing on the bridge over the lake on my way back to the station, because the view of its dome and the snow-white heights of the Pilatus massif rising in the clear winter sky behind it had reminded me of my conversation with Austerlitz in Antwerp four and a half years earlier. A few hours later, on the night of 4 February, long after I was fast asleep in my hotel room in Zurich, a fire broke out in Lucerne Station, spread very rapidly and entirely destroyed the domed building. I could not get the pictures I saw next day in the newspapers and on television out of my head for several weeks, and they gave me an uneasy, anxious feeling which crystallized into the idea that I had been to blame, or at least one of those to blame, for the Lucerne fire. In my dreams, even years later, I sometimes saw the flames leaping from the dome and lighting up the entire panorama of the snow-covered Alps.