Austerlitz

Marie is a Frenchwoman and fellow architectural historian whom Austerlitz meets during their student days in Paris in the late 1950s. She comes from a wealthy family and spends many of her weekends during her studies at her family’s country houses. She is primarily characterized indirectly, by her thoughts and opinions and her feelings for Austerlitz. On her first meeting with Austerlitz, she tells him about a paper mill in the south of France that seems to exist within its own timeless idyll. Within that idyll, she says, “you wish for nothing more but eternal peace” (278). To Austerlitz, this story expresses Marie’s inner being and comes to represent his feelings for her as they fall in love. Her story is about her wish to live in a place untouched by time, a peaceful place in which to perform the timeless and soothing work of turning rags and pulp into smooth, clean sheets of paper. The story is imbued with wistfulness, as Marie has already returned from the mill; it is not a place she could stay. Austerlitz shares this wistfulness for a time lost to the past.

Marie brings Austerlitz out of his shell more than anyone else. However, their fateful trip to Marienbad spells the doom of their relationship. There, in the pump room of Auschowitz Springs, she challenges Austerlitz on his dedication to solitude. He’s unable to lower his defenses; the specter of the Holocaust, represented by the Springs, is an immovable block between them. At the end of the novel, Austerlitz’s passing remark to the narrator about wanting to find Marie suggests they lost contact after this fateful trip. To Austerlitz, a life with Marie is the opportunity to extricate himself from his self-imposed loneliness and misery and to embrace a life of love. He acknowledges to the narrator he wasn’t able to live that life when it was possible.

Gerald is a younger boy Austerlitz befriends during their time at boarding school. Austerlitz sees something of his own misery in Gerald, who, in despair and homesickness, makes a feeble attempt to burn down Stower Grange. Austerlitz looks after Gerald, playing the role of guardian he never experienced himself. In his trips to Gerald’s family home, Austerlitz finds the peacefulness and affection that’s lacking in the Eliases’ house in Bala. Gerald’s family is a beacon of light for the miserable Austerlitz, evidence that a happy life is possible.

In Gerald being sent away from home, where he’s happy, to Stower Grange, where he’s miserable, Austerlitz sees his own past. He remembers feeling, as a four year old, the incomprehensibility of being forced from his happy childhood into a miserable world away. Gerald is the first person who makes Austerlitz feel he isn’t alone in the world. Consequently, his tragic death devastates Austerlitz, exacerbating his experience that everyone who means something to him is ripped away.

Austerlitz’s mother, Agáta, is a Czech Jewish opera singer who evacuates Austerlitz to England, preceding the Nazi invasion of Prague. In contrast to Austerlitz’s father, Maximillian, Agáta has a hopeful outlook on the world and the future of Europe.

Memories of her, and the absence of them, haunt Austerlitz, factoring in much of his torment and drive to uncover his past. She is a ghostly figure who appears only in absence or traces of her existence. Even after he remembers impressions of his mother from his childhood, Austerlitz is unable to definitively recognize her face, either in the Theresienstadt propaganda film or in the portrait he finds of her in the Prague theatrical archives. This inability to regain her, so to speak, torments Austerlitz.