Two types of recovered memory in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

W.G. Sebold's terrific novel "Austerlitz" pivots on its axis at about the mid-point: For the first half of the novel, Austerlitz is a typical Sebold character, much like the first-person narrator that Sebold uses in his other works, full of arcane observations that flow along from one another in a seemingly endless stream, or unfold like a skein would be another way of putting it, most of the observations about the ruins of history, forgotten and vanished industrial villages; failed, grandiose architectural monstrosities of another era; out-of-the way houses where eccentrics lived and thrived (or didn't) - you might borrow the Proust title and say that the mission of a Sebald character is to search for lost time, but it's not time lost in his life, in not in search of memories (Remembrance of Things Past would be an inaccurate description - these recovered bits of history are recovered knowledge, not recovered experience) - but as noted halfway through this novel things change: A. describes following a forlorn Indian sweeper through a doorway in the Liverpool Street station, under process of demolition, and finds himself in an abandoned waiting room (typical Sebald space) where he is suddenly flooded with memories and can recall sitting here as a 4-year-old as his new adoptive parents arrive - he was a war orphan shipped to England for his safety and had totally repressed early-childhood memories. With this insight, he launches on a long recollection - now more truly in the spirit of Proust as a recovered personal memory - and notes that his obsession with arcana may have been a defense, a way to prevent the true memories of his childhood from unfolding - and readers have to wonder whether this may be so for Sebald also, to what extent does his fixation on the ruins of vanished civilizations have to do with his unwillingness or incapacity to recall his childhood in Nazi Germany? A. proceeds by traveling to his native Prague to learn more about his early life, which I'll look at in another post.