W. G. Sebald: History - Memory - Trauma 9783110201949, 9783110182743

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Table of Contents
Foreword: The Sebald Phenomenon
Introduction: Two Languages, Two Audiences: The Tandem Literary OEuvres of W.G. Sebald
Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald
Kafka, Nabokov … Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants
Sebald’s Pathographies
Sebald’s Elective and Other Affinities
In the Weavers’ Web: An Intertextual Approachto W.G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne
Sebald’s Kafka
Sebald’s Amateurs
“A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About”: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
“Egg boxes stacked in a crate”: Narrative Status and its Implications
Speak no Evil, Write no Evil: In Search of a Usable Language of Destruction
On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz
Realism, Photography,and Degrees of Uncertainty
The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants
Landscape and Memory: Sebald’s Redemption of History
The Holocaust as the Still Point of the World in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
W.G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories
Going Astray: Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
No Foothold. Institutions and Buildings in W.G. Sebald’s Prose
The Experience of Destruction: W.G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature
W.G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist That No Eye can Dispel
Backmatter

Citation preview

W. G. Sebald

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Edited by

Scott Denham · Irene Kacandes Jonathan Petropoulos Volume 1

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

W. G. Sebald History - Memory - Trauma Edited by

Scott Denham Mark McCulloh

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines, 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data W. G. Sebald : history, memory, trauma / edited by Scott Denham, Mark McCulloh. p. cm. - (Interdisciplinary German cultural studies ; v. 1) “This volume has its roots in the Third Occasional Davidson Symposium on German Studies held at Davidson College in March of 2003” Pref. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018274-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 3-11-18274-2 (alk. paper) 1. Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944- - Criticism and interpretation. I. Denham, Scott D. II. McCulloh, Mark Richard, 1955- III. Series. PT2681.E18Z97 2006 8331.914-dc22 2006017393

ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018274-3 ISBN-10: 3-11-018274-2 ISSN 1861-8030 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Table of Contents

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Table of Contents Scott Denham Foreword: The Sebald Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Mark McCulloh Introduction: Two Languages, Two Audiences: The Tandem Literary Œuvres of W. G. Sebald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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W. G. Sebald and Gordon Turner Introduction and Transcript of an Interview given by Max Sebald (Interviewer: Michaël Zeeman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Section 1: Contexts & Influences R. J. A. Kilbourn Kafka, Nabokov … Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Martin Klebes Sebald’s Pathographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sara Friedrichsmeyer Sebald’s Elective and Other Affinities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Patrick Lennon In the Weavers’ Web: An Intertextual Approach to W. G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Brad Prager Sebald’s Kafka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Ruth Franklin Sebald’s Amateurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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Table of Contents

Section 2: Narrative and Style Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau “A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About”: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants . . . 141 Katja Garloff The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Ben Hutchinson “Egg boxes stacked in a crate”: Narrative Status and its Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Wilfried Wilms Speak no Evil, Write no Evil: In Search of a Usable Language of Destruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Maya Barzilai On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz . . . . . . . . . . 205 Lilian R. Furst Realism, Photography, and Degrees of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . 219

Section 3: History and Trauma Karin Bauer The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Jan Ceuppens Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants . . . . . 251 David Darby Landscape and Memory: Sebald’s Redemption of History . . . . 265 Stefan Gunther The Holocaust as the Still Point of the World in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Peter Fritzsche W. G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . 291

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Mark Ilsemann Going Astray: Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Michael Niehaus No Foothold: Institutions and Buildings in W. G. Sebald’s Prose

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Susanne Vees-Gulani The Experience of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Christina M.E. Szentivanyi W. G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist That No Eye can Dispel . . . . . . . . . . 351

Short Titles and Abbreviations used in this Volume . . . . . . . . 365 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367

Foreword

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Foreword The Sebald Phenomenon Scott Denham

It is a phenomenon.1 W. G. Sebald, praised among critics as the “most important” and “most talented” German author of the last generation, or even since the Second World War, was better known and more celebrated in the English-language world of letters than in the German, at least between 1996 and 2003, when his œuvre, following his death, began to be read more in the German-speaking world. Indeed, American and British critics read Sebald as if he had single-handedly recreated German literature for our time.2 What are the reasons for this two-fold popularity and double reception? How was Sebald read and understood in the Anglo-American world? New Directions, the publisher of Sebald’s first three books in the USA (Emigrants, 1996; Rings of Saturn, 1999; Vertigo, 1999) sold over 50,000 copies of The Emigrants by the middle of 2002, an exceptional number given the usual small runs of foreign, highbrow literary works. Rings of Saturn and Vertigo sold some 35,000 and 25,000 copies respectively in the same time period. These numbers are about twice those of the German editions, and those had several more years of sales already behind them. New Directions reported the sales figures were “terrific from our point of view.” Austerlitz is already in its third printing from Random House and has been released as an electronic-book and as an audio book as well. In Germany the sales, excepting Austerlitz, which of course appeared eleven years after Sebald’s fiction debut (with Schwindel. Gefühle in 1990), were by no means so pleasing. While the Hanser Verlag reports that Austerlitz has sold “extremely well,” Hanser’s other Sebald 1

2

A different version of this essay appeared in German in Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger, eds., “W.G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und menalcholische Bastelei.” I would like to thank both of them for their inspiration. On Sebald’s similar reception in France, see Ruth Vogel-Klein, “Avant-propos” and “Stendhal nach Auschwitz?”

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titles, including the much-discussed Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999), are only moving off the selves modestly.3 The English version of the airwar essay received, in contrast, massive distribution through publication of a version of the essay in the New Yorker in 2002. This followed the New Yorker ’s publication of an excerpt from Austerlitz in November, 2001. This volume has its roots in the Third Occasional Davidson Symposium on German Studies held at Davidson College in March of 2003, an event planned even before Sebald’s untimely death. (In November, 2001, he politely declined an invitation to read at Davidson during the symposium.) A sign of Sebald’s popularity and importance was not only the Symposium, and the fact that it took place in the United States, but that it was enthusiastically supported by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the Max Kade Foundation and that there was so much interest among not only Germanists, but also among historians, Anglicists, comparatists, and journalists. The Symposium’s audience consisted not only of members of the professorial guild. Several lay readers, one might say, attended as well, those beyond the academic circles who found Sebald compelling enough to attend an academic conference about his works. Sebald’s appeal proved itself to be broad. But we begin this book with the end, or more accurately, with an end, with Sebald’s death, that became among Sebald critics a rhetorical event in itself. Sebald’s premature death in December, 2001, shocked the literary world in Germany as well as in his home, Britain, and in the U.S. It was often described as “tragic” or “unjust,” and while no tragedy, it was certainly premature and unjust. His death was immediately given a rhetorical interpretation, more rather in the Anglo-American world than in Germany. Sebald had only had a decade as a fiction author, and in English only half as many years. The English-language critics seemed unable to refrain from a kind of hagiographic excess: “Even before the death of their author a little over a year ago, W. G. Sebald’s books had a strangely posthumous quality about them. His prose felt as if it had been exhumed from the past, as if the spirit of ruined Europe were speaking through him. Perhaps this is why it was often said that he wrote like a ghost.”4 Sebald is implicitly part of a long tradition of famous authorial deaths: Kleist, Celan, Kafka, Levi. One critic claims that Sebald would have enjoyed his posthumous fame and the scramble among critics to divine 3

4

For information on sales figures I thank Barbara Epler at New Directions and Veronika Stelz at Hanser Verlag. Geoff Dyer, “Terrible Rain.”

Foreword

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meaning in his work and death.5 Some sought to use the obitiuary to argue for Sebald’s place in the literary canon. While this might have been a necessary argument for the general reading public, Sebald was already fully canonized on college and university reading lists. His works are read across German, English, and literature departments in the U.S. With astounding speed Sebald has become a presence in the American academy; hundreds of professors are reading Sebald with their students. Part of the reason for Sebald’s popularity has to do with his critics. From his first publication in English in 1996 on, his work has been reviewed by important critics writing in important venues. The best known are Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, James Wood, Charles Simic, and Cynthia Ozick. Dozens of other critics reviewed Sebald as well, nearly all praising Sebald’s prose as the best to come out of Germany (or England, or Europe!) for years. The journals are equally important for understanding Sebald’s reception among the Anglo-American Bildungsbürgertum: reviews appeared regularly in Atlantic Monthly, The Jewish Quarterly, Times Literary Supplement, New Republic, The Nation, New York Review of Books, L.A.Times Book Review, New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, among others. What is striking about this is Sebald’s status as a German writer not only discussed and known, but also read, as the sales figures show. Perhaps the most striking example of how Sebald hit the literary scene in the English-speaking world is the late Susan Sontag’s jacket blurb for The Emigrants: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants is the most extraordinary, thrilling new book I’ve read this year … indeed for several years. It is like nothing I’ve ever read … A roman d’essai? Even that label does not do justice to the non-existent genre to which Sebald’s masterpiece belongs. A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation, it relates the narrator’s quest to dis5

“I’m reluctant even to mention W. G. Sebald’s death because I don’t want to use it as a rhetorical device. Discovering his books was extraordinary; reading his narrators, who speak up close in our ear, is an intimate experience, however politely or oddly removed they may be. So I (and I expect all readers of Sebald do as well) feel personally involved in his books, even proprietary toward them, and toward him too. It therefore seems ridiculous to avoid his death entirely (he was killed in a car accident on December 14, 2001), since it has left us wanting to say something significant about him, usher him into the canon, continuing to keep his company. Also, I imagine that he would enjoy watching the posthumous hunt for the patterns in his work, since he built them so carefully, and especially since his career ended while his own patterns as an author were still developing, ensuring that any declarations would be speculation.” (Benjamin Gantscher, “Resurrecting the Essential.”)

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Scott Denham cover the truth about four lives – four people who left Germany at different times in this century. I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this is one which attains the sublime.

Masterpiece? Sublime? Powerful words from a most influential critic and intellectual. But Sontag didn’t stop there. She wrote about Vertigo in 2000: Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers in the work of W. G. Sebald. (“A Mind in Mourning.”)

Literary greatness had found its new end-century incarnation in W. G. Sebald. A delightful remark by critic Gabriel Josipovici of the influential Jewish Quarterly in London affirms the general feeling: “It is not every day one is sent a masterpiece to review.” And there were comparisons as well: to Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, Bernhard, Kafka, Poe, Proust, Levi. With this kind of entourage Sebald arrived on the American shores. What were Americans used to from the European intellectual novel? Laura Miller worried ironically when she heard all the high praises, for what usually showed up in the post from the continent? “a slim, desiccated specimen of the modernist European novel, fastidious in its avoidance of such vulgarities as character and story and, when it can be understood at all, espousing a passive, depressive philosophy about the pointlessness of human existence,” just the opposite of what Sebald turned out to be, she was pleased to discover. And the waves of unambigious praise continued: from Cynthia Ozick, James Wood, Christopher Hitchens. Sebald was the literary event of the decade and made even more so by the New Yorker ’s publication of a section of Austerlitz in August, 2001, which put Sebald on some 900,000 coffee tables and nightstands throughout the land. The novel appeared in English in October and Sebald was killed in a car accident in December. The wave of obituaries and reviews coincided to put him back on the front of all the culture and feuillton pages. A different sort of reception came along a year later with the publication of the airwar essay in English. It appeared as On the Natural History of Destruction in 2003, with the New Yorker version appearing in November, 2002. This brought Sebald a new set of readers: historians, as well as history buffs, interested in the allied bombing campaigns. The book made a big splash in England and in the U.S., not only because it

Foreword

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was the first posthumous publication in English, but also because of the topic: directly, the lack of substantial German literary responses to the destruction caused by the Allied bombing campaign, and indirectly, the propriety of German suffering as a literary theme. If there were a “taboo” about portraying German loss and suffering, as Sebald claimed (though most disagreed), it was broken, radically, by a series of books, television documentaries, and discussions, mainly following the German publication of Sebald’s airwar essay in 1999. Jörg Friedrich’s popular (and populist) history Der Brand (The Fire) detailed the destruction, though without new scholarship, in a powerful, readable style. Günter Grass’s long novelle Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) looked at the “history that will not pass away” through the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the deadliest maritime disaster in history. Gerd Ledig’s 1956 novel Vergeltung (Payback), about the bombing of a German city, told in an uncompromising, direct style, was reissued in German and translated into English. This list could go on.6 In essence then, there were two waves of Sebald reception in the U.S., the first in response to his literary work, begun with The Emigrants and concluding with Austerlitz and Sebald’s death, and the second a response to the more or less constant American interest in World War Two and Germany under the National Socialist rule, prompted by his essay on the bombing of Germany and literary representation. Both these waves of reception were pushed along by the power of the internet, which allows news – good or bad – to be quickly propagated and thus also magnified. The jacket blurbs and book reviews get cited and copied and appended to internet culture magazines and book review pages, with their click-through sales links, and then in turn to commercial bookstore sites, which then also automatically construct lists of similar and related titles, even those in other languages. “Other customers who viewed this title also viewed these titles!” one is told. And the excerpted reviews by Sontag, Ozick, and the others multiply as if in a hall of mirrors. Thus, for example, a look at amazon.com for Gerd Ledig’s Payback leads one immediately to Sebald, Sontag, and histories of World War II, as well as to an author list (“Other customers …!”) with Coetzee, Roth, and Grass, for example. Though we should not overvalue the ef6

For an extensive review of the renewed interest in the history and literature surrounding the World War II bombing see the November, 2003, H-Net discussion, http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/WWII_bombing/WWII_bombi ng_index.htm.

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fects of such internet connections, it is nevertheless striking how quickly and densely Sebald became woven into the web. Finally, though, it seems to me that Sebald’s success in the Englishspeaking world, and especially in the U.S., has a great deal to do with his perceived status as a kind of Holocaust writer. The Emigrants, as the first book to appear in English, and Austerlitz, as the last work of fiction, have both been read as “Holocaust literature.” But his is a Holocaust literature of a special sort and he is likewise an exception as a German author for Anglo-American readers. He is perhaps the most thoughtful and eloquent writer to approach the specifically German catastrophe of modernity that is murder, exile, loss, and grief, for he does so with modesty and tact, but incessantly and with a kind of helplessness in the face of the experiences of others. In so doing Sebald has become the kind of German that Americans especially can love. His respect and irony protect him from the typical fate of an intellectual German in the eyes of educated foreign readers who would hold clichéd ideas about Germans who would be know-it-alls or, at least with respect to World War II and the Holocaust, guilt-laden or anti-fascist or moral-relativist and revisionist. With his gentle irony and quiet comic voice that reminds me of Kafka’s, Sebald writes beyond his themes. This going-beyond, this something more, this is the art in his books that Sontag and others recognized and understood immediately. Any reading of Sebald’s work will confirm its presence.

Introduction

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Introduction Two Languages, Two Audiences: The Tandem Literary Œuvres of W. G. Sebald Mark R. McCulloh

W. G. Sebald’s literary career in German and in English translation proceeded in a highly unusual way from the moment he began writing nonacademic prose. First, it was interactive; Sebald knew English and participated in the process of translation as an advisor to his translators. Second, it was characterized by variant publishing schedules; editorial decisions were made to release Sebald’s books in the English-speaking world in an order different from that of the German originals. Thus, Sebald’s first two books, a volume of poetry (Nach der Natur) followed by the novel (Schwindel. Gefühle) appeared in translation many years after they were first published, only after the marked success of The Emigrants, the 1996 translation of Die Ausgewanderten (1992). The differences between the originals and the translations point up some key differences between audience expectations in Germany and Great Britain, as well as Sebald’s own perception, presumably, of differing stylistic potentialities in the two languages. After all, Sebald was keenly interested in problems of translation, and served as the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. It is useful to examine Sebald’s two distinctive œuvres before moving on to the critical standpoints and discussions of the scholars who contributed to the present volume.

I. As the reviews of W. G. Sebald’s works often pointed out, the publication of his fiction in English translation did not follow the sequential order of the original German editions, but rather commenced with his second novel, Die Ausgewanderten. In point of fact, his first novel Schwindel. Gefühle, only became available to English-speaking audiences as his

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third work of fiction – it was published nearly a decade after the original, in 1999, and given the approximated title Vertigo. It is more than conceivable that that book, had it appeared in English as Sebald’s first English-language release, would not have succeeded in launching his British Commonwealth and North American literary career to such considerable acclaim, for reasons I have touched on elsewhere (McCulloh, 105). It was The Emigrants that set the standard for subsequent translations of Sebald’s fiction; and it was The Emigrants that set the tone for the future reception of his works as well. The interplay of reception and the process of translating subsequent to the publication of The Emigrants in 1996 is not something that can be easily demonstrated, however. In the remarks that follow I shall avoid the pitfall of a “hermeneutics of translation” in which I attempt to speak for the translators themselves (Michael Hulse and, in the case of Austerlitz, Anthea Bell). It will become clear enough that the German versions have in some respects a noticeably different character from that of the English versions; I will attempt to describe and analyse those differences, confining my remarks to Sebald’s prose. All translations run the risk of “not getting it right,” and it is well known among readers of Sebald that he located “finding the right thread” at the heart of writing (composing) itself. At the most fundamental level, this danger lurks in lexical decisions that must be made throughout, and these in turn must be applied consistently. In my own experience, settling on a translation of the title of Sebald’s book of essays Die Beschreibung des Unglücks proved more than a little confounding and in the end I did not resolve the issue satisfactorily or uniformly, ending up with two somewhat different versions in the first printing of Understanding W. G. Sebald (xxii, 176). My contention then was that Sebald’s notion of “Unglück” in regard to his selection of Austrian writers is so bound up with melancholia as to be indistinguishable from it. The context in which Sebald uses the word is for the most part the context of depression or melancholia; in the Grimms’ words, it is “das gegenstück zu glück,” “unglückseligkeit,” “unbeglücktheit” (Deutsches Wörterbuch 11:992–94). This is borne out by the publisher’s description of the book on the verso of the first page (not necessarily the most reliable source, I concede), which reads, in part: In the middle of [Sebald’s] analyses stand the psychological presuppositions of writing, especially “the melancholia of the writing subject,” by which Sebald attempts to explain the characteristic depression in Austrian literature.1 1

Im Mittelpunkt [Sebalds] Analysen stehen die psychischen Voraussetzungen des Schreibens, insbesondere “Das Unglück des schreibenden Subjekts,” mit dem

Introduction

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Yet, “Unglück” seems to used in two distinct ways in Sebald, as the “Unglück des schreibenden Subjekts,” “the misfortune of being a writer,” and as “das sich vollziehenden Unglücks,” “our dismal plight” or “the misfortune taking place here and now.” Sebald writes: Melancholia, the contemplation of the dismal plight we are in, has nothing in common with the desire to die. It is a form of resistance. On the level of art its function is anything but merely reactive or reactionary … Describing the dismal plight we face contains the possibility of overcoming it.2

In Jo Catling’s online tribute to Sebald, “Silent Catastrophe,” she translates the final line above as “In the description of the disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it,” giving the word an even more specific meaning: an “Unglück” is a disaster. Is the particular disaster, then, the human predicament as such? Sebald does not make explicit the nature of the disaster, although one may dare to presume, based on interviews and, for instance, the Benjaminian historical bent of Die Ringe des Saturn, that human life is in its totality a calamity like all the other calamities of history. Yet the disaster is in a sense perception-dependent; life is not a disaster unless there is a melancholic present to perceive it as such. And in view of the melancholy characters of a book such as The Emigrants, or Austerlitz, for that matter, Sebald’s literary enterprise seems all the more keenly focused on the subject of depression. Art is compensation for the melancholy creator as well as the beholder – Sebald quotes Rabbi Chanoch’s anecdote about the crying child in his classroom: “‘Sieh ins Buch! Wenn man hineinguck, weint man nicht!’” (Unglück, 12–13). “Look at your book. If you read your book, you won’t cry.” Even if a specific “Unglück” is a disaster, the greater misfortune is to be the melancholy Austrian writer of Sebald’s affinities. Yet my choice of words was, I now realize, overly influenced by the content and diction of Sebald’s fiction. His narrators are melancholy, his characters are in many instances as well. Below is one example of the sort of Sebaldian phrase that led me to favor the translation of “Unglück” as a state of mind over “Unglück” as a predicament:

2

Sebald die eigentümliche Schwermut in der österreichischen Literatur zu erklären versucht. (Beschreibung, title page verso). Melancholie, das Überdenken des sich vollziehenden Unglücks, hat aber mit Todessucht nichts gemein. Sie ist eine Form des Widerstands. Und auf dem Niveau der Kunst vollends ist ihre Funktion alles andere als bloß reaktiv oder reaktionär … Die Beschreibung des Unglücks schließt in sich die Möglichkeit zu seiner Überwindung ein. (Beschreibung, 12).

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Mark R. McCulloh In den wärmeren Monaten geschieht es nicht selten, daß sich der eine oder andere Nachtflügler aus dem kleinen Stück Garten hinter meinem Haus zu mir herein verirrt. Wenn ich am frühen Morgen dann aufstehe, sehe ich sie still irgendwo an der Wand sitzen. Sie wissen, glaube ich, sagte Austerlitz, daß sie sich verflogen haben, denn wenn man sie nicht vorsichtig wieder nach draußen entläßt, so verharren sie reglos, bis der letzte Hauch aus ihnen gewichen ist, ja sie bleiben, festgehalten durch ihre winzigen, im Todeskrampf erstarrten Krallen, am Ort ihres Unglücks haften bis über das Lebensende hinaus, bis ein Luftzug sie ablöst und in einen staubigen Winkel verweht. (Austerlitz, 136–37) In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they have come to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. (Austerlitz, 93–94)

Anthea Bell’s translation, by all accounts countenanced by Sebald, makes use of the expression “come to grief,” suggesting misfortune, but also mental anguish at that misfortune. Thus “am Ort ihres Unglücks” becomes “at the place where they came to grief.” But “plight” is better, in my view, since it is ours, according to Sebald’s foreword, to be mortal in a world filled with loss and decline, a world in which history is one long chain of calamities, and in which the natural world itself is characterized by entropy, the tendency towards disorder. As in the case of Peter Handke’s novel Wunschloses Unglück (1972) – the title is itself a melancholy play on words – it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between one’s unhappy plight and the depression and despair associated with it.

II. The rather more dark, or perhaps more accurately, the graver mood of Sebald’s German originals, to speak in broad and general terms, is evinced in changes such as the editorial decision to omit from the English edition a quotation from Paradise Lost that served as one of three mottos preceding the text of Die Ringe des Saturn. The quotation reads: “Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.” Instead, the English edition includes only the other two mottos, a French quotation from one of Josef Conrad’s letters to Marguerite Poradowska and a scientific description of the origins of Saturn’s rings from the Brockhaus encyclopedia. The former speaks of the

Introduction

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incomprehensible horror of the struggle witnessed by “pilgrims on foot, skirting the shore” – a grave enough subject, to be sure – and the latter is a matter-of-fact rendition of what must have been a colossal, indescribably violent process, had a living soul been able to witness it. Both of these quotations have their gravitas, to be sure, but the element of good bound up with evil is not explicit in the former, nor is it present in the latter. Sebald and his translator seem to have suppressed intentionally the effect of the Milton quotation for the English-speaking audience. Was it purely an economic measure, so to speak, meant to reduce and thereby streamline the thematic introduction provided by mottos? Why eliminate the entanglement of good and evil? Was the topic considered a bit too “over the top” for the British and Americans? An answer from Michael Hulse might still be elicited, but none, regrettably, from the author himself. Leaving the issue of Milton’s dictum aside, the English translation often prefers “severity over playfulness,” as I suggested in Understanding W. G. Sebald (87). Some of this severity is the result of the omission of untranslatable puns, some involving visual imagery. Surely the best example is found in Schwindel. Gefühle, where Henri Beyle stands on the battlefield at Marengo (22–23). Here the reader scans down a portion of a painting to the bottom of the page, then up again to the top of the following page, then down again – “wie ein Untergehender.” The play on “going down” and “meeting disaster” does not work in English, and certainly cannot be connected to Sebald’s visual prank, so the translation forgoes the original’s format and renders “wie ein Untergehender” rather more poetically as “like one meeting his doom” (18). Not only are the obvious dimensions of Sebald’s pun eliminated – the verbal as well as the visual – but an allusion to Thomas Bernhard’s novel Der Untergeher (1983) falls completely by the wayside. In fact the English rather often seems lyrical where the German seems severe, or at least more matter-of-fact. Consider the following recollection described by a character in Die Ringe des Saturn, contrasted with its English version: Blicke ich heute in jene Zeit zurück, hat Frederick Farrar einmal zu mir gesagt, so sehe ich alles wie hinter wehenden weißen Schleiern: die Stadt von der Seeseite her, die von grünen Bäumen und Buschen umgebenen, bis an die Ufer herabgehenden Villen, das Sommerlicht und den Strand, über den wir gerade von einem Ausflug nach Hause zurückkehren, der Vater mit ein, zwei anderen Herren mit aufgekrempelten Hosen voraus, die Mama allein mit dem Parasoleil, die Schwestern mit ihren gerafften Röcken und dahinter die Dienstboten mit dem Eselchen, zwischen dessen Tragkörben ich meinen Sitz hatte. (65)

12

Mark R. McCulloh If I now look back at those times, Frederick once said, it is as if I were seeing everything through flowing white veils: the town like a mirage over the water, the seaside villas right down to the shore surrounded by green trees and shrubs, the summer light, and the beach, across which we have just returned from an outing, Father walking ahead with one or two gentlemen whose trousers are rolled up, Mother by herself with a parasol, my sisters with their skirts gathered in one hand, and the servants bringing up the rear with the donkey, between whose wicker panniers I am sitting on my perch. (48)

There is no doubt the cumulative effect of both passages is wistful and elegiac, but the phrase “the town like a mirage over water” is nowhere to be found in the original German. It can be argued, of course, that the simile aptly conveys the “floating” scenery of Frederick Farrar’s memory from childhood – he also describes watching the festivities on the lighted pier at Lowestoft from a boat on the water – but the German states merely “die Stadt von der Seeseite her” and offers nothing about a mirage. Another feature is worthy of note in considering the more sachlich tone of Sebald’s diction in German. Throughout the German passage Frederick is called by his full name, Frederick Farrar, lending a formal distance to the relationship between the narrator and the speaker, one which also results in a stilted repetitiousness that is not preserved in the English translation. Indeed, the spirit of the English is almost one of intimacy, even vulnerability (In the German version, Farrar is the author’s “vor wenigen Monaten verstorbener Nachbar,” whereas in English translation he is “my friend Frederick Farrar” and thereafter referred to by his first name.) Sebald’s prose technique of reporting speech seemingly unrestrainedly in the fashion of Bernhard (with frequent insertions of the equivalent of “he said” or “she said”) is not yet fully in place in Rings, and will not be until Austerlitz. Here and there one finds other instances where the German prose reads as more matter-of-fact than the English, and it is clear in these cases that Michael Hulse’s native-language inclinations as well as his poetic sensibilities are in play. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter IX of The Rings of Saturn the German seems almost austerely factual: Nach dem Aufenthalt in Orford bin ich mit einem der roten Autobusse der eastern Counties Omnibus Company über Woodbridge landeinwärts nach Yoxford gefahren und von dort aus zu Fuß in nordwestlicher Richtung auf einer ehemaligen Römerstraße in die sehr dünn besiedelte Gegend hineingegangen, die sich unterhalb des Landstädtchens Harleston ausdehnt … Kaum ein Fahrzeug ist mir begegnet, während ich auf der scheinbar endlosen Geraden dahinging, und ich wußte wohl weder damals, noch weiß ich es heute, ob ich das einsame Gehen als eine Wohltat empfand oder als eine Qual. (285)

Introduction

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After Orford, I headed inland traveling on one of the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company’s red buses, going through Woodbridge to Yoxford where I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the old Roman road, into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the south of Harleston … I encountered hardly any vehicles while treading this seemingly unending straight, and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain. (241)

Hulse, presumably with the approval of the author, has made several decisions we might note. First, he leaves out the pedestrian “Aufenthalt” and says simply “After Orford” – a place as well as an occasion – rather than simply “After my stay in Orford.” The narrator “set out into” rather than “went into” (“[ist] hineingegangen”) the thinly populated “countryside” (“Gegend” can mean any type of region). The countryside “lies” to the south of Harleston rather than literally “spreading out below”; although the latter would seem at first glance more rather than less poetic or descriptive, the expression is less in keeping with English usage, in lowland countryside at least, and “lies” has the benefit of brevity and succinctness. Clearly more felicitous to the ears of many is “treading” the seemingly unending straight (vs. “auf der scheinbar endlosen Geraden dahinging”) and the phrase “pleasure or … pain” has the benefit of alliteration, whereas “Wohltat … oder … Qual” seems a combination of words chosen more for its relevant content than its euphony.

III. In short, we perceive in the translations a tendency in two different directions, as befitting Sebald the lover of paradox – especially of coincidentia oppositorum. First, a certain playfulness, based in allusions and linguistic associations, is sometimes vacated in the English versions in favor of pensive earnestness, while on the other hand the drier, more matterof-fact descriptions in the German original often take on a more luminous, poetic character in the translations. These distinctions between the original and the English-language translations are most evident in the case of Schwindel. Gefühle and Vertigo, the first of Sebald’s works of fiction (although it is, as mentioned before, his penultimate novel in English.) Schwindel. Gefühle prefigures the other works in several respects, introducing the solitary peripatetic narrator in the section “All’estero,” as well as employing biographical excursuses on writers (Stendhal, Kafka), as Sebald would later do in Die Ringe des Saturn, and finally, it includes a fic-

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tionalized, semi-autobiographical section called “Il ritorno in patria,” a precursor of the kind of writing found in Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz. What one notices first in Vertigo is the absence of anything like the subjunctive mood for indirect discourse that German so easily and effectively applies in order to report speech, simultaneously suggesting a dispassionate attitude to the veracity (or lack thereof) of the content of what has been said, or in this case, written. “Im übrigen, schreibt Beyle, es sei selbst da, wo man über lebensnahere Erinnerungsbilder verfüge, auf dies nur wenig Verlaß” comes into English in the indicative mood – there is no equivalent for “sei” or “verfüge” – as “Beyle furthermore writes that even when the images supplied by memory are true to life one can place litte confidence in them.” (Schwindel, 10; Vertigo, 6) It is ironic, and surely intentionally so, that the very subject matter in these early quotations is epistemological uncertainty, an uncertainty accentuated, in the German original at any rate, by the grammatical form of the verbs used. In any case, Sebald reaches for the subjunctive mood for reported speech not infrequently throughout his famously “uncertain” narratives.3 As early as the first page, the bilingual reader notices another feature that distinguishes the two versions of the book, namely the marked preference in German for archaisms. (This is not to say that the English versions are by any means entirely devoid of archaisms and the more formal tone they invoke.) Sebald’s chapter on Stendhal is titled “Beyle, oder das merckwürdige Faktum der Liebe,” meaning literally “[Henri] Beyle, or The Strange Fact of Love.” The title in the English version neither corresponds to the literal meaning of the phrase, nor does it reflect the antiquated orthography of “merckwürdig,” but is transmuted into “Beyle, or Love is a Madness most Discreet,” which is a much more expressive rendering – but is it really a rendering of the original, which relies on the suggestiveness of the adjective “strange,” coupled with the semantically dry term “fact”? Omissions of certain whimsical, sometimes utterly enigmatic features serve to reduce the impression of authorial playfulness in the transition from the German to the English versions. For example, Sebald puts the verb “sehen” in all upper-case letters and spaces them apart (German for emphasis, the equivalent of underlining) when he writes of Stendhal’s obsession with Métilde Dembowski, but the English simply relates that Beyle/Stendhal was “unable to endure even a few days without seeing 3

For an excellent discussion of this topic, see James Wood, “W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty” as well as Anabel Aliga-Buchenau’s essay in this volume.

Introduction

15

her.” (19) Again, a matter-of-fact tone characterizes the English translation when the “Senavogel” (“Zena-Bird”?) is excluded from among the Viennese jackdaws (Vertigo, 36; Schwindel, 45) or when the implied cosmic stage manager is erased; “Aus dem Schnürboden senkte der Schlaf sich hernieder” (132) becomes merely “Sleep came …” (112). But of all Sebald’s fiction, Schwindel. Gefühle is undoubtedly the most playful, next to portions of Die Ringe des Saturn, with the title itself – a pun on several levels, unlike its English counterpart (McCulloh, 87–88) – signaling its combinatory and allusive ludic intentions. On the other hand, the overwhelming tone of the fourth and final chapter is elegiac and pensive, anticipating the memorializing “vier lange Erzählungen” (“four long stories”) of Die Ausgewanderten. The final omission in Vertigo is in fact the final line, the date 2013. In the German version, this fanciful touch suggests the book was written, not in the late 1980s, but in the future, a hundred years after the seminal year 1913, the year that looms large in the book as the calm before the beginning of Europe’s long drawn out death throes. As suggested earlier, what we – outsiders to the process engaged in by Sebald in collaboration with his translators – are led to surmise in the end is that The Emigrants, as the first book to be published in English, established Sebald as a composer of melancholy memorials, of poignant meditations on individual suffering and the passing of time, of “factional” memoirs admired as much for their beauty as for their unsettling obsessions with stasis, decline, and destruction. Thus there was in the retrospective task of returning, after nearly a decade, to Schwindel. Gefühle in order to translate it for a growing English-speaking audience, little place for quasi-postmodernist, seemingly gratuitous asides such as the mention of the “Senavogel” (“an imaginary creature that really exists!” Sebald wrote in answer to my query) or the “Schnürboden” from which sleep descends. The final joke involving the date of composition no longer seemed appropriate. And while The Rings of Saturn consistently adheres to the content of the original, reaching un-Emigrants-like flights of fancy with its incorporation of Borgesian inventions (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), it is clear that by the time Sebald was writing that novel, his third, he had found his mature voice and the process of translation no longer required excision. Nor do we find in it the kind of finetuning as when “[Eine] Geste, über die ich mich nicht wenig verwunderte” (“a gesture that surprise/astonished me”) becomes “[a] gesture, which was so out of time.” (Schwindel, 144; Vertigo, 122) or when Salvatore says he takes “refuge in prose as one might in a boat” rather than “on an island” as the German states. (Vertigo, 128; Schwindel, 150).

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IV. What characterizes the English translation of Sebald’s “masterpiece” Die Ausgewanderten in contradistinction to the German original? There is no important difference in tone or mood; both versions convey the narrator’s patient attention to narrated recollections and his sense of both the ordinary and the elegiac. The major difference lies in the aforementioned absence of any feature in English that corresponds to the subjunctive mood for indirect discourse, lending as it does a strong sense of the tentative, the uncertain. Is what the speaker tells the narrator factual or simply what is imperfectly recalled (there seems to be no doubt about the veracious intention of the various characters.) Rather, one notices incidental differences. For instance, one notices occasional semantic substitutions such as “presumptuous” for “unzulässig” (unacceptable, inadmissible) on pages 29 and 45 respectively. On the other hand, in the same paragraph we find a phrase omitted from the translation: “im Verlauf meiner Erkundungen” (in the course of my inquiries), effectively de-emphasizing the narrator’s active role in the construction or reconstruction of Paul Bereyter’s last years. The English states simply “ … I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter,” (29) whereas the German is more extensive: “ … ich … habe … jetzt aufgeschrieben, … was ich von Paul Bereyter weiß und im Verlauf meiner Erkundungen über ihn in Erfahrung bringen konnte.” (45) The brevity of the English discards or at least sublimates the notion of search and discovery from the narrator’s attitude towards his account. Other typical variations between the two texts are, as mentioned earlier, the substitution of commonplace English words for more formal or archaic expressions in German. An utterly outdated and thus, highly literary spelling such as “demohngeachtet” (98) is rendered simply as “nonetheless” (68). On the other hand, such archaic forms occur only occasionally, and do not dominate the German style. Rather, they seem to be something more in the way of stylistic lagniappes for the pleasure of the reader. Other deviations such as “lime green” (154) for “lindengrün” (227) are of no great consequence, alhough most American readers surely would misread “lime” as the citrus fruit rather than the deciduous tree known as the basswood, lime, or linden. More interesting are the occasional examples of periphrasis, such as the passage in which the narrator describes Uncle Adelwarth’s speech: “I do recall being deeply impressed by the fact that his apparently effortless German was entirely free of any trace of our home dialect and that he used words and turns of phrase the meanings of which

Introduction

17

I could only guess at” (68). The original states that the narrator’s uncle spoke German “mühelos nach der Schrift” (98), i.e., “effortlessly according to the written word,” a phrase that the translator is obliged to clarify with his rendering, pointing explicitly to the preferability of the standard Schriftsprache over regional dialects. Beyond a few differences such as the ones noted above, Hulse’s translation of The Emigrants is remarkably true to the original, and critics who have commented on the quality of the translation have said as much. With the appearance of Austerlitz, a somewhat different assessment took shape within the critical reception of the book.

V. The correspondences between the English and German versions of Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz are largely straightforward, and one can only assume that the working relations between the new translator Anthea Bell and the author were more mutually satisfactory than his previous author-translator relationship had become. In any case, the narrative of Austerlitz, due to the seriousness and focus of its subject, provides little opportunity for the ludic spirit of portions of Schwindel. Gefühle to shine through, or the elements of Borgesian phantasy of parts of Die Ringe des Saturn to emerge full blown. An exception to the latter assertion is the scene in the Liverpool Street Station in which Austerlitz stepped into another dimension, a labyrinth of ruins and structures such as M. C. Escher might have drawn.4 Stepping into the derelict and abandoned Ladies’ Waiting Room, he enters another of the several “false worlds” that appear in the book: Kaum einen Lidschlag lang sah ich zwischendurch riesige Räume sich auftun, sah Pfeilerreihen und Kolonnaden, die in die äußerste Ferne führten, Gewölbe und gemauerte Bogen, die Stockwerke über Stockwerke trugen, Steintreppen, Holzstiegen und Leitern, die den Blick immer weiter hinaufzogen, Stege und Zugbrücken, die die tiefsten Abgründe überquerten und auf denen winzige Figuren sich drängten, Gefangene, so dachte ich mir, sagte Austerlitz, die einen Ausweg suchten aus diesem Verließ, und je länger ich, den Kopf schmerzhaft zurückgezwungen, in die Höhe hinaufstarrte, desto mehr kam es mir vor, als dehnte sich der Innenraum, in welchem ich mich befand, als setzte er in der unwahrscheinlichsten perspektivische Verkürzung unendlich sich fort und beugte sich zugleich, wie das nur in einem derartigen falschen Universum nur möglich war, in sich selber zurück. (194–95) 4

See my earlier remarks on this strange episode in McCulloh, 122.

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This passage, with its mend-bending superlatives, comparisons, and contradictions, would surely present a challenge for any translator, and Bell certainly rises to the occasion: From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and colonnades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storied structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on. I saw viaducts and footbridges crossing deep chasms thronged with tiny figures who looked to me, said Austerlitz, like prisoners in search of some way of escape from their dungeon, and the longer I stared upwards with my head wrenched painfully back, the more I felt as if the room where I stood were expanding, going on for ever and ever in an improbably foreshortened perspective, at the same time turning back into itself in a way possible only in such a deranged universe. (135)

Bell does full justice to the content of the passage, choosing her words for their naturalness (“From time to time and just for a split second” rather than the more literal “Hardly the batting of an eyelid long I saw from time to time”) and for more vivid effect in the spirit of Sebald’s original (“deranged” instead of “false,” “head wrenched painfully back” instead of “head forced painfully back”). As with the rest of the translation, the diction here is clear and direct, drawing little if any attention to itself, much as Sebald surely must have wanted. The novelist John Banville rightly called Bell’s translation of Austerlitz “pristine” (36). By the same token, the New York Times critic Richard Eder misses in Bell’s translation the “clear counterpoint” of Hulse’s renderings (10), while the contemporary translator of Theodor Fontane, Gabriele Amman, likewise praises Hulse for succeeding in capturing the “fastidiousness” and “sad resigned rhythm” of Sebald’s prose (29). Her reference is to the first of Sebald’s books to appear in English, The Emigrants, the success of which influenced future lexical decisions in favor of seriousness and elegiac tone, with the result that the first novel Sebald wrote, Vertigo, when it was finally translated into English almost a decade after its appearance in German, underwent a not inconsiderable amount of what might be termed, tongue firmly and archly in cheek, “ludic loss.” In sum, translation being the imperfect art that it is, and editorial decisions being what they are, neither the full gravity of Sebald nor the full playfulness of his writing comes through in English, though the renderings are generally accurate, appropriately literary and eloquent. As befits Sebald, they are works of literature in their own right.

