Austerlitz and the Great Library

Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library

1. A Tale of Personal Curiosity

Several reviewers have criticized Sebald for including in the last pages of Austerlitz a strong critique of the new Bibliothèque Nationale. For example, Gabriele Annan, in the New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001, calls it “the only really dispensable passage” in the book. For me, however, as a librarian with a somewhat greater-than-normal interest in the new Grande Bibliothèque, Austerlitz’s “tirade” was simply the sign of the book’s authenticity, for it mirrored comments a friend who lives in Paris made to me shortly after the library had opened, and reiterated in an e-mail message of 20 November 1998, long before I’d ever heard of Sebald. Here, for example, is how he described the approach to the library:

Facing these obstacles assumes [one] can get into the building in the first place, and a description of that process serves as a caricature of the whole enterprise. The stairs that must be climbed first are as wide as the whole building complex, but in wet weather only a fraction of the access is somewhat safe. The wood chosen by the very pompous, self- satisfied architect, Dominique Perrault, gets so slippery that early visitors had to hang onto the occasional railing (in keeping with the architect's penchant for austerity, the banisters are made of steel and are freezing to the touch) to avoid joining the list of injured; now there are some narrow paths where a nearly invisible skid-resistant covering has been added. Once at the top (and, by the way, wheelchairs have to roll in the street along with the cars to find a ramp because no access has been cut into the high curb), there is the giant space of the esplanade to negotiate, a marvelous experience when there is wind and rain. There are no directional signs to the target, an invisible down ramp. Yes, having climbed the stairs, one has to descend again to reach the entrance. Entering, at least, is easy; there are no doors. The building is completely open to the elements and cold wind, rain and snow follow readers into the main hall.

Here is Austerlitz’s description of the same approach:

If you approach the new Bibliothèque Nationale from the place Valhubert you find yourself at the foot of a flight of steps which, made out of countless grooved hardwood boards and measuring three hundred by a hundred and fifty meters, surrounds the entire complex on the two sides facing the street like the lower story of a ziggurat. Once you have climbed the steps, at least four dozen in number and as closely set as they are steep, a venture not entirely without its dangers even for younger visitors, said Austerlitz, you are standing on an esplanade which positively overwhelms the eye, build of the same grooved wood as the steps, and extending over an area about the size of nine football pitches between the four corner towers of the library which thrust their way twenty-two floors up into the air. You might think, especially on days when the wind drives rain over this totally exposed platform, as it quite often does, said Austerlitz, that by some mistake you had found your way to the deck of the Berengaria or one of the other oceangoing giants…The four glazed towers, named in a manner reminiscent of a futuristic novel La tour des lois, La tour des temps, La tour des nombres and La tour des lettres, make a positively Babylonian impression on anyone who looks up at their façades and wonders about the still largely empty space behind their closed blinds. When I first stood on the promenade deck of the new Bibliothèque Nationale, said Austerlitz, it took me a little while to find the place where the visitor is carried down on a conveyor belt to what appears to be a basement storey but, in reality, is the ground floor. This downwards journey, when you have just laboriously ascended to the plateau, struck me as an utter absurdity, something that must have been devised—I can think of no other explanation, said Austerlitz—on purpose to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers, especially as it ends in front of a sliding door of makeshift appearance which had a chain across it on the day of my first visit, and where you have to let youself be searched by semi-uniformed security men (Austerlitz [New York: Random House, 2001], 276–278; [Munich: Hanser, 2001], 388–391. In further reference, the American and German paginations will be separated by a semicolon).

While the apparent justness of Austerlitz’s remarks made a deep impression on me, it was not the critique of the Bibliothèque itself that has held my interest. It is rather the claim, put forth by Henri Lemoine a few pages later, that the library now stood on the site of warehouses where goods looted from Jewish homes in Paris were stored, repaired, classified, and displayed by “over five hundred” specialists and artisans brought in from the transit camp at Drancy (288–290; 403–405). The question in my mind was “how accurate is this account?” What does anyone else know about it? Where did Sebald get his information? If true, Lemoine’s claim would be another illustration of Walter Benjamin’s dictum that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt, 1974], I/2, 696; Illuminations [New York: Schocken, 1969], 236). When I asked a Parisian friend familiar with the area about this in 2003, after I had read Austerlitz, she replied:

I’ve never heard of that. The area where the BNF is located and its surroundings is immense. There were tracks and buildings and sheds of all sorts belonging to the SNCF’s [the French national railway company’s] freight operations which, for a certain amount of time (as everywhere in France) were more or less under the control of the Germans, since the trains were coordinated by them. What is certain is that it was not on a large scale, or even on a small scale.

