Serendipity Talk: Memory Suppressed and Awakened: W.G. Sebald’s Shoah Novel Austerlitz

Michael W. Farrell, Memory Suppressed and Awakened: W.G. Sebald’s Shoah Novel Austerlitz
Monday,October 12
3:30-5:00 PM
Online

The writer W.G Sebald, according to the New York Review of Books, "stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust." This talk deals with Sebald’s magnum opus, Austerlitz. It tells of Jacques Austerlitz, adopted by Welsh parents after escaping Nazi Europe via a child transport, who passes nearly his entire adult life trying to obliterate the memories of his earliest years as the child of Jewish parents in Prague. Eventually those memories awaken in him and, returning to Prague, he learns of his early childhood but also, and more graphically, of the horrors of nearby Terezin (Theresienstadt) and of his parents’ annihilation.

Michael W. Farrell, a previous Serendipity presenter at OLLI on the novelists Henry James and Thomas Mann, is a retired appellate judge and former chair of the English and German departments at Georgetown Preparatory School. The Shoah writings of the late twentieth century German-English writer W.G. Sebald are of particular interest to him.

No registration is required. The Zoom link will be e-mailed to all those subscribed to the OLLI newsletter the morning of the talk. If you do not receive the newsletter and would like to attend, please join the email list at https://www.olli-dc.org/join_email_list.