Between fiction and truth - W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz as an anti-novel

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the most important characteristics of the so-called anti-novel on the example of a literary work (literary "photo-text") by W.G. Sebald Austerlitz, which in the history of contemporary German literature is considered to be extremely original in terms of form and an unusual (unconventional) prose work drawing on numerous, non-literary means of artistic expression such as photography or film. At the same time, such an unusual (i.e. going far beyond the traditionally understood novelistic genre framework) and unambiguously unclassifiable prose form is an original literary exemplification of the fight against oblivion in the context of the experience of war trauma and the hardships of searching for one's own identity in the postmodern era at the threshold of the twenty-first century, it is strongly oriented towards the reader and the horizon of his reading expectations (Wolfgang Iser), and the line between literary fiction and truth seems to be almost abolished. When discussing the most important anti-novel features, reference was made to the definition of the term "anti-novel" and selected theories in the field of aesthetics of the reception of a literary medialized text (Dieter Wellershof).