The children playing in the streets
The novel opens with a peaceful and normal image presenting the main character playing with one of his friends on the roads of some unnamed city in Britain. The children are portrayed here as being extremely happy and carefree, the only problem they have is deciding what type of game to play. This image pulls the reader into a false sense of security that will later be destroyed by the narrator. The reason why this image is important is that it shows the normal course of life and this portrayal can be later compared with the images which will later appear and will portray the childhood of someone living under Nazi rule.
The propaganda movie
Jacques Austerlitz returns to Germany in his adulthood in an attempt to find more information about his parents. The first thing he sees is an old propaganda movie in which his mother supposedly played in. This fact proved to be true yet the propaganda movie remains important because of the way in which it portrays the Jewish people. This group is shown as being inferior and almost animal-like. This portrayal is representative of the era and it shows just how unaccepting the Nazi regime really was.
Theriesenstadt
In Germany, Jacques found out that his mother was sent to a ghetto named Theriesenstadt, in the Czech Republic. After finding this information, Jacques tries to find more about what happened to her mother and what was her fate. During his research, Jacques stumbles upon a short film, showing the horrific condition in the camp. The images shown in the film are extremely important because it marked Jacques first mental breakdown and also the first time he came into contact with the truth about what happened to his mother.
The last meeting
The book ends with the narrator describing the last meeting that took place between him and the main character, Jacques. At that time, Jacques was living in Paris and spending his time searching old archives for more information about the Nazi regime and those killed in the concentration camps. The narrator describes Jacques as being extremely unstable, on edge, and ready to fall into madness completely. The novel ends with this image and it also has the purpose of conveying a moralizing idea, namely that it is not advisable to remain stuck in the past since it will only lead to pain and suffering.
