ABSTRACT
W. G. Sebald's and Christoph Ransmayr's post-postwar narratives carry traces of trauma, which can certainly be read as an inscription of historical violence. With his first novel, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, Ransmayr effectively brackets the Second World War and the Holocaust, but traces persist in the displacement of these traumatic events to another territory. At points in their writing, Sebald and Ransmayr seek liberation from the burden of the past, via an anti-oedipal network of Deleuzean becomings, deterritorialization, and lines of flight. The proliferation of blind spots in Austerlitz is symptomatic of a traumatophilic attachment to the violence of National Socialism, violence which Sebald came too late to know, but which defines the author and his project. In Austerlitz a significant after-image emerges in the spectral, nocturnal encounter with moths, in the fleeting visions which evoke the transience of photographic images and memories.