Introduction

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The papers that follow represent the outcome of a gathering of professors, writers, and interested students of literature at Davidson College from March 13 to 16, 2003. The speakers came from countries as diverse as Israel, Ireland, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, and of course, there were many domestic participants. One couple in attendance came all the way from Tasmania, while one enthusiastic group in attendance hailed from San Francisco. It was truly a diverse and international symposium. The titles of the papers speak for themselves and we are pleased to allow them to do so. But in order to establish a sense of referential order, they have been grouped into sections by topic, namely “Contexts and Influences,” “Narrative and Style,” and “History and Trauma.” The volume begins with an interview with Sebald by Michael Zeeman, kindly provided by Sebald’s colleague and friend Gordon Turner. We are pleased with the authorial diversity present in this volume: participants in the symposium included esteemed and renowned scholars such as Lilian Furst in comparative literature and Peter Fritzsche in history, as well as many professionals firmly established in academe, and some just beginning their careers, Additionally, the journalist Ruth Franklin of The New Republic spoke at the conference and has contributed a paper for this book. We are grateful for the hard work and critical insights of all the authors, here listed alphabetically with their affiliations at the time: Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Maya Barzilai, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Karin Bauer of Magill University, Jan Ceuppens of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, David Darby of the University of Western Ontario, Ruth Franklin of The New Republic, Sara Friedrichsmeyer of the University of Cincinnati, Peter Fritzsche of the University of Illinois, Lilian Furst of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Katja Garloff of Reed College, Stefan Gunther, USDA Graduate School and the University of Maryland, Ben Hutchinson of Queens College, Oxford, Mark Ilsemann, Princeton University, Russell Kilbourn of McMaster University, Martin Klebes of Northwestern University, Patrick Lennon of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Michael Niehaus of the Universität Essen and the Universität Bochum, Brad Prager of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Christina Szentivanyi of the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Susanne Vees-Gulani of the University of Michigan, and Wilfried Wims of Union College. In conclusion, I should like to mention here other scholars who contributed to discussions that took place during the symposium in March of 2003: Gerald Fetz of the University of Mon-

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tana, Anne Fuchs of University College Dublin, my own former student Christian Hunt of St. John’s College, Oxford, Jonathan Long of the University of Durham, the aforementioned Gordon Turner of the University of East Anglia Norwich, and John Zilcosky of the University of Toronto. We are grateful as well for generous financial support for the symposium from Davidson College, the Max Kade Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald

21

Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald W. G. Sebald and Gordon Turner (Interviewer: Michaël Zeeman)

An essentially private and unassuming man, Max Sebald instinctively shied away from the limelight. However reluctant he was about such matters, at the same time he fully understood the need for public appearances (albeit of limited duration, often negotiated in advance) and PR activities surrounding the publication of his latest work. From the late 1980s German television crews regularly descended on the Sebald residence near Norwich to capture images of the Melancholiker in the idyllic surroundings of rural Norfolk – a world away from his native Allgäu. With his burgeoning reputation as a writer of international stature, Max found himself giving interviews in English, not only in the UK or North America but also in countries where English was the lingua franca. Despite the diffidence that Max professed to feel about having to talk English in such situations, this television interview is an excellent example of his ability to communicate effectively and wittily in response to questions about his work as well as his approach to writing. It is an impressive performance; one sees that he appears relaxed, very much at his ease, in fact, and makes his points tellingly and apparently effortlessly. This is a complete transcript of the interview given by Max Sebald for the programme Kamer met Uitzicht, produced by Netherlands TV, VPRO, and broadcast on 12 July 1998. The present transcript is one of many being produced on the basis of the many interviews that Max gave in German, English, as well as at least one in French, in the course of the last 11 years or so of his life. In due course it is hoped that a database of such all interviews will be accessible to Sebald researchers. On behalf of Max Sebald’s family I should like to thank to the VPRO for their kind permission in allowing the transcript of the interview to be published in this form. Gordon Turner Curator, Sebald Sound Archive

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W. G. Sebald and Gordon Turner

Zeeman: Mr Sebald, welcome in this “room with a view.” You are a writer of German origin living in England and having lived there a very, very long time and that gives a motive almost to a lot of your writing. When I read in the latest book published so far in the Netherlands, Die Ringe des Saturn, there is this motif of a man walking through the countryside, trying to get in touch with his surroundings. The second novel in Dutch was de Emigrés, Die Ausgewanderten and the motif of returning to a country of origin is already present in Schwindel.Gefühle. What is your strong fascination with these emigrants? Is it an utterly private experience put into the practice of writing or was it deeper or earlier than that? Sebald: It goes back a little further. I mean, obviously the whole thing is prompted by the fact that I myself left my home country when I was, I think, 21 years old just about. I began my studies in Germany but then very quickly went to Switzerland and to the French-speaking part of Switzerland, i.e. to a different linguistic environment, and from there I went to England a year or one and a half years later. But further back, of course, there was within my family another story and that is the story of all my uncles and aunts who left southern Bavaria in the late 20s, during the Great Depression, to go to New York. My mother is the only sibling of that generation to remain in Germany. She was by 1933, when the Fascists took over, not old enough to go. Had Hitler turned up a couple of years later, she, too, would have probably followed her brothers and sisters to New York and I would probably never have been born, certainly not in that size, shape or form. So, for one reason or another, this was always quite close to me. And, ironically, my two sisters also do not live in Germany, so there is some kind of urge of expatriation or self-expatriation. Zeeman: And also a great sympathy with them but also with their country and place of origin. What does it teach you to go back to the origins of your characters? Sebald: Well, however short the period of time is, even if it is only a decade, if you only spend your childhood in the place where you were born, it remains, I think, the primal landscape that determines a good deal of your make-up and the way in which you react. I don’t think you ever lose the imprint and you hardly suffer from homesickness when you are 22 and have just left your country two of three years before but it

Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald

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creeps up on you. The more your future horizon shrinks, the more prominent the outlines of your place of origin seem to become in your mind. Zeeman: Some of them seem to neglect their origin or even to hide it. Sebald: Well that is, of course, the difference between my experience and the Jewish experience of emigration or forced emigration – the necessity which many Jewish people felt, certainly in England, but also in Germany, before the great debacle, to hide their origins in order to be better able to assimilate to the host environment. The attempt to hide or to obscure one’s origins, I think, is more definitely associated with the Jewish community than with odd German immigrants like myself. Zeeman: But in any case you have the tendency to give a sort of mirror image of that [process of] hiding by trying to connect the present with the original past. Sebald: Well, the past is what we carry with us. If you want to know where you might be going or where you are likely to be going, you need to know the force lines of the past energies. I do think that a lot of people do not perceive the patterns of the past but if you have a certain educational background, a certain knowledge of what happened in the earlier part of this century, in the nineteenth and eighteenth century, then you can increasingly, the more you understand it, feel that this is a programme that you don’t even have internalised but that it is part of your make-up and that it is going to determine where you will end up or where we will all end up. Zeeman: But in a very overwhelming manner. It is as if, as soon as the narrator touches a stone in a wall of either a garden or a building, the [i.e. its] whole history collapses on him. It is extremely overwhelming and dominant. Sebald: In one sense the future does not interest me or that narrator figure at all because, knowing what I do, I fear that it can only be blighted and that, therefore, the past, horrendous though it is, with all its calamitous episodes, nevertheless seems to be some kind of refuge because at least the pain that you had there is over. It is no longer acute, it has been subdued and so the presence of the past has something very ambivalent

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about it. On the one hand it is burdensome, heavy, it weighs you down, on the other hand it is something that liberates you from present constraints. Zeeman: So it is not only to escape? Sebald: Oh, no, no, it certainly isn’t. It is as far as possible removed from any kind of nostalgic perspective, from any sense of purely antiquarian interest. It is to my mind an attempt to provide something like critical historiography, i.e. to see that it wasn’t just the great events of the past that determine our lives but every little bit is an evolutionary downscaling process upon which we come along in the end and so it certainly has nothing at all to do with escapism or nostalgia. Zeeman: So, what does it tell us? Because, on a certain level, if we go through the books, we see pictures, we see cuttings and clippings from newspapers, we see tickets from a ferryboat, we see whatever on a very everyday level of association. Nevertheless, there is a sub-tone, a subtext, trying to make sense out of all these details, isn’t there? Sebald: I’m certainly not sure that I am able to make sense out of whatever I come across at all except in the effort of recording it, so, whatever sense there is, is primarily an aesthetic sense. I realise that making in prose a decent pattern out of what happens to come your way is a preoccupation, which, in a sense, has no higher ambitions than, for a brief moment in time, to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past. This is why, among other reasons, I have photographs in the text, because the photograph is perhaps the paradigm of it all. The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in a box in an attic. It is a nomadic thing that has only a small chance to survive. I think we all know that feeling when we come accidentally across a photographic document being of one of our lost relatives, being of a totally unknown person. We get this sense of appeal; they are stepping out, having been found by somebody after decades or half centuries. All of a sudden they are stepping back over the threshold and are saying, “We were here too once and please take care of us for a while.” About two months ago in a junkshop in Bungay, which is the nearest small town to where I live, I fished out of a box of cheap prints a little card, which had a lichen on it, a dried lichen, and underneath in very

Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald

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neat handwriting it said: Gathered from the tomb of Marshall Ney, Paris on 7 July 1833. And something like this, totally valueless as such, somehow gets me going. Zeeman: There is a melancholic side to it. It’s not without reason that Schwindel. Gefühle has in the Dutch translation this beautiful title Melancholische dwaalwegen, which more or less defines the procedure that is employed in that book. But there is also the ironical side to it. It seems, at least for the reader, highly amusing for you to find these objects. Sebald: Yes. I mean, the reverse of melancholy is always irony. One is amused about one’s distress occasionally and they are two complementary moods and you can’t really have the one without the other. Zeeman: So how important is the, I would say, “cultivation” of irony? Sebald: Well, it’s absolutely crucial because, if you are primarily, as I fear I am, of a melancholic and maybe slightly depressive bent, then you absolutely need it to survive. And if you happen to get into this profession of writing, you need the irony to keep your readers by your side because unmitigated melancholy is not consumable. Nobody wants it and I understand that perfectly. All melancholic writers had a very funny side to them. Zeeman: It is also in this stressing of the incidental. At the beginning of our conversation you said how incidental even your own existence is but it is also in the driving power of the stories. Everything seems to happen by chance, like finding newspaper clippings that fit exactly into the story. Is this the writer who cleverly organises his material or is this a very lucky person always finding the right newspaper? Sebald: Well, you know, funny things do happen. Zeeman: Yes, but you seem to have a talent to collect them. Sebald: Yes, I do. You know, they come my way! Zeeman: This is an innate talent?

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Sebald: I think it must be. I find it very reassuring rather than disconcerting because Adorno, whom I still appreciate very much, I think once said, “If you’re on the right track, then the quotations come and offer themselves to you; you don’t have to look for them.” Zeeman: But it goes far [i.e. it’s bit far-fetched]. Someone tells you a story about a man who fell from the mountain at the beginning of the century and by sheer luck you seem to be in the neighbourhood on the day, seventy or eighty years afterwards, they re-discover his body and, moreover, just a second before throwing away the newspaper, you realise that this is his story. Sebald: That’s his story. Well, I mean, this is also to unsettle the reader, of course. Zeeman: Of course, it does. Sebald: It’s exactly the same mechanism that you get in crime fiction because in crime fiction at the end everything is explained and everything falls into place when Miss Marple comes into the library and sits everybody down and tells everybody what the footprint in the begonia bed meant. So you can, of course, arrange coincidences retrospectively. You may have the newspaper clipping which gets into the text as a touch of a verification. If people see a clipping like this, they believe it. Zeeman: But that’s exactly the point of the illustrations in the book. At first glance, it’s odd. You don’t find a novel or travel story with so many illustrations, insertions that, moreover, are a functional part of the text. They don’t illustrate the text; they help the text further. The sentence ends at the top of the picture and then the picture is part of the story so it’s far more convincing than Miss Marple telling you about the footprint. Sebald: But nevertheless, there’s the possibility for the same sleight of hand that makes crime fiction possible because it can be all arranged in retrospect. So I had the clipping, I only needed to invent the character that goes with it and associate him with the main figure in the text. In this case it happens to be true. Zeeman: That was what I suspected. Most of them are true.

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Sebald: There are others. Most of them are true but there are several which I made up so the reader must be constantly asking, “Is this so or isn’t it so?” Of course, this is one of the central problems of fiction. Nineteenth-century authors are always at pains to point out that they found this manuscript in a bedroom in Husum and that therefore it is true. They’re not telling a story they’ve made up; they’re recording real life. Of course, in a sense, we still have that problem as narrators. Many writers fudge it or obscure it and I think it is still a crucial problem to deal with, this legitimisation. Zeeman: But the difference is, of course, that we don’t see the manuscript found in the bedstead in Husum. We just get a print and in this case we get the actual material that proves the author’s point. Sebald: Yes, that’s where photography is so wonderfully useful! Zeeman: You collect photographs? Sebald: I do. I have for years. Anything that comes my way I put in a box but I also have a small cheap camera. It’s those implausible things that you come across, that, if you are not able to record them, nobody will believe you, so it’s quite useful to have that tool. Zeeman: A final point about the Ringe des Saturn story: this roaming through the countryside, which is at one and the same time roaming through the countryside and its history, it is as if it has this concentric movement of Saturn’s rings. That is, of course, the idea but also it is as if it is a spiral movement. Sebald: Yes, downward. Zeeman: Downward and to some sort of centre. Sebald: Yes, that’s right. It does have a spiralling swirl in it somewhere and I think that in most of my texts it becomes at least obliquely obvious that the dark centre behind it all is the German past between 1925 and 1950 which I came out of. I was born in 1944 in an idyllic place, untouched by the War, but, in looking back upon this year, I cannot abstract from the fact that I know what happened during this last year of the war particularly – the bombing of my native country, the deporting

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of people from Rhodes or Sicily, or God knows where, to the most ghastly places anybody could possibly imagine. The pervasiveness of that and the fact that it wasn’t just something that happened in one or two places but that it happened almost throughout Europe, and the calamitous dimensions of it, are something that, even though I left Germany when I was twenty-one, I still have in my backpack and I just can’t put it down. And it seems to me that the swirling movement of history moved towards that point and that somehow we have to acknowledge this. Zeeman: But then connecting the past and the present, giving back continuity to the stories, is that honouring the missed out part? Or is that a very bleak vision of our collective history. Sebald: Well, it’s a fairly bleak vision of our collective history. There are saving graces here and there and one tries not to forget about them but, as a whole, it appears, if you look at it from a very long way away, as a phenomenon of evolution, that the way we have developed is one great aberration, some kind of calculating error in the evolutionary matrix … somehow. And, of course, increasingly we know this and the great fires of the Second World War were only the first fires of the kinds of fires that are lit now. This is almost like an amoral perspective, when you think of the burning cities and the burning bodies of the 1940s, and then somehow link it up, as I quite often do, with the images of the burning forests of Borneo or of the Amazon. It would be false piety to look back upon 1940 to 1945 and say, “What horrible times these were!” We’re still living in the middle of them, I feel. Zeeman: One final question: you are of German origin but you do still write in German although you live and have lived for a long time in England and speak English all the time. How aware are you of a certain antiquity, of the fact that you write in German and live English? Sebald: Well, obviously I think that the fact that I haven’t lived in a German-speaking environment for any length of time, for now over 30 years, must have a certain influence upon my writing but I have been, as it were, spared always having to be up with the latest jargon. Zeeman: It makes for a cleaner language?

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Sebald: It does. Lichtenberg once said that, in order to be able write your mother tongue, you have to go abroad for a while and I think that is very true. The temptation is very great, especially now where they grow writers overnight by the hundreds. If you go to a place like Basel or Frankfurt, you have hundreds of colleagues who are writers. And there’s always – I think there must be – strong pressure to be up with the latest thing. Zeeman: And that makes for the recognition of people like Stendhal, living in Italy and writing in French, and Conrad, coming from Poland and living in England? Thank you very much for this conversation.

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Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald

Section 1 Contexts and Influences

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Kafka, Nabokov … Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants R. J. A. Kilbourn

It is a fundamentally insane notion … that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies. – Sebald, Vertigo That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest. – Nabokov, Strong Opinions

This study begins from an acknowledgment of the highly intertextual nature of the prose fiction of W. G. Sebald,1 and from the understanding that Sebald’s fictional world, to use that language, is an irreducibly literary structure, within which the mediated experience of subjectivity is the primary “object” of representation. More specifically, I will consider here Sebald’s bricolagic appropriation and “translation” in Vertigo of Franz Kafka’s “Jäger Gracchus” fragment (1917), as well as Kafka’s diaries and letters from 1913;2 and in The Emigrants Sebald’s manipulation of a recurring motif from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1967), as well as Nabokov’s post-emigration life in America and Switzerland.3 In general I seek to examine how these diverse intertexts signify 1

2

3

Where intertextuality is broadly defined as a synonym for literature conceived as an endless process of recontextualization, rewriting, and dissemination – the dialogic interconnectivity among all texts beyond singular acts of artistic intention. Complete Stories, 226–34; Gesammelte Schriften, Beschreibung, 102–07. On Sebald as a “bricoleur” see Williams, “Elusive,” 101. For the latter see Boyd’s two biographies. As of this writing, comparatively little work has been done on this aspect of Sebald’s intertextuality. See, for example, Williams’s three studies; Ceuppens, 95–7; Sill (cited in Ceuppens, 95).

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within each novel, and in relation to each other. I will compare the two novels in the context of Sebald’s treatment of the problematic conjunction in fictional narrative of the aleatory (chance as narratological principle) and the theme of secular redemption. In-between is subjective “choice” as a product of the pattern – call it “fate” – rather than as a represented individual act of volition. At issue, though, is the fictional – and, ultimately, literal – status of death: the “reality principle” whose cultural valuation in the modern period is always at odds with the problem of its representation. The “common supposition,” according to Sebald, is to see in representations of death “a cipher for salvation” (“Undiscover’d Country,” 22).4 More generally, the metaphysical category of redemption is long since revalued in the gradual shift to a so-called secular late modernity: the Western world’s semi-conscious disavowal of its abiding allegiance to categories like God, an afterlife, or the moral-ethical categories these concepts sustain.5 Sebald’s novels in their different ways extend Kafka’s and Nabokov’s divergent critiques of the persistence of a metaphysical and axiological worldview that is nevertheless often affirmed in the work of Nabokov and Kafka scholars alike.6 I focus here on the subtle relation between Vertigo’s initially metonymic “identification” of the narrator with Kafka (and Kafka’s Hunter, Casanova, Stendhal, Dante, and other historical and fictional figures) and The Emigrants’ repeated invocation of Nabokov’s quasi-allegorical personae. Ultimately, I aim to shed light on Sebald’s unique contribution to an erotic-salvific model predicated on a specific relation between a narrative subject and an other as embodiment of the promise – or hope – of redemption. What is of interest here is the manner in which Sebald responds to the ironically metafictional Nabokovian “solution,” as well as the interminably open-ended non-sol4

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See Sebald’s description in On the Natural History of Destruction of the world of Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung as “a period that has left any hope of salvation far behind” (189). To think the revaluing of redemption as a “redeeming” of redemption is a pleonasm, but a functional one. In the Nietzschean revaluation of redemption, a positively revalued death intervenes to “redeem” a life negatively revalued in the idealist-Romantic tradition. Death acts in the service of life to save a life revalued in terms of death – “death” as interruption, rupture, discontinuity. See my “Redemption Revalued in Tristan and Isolde.” It says far more about prevailing literary critical values in the last century than it does about the authors discussed here that the question of a positive vision of an afterlife or “otherworld” has proven particularly tenacious, for both Kafka and Nabokov scholars.

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ution adumbrated in Kafka. This response takes place within the larger context of Sebald’s abiding concern with the manner in which we – as subjects of late modernity – have yet to come to terms with what we think we have already left behind. Informing this comparison is the question of Sebald’s position visà-vis what Jürgen Habermas famously calls the “incomplete project” of the Enlightenment in modernity; why it is possible to call Sebald anti- if not post-modern.7 As Matei Calinescu remarks in his discussion of the Habermas-Lyotard debate on the postmodern: modernity is “premised on a finalistic vision of universal history, and in this sense Christianity (as the story of humanity’s final redemption from the original Adamic sin) is constitutively modern. All the major “stories of emancipation” of modernity are essentially secularized variations on the Christian paradigm” (Calinescu, 274).8 In this light, the Jewish messianic historical model of exile, wandering and waiting can be seen as either pre-, post-, or even anti-modern, depending the perspective adopted. Insofar as it is interpreted according to a christological typology, the messianic model is pre-modern in that it forecasts and foreshadows the coming modern age. But if it is read and, to a certain degree re-written, in the way it has been in the twentieth-century, such a “messianicity” (to use Derrida’s term) becomes emblematic of a “postmodern” narrative that is defined by its need to emancipate itself from this kind of totalizing interpretation reasserting a more open-ended historical model.9 What an analysis of Sebald should reveal is the degree to which the meaning and significance of the term “modern” – and therefore the very status of “the modern project” – continues to turn on this crucial issue of a kind of reflexive, avowedly secular “faith” in a repertoire of metaphysical structures that constitute the ironically theological basis of contemporary Western culture.

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Arthur Williams, in a recent series of essays, strives to assimilate Sebald to a postmodern camp via the foregrounding of specific formal and thematic features of the novels; see his “Sebald,” 104 and “Das korsakowsche Syndrom,” 74. See Habermas on Christianity as already “modern” with respect to a Roman pagan past (“Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” 1749). “Messianicity,” distinct from messianism, is Derrida’s name for what might be called the ethical relation of the archive toward not the past but the future. In Derrida’s terms, the question of the archive “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, or a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (Archive Fever, 36). This messianicity is a feature of a “Jewishness” distinct from Judaism; a cultural identity predicated on a form of hope that is an “opening toward the future” whose obverse is memory-as-archive (72–75).

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“The Wandering Jew of the Ocean”: Vertigo and Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus” In a series of critical essays from the 1970s Sebald offers his own interpretation of aspects of Kafka’s œuvre, focusing in particular on what might be called Kafka’s ironically messianic eschatology: a negative or anti-eschatology; not about the “end” but rather its deferral or impossibility. In a 1972 essay on “the death motif ” in Das Schloß Sebald (after Benjamin and Adorno) ascribes to Kafka the bestowal of “messianic traits” on “his alter-ego K.” (“Undiscover’d Country,” 29). In recognizing this dimension of Kafka’s text, Sebald overlooks K.’s incomprehension of his own motives, thereby implying the presence of a positive hope for some kind of resolution in a novel whose very structure, of unfinished and unfinishable narrative interminability, militates against such a reading. Four years later (1976), in a second essay, “Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in Das Schloß,” Sebald suggests that “Messianism,” as one of the “ways of transcending [K.’s] hopeless situation,” has a very problematic presence in The Castle. Evoking Ernst Bloch, Sebald claims that “the only invariable and decisive feature [of Jewish messianism in particular] is the concept of hope as the guiding principle in a maze of illusions” (46; my emphasis). That the Hebrew words for land-surveyor and messiah differ by only one unwritten vowel Sebald takes as evidence, again, of K.’s secret status as avatar of a Jewish messiah (57). The other interpretation – more plausible on the evidence of Kafka’s œuvre – is that this single-letter difference is the difference between everything and nothing; it is the specific, signifying difference that keeps K. forever on the hither side of messiah-hood. But then Sebald seems to acknowledge this, highlighting Kafka’s virtuosic use of the German subjunctive mood (e.g. in constructions employing “as if”) as “a token of the desperate disparity between the messianic promise and its actual achievement” (49). Here Sebald lays the ground for much of his own subsequent fictional output through a sympathetic combination of Walter Benjamin’s modernist messianism10 and Ernst Bloch’s utopian “Principle of Hope.” He argues that K. is “a cipher for a future that perpetually retreats ahead of a disheartening reality, a cipher of hope, deeply engrained in privation and never redeemed. Even if this principle 10

Habermas describes “Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit, of the presence as a moment of revelation; a time in which splinters of a messianic presence are enmeshed.” (“Modernity,” 1751).

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is forlorn in its own unreality there remains the desire for its realization” (Sebald, “Law of Ignominy,” 50). In the 1976 “Law of Ignominy” article Sebald openly acknowledges the incommensurability of a messianic impulse and its goal of salvation: “that messianism is doomed to miss the fulfillment of its hopes by a hair’s breadth appears to be the mark of its calamitous origin” (52). This origin, he clarifies, is despair, manifesting in K.’s case out of his “constitutional, inbred weakness. The origins of messianism in despair are the inherent cause of its unavoidable failure and incongruity” (53). Eventually Sebald comes down on the side of a modern Jewish mysticism as manifest in thinkers like Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig: “What is important in messianic thought is solely the viability of what Ernst Bloch called das Prinzip Hoffnung, ‘the Hope Principle,’ a principle which to Franz Rosenzweig appeared to be der Stern der Erlösung, ‘the Star of Salvation’” (53). As Sebald makes clear, this is a principle whose viability is not threatened in any way by the recognized likelihood that the messiah may always be an impostor, a “fictive and merely assumed” identity (53). Again, in K.’s case – and on this point Sebald’s analysis is the least convincing – the messianic figure may not even be aware of his own pseudo-messianic status. According to Sebald’s reading of Kafka, though, this additional “weakness” on K.’s part only redoubles the paradoxical “truth-value” of a principle of hope “stifled and obscured by an oppressive reality” (53). Kafka’s œuvre is a strangely proleptic paradigm of that strain of twentieth-century literature and thought preoccupied with identity construed in terms of language, homeland, and “Jewishness.” The question here is how this aspect of Kafka signifies within Sebald’s appropriation of the Hunter Gracchus story and its idiosyncratic treatment of the theme of salvation through another’s intervention: salvation from bachelorhood through his fiancé Felice Bauer; salvation from Felice (and a stifling bourgeois life-in-death) through the nameless gentile Swiss girl from the Riva trip (see Gesammelte Schriften, 5:157–60). How finally he passively opts for neither form of “salvation” (always with a woman’s intercession); neither bourgeois respectability nor erotic bliss: for nothing except the certain denial of any salvation represented by a life of writing. In terms of Sebald’s engagement with Nabokov, it is arguable that, in the broadest terms, Nabokov’s texts display a similar desire to place literature above everything else – except consciousness itself. Only for Nabokov this is not problematic at all, as it is for Kafka. For Nabokov the literary expression of memory represents the possibil-

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ity of a genuine aesthetic redemption – which is the only form of redemption available to consciousness trapped within itself while able to conceive (albeit negatively) of its self-transcendence (see, e.g., Speak, Memory, 296–97). For his part, Kafka accedes to the existence of “an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”11 The “us” in question is ambiguous; again, it comes down to identity, whether personal, collective or cultural. For both writers, as appropriated by Sebald, “salvation” is also always a question of the relative possibility of returning to a home or homeland in a future that only signifies in relation to a golden past (Nabokov), or that promises to be no different from the present, barring the only real escape, death – the “Heimat” without return (Kafka). On the one hand, then, Sebald in Vertigo exploits the “Jäger Gracchus” story as a parable of the crossing of the aleatory principle with a notion of “fate,” in an ironically temporized, structurally open-ended messianic narrative. Here messiah and subject of experience are identified in the figure of the Hunter (der Jäger), in the typical Kafkan conflation of extremes of self and other in the protagonist. On the other hand, there is Sebald’s appropriation of the butterfly-hunting motif in Speak, Memory (and in Nabokov’s post-emigration life generally), which could be read as evidence of what many critics see as Nabokov’s tacit “faith” in some ontologically autonomous “other world” or level of being, upon which is predicated the possibility of a kind of deliverance beyond a so-called aesthetic redemption.12 In Speak, Memory (and in his other autobiographical and fictional writings) Nabokov elaborates a theory of memory as art:13 as a technique of redemption through the conscious divestment of one’s recollections transfigured as aesthetic objects; transpositions and translations of remembered experience given away as a gift whose giving – if one believes Nabokov – benefits the giver as much as the receiver. This is the Nabokovian version of “redemption” through art; an aesthetic transfiguration of experience through the recuperative mnemonic re-staging of the past, in the temporal equivalent of the effacing or transcendence of spatial boundaries. Ultimately, for Nabokov, this modern art of memory results in a redemption of the experience of exile and loss of identity through 11 12

13

Quoted by Benjamin, “Reflections on Kafka,” (144). This metaphysical school continues to dominate Nabokov criticism. See eg. Alexandrov; Boyd; Johnson and Boyd. See Michael Wood for a dissenting voice. For example: “Memory is, really, in itself, a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses.” (Strong Opinions, 12).

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displacement in time and space. As Nabokov was fond of pointing out, this kind of highly aestheticized mnemonic reconstitution allows him to overcome nostalgia for the Russia of his youth – a place and time beyond any but an imaginative recuperation – since an aestheticized version of the best parts of that past is always in his possession; is his to review or even “give away” at will (eg. Speak, Memory, 76–77).14 For Nabokov, one of the most celebrated of all literary émigrés, intertextuality and memory (as an image-system) are coterminous (see, e.g., Foster, 183).15 The title of The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) encourages a culturalhistorical perspective on the reality of a state of exile and emigration which may or may not be one of “homelessness.” This is the crux of the novel, in terms of Sebald’s oblique juxtaposing of his various emigrantcharacters” states of dispossession with Nabokov’s permanent link to a “home” that exists only in his memory, yet which in its artistic, hypomnesic, translation constitutes for him not simply a powerful antidote to the unstructured messiness of life but a means of imparting that mess with meaning it otherwise lacks. Having lost everything, he lacks for nothing, and even feels free to share his eidetic riches across space and time through the gift of his fictionalized memoirs. For Nabokov, then, “home” is ultimately a function of identity in its linguistic expression, and is therefore always present, always wherever he is, in a collapsing of space that is simultaneously memory’s “negation of time” (Strong Opinions, 78) – the redemption of loss and even death (eg. Speak, Memory, 76–77). For Kafka, on the other hand – that is to say, for the Hunter Gracchus – “identity” is defined as a state of permanent alienation from homeland and language. For Kafka, the ironic messiah of the impossibility of redemption (what Heinrich Heine calls “the Wandering Jew of the

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“[T]he freshness of the flowers being arranged by the under-gardener in the cool drawing-room of our country house, as I was running downstairs with my butterfly net on a summer day half a century ago: that kind of thing is absolutely permanent, immortal, it can never change, no matter how many times I farm it out to my characters.” (Strong Opinions, 12). I am preceded by others in applying this terminology to Nabokov’s aesthetics. See especially John Burt Foster’s Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism, an insightful and comprehensive consideration of “Nabokov’s intense absorption with pictorial images fashioned by memory, images that recapture his past so vividly that they seem to transcend time.” (182).

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Ocean”16) signifies a collective or cultural identity predicated on a desire for a “Heimat,” whether through assimilation or translation. Next to the legend of “the Wandering Jew,”17 one of Kafka’s most significant intertexts is Richard Wagner’s first symphonic opera The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer; [1841]). Interestingly, “[of] all of Wagner’s mature operas, with their mythic or legendary subject matter … Der fliegende Holländer … has the shortest prehistory. Indeed, it was as late as the very end of the eighteenth century that the legend of the wandering seafarer achieved literary form, in various English and German versions” (Grey, 25). The myth of the “eternal seafarer” is thoroughly modern, offering a literary model for a modern subject complementary to that of Faust. “Wagner’s chief source” for his opera was not Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” (1798), but Heine’s 1834 satirical autobiographical fragment Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski.18 The whole of what would become Wagner’s plot is adumbrated in one chapter (seven) of Heine’s anti-Romantic pseudo-memoir. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman is emblematic of the other, major expression of this particular modern subject: “Wagner’s self-identification with the Dutchman … focuses on the theme of spiritual, psychological alienation as the lot of the Romantic artist … In true Romantic fashion, Wagner yearns for a homeland he has never actually known, a utopian artistic “space” that is more a state of mind than any real place” (Grey, 10). In the opera his Romantic “longing for [a] German homeland” manifests itself in the Dutchman’s longing for a woman: “the redeeming woman” whom he envisions as “the feminine element in general” (quoted in Grey, 10). It is through this anthropomorphism that the longed-for homeland (Heimat) – “that is … the sensation of being embraced by some intimately familiar community” – promises him “salvation” (ibid.). In this light, “identity,” whether personal or cultural (private or public), signifies for Kafka an ongoing anxiety or frustration around the relations at the heart of social life, most significantly the sexual-erotic and matrimonial-domestic realms from which Kafka always felt more or less excluded. As the Romantic16 17

18

See Heine, “Schnabelewopski,” 173. According to Olga Skonechnaia, “[t]he story of the Wandering Jew is one of several important mythical themes developed by Nabokov. According to Western medieval legend, the Wandering Jew … refused to allow Christ a short rest on the way to Golgotha. For that reason he was deprived of his own eternal rest. [He] is doomed to wander ceaselessly throughout the ages, awaiting Doomsday, when the curse will be lifted.” (Grayson, 1:186). See Millingdon, in Grey, 25–26).

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Wagnerian version of the Flying Dutchman makes clear, the longing for a homeland on the part of this particular modern subject is equivalent to the desire for a woman who represents the possibility for redemption as “return” to a place never seen or visited before: a “new homeland” that, as much as place or community, is about a positive relation through memory to the past, and therefore to the present. By lifting the key points of Heine’s plot out of the surrounding narrative frame, Wagner eliminates the irony, changing the moral fundamentally and making of the Dutchman’s story a parable of eternal damnation versus eternal salvation through a woman’s faithful and self-effacing love. While it seems very likely that Heine’s text was also a possible “source” for the Gracchus fragment, as will be seen below, Kafka was no truer to Heine than to any other. As Millingdon explains, Heine’s version is characterized by an “ironic, anti-Romantic” tone utterly foreign to Wagner. One can only speculate as to what Heine would have thought of Wagner’s treatment. Here the Dutchman, after a rash oath to round the Cape of Good Hope at all costs, is condemned by Satan to sail the seas for eternity in a phantom ship, undying, unless he is redeemed by the love of a woman, which he gets a chance to try to win once every seven years (see Wagner Act II ([123–24]).19 Until this happens, the Dutchman, like the Ancient Mariner, is neither properly alive nor properly dead, but in a liminal state that is terrible precisely because it has no end.20 The premise is that for finite human consciousness, the only thing worse than dying is living forever, or, to be more exact, not dying forever; a kind of living death, trapped between the 19

20

See Dolezel, “Kafka’s Fictional World,” where this intertext is suggested (71, n. 11). Wagner would not read Schopenhauer until 1854, but his late-Romantic valorization of a kind of “denial of the will to live,” that would reach its expressive apogee in Tristan and Isolde, is already very apparent in the Dutchman (Wagner, Selected Letters, Letter 177 [16 Dec. 1854]). It seems that Wagner never really freed himself from the notion of a kind of redemption, revalued in the service of a paradoxical will to nothingness – but even this is still a will. The operas that precede Tristan show the “unconscious” development of this imperative in the pre-Schopenhauerian Wagner: “What the Flying Dutchman was seeking was an end to the perpetual striving of unnumbered lifetimes, release from the necessity to renew life on any terms: what he specifically longed for was a state of timeless negation of all being, as against the traditional conception of death as a transmutation to a different order of being. ‘When all the dead arise, then shall I dissolve into nothing [Nichts]. Worlds, end your course! Eternal nothingness [Ewige Vernichtung], absorb me’” (quoted in Magee, 344).

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poles of sexual desire and the death-drive.21 In the opera’s most significant departure from Heine’s cynically ironic version, the Dutchman’s death is facilitated by Senta’s when, having spurned her fiance Erik, she jumps from a cliff – ironically – to prove her devotion; the woman’s love and self-sacrifice are key, falling into line with the modern erotic-salvific paradigm of Goethe’s Faust.22 In “Der Jäger Gracchus” by contrast, there is neither woman nor betrayal nor sacrifice nor redemption nor death – other than the initial death that went wrong, when the Hunter fell off a cliff while out pursuing a “chamois” (eine Gemse) (Beschreibung, 105). Kafka compounds Heine’s ironies by making the Dutch sailor a Bavarian hunter who does not take up sailing until after his death (Complete Stories, 229; 231). As will be seen, the presence of an other as mediator – in the tradition, a specific woman (Erlöserinn) or a quasi-divine “feminine element”23 – is conflated in Kafka’s story with the figure of the Hunter himself, as if he were both subject of salvation and saviour in one. The possibility of self-salvation is forestalled, however, by the fact that he has already fallen off a cliff at the outset; he can hardly die again on his own behalf. Indeed, his failure to die properly in the first place is precisely the problem, the paradox with which the unfinished, unfinishable, narrative begins. As if to underscore the Hunter’s ironic messianicity his advent in Riva is announced to the Bürgermeister in a parody of annunciation iconography: a dove flies to him the night before and speaks the news into his ear (228; 104). What I mean here by the principle of chance is obliquely addressed in Vertigo part three (“Dr. K.s Badereise nach Riva”: the section based largely on letters Kafka wrote from Italy in 1913 to his erstwhile fiance 21

22

23

I owe this particular formulation to Brad Prager (see “Sebald’s Kafka” in this volume). In part 3 of Vertigo Sebald, through “Dr. K,” connects this notion with the significance of opera: “Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr. K once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.” (152). “Die Moral des Stückes ist für Frauen, daß sie sich in Acht nehmen müssen, keinen fliegenden Holländer zu heiraten; und wir Männer ersehen aus diesem Stücke, wie wir durch die Weiber, im günstigsten Falle, zu Grunde gehn” (Heine, 174). See Wagner Act 3; see also Dante’s Beatrice, Novalis’s Sophie, Faust’s Gretchen, etc. Whose apotheosis is probably Goethe’s “das ewig Weibliche” at the conclusion of Faust part 2.

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Felice Bauer). In one invented scene an old general, Dr. K.’s tablemate at the sanatorium (and a compulsive reader of Stendhal), observes: “It is a fundamentally insane notion … that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies” (Vertigo, 157).24 In this view, the course of events – a certain narrative logic – is determined neither by individual agency nor by some kind of “fate,” but by the complex interdependency and interconnectivity of things; in other words, by what is commonly referred to as chance, where chance occurrences, coincidences, and all other manner of accidents, when viewed from the proper perspective, can be seen to relate together in fantastically complex but discernibly meaningful configurations. In Kafka’s story, for example, the wrong “turn of the helm” is just that: a mistake, not a choice on the part of the helmsman (228–30). Further, the apprehension of meaning on this level, in this fashion, is not necessarily connected to or dependent upon any narrative resolution in any conventional sense, or even some more specific Erlösung. The connections may make themselves visible at any point, in any order, not necessarily according to a traditional logic of causality and consequence. “Fate,” in this context, equals narrative inevitability as an effect of retrospection: a retro-perspective. More than a banal observation about certain kinds of novels, this is to underline the centrality of memory (as a kind of “technique”) in determining the novel’s form, as much as that form shapes memory.25 To put it another way: this inevitability – a dynamic recursivity – becomes the “law” of a certain kind of narrative, just as it provides the model for what passes for “fate” in modern life. For Sebald, intertextuality is the principal vehicle for the “representation” of this interconnectively determined meaning. It is by no means coincidental if in the German term (Erlösung) we highlight here the narrative sense of solution, resolution, or “closure.” Therefore in this aspect every narrative resolution is a deliverance, a kind of ironic redeeming, in the face of an authentic redemptive possibility which is forever deferred. This general observation about narrative – applicable 24

25

“Diese im Grunde irrwitzige Vorstellung, daß man mit einer Drehung des Steuers, mit dem Willen, den Lauf der Dringe beeinflussen könne, während diese doch bestimmt seien von den vielfältigsten Bezieungen untereinander.” (Schwindel, 172) In this approach, reading and interpretation play as much of a determining role as writing or “intention.” See Alexander, who propounds an alternative theory of Nabokov’s poetics based on a false analogy with his theories of biological mimicry (177 ff.). See also Michael Wood, 190–1.

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to many modern novels – does not explain, however, why (for example) the majority of Kafka’s longer narratives fail to resolve, remain unfinished, fragmentary – but it must be taken into account when considering what kind of effects such narratives produce (or fail to produce) when the Kafkan fragment becomes the model. (It should be noted, by contrast, that Nabokov’s novels, even when they do not offer conventional narrative closure, are always on the formal level consummately “finished.”) But chance – as what might be called a thematized compositional principle – enters into Sebald’s narrative much earlier. For instance, in part one (“Beyle, oder das Merckwürdige Faktum der Liebe”), Marie Henri Beyle (otherwise known as Stendhal) and one Mme Gherardi, journey together in 1814 into the Italian Alps, to Desenzano and Riva on Lake Garda. The latter they reach by boat, and as they enter the port they see “two boys already sitting on the harbour wall playing dice” (Vertigo, 24).26 This is of course the opening line of Kafka’s Gracchus story (226) – what some might see as a blatant example of authorial intention: allusion as intertextuality. The rest of the scene in Vertigo reproduces the Hunter’s advent in Riva, to which Kafka traveled in 1913 (a key date in the book), and which is also the temporal setting of the Gracchus narrative: “two men in dark silver-buttoned tunics were at that moment carrying a bier ashore on which, under a large, frayed, flower-patterned silk cloth, lay what was evidently a human form” (25).27 Beyle’s (and the reader’s) “chance” encounter with the Hunter Gracchus does not simply illustrate the ineluctable interpenetration of the aleatory and the predetermined in novelistic fiction: it enacts it. In Sebald’s proleptic image, this “sombre moment in Riva” will cross Mme Gherardi’s memory “like a shadow”28 – just as it crosses and re-crosses the novel’s sometimes turbulent, sometimes opaquely reflective surface (25). In part two of Vertigo (“All’estero”), through a shifting series of identifications with the exiled Dante, the Hunter Gracchus, and other historical and literary figures, the narrator becomes Kafka’s shadowy doppelgänger (e.g., 151). Trapped in Vienna in 1980 by a kind of creeping paralysis of purpose, the narrator describes how he compulsively follows 26

27

28

“[Wo] schon zwei Knaben auf der Kaimauer beim Würfelspiel saßen.” (Schwindel, 29) “[Z]wei Männer in dunklen Röcken mit Silberknöpfen gerade eine Bahre an Land trugen,auf der unter einem großen, blumengemusterten, gefransten Seidentuch offenbar ein Mensch lag.” (29–30). “Das düstere Ereignis von Riva, das sie in der Erinnerung noch einige Male überlief wie ein Schatten” (30).

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the same paths each day, literally not knowing “where to turn [wenden]” (34–5): “If the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or will-power, and obliged to turn back again” (34).29 The narrator’s problem in Vertigo is equivalent to that of most of Kafka’s heroes (and of Beckett’s novelistic protagonists as well): an epistemological malaise manifest on the level of mobility – a problem derived in part from Dante-pilgrim, wandering in a dark wood (una selva oscura), constrained by the moral geometry of the afterlife always to travel in the same direction, turning the same way, his bodily self regulating the process of purgation that is “fated” to end in redemption (see Vertigo, 35). We can think of the novels of Kafka and Beckett and now Sebald (as heirs to the letter, if not the spirit, of Dante) in terms of a planar model of time and memory in which the only possible movement is on the horizontal, around in circles, or from side to side.30 His narrator’s subjectivity is born of the asymptotic limits of a consciousness trapped in a purgatorial time-space in which any conventional release (Erlösung), like conventional narrative closure (Lösung), is impossible. This is at least in part the function of the novel’s governing conceit of time as not a river but a sea: a vast expanse of water upon which one sails at will or at the mercy of chance, rather than upon a uni-directional current rushing inexorably to a predetermined end (see, e.g., Vertigo, 37–47). Sebald capitalizes on this image-system; Vertigo is a tapestry of recurrent patterns of which the nautical is the most significant: water, waves, boats, sailing, mariners, and seasickness.31 Whether literal or figurative, these elements 29

30

31

“Hätte man die Wege, die ich damals gegangen bin, nachgezeichnet, es wäre der Eindruck entstanden, es habe hier einer auf einer vorgegebenen Fläche immer wieder neue Traversen und Winkelzüge versucht, um aufs neue stets am Rand seiner Vernunft, Vorstellungs- oder Willenskraft anzugelangen und zum Umkehren gezwungen zu werden.” (Schwindel, 39–40). On Sebald’s planar model of memory see my “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” (Long and Whitehead, 140–54). To give one characteristic example (with its own multi-leveled “Kafkan” overtones): “When I awoke the next morning from a deep and dreamless sleep, which not even the surging roar of traffic on the Ring had been able to disturb, I felt as if I had crossed a wide stretch of water during the hours of my nocturnal absence. Before I opened my eyes I could see myself descending the gangway of a large ferry, and hardly had I stepped ashore but I resolved to take the evening train to Venice, and before that to spend the day with Ernst Herbeck in Klosterneuburg.” (37–8).

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appear to represent a radical epistemological crisis symptomatic of an irreducibly intertextual subjectivity.32 Seasickness, of course, is one of the primary manifestations of the “feeling of dizziness” named in the book’s German title: “Schwindel. Gefühle.” The narrator’s bouts of vertiginous giddiness and motion-sickness overlap with his rhythms of sleeping and waking – a narrative rhythm also derived from Dante-pilgrim in his sojourn through hell. This is also the Hunter Gracchus’s “life”: asleep on the boat, awake when on land – an oscillating process differing from Dante’s in the crucial absence of a terminus. Sebald’s narrator is characterized by this oscillation of states of aimless wandering and feeling “at sea” and then of immobility and outright unconsciousness – a hyper-Prufrockian vacillation between indecision and decision whose other intertext, ironically, is the Flying Dutchman and his cycle of restless wandering punctuated every seven years by a chance to marry and be redeemed through love (Grey, 124). As the nautical imagery merges with the depiction of the narrator’s nomadic and alienated existence, his subjectivity (voice, point of view) increasingly overlaps with that of the Hunter Gracchus. This process of identification – ultimately an identification with Kafka’s self-presentation,33 but with the conspicuous absence of Kafka’s ongoing difficulties with women and relationships – this is perhaps the point on which the Kafkan intertext in Vertigo diverges most explicitly from that of Nabokov in The Emigrants. More significant, though, in terms of Sebald’s invocation of Dantean tropes, is the manner in which Sebald exploits the tension between an allegorically externalized moral stance, and a modern secular internalization of an equivalent state of being, in the slippage in his narrative between the narrator’s represented “psychological” and “physical” conditions – an elision effected through the subjunctive evocation of waking up in Venice on All Saints’ day:

32

33

For example: … the darkened plain quaked so tremendously – the memory of terror then, bathes me in sweat again. A whirlwind burst out of the tear-drenched earth, A wind that crackled with a blood-red light, A light that overcame all of my senses; And like a man whom sleep has seized, I fell. (Inferno 3.130–36) Williams calls this a “Kafkaisierung.” (Williams, “Sebald,” 101).

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On that first day of November in 1980, preoccupied as I was with my notes and the ever-widening and contracting circles of my thoughts, I became enveloped by a sense of utter emptiness and never once left my room. It seemed to me then that one could well end one’s life simply through thinking and retreating into one’s mind … my limbs were growing progressively colder and stiffer with my lack of movement, so that … I felt as if I had already been interred or laid out for burial … (Vertigo, 65)34

The pre-modern allegorization of the soul-body division (exemplified in Dante) is here transformed as if in response to Kafka’s post-realist rewriting of this tradition. Sebald’s narrator as it were “internalizes” Kafka’s portrayal of the Hunter as a description adequate to his own epistemoontological condition – a secular approximation of the “poor, unredeemed souls” whose day of remembrance (02 November 1980) the narrator spends in this torpid condition, finally “restored” by a set of secular sacraments: “a hot bath, yesterday’s sandwiches and red wine” (Vertigo, 66) (“die Butterbrote und der Rotwein” [79]). Vertigo’s second section owes as much of a debt to Borges, however. Time and again in his subsequent peregrinations the narrator encounters strange figures and places that suggest his own fall is imminent, just around the next turn. He feels he is being followed by a pair of shadowy functionaries who may or may not be murderers, may or may not even be following him: “so ominous [do] these probably quite coincidental encounters” appear to him as he conflates the aleatory and the foreboding (Vertigo, 72).35 These Borgesian encounters may indeed be proleptic of a murder, just someone else’s; of course a plot, once discerned, gives one’s life a shape, a narrative meaning, it lacked before. As the narrator explains to Luciana, the proprietress of the Hotel in Limone, the text he is writing “might turn into a crime story, set in upper Italy, in Venice, Verona and Riva. The plot revolves around a series of unsolved murders and the reappearance of a person who had long been 34

35

“Mit gelegentlichen Aufzeichnungen, vor allem aber mit meinem teils immer weitere, teils immer engere Kreise ziehenden Nachdenken beschäftigt und bisweilen auch umfangen von einer wollkommenen Leere, habe ich an diesem ersten November des Jahres 1980 mein Zimmer nicht ein einziges Mal verlassen; es schien mir damals, als könne man sich tatsächlich ohne weiteres durch Nachdenken und Sinnieren allein ums Leben bringen … wurden meine Glieder aufgrund meiner Bewegungslosigkeit doch immer kälter und starrer, so daß ich mir … schon vorkam wie ein Bestatteter oder doch zumindest wie ein Aufgebahrter …” (Schwindel, 74–5). “[So] bedeutungsschwer kamen mir die wahrscheinlich ganz und gar zufälligen Begegnungen vor.” (Schwindel, 83).

