W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Sebald’s prose alternates between the most luminous, affecting descriptions imaginable, not at all lyrical but structured with unfailing prosaic perfection and a visual density that draws his subjects in your mind almost against your will, and ponderous, subtly amusing formulations of a very Germanic sort. Above, one of the latter that struck me.
Through the various concerns of Sebald and his fictional character Austerlitz runs the quality of futility: whether in shatteringly fruitless pursuit of a history annihilated by the Holocaust or laboring vainly to recompose lost memories from his own life, the terrible elusiveness of the past -which literally does not exist and whose barest outlines fade rapidly from mind despite this or that artifact or record- reduces Austerlitz to exhausted despair. Once one loses continuity with one’s past there is no recovering it, and it is on such continuity that our sense of identity is built.
The furious efforts of totalitarianism in the 20th century to subsume us into their “all-embracing and absolute perfection” involved attacks on identity and historical continuity alongside the actual slaughter of innocents. Nearly as vile as the Communist and Nazi atrocities were the sophisticated measures undertaken to deprive both ordinary citizens and the persecuted of their identity, their sense of connection to the past. The real meaning behind revolution is more than the assumption of power: it is the placement of a caesura, the cutting of the ties to the past. Doctoring photographs, making new calendars, razing buildings, dispossessing business owners, evicting minorities: it is not mere symbolism.
The destruction of culture, of history, and of human beings for the perfecting of scientifically inarguable ideologies went on quite apart from the “chronic dysfunction” of such systems: further evidence that it is the assertion of “being undeniably right,” rather than the quality of being right or wrong, that permits authoritarianism. Error and futility define us.
Milan Kundera famously said that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Inside of a society with sufficiently ambitious control systems, whether it is Marxist-Leninist or National Socialist or Wahhabist or otherwise in possession of absolute truth and an eschatological sense of its inevitability, this is a struggle most lose. They are erased and forgotten, or reduced to figures in textbooks which recount only the “chronic dysfunction” of failed movements without illuminating how it is that, again and again, we rationally conclude that we must kill in pursuit of an “absolute perfection” as elusive as memory; I think it is because, like memory, it is integral to our identity, and for that we will kill readily.
