ABSTRACT
The eponymous protagonist of W. G. Sebald's final prose work Austerlitz is a Prague Jew who was taken to Britain on a Kindertransport at the age of five to escape the threat of National Socialism. For Wittgenstein, the apprehension of family resemblances is not cognitive, but visual, and it follows that in Austerlitz, the compulsive work of identifying similarities with others is organized around the narrative's visual elements. The Nazi regime was mobilized on the railways in the displacement and transportation of victims, and it can be argued that Austerlitz formulates the overwhelming excess to the oedipal by displacing the primal scene from the home to the railway station as site of loss and separation for both the individual and a collective. The railway network has an ambivalent, even over-freighted significance for Austerlitz, but he attempts to liberate himself by other means, in particular, by pursuing lines of flight.
