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  • Framework:On W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
  • Alexander Verdolini (bio)

Name and Frame: Origins

W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten closes with a remarkable passage. The narrator contemplates a photographic image from the collection that Walter Genewein, chief accountant at the Łódź ghetto, took in order to document its supposedly “bespiegelnde innere Organisation.” It shows three young women, inhabitants of this ghetto, at work behind a “Webrahmen,” as the narrator calls it—behind, as the English translator puts it, “the frame of a loom.” The narrator senses “daß sie alle drei herschauen zu mir, denn ich stehe ja an der Stelle, an der Gene-wein, der Rechnungsführer, mit seinem Fotoapparat gestanden hat.” And he wonders, in the final line, what their names were—perhaps “Roza, Lusia und Lea oder Nona, Decuma und Morta, die Töchter der Nacht.”1 The names, then, perhaps, of the Parcae. As Carol Jacobs writes, the narrator, standing in the place of the photographer, “does not so much take a picture as await his fate.”2

Sebald’s writing is set under the sign of a troubling equivalence: an inability to distinguish, as concerns the topology of representation, between the perpetrator and the one who wishes to remember. (This [End Page 611] ethical contagion reaches further, insofar as the reader, too, contemplates the image in ekphrasis and so stands, virtually, on the same spot—stands under the same virtual judgment.) An ineluctable and dangerous doubling, then, governs remembrance and representation: the gesture of redemption also reenacts the crime.

The figure for this ethical ambiguity is the doubled frame: the frame of the loom, the frame of the photograph. It is the photographic frame, in its virtual detachment of a delimited visual space, that makes the three of us—Genewein, the narrator, the reader—perspectivally fungible. It is the loom’s frame that, more mysteriously, confers upon the three of them—the nameless weavers—the majesty of a judge’s bench.

The present text is marked—even before it opens—by an act of naming not unlike the one with which Die Ausgewanderten ends. The book’s cover bears the photograph of a young boy (is it Sebald?—he has the same eyes, much the same nose, and the same elongated earlobes) meant to be the title character. Above this somewhat enigmatic figure stands the name ‘Austerlitz.’ It is in the virtual—the artificial or fictional—conjunction of this name and this image, both uninvented, that the character and text originate.

We shall return to the boy’s image, which appears again halfway through the book. For now, let us consider the name. The text unfolds out of its aura, and the character arises in the force field of its resonances: Battle of Austerlitz, Gare d’Austerlitz. And, of course, the magnetically proximate Auschwitz—a name which, like a lodestone brought close to a compass, makes the name Austerlitz stray, trembling, from its proper referents. Any accounting for Austerlitz, the space of whose fiction is opened by the naming of an image—any accounting, indeed, for whatever relation, ethical or otherwise, obtains between it and the fact that is Auschwitz—stands to profit from this name’s close scrutiny.

It is, of course, a toponym. It designates, in German, the small south Moravian town known in Czech as Slavkov: the otherwise insignificant town that gave its name to one of Napoleon’s spectacular victories and thereby inscribed itself, improbably, upon the map of Paris and the ledgers of world history. In 1864 the mayor of this town, Jan Koláček, wrote to the historian and politican František Palacký to ask for his help in the resolution of a toponymic enigma. He had found in the municipal archive several documents in which the town bore a third name—Nausedlicz or Novosedlice—and wanted to know why this name had since disappeared. Palacký’s response is perhaps of interest for the readers of Austerlitz: [End Page 612]

The question you pose as to why “Navssedlicz” in the 1416 German document gives way to “Slavkov” in the 1422 Latin document belongs, certainly, among the most tangled cases in the geographical history of Moravia. Do not, however, be...

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