Austerlitz

To avoid the torment of his past, Austerlitz devotes himself to studying architecture, specifically monumental architecture of the capitalist era. According to him, monumental buildings conceal a destructiveness beneath their grand facade. This destruction occurs, almost inadvertently, in service of the display of power and mastery, which, Austerlitz argues, often betrays an insecurity. The pursuit of perfection in such monumental architecture is doomed to effect the opposite of the intended result: “the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability” (296).

This is nowhere more apparent than in the series of fortresses that appear throughout Austerlitz. Austerlitz describes the culmination of fortress architecture as some version of a star-shaped dodecagon or a series of concentric rings, identified as the perfect defensive forms. Every major fortress that appears in the novel—Breendonk, Terezín, Kaunas—was appropriated by the Nazis as a prison; structures intended to repel enemies became prisons and labor camps. Rather than repelling people, the fortresses trap them. In theory, these fortresses epitomize the height of human achievement; in reality, they are inhuman and inhumane eyesores; the narrator describes Breendonk as “a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence” (39).

The new Bibliothèque Nationale also falls into this building category; however, its destructiveness is more pernicious. The building’s history, of which only a hint appears in the novel, is crucial to understanding the nature of this destruction. President François Mitterand, who commissioned the complex to replace the old library, worked in the collaborationist Vichy government during World War II, only deserting for the French resistance after the Allied victory was assured in 1943. After the war, he remained close friends with a number of high-ranking officials from the Vichy government, including René Bousquet, the chief of police responsible for deporting tens of thousands of French Jews to death camps. This friendship ended only in 1993, when Bousquet was assassinated preceding his trial for crimes against humanity. This history explains Lemoine’s oblique remark about who took the most valuable items from the warehouse: “no one will now admit to knowing where they went, for the fact is that the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque” (303). Not only is the library, as Austerlitz describes it, hostile to the very study it should encourage, but it obscures a history of violence few are willing to acknowledge their role in. Just as the grandness of the mirrors in the Antwerp Centraal Station distracted from the chemical poisoning of the workers who constructed them, the spectacle of the new library—and the ideology that it preserves knowledge—distracts from a piece of France’s past, obscured in its very construction.