In our first episode of 2021 we discussed Austerlitz, WG Sebald's last novel, published just months before he died in a tragic accident. The novel is concerned with memory and trauma, explored through the life of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who has repressed his childhood memories of fleeing Prague as a refugee on the Kindertransport. Through Austerlitz's process of remembering and discovering his history, and the fate of his parents in Nazi concentration camps, the book explores the challenges of remembering and representing the Holocaust. It is a deeply architectural novel, concerned with different ways of understanding the historical agency of architecture, and the power that space and material culture have on the formation of memory and the process of remembering.
Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.
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