Winfried Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and His Reflections on Theresienstadt in Light of Resi Weglein’s Eyewitness Account and Memoirs (1945)

The highly reputed novel or literary documentary Austerlitz (2001) by Winfried. G. Sebald has attracted much critical respect and high praise. Sebald worked intensively with various sources reflecting on the Holocaust, and one of those, H. G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941–1945 (first published in 1955), formed the backbone of Austerlitz. One of the surviving prisoners in Theresienstadt, Resi Weglein, who had been a nurse from Ulm, managed to return home after the war in 1945 together with her husband, Siego Weglein, and she sat down soon after to compose her memoirs. Those were finally published in 1988, accompanied by a detailed historical analysis of the history of antisemitism in Ulm and the environs since the early nineteenth century by the local historians Silvester Lechner and Alfred Moos. Those two scholars relied, in turn, heavily on Adler’s detailed study, but Sebald scholars have not yet known of these intriguing connections. Since these memoirs are soon going to be published for the first time in an English translation, it seems to be most pertinent to bring both texts into conversation with each other and thus to add further to our understanding of this famous novel in light of Resi’s writing.