Intermedial Strategies of Overcoming Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Prose: An Analysis of the Novel “Austerlitz”

• Published in: Pytanni͡a︡ literaturoznavstva no. 111; pp. 316 - 337
• Main Author: Kalynych, Kateryna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Ukrainian
• Published: 30.06.2025
• ISSN: 2306-2908
• DOI: 10.31861/pytlit2025.111.316

The article analyzes the therapeutic potential of interlude components in a literary text, considering W. G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz” as an example of a literary representation of the process of overcoming traumatic experience. On the basis of this text, the author traces the gradual reconstruction of the protagonist’s personal memory, the deliberately displaced trauma of the Holocaust, and fragments of his own identity through intermediate markers such as architecture, photographs, films, and documents. In the novel, these visual and material components perform a therapeutic function: they serve as triggers of recollection and trigger the process of reconstructing blocked memories. Attention is focused on the images of the father and mother, who had long been pushed out of Austerlitz’s memory. It is emphasized that through photographs, narratives of the mother’s Czech friend Vera, and architectural details of places associated with the family, the protagonist finds the forgotten figures of the family that disappeared due to deportation, gradually accepts the loss and integrates the events of the past into the gaps of his own consciousness. The main thing is that it is Vera who acts as a living carrier of collective and family memory and creates the conditions for Jacques’s cathartic experience. The transition between the verbal and visual structures of the text creates the effect of “dialogic memory,” in which intermediate objects serve as a kind of “psychoanalytic artifacts” and combine the individual experience of the hero with the collective historical trauma. It is shown how the topoi of memory (from private childhood loci – Prague, to historically marked places associated with the Holocaust – Terezin, Paris) function in the text as “therapeutic guides” between the present and the past and open up the possibility of affective rethinking of tragic events. The novel is analyzed as a peculiar form of retraumatization and existential search, in which the art of words becomes an effective tool for returning to the displaced experience, forming a holistic identity and post-traumatic recovery.