This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

The essay discusses the theme of the Holocaust in Sebald’s texts, though not in the pre-established framework of ‘Holocaust literature’. Its aim is rather to explore a different set of questions: Whom did Sebald choose to write about? What determined his choice and what stories do his characters tell? The two examples examined in this context are the painter Max Ferber and the architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. The essay argues that the protagonists mirror Sebald’s biographic quests to come to terms with the Nazi past and the legacy of the Holocaust. This explains, for instance, why the Jewish characters Sebald invented had hazy, all-but-forgotten Jewish origins and could know no more about themselves than Sebald knew about them: when he grew up, there was no memory of the Jews in post-war Germany.

The chapter discusses the events of the War of the Third Coalition that climaxed on the field of Austerlitz in one of the most famous battles in military history. The 1805 Campaign was the first one Napoleon fought as the emperor and it consolidated his martial reputation: a classic example of the general’s logistical and operational brilliance that allowed him to outmarch and outfight his enemy in just three months after the start of the war. Beginning with the bold and rapid advance of the French Army from the Rhine to the Danube, the chapter examines Napoleon’s envelopment of the Austrian army at Ulm, the manoeuvres to Austerlitz and the counter-attack that resulted in the decisive defeat for the Austro-Russian Army.