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missing” (95).36 As will be seen, a mysterious death is foreshadowed here: one that takes place in the narrator’s past, revisited in the book’s final section. Who is the hunter and who the hunted, who the type and who the shadow, is no longer clear when logical causality has already been problematized on the formal level, and in terms of its relation to an historical model on the one hand, and a realist tradition on the other. Nor, it seems, is this the point. Vertigo is a “crime story” in the same sense that Kafka’s The Trial is a story about legal shenanigans, or “The Metamorphosis” about a traveling insurance salesman. Besides, it is easy to forget that the Hunter Gracchus was already dead when his story opens. In Sebald’s story, the Hunter dies “for real” at the end, while the narrator succumbs early in part two to the death-in-life of Kafka’s Jäger Gracchus. The at times almost parodically cloak-and-dagger atmospherics in this section manifest the narrator’s hyperbolically paranoid epistemology, now recognizable as the “typical” Sebaldian anxiety around the elision of the ontological and the textual, in his rigorous interrogation of the representation of subjectivity within the novel form. By part three of Vertigo it becomes clear that the narrator’s movements, far from the result of mysterious forces or even momentary whims, are as it were pre-determined by Kafka’s movements through Northern Italy recorded in letters and diary entries between 1913 and 1917 (just as they had been foreshadowed in parts one and two by Stendhal’s and Casanova’s travels in previous centuries). The “law” of the narrator’s trajectory in part two is Kafka’s itinerary in Northern Italy, just as the novel’s overall logic is the il- or non-logic of the Hunter Gracchus (85). The nomadic, perpetually “Wandering Jew of the Ocean” has become a type, a subject position, one that need not be coded as “Jewish,” as Wagner and Coleridge – and Kafka himself – have shown. This is not least because in Kafka and elsewhere such a subject has been spliced with the Dantean Christian pilgrim, in the combination of a radically horizontal with an overridingly vertical itinerary: the spatial-temporal co-axial model translated into moral-redemptive narrative terms. But the resulting subject is one which in Sebald, as in Kafka, is always already in exile from the very possibility of return or release – “homeless” (Heimatlosig) in the most radical sense. 36

“[Es] handle sich um einen Kriminalroman. Die Geschichte spiele jedenfalls in Oberitalien, in Venedig, Verona und Riva, und es ginge in ihr um eine Reihe unaufgeklärter Verbrechen und um das Wiederauftauchen einer seit langem verschollenen Person.” (108).

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Already in part two, Kafka, Kafka’s Hunter, and Dante and Dante-pilgrim are properly conflated in the narrator’s descent into the Desenzano train station pissoir. The narrator finds himself wondering “whether Dr. K., travelling from Verona, had also been at this station and found himself contemplating his face in this mirror. It would not have been surprising. And one of the graffiti beside the mirror seemed indeed to suggest as much. Il cacciatore, it read, in awkwardly formed letters … I added the words nella selva nera”:37 “the hunter” in not a dark wood but a “black forest” (Schwarzwald) (Vertigo, 86–7). Dante’s opening setting in the Inferno thus merges with the Hunter Gracchus’s Bavarian homeland, in a restroom graffito that Kafka, like the narrator, may have read while seeking relief. In appropriating, transposing and distributing fragments of Kafka’s Gracchus fragment across his own text, Sebald gives us the beginning, the “backstory,” last. In part two he had already structured the narrator’s recollection of his own experiences according to the template of Kafka’s movements at the time, which the narrator reads as themselves proleptic of the Gracchus narrative. In part three Sebald imagines the emergence of the story in Kafka’s imagination over the years that follow as he recalls his time in Riva. Sebald reproduces verbatim but at intervals the principal details of the story’s opening,38 ultimately reducing the “meaning of Gracchus the huntsman’s ceaseless journey [to] a penitence for a longing for love” (Vertigo, 165):39 “the terrors of love, which for Dr. K stood foremost among all the terrors of the earth” (167).40 Here Sebald ends by advancing a theory of the generation of this story out of Kafka’s own repressed homosexual inclinations – a somewhat reductive moment that threatens to obscure Sebald’s own subtle reimagining of Kafka’s falling victim to the vertigo of desire.41 37

38 39

40

41

“[Ob] Dr. Kafka, der, von Verona herüberkommend, gleichfalls an diesem Bahnhof ausgestiegen sein mußte, nicht auch in diesem Spiegelglas sein Gesicht betrachtet hatte. Es wäre eigentlich kein Wunder gewesen. Und eines der Graffiti neben dem Spiegel schien mir geradezu darauf hinzudeuten. Il cacciatore, stand da in einer ungelenken Schrift … fügte ich dem noch die Worte nella selva nera hinzu.” (Schwindel, 99). See 163–7. “[K]ommt es mir vor, als bestünde der Sinn der unablässigen Fahrten des Jägers Gracchus in der Abbuße einer Sehnsucht nach Liebe” (Schwindel, 180). “[Die] Schrecknisse der Liebe, die für Dr. K., vor allem anderen, die Schrecken der Erde ausmachten.” (Schwindel, 182). “[H]ow are we to fend off the fate of being unable to depart this life … as Gracchus the huntsman does, touching, in a moment of distraction, the knee of the man who was to have been our salvation.” (Vertigo, 167)

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In Kafka’s version, while alive the Hunter had had no fear of death: “‘I had been glad to live and I was glad to die. Before I stepped aboard, I joyfully flung away my wretched load of ammunition, my knapsack, my hunting rifle that I had always been proud to carry, and I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her marriage dress’” (229).42 This slightly jarring, parodically erotic cliché highlights the Hunter’s passive abdication of volition, as he throws off the attributes of the hunter, lying down and placing himself willingly (because to give up will still requires will) in the hands of his “fate,” which he expects to be death in its absolute finality (leaving open the possibility of death as genuine transcendence) – a death that is inadvertently circumvented. And it is this unintentional, inadvertent and ironic avoidance of his “proper” fate that Salvatore the Bürgermeister of Riva calls “a terrible fate” (229) (“ein schlimmes Schicksal”) (Beschreibung, 106) – what Sebald calls “the fate of being unable to depart this life” (Vertigo, 167).43 In part four of Vertigo (“Il Ritorno in Patria”), in which the narrator returns to the southern German village of Wertach-im-Allgaü (Sebald’s home town), Kafka’s Hunter appears in the third-person as “Hans Schlag”: the (Bav)Aryanized Hunter whom the narrator remembers witnessing having sex with Romana the barmaid (238–9), and who subsequently dies under mysterious circumstances, killed in a fall into a snowladen gorge (245–9).44 The description of the dead hunter is only the last of several in the book that reiterate, with slight variations, Kafka’s description of the dead Hunter Gracchus (227). There are several salient variations of detail: after he is covered with a blanket the hunter’s pocket watch “played a bar or so of the popular song “Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit [Always be faithful and happy]“; on the upper left arm of Sebald’s dead hunter is discovered the tattoo of a sailing ship (249). Most 42

43

44

“Ich hatte gern gelebt and war gern gestorben, glücklich warf ich, ehe ich den Bord betrat, das Lumpenpack der Büchse, der Tasche, des Jagdgewehrs vor mir hinunter, das ich immer stolz getragen hatte, und in das Totenhemd schlüpfte ich wie ein Mädchen ins Hochzeitskleid.” (Beschreibung, 106) “Und wie muß man es anstellen, daß man nicht zuletzt, unfähig, aus dem Leben zu gehen …” (Schwindel, 182). Certain details in the narrative, such as the fact that the narrator’s father comes from the Black Forest (possibly identifying him with the Hunter) (193), not to mention the “primal scene” with the Hunter and Romana in the woodshed, accidentally witnessed by the youthful narrator, might suggest to some that a thorough-going psychoanalytic reading of Vertigo is in order. My feeling on this is that Sebald’s narratives are no more reducible to the Oedipal allegory than are Kafka’s.

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significant, perhaps, is the fact (not counting the “little death” of his tryst with Romana) that Sebald’s hunter dies once and stays dead. It is as if his death stood in an obliquely redemptive relation to someone else’s life; an other who, ironically, already suffered and suffers Kafka’s hunter’s “fate” of a living death without hope of redemption, solution, or closure. This other, of course, is the narrator, who, in the tradition dating back to Dante and Augustine, splits himself into a narrating and narrated – “experiencing” – self for the purposes of narrative exigency, only in Vertigo the shape of the narrative never replicates Dante’s retrospectively ineluctable reconciliation of the subject of memory with the remembering subject. The narrator-character, as Greg Bond suggests, is “saved” from death by the death of Schlag, in a kind of redemptive narrative displacement (see Long and Whitehead, 36). Sebald’s other addition to Kafka’s narrative, transposed from a wholly other context, is the presence of the village girl Romana, the narrator’s first and unrequited love (234–5), who, in choosing to couple with Hans Schlag, seems to have become the unwitting engine of destruction in the village (see 239). In Romana we see Sebald’s utterly unWagnerian re-insertion of the erotic-salvific dimension into Kafka’s ironic messianic model45 – an element of generally disastrous significance in Kafka’s own life, as exemplified in the Riva episode, in which the nameless Swiss girl plays the role of an anti-Senta, sailing away on a ship forever, leaving nothing but the unwritten memory of their brief love (160). The element of Kafka’s story in Vertigo that links this discussion to Sebald’s use of Nabokov in The Emigrants is the singular appearance of a butterfly. On the train from London to Italy at the end of part four – following the enigmatic appearance of the “Winter Queen” (the last in a series of beautiful young women readers on trains whom the narrator observes but never addresses [see Emigrants, 104–07]), and before the narrator’s final dream of traversing an Alpine trail, bordered by “a drop into truly vertiginous depths” (262)46 (a void then filled with the echo of a passage from Samuel Pepys’s apocalyptic account of the Great Fire of London – prompted by his reading of Pepys’s diary) – the narrator re45

46

On the German composer’s covert significance in the text, see the recurrence of the name “Ludwig,” whether in reference to the Bavarian Emperor who was Wagner’s patron (53), or to the shadowy “Organizzazione Ludwig,” an anarchoterrorist group in part two (130). “[E]ine wahrhaft schwindelerregende Tiefe.” (Schwindel, 286).

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counts his “butterfly memory”: “I could hardly believe my eyes, as the train was waiting at a signal, to see a yellow brimstone butterfly [Zitronenfalter] flitting about from one purple flower to another, first at the top, then at the bottom, now on the left, constantly moving” (260).47 The level of factual detail alone puts Sebald in the same camp as Nabokov. Here, though, the immediate intertext is Kafka: “ … I, who asked for nothing better than to live among my mountains, travel after my death through all the lands of the earth.” “And you have no part in the other world?” asked the Burgomaster, knitting his brow. “I am forever,” replied the Hunter, “on the great stair that leads up to it. On that infinitely wide and spacious stair I clamber about, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, always in motion. The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.” (228)48 The Hunter’s remark invokes entomological metamorphosis as an archetypal metaphor for literal death-in-life: the temporary “death” of the caterpillar in its cocoon, followed by “rebirth” as butterfly. Clichéd symbol of a fully realized state of being (of the successful transcendence or “translation” from one state into another): in Kafka’s story the butterfly still signifies an intermediate, terrestrial state of pointless perpetual motion (105). As hunter-turned-seafarer, Gracchus cannot fulfill the paronomasic potential of his name; there is no possibility of going “as the crow flies.”49 Only in his dreams can the Hunter break out of the terres47

48

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“Und beinah hätte ich meinen Augen nicht trauen wollen, wie ich, während der Zug vor dem Signal wartete, von einer Staude zur anderen, bald oben, bald unten, bald links, immer in Bewegnung, einen Zitronenfalter sich herumtreiben sah” (Schwindel, 284). Apparently the yellow brimstone – very common in northern Europe, is the most common butterfly in England, and had inspired the AngloSaxons to name the insect buttorfleoge, after its buttery colour. Hence it is a kind of prototypical example. “‘So reise ich, der nur in seinen Bergen leben wollte, nach meinem Tode durch alle Länder der Erde.’ ‘Und Sie haben keinen Teil am Jenseits?’ fragte der Bürgermeister mit gerunzelter Stirne. ‘Ich bin,’ antwortete der Jäger, ‘immer auf der großen Treppe, die hinaufführt. Auf dieser unendlich weiten Freitreppe treibe ich mich herum, bald oben, bald unten, bald rechts, bald links, immer in Bewegung. Aus dem Jäger ist ein Schmetterling geworden. Lachen Sie nicht.’” (Beschreibung, 105) Etymologically, “Gracchus” is a permutation of jackdaw, or the Czech kavka: blackbird, crow, “grackle.” On “grackle” see Wagenbach, 40. See also Koelb, 22

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trial circuit, making a “supreme flight” (der größte Aufschwung) from which he awakens right where he started; his perpetual motion is at the same time a strange immobility (105; 229). At the story’s end the Hunter says of his boat that it is “driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death” (230).50 Either way, whether up or down, the “other world” is utterly beyond his reach, an unreachable destination. In Wagner’s treatment the eternally wandering sailor’s desired “Heimat” had ceased to be an earthly homeland, becoming the state of death in its oblivious finality (Wagner’s “Ewige Vernichtung” [see Wagner Act I (Grey, 112–14)]). In Kafka’s radical alteration of this intertext, even this consolation is denied the doomed Hunter.

“The Butterfly Man”: The Emigrants and Nabokov’s “Art of Memory” “I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts”: thus Nabokov describes himself in Speak, Memory’s sixth chapter (125). Nabokov the butterfly-hunter, pursuing his prey from the Russia of his beloved childhood across Europe as a young husband and father to his temporary home in America as an expatriate51 – yet never prey himself to the pitfalls of nostalgic homesickness, equipped as he is with the perpetually restorative powers of memory for which his obsession with butterflies is

50

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and Janouch, Gespräche, 36. Kafka’s father’s business emblem was a blackbird, in a nod to the Czech version of the family name (Wagenbach, 40). Gustav Janouch, in one of his reconstructed conversations with the writer, records the following confession: “I am a quite impossible bird … I am a jackdaw – a kavka […] I hop about bewildered among my fellow men. They regard me with deep suspicion. And indeed I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a jackdaw.” (Janouch, Conversations, 16–17) [“Ich bin ein ganz unmöglicher Vogel … Ich bin eine Dohle – eine kavka […] Verwirrt hüpfe ich zwischen den Menschen herum. Sie betrachten mich voller Mißtrauen. Ich bin doch ein gefährlicher Vogel, ein Dieb, eine Dohle.” (Gespräche, 36).] In Vertigo part 2 we find the narrator in Vienna, retracing Kafka’s movements in 1913, talking to the “jackdaws in the gardens by the city hall, and a white-headed blackbird that shared the jackdaw’s interest in [his] grapes” (36). “[Er] fährt mit dem Wind, der in den untersten Regionen des Todes bläst” (107). See Wagner Act I. See Speak, Memory, chapter 6.

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strangely emblematic (Speak, Memory, 210). Reproduced in The Emigrants is the famous picture of Nabokov in full butterfly-hunting gear: the paradigmatic image of one of the twentieth century’s greatest memoirists, Nabokov the hunter of elusive memory. The latter is emblematized in his imaginative world by Parnassius Mnemosyne, the butterfly species that Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd calls “a sort of tutelary deity in Speak, Memory – which Nabokov would have liked to call Speak, Mnemosyne” (Boyd, American Years, 563–4).52 Nabokov, it might be said, becomes the “tutelary deity” of Sebald’s second novel. In this light the butterfly is not simply a clichéd allegory for the psyche or “soul,”53 but more specifically and idiosyncratically for memory: memory as primary mode of self-reflective consciousness, trapped within a body in space, capable in the present of actively re-imagining the past. Here memory either thwarts time’s passage a lá Proustian recuperation (a making present through memory as re-presentation), or else torments the subject via the knowledge of precisely the opposite: the past’s irrecuperability and the other’s now absolute absence. Memory in this Nabokovian context is therefore posed as either the key to the suffering subject’s salvation or as the very source of its suffering and thus the thing whose negation through death is to be desired as an escape from an ever-present knowledge of an unbearable past. Nabokov is thus literally introduced into Sebald’s narrative as a kind of personification of memory’s ambivalently redemptive potential in terms of its centrality to his peculiar poetics (prosaics?) of mnemonic divestment – Nabokov’s art of memory, mentioned above. The butterfly hunter embodies for Sebald the salvific potential of the Nabokovian art of memory, in a bitterly ironic symbolism whose radically negative significance at key points in the narrative underscores the peculiar situation of these characters as not so much subjects of as subjected by memory. Nabokov’s avatar puts in an appearance at a key moment in each of The Emigrants four parts. In a manner as ironic as it is serious, these intertextual apparitions seem to signal or represent the moment for each of Sebald’s protagonists when the burden of memory comes to outweigh its beauty, and the subject of memory must confront the cost of exile in time as well as space. Sebald’s use of Nabokov’s autobiography reverses the chronology, moving from the elderly butterfly hunter in Switzerland 52 53

See also Strong Opinions, 90. “That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.” (Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 168).

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to the little boy on a southern German holiday. After twenty-odd years in America, Nabokov retired in 1961 to Montreux, Switzerland, where he lived, with his wife Vera, in the Palace Hotel, until his death in 1977.54 The specificity of the dates is important because each of the four parts of Sebald’s novel is in fact stitched to the others along a time-line keyed to the chronology of Nabokov’s life. In the first section (“Dr. Henry Selwyn”), it turns out that Selwyn has had a youthful sojourn in Switzerland, the story of which justifies the narrator’s seemingly incongruous comparison of the slide of the elderly Selwyn in Crete with the photo of Nabokov “in the mountains above Gstaad” (13)55 – hence the inclusion of the photo of Nabokov mentioned above. The explicit comparison between Selwyn and Nabokov is ironic: Selwyn is tellingly un-Nabokovian in that his relation to his past, and therefore to the present, is increasingly determined by despair (12). Similarly, in section two (“Paul Bereyter”) there is an explicit reference to the actual book Speak, Memory: when Bereyter first meets her in the French Alps in 1971, Lucy Landau is reading “Nabokov’s autobiography” which, like Paulo and Francesca’s Galleotto, brings her together with a stranger, Bereyter himself (43).56 As with Dante’s famous lovers, their story ends unhappily. In an ironic metaphorization of Dante’s representation of the “shades” of the damned, Bereyter is already a soul in hell, before he dies. Sebald’s allusion to Nabokov here is characteristically ironic in that Bereyter’s fascination with trains and the railway (and the desirable conjunction of fates) leads him as if inevitably to his suicide on the tracks outside his hometown, whereas Nabokov’s comparable preoccupation with the trains and rail journeys of his childhood carries him back into a reconstituted golden past (62).57 54

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It was here that Nabokov produced the definitive version of Speak, Memory, which appeared in 1967. This is a (perhaps intentional) lapse: the dinner scene is set in April 1971 (11), whereas the photo of Nabokov was taken in August of that year. See: Boyd, American Years, 563–4. See Inferno 5. Speak, Memory first appeared in 1967 (see n.54 above). See eg. Strong Opinions, 201–03. It need hardly be mentioned that Bereyter’s obsession with trains and timetables also refers to the infrastructure of the Final Solution (see eg. Williams, “Elusive,” 109). This past time, more than simply commensurable with the present, transforms it according to the timelessness of consciousness, whose constitutive faculty is memory in consort with imagination: memory as an image-system. “I would say that imagination is a form of memory. (…) An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection

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In part three of The Emigrants (“Ambros Adelwarth”) memory is presented even more explicitly as the potential bearer of both salvation and self-destruction. As the narrator says of his Uncle Ambros: “telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself ” (100). Uncle Ambros, too, is the opposite of Nabokov in this respect: “[T]he more Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became” (102–03). When “the butterfly man” first makes his appearance in part three he is “middle-aged”: this takes place in 1952 (103), when Nabokov was, in actuality, the same age as the century – give or take a few weeks (104). In 1952–53 Nabokov was in Ithaca, teaching at Cornell and writing Lolita (Boyd, American, 210).58 In other words, where Nabokov is suggested to the narrator in chapter one by the slide of Henry Selwyn in Crete (which is not reproduced in the novel), entering into the text as it were at two removes, and where in chapter two Nabokov enters into the text in the form of his (unnamed) autobiography, here in part three the historical Nabokov enters literally into the novel’s fictional world as a participant (albeit unnamed), in the narrator’s Aunt Fini’s account of Uncle Ambros’s last years in the Samaria Sanatorium in upstate New York. The final image of Uncle Ambros is of a man transfigured by a “longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember” (114). Nothing could be further from this desire for a radical negation of memory as the negation of consciousness, of self – the desire for the extinction of all desire – than “the butterfly man” for whom Ambros is passively waiting on the day before the electro-shock treatment that finally kills him (113–15). Finally, In the novel’s fourth part (“Max Ferber”), like Selwyn and Bereyter before him, the artist Ferber (“Aurach” in the German) recounts to the narrator a trip to Switzerland that was itself a repetition of an earlier trip to Geneva and environs thirty years earlier, with his father, who took him climbing in the alps above the Lake (174). Like Jacques Austerlitz in Sebald’s last novel, Ferber “retraces” this “long-buried”

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we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may want to use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.” (Strong Opinions, 78). See Foster, 89–90. On the resonant irony of “Ithaca” at the juncture in Sebald’s narrative, see Klebes in Long and Whitehead, 135.

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memory when he makes the same journey in the mid-1960s to view Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece.59 (As in 1936 with his father, the adult Ferber stays in the Palace Hotel in Montreux, which is the very hotel in which Nabokov lived out the last years of his life [Boyd, Russian, 643–62]). Ferber then recounts how he undertakes the same climb he made with his father thirty years before. The view from the mountaintop is so unchanged from his recollection of it that he is tempted to hurl himself down into the abyss, when suddenly “a man of about sixty … appeared before him – like someone who’s popped out of the bloody ground. He was carrying a large white gauze butterfly net,” and announced “that it was time to be thinking of going down if one were to be in Montreux for dinner” (174). The “butterfly man” reappears here at a crucial moment, as he did for Ambros, and, in a very different manner, for Paul Bereyter and Selwyn. Sebald’s evocation of the historical Nabokov is, once again, in accordance with the latter’s actual biographical trajectory. On the level of plot, though, the effect of each “appearance” differs significantly. Where Nabokov’s photo provides for the narrator (and reader) a counterpoint to the quietly despairing Selwyn, and his autobiography plays go-between for Bereyter and Lucy Landau (also a point appreciable by the reader), here in Ferber’s reminiscence the butterfly man, whose appearance to Ambros is either a taunt or signal of release, as it were “saves” the adult Ferber from memory’s inexorably vertiginous pull. Following this incident he experiences a total and prolonged lapse of memory, thereby failing to retain any recollection of the journey down the mountain and back to England. This is soon followed by a crisis in which he tries and fails to capture in paint the apparition of the “Man with a Butterfly Net,” falling into a despair in which he is unable to paint anything at all (174). And if despair, as Sebald notes in his 1976 essay on Kafka, is the “source” of messianism, or at least of a desire for salvation, this never benefits Ferber. It is the reader who must make sense of Ferber’s narrative in light of its conclusion with the narrator’s reconstruction of Ferber’s mother’s journal. To paraphrase Kafka: there may be hope, but not for Ferber, nor for the subjects of the other three narratives – or at least: this is not the kind or quality of hope Sebald seeks to represent. In the latter section of part four Ferber gives to the narrator his mother’s memoirs, handwritten between 1939 and 1941, when it was no 59

On the Isenheim altarpiece see After Nature.

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longer possible for her and her husband to emigrate from Germany (192). Ignoring their present “hopeless situation,” Luisa Lanzberg instead recounts her childhood and youth, recalling for example a summer excursion in 1910 with her boyfriend Fritz outside Bad Kissingen (in southern Germany). During their walk she sees “two very refined Russian gentlemen” and “a boy of about ten who had been chasing butterflies and had lagged so far behind that they had to wait for him” (213–14). One of Luisa’s companions claims that the elder and particularly “majestic” of the two gentlemen was “Muromzev. The president of the first Russian parliament.” All of these details: the two Russian gentlemen, one of them described as “majestic,” the little boy chasing butterflies, Nabokov’s age at the time (11), and so forth, are taken almost verbatim from Speak, Memory’s sixth chapter,60 which is devoted to an account of Nabokov’s life-long obsession with butterfly hunting. Sebald here synchronizes the date (1910) of Luisa’s excursion with the actual timing of Nabokov’s own visit to Bad Kissingen.61 In Nabokov’s account the elder gentleman (the other is of course Nabokov’s father, a famous liberal) warns Nabokov the younger: “Come with us by all means, but do not chase butterflies, child, it spoils the rhythm of the walk” (Speak, Memory, 130). Sebald, however, in his first-person rendering of Luisa’s account, “allows” the youthful Nabokov to chase the butterflies, thereby affording Luisa a memory of this occasion that would come back to her three summers later (1913; the same time as Kafka’s trip to Riva) when her beloved Fritz proposes to her right “in the middle of a carefully worked out reminiscence of [their] first outing to Bodenlaube” (214) – a memory-within-a-memory. Too overcome to reply, Luisa nods, “and, though everything else around me blurred, I saw that long-forgotten Russian boy as clearly as anything, leaping about the meadows with his butterfly net; I saw him as a messenger of joy, returning from that distant summer day to open his specimen box and release the most beautiful red admirals, peacock butterflies, brimstones [Zitronenfalter] and tortoiseshells to signal my final liberation” (214). This last act of releasing the carefully gathered specimens (including the yellow brimstone species the narrator recalls in Vertigo), with its metaphorical overtones of redemptive liberation, is a moment of complete fabrication on Sebald’s part, and not merely because it does not feature in the an-

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In English in the original. See Speak, Memory, 130; Boyd, Russian Years, 84.

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ecdote he appropriates from Speak, Memory.62 Sebald’s embedding of this highly visually detailed moment from Nabokov’s autobiography within his recounting of Luisa Lanzberg’s recollections of an idyllic Bad Kissingen is like a further giving of the gift already granted in Speak, Memory, making of Luisa’s recollections a narrative even more poignant than Nabokov’s. This filiation of gift-giving is only fitting, it seems, given that Luisa’s account is written as a gift for her son, Max Ferber, safe in England at the time of writing. The “liberation” signalled by the butterflies is double-edged: in itself the memory is joyous, but from the reader’s perspective it is a bitterly ironic liberation, whose significance must remain metaphorical. In a further irony, the naturalism of Luisa’s voice in the reconstituted memoir is inseparable from a vivid description of a September day artfully reconstructed in someone else’s autobiography. But this would appear to be Sebald’s strategy: of all the characters in The Emigrants only Luisa Lanzberg exploits memory for its redemptive power. In Sebald’s re-imagining, she looks back to well before the long shadow of the Holocaust fell across Europe, to the day she agreed to marry the man she loved, who died very soon after – all of this described in the very terms of Nabokov’s pre-emigration childhood. Mark McCulloh has described “the value of memory” as “the aesthetic compensation for the ineluctable passage of time”63 – a description as applicable to Nabokov as to Sebald, perhaps. Unlike Nabokov’s, though, Luisa’s narrative seems to stand not as compensation but as a kind of consolation, as she, facing the singular fate of millions, could know that Max might someday read of the little Russian boy and the temporal redemption he – as the elder expatriate author composing this scene – has already experienced. Nabokov’s autobiographical project (as a kind of microcosmic version of his entire fictional output) stands as one of the modern period’s 62

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The very idea of the younger Nabokov voluntarily releasing his specimens flies in the face of everything the elder recollecting Nabokov says about his butterfly hunting mania. Indeed, the episode in Bad Kissingen is related in the midst of a section of ch. 6 (SM ) in which he lists the “strange reactions in other creatures” his peculiar passion provokes. In fact, far rather than releasing his catches at the end of a day of hunting, Nabokov the lepidopterist enjoys nothing so much as “snuff[ing] out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in [his] net” (138) (Boyd rather weakly refutes this conclusion [see eg. The Russian Years, 74]. The point Boyd obscures is that to collect butterflies one must kill them). See McCulloh, “Allusions, Affinities, and Transcendence.”

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most successful attempts to represent the redemptive power of memory as an art in the service of life, while consistently avoiding the trap of a sentimentalizing nostalgia for its own sake. The salient difference between Luisa and Nabokov as memoirists is that Nabokov’s vividly recalled childhood reminiscences merge seamlessly with his subsequent and present-day experiences. Exemplary is the final paragraph of Speak, Memory’s sixth chapter, whose last scene shows the Nabokov of 1910 stepping out of a Russian marsh into a Rocky Mountain setting some forty years later: I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let the visitor trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. (Speak, Memory, 139)

To this we can compare the final scene in The Emigrants, the narrator’s deliberately overdetermined reading of the Genewein photo of the three young carpet weavers in the Litzmannstadt ghetto: Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometrical patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home. Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Rosa, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread. (237)64 64

“Hinter einem lotrechten Webrahmen sitzen drei junge, vielleicht zwanzigjährige Frauen. Der Teppich, an dem sie knüpfen, hat ein unregelmäßig geometrisches Muster, das mich auch in seinen Farben erinnert an das Muster unseres Wohnzimmersofas zu Hause. Wer die jungen Frauen sind, das weiß ich nicht. Wegen des Gegenlichts, das einfällt durch das Fenster im Hintergrund, kann ich ihre Augen genau nicht erkennen, aber ich spüre, daß sie alle drei herschauen zu mir, denn ich stehe ja an der Stelle, an der Genewein, der Rechnungsführer, mit seinem Fotoapparat gestanden hat. Die mittlere der drei jungen Frauen hat hellblondes Haar und gleicht irgendwie einer Braut. Die Weberin zu ihrer Linken hält den Kopf ein wenig seitwärts geneigt, während die auf der rechten Seite so unverwandt und un-

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The carpets and patterns are undoubtedly coincidental – but then the beauty of intertextuality is its freedom from intention. It is in fact as a coincidence, and not as represented objects, that these carpets signify here – unless they are seen both literally and figuratively as text, which is true in either instance. Nabokov deliberately folds his carpet to expose the malleable texture of time subject to sovereign consciousness (the indefatigable “I” that does not “believe in time”), superimposing one pattern on another in a concrete imaging of retrospectively perceived coincidence, whose code names are, variously, “contrapuntal genius” or those “tender ghosts.”65 In contrast to Nabokov’s highly visualized verbal imagery, Sebald’s ekphrastic description stands in lieu of the photo it simultaneously interprets. The three women have stopped their weaving to pose for a photo we will never see66 – an image Sebald dares us to read allegorically, in the terms of a premodern, pointedly non-Judaic eschatology – a wholly other economy of “fate” and coincidence – in which the three young women become the three “Fates” of the Roman pantheon.67 In a quasi-Nabokovian move, the passage’s blatant literariness throws our attention back onto the text as text, while simultaneously its specific historical context makes us reflect on its reference to a now vanished world. The irony in Sebald’s gesture of ascribing to these particular women the status of goddesses of human Fate, sitting in judgment, is terrible and inescapable, glimpsed as they are in a context in which their own destiny is stripped of its generality, and granted the terrible specificity, and “fatality,” of a destination.

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erbittlich mich ansieht, daß ich es nicht lange auszuhalten vermag. Ich überlege, wie die drei wohl geheißen haben – Roza, Lusia und Lea oder Nona, Decuma und Morta, die Töchter der Nacht, mit Spindel und Faden und Schere.” (355) See Michael Wood, 190–1. Williams describes the Genewein photo this way: “Its unsettlingly familiar patterns invite an imaginative plumbing of its depths and tell a story which may be in the eye of the reader, or the eye of the author, or the eyes of the subjects whose lives held such promise and whose fate we know.” (“Elusive,” 99) The Parcae. “In Greek religion and mythology, three goddesses who controlled human lives; also called the Moerae or Moirai. They were: Clotho, who spun the web of life; Lachesis, who measured its length; and Atropos, who cut it. The Roman Fates were the Parcae – Nona, Decuma, and Morta.” (The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.).

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Conclusion The quasi-allegorical “butterfly man” represents in The Emigrants the always-imminent promise, if not the immanent reality, of redemption; a metaphor for an ever-deferred (secular) salvific principle that is nevertheless paradoxically “present” in Sebald’s seemingly heavy-handed intertextual homage.68 Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, in Vertigo, functions more obliquely as an intertextual avatar for the Kafkan subject, forever doomed not to death as such but to a sort of purgatorial living “death” of endless waiting, an eternity spent ceaselessly travelling over the world’s seas after a second “accident” sent his ship off course (the first accident being the fall from the cliff that inaugurated the journey to the land of the dead now gone awry). Neither properly alive nor properly dead, now permanently errant, the Hunter figure appears in several forms across Sebald’s first novel, providing not a thematic or formal focus but rather a sort of vertiginously ironic intertextual “justification” for Sebald’s quasi-autobiographical narrator’s circuitous wanderings (in parts two and four especially) through a fictive space which is variously one of history, memory and imagination. In both Vertigo and The Emigrants Sebald, in his more Kafkan mode, resists the Nabokovian resort to an ironically metafictional “solution.” Nevertheless, the later novel offers a subtly but significantly different response to the possibility of redemption held out to the victim of traumatic memory – a possibility embodied in what a Nabokovian fictional poetics presents as memory’s collapsing of spatio-temporal “depth.”69 Sebald’s presentation of the subject of memory subjected by memory follows a more radical modernism – a postmodernism, if you will – that 68

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A New York Times online review singled out for censure one feature of The Emigrants: “ … the man with the butterfly net, a Nabokovian figure, who keeps appearing and disappearing. I found him blatantly symbolic and literary” (Jefferson, 3). See the positive responses of Williams, “Elusive,” 112 n. 20; Ozick, 28; etc. See Williams: “Sebald’s works … are rich in references to perspective … His firstperson narrators often overfly areas or stand on high vantage-points, sometimes in dreams, affording them and the reader a bird’s eye view of the world, revealing its past and hinting at its future.” (“Holistic,” 115 n. 4). Like Moses “Pisgah-sight” of the promised land, this spatialized view of time allows the past and future to become interchangeable, and (in a formulation from Nabokov’s first American novel) for the possibility that escape and return are the same thing (Bend Sinister, 108). On the colonialist version of this trope, what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” view, see Zilcosky, 27.

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goes further than either of these predecessors. Like Nabokov’s, Sebald’s protagonists move through geographies of memory, history and imagination whose “metaphysical laws” are those of consciousness itself. Like Kafka’s, the Sebaldian hero must continuously confront the “truth” that this consciousness is inseparable from the endlessly reiterated narrative patterns of Western literature. This intertextuality – “cultural memory” par excellence – is the only place one can hope to find anything like a redemptive mechanism, or even just its promise, since it is there that our fate is written.

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Sebald’s Pathographies

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Sebald’s Pathographies Martin Klebes

I. W. G. Sebald’s critical work of the 1970s and 1980s, including books on Carl Sternheim (1969) and Alfred Döblin (1980) as well as a considerable number of articles (most of them on Austrian literature), may be described as an insistent interrogation of literary works that attempts to measure these works against the aesthetic claims associated with them, either courtesy of their authors, or else thanks to that indefatigeable publishing industry called Literaturwissenschaft, “that type of literary criticism which is always quick to abstract from its object, without ever returning to that object in order to verify the abstraction” (Carl Sternheim, 14).1 Routinely striking the pose of a muckraking investigator of critical commonplaces fossilized as self-evident truths since time immemorial, Sebald goes about his business of exposing “progressive” literary figures as traditionalists, and neglected ones as unrecognized groundbreakers, operating in the mode of a relentless critique of ideology. One of the major thematic complexes in Sebald’s early critical work is the issue of personal and collective pathologies. The inability on the part of Sternheim and Döblin, for example, to retain a critical stance visà-vis the enveloping ideological parameters of their time is uncovered through an analysis of what Sebald identifies as “pathological” features of their work. In the preface to the Sternheim book, Sebald defends this reading à rebours that identifies pathology as the unacknowledged center of Sternheim’s work (Carl Sternheim, 8) against what he perceives to be the neutralizing tendencies of a standardized Germanistik bent on downplaying anything that might taint the legacy of its objects of analysis. Even though Sebald’s analyses are not necessarily committed in all their 1

All translations of previously untranslated works are my own; for sake of clarity I have modified the translations of some passages from Sebald’s works that have been translated into English.

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particulars to Freudian orthodoxy, Sebald’s critique of the customary resistance against pathographic readings (Carl Sternheim, 9) does echo Freud’s apology of pathography in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. Drawing more general conclusions from tendencies he discovered among da Vinci’s biographers, Freud remarked here “that biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because – for reasons of their personal emotional life – they have felt a special affection for him from the very first” (Freud, “Leonardo,” 11:130).2 The sanitized picture that results from such reverential treatment is, in Freud’s opinion, regrettable, “for they [the biographers] thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature” (130).3 Sebald claims to detect the same kind of bias in favor of an antiseptic portrayal among a majority of literary scholars attributed by Freud to biographers and their “heroes” when he reads the available secondary literary on Döblin’s work first and foremost as evidence of a profound “professional deformation” among Germanistik scholars (Mythus der Zerstörung, 8). As an antidote, and conceivably in pursuit of the kind of truth Freud expects pathography to deliver, Sebald identifies an assortment of indications of abnormality both inherent and unreflected in the works he dissects. A case like Sternheim’s accordingly emerges as paradigmatic for an analysis of “late bourgeois” literature in that “the social and psychological preoccupations and idiosyncrasies of the time are here evident nearly in full, and in basically unsublimated form.”4 Taking stock of Sternheim’s unstable position between the conflicting poles of 2

3

4

“[D]aß Biographen in ganz eigentümlicher Weise an ihren Helden fixiert sind. Sie haben ihn häufig zum Objekt ihrer Studien gewählt, weil sie ihm aus Gründen ihres persönlichen Gefühlslebens von vorneherein eine besondere Affektion entgegenbrachten.” (Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 8:202). “[D]enn sie [the biographers] opfern damit die Wahrheit einer Illusion und verzichten zugunsten ihrer infantilen Phantasie auf die Gelegenheit, in die reizvollsten Geheimnisse der menschlichen Natur einzudringen.” (Gesammelte Werke, 8:203). “Als Kompensation für die Vernachlässigung tradierter Methodik ergibt sich schließlich der eigenartige Zusammenhang, daß gerade der pathologische Fall des Carl Sternheim für die Analyse der spätbürgerlichen Literatur das größte Interesse beanspruchen darf, insofern sich in ihm die sozialen und psychologischen Präokkupationen und Idiosynkrasien der Epoche nahezu vollständig versammelt vorfinden.” (Sebald, Carl Sternheim, 20).

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authoritarianism and submissiveness, sentimentality and cynicism, idealization of nature and a desire for expansion (8), Sebald adds up the following symptoms to arrive at the final diagnosis of Sternheim as a schizoid neurotic (61): fear and uncertainty rooted in misdirected desires of assimilation, resulting in a “schizoid disjunction of Sternheim’s vocabulary” between archaisms on the one hand, and a “falling for the contemporary” (e.g. Anglicisms) on the other (93–4)5; yearning for recognition manifested in permanent self-congratulatory phrases, indicating a “pathological self-centeredness,” or egocentric mania (61); symptoms of paranoia persecutoria, leading to stereotypical accusations of other individuals and groups (61); constant flip-flopping between rationalist justifications and irrationalist impulses (20); loss of a command of discursive language, dressed up as aesthetic “innovation,” for example an excessive use of paranthetic rather than paratactic syntax (83). Sebald therefore finds in Sternheim’s text evidence of a disconcerting confluence of sociological and psychological factors that render its author a negative incarnation of social aberrations, compulsively reproduced but not reflectively mastered by the author as individual. In similar fashion, Döblin emerges as a victim of unsuccessful attempts at assimilation, compensating a stifling petit bourgeois existence with excessive literary gestures. The “utterly unrestrained, phantastic playing with reality” in Döblin’s novelistic output is interpreted not as a sign of authorial sovereignty, but rather as the symptom of a disturbed mind (Mythus der Zerstörung, 8–9). According to Sebald, the psychiatrist Döblin, apparently incapable of self-analysis (72), contributes more to the aesthetic representation of feelings of deprivation (hysteria, compulsive neuroses, paranoia, primitivism) than to an analysis of such derangements (136–7). The emphasis on Döblin’s professional qualifications that would have theoretically put the author in a position – or so Sebald believes – to provide elements of such an analysis, finds an echo in Sebald’s comments on the medical doctor Arthur Schnitzler, whose uncritical representations of casual prostitution in Vienna pay scant attention to the implications of such practices for the affected individuals, both from the perspective of public health, and in light of socio-economic considerations: 5

In this context Sebald also approvingly quotes Adorno’s condemnation of Heine on the same count: “His inability to resist current usage signifies the imitative zeal of someone who has been excluded. Assimilatory language betrays the failure of identification.” (In Sebald, Carl Sternheim, 94).

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Martin Klebes The diagnostically trained gaze of the doctor [Schnitzler] is powerless against the bourgeois ideology – dominating him as much as others – that invents the “Sweet Girl” (süßes Mädel) for itself as an alibi for what were in effect extremely distressful conditions for the female proletariat.6

Thus, it apparently takes a literary pathographer to deliver the diagnoses even of medical professionals like Döblin and Schnitzler who remain insufficiently clear about the psychological and social pathologies which they help to perpetuate by means of their literary writing. The “pathology” at work here would consist in the unacknowledged way in which socio-cultural conditions (unsuccessful assimilation, class anxiety) give rise to individual mental disorders (schizoid or compulsive neuroses), which in turn manifest themselves on the textual surface of literature. Literary criticism, according to Sebald, ought to concern itself with uncovering the conditions responsible for such manifestations, and attempt to recover the connections between an author’s life, his biography, and his textual production.

II. Sebald nowhere mentions explicitly that a tradition of this type of counter-memory does exist in literary historiography, going back to one of the most well-known early exponents of pathographic criticism, the Leipzig neurologist Paul J. Möbius (1853–1907), who coined the term “Pathographie” and wrote on Rousseau, Goethe, Hölderlin, Schopenhauer, Schumann, Scheffel, and Nietzsche, among others. Even though Möbius and other critics following in his wake were interested primarily in pathology as an individual phenomenon, not a collective one – based on the time-honored assumption of some inherent connection between artistic genius and insanity – they still share with Sebald the fundamental theoretical precept that an individual diagnosis (whether conditioned by social factors or not) may be derived from written sources alone, be they biographical, autobiographical, or fictional in nature. Even though Möbius and other adepts of pathography were routinely and primarily fascinated by the most famous cases of mentally ill figures 6

“Der diagnostische Scharfblick des Arztes [Schnitzler] vermag nichts gegen die auch in ihm dominante bürgerliche Ideologie, die sich im süßen Mädel … ein Alibi erfand für die tatsächliche extreme Notlage des weiblichen Proletariats” (“Die Mädchen aus der Feenwelt,” 113).

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in intellectual history, the enormous list of 558 “genius” figures compiled in Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum’s monumental work Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm – first published in 1927 in explicit recognition of Möbius’s previous work (Lange-Eichbaum; Kurth, 306–07) – also includes a host of celebrities with supposedly “abnormal” indications in whose cases no explicit medical diagnosis of a mental disorder was ever given. The subversive power of pathography would conceivably consist in “outing” writers, thinkers, and artists as “abnormal” in ways that previously eluded the processes of an intellectual historiography tuned to select for healthy, wholesome “winners.” It is hardly surprising, then, that pathography would have its detractors. Apart from those targeted by Freud who would not have the memory of their “heroes” tarnished, these included people like the Heidelberg psychopathologist Hans W. Gruhle who objected to Möbius’s remote diagnosis of Schumann, troubled by the fact that your remarks are not convincing to the specialist, and that a completely different judgment was possible on the basis of the same evidence … It is regrettable to all of us, but we must answer your question “is it possible to provide a differential diagnosis on the basis of the literature and in retrospect” in view of our current experience in the negative. (Möbius, Über Scheffels Krankheit, 33)7

Gruhle’s disagreement with Möbius over whether the correct diagnosis of Schumann’s condition would be dementia praecox (early-onset dementia, schizophrenia), or else cyclothymia (bipolar disorder) thus ultimately leads to a more fundamental skepticism regarding the very notion of pathography, given that the textual basis may justify “completely different” diagnostic judgments. Unlike Gruhle in his letter to Möbius, I am not interested in questioning the extent to which any of Sebald’s diagnoses are defensible, or would stand to be corrected in the face of differently weighted textual exegesis of the works of Sternheim, Döblin, and others. The more pertinent question seems to be what precisely one may hope to gain from this type of diagnostics. The role of critique as Sebald applies it to Sternheim and Döblin – but also, with less consistently negative results, to Stifter, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Handke, Ernst Herbeck, and Gerhard 7

“[D]ass Ihre Ausführungen für den Fachmann nicht überzeugend sind, dass ein völlig anderes Urteil über den gleichen Stoff entstehen konnte … Wir müssen es alle bedauern, aber wir können ihre Frage, “ist es möglich, rückblickend, auf Grund der Litteratur eine psychiatrische Differentialdiagnose zu machen,” auf Grund unserer heutigen Erfahrung nur verneinen.”

