Austerlitz

Because he remembers Vera mentioning that she and his family took a trip to the spas at Marienbad the summer of 1938, Austerlitz calls Vera that night (despite never using the telephone) to ask about it. He doesn’t remember that trip but recalls a trip he took there in 1972 with a romantic partner and colleague, Marie de Verneuil, who was studying the architectural history of Europe’s spas. During that visit, Austerlitz was overcome by a feeling he didn’t understand, a deep fear “in the face of the better turn my life should have taken at that time” (222).

In Marienbad in 1972, Austerlitz saw his psyche reflected in the decrepit buildings. Marie told Austerlitz how the resort became popular with the middle class in the late 19th century, in part because of the supposedly panacean powers of its mineral waters—Auschowitz Springs. Like the guests from that time, Austerlitz felt that the waters were curing him of a pernicious illness he inadvertently contracted.

However, two images tormented Austerlitz and halted his healing. The first mental image came from a conversation he’d had with Marie, in which she’d told him of the composer Robert Schumann who’d had a mental health crisis and was subsequently committed to a psychiatric institution; Austerlitz imagined the composer withdrawn in his cell after attempting suicide, with his friends watching from the door slot. The other mental image bothering Austerlitz was an abandoned dovecote he and Marie had visited, inhabited by a few surviving pigeons:

The floor inside the brick walls was covered with pigeon droppings compressed under their own weight, yet already over two feet high, a hard, desiccated mass on which lay the bodies of some of the birds who had fallen from their niches, mortally sick, while their companions, surviving in a kind of senile dementia, cooed at one another in tones of quiet complaint in the darkness under the roof, and a few downy feathers, spinning round in a little whirlwind, slowly sank through the air (230).

On their final day in Marienbad, in the pump room of Auschowitz Springs, Marie asked Austerlitz why he was so withdrawn, and she questioned his belief that he needed to be alone. Austerlitz couldn’t accept the truth of Marie’s words then, but he eventually realized he avoided intimacy to protect himself. 

After this digression into his trip to Marienbad, Austerlitz resumes telling the narrator about retracing the route of the kindertransport across Europe:

As he embarks, the Prague train station conflicts with the image Austerlitz formed from Vera’s story and doesn’t evoke any memories. However, as he departs under the familiar platform roof (pictured), he feels he has traveled back in time to the day he left Prague as a child.

In Germany, the tidiness of the homes and towns surprises Austerlitz, and he realizes he knows less about Germany than any other country in the world. Impulsively, Austerlitz disembarks at Nuremberg, where he’s troubled by seeing no trace of the past amidst the perfect, orderly buildings and people. Returning to the station, Austerlitz struggles against the strong current of people moving in the other direction, and he is forced to step behind an arch and wait for the crowd to thin.

Back on the train, Austerlitz recognizes a passing dark forest from a recurring dream he had in Bala, of crossing an endless forest without direction. He remembers that in Bala, he was also haunted by the memory of a twin brother who accompanied him, silently, on the train journey; this twin died and was stowed with the luggage.

Entering the Rhine Valley, Austerlitz sees the Mäuseturm (pictured), a stone tower on the riverbank that closely resembles the tower on the bank of Lake Vyrnwy. Passing through the valley, Austerlitz loses track of what time in his life he’s living. The castles overlooking the river look both 19th-century and medieval, and in the distance tower three giant chimneys that make “the steep slopes on the eastern mountains look like hollow shells, mere camouflage for an underground industrial site covering many square miles” (243).

Now Austerlitz tells the narrator that when he reflects on his two journeys through the Rhine Valley, everything about them in his mind becomes jumbled: “my experiences of that time, what I have read, memories surfacing and then sinking out of sight again, consecutive images and distressing blank spots where nothing at all is left” (244). Austerlitz imagines the valley as it was throughout time, from a wilderness explored by early travelers to a landscape painted by J. M. W. Turner in the 19th century, when he stayed near the town of Bacharach, the site of a medieval pogrom.