1 The Museum, Memory Media and Media Nostalgia in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) 1 Silke Arnold-de Simine Abstract Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) explores the mediating capacities of the written and the spoken word, photography, film and the museum to relive things observed, but not experienced or experienced, but not remembered. These media of memory form the basis of the protagonist’s efforts to discover his past by travelling not so much into the depths of his own traumatized individual memory, but through the realms of ‘communicative’, ‘political’ and ‘cultural memory’. This contribution investigates the dynamics of a mixed-media simulation in Austerlitz, a text which quotes and reworks museums’ strategies of providing a access to the past, but at the same time modifies, alienates and questions these strategies. Sebald’s texts are the result of a search for new forms of expression and as such they reject and undermine traditional boundaries between genres and styles, between fiction and non- fiction. Amongst others they have been described as unconventional travelogues in which his narrators and protagonists are always on the move across Europe on buses and trains, but most of the time on foot. Walking seems to provide the adequate mode for chance encounters 1 I am grateful to the Humanities Research Centre (Australian National University) for a Visiting Fellowship in 2005 which provided me with a period of intensive research and stimulating academic exchange during which this essay originated.