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Roth8 – is to provide an analytical perspective where it is found lacking in the works considered. The texts are repeatedly taken as indicators of psychic economies that need to be inferred from a given textual basis. Characterizing Döblin’s novels as dream work intent on communicating the experiences of the writing subject, Sebald defines critique appropriately as the recovery of the images populating the author’s dream(s) (Mythus der Zerstörung, 9), and thus identifies linguistic images (tropes) as the potential key to unlock mental images: metaphorical language either disjointed (Sternheim), excessive (Döblin), or hermetic (Ernst Herbeck) is repeatedly taken as evidential support for hypotheses concerning the psychological state of those who employed it. Ultimately however – as Sebald apparently concludes sometime after publication of the Döblin book – this way no defensible diagnosis lies. The interpretation of text as a manifestation of clinical symptoms, possibly unrecognized or repressed, is forced to submit the existence of causal connections that cannot be substantiated with any kind of certainty. One fundamental premise of Sebald’s earlier critical work therefore turns out to be fundamentally challenged by his own literary writing that emerges around the time when his academic output is noticeably diminishing. Where the Döblin book had still advocated the recovery of the “primal images” (Bachelard) giving the literary text its symptomatic character, such latent contents are now viewed skeptically by Sebald turned “literary” author. Across all of Sebald’s later works, the inaccessibility of psychic interiors is a striking, recurrent theme. Examples to this effect include the reluctance of the narrator in “Paul Bereyter” (Emigrants, 29) to surrender to his “excesses of emotion,” chastizing himself for the momentary belief that he could re-represent the contents of Bereyter’s experiences; or of the absence of any inkling on the part of the narrator of Austerlitz as to what the prisoners at Fort Breendonk, Jean Améry among them, must have felt as they endured torture at the hands of the SS, even though the narrator visits the facility “first-hand” (Austerlitz, 26). Sebald’s most striking formal device to the end of undermining the diagnostic view into the interior of narrators and characters is the inclusion of a large number of photographs in his later texts. These reproductions are not illustrations of the manifestations of mental states or contents, as one might suppose, but rather images whose very externalization throws the stability of any internal images to be recovered into doubt. 8

All of these essays are in Sebald’s Beschreibung des Unglücks.

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The pictorial level thus coexists with the textual level in Sebald’s books, but neither one is to be read as causally prior. The photographs, too, are signs, but they routinely do not admit of a straightforward symptomatic “diagnosis” that would fix their meaning by suggesting a reading of the kind which Sebald’s own early work proposes of literary text. The use of photographic images as additives to the text that would support its pathographic character recall the work of Cesare Lombroso, to whom the “fact,” if not the term, of pathography may be traced back (Lange-Eichbaum; Kurth, 307). Lombroso not only attempted textual exegeses of literature in search of connections between genius and insanity,9 and of palimpsests on prison walls to arrive at a typology of criminals.10 He also famously resorted to anthropometry and photography in his attempt to visually demonstrate his classifications of pathological individuals into typological classes.11 The photograph here becomes a piece of evidence in support of a scientific approach to criminology that would try to reconstruct physiological predispositions to aberrant behavior.12 The photographs in Sebald’s narratives, on the other hand, do not easily admit of the kind of evidential function sought by Lombroso. Rather, the disorienting incongruence between the photographs and the surrounding text thoroughly undermine the reader’s confidence in the notion that the former are merely showing that which the latter says. Consider the following three examples, taken from Vertigo and Austerlitz: First, the picture of Kafka before an artificial aeronautic backdrop at the Vienna Prater, whose smiling strangely appears to contradict, “to his own bewilderment,” the profoundly uneasy feelings that the narrator has just claimed on behalf of “Dr. K.” (Vertigo 143–4; Schwindel, 166). Second, the picture of a helper at the Romford Greenery where the character Jacques Austerliz temporarily works, and where, according to his words, his condition improved, possibly but not certainly due to his coworkers, “those people marked by their mental suffering, though in part 9 10

11

12

See Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius. See Cesare Lombroso, Kerker-Palimpseste. Wandinschriften und Selbstbekenntnisse gefangener Verbrecher. See Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (chapter 7), and Gina Lombroso, Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. Sir Francis Galton’s experiments with composite photography (see his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development) are similar to Lombroso’s use of photographs, likewise conceived to reveal personality types, though Galton – unlike Lombroso – was not primarily concerned with “pathological” subjects.

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also carefree” (Austerlitz, 232).13 It is impossible to tell from this picture to which of those two classes the man (or woman) pictured is supposed to belong, or whether the two alternatives given by the narrator are possibly meant to overlap in one and the same person. And third, the photograph of a horseback rider in “Il ritorno in patria,” presumably meant to underscore the claim “that horses often have a somewhat crazed look in their eyes” (Vertigo, 190).14 The picture, however, hardly supports this perception unambiguously, certainly less so than the later reproduction of a historical painting by the Wertach painter Hengge, accompanied by the repeated claim (208; Schwindel, 237). Two images are here adduced as “proof ” of the same perceptual claim, leaving the viewer free to take either one, or both, or neither, as adequate demonstration of the internal state in question, the “madness” of horses. Whether it is a simple puzzling inconsistency between text and image as in the case of Kafka, an overdetermination of text in relation to image as in the case of the horticulturalist, or the reverse overdetermination of images in relation to text as in the case of the horses, the specter of a breakdown of the pathographic assumption about the indicative power of written and pictorial signs is undeniable. Gruhle’s skeptical evaluation of the claim to arrive at diagnoses “by way of literature” finds a complement in the relation established between text and image in Sebald’s narratives that designates both types of signs as highly unreliable indicators of supposed internal states in their referent.

III. In a late essay on Robert Walser, Sebald’s eventual return to literary criticism is markedly affected by the diagnostic skepticism that is evident in his literary prose.15 Much of what Sebald reports in this essay is derived rather directly from Robert Mächler’s Walser biography that is itself largely based on the recollections of Walser’s friend and executor of Walser’s estate, Carl Seelig; anecdotes related by Sebald about Walser’s sometimes extravagant, sometimes tattered suits (60, 109), about the group of “respectable” Swiss authors, the widespread acclaim of whose work is 13

14 15

“[D]ie von ihrem Seelenleiden gezeichneten, teils aber auch frohsinnigen Leute” (Austerlitz, 330). “[D]aß Pferde sehr oft einen etwas irren Ausdruck an sich haben.” (Schwindel, 216). “Le promeneur solitaire,” in Logis in einem Landhaus.

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identified as the backdrop of Walser’s marginal status during his own time (101), or Walser’s comment about the “100 % quality work routinely expected of the poet” are all lifted directly from Mächler’s account. At the same time, it is exactly the kind of straight reconstruction of biography from literature as source material attempted by Mächler that Sebald is intent on undermining in his essay. Mächler himself is confident that the substance of his [Walser’s] prose [is] undoubtedly for the utmost part his own experience, including self-reflective considerations. Many facts of his life are only tenuously established independently of his work – details and the feeling of experience are primarily communicated through the texts that make up his work … They capture, if not always the precise what, then at least the unique how of what was experienced.16

This alleged “lived experience,” however, always finds itself thoroughly mediated, sometimes across two levels (Mächler interpreting the “how” supposedly encoded in Walser’s literary text), sometimes across three (Mächler recounting Seelig’s account of Walser). Mächler also presents five of the seven photographic portraits that Sebald includes in his essay, though in Mächler’s book they do not form part of the text but are instead confined to a separate section of illustrations. In Sebald, the images have here – in contrast to all essays preceding the publication of Logis in einem Landhaus – invaded even the “critical” text, and are introduced as “seven very different physiognomic stations that suggest the silent catastrophe which happened along the way” (Logis, 134–35). That “catatrophe,” of course, is Walser’s mental breakdown, resulting in his voluntary entry into a mental institution in Berne in 1929, and his subsequent institutionalized life until his death in 1956. As in the case of Möbius’s pathographic subjects Hölderlin and Nietzsche, Walser’s retreat from “normal” life into the realm of institutional or private confinement has been the subject of much speculation as to the possibility of its willful, intended character. Mächler himself is skeptical of an intentional simulation on Walser’s part, but notes the recollections of Walser editor Jochen Greven about his conversation with the psychiatrist Theodor Spoerri, who had personally visited Walser in the Herisau clinic: 16

“Der Stoff seiner [Walsers] Prosa [ist] unzweifelhaft zum allergrößten Teil das eigene Erleben, mit Einschluß der reflektierenden Selbstschau. Vieles aus seinem Leben ist außerhalb des Werkes nur dürftig belegt – Details und Erlebnisstimmung werden vorzugsweise durch die Werktexte vermittelt … Sie geben, wenn auch nicht immer das genaue Was, so doch das einzigartige Wie des Erlebten wieder” (Mächler, 10).

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Martin Klebes He [Spoerri] further remarked that Walser’s appearance had starkly reminded him of the reports of the late Hölderlin. Somewhat playfully he alluded to the possibility of a more or less conscious imitation of Hölderlin on Walser’s part, referring also to Walser’s prose piece on Hölderlin – that is, he considered the possibility of a retreat into illness, or into the role of a schizophrenic patient, a studied assumption of the behavioral patterns of a schizophrenic. Thus, he certainly acknowledged moments of dissimulation, of masking, or of intentional reduction and of conscious self-styling, while on the other hand never retreating from the basic diagnosis of schizophrenia. At this point the conversation quickly drifted off into the complexities of determining concretely what schizophrenia really is, the problematic character of diagnosis in general, etc.17

Indeed, it is the difficulty of the very notion of diagnosis itself that emerges as the main “result” of Sebald’s reading of Mächler’s reading of Walser. In his prose piece “Hölderlin” that Spoerri mentions to Greven, Walser himself had already complicated the issue of diagnosis when he reconstructed the “dangerous tremor” (gefährliche Erschütterung) in Hölderlin’s “interior” (Walser, 116). The onset of madness, “that slow, soft, terrible disintegration of all lucidity” (117), according to Walser’s narrator, allegedly happened before Hölderlin ever “decided” to fall in love with Susette Gontard, and the would-be love affair between the two as a result of that disintegration consequently takes up almost the entirety of Walser’s narration, while the period more typically acknowledged as the time of Hölderlin’s “madness” is recapitulated in a single sentence, the very last one of the prose piece: “Then Hölderlin left home and drifted around for a while before falling into an incurable derangement” (120). The claim of a loss of “lucidity” at a particular point in time is thus cast by Walser as an entirely arbitrary narrative decision – one that may be made to turn Hölderlin’s pathological condition, as Walser does, into a story of unrequited love. At the same time, the final “fall” thus effected may just as well be equivalent to the choice “to live in a pretty, elegant prison” earlier ascribed to Hölderlin when the narrator characterizes the 17

“Er [Spoerri] bemerkte dann noch, er habe sich bei Walsers Auftritt stark an die Berichte über den alten Hölderlin erinnert gefühlt. Etwas spielerisch deutete er die Möglichkeit einer mehr oder weniger bewußten Hölderlin-Imitatio von seiten Walsers an, indem er auch auf das Hölderlin-Prosastück verwies – also eines Rückzugs in die Krankheit oder in die Rolle des schizophrenen Kranken, einer Einübung in den Habitus des Defektschizophrenen. Er rechnete also durchaus mit Momenten der Verstellung, Maskierung oder gewollter Reduktion und gesuchter Selbststilisierung, ohne andererseits von der Diagnose der Schizophrenie eigentlich abzurücken. Hier verlief sich die Unterhaltung schnell in das weite Feld der schwierigen konkreten Bestimmung, was Schizophrenie eigentlich sei, der Diagnoseprobleme usw.” (Mächler, 253).

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trading of a desire for freedom for an attempted bourgeois existence as a tutor. That “prison,” in turn, may or may not be coextensive with the one in which Spoerri encountered Walser. It is Mächler’s contention that throughout his life Walser invested “much more energy into the dissimulation of his internal suffering” (Mächler, 256) than he may have invested into their simulation as a patient in mental institutions. However, if Walser’s literary text really is the result of a life of dissimulation, the reverse strategy of trying to decode the text to arrive at that which has been dissimulatively “disfigured” by it can be no more conclusively successful than Spoerri’s diagnosis of schizophrenia on the basis of the behavior exhibited by the patient Walser. Literature is dissimulation as such, and as Sebald recontextualizes Mächler’s text and the images he uses, he appears to be taking a cue from his own narratives to the effect that this constitutive dissimulation is not easily remedied by retroactive pathographic reading, or viewing of images. With respect to Walser, then, Sebald eventually arrives at the conclusion that the seven reprinted photographic portraits only serve to emphasize the uncertainty as to who Walser “really” was, and as to whether or not the progression of a mental illness is actually documented in them. In the end, he finds: “What kind of illness it was, in a diagnostically precise sense, doesn’t matter much.”18 It would add little clarity, that is, to the “utmost measure of lucidity” (Logis, 159) to be found in Walser’s writing – a lucidity that may be acknowledged or denied by pathographic reading in the same arbitrary fashion that Walser himself demonstrates by shifting the boundaries of Hölderlin’s alleged loss of it. Sebald accordingly writes of Walser’s Bleistiftgebiet that this text should not be reduced, either in its content or in its form, to a representation of the “increasing psychological disintegration” of its author (156). The interpretation of writing, like the interpretation of the presented Lichtbilder, turns out to be something other than a diagnostic reading of unequivocally symptomatic signs.

18

“Was für eine Krankheit das in einem diagnostisch genauen Sinne war, tut wenig zur Sache” (Sebald, Logis, 161).

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Sebald’s Elective and Other Affinities

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Sebald’s Elective and Other Affinities Sara Friedrichsmeyer

Ever since their discovery by Galileo, the rings around the planet Saturn have puzzled scientists. Held together by strange gravitational forces that seem to defy logic, they appear to be chance, almost coincidental phenomena, yet their power and beauty, though baffling, cannot fail to elicit some spectra of meaning. By choosing The Rings of Saturn as the title for his 1995 work, W. G. Sebald invites us to contemplate those mysterious forces as they emerge in his text, to attend to those “rings” of sheer coincidences and seemingly predetermined connections that are so difficult to credit on a purely rational level. I take the title for my paper from a short passage in the same work in which he uses the term “elective affinities” (182) to refer to one of those chance correspondences, specifically to the unusual and unexpected congruencies between his own biography and that of Michael Hamburger. Although Goethe’s name does not appear, such a phrase in a work by a writer as deeply intellectual as Sebald, one whose works are so densely and consciously intertextual and referential, is not without import. With reference then to Goethe’s Elective Affinities, I propose to examine what I see as Sebald’s artistic predilection for “elective” and for other affinities as well. They are, I believe, central to his literary imagination, and in fact provide a paradigm for both structural and thematic cohesion not only in The Rings of Saturn, but throughout his literary œuvre. The patterns I am focusing on are the oddly fated encounters, those strange and inexplicable linkages, startling physical or biographical similarities, correspondences of names and dates, and even lists of otherwise largely unrelated objects that run like warping threads through Sebald’s works and defy our sense of time and space.1 Sometimes they illuminate 1

I wish to thank the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati for supporting research that contributed to this article. In our scientific, technological, and ultimately rational Western world, this is unusual but not unique. Günter Grass, for example, also makes much of coincidence in Im Krebs-

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unsettling coincidences over time, as when the narrator in The Rings of Saturn introduces Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century writer whose coffin was damaged in 1840 a century and a half after his death, with the result that his skull was placed in a museum until 1921 when it underwent a second burial; this Thomas Browne, the narrator in Rings of Saturn tells us, wrote in a widely-read treatise about nothing less than multiple burials and the fate of one’s own bones (11). At other times Sebald points to unexpected linkages between personal histories and geography. In the same text, the narrator inserts Kafka into the discussion of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement – a discussion alluding to the evils of colonialism marked from the outset by far-flung correspondences – by reference to a trip Conrad made in 1891 in which he “reached Ostend, the selfsame port that one Joseph Loewy [Kafka’s uncle] left some days later” (121). Another form of linking occurs, again in The Rings of Saturn, in the way that silkworms at various points in the work help chart the rise and fall of empires; when at the end Sebald then circles back to Thomas Browne, with whom he had begun the work, and connects even him to the silk trade, the affinities have been choreographed in such a way as to help unify the work aesthetically. These affinities, these accordion pleats of time and space that range through the cosmos and across national cultures and geographies, so central to Rings of Saturn, are just as prevalent in Sebald’s other literary works. In each of the three parts of After Nature, for instance, reference is made to the town of Windsheim, thus providing an unanticipated link between the subjects of the first two segments – the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald (32) and the eighteenth-century scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller (43) – and then linking them to the author himself, the subject of the third section; it was in Windsheim, we are told, that the author’s mother discovered her pregnancy (86). Biographical connections between the author and his historical subjects are further inferred in the case of Steller, through repetition of his name that recalls Sebald’s own, and of Grünewald, through the multiple links to St. George (5). In Vertigo the affinities extend their connecting powers in a gang. January 30th is the date of Wilhelm Gustloff ’s birth in 1895, of Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, and – Grass’s own invention – the birth of Paul Pokriefke. Further, Konrad chooses April 20th for the murder of David, a date that recalls Hitler’s birth on April 20, 1889. A comparative study would show that for Grass these coincidences have their root in his own view of history, expressed at the end of the novel: “It doesn’t end. It will never end.”

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kind of time warp when the narrator recounts having recognized “without a shadow of a doubt” (254) a young woman on a train as Elizabeth, James I’s daughter. Occasionally they are expanded over several pages in the text, as in The Emigrants when the narrator relates the many coincidences that have shaped the extraordinary relationship between himself, Dr. Selwyn, and the Swiss guide Johannes Naegeli (13–23). In 1913 Dr. Selwyn had traveled to Bern to study but instead – and it is impressed upon us that this decision was unprompted by reason – went mountain climbing and thus met Naegeli. Despite the intense friendship that developed, he returned to England, perhaps in 1914, and never saw Naegeli again. From Selwyn the narrator reports having heard, however, that Naegeli had soon thereafter gone missing on a glacier; in 1986, the narrator continues, he thought of Selwyn for the first time in many years, and then purchased a newspaper which by chance was the exact paper that carried a report on Naegeli’s remains, discovered now some 72 years later.2 In the fourth segment of the same work, the narrator reports losing track of the painter Max Ferber (Aurach), thinking of him often, coming across one of his paintings in the Tate by “sheer chance,” and, soon after, seeing the artist’s picture in the newspaper, “again pretty much by chance, since I have long avoided reading the Sunday papers” (177). These fateful occurrences or coincidences, these accidents or quirks of chance, are just as conspicuous in Sebald’s last work: in Austerlitz the narrator’s numerous encounters with the title character are often consequences of the remotest of chances. As he tells it, he met Austerlitz one day in a waiting room of the Antwerp railroad station while traveling “partly for reasons which were never entirely clear to me” (7). Thereafter “our paths kept crossing in a way that I still find hard to understand, on all my Belgian excursions of that time, none of them planned in advance” (27). The personal biography that Austerlitz unravels over the course of the work is also indebted to this patterning: after years (and roughly half the book) of dimly intuiting a fissure in his life, it is only when, while sitting rather listlessly in a London bookstore, he hears two women reminiscing about their experiences with the Kindertransport, that the emerging memories of his past begin to take shape. Only then does he realize that “these fragments of memory were part of my life as well” (141). 2

As the narrator goes on to comment: “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead” (23). Noting the frequency of coincidence in Sebald’s works, McCulloh cautions against reading such passages with reference to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” and suggests instead a Freudian model. See especially Chapter 3.

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These affinities, then, are frequent, and they are present in all of Sebald’s major works of imaginative writing. There are, of course, as the preceding examples have demonstrated, notable differences among them. The many coincidences, seemingly the products of serendipity or simple chance, that occupy one end of the spectrum, are not to be equated with those on the other: the links that suggest the deeper workings of fate. My justification for discussing them under the broad rubric of “affinities” is that they, and the myriad examples along the continuum, all defy reason and deny humans control of their own destiny. Further, Sebald is not intent on distinguishing between them; they appear, in fact, with so much variety in each work that the affinities are striking because of their prevalence rather than for any linear development. Nevertheless, it can be noted that in the earlier works the odd and unexpected connections dominate; and although the affinities there often help form webs illuminating personal kismet, often with a direct reference to Sebald himself, the linkings are in later works more impersonal. And whereas by the time of The Rings of Saturn the author is investing certain of these affinities with something bearing almost cosmic import, he employs them in Austerlitz primarily as a device to propel the plot line.3 Frequently, Sebald alludes to the connections in a way that bestows upon them a measure of credibility, usually through his narrators whom we all know to bear an often uncanny resemblance to their creator. In After Nature we are reminded that a desire for patterns is part of our genetic heritage: “Our brains, after all, / are always at work on some quivers / of self-organisation, however faint, / and it is from this that an order / arises, in places beautiful / and comforting, though more cruel, too, / than the previous state of ignorance” (83). The narrator in The Rings of Saturn acknowledges their existence on a plane somewhere beyond the purely rational: “No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings … occur far more often than we suspect, since we all move, one after the other, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency” (187). In Austerlitz it is the title character rather than the narrator who addresses the no-

3

Several reviewers have commented on the coincidences; Frank, for example, finds that The Rings of Saturn has the “relentless unity of obsession” (60–61); Aciman calls the connections in the same novel “forced” (46).

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tion of affinities;4 lamenting our inability to understand the laws governing the return of the past, Austerlitz admits that he himself feels as if time is really “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (185). Sebald is, of course, a thinker too sophisticated to let these affinities or his occasional affirmation of their power stand completely unchallenged, and he thus finds various ways to signal his own ambivalence. In After Nature, after pointing out the uncanny facial resemblance between Grünewald and a painting of a crowned female saint by Holbein the Younger, the narrator demonstrates his willingness to downplay the similarity: “Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art / men had revered each other like brothers, and / often made monuments in each other’s image” (6), although the inclusion of the word “seemed” further complicates the matter. Similarly, after the strange appearance of the seventeenth-century “Elizabeth” in Vertigo, when the narrator reports his vain attempts to locate the book she had been reading, he casts doubt on what he had earlier claimed as “without … doubt” by telling us that he now believes that the book exists nowhere at all (256). And in The Emigrants, when the narrator, while recounting the story of Max Ferber’s (Aurach’s) early life, singles out for telling Ferber’s discovery that he was lodged in 1944 where Wittgenstein had lived in 1908, he follows this with Ferber’s purported comment that “doubtless any retrospective connection with Wittgenstein was purely illusory.” But Sebald continues in a way that almost immediately reaffirms the significance of the coincidence, for he has his narrator report Ferber’s statement that the link to Wittgenstein helped him become more aware of “a sense of brotherhood that reached far back beyond his own lifetime” (166–67). These comments, often resembling authorial asides, are ostensibly intended to cast aspersions on the affinities, i.e., to demonstrate that Sebald is not so naïve as to credit them in any consequential way.5 Such attention to them, however, does not deflect questions but instead has the effect of impressing the affinities more deeply into the reader’s mind. 4

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The frequently noted overlap between narrator, author, and even character in Sebald’s works raises a number of issues, among them questions of genre. Paranormal phenomena are just as troubling to many people today as they were in Goethe’s era. On one level a reliance on coincidence or fate resembles a kind of magic thinking not usually credited in Western thinking; examples range from the abstractions of academic probability theory to new age thinking. A web search for “coincidence” demonstrates this range.

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In an interview with Joe Cuomo and in some of Sebald’s scholarly writings, affinities are also at issue, but the gestures toward ambivalence there are less qualified than those embedded in the literary works. When speaking with Cuomo in 2001, he takes care to dismiss their connections to parapsychology or to Jungian psychology, both of which he terms “tedious.” But, at the same time, he goes out of his way to credit them when he suggests that they are in some way responsible for why he “got into this strange business of writing books.” As he tells it, during a period in which he felt that he was “hemmed in increasingly by the demands” of a job, he was reading a book one day by an obscure German writer titled “The Head of Vitus Bering.” That book contained in a footnote a reference to an “18th century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials as I have, and who happened to have been born in a place that my mother visited when she was pregnant, in 1943” (2). As readers of Sebald know, G. W. Steller figures prominently in After Nature, his first literary work. And with that prose poem, as we also know, W. G. Sebald became a writer. In the same interview with Cuomo, Sebald makes an admission that helps to give meaning to these structures of linkages, this time without any accompanying hedges: we build on small coincidences, he believes, because “we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence” (2). It is the pattern created by the small, almost trivial coincidences that, when joined with others in his literary works, are endowed through Sebald’s artistry with profound, albeit enigmatic, significance. They are, of course, linked to the function of memory and its unreliability, but that is not the focus of this article. In a critical essay on Robert Walser contained in Logis im Landhaus Sebald also comments on the linkages.6 Having noted distinct biographical correspondences between Walser and his own grandfather, a “merkwürdigen Zufall” (138) linking Walser and Carl Selig, and finally certain connections between Walser and himself, he asks: What do such similarities, intersections, and correspondences mean? Does it have to do only with the vexing images of memory, with delusions of the self or the senses, or with the schemata programmed into the chaos of human interaction, covering equally both the living and the dead, with an order incomprehensible to us?7 6 7

I thank Jerry Fetz for his comments on this passage. “Was bedeuten solche Ähnlichkeiten, Überschneidungen und Korrespondenzen? Handelt es sich nur um Vexierbilder der Erinnerung, um Selbst- oder Sinnestäuschungen oder um die in das Chaos der menschlichen Beziehungen einprogram-

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For readers with a scientific bent, such a query raises the intriguing possibility of using chaos theory as a context for understanding not just Sebald’s remarks in the Walser essay, but all the assorted phenomena I am referring to here as affinities. But scientific contexts are not my focus here either. Rather, I am speculating on why Sebald incorporates these affinities into his works, or, more specifically, why he is drawn to these coincidences and linkages that never impose a meaning, but which by their very existence in a work of art seem to promise at least a shadowy glimpse of something beyond themselves, a force that, like the rings circling Saturn, affirms cohesion on some nearly unfathomable plane. To help make sense of their hold on Sebald, I return to Goethe. Now Goethe (and, incidentally, the other great expositor of elective affinities in the German cultural sphere, Gottfried von Strassburg) directs the powerful affinities toward heterosexual love, and although critics have long debated the actual focus or “meaning” of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, most would agree that the forces propelling Goethe’s lovers pit, on the thematic level, the social world of morality and free will against the amoral or disinterested passions inherent in the natural world. In Sebald’s works the passions of heterosexual love are rarely present, and I would argue that, although the social and moral world in which his characters move is not at all irrelevant, it is less a specific concern than is their relationship within the larger natural world itself, a world Sebald expands beyond the flora and fauna of Goethe’s lovers’ gardens to embrace the existential dimensions of space and time in which human beings find themselves. Scholars have long been aware that Goethe borrowed the concept of elective affinities from a 1775 study – De attractionibus electivis – by the Swedish chemist Torben Berman that was translated into German in 1782 by Hein Tabor as Die Wahlverwandtschaften. And with varying degrees of credulity they have often referred to the anonymous advertisement Goethe himself wrote for the novel, avowing that just as natural scientists had in the past used ethical analogies to illuminate scientific principles, so “the author” was now doing the opposite, i.e., identifying a moral, or essentially “spiritual meaning” by analogy from the world of chemical interactions.8 Just as this advertisement helped fuel the critical

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mierten, über Lebendige und Tote gleichermaßen sich erstreckenden Schemata einer uns unbegreiflichen Ordnung?” (Logis, 137–38). The anonymous advertisement for the novel was placed by Goethe himself in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. See Tantillo, xviii.

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debate, so too have Goethe’s varied references to the novel been mined by literary critics in their efforts to formulate a definitive interpretation of the novel. As Victor Lange phrased it, Goethe spoke of Die Wahlverwandtschaften in the gravest terms, and always with a sense of “awe and humility as before a spectacle that surpasses human understanding” (Lange, viii). Perhaps that willingness to let Goethe have his say has contributed to the fact that, even after two centuries, no critical consensus has emerged on what Goethe intended with his novel.9 To be sure, Elective Affinities has been controversial since its first publication. One of the reasons that it so troubled Goethe’s contemporaries was that it muddied the clear Kantian dualism that structured their thinking – that of Schiller, for example, and, more disastrously, of Kleist – and refused to affirm the claims of the human/moral world against those of a disinterested nature. My argument for the importance of Goethe’s concept of elective affinities to Sebald’s œuvre is premised on my understanding of the forces unleashed by the elective affinities in that novel of 1809 as primal and elemental, and the death and destruction which ensue as a warning to those who believe they can resist or even control them. I would argue that Goethe intended, or at least hoped, that his readers would be horrified by the ending, but less because of the human dependence on the natural world upon which the novel is predicated, than because of the consequences to his characters when they refuse to concede their subservience to it. Writing in an era of scientific and philosophic challenges to a Newtonian world view, Goethe chose in this way to add his voice to that debate, inferring the dangers of trying to segregate the human realm from the world of nature and inferring as well the need for acknowledging the supremacy of those natural, i.e., non-rational, forces that he had represented in the concept of elective affinities. Sebald too refuses a sure separation between natural and human spheres; indeed his writing proclaims the very core of human existence to be intricately linked to the natural world: as human beings we too fashion our existences, as the title of his first literary work has it, “After

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See Tantillo for a discussion of the critical response to the novel. Critics have long debated its stance toward marriage, the aristocracy, theology, morality, romanticism, for example; much of the critical discussion over the past nearly two centuries centers on what the novel has to say about free will, with equally vehement voices on both sides. See also Tantillo’s discussion of the importance of Walter Benjamin’s essay to subsequent interpretations (Chapter 3).

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Nature.” At times his narrators and fictional creations even demonstrate the typical romantic connection to nature, sharing their gloom with the English rains. The relationship is more consistently an issue, however, in the countless examples of misguided human attempts at controlling or dominating the natural world. In The Rings of Saturn, for example, we are treated to a detailed description of Somerleyton Hall, a “princely palace” rebuilt with extraordinary effort in the nineteenth century so that visitors “were barely able to tell where the natural ended and the manmade began” (33). But this “illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured” (34) that Sebald elaborates upon at length is shattered by his mention of the poisonous gas required to maintain the night-time illumination (34), and, further, by mention of a later gas explosion.10 Sebald’s narrator, again a mouthpiece for Sebald himself, asserts the author’s position in the comparison of the nineteenth-century version of Somerleyton – “how uninviting Somerleyton must have been” (36) – with its present-day reincarnation as a “fine” house “now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion” (36). And then he continues: “The grounds, in contrast to the waning splendour of the house, were now at their evolutionary peak, a century after the heyday of Somerleyton. The flower beds might well have been better tended and more gloriously colourful, but today the trees … filled the air above the gardens, and several of the ancient cedars … now extended their branches over well-nigh a quarter of an acre, each an entire world unto itself” (37). The disasters at Somerleyton Hall recall those in Goethe’s novel, for the resistance of Goethe’s fictional creations to the elective affinities with which they were confronted parallels their more concrete attempts to control nature: the designs for their gardens were, after all, intended to enhance the “naturalness” of nature.11 The nearly obsessive references to ruined and destroyed buildings, monuments, and cities in Sebald’s writing attest to the impossibility of humans controlling their own histories; the ruins 10

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Somerleyton Hall, which is similar to other historical homes, monuments, etc., that play a role in Sebald’s works, is not a fiction. For a history of the “pleasure palace,” without reference to poisonous gas, however, see: http://www.somerleyton.co.uk. Landscape gardening is connected to an aestheticization of nature in the interests of human enjoyment. See Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, especially chapter 9 on “Arcadia Redesigned,” for background to the concept of a “natural” landscape. See Christian C. L. Hirschfeld for a theoretical background to eighteenth-century gardens, i.e., to conscious design as a way of bringing about the “natural” (xvi).

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exist only as reminders of human hubris, and as proof that we cannot control, cannot – as the failure at Somerleyton demonstrates – domesticate nature. We are part of the natural world in strange and unpredictable ways, and our meddling attempts to create an autonomous sphere are destined to failure. In The Emigrants, for example, we are reminded that a “neglected garden” (11) produces more flavourful vegetables than those more carefully tended (13). In the two epigraphs in The Rings of Saturn (the German version includes a third from Milton’s Paradise Lost) the link between the human and natural worlds is expressed ex negativo by pointing to the essential loneliness, even enforced alienation, of both. The “unfortunate souls” of the Conrad epigraph who can only watch the unfoldings of the world without comprehension are linked – i.e., given complementary meaning simply by their positioning – with the ice crystals that make up Saturn’s rings, fragments ejected earlier from a center whose hold is defined solely by chance developments. They affirm connections between humans and the natural world, but prompt awareness that the links are neither controllable nor reliably benign. Although Sebald is writing almost two centuries after Goethe, and after the discovery of quantum systems that have at least in the scientific community created havoc with traditional notions of causality and time, his is still a world that valiantly strives to pay obeisance to the rules of rational order. It is thus also one in which the realm of nature is disturbingly and increasingly distanced from human life. Goethe’s challenge to mechanistic science took place at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and, similarly, Sebald understands his own time as one in which the advocates of reason and nonreason generally maintain adversarial stances. When Sebald moves his characters through time and space, he challenges the exclusivity of reason and edges toward his own idiosyncratic form of metaphysics that confronts the rational/irrational dichotomy. Metaphysics, Sebald has said, is something “that’s always interested me … I’ve always thought it very regrettable, and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard” (Cuomo, 3). Reason, he seems to imply, when in his imaginative writings he calls up strange example after example from the past, triumphed during the eighteenth century despite earlier proof of its insufficiencies. Writing about Grünewald in After Nature, for instance, he can only express his bewilderment that humans were somehow able to maintain an illusion of rationality

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even in the face of irrefutable evidence that “long before that time / pain had entered into the pictures” (7). Like Goethe, then, Sebald questions our stubborn reliance on reason and our unwillingness to live in congruence with the natural world. But whereas Goethe was not undone by what he saw around him, Sebald nearly is. What for Goethe was largely a social problem, and one he could criticize from a distance, is for Sebald the manifestation of a world without intrinsic order, one in which death and destruction is everywhere, on a cosmic and not a merely social scale. This is, I believe, the primary explication for the elegiac tone of his works, for the sense of mourning that critics have identified as shaping the core of his literary persona. Ruth Franklin, for example, has commented on the “unique brand of melancholy” that afflicts Sebald’s characters; his works, she notes, have “always presented suffering without its cause, as merely a part of the great pattern of pain that defines the human condition” (8). And even there the affinities are at work: in After Nature Sebald claims a personal link to melancholy and mourning, fate having decreed that he be born under the sign of “the cold planet Saturn” (88). I want to suggest here that Sebald, by the very act of writing, is struggling for an antidote to what experience tells him: that the world and everything in it is random, without meaning, and thus an inescapable source of profound suffering. Like Balzac or Zola or Tolstoy or other nineteenth-century writers of the great social novel who wanted to demonstrate that various social phenomena were all intertwined, Sebald, writing a century later, wants to spread the umbrella even more widely so as to connect the human with the natural world. With his deep and almost paralyzing awareness of transitoriness and his awareness of the arbitrariness of phenomena, which abandon human beings to lives of physical and existential aloneness, he finds consolation only in the fleeting, often ephemeral affinities that establish connections unmindful of empirical boundaries of space and time. In a world where death and destruction are everywhere and always present, the mysterious powers of the elective and other affinities offer the only possibility, however remote, for meaning. Sebald’s affinities may be less eruptive than those that doomed Goethe’s lovers, but they are nonetheless just as insistent in their annihilation of the hubristic human claims of autonomy from the forces of the natural world. I read Sebald’s works as a debate with Western culture in which he assumes the role of mournful challenger. From the beginning of his literary career, he has consciously claimed his place within this tradition,

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and his astounding range has often been the subject of critical admiration. The cast of characters that peoples his literary imagination is often flanked by historically well-known writers, artists, scientists, and explorers, all of whom have helped to construct and define European culture especially since the Enlightenment. And that is, of course, a tradition associated in its very marrow with reason, with rational connections, with causality. That Sebald, then, exhibits a preoccupation with those who have been at odds with it (figures like Kafka, Robert Walser, or Borges) does not surprise. But his exposure of this tradition as illusory, this tradition which has always validated a search for general patterns in the world through empirical observation and the evaluation of the logical relation between concepts, does not make him a postmodernist. A postmodernist, I would argue, sets out from the assumption that all patterns are arbitrary constructions, that truth as well as logic are human inventions, and that all aspects of life are contingent and revisable. True, Sebald is not looking for meaning in the form of metatheories or grand designs, but he is working through his own experiences and those of others, hoping to discover even seemingly random or even capricious patterns that can somehow be construed to yield meaning. Although Goethe’s lovers were convicted because they refused to accept the authority of the natural world, Goethe took care to offer his readers an opportunity to incorporate their literary experiences within a meaningful philosophy of life. And this, as Victor Lange phrased it several decades ago, would embrace the Goethean virtues of Entsagung that cedes control of the world and Ehrfurcht, and would enable human beings to respect the total compass of reality (Lange, xiii). There is no such consolation in Sebald’s writings, not through an analysis of the complex patternings drawing on the work of chaos theorists or quantum physicists, and not by reference to religion or philosophy. Instead, any solace is to be found in the affinities themselves. For Goethe they may have been significant primarily because of their effect on the human, social world, but for Sebald they are existentially meaningful simply because they exist. And when he affirms them through the power of his aesthetic imagination, he assures that they become ever more so. Susan Neiman in Evil in Modern Thought suggests that much of Western philosophy is an attempt to comprehend evil. She has a complex and sophisticated notion of evil, one that I cannot detail here, but what is important for this study is her belief that evil is not just an ethical violation, but can also be an “epistemological” disruption that challenges

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our interpretations of the world and can manifest itself in chaos or meaningless. This understanding of “evil” helps, I believe, to explain Sebald’s intellectual position. A philosopher, of course, would have to distinguish between causes of evil, whether they be human or “willed,” to use Neiman’s phrase, and Sebald does not do that. He is not trying to develop a system, but trying to understand how to “be” in the universe and why. In The Rings of Saturn he tells us that “In the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light … I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air” (67). As a writer and as a student of the peculiarities of human history, having been dissuaded of the power of those swallows as well as of all claims to reason and causality, he finds in the strange patterns shaped as connections a tentative counterweight. They are portentous because – although almost surely without any definitive or ultimate validity – they do offer some assurance, if fleeting and perhaps even illusory, that the “rings” of our lives have some relationship to a larger whole, that we are not completely alone, and that elective and other affinities are holding us within a certain orb of meaning.

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An Intertextual Approach to W. G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne

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In the Weavers’ Web: An Intertextual Approach to W. G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne Patrick Lennon

Sebald, Hamburger, Hölderlin In the course of his walking tour through coastal East Anglia, the narrator of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn visits the writer (poet, translator, essayist) Michael Hamburger at his home on the outskirts of Middleton in Suffolk. Hamburger and Sebald’s narrator, readers learn, have a number of things in common. There is the fact, for instance, that Hamburger and Sebald’s narrator both emigrated from Germany to England in 1933 and 1966, respectively (182). There is also the fact, as the narrator continues, “that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol” (182–83). Sebald’s narrator further writes of the “intersecting” of their lives in that of one Stanley Kerry: “When I now think back to Stanley Kerry, it seems incomprehensible that the paths of Michael’s life and mine should have intersected in the person of that extraordinarily shy man, and that at the time when we met him, in 1944 and in 1966 respectively, we were both twenty-two” (187). These (superficial) biographical coincidences or similarities between the lives of Hamburger and Sebald’s narrator (and Sebald himself of course) tie in with a (deeper) feeling of attachment or identification that the narrator felt upon his first visit to Hamburger’s home. During this visit, the narrator writes, “I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as [Hamburger] does” (183). The narrator felt on that occasion also “as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials” were his own (183), “as if I or someone akin to me had long gone about his business there” (184) and, finally, as if “Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time ago” (185).

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These thoughts of the narrator on his relation to Michael Hamburger echo those of Hamburger on his relation to Friedrich Hölderlin. Indeed, upon his arrival at Hamburger’s home, Sebald’s narrator and Hamburger settle in the quiet garden for some afternoon tea. Before long, Hamburger, in the course of their conversation, ponders “the imponderables that govern our course through life” (182) and the nature of his relation to his precursors, in particular, to Friedrich Hölderlin, whom Hamburger has translated into English: Does one follow in Hölderlin’s footsteps, simply because one’s birthday happened to fall two days after his? […] Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin’s birth? […] And did not Hölderlin dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? (182)

Just as Sebald’s narrator observed and reflected on the similarities and coincidences between his own life and Hamburger’s, so too does Hamburger observe and reflect on the similarities and coincidences between his life and Hölderlin’s. In his Understanding W. G. Sebald, Mark McCulloh considers the narrator’s visit to Hamburger an “especially vivid manifestation” of Sebald’s preoccupation with the “mystery of identity and the relationship of identity and memory” (72–73), further speaking of the narrator’s “feeling of merging identity […] based on coincidences and the repetition of coincidences” (74). McCulloh writes that “Sebald is interested in whether identity is somehow fluid, something that can be shared” and asks whether Hamburger is “mad to believe he is somehow one with Hölderlin?” (73), and whether it could be that the narrator “in fact is Michael, or was once Michael?” (73–74). This idea of a “merging identity,” of the mergence or fusion of these men’s lives (the narrator with Hamburger, and Hamburger with Hölderlin) is not as insane as it may at first appear, if the question of “merging identity” be one relating, not to their persons or to the course of their lives, but to their writings which do, on occasion, seem to fuse. Hamburger’s reflections on the coincidences between his life and Hölderlin’s ended with a double question (“And did not Hölderlin dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother?” [182]) the last in a series of five questions, which are immediately followed by two more: “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself,

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then one’s own precursor?” (182). These two questions come right before Sebald’s narrator’s enumeration of the coincidences between his life and Hamburger’s (starting with the sentence: “The fact that I first passed through British customs thirty-three years after Michael […]” [182]). In these two questions, then, relating to the “elective affinities” and the “precursors,” the voice and text of Hamburger and Sebald’s narrator fuse and become indistinct as it is unclear as to who, of Hamburger and Sebald’s narrator, uttered them (Sebald’s omission of quotation marks is, of course, significant in this respect). These questions can be attributed either to Hamburger, as he ponders his connection to Hölderlin, concluding his list of questions with two final, more general queries, or they can be attributed to the narrator, as, shadowing Hamburger, he ponders the connections between writers and their precursors (i.e. Hamburger and Hölderlin, as well as Hamburger and himself), before listing the correspondences between himself and Hamburger. A second instance of this textual mergence is found in the same section on Michael Hamburger. In his review of the novel, André Aciman writes that there is “a brief moment in The Rings of Saturn where everything comes together: when [Sebald] slips into the life and voice of Michael Hamburger […]” (46). Aciman further writes that “[the] prose in the pages devoted to Hamburger’s return to Charlottenburg [in Berlin] in 1947 is perhaps the very best that Sebald has written” (47). The passage in question deserves some attention. It comes before the narrator has arrived at Hamburger’s house (176 ff.) and opens in the third person – “Michael was nine and a half when, in November 1933, with his siblings, his mother, and her parents, he came to England” (176) – but soon switches to the first person and is occasionally punctuated by such expressions as “Michael writes” (176) or “Michael writes elsewhere” (179). The section thus largely seems to consist of (verbatim?) citations from Hamburger’s memoirs. As a result, Aciman’s suggestion that these are Sebald’s pages (and “perhaps the very best that Sebald has written,” at that) seems ironic. There is in fact little reason to doubt their “authenticity,” since Sebald repeatedly quotes, more or less verbatim, from works of other authors, something which he does most prominently in The Rings of Saturn (Thomas Browne and Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, are two such authors among many others). In the German edition, moreover, Hamburger is, on occasion, quoted as expressing himself, in his memoirs and later in conversation with Sebald’s narrator, in English – parts of his writings and speech are rendered in (italicized) English in the German edition of the novel (in the English translation, however, these

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parts are not italicized, and so blend into the surrounding text). An example from his memoirs, “How little there has remained in me of my native country, konstatiert der Chronist […]” (Ringe, 210–11); or, in conversation with Sebald’s narrator, “For weeks, sagte Michael, there is not a bird to be seen […]” (216). These quotations in English in the German edition seem to confirm the suspicion that they are given verbatim, and thus confirm their authenticity. But perhaps the matter of their authenticity is not that important (a comparative reading of Hamburger’s memoirs with the passage in Sebald’s work would easily and rapidly clarify the matter). Rather, the establishment of the distinction between Hamburger’s and Sebald’s texts would perhaps obscure two things. First, the fusion of textual identity between the two writers (and beyond them, in a sense, between all writers and all texts?). Second, the fact that these pages are Sebald’s pages. Though he may not have written them, he has rewritten them into his own text and has thus, in a sense, appropriated them. Sebald’s (narrator’s) text and Hamburger’s thus become indistinct from one another. One is superimposed on the other, in much the same way that their lives seem to be superimposed (as Hamburger’s seems to be on Hölderlin’s). In regard of this textual fusion or superposition, it is also significant that Sebald should have his narrator visit the person of a translator (i.e. Hamburger). In translations too there is a fusion of two texts, since the translator’s work is as distinct from the original work as it is indistinct from it. If we read Hamburger’s translation of Hölderlin’s poetry, we believe that we are reading Hölderlin, and not Hamburger, but we are, in a sense, reading Hamburger, and not Hölderlin. A translation, therefore, is and is not the original text, it is and is not an original text. Here too there is a fusion or superposition of two texts. These coincidences between the lives of these different writers, in and of themselves, are not very significant. Rather they seem to be used to strengthen the links between their works. A coincidence is, of course, (an instance of) “occurring or being together.” And in effect, Hamburger and Hölderlin are together (in the translation), just as Sebald’s narrator and Hamburger are also together (in the former’s and/or latter’s text, as the case may be). More significant than the fusion of identity at a biographical level, therefore, is the fusion of identity at a textual level: a merging textual identity, or indeed, identical texts (in this respect, it is worth remembering that the term “identity” comes from “idem,” i.e. “same”).

