Breendonk, Austerlitz, and Memory: A Jigsaw

The place was awful.

There was really no other word for it. I was standing before a complex of concrete buildings rising in a low pile above the Belgian marshland. Their faces were unadorned, nearly featureless. Even the sky looked lifeless and bleached. A stiff breeze whipped in from across the moat—yes, there was an actual moat. Off to one side, against a slight grass rise, stood ten wooden posts set into the ground. Each was sharpened to a point, pockmarked by multiple bullet holes. 

Photograph by Rory McInnes-Gibbons

Awful as it was, I did feel a perverse sense of awe. I’d never been anyplace quite so oppressive. Everything seemed designed to telegraph an adherence to subservience, to dominance, to the inexorability of the institution.

Welcome to Fort Breendonk, former concentration camp.

It was February of 1993. My band, Circus Lupus, was on our first (and last) European tour. Maybe Breendonk wasn’t the most intuitive place to take an American punk band, but I’m glad our guide—Luc? Gerárd?—did. As I walked across the barren parade grounds, through the frigid and windowless barracks, past torture cells designed to amplify the sounds of screaming, something clicked over for me. Europe’s living past—and thus my own—was far closer than I’d imagined.

I’d more or less forgotten my afternoon at Breendonk, but the place resurfaced in a couple of surprising ways this past month. The first came during an interview with Dave Eastaugh of C86, a podcast inspired by the NME cassette compilation of the same name. What began as a chat about my high school band, The Vile Cherubs, takes an unexpected turn around the 1-hour mark when it pivots to Death Trip, my forthcoming book. If the subject matter leans dark, it was a true pleasure to try and explain the book’s premise to someone who clearly didn’t expect a conversation on indie rock to morph into the Holocaust, psychedelics, and family trauma. (You can hear the interview, by the way, by clicking here.)

Cover image of “Austerlitz.” You can find a fascinating essay on Sebald’s innovative use of images here.

But Breendonk wasn’t done with me, or I with it. It resurfaced only a few days later when, at a loss for what to read at an upcoming retreat, I picked up my copy of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. It’s a haunting book, chronicling the title character’s search for his past and his identity. As Austerlitz unreels his alternatingly dispassionate and slightly desperate story to an unnamed narrator, he learns he was one of the children evacuated from Europe in a program called Kindertransport, a series of rescues of Jewish children in the months before the Second World War transformed the continent into a giant prison camp for Jews. And though I’d forgotten it, Breendonk is one of Austerlitz’s touchstones. By the book’s end the narrator has visited it twice, simultaneously horrified by and yet drawn to it: 

Covered in places by open ulcers with the raw crushed stone erupting from them, encrusted by guano-like droppings and calcareous streaks, the fort was a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence.

I can’t remember how old I was then I first read Austerlitz, but I remember the awe—true awe this time—it stirred in me, mixed as it was by deep discomfort. What I saw in the book was myself, or some long-lost part of myself, and I didn’t know how to find my way back to it. Eventually I would, but that’s another story. The one I call Death Trip, which I’ll be sharing with you in its entirety in 2024.

I may as well get it out now: Fatherland is nowhere near as good as Austerlitz, though that’s not to say I’m not proud of it. But Sebald did something truly remarkable with this, his final book. In blurring the lines between fiction and history, fantasy and documentary, he painted a portrait of a post-Holocaust world that’s simultaneously dreamlike and razor-sharp. The past is painfully close, caught in the reflection of the setting sun on distant water or dancing, just out of reach, outside the window of a high-speed train. It swirls all around us and surfaces in unexpected moments, as when the title character stumbles upon a ramshackle circus orchestra in the shadow of Gare d’Austerlitz, one of Paris’ great rail terminals:

It seemed to me…as if the music came from somewhere very distant, from the East, I thought, from the Causcasus or Turkey. I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life.

Austerlitz hadn’t yet been written when I visited Breendonk, but I recall now the eerie sense that some long-ago transmission had finally reached me. There was information for me here, I was sure of it. And yet I lacked the wisdom, or perhaps the courage, to dig deeper. Having just turned 22 and fulfilled my decade-long goal of touring Europe, I thought I’d made it.

I hadn’t. After the band returned to the States and promptly broke up, I more or less forgot I might be an artist at all. It was time to buckle down, get serious, make something of myself. It would be years until I learned how to tap into my creative intuition again, to tune in to the ghostly signals I sensed at Breendonk. Look back, they told me. There’s more for you to gather here. Eventually, I’d follow those voices to their source, back to Budapest, where that circuit finally completed. I unearthed my family’s story, or as much of it as could be known. And I put my father’s weary ghost to rest, so that the both of us might finally find some peace.

That’s something Austerlitz never gets to experience for himself. At the book’s closing he’s gone off in search of his own, long-disappeared father, but it’s far from certain he’ll succeed. Rereading the book now, on the other side of my own descent into familial memory, I’m all the more grateful I did.

W.G. Sebald himself died shortly after the publication of Austerlitz, in a traffic accident at the age of 57. His death ended a career many speculate would have culminated in a Nobel Prize.