My friends also sent me a link to The Documentation Project at Loyola College, Baltimore <http://docproj.loyola.edu/jdp> on the Jeu de Paume, where the Nazis had stored art treasures looted from the Jews of France. It was useful in that it introduced me to the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s special unit in charge of pillaging cultural goods in the occupied territories, but it was limited to works of art. Henri Amouroux’s ten-volume study of the German occupation of France, La grande histoire des Français sous l’occupation (Paris: Laffont, 1976–1993) revealed nothing about looting. The Dictionnaire historique de la France sous l’occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 2000) did contain an article on the looting of art works, but of nothing else.

Finally, in Lynn Nicholas’s book on the looting of Europe’s art treasures, The Rape of Europa: the Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage, 1995), I did find a few pages on the looting of furniture and other household goods from the homes of deported Jews in Paris and the Western occupied territories under the “auspices” of the ERR, known as the M-Aktion (“Operation Furniture”; M=Möbel, “furniture”). Basing her work on American archives, Nicolas offered a certain level of detail on the operation, which she said “marks a new low, even in the history of looting” (138):

Some thirty-eight thousand dwellings [in Paris] were sealed. It was pretty complicated work: only unoccupied homes were involved, and, after consultations with the [German?] embassy, confiscation officials exempted absent Jews of many nations as well as those “who work for German firms in forestry and agriculture, or who are prisoners of war.” Food discovered on the premises was sent to the Wehrmacht; beds, linens, sofas, lamps, clothes, etc., were checked off on specially printed forms. A French organization, the Comité Organisation Déménagement, was set up and made responsible for measuring doorways, talking with concierges, packing, transporting, and finding railcars for the loot. The Union of Parisian Movers was forced to supply some 150 trucks and 1,200 workers a day for the operation…

The Germans…were also supposed to supervise the French railroads so the process would not be obstructed through “energy and ill-will.” Everything except art, which was sent to the Jeu de Paume, was first taken to a huge collecting area for sorting. Due to increasing acts of sabotage by the French workers, the camps were fenced off and seven hundred Jews “supplied by the SD” were interned therein, divided into groups of cabinetmakers, furriers, electricians, and so forth, and set to work processing and repairing the incoming goods, which passed them by on a conveyor belt (139).

Clearly these are the very activities described by Henri Lemoine in Austerlitz, but Nicholas doesn’t indicate where the “camps” (note the plural) were located.

When we returned to Paris in late 2003, our friends had a new clue waiting for us: a radio program broadcast 1 July 2003 on France Culture carried the title “Austerlitz-Lévitan-Bassano,” and told the story of three internment camps in Paris where the booty from Jewish homes had been processed for shipment to Germany. < http://www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture2/emissions/surpris/fiche.php?diffusion_id=14677> Three of the survivors recalled “how they were arrested and sent from Drancy to the Lévitan or Austerlitz camp, how life there was organized. As the last witnesses—internees or the children who came on weekly visits—they remember the alleyways of the warehouses, the rows of shelves stacked with bric-à-brac, furniture, linens of all kinds, labeled and arranged by categories, waiting to be loaded on the trains—a maniac inventory, surrealistic and absurd. There is no plaque commemorating these places of internment, which were nevertheless inseparable and unavoidable links in the Nazi logic of extermination.” Clearly, then, there was an internment camp for the processing of looted goods in the vicinity of the Gare d’Austerlitz; the question remained: how close was it to the location of the Great Library?

Further searching revealed a book, recently published by Fayard, which appears to have been the unacknowledged source for the radio program: Des camps dans Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, juillet 1943–août 1944, by Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a historian specializing in the economic aspects of the holocaust, and Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist studying collective memory. It had been commissioned in October 2001 by an association of former internees determined to preserve the memory of the camps (Des camps dans Paris, 299). The authors’ massive research encompassed public and private archives; published sources; and interviews with survivors, their descendants, and other interested parties. Here, at last, was a real source that might answer our questions! A book focused on the camps themselves would surely locate them precisely and offer other details that could confirm or otherwise throw light on Sebald’s account.

2. “Camp Austerlitz” and the Great Library

The center described by Henri Lemoine turns out to have been but one of three “internment camps,” branches of Drancy, devoted to the processing of the looted goods. They were part of the M-Aktion and met certain specific needs of the occupying powers. First, there was a labor shortage in Paris that might be met by the use of prisoners; second, there were stories that the French workers were unreliable, and engaged in sabotage (see Lynn Nicholas, above; according to Des camps dans Paris [85], sabotage was never proven.); third, Drancy held too many Jews who, under the demented Nazi racial classifications, were not eligible for deportation to the east: Jews married to “Aryans,” half-Jews (Mischlinge), spouses of prisoners of war, etc. Employing these individuals in Paris would open up more space in Drancy for those destined for deportation.

