Works on Paper Book Club: Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Join us for our inaugural Works on Paper Book Club with moderator Ted Mann, project assistant curator of painting and sculpture, who has selected the novel Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. Mann will open with a short talk on Austerlitz and its connections to Memory and Matter: Personal and Collective Histories — currently on view on Floor 6, part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10 — before leading the group through a discussion guided by his own questions.

We encourage everyone to read as much of the book as they can, but don’t let an unfinished last chapter stop you from joining us! Come ready to discuss — just know that all plot points are fair game.

Please note, space is limited and advance registration is required. RSVP here.

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald is available for purchase in the Museum Store or for checkout in your local library.

Works on Paper Book Club

Each month, read and discuss books chosen by the museum’s curators, staff, or exhibiting artists in our book club Works on Paper. Selections are personal: books that inspired their own work, shaped their thinking, or connect to ideas alive in the galleries right now. From fiction and biography to art criticism, poetry, and more — the only thread is that the book opens something up for the reader. And each session, you’ll sit down and explore the book together with the person who selected it.

Art asks us to slow down — to stand before something and truly look. Works on Paper is a book club built on that same instinct.

About Austerlitz

A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is — a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

About the Author

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. His other books include After Nature, Campo Santo, and On the Natural History of Destruction. He died in December 2001.

About the Moderator

Ted Mann was the lead curator for Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10 and organized its reinstallation together with Gamynne Guillotte, the Leanne and George Roberts Chief Education and Community Engagement Officer at SFMOMA. Prior to joining the museum in 2024, Mann worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, for over a decade, including on the Panza Collection Initiative, a joint curatorial and conservation research project that was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and dedicated to the preservation and future display of artworks from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, he co-authored the catalogue that grew out of the project, Object Lessons: Case Studies in Minimal Art — The Guggenheim Panza Collection Initiative, which received the Dedalus Foundation’s 2022 Robert Motherwell Book Award. Mann also guest curated two exhibitions at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis: Bruce Nauman: Blue and Yellow Corridor (2018–19), and Stephen Kaltenbach: the Beginning and The End (2020–21), co-organized with Constance Lewallen. He received his BA from Williams College and his MA and MPhil in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.