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Sebald and Sterne: the Visual and the Verbal One other coincidence between Michael Hamburger and Friedrich Hölderlin which is not mentioned in The Rings of Saturn is the fact that their surnames have the same number of letters (nine) and the same initial (H). Similarly, W. G. Sebald shares with Laurence Sterne the fact that their surnames share the same number of letters (six) and the same initial (S) (as do, for that matter, the above Browne and Borges: six letters beginning with B). These coincidences may appear to be rather trivial (which they are), yet coincidences of this kind play a significant role in Sebald (see, e.g., the interview with Joe Cuomo “The Meaning of Coincidence”). But to return to Sterne. Admittedly, Sterne may not be the first name that comes to mind when, in approaching the fictions of W. G. Sebald, we ponder the intertextual nature of Sebald’s work and the identity of his literary ascendants (Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Adalbert Stifter or indeed Robert Burton, among other names, come more readily to mind). Yet perhaps Sterne and Sebald have more in common than meets the eye. A “quick flick” through the fictions of Sterne and Sebald suffices to establish that they consist for a significant part of visual materials: the approximately 300 black-and-white photographic and other pictorial reproductions scattered throughout Sebald’s four fictions; the illustration of the coat of arms in Sterne’s (or, indeed, Yorick’s) Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (73), or the black page (29–30), pointing index (e.g., 92, 98), marbled page (185–86) or cross (286), among other visual materials, in Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. At first sight, also, there appears to be (as, in part, there is) a clear distinction between the visual domain, as it were, in Sterne and Sebald, and the verbal domain (the text proper). But the distinction between the two is not always clear-cut and there are numerous occasions when the two domains overlap, occasions when the one seems to take on something of the other. In Sebald’s work, the visual material (the reproductions) sometimes seems to be as readable (in a literal sense) as the verbal domain. Those reproductions which include text (e.g. the reproduction of a newspaper clipping) have a significant verbal character to them. In Sterne, by contrast, whereas the visual materials do not contain any text and are thus difficult if not impossible to read (in a literal sense), it is the verbal material (the text proper) which has been charged with an important visual character.

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Some examples follow. In Sebald, there are numerous reproductions which we can, literally, read: newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, bills, train tickets, diary pages, etc. We can read these visual materials as we can read the text. Indeed, we tend to read these visuals in conjunction with the text, as the former seem to confirm the latter and thus to serve, for a large part, a function of authentification. In The Rings of Saturn, for instance, the text of the newspaper clipping about Major George Wyndham Le Strange largely seems to confirm the narrator’s text (it seems to be the source of the narrator’s text), and so the verbal and the visual domains become somewhat indistinct. On occasion, however, the authenticating function of the reproduction seems to be more apparent than real, as, for instance, in the case of Ambrose Adelwarth’s diary in The Emigrants (132, 135), where the illegibilty of the text in the reproduction raises the suspicion that the diary may be a fake. If, in Sebald, the visual domain sometimes has an important verbal character to it, in Sterne, by contrast, the visual domain (the black page, etc.) utterly resists any literal reading as it lacks any verbal character: Sterne’s visual materials do not contain any text that we can read. However, the verbal domain in Sterne has a strongly visual character which is highly significant. Again, a “quick flick” through Sterne’s work suffices to establish the prominence and significance of, for instance, Sterne’s extensive and deliberate use of dashes, asterisks and other typographical markers. Likewise, Sterne’s use of different typefaces has an equally significant visual character. For instance, in the passage relating to Tristram’s mother’s marriage settlement, Sterne uses, on occasion, a Gothic lettertype to give an appearance of of authenticity to this (pseudo) legal document (33–5). Strictly speaking, legalese may not be a foreign language, but it is an appropriate transition to the presence of foreign languages in Sterne’s work and their visual impact. Indeed, besides the Gothic typeface, Sterne makes use of Greek letters, either in footnotes (e.g. 319) or in the body of the text (e.g. 322). As Melvyn New states in his note on the text of Tristram Shandy, “Greek words were photographically reproduced from the first edition in order to emphasize that for Sterne the appearance of Greek had a visual significance that ought not to be ignored […]” (New, xlvi). Besides Greek, Sterne also includes Latin in his book and though the typeface may not be different from that of the main text, the presence in the text of a different language has a strong visual impact, since that foreign language may not be readable by some readers: the text may thus be stripped of its verbal character (the words mean nothing to us) and become charged with a visual character (we can

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only look at them). Bishop Ernulphus’s text of excommunication, for instance, is given in both Latin and English (140 ff.). Here the function of authentification is made clear by Tristram when he observes in a footnote that “[as] the genuineness of the consultation of the Sorbonne upon the question of baptism, was doubted by some, and denied by others, – ’twas thought proper to print the original of this excommunication […]” (140). The Sorbonne Memoire Tristram refers to is to be found, in French (and some Latin), in volume one (49–51). By reproducing these documents in the original (Latin and French), Sterne seems to be striving for an authentification effect, just as Sebald seems to do. In this respect, it might be worth considering whether, like Sebald, Sterne might not have wanted to include reproductions of the original documents. Indeed, Melvyn New draws our attention to this possibility when he writes in his note on the text of Tristram Shandy that “where it was felt (for example, in the Sorbonne Memoire) that Sterne would have used a photocopy had the technology been available, the copy-text was emended to conform to his source” (New, xlvi). Through the manipulation of his verbal material, therefore, Sterne aims for and overwhelmingly achieves a goal similar to that pursued by Sebald in his manipulation of visual materials. It is, finally, perhaps also significant that the texts Sterne and Sebald seem to want to authenticate are, often, in a language other than that of their original text. Besides legalese (which might just qualify as an alien language), Sterne includes Greek, Latin and French “original” documents (some appear to be invented, as, for instance, Hafen Slawkenbergius de Nasis [200; see also New, 594n1]). Likewise, Sebald uses French, Italian, Dutch, Czech as well as English “original” documents, as in the above example on Hamburger’s memoirs (in Sebald too some documents might be invented). These verbal, foreign-language excerpts have a significant visual impact: indeed, if we do not master the foreign language, the text loses its verbal character (since the text is illegible to us) and so acquires a strong visual character (we can only look at the text).

Fortification: Breendonk, Namur, Terezín / Theresienstadt Terms of fortification, it seems fair to say, stand out. Demi-culverin, epaulement, gabion, horn-work, tenaille and toise, for instance, are not everyday terms and as such, they have as important a visual character as they do a verbal one. Indeed, though they are words, they are rare and come from a very specific and largely outdated register (they are, more-

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over, largely of French origin, and thus from a foreign language). In consequence, it is perhaps arguable that their visual character dominates their verbal character (we look at them and read them, but wonder what they mean), and thus that they can have a significant visual impact. Terms of fortification feature quite prominently, and memorably, in Tristram Shandy, but one would not really expect them in the work of a late twentieth-century author. So when we came across a few of these terms of fortification in Sebald’s Austerlitz, we could not but think of Sterne and his fortification specialists, the inseparable Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby. But to start with Sebald. At the beginning of Sebald’s Austerlitz, Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator: No one today […] has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonometric and logistical calculations they record, of the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortification and siegecraft, no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit and glacis […]. (17–18)

Well, no one today, one would be inclined to agree, but fortification aficionados or, undoubtedly, readers of Tristram Shandy. For any reader of Tristram Shandy is bound to have become infected with Corporal Trim’s and Uncle Toby’s great enthusiasm for fortifications and thus to have some knowledge of the terms Austerlitz mentions. To know, for instance, that an escarpe, or scarp, is the interior slope of the ditch of a place (i.e. the slope of that side of a ditch which is next to the place, and faces the campaign); or that the courtine, or curtin, is that part of a wall, or rampart, which is between two bastions, or which joins the flanks thereof (the curtin is usually bordered with a parapet five foot high, behind which the soldiers stand to fire upon the covert way, and into the moat); these definitions are borrowed, of course, from the five-page glossary of terms of fortification included, luckily, in Tristram Shandy (667–72). Fortified towns or, more generally speaking, fortification does not feature prominently in Sebald’s work as a whole. Besides a fleeting reference to the fortress of Bard in the first section of Vertigo (6), the only other references thereto are, to all appearances, in Austerlitz: there is a reproduction of the groundplan of the fort of Saarlouis, included below the above terms (18), and there are longer passages on the fort of Breendonk (mentioned by Austerlitz and visited by the narrator) and the fortified town and then concentration camp Terezín/Theresienstadt (visited by Austerlitz).

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In Sterne’s work, by contrast, fortification features prominently, as fortified towns constitute the core of Uncle Toby’s hobby-horse. At the end of volume one of Tristram Shandy, we read that “[the] history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it; – my uncle’s visiters at least thought so,” Tristram informs us, and so these visitors “would frequently turn the discourse to that subject, – and from that subject the discourse would generally roll on to the siege itself” (63). These conversations, Tristram observes, […] were infinitely kind; and my uncle Toby received great relief from them, and would have received much more, but that they brought him into some unforeseen perplexities, which, for three months together, retarded his cure greatly; and if he had not hit upon an expedient to extricate himself out of them, I verily believe they would have laid him in his grave. (63)

These perplexities, the text continues, “arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counterscarp, – the glacis and covered way, – the half-moon and ravelin, – as to make his company fully comprehend where and what he was about” (67–68). As Tristram further observes: “To speak the truth […] ’twas a difficult thing, do what he could, to keep the discourse free from obscurity” (68). There follows an astute and amusing example of Toby’s perplexities: What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my uncle Toby, was this, – that in the attack of the counterscarp before the gate of St. Nicolas, extending itself from the bank of the Maes, quite up to the great water-stop; – the ground was cut and cross-cut with such a multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices, on all sides, – and he would get so sadly bewilder’d and set fast amongst them, that frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save his life; and was oft times obliged to give up the attack upon that very account only. (68)

“These perplexing rebuffs,” Tristram writes, “gave my uncle Toby Shandy more perturbations than you would imagine” (68) (yet perhaps we can imagine). Toby’s talking about his (physical) wounds thus seems to be considered as beneficial for his convalescence and thus encouraged for its therapeutic value. Likewise, Jacques Austerlitz seems to get some relief by talking about his (mental, psychological, emotional) wounds, as we read that, upon thinking of his encounters in Belgium with the narrator, Austerlitz was “telling himself he must find someone to whom he could relate his own story […]” (60), which story he then relates to the narrator.

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But this process of talking about one’s wounds (a part of the treatment of trauma, perhaps) is not without its “perplexities” for Austerlitz either. In his attempt to somehow come to grips with the fate of his mother at Theresienstadt, which Austerlitz visits (264ff.), Austerlitz tells the narrator that, later, while he was working as an assistant gardener in Romford, he began, he writes, “to spend my evenings and weekends poring over the heavy tome, running to almost eight hundred close-printed pages, which H. G. Adler […] had written between 1945 and 1947 […] on the subject of the setting up, development and internal organization of the Theresienstadt ghetto […]” (327). The reading of the book was for Austerlitz “a painstaking business because of my poor knowledge of German” (330). It was, he says, “almost as difficult for me as deciphering an Egyptian or Babylonian text in hieroglyphic or cuneiform script. The long compounds, not listed in my dictionary, which were obviously being spawned the whole time by the pseudo-technical jargon governing everything in Theresienstadt had to be unravelled syllable by syllable” (330). Austerlitz then lists some of these (italicized) compounds: “Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstätte, Menagetransportkolonnen, Küchenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihenuntersuchung, and Entwesungsübersiedlung” (330). The difficulty for Austerlitz is that he has to work out what these words mean (that is, to get beyond their visual character and to master their verbal character), then “fit the presumptive sense of my reconstructions into the sentences and the wider context” – which, however, “kept threatening to elude me, first because it quite often took me until midnight to master a single page, […] and second because in its almost futuristic deformation of social life the ghetto system had something incomprehensible and unreal about it, even though Adler describes it down to the last detail in its objective actuality” (330–31). Toby’s and Austerlitz’s perplexities, though presented by Sterne and Sebald in different ways, seem, largely, to arise out of their difficulties with language, more specifically, a language that comes from a specific register (that of fortification, and that of concentration camps) and a language that is, in part, alien (French terms of fortification for Toby, and the German terms relating to the concentration camp). These words are indeed perplexing both visually (the language is alien) and verbally (the meaning of the words escapes us). (In the English edition of Austerlitz, their visual impact, to non-German speakers, must be quite strong, perhaps similar to that of, for instance, Greek in Sterne: indeed, these long German compounds might not be unlike Greek to most Englishspeaking readers.)

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But do Toby and Austerlitz manage to work themselves out of their perplexities? In order to extricate himself from his painful situation, Toby hits upon the following idea: “He was one morning lying upon his back in his bed […] when a thought came into his head, that if he could purchase such a thing, and have it pasted down upon a board, as a large map of the fortifications of the town and citadel of Namur, with its environs, it might be a means of giving him ease” (69). Upon receiving the map, Toby “began immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost of diligence, to the study of it” (72). “But the desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it […]” (72), so that “before the first year of his confinement had well gone round, there was scarce a fortified town in Italy or Flanders, of which, by one means or other, he had not procured a plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully collating therewith the histories of their sieges, their demolitions, their improvements and new works” (73). And in the second year of his convalescence, Toby purchases books, “almost as many more books of military architecture, as Don Quixote was found to have of chivalry” (73), including works of “the Marshal Vauban” (Vauban is the military engineer who designed Saarlouis, an illustration of which is included in Austerlitz, below the above terms of fortification which Austerlitz cites [18]). By contrast, Austerlitz refrained from seeking any knowledge of the events related to the Third Reich during most of his life, much to his regret. “It seems unpardonable to me today,” Austerlitz says, “that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my own accord […]” (331). And so, though he too has obtained a map or, more specifically, a groundplan of Theresienstadt, included in the novel (328–29), and though he too seems to study his subject with as much devotion as Toby, his prospects seem bleaker. In Tristram Shandy, by contrast, the map of Namur that Toby uses to extricate himself from his troubles is not included in the novel (though it features in the engraving by Ravenet, after a drawing by William Hogarth, which served as the frontispiece to the second edition: the map of Namur hangs on the back wall [see 107]). Again, as with the case of the Sorbonne Memoire and the other verbal documents, perhaps Sterne would have included a photocopy of the map had he had the technological means to do so. Indeed, he would perhaps have included a photocopy of the said map alongside many other visual materials. This can be presumed from a passage in volume one of Tristram Shandy, in

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which Tristram, after attempting to outline the midwife’s reputation in the village and the extent of her “circle of importance,” observes: But I must here, once for all, inform you, that all this will be more exactly delineated and explain’d in a map, now in the hands of the engraver, which, with many other pieces and developments to this work, will be added to the end of the twentieth volume […] by way of commentaty, scholium, illustration and key to such passages, incidents, or innuendos as shall be thought to be either of private interpretation, or of dark and doubtful meaning after my life and my opinions shall have been read over […] by all the world […]. (31–32)

Unfortunately, Sterne’s nine-volume work does not include such an appendix. But it is perhaps interesting to note, as Melvyn New does, that Sterne’s “probable” source of historical information on the siege of Namur, i.e. Paul Rapin de Thoyras’s The History of England, translated and furthered by N. Tindal, does include a map of Namur, and that this map is included in the University Press of Florida edition’s Notes to Tristram Shandy (see New, 563n1). Thus, whereas Sterne’s primary material becomes our secondary material (the critical apparatus surrounding his work), in Sebald, what might have been integrated in the secondary material has been integrated by Sebald into his text.

In the Weavers’ Web The groundplans of Theresienstadt and Saarlouis that Sebald reproduces in Austerlitz (328–29 and 18, respectively) look a lot like spiders’ webs, being complex and, in a sense, infinite designs (infinite since it is difficult to determine either a starting point or a finishing point to these constructions). Sterne of course did not include such visuals in his book, but he does work a web motif into Tristram Shandy, which recurs on a number of occasions, and which he relates explicitly to the writing of books. For instance, in Tristram’s evocation of his father’s “Tristra-paedia”: “[…] my father spun [his book], every thread of it, out of his own brain, – or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that ’twas pretty near the same torture to him” (307). Or, in a more explicit passage referring to Tristram’s own storytelling: […] in good truth, when a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy […] and now, you see, I am lost myself! – But ’tis my father’s fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambrick, running along the whole length of the web […]. (383)

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Sebald does not use the image of the web, but he does use the image of the weaver, most notably in The Rings of Saturn, where the narrator writes of the fear getting hold of “the wrong thread” (283). Sterne and Sebald both weave their own texts, out of their own thread and that of others, by including numerous other texts, either historical documents or invented ones, into their own text. And as Roland Barthes reminded us in his Image – Music – Text, the word “text” originally meant “a tissue, a woven fabric” (159). In his review of The Rings of Saturn, Blake Morrison, his patience somewhat tried by Sebald’s narrator’s tenuously linked intellectual and physical wanderings, observes that “[mostly] Sebald gets away with it, though his publishers surely wouldn’t have indulged his Shandyism but for the success of The Emigrants. Sometimes even the most patient reader feels short-changed” (46) – Morrison gives the Southwold episode as an example of “a particularly digressive digression” (46). And indeed, for some readers, Sterne’s and Sebald’s books “lack plot.” Their narrative threads are not easy to follow (if there is a narrative thread at all). Sterne’s and Sebald’s method (be it designated as digressive, associative, or otherwise) largely makes the element of plot seem out of place in regard to their works, so much so, in fact, that an outline of events appears to be a better suited tool in approaching their novels. Arthur H. Cash, for instance, provides a good example of such an outline for Tristram Shandy (see Cash 36–40). Perhaps Sterne’s and Sebald’s approach to books, as composite intertexts, stems from their professional careers. Indeed, Sterne and Sebald were employed in oddly similar day jobs: Sterne as a village vicar, who delivered sermons, and Sebald as a professor of literature, who delivered lectures. Both, then, read, studied and responded, orally and in writing, to various texts. Moreover, just as Sterne published several volumes of his sermons during his lifetime, so too did Sebald publish several volumes of literary criticism in the course of his career (it might here be added that whereas Sterne published his sermons as The Sermons of Mr Yorick, the fictional character of Yorick thus doubling as the author, in Sebald’s fiction, by contrast, it is the author W. G. Sebald who doubles as the narrator-protagonist W. G. Sebald). Also, they both undertook literary careers relatively late. In 1759, at the age of 45, Sterne wrote his satire A Political Romance (which was, however, immediately withdrawn) and in that same year published the first two volumes of the nine-volume Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). In 1988, at the age of 44, Sebald published his first work of poetry, Nach der Natur – Ein Elementargedicht (After

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Nature) and in 1990, at the age of 46, his first work of fiction, Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo). (And it might here be added that in a further and least fortunate coincidence both these so-called late starters died at a relatively early age: Sterne, on 18 March 1768, at the age of 54, and Sebald, on 14 December 2001, at the age of 57 – some ten years approximately after they were first published.) Sterne’s and Sebald’s lifelong engagement with texts, as readers (first?) and writers (second?), therefore seems to be significant in regard of the highly intertextual nature of their own writings, consisting for a large part, as they do, of a wide range of documents, which merge, on occasion, with their own (as in the case of Hamburger), or with which they sometimes intersect (as with the terms of fortification). Perhaps it is worthwhile, as readers, to bear their intertextual approach in mind when reading Sterne and Sebald, for, though there are many different and diverse weavers, they are all, in a sense, working on a single web.

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Sebald’s Kafka Brad Prager

The double is everywhere in Franz Kafka’s work. In his notes and diaries, the author’s doubles appear to him, and his many memorable figures such as the land-surveyor K., Gregor Samsa, and Georg Bendemann were each taken as nothing less than alter-egos of the author himself. In W. G. Sebald’s numerous Kafka allusions, both to the writer and to his writings, one finds Kafka no less doubled. While Sebald acknowledged that in Kafka (who served as one his foremost inspirations, both in his work as a literary historian and as a creative writer) many armies of interpreters have found and would continue to find their representative thinker,1 he was hardly exempt from projecting multiple philosophical positions onto that single elusive image. He sometimes saw in Kafka a Marxist cultural critic, and at other times an existentialist whose fascination with death in life paralleled his own. The common ground between his two interpretations lies in the trope of the metamorphosis; the 1

I mean here to point to Susan Sontag’s comment that Kafka’s work has been subjected to “mass ravishment” by “armies of interpreters.” See Sontag, Against Interpretation, 8. Sebald made many comments of his own that were consistent with Sontag’s remark. In 1986, for example, he wrote, “[D]ie verquersten Deutungsversuche am Werk Kafkas [haben] ihren Sinn, was freilich nicht heißt, daß alle Interpretationen denselben Grad der Legitimität beanspruchen könnten. Wer die fast schon ins Abstruse angewachsene Literatur zu Kafka zu überblicken versucht, den nimmt vor allem wunder, weshalb das an der eigenen Ausgezehrtheit schon leidende Werk dieser parasitären Invasion nicht erlegen ist” (“Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen,” 194). And again later: “Nimmt man heute wahllos eine der seit den fünfziger Jahren erschienenen Kafka-Studien zur Hand, so ist es beinahe unglaublich, wieviel Staub und Schimmel die existentialistisch, theologisch, psychoanalytisch, strukturalistisch, poststrukturalistisch, rezeptionsästhetisch, oder systemkritisch inspirierten Sekundärwerke bereits angesetzt haben, wie öde in ihnen auf jeder Seite das Geklapper ist der Redundanz. Natürlich gibt es zwischendrin auch etwas anderes, denn im geraden Gegensatz zu dem auf den Mühlen der Akademien gemahlenen Schrot steht die gewissenhafte und geduldige Arbeit der Herausgeber und Realienforscher” (“Kafka im Kino,” 3).

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idea of physical and cultural transformation one finds echoed in Austerlitz, The Emigrants and other works. In the metamorphosis, the integration of man and animal worlds serves to inscribe a limit on that which is human, yielding an approach that is Marxist – in as much as it takes consciousness to be a historical category presently defined by industrialization – but one that also returns to an existential fascination with the image of the dying animal, often at the expense of other thematic concerns. The third of the four novellas that comprises Vertigo, “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” is devoted entirely to Kafka. Sebald there places emphasis on Kafka’s libidinal struggles, but Eros ultimately yields to Thanatos in that tale, turning his modernist homage into an existential rhapsody in which Kafka and his doppelgänger peer back at us from the land of the dead. In the following work I intend to examine the author’s parallel visions of Kafka in order to trace the paths, the problems, and finally the limits of Sebald’s own alternately Marxist and existential worldviews. Sebald’s quasi-fictional works are filled with protagonists that long to shed their identities and become something they are not. At points, some of them seek out butterflies as assurance that such wholesale transformations have analogues in nature. A fundamental link, then, in studying the relationship of Sebald’s work to that of Kafka, is their common engagement with such metamorphoses. Throughout The Emigrants, for example, butterflies appear as literal and figurative chimeras.2 His implicit contention is that one’s background or national identity may be a confining category out of which one would hope to metamorphose, yet cannot. He was writing from the knowing perspective of one who had undergone such a transculturation; having been born in Munich, he moved to England for good in 1970, but chose to retain his German passport, explaining, “I could have had a British passport years ago, but I was born into a particular historical context, and I really

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Butterflies and butterfly nets appear regularly in The Emigrants. In the first section, the one that focuses on Henry Selwyn, the narrator recalls a photo of Nabokov holding a butterfly net and Sebald includes that famous photo in the text. Additionally, in the third chapter, Fini, the narrator’s Aunt and Ambros Adelwarth’s niece, goes to visit Ambros in the clinic. They look out the window and see “The Butterfly Man” (Emigrants, 151). Ralf Juetter points out that this figure “is very likely to be Nabokov, who, not unlike Ambros Adelwarth, had to be content with memories of a happier past, a past before his exile, which was to become his life” (172).

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don’t have an option” (Angier, 13). His subjects likewise find it impossible to be reborn into national or cultural contexts other than their own. In an interview conducted shortly before he had completed Austerlitz, Sebald explored some of the connotations commonly associated with butterflies and revealed that he found moths, on the whole, more intriguing. He notes: “Butterflies flit about in daylight, moths hide in darkness. You only see them when, for instance, they get into a house. Then they sit absolutely still in a fold of a curtain or a whitewashed wall, for days on end, until all the life has gone out of them and they fall to the floor.” He then adds, “The idea of transformation, metamorphosis, in terms of turning from a pupa into a beautiful winged thing, doesn’t particularly appeal to me. It strikes me as rather trite” (Kafatou, 35). The metaphor of a transformation into “a beautiful winged thing” comes still more explicitly to the foreground in Sebald’s Austerlitz, a novel about a man by that name who was placed on the Kindertransport in Prague by his Jewish mother, Agáta Austerlitzová, in 1939, when he was four years old, and ended up living with a Calvinist preacher in Wales under a different name.3 The novel documents how the man, originally named Austerlitz, gradually uncovers lost memories from his childhood. It descends not into the particulars of his metamorphosis, but rather into those of his ongoing self-disclosure. At one point in the novel, Austerlitz supplies a long disquisition on the subject of moths, metamorphosis and death that reproduces many of the comments Sebald made in that earlier interview (Austerlitz, 90–94). Recognizing himself in the winged creatures, Austerlitz fixates on how they can keep still for long periods, lowering their body temperatures until they achieve a half-dead state. The main character’s fascinations, as well as those of the narrator, are with stillness, mortality, and the absence of boundaries between the

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In an interview with Maya Jaggi, Sebald explains the background of the quasi-fictional Jacques Austerlitz. He says: “Behind Austerlitz hide two or three, or perhaps three-and-a-half, real persons. One is a colleague of mine and another is a person about whom I happened to see a Channel 4 documentary by sheer chance. I was captivated by the tale of an apparently English woman [Susi Bechhöfer] who, as it transpired, had come to this country with her twin sister and been brought up in a Welsh Calvinist household. One of the twins died and the surviving twin never really knew that her origins were in a Munich orphanage. The story struck home; it cast my mind back to Munich, the nearest big city to where I grew up, so I could relate to the horror and distress” (“The Last Word”).

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worlds of the living and the dead, rather than with transformation and rebirth. The work seems almost explicitly directed against the “trite” idea that one can change from a pupa into a butterfly, flitting away from one’s problems, past, and national heritage. One of the sources of that novel’s title can be found in Kafka’s diaries. On December 24, 1911, Kafka attended his nephew’s circumcision in Prague. It was Christmas Eve, and therefore a moment when he was likely giving special consideration to his own Judaism in relation to the Christian culture in which he lived.4 In his diary, he writes, “This morning my nephew’s circumcision. A short bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2,800 circumcisions behind him, carried the thing out very skillfully.”5 Kafka seems repulsed by the methods of circumcision and describes the operation in graphic detail. He then reflects on the ritual as a whole: It is so indisputable that these religious foms, which have reached their final end, have merely a historical character even as they are practised today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.6

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The question of Kafka and assimilation was of particular interest to Sebald, because he had a specific interest in the many who immigrated to Vienna from the East. In the introduction to Beschreibung des Unglücks, Sebald writes: “Die Familie Kafka bewohnte in den Jahren 1896 bis 1907 eine Wohnung in der Zeltnergasse in Prag. Durch eines der Fenster dieser Wohnung blickte man nicht nach draußen hinaus, sondern in den Innenraum der Teynkirche, in welcher, wie es hieß, ein jüdischer Knabe namens Simon Abeles sein Grab hatte, der von seinem Vater ums Leben gebracht worden war, weil er zum Christentum hatte übertreten wollen. Wer versucht, sich die gemischten Gefühle zu vergegenwärtigen, mit denen der junge Franz Kafka von diesem eigenartigen Logenplatz herab beispielsweise das düstere Karfreitagsritual verfolgt haben mag, der kann vielleicht ermessen, wie akut das Gefühl der Fremdheit trotz unmittelbarster Nachbarschaft im Prozeß der Assimilation zu sein vermochte” (10–11). Kafka, Diaries, 147. The German text reads as follows: “Heute vormittag Beschneidung meines Neffen. Ein kleiner krummbeiniger Mann, Austerlitz, der schon zweitausendundachthundert Beschneidungen hinter sich hat, führte die Sache sehr geschickt aus” (Tagebücher, 204). This and other translations are my own, unless a translation is cited. Kafka, Diaries, 147–48. “Diese an ihrem letzten Ende angelangten religiösen Formen hatten schon in ihrer gegenwärtigen Übung einen so unbestrittenen bloß historischen Charakter, daß nur das Verstreichen einer ganz kleinen Zeit innerhalb dieses Vormittags nötig schien, um die Anwesenden durch Mitteilungen

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As Sander Gilman points out, in this passage “Kafka stresses the distance that the westernized Jews have from the intrinsic meaning of the ritual [of circumcision].” He adds, “Indeed, what Kafka describes is the contrast between the safe, clean, but forgetful world in Prague, and the dirty, yet vibrant and wholesome world of Eastern Judaism” (33). In this way, the name Austerlitz – taken as a title not only for its self-evident homophony with the word “Auschwitz” – is a symbol both for the violence of inscribing Jewish identity on the body and for how that identity is carried across European borders as personal history. Like Kafka, the protagonist of Austerlitz, Jacques Austerlitz – who had for years lived with the impression that his given name was Dafydd Elias – was a Jew from Prague, and he is forced to confront the gradual disclosure of his Jewish past. The idea that one could walk away from one’s history, especially a history that is marked on the body shortly after birth, without being overwhelmed by its traces, is presented here as an illusory butterfly fantasy. In this and other ways, Austerlitz picks up on aspects of Kafka’s work. Returning more directly to the question of metamorphosis, Sebald’s narrator now and again blends the characteristics of men and animals to describe his title character and uses these animalizing images to depict an alienating bourgeois world. Alluding to specific passages from Kafka cited elsewhere in Sebald’s work,7 the narrator imagines that the waiting room of the Antwerp train station, the Salle des pas perdus, is akin to a “nocturama” he had visited. He observes:

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über den veralteten frühern Gebrauch der Beschneidung und ihrer halbgesungenen Gebete historisch zu interessieren” (Tagebücher, 205). The passage recalls ones found in Kafka, and in his review of a 1996 book entitled Kafka im Kino, Sebald indicates his familiarity with such passages. Sebald writes: “Als Kafka im Winter 1911 auf einer Dienstreise das Kaiserpanorama in Friedland besucht und durch das Okular in die Tiefe des künstlichen Raumes hineinstarrt, sieht er die Stadt Verona mit Menschen ‘wie Wachspuppen an den Sohlen im Boden im Pflaster befestigt.’ Zwei Jahre später wird er auf denselben Gassen herumgehen und sich so weit ab von aller Lebendigkeit fühlen wie vielleicht sonst nur die Puppen, die er in Friedland gesehen hat. Das innerste Geheimnis der profanen Metaphysik ist diese seltsame Sensation der Körperabsenz, die hervorgerufen wird durch einen, wenn man so sagen kann, überentwickelten Blick. Bezeichnenderweise müssen sich ja auch die Klienten, wenn sie aus dem Dämmer der Peep-Show wieder auf die Straße herauskommen, immer einen kleinen Ruck geben, um wieder Herr zu werden über den ihnen vor lauter Schauen abhanden gekommenen Körper” (“Kafka im Kino,” 3).

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Like the creatures in the Nocturama, which had included a strikingly large number of dwarf species – tiny fennec foxes, spring-hares, hamsters – the railway passengers seemed to me somehow miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the ceiling or because of the gathering dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the passing thought, nonsensical in itself, that they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo.

Without skipping a beat, he then adds, “One of the people waiting in the Salle des pas perdus was Austerlitz” (Austerlitz, 6–7), giving the reader every indication that he imagines Austerlitz to be – like a figure from Kafka’s menagerie or even like Kafka himself – either a man who feels caught between man and animal states, or a man among animals who call themselves men. It is no accident that the novel Austerlitz resonates with Kafka’s writings; Sebald made his choice of intertexts clear. One should not, however, draw the conclusion that Sebald and Kafka were simply trying to assert that once one is born a Jew one must stay a Jew, despite the fact that some of Kafka’s most famous stories, such as “Report to an Academy” (to which Sebald himself devoted a literary-critical essay) can and have been read to satirize the suggestion that one could convert or assimilate away from Judaism. The constellations depicted both by Austerlitz and by Kafka’s stories are more complex. The works comment on both sides of the assimilation equation. Their protagonists – Austerlitz as well as the ape that poses as a man in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” for example – are the living traces of a past with which bourgeois culture cannot come to terms. The acts of becoming-animal fail to liberate their protagonists. They only point to the absurdity of assuming that there is a moral or existential limit by which one could define human behavior against that of animals. Kafka and Sebald used the animal kingdom in order to present the position that in any “civilized” society, inhumanity knows no bounds. It is difficult to think the word metamorphosis – and especially the trope of the insect metamorphosis – in connection with the German literary tradition without returning to Kafka’s most well-known story of the same name. It would be premature, however, to confine an analysis of Kafka’s animal stories to that single association. Animals are located in the centers or peripheries of most of Kafka’s narratives. In some cases, figures that were once human have metamorphosed, in others they are in the process of transforming, and in still others they appear at

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first to be animals and then turn out to be objects (as in the well-known case of Odradek). Sebald himself was drawn to apocalyptic fiction about the historically defined character of human consciousness (and specifically to the work of Stanislaw Lem8). He observed that the quasiscience-fictional vision one finds in Kafka’s stories makes them all the more timely. For Sebald, Kafka not only offered a means to understand our relationship to the past, but a means to understand the future as well; he opened a window onto a coming age when our past “humanness” will have become unrecognizable to us. Interpreting Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” Sebald’s observations are consistent with those of authors like Lem and Borges. Sebald writes: “The conjectures that Kafka pursues in his metamorphosis stories are of a peremptory interest at a time like the present, when a fundamental mutation of mankind seems underway” (“Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen,”195).9 Moreover, in a critical tone that unambiguously echoes Theodor Adorno’s Marxism, he writes: The unfortunate hybrid-creature [in “Report to an Academy”] appears as the speaking instantiation of the soul, and one suspects that the academics represent figures that are no longer human in any way, but are instead inorganic creations that only simulate human existence in their outward appearance. From this constellation the text can be read between its lines as a fairy tale of the coming of the machines, now translated into the real fact that machines have come to take the burden of knowledge from us. If intelligence falls entirely under the sway of electronics, moral scruples are closed out as redundant, and the perfection of instrumental reason is successful thanks to our commerce with the machines, then our prior existence [vie antérieure] as humans will be as little memorable to us as the ape’s animal prehistory is memorable to him. And our last effort at recuperating

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In the essay “Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen – Zu Kafkas Evolutionsgeschichten,” Sebald praises Lem, saying that he was an author “der bereits zu Beginn unseres Jahrhunderts den Versuch unternahm, mögliche Transformationen der menschlichen Intelligenz und Sensibilität zu begreifen, etwa indem er sich und seine Leser dazu anhält, den Übergang von der vormenschlichen zur menschlichen Entwicklungstufe in der Imagination nachzuvollziehen” (195). He also begins his essay “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte – Versuch über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung mit Anmerkungen zu Kasak, Nossack und Kluge” with a long epigram from Lem’s Imaginary Magnitudes. His later figuration of that essay, Luftkrieg und Literatur, begins with a Lem epigram as well. The German text reads as follows: “Die Konjekturen, die Kafka in seinen Verwandlungsgeschichten verfolgt, sind in einer Zeit wie der gegenwärtigen, in der eine tiefgreifende Mutation der Menschheit sich anzubahnen scheint, von unabweisbarem Interesse.”

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the existence we have overcome, the one we have forfeited, will be taken up by subsequent generations with the same indifference with which the high masters of the Academy take up the words of the poor ape. (“Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen,” 197)10

While this emphasis on instrumental reason and the transformation of the species forms one part of Sebald’s interest in Kafka, there is another direction in which the novel Austerlitz is linked with the corpus of Kafka’s work. The looming specter of death is omnipresent in the writings of both authors. Sebald’s interest in Kafka is occasionally guided by existential concerns that amount to – as one might say, borrowing a term from Adorno – a “death metaphysics.” At the top of the earlier of his two anthologized essays on The Castle, Sebald inscribes the following epigram from Kafka: “Death is before us, much like a painting of the battle of Alexandria on a schoolroom wall.”11 This epigram resonates with Austerlitz insofar as one of the other explicitly mentioned sources of work’s title is the name of a Moravian village in which Russian and Austrian troops fought the French in 1805. As the narrator of the novel recounts, Jacques Austerlitz heard his schoolteacher talk about the battle at length when he was a young man, and at that point he started to have a sense of pride in his own original name. He adds, the more often the teacher said it in front of the class, “the more it really did become my own name, and the more clearly I thought I saw that what had at first seemed like an 10

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The German text reads: “So erscheint die unselige Zwitterkreatur [in “Report to an Academy”] als die beredte, seelenvolle Instanz, während es sich bei den Akademikern, möchte man mutmaßen, vielleicht schon um gar nicht mehr menschliche Figuren, sondern um anorganische Wesenheiten handelt, die das menschliche Leben nur noch dem äußeren Erscheinungsbild nach simulieren. Aus dieser Konstellation ergibt sich eine Interlinearversion des Texts, die davon erzählt, daß nach uns die Maschinen kommen werden, ein Märchen also, das jetzt, da die Maschinen dabei sind, uns die Last des Wissens abzunehmen, in die Wirklichkeit übersetzt wird. Wenn uns, vermittels unserer Kommunikation mit den Maschinen, die Anverwandlung der elektronisch gesteuerten Intelligenz, die Ausschaltung redundanter moralischer Skrupel und damit die Vervollkommnung der instrumentellen Vernunft gelungen sein wird, dann wird uns unsere menschliche vie antérieure wohl ebensowenig erinnerlich sein wie dem Affen sein animalisches Vorleben. Und unser letzter Versuch einer Rekapitulierung unserer überwundenen Existenz, der Beschreibung dessen, was wir eingebüßt haben, wird von den nachgeborenen Generationen mit derselben Indifferenz aufgenommen werden, wie die Worte des armen Affen von den hohen Herren der Akademie” (“Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen,” 197). The German text reads: “Der Tod ist vor uns, etwa wie im Schulzimmer an der Wand ein Bild der Alexanderschlacht.”

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ignominious flaw was changing into a bright light always hovering before me” (Austerlitz, 72). The battle of Alexandria hangs before Kafka, defining his existence, just as the battle of Austerlitz hovers before Sebald’s protagonist. Similarly, Sebald’s earliest Castle essay focuses on the land-surveyor K.’s circuitous travels at the periphery of the Castle. Sebald notes that the novel’s circularity and endlessness thematic repetitions bespeak the anxiety that one would yearn to die, yet be unable to. He there interprets The Castle as a waking nightmare wherein the protagonist is imprisoned in a netherworld. Sebald summarizes his purpose early in the essay, writing: “Critics have singularly failed to come to terms with [Kafka’s] gaze, they have overlooked the yearning, fearful images of death which pervade Kafka’s work and which impart that melancholy whose onset was as early as it was persistent” (“The Undiscover’d Country,” 22). In its German and English forms (see also “Thanatos”), that essay focuses on the Castle as the center of the land of the undead. For Sebald, every sign in the novel is a sign of death; its characters resemble corpses and its inns are always the “assembly points” of the dead. This vision is one of a land similar to that which is inhabited by Austerlitz, who through his melancholy lens sees the night filled with “nocturnal specters.” To Austerlitz, train stations seem like entrances to the underworld, and he even takes note of one that is built on a burial ground. Upon reading Balzac, Sebald’s death-obsessed protagonist, who keeps fossilized moths in jars, concludes, “the border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think” (Austerlitz, 283).12 While Sebald’s 1986 essay on “Report to an Academy” had been Adornian through and through, arguing that Kafka wrote from the perspective of a “reverse natural history,” such an angle on Kafka, heavily inflected by the language of critical theory, competes with the fascination with death evinced in his early studies of The Castle. In those essays, Kafka is represented as an existentialist of sorts, who studies the obstacles that impede one’s own confrontation with death, or – to borrow a term from Adorno’s nemesis, Martin Heidegger – one’s being-towarddeath. Given these two simultaneous and competing approaches to Kafka, it is no accident that Sebald chose to spend time studying, re-thinking, and in some measure rewriting Kafka’s fable of the undead, “The Hunter Gracchus” in his own tale, “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at 12

There are no shortages of such images in The Emigrants either. In Chapter Four, for example, postindustrial Manchester is represented as the city of the dead.

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Riva.”13 That story synthesizes a number of Sebald’s Kafka fixations: the conflation between human and animal worlds, Kafka’s modernist exploration of the libido, and ultimately his fascination with Kafka’s relationship to death. In what follows, I intend to explore how that quasi-fictional Kafka narrative locates itself among Sebald’s multiple Kafka standpoints. Kafka’s tale “The Hunter Gracchus” describes a ship silently approaching an Italian harbor. A man with “wildly matted hair” lies on the ship, and for all purposes he appears to be dead. To the Burgomaster of Riva, who greets him on the bier, he explains that he was a hunter who fell from a precipice while hunting a chamois [eine Gemse], and since then he has been trapped on a death ship. This ship, which was to carry him to the other side, has lost its way, and he cannot make it to the other world. He asserts that he would have been happy to die, and when he thought it was his turn, he gladly slipped into his shroud. Now, however, because of the mistake, he cannot die, and he moves as if forever trapped on a staircase, sometimes up, sometimes down, but always in motion. In this way, the hunter laments, he has been turned into a butterfly.” Though it seems that it is only a story about a half-death or living death, there are animals other than the butterfly concealed throughout “The Hunter Gracchus.” The name Gracchus shares a root with the word “grackle” (the Latin graculus), or blackbird. In Czech the word for this type of bird is kavka, and Kafka’s father had a blackbird on his business letterhead (as noted in Davenport, 27). It has also been noted that the word that Kafka uses for the Hunter’s prey, Gemse, is a word that was commonly used for prostitutes at the time. The critic Frank Möbus writes that the knowledge that Gemse means prostitute is “essential for an understanding of this story,” and that in general, “Gemse-hunt” generally denoted a visit to a woman of the oldest profession. Still today, the adjective derived from it, “gemsisch” is commonly used in Vienna for “wanton or lusty.” In Prague this phraseology is particularly well known because one of the best known bordellos of Europe, the “Goldschmied Salon,” had the address, no. 5 Gemse Lane (259–60).14

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Oliver Sill sees the story as an allegory that is key to understanding the whole of Vertigo. Sill notes that images of the hunter Gracchus occur in every chapter. Indeed Gracchus plays a prominent role in the fourth, autobiographical chapter in the persona of the hunter Schlag, a point I have chosen not to explore further in this essay due to considerations of space. See Sill, especially 606. The German text reads: “‘Gemsenjagd’ bezeichnete … allgemein den Besuch bei einer Dame des horizontalen Gewerbes, und noch heute ist das davon abgeleitete Adjektiv ‘gemsisch’ in Wien geläufig für ‘lüstern, geil.’ In Prag kannte man diesen

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The overwhelming tendency, therefore, has been to read this story as an allegory for Kafka’s personal consternation over whether or not to marry Felice Bauer,15 an engagement that he broke off twice, first in 1914 and then again in 1917. His anxiety about commitment was compounded by his self-reproach for having visited prostitutes. Statements found in Kafka’s letters to Felice confirm such readings. While he was in Riva, Kafka described his own situation: “Imprisoned by inhibitions with which you are familiar, I am unable to move, I am utterly, but utterly incapable of suppressing the inner obstacles.” Returning to an animal metaphor, he then added, “What hinders me is not having to ‘give up too much of myself,’ … it is rather that I am prostrate, like an animal that one cannot get at (not even I) either by coaxing or persuasion” (Letters, 320). Taking this perspective into account, it would seem that the story, and even its animal transformations, are more about sex than anything else, and in some measure, Sebald takes things in this direction. Walter Benjamin, with whose Kafka readings Sebald repeatedly evinced familiarity, reads “Gracchus” in the light of its messianic overtones.16 Benjamin’s Kafka reading balances anxiety about barbaric Modernity with hopefulness. He notes the appearance of the butterfly in “The Hunter Gracchus,” and points out that in Kafka, animals akin to the butterfly into which Gracchus has turned, tend to flit “irresolutely” from one anxiety to the next. Benjamin then summarizes: “This much is certain: of all of Kafka’s creatures, the animals have the greatest opportunity for reflection. What corruption is in the law, anxiety is in their thinking. It messes a situation up, yet is the only hopeful thing about it” (“Franz Kafka,” 132). Taking a different direction from that of Benjamin, Adorno links Gracchus to the historical category of the bourgeoisie,

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Phraseologismus besonders genau, denn dort befand sich damals eines der berühmtesten Bordelle Europas, der ‘Salon Goldschmied’ – Anschrift: Gemsengasse 5” (259–60). See Citati’s biography, pages 113–14, for an expanded comment on this subject. As an example of such familiarity, consider the explicitly messianic moments in Sebald’s own literary-critical reflections on Kafka. In his 1991 essay on The Castle, for example, Sebald describes how the figure of Barnabas, the messenger to and from the castle, appears to Kafka’s K. Sebald explains: “Der Schein, dem K. hier auf einen Augenblick sein Vertrauen schenkt, ist der der in ihm aufflammenden Hoffnung auf eine der häßlichen Welt eingeborene Beziehung zu seiner besseren Vision. Bei solchem Schein kann Theologie, wie Benjamin wußte, als bei ihrem liebsten Gegenstand ihr Zelt aufschlagen, um der ausdrucksbildenden Kraft der Finsternis … ein Gegenteil zu bieten” (Unheimliche Heimat, 102).

