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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Austerlitz and the Nazi propaganda film

As the eponymous "Austerlitz" in W.G. Sebold's excellent novel continues to recover lost memories of his childhood, he learns that the Nazis directed a film based in the Czech concentration camp where his mother was imprisoned and (presumably) where she died, and he actually gets a copy of the film from an archive - turns out to be only about a 15-minute clip - and he makes his own slow-mo version that plays for an hour and he watches repeatedly hoping to capture an image of his mother (he doesn't, apparently) - he of course realizes that the film is a Nazi propaganda horror, that they forced the Jewish prisoners to pretend to be going about the normal course of urban life and included no images of the starvation and brutality that marked real life in the camp. This all may sound familiar, as we now know (not sure if it was known when A. was published ca 2001) that there was in fact such a Nazi film, actually done in the Warsaw ghetto, and that it has since been recovered and is the subject of an excellent documentary, using the actual footage and interviews with at least one of the people responsible for this horrifying film - can't remember the name of the film right now [A Film Unfinished], but saw it within past year and was very moved, and think I remember a reference someone made to Sebald's using similar material. The great subject of his fiction is the appropriation and misappropriation of the past, the way in which memory is obscured by history - and in A., his final novel and most accomplished I would say - he explores not only the forces of history but also the development of a personality, he slowly unfolds and reveals layers of A's personality, even as A. discovers (or actually recounts to the unnamed narrator the process of his discovery) of the secrets of his past, his repressed memories. There is always the sense that A. represents more than himself - that he represents a mode of European history, as even his name suggests, with its reference to the Napoleanic battle of "3 emperors" (recounted in detail in War and Peace, by the way). I'm nearing the end of the novel, and, though I've read it before, I am not sure how Sebald concludes it - knowing Sebald, probably on a note of dissonance and ambiguity.

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