The “Lévitan” camp, located in a former furniture warehouse in the 10th arrondissement, was created 9 July 1943. The Austerlitz camp was established (that is, the prisoners were moved there from Drancy) 1 November 1943. It occupied two buildings belonging to the Magasins Généraux (General Warehouses) of Paris, located at 43 Quai de la Gare, a stretch of the quai now called Quai Panhard et Levassor. These warehouses were situated between the Pont de Tolbiac and the Rue Watt, approximately 400 meters upstream from the future site of the Grande Bibliothèque, which is on the northern (downstream) side of the Pont de Tolbiac, closer to the Gare d’Austerlitz. The third camp, Bassano, was created in 1944 in an unoccupied hôtel in the upscale 16th arrondissement.

The Austerlitz camp existed until 12 August 1944, when it was evacuated in the face of the advancing allied armies, with the internees being sent back to Drancy (Des camps dans Paris, 256–258). On 1 August the last trainload of furniture destined for Germany—52 cars— was loaded. Then, on 26 August the Germans bombed the camp (Des camps, 261, 290) and everything remaining was destroyed, either by the explosions or in a subsequent fire. A former internee, returning to the site, described it as nothing but smoking rubble.

Taken literally, then, Lemoine’s statement that “the whole affair (die ganze Geschichte) is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque” (Austerlitz, 289; 405) is false on one count and inexact on another. The Austerlitz camp was not located “on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Pont de Tolbiac,” and insofar as “the whole affair” would have included still usable items, they would have been at best rubble and ashes. An aerial photograph showing the destroyed camp is included in Des camps dans Paris.

Thus the “facts” of Henri Lemoine’s account do not square with the reality, as the authors of Des camps take pains to point out (290). Nor was the camp was guarded by “a contingent of Indochinese soldiers” (Soldaten aus Hinterindien), but by members of the so-called Vlasov army, Soviet prisoners of war “from the Caucasus or Mongolia” (Des camps, 166) organized by the Germans to fight the Soviets. On the other hand, the ironic use of the term “Galeries d’Austerlitz” by the prisoners is well documented: it can be seen in the reproduction of an article on the camp written by one of the internees, Muriel Schatzmann (Des camps, 136).

The warehouses of the Austerlitz camp were reconstructed after the war following the same design as the originals and formed part of the expansion of the Grands Moulins, the flour mills that supplied Paris’s bakeries. Milling continued until 1996; the Grands Moulins left the following year, and the reconstructed buildings of the camp were demolished in June 1997 as part of “ZAC-Rive Gauche,” a vast development project covering the entire area from the Gare d’Austerlitz to the Boulevard Masséna, which will include buildings for an expanded University of Paris-7 campus on the site of the Austerlitz camp (Des camps, 296; for the university see <http://www.sigu7.jussieu.fr/PRG/projet.html#plansite>). The acronym ZAC stands for the very French but un-Sebaldian term “Zone d’Aménagement Concertée” (Intrgrated Development Zone). According to the “Chroniques-Nomades” website < http://www.chroniques-nomades.org/13ardt/13ardt002.htm >, it is the “greatest construction site in Paris since Haussmann.”

Although Des camps dans Paris does not support the historical exactitude of the Sebald-Lemoine account of the Grande Bibliothèque, Sebald and Austerlitz occupy something like a place of honor in the book. Its epigraph includes two passages from Austerlitz, and in the concluding chapter, Sebald is given credit for having brought the story of the Parisian camp to light. For the authors, the story of the Paris camps represents un trou de mémoire, an empty place in the collective memory of the Occupation, which until now has recognized only the deportations on the one side, and the pillage of art works on the other. It fell to Sebald, “perhaps the last great German writer of the twentieth century,” to “point out one of the Parisian camps, Austerlitz, and even to give its name to a great novel full of cross-connections, whose intention is to describe the impossible memory and ineluctable burial of all traces of the past” (Des camps, 290).

3. Sebald’s sources

Where then did Sebald learn about the Austerlitz camp? While he might have found out about the M-Aktion and the use of prisoners to process the booty from Lynn Nicholas’s book, he would not have found there any connection to the site of the Bibliothèque Nationale. His most likely sources were two articles, both noted in Des camps dans Paris (298), that appeared in the month after the opening of the Grande Bibliothèque. “Die Türme des Schweigens” (The Towers of Silence), by Alexander Smoltczyk with photos by Maurice Weiss, appeared in the 24 January 1997 issue of ZeitMagazin. Its headline reads: “A month ago the new French National Library opened with great pomp. The site is said to have been a wasteland. In fact, Europe’s greatest collection of knowledge stands on a site of barbarity: Back in 1943 private libraries belonging to Jews were concentrated here. Nobody talks about it.” A summary of the ZeitMagazin article, written by Nicolas Weill, the great-grandson of one of the internees, appeared on the front page of the 23 January 1997 issue of Le Monde with the headline: “The François-Mitterrand Library in the shadow of a Nazi camp.” This brief article provided much of the impetus for bringing together the survivors of the camps into an association (Des camps, 10–11).

