Contrary to widely-held opinion, Austerlitz is a problematic book. In Austerlitz, for the first time Sebald veered dangerously close to the conventions of the novel, a form of writing he repeatedly disavowed in interviews. Classifying Austerlitz as ‘a prose book of an undetermined kind’ (EM 123) or ‘a long prose elegy’ (EM 103) did not prevent both critics and the general readership from perceiving it as a novel. As the book evolves around the reconstruction of the central character's life story, it is marked by a narrative coherence absent from his previous books. One very obvious manifestation of this unity can be seen in that Austerlitz is firmly focused on the title character, while all his other texts are collections of separate yet interrelated individual stories.

One of the reasons that Sebald resisted the categorization ‘novel’ was because it implied a narrative that was fictional in nature. Sebald, however, wanted Austerlitz to appear as an authentic tale of racist persecution; the title character, he maintained in interviews, is based on two real biographies. First, there is the supposed retired architectural historian from London of Czech origin. The ‘picture of the child cavalier’ (A 260), which features on both German and English cover of the book (and in other editions as well) is, according to Sebald, a photo of him as a five-year-old boy. However, it is telling that this person has thus far not been identified. Moreover, Sebald most probably acquired the photo, which is now amongst his papers in the German Literature Archive, at a rummage sale.

Sebald's statements on Austerlitz require disobedient reading, too. In all likelihood, the architectural historian was invented in order to deflect attention from the second and indeed major model upon which the title character was constructed. Susi Bechhöfer was born in Munich in 1936 to a Jewish mother and a German soldier father; in 1939, she and her twin sister, Lotte, were evacuated to safety in the United Kingdom. She recounts the story of the recovery of her origins in her memoir Rosa's Child (1996).