All About Austerlitz

Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

All about Austerlitz. The Campaign, the Battles, the Places and the Troops

Austerlitz again? Yes, Austerlitz again! By now everything has been said and told about that famous battle of December, 2, 1805, which represents one of the zenith of Bonaparte's "genius". The battle of Austerlitz has been emphasized as the battle of the Three Emperors, the last of which, considered in Europe a "parvenu", was Napoleon himself. It was one of the battles that had the honor of giving its name to one of the most important railway stations in Paris, Gare de Austerlitz, as well as giving its name to a bridge over the Seine, opened in 1807, iron and toll. Already these trivial considerations are reality witnesses of how the new emperor was pleased with the Campaign of 1805 and its final outcome.

The Battle of Austerlitz; Napoleon's Greatest Victory