“Die Türme des Schweigens” is a piece of investigative journalism that turns into an angry denunciation of French officialdom’s silence over the presence of a Nazi work camp within Paris and of the obstacles it had placed in the way of restitution for the victims. As the headline quoted above suggests, the author is particularly taken with the fact that in the shadow of the new library lay a site of a warehouse where the contents of other libraries, books confiscated from their Jewish owners, had been stored. These included a “valuable collection of socialist theory with first editions of classics” belonging to the former SPD deputy Norbert Marx; the library of the great historian Marc Bloch, who in 1944 was “arrested, tortured, and shot by the Gestapo”; and the books of Émile Durkheim, of which “not a trace remains,” but whose name graces one of the streets leading to the new library (14).

The article also demonstrates how precise facts can become confused by less precise, but more rhetorically attractive distortions. It points out that the “area between Rue Watt and the Rue de Tolbiac consisted of bricks, smoke, railroad tracks, and the screeching wheels of the railroad cars,” and gives 43 Quai de la Gare as the address of the Austerlitz camp, but also places that location “in the immediate vicinity of the tract of land occupied by today's library” (12). For Claude Bensignor, a local inhabitant who investigated the area’s history, the distance between the camp and the site of the library became less significant than their proximity: “Isn’t it strange,” the article quotes him as saying, “the idea that this colossal structure holding the knowledge of the nation stands on the clay feet of a camp?” From here it is one more step to Henri Lemoine’s version: “On the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac stood…an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris” (Austerlitz, 288; 403).

Some of the facts in the ZeitMagazin article are contradicted by the version in Des camps. It states, for example, that “the quai de la Gare was surrounded and guarded by approximately eighty Mongolian soldiers” (12). This most likely refers to the members of the “Vlasov army,” which included troops from Central Asia who appeared to some as “Mongolian.” In Austerlitz this becomes “aus Hinterindien” (Southeast Asia) in the German and “Indochinese” in the English translation. The article also appears to err in attributing the opening of the camp to the SS; the establishment and operation of the camps were the responsibility of the Dienststelle Westen (Western Services Office) of the Ministry of the Occupied Territories of the East; it was the SD (Security Service) that provided the camps with Jewish prisoners for labor.

A comparison of the Sebald-Lemoine account of the Austerlitz operation with the report in Zeit-Magazin shows how closely Sebald followed some parts of the report, and when he deviated from it. The left-hand column below gives Henri Lemoine’s account, while the right-hand column matches it with corresponding passages from “Die Türme des Schweigens.” Note that the source for the story of the rosin from confiscated violin cases has not yet been identified. In the magazine article, we have retained the quotation marks around the statements of interviewees.

Austerlitz (Hanser, 2001), 403–405

“Die Türme des Schweigens,” ZeitMagazin, 24 January 1997

Auf dem Ödland zwischen dem Rangiergelände der Gare d’Austerlitz und dem Pont Tolbiac, auf dem heute diese Bibliothek sich erhebt, war beispielweise bis zum Kriegesende ein großes Lager, in dem die Deutschen das gesamte von ihnen aus den Wohnungen der Pariser Juden geholte Beutegute zusammenbrachten

Die Gegend zwischen Rue Watt und Rue de Tolbiac war eine aus Ziegelsteinen, Rauch, Schienen und dem Kreischen der Waggonachsen (12).

In November 1943 eröffnete die SS auf dem Eisenbahngelände Tolbiac das Camp d’Austerlitz. Es war ein Nebenstelle des Konzentrationslagers Drancy im Pariser Nordosten. Von Drancy aus rollten die Deportationszüge mit den französischen Juden in die Vernichtungslager in Polen. Ihr Besitz wurde gesondert verschickt. Im unmittelbarer Nähe des heutigen Bibliotheksgeländes am Quai de la Gare Nr. 43, wurde bis August 1944 von—im Nazihjargon—halb- oder mit Ariern verheirateten Juden Beutegut aus jüdischen Haushalten sortiert, um in die ausgebombten Städte des Reichs gebracht zu werden (12).

An die vierzigtausend Wohnungen, glaube ich, sagte Lemoine, sind es gewesen, die man damals ausgeräumt hat in einer monatelangen Aktion, für die der Fuhrpark der Vereinigung der Pariser Möbelspediteure requiriert und ein Heer von nicht weniger als fünfzehnhundert Packarbeitern zum Einsatz gebracht wurde.

