ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the often neglected but nonetheless important asset of architecture, which brings the past to the present even without having deliberate designation, requiring specialized knowledge, or carrying physical trace. The study makes use of a literary author’s acute sensitivity to the environment and keen ability to describe his reactions. Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) is a story of the eponymous protagonist, who at the age of four was sent from Prague to London on Kindertransport. Throughout the book the physical environment works as a catalyst, as Austerlitz, now grown, regains the past he once lost and seeks his parents’ past he himself has never experienced. Sebald used two literary strategies: he placed fictional events in actual buildings, many of which are familiar to the reader, and used the first person singular, I, for multiple personalities without bracketing the sentences by quotation marks. With these strategies Sebald succeeded in depicting the experience of the past unavoidably ethereal and at the same time forcefully grounded, and at once acutely personal and assuredly shared. The literary piece demonstrates how architecture contributes to the existential meaning of life: It not only brings the past to the present for us, but when it does, it also endows us with the sense of identity and that of solidarity, in the surrounds of both our contemporary and predecessors.
