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W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which many critics call the most important German-language novel of the 21st century, was published in 2001, shortly before the author's tragic death in a car accident.

This novel, or a «prose book of indeterminate genre», as Zebald himself called it, is distinguished not only by an unusual, labyrinthine plot, which the author builds with the care of a spider weaving its web, but also by a special poetic language that turns this work into a long poem about the search for a lost childhood. The unnamed narrator meets again and again the mysterious hermit Jacques Austerlitz, who is in love with European landscapes and architecture, and tells him about his many years of trying to uncover the secret of his own origin.

This search takes him almost across Europe and leads him to visit various «memory sites» of recent German and European history.nbsp;— from Antwerp to London, from Paris to Marienbad, and from Prague to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

And this is only the external, plot outline of the novel, full of historical excursions, poetic observations, and melancholic reflections on the (un)habitation of space and the passage of time that a person is forced to cope with.