“In Paris allein wurden durch rund 20 Erfassungsbeamte über 38 000 Wohnungen erfaßt. Der Abtransport des Wohnungseinrichtungen erfolgte unter Hinzuziehung des gesamten Führparks der Vereinigung der Pariser Möbelexpiditeure, die täglich bis zu 150 Lastfahrzeuge mit 1200 bis 1500 französischen Arbeiter zu stellen hatten,” heißt es im Abschlußbericht von August 1944 (16).

Alle, die in irgendeiner Form an diesem bis ins letzte durchorganisierten Enteignungs- und Weiterwertungsprogramm beteiligt waren, sagte Lemoine, die federführenden und teilweise miteinander rivalisierenden Stäbe der Besatzungsmacht, die Finanz- und Steuerbehörden, die Einwohner- und Katasterämter, die Banken und Versicherungsagenturen die Polizei, die Transportfirmen, die Hauseigentümer und Hausbesorgter, hätten zweifellos gewußt, daß von den in Drancy Internierten wohl kaum einer jemals zurückkommen würde.

“Das Lager Austerlitz ist en äußerst heikles Thema. Hier haben wir einen sichtbaren Beweis, wie weit die Komplizenschaft des französischen Staats in der Judendeportation ging. Wenn jemand eine Wohnung ausräumt und weitervermietet, dann weiß er doch, daß der Besitzer nicht mehr wiederkehren wird.”—Michel Frouin (16)

Die systematische Plünderung und Enteignung jüdischer Wohnungen in Paris ist ein Thema, über das bis heute niemand gern spricht. Schon gar nicht die Stadtverwaltung von Paris. Denn sie hat in erheblichem Ausmaß von den Arisierungen profitiert (16).

Der Großteil der seinerzeit kurzerhand appropriierten Wertgegenstände, Guthaben, Aktien und Immobilien befindet sich ja, sagte Lemoine, bis heute in den Händen der Stadt und des Staates.

“Über den Entschädigingenen an die Deportierten steht ein großes Fragezeichen,” sagt Jacques Fredg, der Leiter des dokumentationzentrums CDJC. “Es hat diverse Zahlungen an die Jewish Claims Conference gegeben, von deutscher und französischer Seite. Aber alle Wertgegenstände, alle Aktien und Gelder, die den Juden in Drancy abgenommen wurden, gingen erst an die Staatsbank Caisse des Dépôts et Consignes und dann ans Finanzministerium. Nichts wurde je zurückgegeben” (17)

…In Frankreich war es der Staat, der zugleich enteignete und das Vermögen so lange verwaltete, bis sich zufällig ein Anspruch rührte. Für die Abwicklungen, sagt Fredg, seien bisweilen Vewalter zuständig gewesen, die noch von der Vichy-Regierung eingesetzt worden waren. Geld von beschlagnahmten Konten wurden zwar zurückerstattet, doch zum Nennwert und unter Abzug der Steuern (17).

Und dort drunten auf dem Lagerplatz Austerlitz-Tolbiac stapelte sich in den Jahren ab 1942 alles, was unsere Zivilisation, sei es zur Verschönerung des lebens, sei es zum bloßen Hausgebrauch, hervorgegracht hat, von Louis-XVI-Kommoden, Meißner Porzellan, Perserteppichen und ganzen Bibliotheken bis zum letzten Salz- und Pfefferstreuer.

“Es hat hier ein Lager gegeben…Ein Arbeitslager. In Paris sind während des Krieges 38 000 jüdische wohnungen ausgeräumt worden. Die Bewohner kamen nach Drancy und von dort nach Polen. Ihre Möbel, Pelze, Bücher kamen hierher nach Tolbiac.”—Claude Bensignor (12).

Alle Gegenstände wurden auf das Eisenbahngelände Tolbiac-Austerlitz gebracht (16).

Es soll sogar, wie mir einer, der in den Lager tätig gewesen ist, unlängst berichtet hat, sagte Lemoine, eigene Kartonschachteln gegeben haben für das aus den konfiszierten Geigenkästen saubertkeitshalber herausgenommene Kolophonium.

Mehr als fünfhundert Kunsthistoriker, Antiquitätenhändler, Restaurateure, Tischler, Uhrmacher, Kürschner und Coututièren, die man aus Drancy herbeigeholt hatte und die bewacht wurden von einem Kontigent Soldaten aus Hinbterindien, waren Tag für Tag vierzehn Stunden damit beschäftigt, die einlaufenden Güter instandzusetzen und nach ihrem Wert und Art zu sortieren—das Silbersteck zum Silbersteck, das Kochgeschirr zum Kochgeschirr, die Spielsachen zu den Spielsachen und so fort.

