W.G. Sebalds babylonische Bibliothek. Kritik an einem heterotopischen Raum der Moderne

Abstract

W.G. Sebald’s description of the French Bibliothèque National as a “Babylonian library” in his last book Austerlitz displays a deep cultural pessimism that is comparable to Franz Kafka’s tower-of-Babel-parable "Das Stadtwappen". In both texts, acts of hubris lead to society’s self-destruction. Therein, we can analyze a transformation of myth into a critical approach to the modern era; an approach that has been theoretically substantiated by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, whose texts were well known to Sebald. The space that is examined in this essay is recognisable as a modern heterotopia, although Michel Foucault’s more positive concept is contaminated by Elias Canetti’s notion of deathly architecture. The multiple subtexts that are evoked by Sebald point to his own idea of “melancholic resistance”. Instead of a sincere resistance, however, the text builds an oversimplified and fatalistic critique of modernism by invoking various pictures of decay.