* 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. G. SEBALD was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
2011 Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2001 W. G. Sebald
Translation copyright © 2001 Anthea Bell
Introduction copyright © 2011 by James Wood
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag
in 2001. This English language translation was first
published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc.,
and in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton,
an imprint of Penguin Group UK, in 2001.
Published by arrangement with Hamish Hamilton,
an imprint of Penguin Group UK.
The bottom photograph on this page appears courtesy of the
Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge, England.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944–2001
[Austerlitz. English]
Austerlitz/W. G. Sebald; translated by Anthea Bell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64541-2
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Fiction. I. Title.
PT2681.E18 A9513 2001
833′.914—dc21 2001019785
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