Die Depots arbeiteten vierzehn Stunden am Tag. Kürschner, Schneider, Elektriker, Uhrmacher, Tischler reparierten und restaurierten die ankommende Beute (12).

“Die Frauen kümmerten sich um das Geschirr und verpackten es. Wir wurden von SS beaufsichtigt, etwa dreißig waren es. Der Quai de la Gare war umzingelt und bewacht von mongolischen Soldaten, ungefähr achtzig.”—André Cohen (12)

“Täglich wurden einige tausend Kisten ausgeladen. Etwa 150 Internierte mußten sie auspacken und den Inhalt in bereits etikettierte Kisten lagen: Porzellan, Arzneien, Wäsche, Spielzeug, Uhren, Kunstgegenstände, Haushaltwaren.”—Gilberte Jacob (12–13)

Über siebenhundert Eisenbahnzüge sind von hier abgegangen in die zerstörten Städte des Reichs.

Es waren 736 Güterzüge mit 29 436 Waggons, die Paris in Richtung Reich verließen (16).

Nicht selten, sagte Lemoine, werden auch in den Lagerhallen, die von den Häftlingen Les Galéries d’Austerlitz genannt wurden, aus Deutschland herebeigereiste Parteibonzen und in Paris stationierte höhere Chargen der SS und der Wehrmacht herumgegangenen sein mit ihren Gemahlinnen oder anderen Damen, um sich eine Saloneinrichtung auszusuchen für die Villa im Grunewald, ein Sèvres-Service, einen Pelzmantel oder einen Pleyel.

Die Häftlinge nannten ihr Lager die Galéries Austerlitz. Nach dem Kaufhaus Galéries Lafayette, wo es auch alles gibt (14).

Denn es war keineswegs selten, daß Naziwürdenträger oder ihre Frauen vorbei kamen und sich etwas passendes aussuchten, einen Pelz, ein hübsches Buch, ein Service Sèvres-Porzellan (14).

“Nachdem sie über mein Schicksal gegrämt und ein paar Tränen vergossen hatte, bat sie mich, ihr die besten Möbel für ihre Sechszimmerwohnung auszusuchen. Und vor allem einen Flügel. Die Kisten wurden an ihre Adresse geschickt: Frau Maria Paudler, Berlin-Grunewald.”—Muriel Schatzmann (14)

Die wertvollsten Sachen hat man, naturgemäß, nicht en gros in die ausgebombten Städte geschickt; wo sie hingekommen sind, das will heute niemand mehr wissen, wie ja überhaupt die ganze Geschichte im wahrsten wortsinn begraben ist unter den Fundamente der Grande Bibliothèque unseres pharaonischen Präsidenten, sagte Lemoine.

Auf das Lagerhaus in Tolbiac, durch das viele Bücher gegangen waren, fielen an 26. August 1944 eine deutsche Brandbombe. Die Umzugsfirmen, di Jo Goldenbergs Wohnung ausräumten, behielten ihre Depots noch bis zum Baubeginn der Nationalbibliothek (17).

Austerlitz (translated by Anthea Bell; Random House, 2001), 288–89

“Die Türme des Schweigens” (translation by J. L. Cowan)

Thus, on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.

The area between Rue Watt and the Rue de Tolbiac consisted of bricks, smoke, railroad tracks, and the screeching wheels of the railroad cars (12).

In November 1943 the SS opened Camp Austerlitz at the Tolbiac railway yards. It was an extension of the Drancy concentration camp northeast of Paris. It was from Drancy that trains carrying deported French Jews left for the extermination camps in Poland. Their property was deported separately: in the immediate vicinity of the tract of land occupied by today's library at Quai de la Gare no. 43, booty from Jewish households was sorted by—to use the jargon of the Nazis—half-Jews or Jews married to “aryans,” so that it could be sent to the bombed-out cities of the Reich (12).

I believe they cleared some forty thousand apartments at that time, said Lemoine, in an operation lasting months, for which purpose they requisitioned the entire pantechnicon fleet of the Paris Union of Furniture Removers, and an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men was brought into action.

According to the final report of August 1944, “In Paris alone, more than 38,000 homes were seized through the action of about twenty confiscation officials charged with this task. The removal of their furnishings involved the engagement of the entire fleet belonging to the Parisian Union of Furniture Movers, which had to supply daily up to 150 trucks with 1200 to 1500 French workers” (16)

All who had taken part in any way in this highly organized program of expropriation and reutilization, said Lemoine, the people in charge of it, the sometimes rival staffs of the occupying power and the financial and fiscal authorities, the residents’ and property registries, the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings, must undoubtedly have known that scarcely any of those interned in Drancy would ever come back.

