One of the novel’s primary concerns is the way in which the past vanishes unless we try to rescue it from oblivion. The narrator sums up this phenomenon as he recounts seeing the former Nazi offices in his first visit to the Breendonk fortress:

[E]verything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life [...] the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on (42).

Austerlitz’s attempts to uncover his past demonstrate the impossibility of truly understanding the past as it really was. The best he can do is extrapolate a chronicle from traces he discovers; no piece of information illuminates the past such that he could experience it as he experiences the present.

Memories are unique records of the past because they have an emotional resonance and a personal meaning; they are the record of an individual life that is absent from history, which only tells of the past in an impersonal, general way. While it’s important to understand the past historically, it is also important to realize what history omits. As Hilary explains, “All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others” (88).