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which refuses to die despite its utter uselessness. He links this understanding of Gracchus to the horror of Auschwitz, writing: Perhaps this is what is meant by the tale … the once wild hunter, a man of force who was unable to die. Likewise, the bourgeoisie has failed to die. History becomes Hell in Kafka because the opportunity for salvation was missed. The late bourgeoisie itself brought this about. In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middle ground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies, victims unable to take their own lives. (Prisms, 260; translation modified)

To varying degrees, Kafka’s writing now and again brought Sebald over to Adornian positions. Primarily, Sebald recognized Kafka as a chronicler of the decline of the autonomous subject; a position that has often been attributed to Adorno himself, who was nostalgic for the liberal subject of the nineteenth century, one he felt that mass culture (and eventually the culture industry) had eliminated. Sebald summarizes, “everywhere in Kafka’s works there are signs that he was feeling a vague sense of horror over the impending mutations of mankind that accompanied the emerging age of mechanical reproduction; in these mutations he saw the end coming of the autonomously educated bourgeois individual” (“Kafka im Kino,” 3).17 Along similar lines, Sebald demonstrates awareness that under conditions of capitalist production the subject turns itself into the very object that it wishes to dominate, as he indicated in his reading of “Report to an Academy.” Very much in the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Sebald concludes, “Our mutation will be complete when the riddle of humankind is exchanged for the transparency of machinery, and when conversely, the machine ceases to function in accord with its blueprint. Then subjectivity and objectivity, the principles of our thought, will have entered into a new relationship, in accord with nature, so to speak” (“Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen,” 201).18 In that essay, Sebald takes the 17

18

The German text reads: “[I]n Kafkas Werken finden sich überall Anzeichen dafür, daß er ein undeutliches Grauen empfand vor den mit dem beginnenden Zeitalter der technischen Reproduktion sich anbahnenden Mutationen der Menschheit, mit denen er wohl das Ende des von der bürgerlichen Kultur ausgebildeten autonomen Individuums heraufkommen sah.” The German text reads: “Unsere Mutation wird vollzogen sein, wenn die Rätselhaftigkeit des Menschen eingetauscht ist gegen die Geheimnislosigkeit der Maschine und wenn umgekehrt die Maschine dagegen sich sperrt, nach ihrem blueprint zu funktionieren. Damit sind Subjektivität und Objektivität, die Grundbegriffe unseres Denkens, naturgemäß, möchte man sagen, in eine andere Relation getreten.”

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position that humanity will never overcome its own alienation through machines. He adds: “For a long time now we have participated in a charade, believing that it was the dog who was obeying the voice of his master coming from within the apparatus, but the dog, as we all know, is not so dumb. It is we who sit mutely before that box to which we have given our voice” (198).19 While Kafka’s influence tended to bring Sebald around to Marxist criticism in the vein of Adorno, his story, “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” elects to capture a different Kafka. It depicts an author and stylist more consistent with the world of Thomas Mann and Freud than with that of Adorno. The narrative is a fantasy closely based on an excursion that Kafka took in September of 1913. Kafka visited Riva twice, first in September of 1909 (with Max and Otto Brod) and then again four years later. In Sebald’s text, as in reality, Kafka, who is here “Dr. K.,” has been sent to Vienna by the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company in order to attend a conference, after which he was to continue on to Verona and Riva. Quoting almost verbatim from a letter to Felice Bauer from September 9, 1913, Sebald reconstructs Dr. K.’s thoughts, employing the first-person indirect, Kafka’s own favored technique. Sebald recounts: “Dr. K. feels he has reached the end of the line and realizes that he should have begged the Director on his knees to let him stay in Prague. But of course it is too late now” (Vertigo, 141–42). As Möbus and others have noted, however, Kafka ultimately saw the voyage as an opportunity to separate himself physically and psychologically from Felice, whom he did not wish to marry (see Möbus, 253). Dr. K. spends three weeks at Dr. von Hartungen’s hydropathic sanatorium in Riva, where he has a rendezvous with “a very Italian looking woman” from Genoa. He is arguably interested in her because she does not appear Jewish (as argued by Möbus, 269), and he is clearly also distracted by his own desires for men. Like Mann’s Aschenbach, Dr. K. seems inspired to romance (and homosexuality) by the appearance of Italian waters, and perhaps the guilt from this tryst occasions the reflections that are said to have inspired Kafka’s “Gracchus.” In the final pages of Sebald’s story, he seamlessly integrates passages from “Gracchus,” and his dreamlike prose mirrors that of Kafka. Like Dr. K. (as well as K. 19

The German text reads: “Eine Zeitlang gaben wir in einer seltsamen Charade noch vor, es sei der Hund der Stimme seines Herrn aus dem Apparat hörig, obschon der Hund, wie wir wissen so dumm gar nicht ist. Wir sind es ja, die stumm vor dem Kasten sitzen, dem wir unsere Stimme geliehen haben.”

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the land-surveyor, and the many protagonists of Sebald’s own longer narratives), Gracchus is doomed to live in permanent exile. The hunter feels he is punished, although he has done nothing wrong, and Sebald directly and indirectly illustrates how Kafka links the inability to die with his subject’s own self-hatred for having wandering desires. By 1913 Kafka had become increasingly anxious about his own bachelorhood. Two years earlier, the figure of the bachelor had haunted his stories, making appearances in “Description of a Struggle” and “Wedding Preparations in the Country.”20 As Sebald explores, Kafka’s anxiety about marital and familial responsibility was exacerbated by his own heterosexual ambivalence. As Sebald narrates it, Dr. K. becomes unsettled soon after his arrival in Vienna and he there imagines Franz Grillparzer, the Austrian poet and dramatist, seated next to him, placing a hand on his knee. For Kafka, Grillparzer symbolized the possibility of acting on one’s homosexual desires. Kafka explored this idea in a letter to Felice that Sebald grafts almost directly into his own text. In the letter, Kafka rhapsodizes that he found it impossible to lead the only possible kind of life, i.e. to live together, each one to be free, each one for himself, not to be married, neither outwardly nor actually, simply to be together and by doing so to have taken the last possible step beyond the friendship between men, right up to the limit set for myself where one foot is already raised. But after all, this too is impossible … [Grillparzer] did it, that very thing … But what an intolerable, wicked, repulsive life it was, and yet just about what I could manage, though with far greater suffering – since, in certain ways, I am much weaker. Return to this later. (Letters 318–19)

The editors of his letters note that above the word “Return,” Kafka inserted the word “dream,” as a reminder, perhaps, to transcribe a dream he had had at this point. In Sebald’s story, he has Dr. K. recapitulate this fragment of Kafka’s letter to Felice (Vertigo, 142–43). The scene in which Grillparzer places a hand on Dr. K.’s knee was added by Sebald, and may be a creative exploration of the un-transcribed dream to which Kafka was referring. This placement of the hand on the knee by someone who has taken “the last possible step beyond the friendship between men” becomes the novella’s defining moment. At the conclusion of Kafka’s tale, the chief magistrate of Riva comes to talk to Gracchus, and at the end of their conversation, the hunter lays his hand on the magistrate’s knee. Sebald’s work, which began with this very gesture, ends with it as 20

For a more thorough exploration of the image of “The Bachelor” in Kafka’s work, see Citati’s biography, especially 17–26.

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well. In the story’s last moments, Sebald’s Dr. K. admits to having lustfully followed the handsome young son of the owner of a Jewish bookstore in Prague, while experiencing “a feeling of unbounded pleasure.” Sebald writes, “At this point Dr. K surely came within an inch of admitting to a desire which we must assume remained unstilled.” He adds: “And how are we to fend off the fate of being unable to depart this life … confined to a bed in our sickness, and, as Gracchus the Huntsman does, touching, in a moment of distraction, the knee of the man who was to have been our salvation” (Vertigo, 167). “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva” shares much in common with Death in Venice, but Sebald and Dr. K. refuse their protagonists the easy way out that was given to Mann’s Aschenbach; Dr. K. was denied the luxury of a satisfying love-life as Gracchus was denied the possibility of a satisfying death, and the two appear to partake of the same purgatory. Intrigued by the connection between sex and death in Kafka’s work, Sebald had remarked that in the Castle the prevailing irony consists in the fact that that which is denied in one’s longing for love, in the end is also left unsatisfied by the death drive. Both drives are, according to Freud, directed at the dissolution of individuated existence, beyond which, at least in the terms of our concepts and imagination, nothing is to be experienced. Kafka described the identity of Eros and Thanatos as comforting and unsettling at one and the same time (“Das unentdeckte Land,” 87).21

In “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva” Sebald studies still more closely this connection between Eros and Thanatos. Erotic fulfillment is coupled with a search for subjective dissolution; a quest for a moment’s freedom. In conjunction with the idea that death lies behind all erotic desire, Sebald’s tale at one point depicts Dr. K passing through Verona and spending the day in Desenzano. Dr. K. visits a cinema there, and Sebald writes: There is nothing in Dr. K.’s Desenzano notes to tell us of what he saw on that 20th of September in Verona … Was it, as I initially supposed, a story that ran with some success in the cinemas of Austria in 1913, the story of the unfortunate Student of Prague, who cut himself off from love and life, when, on the 13th of May, 1820, he sold his soul to a certain Scapinelli? The extraordinary exterior 21

The German text reads: “Die äußerste Ironie besteht allerdings darin, daß das, was der Liebessehnsucht versagt wird, zuletzt auch dem Todestrieb nicht verstattet werden kann, dann auch dieser zielt nach der These Freuds auf die Auflösung der individuierten Existenz, jenseits derer, zumindest in unseren Begriffen und Vorstellungen, nichts erfahrbar ist. Kafka hat die Identität von Eros und Thanatos als trostreich und trostlos zugleich beschrieben” (87).

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shots in this film, the silhouettes of his native city flickering across the screen, would doubtless have sufficed to move Dr. K. deeply, most of all perhaps the fate of the eponymous hero, Balduin, since in him he would have recognized a kind of doppelgänger, just as Balduin recognizes his other self in the dark-coated brother whom he could never and nowhere escape. In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness.

He then adds, “would this sort of scenario not have struck Dr. K. as the description of a struggle in which … the principal character and his opponent are in the most intimate and self-destructive of relationships, such that, when the hero is driven into a corner by his companion he is forced to declare: I am betrothed, I admit it” (Vertigo, 150–52). Here, Sebald explicitly refers to “Description of a Struggle.” In that narrative, Kafka’s protagonist and alter-ego is accompanied by a male acquaintance with whom he becomes so erotically entangled that he must finally come clean and confess to him that he is engaged. At that point he recommends to his acquaintance – who is himself evidently the alter-ego of the narrator, and to whom he obviously finds himself attracted – that he kill himself. The inability to act on one’s (homosexual) desires is here again depicted as a half-death, or as a longing for death. At the root of Kafka’s suicidal logic was distaste for bourgeois marriage as well as a desire for men, both of which are in evidence in “Description of a Struggle.” In a letter from September 28, 1913, Kafka had written to Max Brod: You might think that being alone and not speaking of such things gives one the sense of being in control. That is not the case. The need to be alone exists outside of me, and I am hungry for it. To imagine a honeymoon couple distresses me. Every honeymooning couple I see, whether I come in contact with them or not, is a repulsive sight to me, and when I want to awaken a sense of disgust, I need only imagine placing my arms around a woman’s hips.22

The way he represses his desires by the waters of Riva sounds like analogous moments in Death in Venice. In Mann’s story, as well as here and in “Description of a Struggle,” the upraised boot that waits to crush be22

The German text reads: “Du könntest glauben, daß das Alleinsein und das Nichtreden diesen Gedanken eine solche Übermacht gibt. Das ist es aber nicht, das Bedürfnis nach Alleinsein ist ein selbständiges, ich bin gierig nach Alleinsein, die Vorstellung einer Hochzeitsreise macht mir Entsetzen, jedes Hochzeitsreisepaar, ob ich mich zu ihm in Beziehung setze oder nicht, ist mir ein widerlicher Anblick, und wenn ich mir Ekel erregen will, brauche ich mir nur vorzustellen, daß ich einer Frau den Arm um die Hüfte lege.”

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neath it the man who gives into those desires is death itself. Sebald’s Dr. K. is trapped between worlds, much like K., the land-surveyor, as he was depicted in Sebald’s reading of The Castle. His anxieties place him on the edge of society, such that death becomes his only homeland (see “Das unentdeckte Land,” 86). In Desenzano, the eternally irresolvable encounter with death is embodied by an encounter with a doppelgänger.23 In his review of Hanns Zischler’s book Kafka im Kino, Sebald makes the connection between death and the cinematic doppelgänger explicit: In the end, the whole technology of photographic representation relies on the principal of absolutely perfect duplication, or on the potential of infinite reproduction. One need only take one of those stereoscopic cards in their hands and one already sees everything twice. And because the copy remained even after its subject was long gone, there was a disquieting feeling that that which had been photographed, man or nature, possesses a lesser degree of authenticity than the copy, and that the copy excoriates the original, so to speak, precisely as one who meets his doppelgänger feels himself negated. (“Kafka im Kino,” 3)24

In Sebald’s understanding, Dr. K.’s encounter with the cinema certainly recalls the definition of an experience that is “uncanny,” or unheimlich. Taking cues from Freud’s essay, the history of meanings associated with the doppelgänger was always directly connected with death, and as it is employed here, the double is death’s harbinger. Sebald’s Kafka appears to have been asking himself the question, how can I be both here and 23

24

One should note that the doppelgänger makes an appearance in Austerlitz as well. Austerlitz, while traveling on a train, thinks to himself: “I recollected another idea which had obsessed me over a long period: the image of a twin brother who had been with me on that long journey, sitting motionless by the window of the compartment, staring out into the dark. I knew nothing about him, not even his name, and I had never exchanged so much as a word with him, but whenever I though of him I was tormented by the notion that towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings” (Austerlitz, 224–25). The German text reads: “Die ganze Technik der fotografischen Abbildung beruht schließlich auf dem Prinzip der vollkommen modellgetreuen Verdoppelung beziehungsweise der potentiell unendlichen Vervielfältigung. Man brauchte nur eine dieser stereoskopischen Karten in die Hand zu nehmen, und schon sah man alles zweimal. Und weil das Abbild noch fortdauerte, wenn das Abgebildete längst vergangen war, so lag auch die ungute Ahnung nicht fern, daß dem Abgebildeten, den Menschen und der Natur, ein geringerer Grad von Authentizität eigne als der Kopie, daß die Kopie das Original aushöhle, wie es auch heißt, daß einer, der seinem Doppelgänger begegnet, sich selber vernichtet fühlt” (“Kafka im Kino,” 3).

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there? And because my twin negates me, how do I exist? For Dr. K., as was the case in “Description of a Struggle,” his other existence is as a man who has taken the “next step” past friendship with another man. In taking that step, he would finally and erotically negate the self, but in not taking the step, he is neither here nor there, trapped between worlds in a half-dead state. Unresolved Eros and unsatisfied Thanatos are thereby linked, hence the image of one trapped between worlds, flitting about like a butterfly. By all accounts, Gracchus and The Castle’s K. were each Kafka’s own double, and the two figures share much in common. Sebald underscores the equation between these two figures in the modified and anthologized version of his first essay on that novel. Like Gracchus, K. was caught between the worlds of the living and the dead, and eventually Sebald links the two with one another, writing: The longing for everlasting peace, which is a promise held only by death in K.’s world, coupled with the fear of not being able to die and of an unforeseeably long stay in the no-man’s land between man and thing – where we encounter the plagued Hunter Gracchus – are the longing and the fear that make up the motifs of K.’s journey into “the undiscovered country from which no wanderer returns.” (“Das unentdeckte Land,” 92)25

Like the Gracchus story, which at first seemed to be about sex and selfloathing, Sebald’s Kafka reading in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks is all about death. Sebald’s Kafka repeatedly appears as an emissary of death, sending us messages from beyond the grave. Again, in his review of Zischler’s book, Sebald noted: Hardly ever before has one seemed as alone as Kafka does in his final photographs, upon which has been based, by the way, an extrapolation, painted by Jan Peter Tripp. It shows Kafka as he might have looked had he lived eleven or twelve years longer. It world have been the year 1935. The Reichsparteitag would have come and gone just as in that Riefenstahl film. The race laws would already have been passed and Kafka, had he let such a photo be taken, would have looked at us just as he does in this ghostly image – from beyond the grave. (“Kafka im Kino,” 3)26 25

26

The German text reads: “Die Sehnsucht nach unabänderlicher Ruhe, der in der Welt K.s allein der Tod eine mögliche Erfüllung verspricht, und die Angst vor dem Nichtsterbenkönnen und einem unabsehbaren Aufenthalt in dem Niemandsland zwischen Mensch und Ding, in welchem uns der geplagte Jäger Gracchus begegnet, diese Sehnsucht und diese Angst dürfen als die Motive gelten für diese Reise K.s in ‘das unentdeckte Land, von des Bezirk kein Wandrer wiederkehrt’” (“Das unentdeckte Land,” 92). The German text reads: “Tatsächlich schien kaum je zuvor einer so allein wie Kafka auf seinen letzten Bildern, zu denen es übrigens noch ein gewissermaßen

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In “Gracchus,” Kafka thematizes the dark side of what it might mean to transform into a butterfly. He defines it as the inability to die a proper death, flitting about looking for everlasting peace. The butterfly as a figure for evading death brings us back to the comment made by Sebald in his earlier interview where he had noted that an imprisoned moth simply holds quite still, “until it just keels over.” He then had added, “Perhaps that is what we should do, instead of bustling about going to see the doctor and causing trouble to everyone around us … To me the really wonderful thing about [moths] is the way they perish” (Kafatou, 34–5). If Gracchus had not moved from port to port, struggling to avoid death, but had been allowed to perish, like a forlorn moth on the wall, his fate would have been less cruel. The use of the word “perish” in Sebald’s comments inadvertently recalls an existentialism found at various stages of Heidegger’s work. For Heidegger, the distinction between to die (sterben) and to perish (verenden), dual modes of either being-towards-death or of having no knowledge of the matter, constitute the chief difference between man and animal. The idea stems from the traditional philosophical position that animals have no access to language, a position of which Kafka made light, always refuting the boundary between man and animal, and rejecting the relevance of such bogus distinctions. As early as in Being and Time, Heidegger made claims about authentic Dasein as a mode of being-towards-death that assimilates the knowledge that it can and will die. In contrast to man, animals perish without dying, without being able to understand the loss of their own lives. Arguably, this is a key distinction in Heidegger’s thought, allowing the image of man to transform into Dasein through becoming capable of death as death. In his lecture The Thing from 1949, Heidegger makes his fundamental distinction clear. He writes: Mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of being itself. Death, as the shrine of aus ihnen extrapoliertes gibt, das von Jan Peter Tripp gemalt wurde. Es zeigt Kafka, wie er vermutlich ausgesehen hätte, wenn er elf oder zwölf Jahre länger am Leben geblieben wäre. Man hätte dann das Jahr 1935 geschrieben. Der Reichsparteitag wäre über die Bühne gegangen, genau wie in dem Riefenstahl-Film. Und die Rassengesetze wären in Kraft getreten, und Kafka, wenn er sich noch einmal hätte fotografieren lassen, hätte uns angesehen wie aus diesem Gespensterbild – von jenseits des Grabs” (“Kafka im Kino,” 3).

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Nothing, conceals within it the essence of being. The mortals we now call mortals, not because their earthly life comes to an end, but rather because they are capable of death as death. (17–18)27

Over and above such existential reveries, Adorno insisted on socially relevant critique. He called the whole of Heidegger’s rhapsodic death metaphysics trivial, arguing that they were a distraction from any real critique of alienating capitalism and of the repressive side effects of the Enlightenment. Arguably, Heidegger may have wanted to avoid socially relevant critique insofar as in 1949, when he composed “The Thing,” he was little inclined to retrace his recent and embarrassing political perspectives. Throughout his career Adorno continually critiqued Heidegger for such existential mooning, and in Negative Dialectics, he fulminated: “The deterioration of death metaphysics, whether into advertisements for heroic dying or into the triviality of purely restating the unmistakable fact that men must die – all this ideological mischief, probably rests on the fact that human consciousness is persistently too weak to sustain the experience of death, perhaps even too weak for its conscious acceptance … The reflections that give death a meaning are as helpless as the tautological ones” (Negative Dialectics, 369; translation modified). Adorno maintained that Heidegger’s death-philosophizing prevented his work from having real social relevance. It was a symptom of his attempts to dodge discussion of the politics and ideology of his later work. My provocative comparison between tendencies in Sebald’s work and in Heidegger’s by no means intends to conflate the work of the two. It should be said that Sebald’s modernist homage in Vertigo brings out a subtle intertwining of Eros and Thanatos in Kafka’s work that would be available only to the most enlightened of his readers. I simply mean to ask whether his meditation on such subjects, given the persistence of his ruminations on death and dying, would not benefit from critical scrutiny. It might be that Sebald was aware that his death metaphysics risked making too broad an analytic category of death itself, and perhaps for 27

The German text reads: “Die Sterblichen sind die Menschen. Sie heißen die Sterblichen, weil sie sterben können. Sterben heißt: den Tod als Tod vermögen. Nur der Mensch stirbt. Das Tier verendet. Es hat den Tod als Tod weder vor sich noch hinter sich. Der Tod ist der Schrein des Nichts, dessen nämlich, was in aller Hinsicht niemals etwas bloß Seiendes ist, was aber gleichwohl west, nämlich als das Sein selbst. Der Tod, als der Schrein des Nichts, birgt in sich das Wesende des Seins. Der Tod ist als der Schrein des Nichts das Gebirg des Seins. Die Sterblichen nennen wir jetzt die Sterblichen – nicht, weil ihr irdisches Leben endet, sondern weil sie den Tod als Tod vermögen.”

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this reason his early essays on The Castle (“Thanatos,” “Undiscover’d Country,” and “Das unentdeckte Land”), which focus almost entirely on Kafka’s confrontation with death, fail to locate Kafka’s “homelessness” in a properly thorough cultural context. While those essays pay some attention to Kafka’s Jewish background, the “Land” from which K. has been exiled is a trans-historical space, defined by death itself, rather than the space of central Europe on the way to its pursuant mid-century tragedies. Unlike those essays, Sebald’s later essay on The Castle, in Unheimliche Heimat, studies the fate of Kafka’s multiple characters as an allegory for central European Jewry, and I would suggest that he returned to this novel because he recognized that the apparent universality of his original position, and the way his Kafka sometimes became a Kafka-untodeath, detracted from the specificities of critical engagement with the question of Heimat. Perhaps for this reason he felt compelled to look again at that novel not through the eyes of the death metaphysician, but with a renewed emphasis on its cultural context.

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Sebald’s Amateurs

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Sebald’s Amateurs Ruth Franklin

In an obituary in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote of W. G. Sebald: “His province was not the ivory tower but the crinkled photograph album and the muddy track.” This comment captures something of both the substance and the texture of Sebald’s remarkable prose works, with their distinctive blend of novel, essay, encyclopedia, and dream. Each of his books is marked by an extraordinary profusion of knowledge, from interpretations of paintings and mini-biographies to factoids about the herring. Yet there is not a whiff of the ivory tower about his project: Sebald diffuses his erudition so modestly that one can easily imagine him assembling his books exactly as those books depict their author doing – scouring old photograph albums, roaming isolated paths exposed to the elements. The seduction of his writing is so complete that it can be a struggle to remember that the books are, in many ways, fiction, and that untruths lurk amid all the dazzling particulars. But Sebald belongs more to the muddy track than the ivory tower in another way as well. Though he taught at the University of East Anglia for more than thirty years, his colleagues in the academy have been relatively slow to recognize his literary achievements. Eighteen years have passed since Sebald published his first book of poetry; fourteen since the publication in Germany of The Emigrants, arguably his first major work. Yet the wheel of Sebald criticism is only just beginning to turn. He has, however, been unusually well represented in journalism, at least the more genteel precincts of that “muddy track,” including The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books.1 In fact, the lengthy and serious reviews of Sebald’s books, in these and other publications, have in large part been responsible for

1

See, among others, Gabriele Annan, “Ghosts”; James Wood, “The Right Thread”; Benjamin Markovits, “What Was It That So Darkened Our World?”

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making his reputation, at least in England and America; and these reviews are cited often and approvingly by Sebald scholars.2 The phenomenon of Sebald’s strong presence in the media coupled with his elusiveness in the academy has something to do, of course, with the differing cycles that govern the two professions: journalists are defined by their drive to be the first to comment on anything, while the books and articles of academics are usually years in the making. The year 2003 saw the publication of the first full-length study of Sebald’s work, Mark McCulloh’s Understanding W. G. Sebald, and more are to come. But there is another component to the reasons underlying Sebald’s warm endorsement from book reviewers and their audience – the general public – rather than from professors and the academy, a component that is inherent to the work itself. The cultivation of knowledge, the purposes to which knowledge is put, and the reasons underlying the drive to pursue knowledge are central themes of Sebald’s writing. But while Sebald’s scholarship is crucial to his books, the books themselves both depict and embody an almost anti-academic – it could be called “amateur” – approach to study and contemplation. Despite the negative connotations often associated with the word, “amateur” is of course rooted in the Latin word amare, to love. I use it here to suggest a person who engages in study for non-monetary purposes and not for public consumption, and also to capture some of the romantic enthusiasm for learning that one senses in Sebald’s books, an enthusiasm that is reserved for private or even secret endeavors – the books written “at the so-called weekend and at night,”3 as Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants says of his own Max Ferber story (230). The scholars who appear in them seem to operate free of professional constraints, guided by their personal curiosity but also by deeper, more elemental forces. And when writing in Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn of what might be his own investigations, Sebald presents himself not as an expert but as something like a gentleman-scholar (perhaps on the model of his hero Thomas Browne), pausing on each topic only long enough to make a useful observation before moving on to the next ob2

3

To give just a couple of examples: Mark McCulloh cites a long passage from James Wood’s review in the introduction to Understanding W. G. Sebald; Andreas Huyssen mentions work by Dieter Forte and other German critics in the Sebald chapter of his study Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Many of the papers given at the Davidson College Symposium also made reference to these and other critics. See also Scott Denham’s foreword in this volume. “an den sogenannten Wochenenden und in der Nacht” (344).

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ject of his interest. If his readers tend to approach his books in a similar way, it could well be by his own design. Sebald repeatedly portrays the pursuit of knowledge as a fundamentally individual activity. I will start with his portraits of Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns, which appear near the beginning of The Rings of Saturn. Though the narrator identifies both characters as professors, and people whose names and biographical data match theirs were in fact his colleagues,4 we learn very little about the work that they do – his focus is almost exclusively on their personal qualities. Michael is a gentle soul, Sebald writes, “one of the most innocent people I have ever met” (6).5 His extreme frugality, which borders on eccentricity, is of a piece with this innocence: “Year in, year out, as long as I knew him, he wore either a navy blue or a rust-coloured jacket, and if the cuffs were frayed or the elbows threadbare he would sew on leather trims or patches,” the narrator says. “He even turned the collars of his shirts himself ” (6).6 Michael spends his summers on long walking tours in the Swiss countryside, which are somehow related to his studies, but these, again, seem intended more for the pleasure of the work than for glory in it: “It often seemed to me, when he returned from these travels or when I marvelled at the degree of dedication he always brought to his work, that in his own way he had found happiness, in a modest form that is scarcely conceivable nowadays” (6).7 Michael is an anachronism, and his anachronistic qualities are heightened by the purity of the absorption he brings to his work. With his innocence, his freedom from material desires, his singularity of focus, and his humility, it comes as no surprise that he is not long for this world: by the time his sudden death appears in the text, we have already read his eulogy. Janine teaches in the same department as Michael, and dies within a few weeks of him, ostensibly of an unidentified illness. But the narrator 4

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See Christopher Smith, ed., Essays in Memory of Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns. “einer der unschuldigsten Menschen, die mir jemals begegnet sind” (14). “Jahraus, jahrein trug er, seit ich ihn kannte, abwechslungsweise eine dunkelblaue und eine rostfarbene Jacke, und wenn die Ärme abgestoßen oder die Ellbogen durchgewetzt waren, hat er selber zu Nadel und Faden gegriffen und einen Lederbesatz aufgenäht. Ja, sogar die Kragen an seinen Hemden soll er gewendet haben” (15). “Oft, wenn er von einer solchen Reise zurückkam oder wenn ich den Ernst bewunderte, mit dem er stets seine Arbeit verrichtete, schien es mir, als habe er, auf seine Weise, das Glück gefunden in einer inzwischen kaum mehr denkbaren Form von Bescheidenheit” (15).

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hypothesizes that she died of something like a broken heart, bereft of her unique friendship with Michael: “[O]ne might say that she was so unable to bear the loss of the ingenuous, almost childlike friendship they had shared, that a few weeks after his death she succumbed to a disease that swiftly consumed her body” (7).8 Remembering her, the narrator dwells particularly on her enthusiasm for Flaubert, whose work she can quote at length and by heart: “Over the years [she] had come to a profound understanding of the nineteenth-century French novel that had about it a certain private quality, wholly free of intellectual vanity and was guided by a fascination for obscure detail rather than by the selfevident”(7).9 She has fixed particularly upon the detail of sand, which she understands as symbolic of Flaubert’s fear of “the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head” (7).10 This, she believes, was the source of his nervous ailments, particularly his overpowering phobia of writing. But the linchpin of Janine’s interpretation is left deliberately obscure. Janine reports that Flaubert “supposedly once … said” (7)11 that at such times it felt “as if one was sinking into sand” (7).12 The source remains obscure: we cannot be sure, at least based on the information provided in this text, whether Flaubert did in fact say this or whether Janine has made the metaphorical leap on her own.13 Regardless, at this point Janine’s interpretation takes a more ominous turn. “In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary’s winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara. For him, every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas mountains” (8).14 The trace of fore8

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“[M]an darf sagen, daß sie den Verlust Michaels, mit dem sie eine Art von Kinderfreundschaft verband, so wenig verschmerzen konnte, daß sie ein paar Wochen nach seinem Tod selber einer ihren Körper in den kürzesten Zeit zerstörenden Krankheit erlag” (16). “[Sie hatte] im Verlauf ihres Lebens eine von jeglicher Intellektuelleneitelkeit freie, stets vom obskuren Detail, nie vom Offenkundigen ausgehende, gewissermaßen private Wissenschaft von der französischen Romanliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelt” (16). “auf die von ihm beobachtete, unaufhaltsam fortschreitende und, wie er glaubte, bereits auf seinen eigenen Kopf übergreifende Verdummung” (17). “soll einmal … gesagt haben” (17). “als versinke man im Sand” (7). I have been unable to locate the passage. “In einem Sandkorn im Saum eines Winterkleides der Emma Bovary, sagte Janine, hat Flaubert die ganze Sahara gesehen, und jedes Stäubchen wog für ihn soviel wie das Atlasgebirge” (17).

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boding already perceptible in these lines deepens as the narrator describes Janine’s office. On her desk, Sebald writes, “a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room” (8).15 “Sand conquered all” (8)16 for Flaubert, but Janine is in danger of being conquered, too. As the layers of description build, the papers seem to become a metaphor for the true subject, which is the illness that is slowly overtaking Janine’s body: The carpet, too, had long since vanished beneath several inches of paper; indeed, the paper had begun climbing from the floor, on which, year after year, it had settled, and was now up the walls as high as the top of the door frame, page upon page of memoranda and notes pinned up in multiple layers, all of them by just one corner … It once occurred to me that at dusk, when all of this paper seemed to gather into itself the pallor of the fading light, it was like the snow in the fields, long ago, beneath the ink-black sky. In the end Janine was reduced to working from an easy chair drawn more or less into the middle of her room … (9)17

Janine is obsessed with the sand in Flaubert because she, too, is in danger of sinking; and suddenly the piles upon piles of paper that blanket her office are as vast as the grain of sand in Emma Bovary’s hem, as heavy as the Atlas mountains. The “intense personal interest” (7)18 that she takes in Flaubert can now be understood on another level: does she sense a connection between his mounting sand and her own approaching death? Such a convergence would certainly be within the bounds of the Sebaldian universe. 15

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“war im Verlaufe der Zeit eine richtige Papierlandschaft mit Bergen und Tälern entstanden, die inzwischen an den Rändern, so wie ein Gletscher, wenn er das Meer erreicht, abbrach und auf dem Fußboden ringsum neue, ihrerseits unmerklich gegen die Mitte des Raumes sich bewegende Ablagerungen bildete” (17–18). “Der Sand erobere alles” (17). “Auch der Teppich war seit langem schon unter mehreren Lagen Papier verschwunden, ja das Papier hatte angefangen, vom Boden, auf den es fortwährend aus halber Höhe hinabsank, wieder die Wände emporzusteigen, die bis zum obereren Türrand bedeckt waren mit einzelnen, jeweils nur an einer Ecke mit einem Reißnagel befestigten, teilweise dicht übereinandergehefteten Papierbögen und Dokumenten … [A]ll dieses Papier versammelte auf sich in der Stunde der Dämmerung den Widerschein des vergehenden Lichts, wie vordem, so habe ich mir einmal gedacht, unter dem tintenfarbenen Nachthimmel der Schnee auf den Feldern. Janines letzter Arbeitsplatz ist ein mehr oder weniger in die Mitte ihres Büros gerückter Sessel gewesen …” (18). “größtmöglich[e] persönlich[e] Interesse” (16).

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Sebald develops the connection between the intellectual and the personal much further in Austerlitz. The title character, a retired art history professor, shares certain characteristics with Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns, from his work habits (“his crowded study … was like a stockroom of books and papers with hardly any space left for himself … among the stacks piled high on the floor and the overloaded shelves” [32]19) to his modesty (he refers to his studies as “tentative ideas” [33]20) And, like theirs, his research is too wide-ranging to be easily assimilable into journal articles or books: His investigations, so Austerlitz once told me, had long outstripped their original purpose as a project for a dissertation, proliferating in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based entirely on his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings. Why he had embarked on such a wide field, said Austerlitz, he did not know; very likely he had been poorly advised when he first began his research work. But then again, it was also true that he was still obeying an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand … (33)21

Like Janine’s study of Flaubert, the foundation of Austerlitz’s investigations is personal: all his research, as he later recognizes, is a function of his unconscious search for his own roots. When Austerlitz actually learns the secrets of his past, he abandons his book, and the narrator takes over, recording his story for him. Austerlitz’s anti-institutional approach to knowledge begins with his days in elementary school at Stower Grange, which, “[l]ike most such educational establishments, … was the most unsuitable place imaginable for an adolescent” (59).22 What knowledge he manages to accumulate is 19

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“Ein, zwei Stunden bin ich dann meist bei ihm gesessen in seinem engen Büro, das einem Bücher- und Papiermagazin glich und in dem zwischen den am Fußboden und vor den überfrachteten Regalen sich stapelnden Konvoluten kaum Platz gewesen ist für ihn selber” (47). “Denkversuche” (48). “Seine Recherchen, so sagte mir Austerlitz einmal, hätten ihren ursprünglichen Zweck, der der eines Dissertationsvorhabens gewesen sei, längst hinter sich gelassen und seien ihm unter der Hand ausgeufert in endlose Vorarbeiten zu einer ganz auf seine eigenen Anschauungen sich stützenden Studie über die Familienähnlichkeiten, die zwischen all diesen Gebäuden bestünden. Weshalb er auf ein derart weites Feld sich begeben habe, sagte Austerlitz, wisse er nicht. Wahrscheinlich sei er bei der Aufnahme seiner ersten Forschungsarbeiten schlecht beraten gewesen. Richtig sei jedoch auch, daß er bis heute einem ihm selber nicht recht verständlichen Antrieb gehorche …” (48). “Wie die meisten derartigen Erziehungsanstalten war Stower Grange der für einen Heranwachsenden denkbar ungeeignetste Ort” (85).

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no thanks to the teachers, who constitute “a curious collection of oddities, most of them over sixty or suffering from some affliction” (59).23 Despite the uncongenial atmosphere, Austerlitz’s natural enthusiasm for learning cannot be dampened. “[C]onfined as I had been until now to the Bible in Welsh and homiletic literature, it seemed as if a new door were opening whenever I turned a page,” he says. “I read everything in the school library, which contained an entirely arbitrary selection of works, and everything I could borrow from my teachers – works on geography and history, travel writings, novels, biographies – and sat up until late in the evening over reference books and atlases” (61).24 (The genres Austerlitz mentions, it seems worth noting, are exactly the sorts of texts that Sebald hybridizes in his own books.) The exception to these generally useless teachers is André Hilary, a newcomer to Stower Grange and a dynamic, dramatic lecturer in European history; it is from him that Austerlitz learns of the Battle of Austerlitz, which Hilary invokes so vividly as to move Austerlitz wholeheartedly to embrace his new identity, of which he has only just learned. Hilary’s course marks an important turning point in Austerlitz’s academic career: the teacher is so impressed by a paper that Austerlitz turns in that he asks whether his pupil has a family member who is a historian, but when he learns the real reason for Austerlitz’s interest in the period he becomes his student’s devoted advocate, helping him win a scholarship to university. 23

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“auch die übrige Lehrerschaft setzte sich … zusammen aus den absonderlichsten Existenzen, die größtenteils über sechzig waren oder an irgendeinem Gebrechen litten” (85). The narrator shares this disdain for schoolteachers, noting: “When I began my own studies in Germany I had learnt almost nothing from the scholars then lecturing in the humanities there, most of them academics who had built their careers in the 1930s and 1940s and still nurtured delusions of power, and I found Austerlitz the first teacher I could listen to since my time in primary school” (33). (Austerlitz ist ja für mich, der ich zu Beginn meines Studiums in Deutschland von den seinerzeit dort amtierenden, größtenteils in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren in ihrer akademischen Laufbahn vorangerückten und immer noch in ihren Machtphantasien befangenen Geisteswissenschaftlern so gut wie gar nichts gelernt hatte, seit meiner Volksschulzeit der erste Lehrer überhaupt gewesen, dem ich zuhören konnte” [47–48].) The reference here to the war years suggests another reason for Sebald’s mistrustful portrayal of academic institutions. “[E]ingesperrt, wie ich bis dahin gewesen war, in die walisische Bibel und Homiletik, schien es mir nun, als öffnete sich mit jeder umgewendeten Seite eine weitere Tür. Ich las alles, was die vollkommen willkürlich zusammengestellte Schulbibliothek hergab und was ich von meinen Lehrern leihweise erhielt, Geographie- und Geschichtsbücher, Reisebeschreibungen, Romane und Lebensschilderungen, und saß bis in die Abende hinein über Nachschlagewerken und Atlanten” (89).

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Austerlitz’s adult academic life is interrupted by lengthy nervous breakdowns, each of which is brought on, at least in part, by a renewed attempt to work on his book, and later cured in part by a shifting of his focus to alternate areas of interest. The first breakdown occurs in 1957, after he has gone to Paris to pursue his studies. From the start, despite his best efforts, he is unable to focus on his research, and seems to doubt its value: [D]uring my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening … losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. (260)25

Soon he has a total mental breakdown, which he describes as “hysterical epilepsy” (268).26 Paradoxically, though the attack seems to have been brought on by information overload, it can be cured only by more information. Marie de Verneuil, a woman Austerlitz has met in the library, tends him in the hospital and brings him an eighteenth-century medical book which he reads over and over, memorizing its prescriptions for herbal remedies. “[B]y immersing myself in the better world of this little book, whole passages of which I still know by heart … I regained my lost sense of myself and my memory,”27 Austerlitz says (271). It is also Marie’s presence that 25

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“[I]ch habe damals in meiner ersten Pariser Zeit wie später auch in meinem Leben mich bemüht, den Blick nicht von den Gegenständen meines Studiums zu heben. Unter der Woche ging ich tagtäglich in die Nationalbibliothek in der rue Richelieu, wo ich meist bis in den Abend hinein … an meinem Platz gesessen bin und mich verloren habe in den kleingedruckten Fußnoten der Werke, die ich mir vornahm, in den Büchern, die ich in diesen Noten erwähnt fand, sowie in deren Anmerkungen und so immer weiter zurück, aus der wissenschaftlich Beschreibung der Wirklichkeit bis in die absonderlichsten Einzelheiten, in einer Art von ständiger Regression, die sich in der bald vollkommen unübersichtlichen Form meiner immer mehr sich verzweigenden und auseinanderlaufenden Aufzeichnungen niederschlug” (366–67). “hysterische Epilepsie” (377). Sartre described Flaubert’s epilepsy similary in l’Idiot de la famille. “[W]irklich habe ich über der Lektüre diese Büchleins, von dem ich heute noch ganze Passagen auswendig weiß, mein verlorenes Selbstgefühl und meine Erinnerungsfähigkeit wiedererlangt” (381).

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has restored him: the preface to this little book refers to “the pious and charitable ladies of the upper classes,” who are “instruments of divine mercy” (271).28 After thirty years of teaching, Austerlitz takes early retirement – partly, he says, because of “the inexorable spread of ignorance even to the universities” (120),29 and partly because he hopes finally to be able to finish the project he has postponed. But his renewed attempt to work on the book provokes the descent towards another breakdown. He finds his notes “misguided, distorted, and of little use”30 (121), his work full of “the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses” (122).31 He succumbs to intellectual paralysis. “[N]ow I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed” (122).32 Finally, in despair, he casts all his papers on the compost heap. Soon afterward – he happens to be browsing in a bookstore at the time – he hears the radio program about the Kindertransport that proves to be the most important trigger of his memory. At this point he begins to realize that his obsessive note-taking, his exhaustive search for meaning in books, has led him astray; the only way to discover what he truly seeks is to set out in person, abolishing the distance between reader and text. After Austerlitz returns from Prague, his anxiety attacks are worse than ever. “It was obviously of little use,” he remarks, “that I had discovered the sources of my distress … reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement”

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“die frommen und wohltätigen Damen der oberen Stände … [die] von der höchsten, über unseren Geschicken waltenden Instanz zu Werkzeugen des göttlichen Erbarmens auserkoren seien” (381). “wegen der auch an den Hochschulen … immer weiter um sich greifenden Dummheit” (174). “unbrauchbar, falsch und bezeichnet” (175). “die schlimmsten Fehler, Ungereimtheiten und Entgleisungen” (176). “Jetzt … war mir das Schreiben so schwer geworden, daß ich oft einen ganzen Tag brauchte für einen einzigen Satz, und kaum daß ich einen solchen mit äußerster Anstrengung ausgesonnenen Satz niedergeschrieben hatte, zeigte sich die peinliche Unwahrheit meiner Konstruktionen und die Unangemessenheit sämtlicher von mir verwendeten Wörter” (176).

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(228).33 Now he has gone too far in the other direction: drowning in a surfeit of emotion about his past, he needs a rational touchstone, an intellectual framework against which to balance his confused thoughts. He finds it, again, in a book with an explicitly personal significance: this time it is a lengthy tome that describes seemingly every detail of the operation of the Theresienstadt ghetto, where (as he now knows) his mother was interned. At the same time, he is working as a gardener to calm his nerves, and his struggle through the book has something of the same meticulous, detached quality as his labor in the greenhouse: since his German is rudimentary, he must work out the “pseudo-technical jargon” (233)34 that governed life in Theresienstadt “syllable by syllable (233).”35 This process seems to allow him the necessary distance to digest the horrors of life in the ghetto, leading him eventually to a film that contains an image of his mother. The pattern repeats one last time at the end of the book, with an important variation. By now Austerlitz has moved back to France to seek out traces of his father, who, he has learned, fled there during the war. The library has moved to a new location on the outskirts of the city, a “hideous, outsize building … [which is] both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings” (275–6),36 with its steep steps, overwhelming esplanade, and maddening bureaucracy. He soon learns that the library is literally built atop the remains of something portentously named the Austerlitz-Tobiac storage depot (ostensibly in reference to the Gare d’Austerlitz), a huge collection of warehouses that once held the possessions of Jews transported to Drancy. With this final irony, Austerlitz understands that he will never find what he is looking for in the library, which he comes to believe is responsible, in its “inexorable spread of processed data,” for the “dissolution … of our capacity to remember” (286).37 When the novel ends, Austerlitz has learned the name of the camp where his father was im33

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“Es nutzte mir offenbar wenig, daß ich die Quellen meiner Verstörung entdeckt hatte … die Vernunft kam nicht an gegen das seit jeher von mir unterdrückte und jetzt gewaltsam aus mir hervorbrechende Gefühl des Verstoßen- und Ausgelöschtseins” (326). “Fach- und Verwaltungssprache” (334). “Silbenweise” (334). “[ein] in seiner ganzen äußeren Dimensionierung und inneren Konstitution menschenabweisenden … Gebäude” (388). “die im Gleichmaß mit der Proliferation des Informationswesens fortschreitende Auflösung unserer Erinnerungsfähigkeit” (400).

