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 month’s 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.

中文翻译：

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'Eine Märchenerzählung, die […] älter geworden ist mit der verflossenen Zeit'：WG Sebald 的 Austerlitz (2001) as a Melancholy Kunstmärchen

WG Sebald 以其散文写作的忧郁基调而闻名。然而，正如本文旨在表明的那样，他的作品中存在着一种迄今为止未被充分讨论的对“Kunstmärchen”的德国浪漫形式的债务，这在 Sebald 的最后一部小说奥斯特利茨中最为明显，该小说在其作者于 2001 年突然去世前仅一个月出版. 这部小说的出版日期及其对“Kunstmärchen”形式的影响意义重大，因为这表明塞巴尔德对 20 世纪欧洲现代性的有据可查的忧郁观点起源于早期浪漫主义文学形式。'Kunstmärchen' 的比喻和惯例构成了对过去的理解的重要驱动力，过去不可挽回地与现在分离，出现在 Sebald 的忧郁散文中。