Recommendations
Books Like Austerlitz
Best books to read after Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Austerlitz is Sebald's most concentrated and most haunting novel — Jacques Austerlitz's gradual recovery of the childhood identity he suppressed as a child survivor of the Kindertransport. If the novel's extraordinary prose and its portrait of how trauma reorganizes memory and perception moved you, these books share its concern with the afterlife of historical catastrophe, its interest in how place holds memory, and its willingness to move between history and personal story without transition.
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The Emigrants
by W.G. Sebald
The essential predecessor — four portraits of displaced European Jews whose lives were destroyed by the Third Reich; where Austerlitz focuses intensely on a single protagonist's recovery of memory, The Emigrants distributes the same concern for memory and loss across four very different lives; the best introduction to Sebald's method
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The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
The companion work — Sebald's walking memoir of the Suffolk coast organized as a meditation on decay, memory, and the violence underneath European civilization; more essayistic and digressive than Austerlitz, it shows the full range of Sebald's concerns before he concentrated them in his final novel
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The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth
The essential companion in the Central European tradition of mourning for a lost world — Roth's elegy for the Habsburg Empire; where Sebald's Austerlitz excavates the specific trauma of the Holocaust through one man's suppressed childhood, Roth mourns the broader dissolution of Central European Jewish culture through the decline of an imperial dynasty
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If This Is a Man
by Primo Levi
Levi's memoir of Auschwitz — the essential direct testimony companion to Austerlitz's oblique and novelistic engagement with the same history; where Sebald circles the Holocaust through its aftermath and its survivors' psychic damage, Levi confronts it directly from inside; both are required reading for understanding what fiction and memoir can do with extreme historical trauma
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Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Spiegelman's graphic memoir about his father's survival of Auschwitz and the transmission of trauma to the second generation — the most celebrated visual parallel to Sebald's use of photographs and visual evidence in Austerlitz; both are organized around the relationship between the survivor and the inheritor of memory
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The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
Schlink's novel about a young German man's relationship with an older woman who is later revealed as a concentration camp guard — the essential German literary exploration of the moral and psychological inheritance of the Holocaust for the generation born after it; the complement to Austerlitz's portrait of the survivor's child
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Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Foer's novel about a young Jewish-American writer traveling to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather during the Holocaust — the most inventive American parallel to Sebald's project of recovering Jewish Central European history through a combination of personal investigation and fictional reconstruction
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Night
by Elie Wiesel
Wiesel's memoir of his deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald at fifteen — the most widely read testimony from the Holocaust and an essential companion to Austerlitz for readers who want direct testimony alongside Sebald's indirect and novelistic approach
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