“The Austerlitz camp is an extremely touchy subject. Here we have visible proof of the extent to which the French state was complicit in the deportation of the Jews. Anyone who cleared out a home and then rented it to someone else must have known that the owner was not going to come back.”—Michel Frouin (16)

The systematic plundering and expropriation of Jewish homes in Paris is a subject that nobody likes to talk about today. Certainly not the municipal administration of Paris, since it profited considerably from the aryanization process (16).

For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time, said Lemoine, remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day.

“Over the matter of restitution to the deportees stands a big question mark,” says Jacques Fredg, director of the CDJC (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation). “From both the French and German sides various payments were made at the Jewish Claims Conference. But all valuables, all shares and money taken from the Jews at Drancy went first to the state bank, Caisse des Dépôts et Consignes (Deposit and Consignment Fund) and from there to the Ministry of Finance. Nothing was ever given back” (17)

…In France it was the state that not only expropriated the property; it also administered it until a claim might come along. For settlements, said Fredg, it was often the case that the authorized administrators remained those appointed by the Vichy government. Money from confiscated accounts was restored, certainly, but at its nominal value and after deduction of taxes (17).

In the years from 1942 onwards everything our civilization has produced, whether for the embellishment of life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests or drawers, Meissen porcelain, Persian rugs and whole libraries, down to the last saltcellar and pepper mill, was stacked there in the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot..

“There was a camp here…a labor camp. In Paris during the war 38,000 Jewish homes were cleared out. The inhabitants went to Drancy and from there to Poland. Their furniture, furs, and books came here, to Tolbiac”—Claude Bensignor (12)

All articles were brought to the Austerlitz-Tolbiac railroad yards (16).

A man who had worked in it told me not long ago, said Lemoine, that there were even special cardboard cartons set aside to hold the rosin removed, for the sake of greater cleanliness, from confiscated violin cases.

Over five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers, and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indochinese soldiers were employed every day, in fourteen-hour shifts, to put the goods coming into the depot in proper order and sort them by value and kind—silver cutlery with silver cutlery, cooking pans with cooking pans, toys with toys, and so forth.

The depots worked fourteen hours per day. Furriers, tailors, electricians, clockmakers, and joiners repaired and restored the arriving booty (12).

“The women occupied themselves with the plates and dishes and wrapped them. We were supervised by the SS—about thirty of them. The quai de la Gare was encircled and guarded by Mongolian soldiers, about eighty.”—André Cohen (12).

“Thousands of crates were unloaded every day. About 150 internees had to unpack them and place the contents in separately labeled crates: porcelain, medicines, underwear, toys, clocks, objets d’art, household goods. The book section was in the basement.” —Gilberte Jacob (12–13).

More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich.

Seven hundred-thirty eight freight trains, with 29,436 freight cars, left Paris for the Reich (16).

Not infrequently, said Lemoine, Party grandees on visits from Germany and high-ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers stationed in Paris would walk around the halls of the depot, known to the prisoners as Les Galéries d’Austerlitz, with their wives or other ladies, choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald villa, or a Sèvres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano.

The prisoners called their camp “Galéries d’Austerlitz,” after the Galéries Lafayette, which also carry everything (14).

It was not at all unusual for Nazi dignitaries or their wives to come by and pick out something suitable: a fur coat, a nice book, or a Sèvres service (14).

“After she had fretted over my fate and shed a few tears, she asked me to pick out the best furniture for her six-room house. Especially a piano. The crates were sent to her address: Frau Maria Paudler, Berlin-Grunewald.”—Muriel Schatzmann (14)

The most valuable items, of course, were not sent off wholesale to the bombed cities, and 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, said Lemoine.

On 26 August 1944 a German fire bomb fell on the camp buildings, where many books had passed through. The moving company that had cleared out Jo Goldenberg’s home kept up its warehouses until construction began on the National Library (17).

Conclusion: Some thoughts on literature and history

Research into the details of the Sebald-Lemoine account of the camp has led me to conclude that several other matters overshadow the question of precise historical accuracy. Sebald, of course made no claim to be a historian, or absolutely precise with historical details (see, for example the interview with Maya Jaggi, “Recovered Memories,” The Guardian, 22 September 2001). Henri Lemoine is after all a fictitious creation, as are Sebald’s narrator and Austerlitz himself, and also probably the former internee who told Lemoine about the rosin from the violin cases. The claim in Des camps dans Paris that “the detailed description of the camp [in Austerlitz] is in complete discrepancy with the reality to which it claims to bear witness” (290), though an understandable reaction by scholars engaged in painstaking research, is an exaggeration that does not square with the praise the authors give Sebald for having revealed the existence of the Austerlitz camp to the reading public. The displacement of the camp 400 meters to the north, the identity of the soldiers guarding the camp, and the inclusion, not mentioned by independent sources, of art historians and antique dealers among the internees, are the details in Sebald’s account that differ from what we now know to be the historical evidence. The most crucial of these details, the exact location of the camp, has seemed less important to the concerned parties than the symbolism of a pretentious monument to culture being erected near the site of oppression. In any case, the site of the camp will be covered over by another cultural institution—an ultra-modern university campus—as part of the vast 130-hectare ZAC-Rive Gauche development.

