Saving the dead: memory’s impossible project in Austerlitz and “Marginalia in Mahler”

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the energy of resumption that memory is efficient
of in reconfiguring the dead in W G Sebald’s Austerlitz and Theodor Adorno’s
“Marginalia in Mahler”. Sebald in Austerlitz and Mahler in Das Lied von der Erde (The
Song of the Earth) manifest their attempts with the instrumentality of memory to rescue
the dead from the amnesia of existence. The absent is the domain that Sebald and
Mahler engage themselves with. Both of them in their respective fields aspire to
reconstruct the absent. They challenge through art the fog of forgetting.