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

SUZUKI Yoshiko


I would like to discuss in this paper some remarkable arts dealing with memory by the German author, W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), with reference to the visual images included in his work Austerlitz. I begin my discussion by illustrating several key aspects of his works. In Section 2, I show how a certain type of image appears repetitively, as if acting as a threshold or a doorway, through which lost memories return to us. Then in Section 3, I pick up certain other images in Austerlitz which have strange resemblances each other and whose links through such resemblances appear to form a recurrence. In Section 4, I contend that a group of such images can be compared with the eye motif in ‘The Sandman’ which Sigmund Freud discusses in his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919) in terms of the concepts of the ‘Uncanny’ and ‘repetition compulsion’ in the theory of psychoanalysis. In Section 5, I refer to some other works and thoughts, namely, a discussion by H. D. Buchloh about Gerhard Richter’s Atlas; Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg; and a concept of ‘flatbed picture plane’ by Leo Steinberg, to examine the functioning of the visual images in Austerlitz. In conclusion, I discuss Sebald’s attempts to utilize a tention between the fiction and the reality as well as psychic effects arising from the resemblance and the recurrence of visual images, in order to gain access to unconscious memories.

Keywords: W. G. Sebald, visual image, S. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, memory and trauma