Against these discrepancies one has to set the literary concision of Sebald’s account of the history of the M-Aktion and the camp. In particular, his characterization of the looted articles as “everything our civilization has produced, whether for the embellishment of life or merely for everyday use,” encapsulates not only the facts but the larger historical and moral significance of the looting. And taken in context, the expression “the whole affair,” refers not only to the physical remains of the camp, but to the entire history of deportation, confiscation, looting, the camp, and, perhaps most important, the official silence surrounding its history.

In retrospect, we can view the Sebald-Lemoine account from three wider perspectives. First, it parallels the project that residents of the Austerlitz-Tolbiac area, together with former internees and their descendants, undertook with the aim of retrieving, and hopefully preserving, the memory of the camp. Both the camp site itself and the history it contained were threatened by the gigantic development scheme intended to transform completely the entire eastern part of Paris, of which the Great Library was the first stage. The memorial project, whose origins go back to the late 1980s, included the formation of the Amicale Austerlitz-Lévitan-Bassano (Association Austerlitz-Lévitan-Bassano) in early 1998 and the engagement in October 2001 of Dreyfus and Gensburger to write the history; it culminated in October 2003 with the publication of Des camps dans Paris.

Lemoine made his statement, according to the chronology of Austerlitz, in September or October 1997. It was probably during this time that Sebald started work on Austerlitz, after having abandoned his Corsica project (see Sven Meyer’s editorial notice in Campo Santo [Munich: Hanser, 2003], 262); he was thus writing Austerlitz during the time the Amicale was looking for someone to write the history of the camps. Austerlitz appeared in German in March 2001, in English in October of that year, and in French translation in October 2002, at a time the research on Des camps dans Paris was underway, but not completed. Lemoine’s statement, therefore, appears to have been the first public mention of the Paris camps since the newspaper articles of January 1997.

Second, Sebald’s account of the library and the camp is one node in the network of stories he tells about suppressed memory and the destruction of the past. That the possessions looted from Jewish homes in France were intended for the bombed cities of Germany offers a subterranean connection between Austerlitz and On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur). There are of course any number of thematic connections with other episodes in Austerlitz itself, such as the urban developments around the Liverpool Street Station and the German occupation of Prague. While comparable in importance, many of these links are quite different from each other. The description of Theresienstadt Sebald took from W. G. Adler’s book, condensing it into a single virtuoso sentence of controlled outrage is mirrored on a more restrained scale by the adaptation of the article in ZeitMagazin. A more directly personal link exists between the fate of the camp and the episode at the Bastiani circus, where Austerlitz has one of his most profoundly moving experiences (272–275; 382–387). The modest and primitive circus, located on the “wasteland” near the Gare d’Austerlitz, stands in sharp contrast to the cold and pretentious monumentality of the Great Library which was later built nearby.

Finally, the discovery that the camp described by Lemoine was called “Austerlitz” adds several new symbolic dimensions to the name of Sebald’s protagonist. As the site of an internment camp, the name “Austerlitz” is not only directly connected to the holocaust, but to a particularly squalid episode in the extermination process that had itself been part of suppressed memory—un trou de mémoire that parallels Austerlitz’s own. It also adds to the irony of Austerlitz’s early notion that his name linked him “in some mysterious way to the glorious past of the people of France” (72; 106), since Camp Austerlitz must be associated as much with French collaboration and betrayal as with solidarity and resistance.

Today, the name “Austerlitz” is being attached to new hotels, apartments, offices, and conference centers in the vast urban development surrounding the Grande Bibliothèque. It is as if a “new,” postmodern Austerlitz has arisen to place a massive concrete slab over the “old” one, burying it physically and threatening to bury it in the social consciousness. Under these circumstances the exact details of Austerlitz are less important than the fact that it has become part of a larger, if still modest, effort to rescue the memory of the camp from oblivion.

As a crowning irony, the agency in charge of the development, SECAMA ZAC-Rive Gauche, also helped underwrite Des camps dans Paris, the book that preserves the memory of the Parisian camps and all they contained. Whether the power of the written word will outlast that of glass and concrete remains to be seen.

[Posted at the Davidson Sebald Symposium, stable url: http://www.davidson.edu/academic/german/denham/cowan.htm]