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prisoned, and he is headed there to continue his research in person. But he leaves the narrator with, again, a book: a memoir by the novelist Dan Jacobson of his search for his grandfather based on only a few personal effects.38 And of course the reader of Austerlitz, mirroring the narrator, ends up with a book in his hands as well: this chronicle of Austerlitz’s search for his past. Like his characters, Sebald’s narrators are characterized by intense engagement in intellectual activity, and they pursue it in a similar way. Over the course of his work, we see the narrators contemplating a nearly infinite variety of subjects – Kafka’s visit to the spa at Riva, the triptychs of Matthias Grünewald, the history of colonialism in the Belgian Congo. But they rarely set foot in a library, preferring instead venues such as the Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room in The Rings of Saturn, a “favourite haunt” (93).39 Though these investigations, and the long digressions in which they are pursued, appear to be random, they, too, are governed by a profound organizing principle that emerges gradually over the course of the books. And the narrators, like the professors in Sebald’s work, approach these topics with a combination of curiosity and authority that retains the amateur’s conception of his or her labor as a personal endeavor. There is a metaphor for this in The Rings of Saturn, in which Sebald refers obliquely to a fable by Borges that describes the construction of Tlön. The terms of this project are vague, but it aims at “creating a new reality, in the course of time, by way of the unreal …”: The language of Tlön, which hitherto no one had mastered, has now invaded the academies; already the history of Tlön has superseded all that we formerly knew or thought we knew; in historiography, the indisputable advantages of a fictitious past have become apparent. Almost every branch of learning has been reformed … Every language, even Spanish, French and English, will disappear from the planet. The world will be Tlön. (70–1)40

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Dan Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom. “mein liebster Ort” (115). “ … über das rein Irreale im Laufe der Zeit zu einer neuen Wirklichkeit zu gelangen … Schon ist das bislang von niemand beherrschte Idiom von Tlön in die Schulen eingedrungen, schon überdeckt die Geschichte Tlöns alles, was wir vordem einmal wußten oder zu wissen glaubten, schon zeigen sich in der Historiographie die unbestreitbaren Vorteile einer fiktiven Vergangenheit. Nahezu sämtliche Wissenszweige sind reformiert … Alle Sprachen, selbst Spanisch, Französisch und Englisch, werden vom Planeten verschwinden. Die Welt wird Tlön sein” (91). Here, as well, the suggestion of “the indisputable advantages of a ficticious past” subtly recalls the Nazi period, and the drive to excise its remnants from the academy.

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This vision of academe is more apocalyptic than utopian; still, there is comfort in separation from it. “But, the narrator concludes, what is that to me? In the peace and quiet of my country villa I continue to hone my tentative translation … of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (which I do not mean to publish)” (71).41 To a certain extent, it is unnecessarily limiting to insist on a sharp distinction between “professionals” and “amateurs” when Sebald’s own work crosses so many boundaries. In addition to his four long prose works, he published several books of criticism, as well as a small amount of poetry. It is worth noting, though, that Sebald himself turned away somewhat from the academic life. After 1990, the date of publication of his first novel, Vertigo, Sebald seems to have sharply curtailed his scholarly work. The notable exception is On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur), his lectures on the air war in German literature, but certainly this highly unconventional and personal text does not easily fit any academic model. Sebald’s creative works finally encourage the same private response that they embody: first by example, but also in a deeper way. His creation of an essentially new genre, a profoundly unstable hybrid of fact and fiction that confounds every expectation, forces the reader to approach his work without preconceptions. Without even much in the way of secondary sources as a guide, the academic and the general reader meet on even footing, equally caught up in the darkness and the light that permeate Sebald’s extraordinary writings. Reading Sebald, we are all amateurs.

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“Mich aber, so schließt der Erzähler, kümmert das nicht, ich feile in der stillen Muße meines Landhauses weiter an einer tastenden … Übertragung des Urn Burial von Thomas Browne (die ich nicht drucken zu lassen gedenke)” (91).

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“A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About”: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau

Critics have called W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants a “hybrid genre of memoir, novel, and essay” (Lubow) and a combination of “history, fiction, reportage, […] pictures, travel notes and autobiography” (DiPiero). How can the author weave together such a mix of genres and forms? Sebald’s narrator is the answer to that question. His voice unifies the pieces and links the life stories of the four emigrants whose names appear as the titles of the four parts of Sebald’s work. In spite of the fact that the German subtitle “Vier lange Erzählungen” (“Four Long Stories”) seems to indicate that we will find four separate stories, the narrator’s experiences and his account of his encounters with the lives of the four emigrants firmly link the four parts into an “elegant, unified tapestr[y]” (Lewis, 86). The narrator presents a fictional autobiography in which the four emigrants play major roles. Three “absences” mark this work. First, while the narrator chronicles in detail his life at the time of the meeting with or his further research into the lives of the emigrants, he does not divulge his own story of emigration. Second, this absence of the narrator corresponds to another significant absence both in the frame story (the narrator’s experiences) and the individual stories of the emigrants: the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the shadow that hangs over each one of the fictional lives as well as the author’s own life. However, none of the emigrants refers openly to the horrors of the Holocaust, and the narrator does not take up the subject in a direct manner either. Third, these thematic absences parallel the narrator’s absence in the structure of the narration. At times, the narrator’s voice and own experiences are the center of the plot, and at other times, the narrator’s voice seems to vanish completely. In this essay, I examine these three absences: the curious structural interplay of the narrator’s absence and presence, as well as the connection to the thematic

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absence of the narrator’s own emigration story and the absence of the Holocaust. The Emigrants begins with the narrator’s first-person account of his experiences in Hingham, where he and his wife encounter Dr. Selwyn, the first of the four emigrants. “At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live” (3).1 This factual beginning leads the reader to believe that the narrator is telling “the truth” about his experiences that he is about to share. “First person narration […] carries with it an inherent quality of realism and conviction based on a claim to firsthand experience […] and knowledge” (Riggan, 58). The narrator, therefore, prepares the reader for a story he is about to relate; one that will be “true.” He sets up the narrative as an account of his actions and experiences. In another passage, he adds that his feelings and thoughts will be a part of the narration: seeing the house in which he and his wife will rent an apartment reminds him of another house. The reader learns of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings: And I recalled the château in the Charente that I had once visited from Angoulême. In front of it, two crazy brothers – one a parliamentarian, the other an architect – had built a replica of the façade of the palace of Versailles, an utterly pointless counterfeit, though one which made a powerful impression from a distance. The windows of that house had been just as gleaming and blind as those of the house we now stood before. (4)2

As this passage shows, the narrator’s presence is very strong in the beginning of the text. He sets up a frame for the stories of the emigrants, which he has yet to meet. Embedded in the frame of the narrator’s experiences lie the stories told either by the emigrants themselves, by eyewitnesses, or by photos, diaries and memoirs. The narrator remains an important character throughout the whole novel and his presence in fact becomes stronger and stronger throughout. 1

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“Ende September 1970, kurz vor Antritt meiner Stellung in der ostenglischen Stadt Norwich, fuhr ich mit Clara auf Wohnungssuche nach Hingham hinaus” (7). “Und mir kam das Landhaus in der Charente in den Sinn, das ich von Angoulême aus einmal besucht hatte und vor dem zwei verrückte Brüder, der eine Deputierter, der andere Architekt, in jahrzehntelanger Planungs-und Konstruktionsarbeit die Vorderfront des Schlosses von Versailles errichtet hatten, eine ganz und gar zwecklose, aus der Entfernung allerdings sehr eindrucksvolle Kulisse, deren Fenster geradeso glänzend und blind gewesen waren wie die des Hauses, vor welchem wir jetzt standen” (9).

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While the description of the narrator’s actions and thoughts is still rather short in the Dr. Selwyn section, the narrator becomes more important in the section on Paul Bereyter. Twenty pages in this second section are dedicated to the narrator’s memories of this second emigrant. However, Paul Bereyter remains a very distant image for the reader, while the narrator’s memories create a very distinct picture of his own childhood in W. where he was the pupil of the teacher Bereyter. In the same way, when the narrator tries to find out more about his former teacher, in his conversations with Paul’s partner Lucy Landau, the narrator keeps himself and the frame present by commenting about the situation in which the conversation takes place “in Yverdon […], a day I recall as curiously soundless” (42).3 In the third part, which centers on Ambrose Adelwarth, the narrator’s own great-uncle, his presence becomes even more prominent. Many pages of this section are devoted to the detailed descriptions of the narrator’s travels to America where several other family members emigrated with the now deceased Adelwarth: “So on that 2nd of January, a dark and dreary day, I drove south from Newark airport on the New Jersey turnpike in the direction of Lakehurst” (72);4 “After morning coffee on the second day of my stay at Cedar Glen, I went over to Uncle Kasimir” (80).5 Finally the narrator visits Ithaca, New York to find the asylum in which his uncle Adelwarth had died: “It was not until the early summer of 1984 that I finally went to Ithaca […] So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere” (105).6 Such detailed descriptions abound as for example in the narrator’s visits to

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“in Yverdon […], an einem mir als eigenartig lautlos in Erinnerung gebliebenen Sommertag” (63). “Vom Flughafen aus bin ich also an jenem zweiten Januar, es war ein licht- und trostloser Tag, auf dem New Jersey Turnpike nach Süden in Richtung Lakehurst gefahren” (104–105). “Am zweiten Tag meines Aufenthalts in Cedar Glen West ging ich nach dem Morgen Kaffee zum Onkel Kasimir hinüber (117). “Erst im Frühsommer 1984 bin ich schließlich in Ithaca gewesen […] Also bin ich wieder nach New York geflogen und von dort aus am selben Tag noch mit einem Mietwagen nordwestwärts gefahren auf dem State Highway 17, vorbei an allerhand mehr oder weniger ausgedehnten Ansiedlungen, die mir trotz ihrer teilweise vertrauten Bezeichnungen im Nirgendwo zu liegen schienen.” (153).

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Dauville, where his experiences lead him to dream about Ambrose and his lover Cosmo’s life. The centrality of the narrator continues to grow in the fourth part in which almost sixty pages throughout the section are devoted to the narrator’s own beginnings in Manchester, which parallel those of Max Aurach, the fourth emigrant. Therefore, the description of his own first months in England work well as a contrast to the fourth emigrant’s life story. Although one could argue that his own story is only there to highlight Aurach’s life, details such as the flight to Manchester, the material from which the dressing gown of the landlady Mrs. Irlam are made, the tea machine which she gives the narrator as a welcome present, and the narrator’s wanderings and observations of Manchester, show the narrator’s strong presence as well as the importance he gives his own story. At the end of this fourth part, the narrator undertakes another research journey, this time to Bad Kissingen, to visit settings described by Max Aurach’s mother, whose memoirs he has read and shared with the reader previously. All these detailed descriptions of the experiences, travels, encounters with the emigrants or eyewitnesses, as well as thoughts and comments of the narrator make The Emigrants a fictional autobiography, since much of this narrator’s life data are similar to what is known about W. G. Sebald. The reader encounters in a fictional autobiography a “formal framework of credibility” set up by the narrator’s description of “reality” with “little or no real characterization of the narrator” (Riggan, 27). In a sense, the narrator remains “anonymous” (Lewis, 89). Since the text purports to be about the four emigrants Dr. Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambrose Adelwarth and Max Aurach, this might be expected. However, since the narrator provides so much detail and becomes increasingly present throughout the novel, the telling of the stories of the four emigrants also becomes a fictional autobiography of the narrator. Nevertheless, the narrator’s main goal is to relate the stories of the four emigrants. In doing so, he either speaks to the emigrants themselves or to those around them who witnessed their lives. The reader learns of the emigrants and their experiences through reported speech. The narrator remains strongly present and reminds the reader that he is having a conversation with an emigrant or a witness in that he often frames reported speech by describing the circumstance for the conversation, followed by a speech indicator such as “he said” (“sagte er”) and the subjunctive:

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I no longer remember how Ferber came to tell me the extremely cursory version of his life that he gave me at the time, though I do remember that he was loath to answer the questions I put to him about his story and his early years […] The only point of note concerning that first brief stay in Manchester, said Ferber, was the fact that he had lodged at 104, Palatine Road. (166)7

The narrator’s strong presence shows itself in the framing remarks of the conversation, the speech indicator “sagte Aurach” (“said Ferber”) and the use of the subjunctive in German – “sei” (“was”).8 “German […] has a subjunctive form that is associated almost exclusively with indirect discourse. By using the subjunctive […] the message bearer can accentuate the indirect nature of the message as if to say ‘This is not my idea; this is what somebody else said’” (Rankin, 349). In an interesting quirk of the German language, the narrator therefore does not need to repeat the speech indicator, which is necessary in English “in order to make it clear that it is [the speaker’s] speech which is being reported, not the opinions of the author [or narrator]. In German a writer can simply state the identity of the source at the outset, and then proceed to use the subjunctive” (349). By doing so, the narrator keeps himself present while reporting the speech of the emigrants or those who witnessed their lives. In fact, the narrator often repeats speech indicators to make it clear over and over again that this is a conversation with him and that he is present throughout the telling. The narrator uses another linguistic device to keep the reader alerted to the fact that he is the partner in the conversation with the emigrants or the witnesses. He draws attention to his presence by quoting the emigrants in their original language at times. For example, the narrator presents Dr. Selwyn’s account of his life in reported speech in German. However, suddenly we read “Next to tennis, said Dr. Selwyn, motoring was my greatest passion in those days” (21)9 or “And for that purpose he specially put on his paletot […]. I still see him standing there in the driveway, said Aunt Fini, in that heavy overcoat looking very frail and unsteady” 7

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“Ich weiss nicht mehr, bei welcher Gelegenheit mir Aurach seine äußerst kursorische Lebensbeschreibung gab, glaube mich jedoch zu entsinnen, daß er nur ungern auf meine an diese Lebensbeschreibung sich anschließenden und seine Vorgeschichte betreffenden Fragen einging […] Das einzige Bemerkenswerte an seinem kurzfristigen ersten Aufenthalt in Manchester sei die Tatsache gewesen, sagte Aurach, daß er sein Logis damals in der Palatine Road Nr. 104 […] gehabt habe” (247–48). In English this form of subjunctive for the indirect discourse has no equivalent. “Next to tennis, sagte Dr. Selwyn, motoring was my greatest passion” (34).

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(104).10 By inserting into the original German narrative English quotations that represent the emigrants’ or their witnesses’ speech, the narrator draws attention to the fact that they speak another language and that he is the one standing between the reader and the characters as the translator. In the conversation with Dr. Abramsky, the narrator’s presence and control (exhibited by the fact that he is translating the character’s words) become even more evident: “Other patients often had to be frogmarched to the treatment room” (111).11 The narrator’s strong presence shows itself in this aside, which draws attention to the fact that he is translating. In similar ways, the narrator includes self-critical comments in the frame narration, which draw attention to himself and the act of writing, researching and telling of the stories. The narrator “ends deeply implicated in the other’s trauma, [hence his strong presence in the text] committed to a struggle to express the unimaginable and perpetuate it” (Parry, 4). Indeed, the narrator perceives of the reporting that is the writing of the emigrants’ stories as a struggle: During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had (in other words, mostly at the so-called weekend and at night), I was working on the account of Max Ferber given above. It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. (Emigrants, 230)12

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“Und zu diesem Zweck legte er eigens […] seinen Paletot […] an. I still see him standing there in the driveway, sagte die Tante Fini, in that heavy overcoat looking very frail and unsteady” (152). “[…] die anderen Patienten [mussten] nicht selten mit Gewalt in die Apparatekammer gebracht werden (frogmarched, lautete der Ausdruck, dessen sich Dr. Abramsky an dieser Stelle bediente)” (163). Note how the English version of the original German loses this aspect of translation and of the emphasis the author placed on the usage of the word “frogmarched” by Abramsky. “Über die Wintermonate 1990/91 arbeitete ich in der wenigen mir zur freien Verfügung stehenden Zeit, also zumeist an den sogenannten Wochenenden und in der Nacht an der im Vorhergehenden erzählten Geschichte Max Aurachs. Es war ein äußerst mühevolles, oft stunden- und tagelang nicht vom Fleck kommendes und nicht selten sogar rückläufiges Unternehmen, bei dem ich fortwährend geplagt wurde von einem immer nachhaltiger sich bemerkbar machenden und mehr und mehr mich lähmenden Skrupulantismus. Dieser Skrupulantismus bezog sich sowohl auf den Gegenstand meiner Erzählung, dem ich, wie ich es auch anstellte, nicht gerecht zu werden glaubte, als auch auf die Fragwürdigkeit der Schriftstellerei überhaupt” (345).

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In a process reminiscent of Max Aurach’s painting technique, the narrator admits that “By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions” (230)13 and the final version, i.e., what the reader has in front of his or her eyes, is only “a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched” (231).14 This apparent self-doubt seems to show that the narrator is unsure of his reliability and ability to accurately present the emigrants’ lives as they are told to him. The three elements mentioned above – the use of the subjunctive, the use of translation, and self-critical comments – all point to a strong presence of the narrator and emphasize the unreliability of narration. The subjunctive allows the narrator to point out that it is the characters’ words he is reporting and that they might not be entirely true. When he accentuates his role as translator, the narrator inherently admits that these are not the exact words of the characters. Rather, he has already filtered and transformed them. When he expresses doubt in his own ability to present the characters’ words, the narrator strengthens his presence in the text, but also shows that he might not be reliable. A narrator who reports the words of others “can only report to the best of his ability and recollection the overt words and actions in his protagonist’s life and draw from these inferences and interpretations concerning the inner nature of that protagonist. He is incapable of penetrating directly into the psyche of the protagonist or of any other character within the chronicle” (Riggan, 22). The narrator’s doubts of his own reliability are mirrored in the doubt of the accuracy of the character’s memories. Aunt Fini admits that she is not a reliable source: Why I shall never know, said Aunt Fini, but in my mind’s eye I always see Ambros crossing Lake Constance from Lindau by steamer in the moonlight, although that can scarcely have been how it was in reality. (77)15

But not only Aunt Fini’s memories might be less than accurate. Even the photos that serve as proof of the stories can be manipulated, for example, the one of the book burning in Würzburg. The narrator him13

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“das meiste davon war durchgestrichen, verworfen oder bis zur Unleserlichkeit mit Zusätzen überschmiert” (345). “ein missratenes Stückwerk” (345). “Warum weiß ich auch nicht, sagte die Tante Fini, aber in meiner Einbildung fährt der Ambros immer von Lindau aus mit dem Dampfschiff im Mondschein über den Bodensee, obgleich das in Wirklichkeit nicht gut der Fall gwesen sein kann” (112).

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self admits after some research that the photo is not an accurate representation of the events told in the story, “but in the meantime I have tracked down the photograph in question in a Würzburg archive, and as one can easily see there is no doubt that Ferber’s uncle’s suspicions were justified” (184).16 Sebald himself emphasized in an interview the unreliability of the facts: “‘I had the picture’ he explained, ‘I thought very consciously that this is a place to make a declaration. It couldn’t be more explicit. It acts as a paradigm for the whole enterprise’” (Lubow). The author’s comments illuminate the narrator’s own doubts. The unreliability of the narrator, the characters’ memory, and even ostensible evidence such as the photos make the narrative unstable. One is not sure what is true, what is accurate, and what is real. In his presence, then, the narrator claims authenticity for his narration but at the same time undercuts this authenticity and reveals the instability of narration and memory. In contrast to this strong presence of the narrator, many passages show a complete absence of the narrator. The following passage exemplifies how the narrator removes himself from the narration: Dr. Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by his question whether I was ever homesick. I could not think of any adequate reply […] When I asked where it was that he felt drawn back to, he told me that at the age of seven he had left a village near Grodno in Lithuania with his family. […] For years images of that exodus had been gone from his memory. (18)17

So far, the narrator has provided a frame for the discussion, reported speech with a speech indicator and used the subjunctive in the German original. All of these elements point to the presence of the narrator. However, the passage continues:

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“doch habe ich seither die Fotografie, um die es sich handelt, in einem Archiv in Würzburg ausfinding machen können, und es besteht, wie leicht zu sehen, tatsächlich kein Zweifel, daß der von Aurachs Onkel ausgesprochene Verdacht [daß das Bild eine Fälschung ist] gerechtfertigt ist (274–5). “[wir gerieten] in eine längere Unterhaltung, die davon ausging, daß Dr. Selwyn mich fragte, ob ich nie Heimweh verspüre. Ich wußte darauf nichts Rechtes zu erwiedern […] Auf meine Frage, wohin es ihn denn zurückziehe, erzählte er mir, er sei im Alter von sieben Jahren mit seiner Familie aus einem litauischen Dorf in der Nähe von Grodno ausgewandert. […] Jahrzehntelang seien die Bilder von diesem Auszug aus seinem Gedächtnis verschwunden gewesen” (30–31). My emphasis.

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I can still see the teacher who taught the children in the Cheder […] placing his hand on my parting; I can still see the empty rooms of our house. I see myself sitting topmost on the cart, see the horses’ crupper, the vast brown earth, the geese with their outstretched necks in the farmyard mires, and the waiting room at Grodno station […] I see the telegraph wires rising and falling past the train window, the façades of the Riga houses, the ship in the docks and the dark corner on deck where we did our best to make ourselves at home in such confined circumstances. (19)18

In this continuation of the passage, the narrator disappears. Dr. Selwyn’s voice is strong, and his vision becomes the vision of the reader. We see what he sees. His story takes on its own life and does not seem to be viewed through the lens of the narrator. Several sentences after this passage, the narrator comes back by inserting an indicator of speech. However, in the meantime the narrator’s absence allows the emigrant’s voice immediacy and with that authenticity. The narrator disappears as mediator between the character and the reader. The reader seems to be directly in contact with the teller of the story, the emigrant Dr. Selwyn. Linguistically, this disappearance of the narrator follows a pattern of an absence of speech indicators, which is legitimate in German anyway. While in “English this frame [the speech indicator] must be repeated each time an indirect quote is given,” in German this is not necessary as long as the narrator uses subjunctive in the reported speech (Rankin, 349). In the case of this passage and many others in the text, in which the narrator disappears, the modus is indicative – creating immediacy and drawing attention away from the fact that this is reported speech. Many other passages in the text follow the same pattern. The narrator introduces the speaker and speaking situation, remains present for a while by using speech indicators and subjunctive and then withdraws by skipping the speech indicator and changing the mode to indicative. The following passage in which Max Aurach describes his departure from Germany again illustrates this pattern:

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“Ich sehe, sagte er, wie mir der Kinderlehrer im Cheder […] die Hand auf den Scheitel legte. Ich sehe die ausgeräumten Zimmer. Ich sehe mich zuoberst auf dem Wägelchen sitzen, sehe die Kruppe des Pferdes, das weite, braune Land, die Gänse im Morast der Bauernhöfe mit ihren gereckten Hälsen und den Wartesaal des Bahhofs von Grodno […] Ich sehe die auf- und niedersteiegenden Telegrafendrähte vor den Fenstern des Zuges, sehe die Häuserfronten von Riga, das Schiff im Hafen und die dunkle Ecke des Decks, in der wir, soweit es anging unter den gedrängten Verhältnissen, häuslich uns einrichteten” (31).

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When I asked if he remembered saying good bye to his parents at the airport, Ferber replied, after a long hesitation, that when he thought back to that May morning at Oberwiesenfeld he could not see his parents. He no longer knew what the last thing his mother or father had said to him was, or he to them […] I see myself looking out of the little square window as we raced across the big, green, deserted airfield, at a distant flock of sheep and the tiny figure of a shepherd. And then I see Munich slowly tilting away below me. […] There, at Frankfurt am Main airport, my opened suitcase sat on an ink-stained table while a customs official, without touching anything, stared into it for a very long time, as if the clothes which my mother had folded and packed, in her distinctive, highly orderly way […] might possess some mysterious significance. (188)19

The passage continues for many pages in the indicative without any speech indicators. Max Aurach seems to speak directly to the reader, describing his first years in London. Similar passages in which the narrator completely disappears from the character’s narration can be found in each of the four parts.20 However, these absences of the narrator are not limited to reported speech. The narrator also disappears when he presents the diary of Ambrose Adelwarth and the manuscript of the memoirs of Luisa, Max Aurach’s mother. In presenting Ambrose’s diary, the narrator remains present by indicating that it is in front of him and by repeating such phrases as “it says” (128).21 However, soon the diary takes on a life of its own. The narrator disappears and we seem to hear Ambrose’s voice as he is narrating his adventures with Cosmo:

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“Auf meine Frage, ob er [Max Aurach] sich an den Abschied von den Eltern am Flughafen erinnere, erwiderte Aurach nach längerem Zögern, er sehe, wenn er an jenen Maimorgen auf dem Oberwiesenfeld zurückdenke, die Eltern nicht mehr bei sich. Er wisse nicht mehr, was die Mutter oder der Vater zu ihm oder was er zu ihnen als Letztes gesagt habe. […] ich sehe mich, wie wir über die weite, leere und grüne Fläche rollen, hinausschauen bei dem viereckigen Fensterchen auf eine Schafherde in der Ferne und auf die winzige Figur des Schäfers. Und dann sehe ich die Stadt München langsam wegkippen. […] Mein Koffer ist dort, in dem Flughafengebäude von Frankfurt am Main, mit offenem Deckel auf einem tintenfleckigen Tisch gelegen, und ein Beamter der Zollbehörde hat, ohne das geringste auch nur anzurühren, sehr lange in diesen offenen Koffer hineingestarrt, als hätten meine von der Mutter in der ihr eigenen überaus ordentlichen Art zusammengelegten und verstauten Kleidungsstücke […] irgendeine geheimnisvolle Bedeutung” (280–1). Lucy Landau, 72, 89; Kasimir, 117; to name only a few. “steht da geschrieben” (188).

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Cosmo stands fore like a pilot. Calls the name Fano to a sailor. Sísíorsí, the sailor shouts, and, pointing ahead, he repeats, louder: Fano! Fano! Later, low on the already darkened island, I see a fire. There are fishermen on the beach. One of them waves a burning piece of wood. (128)22

More striking even than in the diary is the narrator’s absence in the presentation of the memoirs of Max Aurach’s mother. At first, as with the diary, the narrator explains that the manuscript is lying in front of him: “The manuscript which Ferber gave me on that morning in Manchester is before me now. I shall try to convey in excerpts what the author […] recounts of her early life” (193).23 At first, the narrator is very much present and in control of the manuscript as he says over and over again “she writes” (193)24 and “Luisa writes” (194).25 But soon the narrator vanishes and we seem to read Luisa’s words directly. The present tense and indicative mood underscore the immediacy of her voice. As Luisa remembers her childhood home, she describes it in the most minute detail: There are two green velvet armchairs with knotted fringes all around, and between the windows that face onto the square is a sofa in the same style. The table is of light-coloured cherrywood. On it are a fan-like frame with five photographs of our relatives in Mainstockheim and Leutershausen and, in a frame of its own, a picture of Papa’s sister, who people say was the most beautiful girl for miles around […] Also on the table is a china swan with its wings spread, and in it […] our dear Mama’s evergreen bridal bouquet. (195)26

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“Cosmo steht im Bug wie ein Lotse. Ruft einem Matrosen das Wort Fano zu. Sisiorsi, schreit dieser und vorausweisend lauter noch einmal: Fano! Fano! Später sehe ich am Fuß der schon ins Dunkel getauchten Insel ein Feuer. Es sind Fischer am Strand. Einer von ihnen schwenkt ein brennendes Holz” (189). “Die von Aurach an jenem Morgen in Manchester mir übergebenen nachgelassenen Blätter seiner Mutter liegen nun vor mir, und ich will versuchen, auszugsweise wiederzugeben, was die Schreiberin […] in ihnen von ihrem früheren Leben erzählt” (289). “so schreibt sie” (290). “schreibt Luisa” (291). “Zwei grünsamtene Sessel mit Trottelfransen ringsum, und zwischen den auf den Platz hinausgehenden Fenstern ein ebensolches Sofa. Der Tisch ist aus hellem Kirschbaumholz. Ein fächerartiges Gestell mit fünf Fotografien unserer Verwandten aus Mainstockheim und Leutershausen steht darauf und in einem eigenen Rahmen ein Bild der Schwester von Papa, die das schönste Mädchen weit und breit gewesen sein soll […] Außerdem steht auf dem Tisch ein Porzellanschwan mit offenen Flügeln und darin das […] immergrüne Brautbukett unserer lb. Mama” (292).

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The narrator’s absence and the strength of Luisa’s voice is underlined by the abbreviation “lb. Mama” for “liebe Mama” (“dear Mama”)27 which is an abbreviation Luisa must have used in her manuscript, since the narrator has not once used such an abbreviation or any other abbreviation of any kind in his narrative. The absence of the narrator, then, allows the characters to speak directly to the reader. Their voices gain immediacy and with that authenticity. This quality of authenticity seems to say that there is a true, real story that allows for the possibility of a stable narration. The photos, the diary and the manuscript complement the reported speech as evidence of a reality that is presented in this stable narration. As we have seen however, the narrator’s presence undercuts this stability. When the narrator is present, inevitably the instability of the narration comes to the fore in his use of the subjunctive, the use of translation, his self-critical comments and the unreliability of the memories. The Emigrants, therefore, incorporates a curious interplay between the narrator’s presence and absence, the stability and instability of narration and the reliability of proof versus the unreliability of narration and memory. The absence of the narrator gives particular weight to the story of Luisa, since her voice emerges as the strongest with the least interference of the narrator. She is not an emigrant herself, but rather the mother of an emigrant, one of the ones who did not make it out of Germany and who perished in the Holocaust. She is also not describing life in exile, nor the life she had to lead under the Nazis let alone what she had to endure in the Holocaust. She writes of a time before the terror. While all the others have described the lives of emigrants – Dr. Selwyn his own life, Mme. Landau and the narrator their memories of the deceased Paul Bereyter, Tante Fini and Onkel Kazimir their own emigrant experiences and that of Onkel Ambrose, and finally Ambrose’s diary that of his life after emigration with a Jewish lover – Luisa’s account is not about an emigrant’s experience at all. While it does relate to the emigrants’ experience in that it was sent to Luisa’s son who emigrated and who had to live with the memories of his own emigration, and of his parents who perished in the Holocaust, Luisa’s story is especially poignant because it is written by one who could not escape. Instead of describing the terror of the Holocaust, she turns backwards to memories of her childhood and youth – it is memories that must have kept Luisa sane and going towards the end. In this sense, Luisa is different from Dr. Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, 27

The English translation does not account for this abbreviation.

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Ambrose and her own son Max Aurach. Each one of them seem to have been running away from memories, trying to stamp them out, by committing suicide in the case of Dr. Selwyn and Paul Bereyter or by submitting to electroshocks in the case of Ambrose. Even Max Aurach admits to having been paralyzed and petrified in a state of not remembering. Luisa is the only one who seems to embrace memories. By contrast, the narrator does not embrace his own memories. Rather, like the other emigrants, he avoids his own memories. He does not allow his own memories to surface – he seems to have managed as Ambrose wished to do to keep his own memories tightly bound. He does not once use the opportunity, in the many passages in which he is present to explain why he himself left his home. His own story of emigration remains a “fifth story of exile kept quiet” (Kastura, 197).28 As a presumably Gentile fictional autobiographer born after World War II, the narrator – as the reader might assume – did not leave Germany on account of the Holocaust. But the longer the narrator’s presence and absence vacillate in the text, the clearer it becomes that his fascination and passion for these particular emigrants is due to the fact that his own emigration has a lot to do indeed with the Holocaust. As a fictional autobiographical copy of Sebald, the narrator probably grew up as Sebald himself described in interviews: “Sebald only slowly became aware of the unspeakable atrocities committed around the time of his birth […] his father […] returned home from a French prison camp in 1947 [… and] never talked about the war […] Sebald said he learned ‘practically nothing’ about Germany’s wartime history until he was in his mid-teens” (Martin, 40). In his lectures on Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald writes that despite all their efforts to come to terms with the past, the Germans have become “a people remarkably blind to history and lacking in tradition.” The Holocaust is not the German people’s only crippling historical legacy. The “true state of utter material and moral devastation in which the entire country found itself ” at the end of the war was treated as a “shameful family secret marked with such a powerful taboo that one could probably not even acknowledge it to oneself ” (Lewis, 89).

If for Sebald it was “shame about this ‘country, cleaned and straigthened up to the last corners, which had looked for and found’ its economic well-being in ‘lack of memory and spiritual poverty’” (HeidelbergerLeonard, 123)29 that convinced him to emigrate, we can assume that his 28 29

“verschwiegene fünfte Exilgeschichte.” “Scham über dieses ‘bis in den letzten Winkel aufgeräumte und begradigte Land, das in Erinnerungslosigkeit’ und ‘Geistesverarmung’ sein ökonomisches Heil gesucht und gefunden habe.”

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fictional autobiographical self, the narrator of The Emigrants, probably also left because he could not stand to live in post-war Germany. At the center of this text, then, is the Holocaust, although it is never mentioned directly and only a few times indirectly. One might expect that a narrator who left Germany for being ashamed of how the Germans forget their historical legacy would say loud and clear what he thinks of the Germans and of the Holocaust. However, the third absence in this text, next to the structural absence of the narrator and the absence of the narrator’s own story of emigration, is the absence of the Holocaust. The emigrants themselves or the witnesses of their lives cannot speak about the Holocaust. Dr. Selwyn says “The years of the second war […] were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to” (21).30 Mme. Landau describes Paul’s silence on the subject of the Holocaust and the deportation of his fiancée: “Paul had preserved a resolute silence on the subject, possibly because he was plagued by a sense of having failed or let her down” (49).31 Mme. Landau later learns that the fiancée and her mother were deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt. Similarly, Ambrose’s relatives only obliquely describe that Cosmo, Ambrose’s Jewish lover, lost his sanity during the war: he seemed to know in his head “what was happening in Europe: the inferno, the dying, the rotting bodies lying in the sun in the open fields” (95).32 Max Aurach does not remember much either, except the Nazi parades and he admits “It had been a terribly bad time for him, a time scarcely to be endured, a time he could not bear to say any more about” (167).33 These passages are some of the very few that obliquely refer to war and the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the central event in the lives of all the characters, because it changed their lives, it is the trauma that is resurfacing in the lives of almost all the characters’ memories and leading to suicide, depression and illness. However, the Holocaust remains the 30

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“Die Jahre des zweiten Kriegs […] waren für mich ein blinde und böse Zeit, über die ich, selbst wenn ich wollte, nichts zu erzählen vermöchte” (35). “Der Paul, sagte sie, habe sich hierzu beharrlich ausgeschwiegen, möglicherweise weil er, wie sie vermute, von der Vorstellung geplagt wurde, ihr gegenüber versagt und sie im Stich gelassen zu haben” (73). “was in Europa vor sich ging, das Brennen, das Sterben und das Verwesen unter der Sonne auf dem offenen Feld” (139). “Es sei für ihn eine ungemein böse, kaum zu überstehende Zeit gewesen, über die er nur schwer Genaueres aussagen könne” (249).

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“unspeakable” (Steiner, 348), it is “something [that] waits to be phrased that cannot be; it is a silence, lost to representation […] All Art can do is struggle with and bear witness to the unsayable” (Parry, 420). This is what the narrator attempts to do. He is trying to describe the Holocaust and its devastation without describing the Nazi terror. By keeping the Holocaust absent, he establishes it as the most central presence in the text. It is like a loud scream in the silence. The narrator does not comment on the emigrants’ accounts of their lives, he remains absent for most of their stories, and keeps his own emigration story absent because he is “careful not to imply that the survivors have any obligation to describe their experiences and recognizes their ‘unassailable right to silence.’” In fact, he recognizes the power of this absence, of this silence, since it seems to speak louder than a tirade against the terrors of the Holocaust. Ultimately, the author manages to “recover [… history] through a fictional representation of the inaccessibility of its occurrence” (Parry, 427). The narrator’s presence therefore allows the characters to come forward, connects their stories and reminds the reader that these are memories at times even unreliable memories. By being present, the narrator retains control of the narration. In his absences, he allows the characters to gain immediacy to seem to speak directly to the readers. It is his absence and silence about the Holocaust and his own emigration story that bears witness to the pervasive presence of the horror of the Holocaust. It cannot be forgotten.

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The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Katja Garloff

Not long before he wrote Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald reviewed in an article in Lettre the work of Alfred Andersch, including the 1967 novel Efraim. To the best of my knowledge, this is first novel by a non-Jewish German author writing after the Holocaust whose protagonist is a German Jewish emigrant. It tells the story of a British journalist of German Jewish origins who in 1962 temporarily returns to his native Berlin, officially to gauge the public attitude during the Cuba missile crisis but unofficially to find out more about the fate of a “half-Jewish” girl during the Third Reich. The girl is the out-of-wedlock daughter of Efraim’s Gentile British boss, Keir Horne. After learning that in the late 1930s, Horne had the opportunity to help his daughter by issuing an affidavit but refused to do so, Efraim’s alienation from his boss and from journalism is complete and he leaves the profession to become a literary writer. In Sebald’s review he harshly criticizes Andersch’s tendency toward self-aggrandizement, which he regards as a symptom of the attempt of the innere Emigration to construe the self as a refuge from history. The inflation of the self culminates in Efraim in a narrative perspective that completely silences the voices of the victims of the Holocaust. Rather than recognizing Horne’s moral failure as his own – Andersch had divorced his “halfJewish” wife in 1943, thereby endangering her and their daughter – Andersch “chooses George Efraim to represent him. More precisely, he puts himself into the character, ruthlessly taking him over, until the reader gradually comes to realize that there is no George Efraim anymore, only an author maneuvering in place of his victim” (Natural History, 136).1 In

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“Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, 136. The German original reads: “wählt … George Efraim zu seinem Stellvertreter. Genauer gesagt, er versetzt sich in ihn hinein und breitet sich rücksichtslos in ihm aus, bis es, wie der Leser allmählich realisiert, einen

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this essay I read Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz in the light of the following question: how can someone who has not suffered under the Nazis legitimately speak for, or at least about, a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution? I argue that Sebald’s construction of a non-Jewish narrator presents an alternative to Andersch’s facile identification with the victims. By narrating Austerlitz’s story and simultaneously exploring the narrator’s investment in his story, Sebald reestablishes the grounds of narrative legitimacy. To this end he invokes the idea of trauma – as I will show, the encounters between Austerlitz and the narrator are informed by the same principles that govern the retrieval of traumatic memories – and locates a peculiar force of obligation in the photographs Austerlitz is said to pass on to the narrator. It can hardly go unnoticed that Sebald’s writings resonate with the contemporary discourse of trauma in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism. Austerlitz lists the symptoms of a posttraumatic stress disorder resulting from the experience of persecution and flight during the Third Reich, and moreover, it incorporates the logic of trauma into the very form of the text. There is the protagonist’s unwillingness or inability to talk about his life and origins, which at times widens to a general crisis of language.2 There is the indirect historical referentiality, the way in which history enters into the text at unexpected moments, in signifiers created through mechanisms of displacement and condensation. One example of this is the highly overdetermined name of the protagonist. “Austerlitz” assonates with “Auschwitz,” the most frequently used metonym for the Holocaust, which also returns in the “Auschowitz Springs” (215)3 in Marienbad, where Austerlitz once stood frightened by unspeakable enigmas and horrors. And finally there is the idea of the temporal unlocability of traumatic events, the disjunction between experience and understanding Freud called Nachträglichkeit or “deferred action.” Austerlitz himself describes the dynamic of trauma as an experience that has not been fully registered and therefore, in some sense, not yet really occurred:

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George Efraim gar nicht mehr gibt, sondern bloß noch einen Autor, der sich an die Stelle des Opfers manövriert hat” (Luftkrieg, 153 f.). See, for instance, Austerlitz (8, 12; 31, 46; 122 ff., 177 ff.). Here and elsewhere, parenthetical references are first to the English edition, then to the German original of Austerlitz. In-text citations are to the English edition, with German references in the notes. “Auschowitzer Quellen” (306).

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A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish. (101)4

Though this passage ends with a sense of pain and misery, the novel as a whole attempts to salvage the peculiar experience of time described here. Austerlitz’s ability to resist the rule of time in modernity, an ability that is emphasized throughout the novel, is both a symptom of trauma and a step towards its cure.5 More precisely, the sense of stasis founds a mode of narration that connects private story and public history in new and significant ways. Austerlitz himself talks of the “marks of pain which … trace countless fine lines through history” (14)6 “and cites as an example “the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places” (14)7 that occupy him whenever he studies the architecture of train stations. He must have had similar feelings when he was forced to leave his home as a small child. The fact that these feelings inform his studies indicate that trauma becomes a source of knowledge. The very interest in archi4

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“Eine Uhr ist mir immer wie etwas Lachhaftes vorgekommen, wie etwas von Grund auf Verlogenes, vielleicht weil ich mich, aus einem mir selber nie verständlichen inneren Antrieb heraus, gegen die Macht der Zeit stets gesträubt und von dem sogenannten Zeitgeschehen mich ausgeschlossen habe, in der Hoffnung, wie ich heute denke, sagte Austerlitz, daß die Zeit nicht verginge, nicht vergangen sei, daß ich hinter sie zurücklaufen könne, daß dort alles so wäre wie vordem oder, genauer gesagt, daß sämtliche Zeitmomente gleichzeitig nebeneinander existierten, beziehungsweise daß nichts von dem, was die Geschichte erzählt, wahr wäre, das Geschehene noch gar nicht geschehen ist, sondern eben erst geschieht, in dem Augenblick, in dem wir an es denken, was natürlich andererseits den trostlosen Prospekt eröffne eines immerwährenden Elends und einer niemals zu Ende gehenden Pein” (147 f.). See the frequently quoted passage on the dominance of time in modernity (12, 17 f.), which contrasts with Austerlitz’s experiences of being-outside-of-time (101, 147 f.; 117, 169) and his references to spaces outside of time (108, 156; 257 f., 363). See also the essay by Karin Bauer in this volume, which traces the echoes of Benjamin in Austerlitz’s relationship to time and history. “Schmerzensspuren, die sich … in unzähligen feinen Linien durch die Geschichte ziehen” (20). “die Qual des Abschiednehmens und die Angst vor der Fremde” (21).

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tecture, a spatial archive of history, figures as both a symptom of repression and a form of remembrance. Though his art-historical research arguably helps Austerlitz avoid a confrontation with his own history, the narrator also observes that “the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life” (13).8 The figure of Austerlitz thus lends support to an idea that informs much recent trauma theory, namely that the blockage of speech and memory in trauma may give rise to new forms of transmission. Elsewhere I have argued that the experience of emigration is frequently invoked to explain this possibility and that Sebald’s interest in emigrants should be seen in this context. The disjointed dialogues between narrator and protagonists in Die Ausgewanderten dramatize the ways that literary testimony emerges in spite of – or rather because of – the impossibility of fully recovering the traumatic past.9 We know very little about the narrator of Austerlitz, and the little we know might lead us to assume that the narrator is identical with the author. However, as in Die Ausgewanderten, the narrator is rather carefully construed as both similar to and different from the protagonist, and as both a victim and an accomplice of past violence. Like Austerlitz, the narrator is displaced and troubled by repressed memories. Unlike him, he is a descendant of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and has a different kind of investment in the history of the Third Reich. The fortification and former concentration camp of Breendonk, which the narrator visits after his first encounter with Austerlitz and which reminds him of the family fathers he knew in his youth, is said to open the door to the horrors of his own childhood. These horrors include a repulsive smell and “the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbürste” (25)10 which he hated just as much as his father loved it – presumably because it was his father’s preferred instrument of punishment, though this 8

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“die erzählerische Vermittlung seiner Sachkenntnisse die schrittweise Annäherung an eine Art Metaphysik der Geschichte gewesen ist, in der das Erinnerte noch einmal lebendig wurde” (18 f.). See Katja Garloff, “The Emigrant as Witness: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten.” I argue there that in the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Giorgio Agamben and others, the emigrant embodies the non-coincidence between place and memory that is the very condition of testimony. I also show that “Max Aurach,” the last story of Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten, can be read as a series of impossible returns and missed encounters. It is precisely because the circuits of communication are irreparably broken that new processes of transmission set in. “Wurzelbürste” (37)

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remains unspoken. The anthropomorphic description of a wall onto which the narrator projects his own anxieties, even suggests that he suffers panic attack: “I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty, covered with bluish spots, and seemed to me to be perspiring with cold beads of sweat” (25f.).11 These allusions to past and present fears, which moreover are associated with the potential for cruelty of those family fathers who performed tortures at Breendonk, cast the narrator as someone who is just as much in need of help as the protagonist whose story he relates. Austerlitz also becomes the first teacher since primary school from whom the narrator actually learns something, whereas his university teachers, most of whom “had built their careers in the 1930s and 1940s and still nurtured delusions of power” (32f.)12 were unable to teach him much. At the same time, the narrator’s occasional guilt feelings, for instance regarding the fire at the Lucerne train station during his 1971 visit there (10 f., 15 f.), indicate that he also feels responsible for the violence he recounts. The encounters between narrator and protagonist are construed as the result of unconscious fears and wishes on both sides. In the very first sentence we learn that the narrator travels somewhat compulsively – “repeatedly” (3)13 – to Belgium for reasons that remain opaque to him. He does not remember on which of these occasions he first met Austerlitz. The lack of insight into his own motivation also transpires in the uneasiness that overcomes him in Antwerp, where the first street name he mentions, “Jeruzalemstraat” (3), signifies both a site of destruction and the hope for restitution. The subsequent encounters between him and Austerlitz are the products of chance and yet occur with an uncanny regularity, as if out of necessity.14 These chance encounters, which enable the narrator to reconstruct the story of Austerlitz, are equivalents of the flashbacks and other manifestations of mémoire involuntaire through which Austerlitz gains access to his repressed memories. Witness how the narrator goes to London in order to cure what he deems a “hysterical 11

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“ich gezwungen war, mit der Stirn mich anzulehnen an die von bläulichen Flecken unterlaufene, griesige und, wie mir vorkam, von kalten Schweißperlen überzogene Wand” (37). “größtenteils in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren in ihrer akademischen Laufbahn vorangerückten und immer noch in ihren Machtphantasien befangenen” (47). “wiederholt” (5). See for instance 27, 40; 44, 64. Another time the narrator meets Austerlitz “as agreed” (254) [“verabredungsgemäß” (359)] in a bar in Paris even though Austerlitz’s vague invitation did not specify the time and place of their meeting.

