‘Eine Märchenerzählung, die […] älter geworden ist mit der verflossenen Zeit’: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) as a Melancholy Kunstmärchen

W. G. Sebald is well known for the melancholy tone of his prose writing. However, as this article aims to show, there exists a heretofore underdiscussed debt to the German Romantic form of the ‘Kunstmärchen’ in his work that is most discernible in Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, which was published only months before its author’s sudden death in 2001. The date of this novel’s publication and its debt to the ‘Kunstmärchen’ form are significant, since this suggests that Sebald’s well-documented melancholy perspective on twentieth-century European modernity has aesthetic origins in earlier Romantic literary forms. The tropes and conventions of the ‘Kunstmärchen’ constitute vestigially important drivers in the construction of the understanding of the past as irrecoverably separate from the present that emerges in Sebald’s melancholy prose. By examining clear instances in Austerlitz which draw on thematic and structural elements of the ‘Kunstmärchen’, this article suggests that Romantic dissatisfaction with the world of the modern and the everyday finds its late echoes in Sebald’s millennial melancholy and emerges as a key constitutive factor in the novel’s sustained refusal to offer closure or reconciliation between the narrative’s present and the past it attempts to investigate.