Fulgurations: Sebald and Surrealism

Abstract

Scholars have commented on the similarity between images of eyes in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Breton's Nadja. While Sebald was familiar with texts by the surrealists, notably Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris, I argue that his knowledge of their work was significantly mediated by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's essentially skeptical view of the movement's aim to achieve insight through the workings of chance gives way in Austerlitz to a more profoundly pessimistic view on the possibility of such insight. Whatever hope Benjamin may still have harbored for moments of what he called "profane illumination" is occluded by the historical events that subtend Sebald's narrative, ranging from imperialism to the Holocaust. Austerlitz emphasizes this point in its concluding reflections on Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom, a family story that moves from the dark past of South Africa to the Nazi atrocities in Lithuania.

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