Coming to Terms with the Past: The Narrative Methods That Convey the Workings of Memory in 'Austerlitz' and 'Extinction' Helen Sabina Hardy College

Since 1945, German literature has met the challenge of evoking mental processing of past events by exploring by what means we access the past. As literature depends far more on individual production and reception than film and television, which are more communal, it has been relied upon as a corrective to official memory.[1] The literature of this period’s attitude towards memory’s fallibility and subjectivity is inextricably linked to the narrative methods authors use to evoke memory and reflection in their works. A well-known example is W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a novel which narrates the struggle of a man with a Jewish background who unconsciously represses the memories of his former life, and yet finds no healing in his quest to rediscover his identity. Interwoven with photographs, which Sebald uses as his protagonist’s prompt for reflection on memory, the narrative is punctuated by a visual-verbal dialectic[2] which contributes to the reader’s perception of the text’s authenticity. Similarly, the protagonist Franz Josef Murau of Thomas Bernhard’s final novel Auslöschung (Extinction) uses family photographs and the technique of perspectivism to evoke his own reflections to enable to him to complete his Erinnerungsarbeit or...