Reconciling History in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

Abstract

In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz there is brief mention of the spa town Marienbad, in the Karlovy Vary region of the Czech Republic. Marienbad, for Sebald’s eponymous character, Austerlitz, is a peace-time destination, a location of memory, of serenity, before the madness to come. Austerlitz, who as a Jewish child will be sent away from Central Europe on a Kindertransport to England, losing his bearings, his parents, his history in this momentous journey, is, far after the war, brought to remember Marienbad. His memory of this summer retreat, and its loveliness, is already ghosted by his departure. He left for England from the same station from which the family departed, just the year before, for Marienbad. This coincidence is recalled for Austerlitz far in the future as he hears a narrative of his life from Vera, his former nursery maid: Towards evening, when I said goodbye to Vera, holding her weightless hands in mine, she suddenly remembered how, on the day of my departure from the Wilsonova station, Agáta had turned to her when the train disappeared from view, and said: We left from here for Marienbad only last summer. And now — where will we be going now?