Images that remember us: photography and memory inAusterlitz

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. W.G. Sebald quoted in ‘The last word:’ an interview with Maya Jaggi, Guardian Unlimited, Friday, 21 December 2001, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0.6000.62475000.html accessed 19 February 2003. 2. J.J. Long has recently argued that Sebald's books are dominated by the phenomenon of ‘post memory’: Post memory refers to the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, and whose own belated stories are “evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated”. J. J. Long, ‘History, narrative, and photography in W.G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten’, Modern Language Review, 98.1 (January 2003), p. 122. Long's use of the term ‘post memory’ is drawn from the work of Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 22. 3. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: The Harvill Press, 1998) p. 255. 4. Friedrich A. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information System: Essays, edited and introduced by John Johnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), p. 42. 5. Apart from J.J. Long's article referred to previously (n. 3), see Stefanie Harris, ‘The return of the dead: memory and photography in W.G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten', The German Quarterly, v. 74. 4 (autumn 2001), pp. 379–91. 6. W. G. Sebald, Auterlitz trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), pp. 173–4. All further references are included in the body of the text. 7. Peter Szondi, ‘Hope in the past: on Walter Benjamin’, Critical inquiry, 4.3 (Spring 1978), p. 499. 8. Delia Falconer, ‘The eloquence of fragments’, Eureka Street on line (December 2001) http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/pages/111/111falconer.html accessed 19 February 2003. 9. Michel Beaujour, ‘Some paradoxes of description’, Yale French Studies, 61 (1981), p. 36. 10. Michel Beaujour, ‘Some paradoxes of description’, Yale French Studies, 61 (1981), p. 44. 11. Susan Sontag, ‘A mind in mourning’, Times Literary Supplement (25 February 2001), p. 4. 12. Susan Sontag, ‘A mind in mourning’, Times Literary Supplement (25 February 2001), p. 4. 13. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 94. 14. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 94. 15. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Catherine Porter (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 86. Quoted in Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 93. 16. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 93. 17. Philippe Hamon, ‘Rhetorical states of the descriptive’, Yale French Studies, 61, (1981), p. 23. 18. Philippe Bonnefis, ‘The melancholic describer’, Yale French Studies, 61, (1981), p. 149. 19. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 87–8. 20. Sontag, ‘A mind in mourning’, p. 3. 21. Falconer, ‘The Eloquence of Fragments’. 22. W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: The Harvill Press, 1996), p. 45. In Austerlitz we find a similar passage when Austerlitz describes an album of photographs depicting the inhabitants of the village of Llanwddyn that had since been submerged beneath the waters of the Vyrnwy reservoir: I leafed again and again though [sic] these few photographs … until the people looking out of them, the blacksmith in this leather apron, Elias' father the sub-postmaster, the shepherd walking along the village street his sheep, and most of all the girl sitting in a chair in the garden with her little dog on her lap, became as familiar to me as if I were living with them down at the bottom of the lake. At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me, and see the reflection, broken by ripples, of the stone tower standing in such fearsome isolation on the wooded bank (pp. 72–4). 23. Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 46. 24. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96. 25. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96. 26. Referring to Freud's writings on the compulsive nature of traumatic memories, J. J. Long argues that the photographs in The Emigrants function as ‘a kind of belated symptom of familial and collective history that needs to be mediated through a process of narration in order to become knowable and communicable’ (p. 126). This is part of Long's larger proposition that the overall function of the images is to ‘create patterns of constancy that are repeated within and between the lives of the individual emigrants, including that of the narrator himself’ (p. 135). 27. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Postmodernism as mourning work’, Screen, 42. 2 (Summer 2001), p. 197. 28. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. edited with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). Further references to this essay are included within the text. 29. Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction trans. Jeremy Gaines (Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 101. 30. W.G. Sebald, ‘The remorse of the heart: on memory and cruelty in the work of Peter Weiss’, in On the Natural History of Destruction. With Essay on Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 176.