W.G. Sebald's enigmatic novel Austerlitz presents a survivor's narrative of the eponymous Jacque Austerlitz, a man whose search for his past and identity takes the reader on a journey that transcends time, space, and medium. As a young Jewish boy in 1939, Austerlitz was rescued from Nazi-controlled Prague by the Kindertransport initiative, though he – like many others – never saw his parents again. This paper will investigate the role of Sebald's narrator: an unnamed German drawn to Austerlitz through a series of coincidental meetings, who then becomes privy to the latter's fascinating and heart-wrenching story. Why has Sebald chosen this man as narrator, and what makes his retelling so profound?
In exploring these two questions I argue that it is everything we are not told about the narrator that allows his recounting (and, by extension, this novel) to succeed, since it is Austerlitz' story and not his own. The narrator's willingness and ability to listen may provide us with the key to bearing witness for another, be it in research, archival work, or any number of narrative genres: do not get in the way of a story that belongs to someone else. How else, after all, could a non-Jewish German, like Sebald, have become such a crucial voice in Holocaust literature?