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weakness in my eyesight” (35).15 It is there that he sees Austerlitz again after two decades of silence and they resume their conversation exactly where they had broken off (41, 60). Though the narrator’s sight problems turn out to have organic reasons, the mention of hysterical blindness establishes a parallel to Austerlitz’s hysterical epilepsy in Paris, which led to the retrieval of traumatic memories (268, 377). The encounter between narrator and protagonist in London thus figures as an instance in the cure of a traumatic neurosis. However, if the novel invokes here the psychoanalytic idea of therapeutic narration, it also blurs the clear distinction between patient and therapist. Whereas Austerlitz’s emphatic demand for a listener to his story (43, 64) supports the impression of the presence of a “therapist-narrator” (Long, “History,” 125), the beginning of the novel gives a certain primacy to the narrator’s own compulsions and insecurities. His emotional investment in the past is construed as the reason for his interest in Austerlitz rather than as the effect of their therapeutic encounter. To emphasize this again, Austerlitz is not a psychoanalytic case study. Sebald engages with psychoanalysis on a theoretical rather than an empirical level, posing the question of how the transmission of traumatic experience might be possible. By invoking the experience of trauma but taking it out of the context of individual pathology, Sebald transforms the symptoms of illness and methods of treatment into a poetics of history. The photographs that are said to pass from protagonist to narrator are an important element of this poetics. The use of photographs is a feature in all of Sebald’s work, but in Austerlitz the activities surrounding photography become an even more integral part of the narrative than before. We learn that Austerlitz, a prolific photographer, gives the narrator hundreds of photographs on one occasion (7, 11) and a single photo of his mother on another occasion (253, 357). Moreover, the tak15

“hysterische Seeschwäche” (51). Significantly, the narrator first of all mentions how his sight problems affect his ability to look at photographs: “Even when I glanced up from the page open in front of me and turned my gaze on the framed photographs on the wall, all my right eye could see was a row of dark shapes curiously distorted above and below – the figures and landscapes familiar to me in every detail having resolved indiscriminately into a black and menacing crosshatching” (35); “Auch wenn ich den Blick von der vor mir aufgeschlagenen Seite abhob und auf die gerahmten Photographien an der Wand richtete, sah ich mit dem rechten Auge nur eine Reihe dunkler, nach oben und unten seltsam verzerrter Formen – die mir bis ins einzelne vertrauten Figuren und Landschaften hatten sich aufgelöst, unterschiedslos, in eine bedrohliche schwarze Schraffur” (51).

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ing, developing, and viewing of photographs become a prime metaphor of memory. The retrieval of traumatic memories is said to be analogous to the development of photographs, since in both cases the contours of the object appear suddenly and momentarily (77, 113). The text at times enacts this mode of appearance through its juxtaposition of texts and images. When Austerlitz tries hard to recall the details of his departure from Prague in 1939 but his memories remain irredeemably blurred and fragmentary, he comments: “but as soon as I tried to hold one of these fragments fast, or get it into better focus, as it were, it disappeared into the emptiness revolving over my head” (219, my emphasis).16 And when he then suddenly grasps one clear memory – of the roof of the Prague train station – the reproduction of a photograph lends visual evidence to the epiphanic mode of visual memory.17 However, a closer look at this particular photograph reveals that the process of remembrance is more complex and mediated than the narrative suggests. Though Austerlitz recounts how the glimpse of the roof threw him back into the past, the photo itself shows us nothing about this past. It is a highly abstract image, a grid of black lines on a white background, looking like a piece of writing rather than a picture of a roof. Highlighting the non-transparent character of photographs, Sebald both invokes and questions an idea that has gained much currency in contemporary trauma theory, namely that the instantaneous appearance and photographic acuity of a memory image are indexes of its authenticity.18 Witness the scene in which Austerlitz stands in the waiting room of the Liverpool Street station in London and suddenly remembers his arrival in England over fifty years ago. The power of visual memory to conjure up the past in vivid detail is here emphasized through the repetition of phrases such as “I also saw” (137).19 However, right before this vision Austerlitz glimpses on the floor a pattern that evokes both writing and photography – “the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet” (136)20 – suggesting that memory needs the sup16

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“doch sowie ich eines dieser Fragmente festhalten oder, wenn man so sagen kann, schärfer einstellen wollte, verschwand es in der über mir sich drehenden Leere” (312, my emphasis). In another scene, Austerlitz is able to reconstruct buried events with the help of photographs (268, 377). For a summary and a critique of this assumption of trauma theory, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 266–297. “ich sah auch” (197). “das schwarzweiße Rautenmuster der Steinplatten zu meinen Füßen” (196).

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port of a system of codification in order to work. Similarly, when Austerlitz recovers memories of his childhood while walking through Prague, he emphasizes the superiority of involuntary, sense-based memory over conscious, language-based memory, yet what he actually sees are abstract ornaments rather than tangible things. His gaze falls on “a finely wrought window grating, the iron handle of a bell pull, or the branches of an almond tree growing over a garden wall” (150),21 decorative details that fail to conjure up for the reader the all-encompassing sense impression Austerlitz is said to experience. As he himself states in a passage printed next to the photographs of two such ornaments, a mosaic and a staircase, these ornaments are “signs and characters from the type case of forgotten things” (151),22 written ciphers that still need to be decoded and integrated into a context. The many abstract photographs in Austerlitz underscore this need for decoding and contest the idea of visual immediacy propagated on the level of narrative.23 Sebald’s skepticism about the idea of visual immediacy goes hand in hand with his critique of the ways in which images, and in particular mass-produced media images, take the place of the very events they depict. If we can never really know the historical events, this is not necessarily because they are by definition inaccessible but because our minds are saturated with prefabricated images. As Austerlitz’s history teacher in high school once put it, history is a “concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered” (72).24 The critique of images that simultaneously create and destroy memory is abetted by the depiction of the propagandistic and prosthetic character of Nazi films.25 For instance, Leni Riefenstahl’s cin21

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“an einem schön geschmiedeten Fenstergitter, am eisernen Griff eines Klingelzugs oder im Geäst eines Mandelbäumchens” (217). “Buchstaben und Zeichen aus dem Setzkasten der vergessenen Dinge” (218). On Sebald’s contestation of the idea that visual memory is somehow more immediate and “true” than narrative memory, see also the description of Austerlitz’s “recognition” of his mother in the Theresienstadt film (251 f., 355), which turns out to be a mistake. See also Maya Barzilai’s essay in this volume. “Beschäftigung mit immer schon vorgefertigten, in das Innere unserer Köpfe gravierten Bildern, auf die wir andauernd starrten, während die Wahrheit irgendwoanders, in einem von keinem Menschen noch entdeckten Abseits liegt” (105). See Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Landsberg defines prosthetic memories as “memories which do not come from a person’s live experience in any strict sense. These are implanted memories and the unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones are frequently accompa-

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ematic account of the 1934 Nazi party convention at Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will, seems to have shaped the memory of Austerlitz’s father of Hitler’s arrival at Nuremberg more than his actual witnessing of the event (169 f., 243f.). It is interesting in that regard that the narrator transforms another Nazi film, a 1944 documentary about Theresienstadt, into a kind of photograph when he has a slow-motion copy of it made, which he then searches for traces of his mother. The slow-motion version undoes the original’s propagandistic effects by turning the polka that accompanies the pictures of a blacksmith’s workshop into a “funeral march dragging along at a grotesquely sluggish pace” (247)26 and the off-commentary into “a menacing growl” (250).27 This is what the photos in Sebald’s texts are meant to accomplish: rather than illustrate history, they defamiliarize the prefabricated images of history that have colonized our minds. To grasp the effect of the photographs in Austerlitz, we might consider once more the book that, as I have been arguing, was its negative model, Alfred Andersch’s Efraim. At two crucial junctures Efraim includes excerpts from the Auschwitz and Treblinka trials that describe extremely cruel murders of Jewish babies during the Holocaust.28 Through the insertion of these documents Andersch mobilizes what James Young has called a “rhetoric of fact” to authenticate an experience so extreme that it might otherwise meet with disbelief.29 The trial excerpts accomplish this effect in part because their sources are cited in the back of the book.30 In disrupting the first-person narrative and highlighting this shift visually

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nied by another disruption: of the human body, its flesh, its subjective autonomy, its difference from both the animal and the technological” (190). “ein mit geradezu grotesker Trägheit sich dahinschleppender Trauermarsch” (352). “ein bedrohliches Grollen” (353). See also Austerlitz’s reading of H. G. Adler’s book on Theresienstadt, which he has to decipher word by word because his poor understanding of German (233ff., 334f.) The slow and painful process by which Austerlitz deciphers Adler’s book contrasts with the facility with which the protagonist of Andersch’s Efraim recovers his native German language – which was one of the things Sebald found so implausible in Efraim, a symptom of its confusion of the positions of victims and perpetrators. See Sebald, Luftkrieg, 154. See Andersch, Efraim, 173, 348. See James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, esp. 64–80. In fact, the overall effect of these documentary inserts is more complex and deserving of attention. For Andersch also fictionalizes the documents rather ostentatiously and in so doing he allows the reader to avoid the experience of the victims altogether, thus easing the burden of responsibility. One might say that Andersch simultaneously exploits the rhetoric of fact and the license of fiction.

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through italics, these documentary inserts might be said to create an effect akin to that of the photos in Sebald. Yet the difference becomes clear when we compare the narration of the photos’ origins in Austerlitz with the credentials printed on the last page of Efraim. To be sure, the photographs in Austerlitz also authenticate the narrative, for when we see them, we assume that the act of their delivery and by implication Austerlitz’s story are just as real as the photographs in front of our eyes. Yet because the source of the photographs is given within the literary rather than a separate meta-text, their status and function remain open to interpretation. Whereas Andersch uses documentary inserts to imbue the narrative with an aura of authenticity, Sebald’s photographs keep reminding us of the difficulty of understanding an experience that is not our own and that can never be appropriated. I have argued that Sebald does not flesh out the claims of trauma theory in psychological portraits but rather transposes the logic of trauma from intra-psychic processes to the interaction between narrator and protagonist. The accidental encounters between narrator and protagonist mime the disjunctive rhythm in which traumatic memories come to the fore. The question remains whether the emphasis on the narrator’s role in this constellation is not problematic. As one of the conference participants put it, is this a story of “Jewish storyteller meets German historian” in which only the latter is able to put the story together and transmit it to his readers? To answer this question in the affirmative would mean to forget that the narrator functions both as a literary character and a narrative device. As a literary character, he indeed acts like a therapist who enables the reconstruction of the events. He is the condition of the story or at least holds a certain interpretive power over it – though, as I have been arguing, he is never in mastery of the process of reconstruction. As a textual device, the narrator produces a distancing effect because his presence highlights the level of mediation in the reconstruction of the past. Through techniques of narrative embedding and an oscillation between indicative and subjunctive, Sebald reminds us of the space of fabrication and distortion that opens up in the transmission of memories.31 Rather than attempting to restore authenticity at all costs, he sheds light on the conditions of a story’s transmission and the question of what gives someone the right to tell another’s story. In the last section of the book, two moments of “symbolic investiture” that 31

On the specific techniques, see also the essay of Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau in this volume.

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confer upon the narrator – and the author – the authority to tell Austerlitz’s story, highlight this underlying quest for legitimacy.32 The first of these moments involves the legacy of the photos. As we have seen, Sebald valorizes photography because of the archaeological work it requires and the non-contemporaneous relationships it establishes. Because the viewing of photographs involves a temporal lag between perception and cognition, the future of their reception is peculiarly open-ended. In a brilliant new book on trauma and photography, Ulrich Baer argues that the specific temporality of photographs constitutes a challenge we should take seriously. The famous “reality effect” of photographs may result from viewing conventions, but it cannot be reduced to these. Photographs can convey a sense of the reality of their subject, regardless of the photographer’s intentions and biases, because the technology involved in their production deprives the photographer of “complete authorial control” (Baer, 138) over his or her representation. The capacity of an image to show something beyond the photographer’s intention is especially important in Holocaust photography, which was often taken by the perpetrators, with their all too obvious biases and purposes. As Baer shows for a series of photographs from the Lodz ghetto that were clearly taken from a Nazi perspective, these nevertheless “register details that are contingent and extraneous to such a perspective, and those details let us see beyond the Nazis’ reconstruction of a hermetically sealed Holocaust universe” (139). Tellingly, Austerlitz elicits such details out of the Theresienstadt documentary by altering the temporal flow of the film, by making it more photographic. It is in this context that we have to read one of Austerlitz’s last remarks, made when he gives the narrator the key to his house in London: “I could stay there whenever I liked, he said, and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life” (293).33 These photographs, the only remnants of Austerlitz’s life, constitute the medium of a future imaginative rapprochement between narrator and protagonist. Blurred, cryptic and impersonal as they are, they present a challenge to the viewer and the narrator is shown to be the first

32

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For a different context, Eric Santner has defined the concept of “symbolic investiture” in My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, especially 11 f. “Ich könne dort, wann immer ich wolle, sagte er, mein Quartier aufschlagen und die schwarzweißen Bilder studieren, die als einziges übrigbleiben würden von seinem Leben” (410).

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to respond to this challenge. One might in fact say that this is how the text construes its own possibility. Towards the end there are several hints at the impending death Austerlitz, who bids farewell to the narrator with a story about a cemetery. Though his death is never shown to actually take place, the book allows for the conclusion that it was composed only after Austerlitz had died and bequeathed his photographs to the narrator. As I have shown, the photographs do not illustrate the past but rather oblige their viewers to continue to search for the past, however difficult this task might prove. In suggesting that he followed Austerlitz’s invitation, that he continued to study the photographs and reopened their future by passing them on to his readers, the narrator gives a possible justification for his own text. The book’s last pages dramatize another moment of symbolic investiture. After taking leave from Austerlitz, the narrator once more visits Breendonk. This time he devotes surprisingly little attention to his surroundings, but rather describes at length how he sits down at the end of his visit to read a memoir given to him by Austerlitz in Paris. The memoir’s author, named Jacobson, recounts his experience as a Jew who grew up in South Africa and after WW II tried to track down his family in Eastern Europe but found only the traces of destruction. The memoir deals with similar themes as Austerlitz, from the absence of the father and of tangible origins to the sight of a fortification that was useless during WW I and converted into a concentration camp by the Germans during WW II. The scene of the narrator’s reading about these things adds another self-reflexive dimension to the text and once more poses the question of what constitutes a rightful legacy. Finally, in the face of so many absent origins and legacies, Austerlitz invents a new one. The novel ends on recounting a scene from the memoir in which Jacobson finds several phrases and names etched into the walls of the fortification, including one that is accompanied by a date: “Max Stern, Paris, 18. 5. 44” (298). Supposedly this is the signature of one of the Jewish inmates who thereby meant to mark his presence in the camp, but what we read here are also the second middle name and the birth date of the author of the book, W. G. Sebald (who went in England by the short form of his second middle name: “Max”). This is a highly resonant scene and a potentially problematic gesture of identification. The camp seems to become here the birthplace of the author, or at least the site of an uncanny proximity between him and his narrative subjects, thereby investing him with a new kind of authority to speak for the victims of the Holocaust. However, the coincidence between the date of the inscription and the

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author’s birthday is neither made explicit in the text nor is it anchored outside of the text like the trial excerpts in Efraim. It is a connection that remains arcane and that never transcends the realm of fiction. Sebald’s solution to the dilemma of authorship is quite ingenious. By concluding a novel that contests the possibility of ever fully understanding the victims with the encrypted wish to be able to speak for them, Sebald marks it as precisely that: a secret wish, which remains an arrogation as much as an obligation.

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“Egg boxes stacked in a crate”: Narrative Status and its Implications Ben Hutchinson

W. G. Sebald’s four main prose books are all centrally concerned with the perception of collective history through individual experience. For such a prose stylist this insistence on personal perspective expresses itself inevitably in the structure of his writing, and in particular in the narrative strategies that he uses. Proceeding from the perspective of a firstperson narrator, whom the reader casually identifies with the author himself, he artfully builds layers of narrative on top of one another, “all interlocking” (Austerlitz, 192).1 This narratorial vertigo is moreover mirrored in many of the leitmotifs that recur in his work: this is the familiar emphasis on a labyrinthine process of travel, of continuous quest. I intend, therefore, to explore how Sebald’s “historical metaphysic” (ibid, 14)2 is constructed as a process of narrative regression, balanced on a precipice of retrospection, – and I will thus insist that he be read as an artist and novelist, not as an historian or holocaust chronicler. In all of Sebald’s books the most immediate structural contrast is between the story of narration, and the stories narrated; that is to say, between the present as he experiences it and the past as he relates it. The uncertain status of the narrator – is he to be equated with Sebald? – can itself be read as “a further tactic of disorientation” (Jörg Drews in Porträt, 68),3 but in any case the sensation of narrative vertigo stretches far beyond the authorial first person. It seems that one can trace, through the course of his books, a gradual progression in narrative complexity, a thickening of the filters between the “action” and the reader. Vertigo is presented largely as his story, from his point of view (excluding, of course, the two literary interpolations); by the time of The Rings of Saturn 1 2 3

“immer das eine im andern verschachtelt” (Austerlitz, 196). “Metaphysik der Geschichte” (Austerlitz, 19). My translation: “ein weiteres Ingrediens der Verunsicherungsstrategie” (Porträt, 68).

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and Austerlitz the stories are invariably related at multiple removes, establishing a narrative history parallel to the actual history. Any number of examples could serve to illustrate this most fundamental of Sebaldian techniques. In The Rings of Saturn, for instance, the way stories are set within stories provides the narrative equivalent of the author’s wanderings, departing from the places visited but then spooling out from one another like concentric circles across a “relationship of time and space” (14),4 so that this narrative framework becomes in a sense the subject, as well as the style, of the book. This is apparent in every chapter, producing a narrative structure that can be schematized as passing through multiple stages. So, for example, by the end of Swinburne’s story in chapter six, the poet’s aunt “talks” to the poet, who in turn talks to his guest, who in turn “talks” to Sebald, who in turn talks to the reader. Or in chapter eight, the reader approaches the Ashburys in Ireland via Fitzgerald via Sebald’s dream. Examples of this kind of “interlocking” narrative structure could be pulled out almost at will; the question, then, is what is its effect? The nature of Sebald’s first-person perspective invariably leads him to self-conscious speculation about the nature of writing, whether implicitly in someone else’s work or explicitly in his own, and so we in turn can perhaps be led by his own conclusions. We may note, then, his description of Thomas Browne’s literary style: he constructs “labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness’, and which produce “a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view” (The Rings of Saturn, 19).5 This has a clear relevance to Sebald’s own style, where the past is mediated through this telescoping of narrative perspective. His sentence structure too, can clearly be as labyrinthine as anything in Mann or Kafka: the bravura ten page sentence describing the ghetto of Theresienstadt in Austerlitz, for example, recalls a similar use of hypotaxis to evoke the process of constructing Kafka’s Great Wall of China – “and indeed there was no end to the improvements and embellishments” (Austerlitz, 340).6 4 5

6

“Verhältnis von Raum und Zeit” (Austerlitz, 18). “er baut labyrinthische, bisweilen über ein, zwei Seiten sich hinziehende Satzgebilde” … “ein Gefühl der Levitation. Je mehr die Entfernung wächst, desto klarer wird die Sicht.” (Ringe, 30). For a discussion of the “art of levitation” see my essay, “Die Leichtigkeit der Schwermut: W. G. Sebalds Kunst der Levitation.” “und so war der Verbesserungs- und Verschönerungsmaßnahmen kein Ende” (Austerlitz, 344).

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Yet the biggest single influence on Sebald’s sinuous prose style was seemingly Thomas Bernhard. The latter’s The Lime-Works (Das Kalkwerk), for example, makes even greater use of this concatenation of clauses, self-consciously deconstructing its own narrative techniques of reported speech and subjunctives. The protagonist Konrad is trying to write a study on “The Sense of Hearing’, which he is doomed never to finish; as Sebald himself remarks in his essay on Bernhard, “the price of heightened sensibility is the increasing difficulty of articulation” (Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 110).7 Konrad thus torments his wife with long composite sentences, the longest, most intricately complex sentences [Schachtelsätzen], the kind it admittedly gave him the greatest pleasure to experiment with, or such sentences as this, for example: The connections which, as you know, are quite independent of the interconnection of the whole, but are nevertheless connected, in the most delicate ways, with the connections of the connection which is independent of the interconnection, and so forth. You could say, of course, that the whole thing was crazy, but then you would have to say that everything was crazy, which is the simple truth … (101)8

What Sebald thus shares with Bernhard, as this passage illustrates, is not simply prolix sentence structure, but rather its implications: the confusion of both temporal and spatial relationships (Bernhard’s “connections,” Sebald’s “relationship of time and space”), and the quixotic attempt to assert continuity across the disorienting abyss of the past. Bernhard exploits the ability of German to enfold adjectival clauses one within the other to suggest the pain of temps perdu, as, for example, in the distance between siblings: he suffered because his sister and his brother Francis were only one year apart in age, they were practically the same age and inseparable companions in consequence, of course, while he, years older than they, which made him much weaker than they, was separated from them by the difference in age between them and him, a separateness that hurt him to the roots of his being, [ständig von ihnen durch

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My translation: “Im übrigen ist der Preis für die Steigerung der Sensibilität die zunehmende Schwierigkeit der Artikulation.” “mit langen, längsten, sogenannten vielfachen Schachtelsätzen, mit welchen zu experimentieren ihm allerdings das größte Vergnügen mache. Mit dem Satz zum Beispiel: die Zusammenhänge, die, wie du weißt, mit dem Zusammenhang nichts zu tun haben, aber die doch auf das empfindlichste mit den Zusammenhängen des Zusammenhangs, der mit dem Zusammenhang nichts zu tun habe, zusammenhängen und so fort. Man könne sagen, daß alles sei verrückt, aber dann müsse man auch sagen, daß alles verrückt sei, in Wahrheit sei auch alles verrückt …” (Thomas Bernhard, Das Kalkwerk, 118).

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mehrere ihn tatsächlich ununterbrochen bis in die Tiefe seiner Existenz hinein schmerzende Jahre] and so he had grown up in isolation because of the ruinous gap in age between him and them. He had always been alone. (47)9

Bernhard, then, provided the example par excellence of how elegiac grammar can enact the distance evoked. Sebald borrows this technique as the basis of his own prose style, yet he broadens it into a wider, socio-historical framework. He explores a sense of historical vertigo, an inversion of perspective linked in particular to the travel imagery so ubiquitous in his writing. Images of this appear in both The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants, from either side of the spectrum: in the former, a boat on the horizon seems to stay still whilst he himself moves; in the latter, it is the minarets of the city that seem to sway as Ambros and Cosmo approach Constantinople, and not the boat they are on. As Sebald says in On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur), “Everything lies all jumbled up […], and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid” (74),10 a sense conveyed through the dizzying reductio of his narrative texture. In The Emigrants this narrative texture is used to suggest the layers of history that the emigrants have placed between themselves and their origins. As the stories are related, so the layers of narrative themselves become “emigrated,” highlighting the generational disparities that stretch across a family. So in the central story of the book we have Cosmo’s reasons for wanting to visit Halifax (to see an imaginary brother) related via Ambros via Aunt Fini via Sebald to the reader, as if Ambros’s life has become a microcosm of the family history (142); indeed, Aunt Fini starts her story of Ambros, the narrator tells us, “as if a quite new and altogether more significant story were now beginning” (76).11 The sense of past and future that all people (and in particular emigrants) carry with them is furthermore conveyed through implied layers 9

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“Auch hatte er unter dem Umstand zu leiden gehabt, daß seine Schwester wie sein Bruder Franz nur ein einziges Jahr auseinander und also gleichaltrig und dadurch naturgemäß immer miteinander gewesen waren, während er als der viel Ältere, dadurch aber viel Schwächere, ständig von ihnen durch mehrere ihn tatsächlich ununterbrochen bis in die Tiefe seiner Existenz hinein schmerzende Jahre, und das heißt, auf die zerstörerische Distanz mehrerer Jahre zwischen ihm und ihnen getrennt aufwachsen habe müssen.” (Bernhard, 58–59). 74. “alles liegt in ihnen durcheinander, und wenn man in sie hinabschaut, so graust und schwindelt es einem” Luftkrieg und Literatur, 80. “als fange nun eine ganz andere, weitaus bedeutungsvollere Geschichte an.” (Die Ausgewanderten, 111).

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of narrative: the mise-en-abîme of the painting of their home village hanging on the wall in the photograph of the New York apartment, or the narrator describing how as a child he would pore over maps and alphabets of the American landscape, imagining in his head his own brave new world. On the Natural History of Destruction offers a gloss on the significance of this kind of imaginative faculty: “the retrospective learning process […] is the only way of deflecting human wishful thinking towards the anticipation of a future that would not already be pre-empted by the anxieties arising from the suppression of experience” (64).12 Austerlitz makes a strikingly similar statement: “Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory” (198).13 Austerlitz as a whole can be read as a peroration of Sebald’s style. This is certainly true of its narrative structures, where the four stories of emigration presented in The Emigrants are compressed into the one sustained narrative, the one long paragraph. As ever, the layers of narrative are at any given moment concertina’d; once Austerlitz overcomes his initial diffidence and starts telling his story, the multiple narrative removes make the reader feel part of his quest for his roots, particularly when he travels back to Prague and relates what is anyway a distant and questionable past. Narrative interpolations abound, phrases such as “So I think Vera began, said Austerlitz, your mother Agata …” (235),14 so that the narrative uncertainty comes to reflect the historical haziness, a chain of third-person command passed down through time. The verb verschachtelt is the common thread, a term inherited, as we have seen, from Bernhard: like Russian dolls the narrative perspectives unspool one within the other, cushioning the fragility of history like “egg boxes stacked in a crate” (Austerlitz, 128) (ineinander verschachtelten Eierkartons). This recurrent structural device is rendered thematically explicit in their discussions of time and memory. So Austerlitz describes his memories in Liver12

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“Der Lernprozeß […] ist […] die einzige Möglichkeit, die in den Menschen sich regenden Wunschvorstellungen umzubiegen auf die Antizipation einer Zukunft, die nicht schon von der aus verdrängter Erfahrung resultierenden Angst besetzt wäre” (Luftkrieg und Literatur, 69–70). “Darüberhinaus war ich ja auch andauernd beschäftigt mit der von mir Jahrzehnte hindurch fortgesetzten Wissensanhäufung, die mir als ein ersatzweises, kompensatorisches Gedächtnis diente” (Austerlitz, 202). “Deine Mutter Agáta, so begann sie, glaube ich, sagte Austerlitz …” (Austerlitz, 239).

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pool street station as “all interlocking (immer das eine im andern verschachtelt) like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty grey light, and which seemed to go on and on for ever” (192);15 so it always seems to him “as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking (ineinander verschachtelte Räume) according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (261).16 We must ask ourselves, however, to what extent it is legitimate to equate Sebald’s own writing style with pronouncements he attributes to his ‘characters’. His attempt to clarify the issue of narrative status is wonderfully disingenuous, given his own narrative elusiveness: ‘I am of the opinion’, he said in an interview, “that one can no longer write these days as if the narrator were transparent and of no importance. The narrator must lay his cards on the table, but in the most discreet way possible” (Porträt, 144).17 Here is the characteristic Sebaldian reticence: the expressed wish for narrative transparency is countermanded by the imperative of discretion, a discretion that yet belies a tenacious narrative control. Austerlitz is an exception in that its sheer length means that there are passages in which the protagonist Austerlitz comes to assume narrative control, speaking in the first person as if his récit were not mediated through Sebald – but yet there is still a marked absence of direct dialogue between narrator and protagonist. Otherwise Sebald himself rarely relinquishes his own first-person perspective (except for the extended quotations from journals and diaries), preferring to use indirect speech and the subjunctive to evoke a certain “reported” distance; and thus we always sense his controlling mind behind the prose. The rare slippages into foreign languages (usually English) serve to emphasise this, so that at these key moments a sense of an unmediated first person dialogue is allowed to emerge, such as the repeated references to the “butterfly man” in The Emigrants. Yet this is the exception; the narrator is nearly always felt to be present, lurking discreetly in the background. 15

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“gerade so wie die labyrinthischen Gewölbe, die ich in dem staubgrauem Licht zu erkennen glaubte.” (196). “als gäbe es keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Räume, zwischen denen die Lebendigen und die Toten, je nachdem es ihnen zumute ist, hin und her gehen können …” (265). My translation: “Ich glaube, daß man heute nicht mehr so schreiben kann, als sei der Erzähler eine wertfreie Instanz. Der Erzähler muß die Karten auf den Tisch legen, aber auf möglichst diskrete Art.” (Interview with Marco Poltronieri in Porträt, 144).

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In the two novels which are presented as autobiographical travelogues, Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, the narrator in fact becomes foregrounded, since the thrust of the action depends upon his peregrinations. In the former the two main sections, representing movements of departure (“All’ estero”) and return (“Il ritorno in patria”), are interrupted by the two shorter third-person stories of Stendhal and Kafka in which, by contrast, there is a discreet authorial absence. There is a clear slippage, however, between the two sections, the “biographical” and the descriptive: Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus” becomes the presiding spirit of Sebald’s own quest for his childhood, recurring in the figure of “the hunter Hans Schlag” from the Black Forest. This is, of course, entirely characteristic: one of the central questions posed by Sebald’s work is the extent to which memory is a construct. From his first book onwards, there is an implicit emphasis on the role of art in the preservation of memory, a role indicated in the ambiguity of the title After Nature: “It seemed as though in such works of art / men had revered each other like brothers, and / often made monuments in each other’s / image …” (6)18 Vertigo takes a more disingenuous route towards the same basic truth. Susan Sontag’s suggestion that it represents a “self-portrait of a mind” (Where the Stress Falls, 45) relates the author’s internal, literary, frame of reference to his external, physical, peripatetions. The questionable “sightings” of Dante, Kafka, Ludwig II and others betray a professorial paranoia just as much as the more stylised sub-sections on Stendhal and Kafka; the quest for his roots becomes in turn defined by quests both metaphorical (Kafka’s hunter) and literal (the pseudo-murder mystery of the Ludwig-Gruppe), to the extent that Sebald himself comes to feel that he is the hunted (“And equally you can feel like a quarry yourself ”[52]19). This induces a self-consciousness worthy of a Robbe-Grillet novel, causing him to question the status of his inchoate book – “(I) had a growing suspicion it might turn into a crime story” (94–5).20 This feeling of “vertigo” as a narrative structure, central to both this book and its successors, is thus both produced and offset by recourse to previous works of art. Narration is presented as a double-edged sword. So in The Emigrants Ambros’s memory is said both to condemn and to 18

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“es scheine, als hätten im Kunstwerk / die Männer einander verehrt wie Brüder, / einander dort oft ein Denkmal gesetzt” (Nach der Natur, 8). “Umgekehrt wird man leicht selbst zum Verfolgten” (Schwindel, 61). “ich (habe) aber in zunehmendem Maße das Gefühl, es handle sich um einen Kriminalroman.” (108).

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console him: “telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself ” (100).21 The narrative uncertainty that permeates his work – first, the question of whether the narrator is indeed Sebald, and second, the myriad levels of “vertigo-inducing” (schwindelerregende) narrative through which the stories are filtered – can perhaps be explicated with reference to the classic formalist distinction between plot and story. The suggestion that “plot” is the chronological story “impeded” has a resonance beyond the stylistic, in that this is how individual history emerges for Sebald: his characters, often emigrants who have re-fashioned their lives, narrate the stories of their own, self-created “plots,” showing how the individual life is a defiant construct set against the linear “chasm of time” (Austerlitz, 153).22 Indeed even the march of time, the most non-human and irrefutable of concepts, is presented as an Augustinian construct, humanity’s crowning artifice: “Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions” (141).23 The sense we try and impose on time is analogous to the sense we try and impose on history, a struggle doomed to failure and yet the stimulus for so much creativity, the need to remember that is so central to the post-Holocaust era. We can hear this when Sebald himself, rather than Austerlitz, speaks on visiting the fortress of Breendonk of “how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion, […] in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses […] – and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time …” (Austerlitz, 30–31)24

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“Das Erzählen ist darum für ihn eine Qual sowohl als ein Versuch der Selbstbefreiung gewesen, eine Art von Errettung und zugleich ein unbarmherziges Sichzugrunde-Richten” (Die Ausgewanderten, 146). “Abgrund der Zeit” (Austerlitz, 157). “Die Zeit, so sagte Austerlitz in der Sternkammer von Greenwich, sei von allen unseren Erfindungen weitaus die künstlichste …” (145). “wie wenig wir festhalten können, was alles in wieviel in Vergessenheit gerät, […] indem die Geschichten, die an den ungezählten Orten und Gegenständen haften, welche selbst keine Fähigkeit zur Erinnerung haben, von niemandem je gehört, aufgezeichnet oder weitererzählt werden, Geschichten zum Beispiel, das kommt mir jetzt beim Schreiben zum erstenmal seit jener Zeit wieder in den Sinn, wie von den Strohsäcken …” (35).

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That last clause is the unmistakeable accent of the self-conscious writer, and indeed Sebald offers clues throughout his work to his own view of the writing process and its cultural role as ersatz narrative. In On the Natural History of Destruction, which deals with the perceived failure of imaginative literature to come to terms with wartime destruction, he suggests that his bricolage method of writing has the advantage of reflecting the fragmentary nature of collective memory: “I am well aware that my unsystematic notes do not do justice to the complexity of the subject, but I think that even in their incomplete form they cast some light on the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable” (78–79).25 All his books involve discussions or images of writing, whether his own or that of others; indeed, as the paradigm of the preservation of memory, “writing” could be said to be his crowning theme. His “authorial scruples” (as he said of Flaubert26) interrogate the Nietzschean question of whether art can be worth more than truth, horrifically pertinent to Adorno’s post-Auschwitz era. This is the issue at the heart of his blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction, the characteristic “factitious” uncertainty. Just as the use of photographs encourages the reader to respond as if to empirical fact (and yet their staged artificiality barely sustains closer inspection), so the artful weave of the prose itself betrays a highly stylised, literary mentality behind the seemingly casual events: the recurrence of various leitmotifs (such as silk, snow or labyrinths in The Rings of Saturn) helps to create a sense of cohesive art, but belies the notion of factual reportage. Sebald is clearly aware of this distinction, as evidenced by his inability to answer his landlady Luciana’s question (in Limone) of whether he is “a journalist or a writer” (94).27 In this context Stephen Romer’s mistaken claim in a recent newspaper review that Sebald “taught modern history for many years” (rather, of course, than literature) has a resonant irony (“Beyond Strangeways”).

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“Ich bin mir durchaus bewußt, daß meine unsystematischen Notizen der Komplexität des Gegenstands nicht gerecht werden, glaube aber, daß sie selbst in ihrer mangelhaften Form gewisse Einblicke in die Art eröffnen, in welcher das individuelle, das kollektive und das kulturelle Gedächtnis mit Erfahrungen umgehen, die die Belastungsgrenze durchbrechen.” (Luftkrieg und Literatur, 84). “die schriftstellerischen Skrupel Flauberts” (Die Ringe des Saturn, 16). “ein Journalist oder ein Schriftsteller” (Schwindel, 108).

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We might even go so far as to suggest that Sebald’s œuvre constitutes an attempt to redress the perceived failure of the imagination that is his thesis in On the Natural History of Destruction. The constant recourse to works of art, both explicitly and implicitly, sets the imagination against a profane reality, a necessary artistic complement to the journalist’s facts and figures – “The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals” (26).28 In an interview with Sigrid Löffler he expanded upon this role of the imagination as a narrative alternative: “What historical scholarship cannot produce is a metaphor or allegory of a period of collective history. Yet it is only by making it metaphorical that history becomes empathetically accessible to us” (Porträt, 137).29 This basic credo seems to underpin much of his work. Aunt Fini’s description of how Ambros’s stories were so fantastical invites an obvious wider interpretation: she began to believe “he was suffering from Korsakov’s syndrome: as you may know, said Aunt Fini, it is an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions” (The Emigrants 102).30 The narrative interpolations (‘as you may know, said Aunt Fini’) are pure Sebald, a gentle reminder of the familial, generational context in which the story takes place, an insistence on the narrated nature of history. They may seem to take the reader into the confidence of Aunt Fini (as if we already “know” this), yet it actually works to hold us at a distance, since it is the narrator who is being addressed, not the reader; we are outsiders, whereas the narrator is part of the family. So often, the action is related as it is perceived, subjectively, from the inside out, rather than objectively from the outside in. Reminiscences, dreams and anticipations come to replace the actual facts of whatever may have “really” happened, to the point that reality is re-imagined as an individual narrative – in, for example, Aunt Fini’s descriptions of Ambros: “Why, I shall never know, said Aunt Fini, but in my mind’s eye I always 28

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“Die Berichte einzelner Augenzeugen sind darum nur von bedingtem Wert und bedürfen der Ergänzung durch das, was sich erschließt unter einem synoptischen, künstlichen Blick” (Luftkrieg und Literatur, 33). My translation: “Was die historische Monographie nicht leisten kann, ist, eine Metapher oder Allegorie eines kollektiven Geschichtsverlaufes zu produzieren. Aber erst in der Metaphorisierung wird uns Geschichte empathetisch zugänglich.” (Porträt, 137). “er leide an dem Korsakowschen Syndrom, bei dem, wie du vielleicht weißt, sagte die Tante Fini, der Erinnerungsverlust durch phantastische Erfindungen ausgeglichen wird” (Die Ausgewanderten, 149).

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see Ambros crossing Lake Constance from Lindau by steamer, in the moonlight, although that can scarcely have been how it was in reality” (77).31 The use of “texts,” both invented and existent, serves further to underline this emphasis on the individual, imaginative perspective. In The Emigrants he creates the diaries of Ambros and then Luisa (in the final story), in order to overcome the third-person impasse; elsewhere, the myriad references to Kafka, Borges, Browne, Stendhal, Chateaubriand et al. return us continually to the notion of life as an imagined narrative, a literary palimpsest. More interesting still, perhaps, are the many unacknowledged allusions and quotations, that create a sense of the slippage between “life” and “art”: in the narrator’s mind the two are so thoroughly imbricated as to suggest that the imagination has become an indispensable defence against the world. As Austerlitz says, “everything becomes confused in my head: my experiences of that time, what I have read, memories surfacing and then sinking out of sight again” (319).32 So we encounter, for example, whole sentences lifted verbatim from other authors (such as that borrowed from Walser in Vertigo33); so we discern entire passages based on literary biography, whether Austerlitz’s trip to Marienbad (echoing Kafka’s sojourn with Felice), or the last section of his life in Paris evoking the archetypical flânerie of any number of writers such as Benjamin or Rilke – (the visits to the Salpetrière in Malte, the strolls through the Jardin du Luxembourg in the Neue Gedichte). When Austerlitz claims, at the end of this Parisian narrative, “I don’t know what it all means” (408) (ich weiß nicht, was das alles bedeutet),34 perhaps we can even detect Heine’s Lorelei as an ironic echo (Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / daß ich so traurig bin …). Like Heine, he has been searching for his homecoming (die Heimkehr), but is distracted by the sirens of memory. 31

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“Warum, weiß ich auch nicht, sagte Tante Fini, aber in meiner Einbildung fährt der Ambros immer von Lindau aus mit dem Dampfschiff im Mondschein über den Bodensee, obgleich das in Wirklichkeit nicht gut der Fall gewesen sein kann.” (112). “dann geht mir alles in meinem Kopf so durcheinander, das, was ich erlebt und das, was ich gelesen habe” (Austerlitz, 323). “Die Felswände erheben sich aus dem Wasser in das schöne Herbstlicht, so halb und halb grün, als wäre die ganze Gegend ein Album und die Berge wären von einem feinsinnigen Dilettanten der Besitzerin des Albums aufs leere Blatt hingezeichnet worden, zur Erinnerung” (Schwindel, 172). (Austerlitz, 410).

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We have suggested that this final novel can perhaps be read as the crowning allegory of Sebald’s writing process. The character of Austerlitz is portrayed in terms deliberately reminiscent of Sebald himself, with his rucksack and Wittgensteinian lucidity. His quest for his roots in Prague is analogous to the author’s process of research, an attempt to collect and give coherence to the detritus of his story. This is an illusion, however, a search doomed to disappointment. The overwhelmingly elegiac tone of Sebald’s writing stems from this sense of irrecuperable loss: that the more images of the past he collects, the more improbable they come to seem, the more their irretrievable pastness becomes apparent. As he says in Vertigo, “the more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happpened in this or that way” (212).35 Benjamin’s angel of history is but a wingbeat away, his back turned to the future as he surveys the rubble of the past.36 The representation of history depends upon a willed suspension of chronology, and this is where art, and in particular a self-consciously narrative art such as that of Sebald, serves both to distort and to design these fragments shored against his ruin: “This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was” (125).37

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“je mehr Bilder aus der Vergangenheit ich versammle, sagte ich, desto unwahrscheinlicher wird es mir, daß die Vergangenheit auf diese Weise sich abgespielt haben soll” (Schwindel, 231). For a discussion of this typically Sebaldian syntactic structure, see my “Umgekehrt.” Quoted in On the Natural History of Destruction: “This storm is what we call progress” (68). “Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.” (Luftkrieg und Literatur, 74). “Das also […] ist die Kunst der Repräsentation der Geschichte. Sie beruht auf einer Fälschung der Perspektive. Wir, die Überlebenden, sehen alles zugleich und wissen dennoch nicht, wie es war.” (Ringe, 151–522).

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Speak no Evil, Write no Evil: In Search of a Usable Language of Destruction Wilfried Wilms

Early in 2003 the New York Times confronted the public with the timehonored moralizing tenor regarding contemporary challenges of the traditional interpretation of the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflict. Richard Bernstein’s article, “Germans Revisit War’s Agony, Ending a Taboo,” intended primarily as a review of Jörg Friedrich’s recent bestseller Der Brand, observed critically “what many Germans have been doing lately: talking about their own suffering in World War II.” Friedrich’s amazingly successful book filled pages of newsprint on both sides of the Atlantic and sparked a tempestuous transatlantic controversy, culminating a debate begun by W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald’s lectures and his essay on air war and literature in the late 1990s that “took the lid off.”1 Building on Sebald’s pioneering work, Friedrich’s Der Brand finally started the nationwide, if not international debate over the suffering of the German civilian population. Within a few weeks, over 100,000 copies of Der Brand were sold while the historian Guido Knopp stimulated the German television audience in several prime-time series with the visual images of the bombing raids and the despair of German refugees in the Eastern provinces. The book touches on the question of the legitimacy of the air raids in a much more direct way than Sebald’s earlier essay. Indeed, Der Brand asks openly whether a war crime can be considered a legitimate response to an aggressor such as Nazi Germany, even if this assailant unleashed a criminal war in the first place. Like W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction and Günter Grass’s latest novel Crabwalk, Friedrich’s Der Brand tries to find a language with which to capture and describe events of that war that have never received broad attention. All three authors, in the final analysis, seem to be posing a challenge to the official script of World War II since they de1

Maya Jaggi, “Recovered Memories.”

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pict, often in graphic detail, how German non-combatants became victims of morally dubious Allied attacks. Ever since Sebald lifted the soundproof mourning-veil with his lectures on air war and literature, we have come to identify the silence surrounding the bombing war – or, in the case of Grass’s Crabwalk, the early 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the resultant death of approximately 9000 refugees – as a self-imposed taboo. Debate surrounding the death of over half a million civilians and the destruction of Germany’s cities by Allied airpower fell victim to what Sebald identified as “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression.”2 His study played out this repression hypothesis in a number of ways. For him, the silence was a result of apathy, self-anesthesia, and suppression. The “tacit imposition of a taboo” accompanied Germany’s reconstruction, discouraging anyone from glancing back at the shame of the recent past (34). “There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described” (10). What puzzles and worries Bernstein in the New York Times is not only that this taboo “has been suddenly and rather mysteriously broken.” It is the public reaction to Friedrich’s book that rings the alarm bells for Bernstein. “But the reaction to Mr. Friedrich’s book is something special, more visceral and widespread, and it brings questions to mind: Is there a danger that the Germans will conflate their suffering with the vastly greater and more unforgivable suffering they inflicted on millions of others, including both the genocidal slaughter of the Jews and the bombing raids on London, Coventry, Warsaw and Rotterdam? Have the Germans attached themselves to Mr. Friedrich’s book … because it gives them a rare and intoxicating taste of the moral high ground?” To be sure, Bernstein does not stand alone with this fear. Numerous voices within the public debates that ensued are alarmed about what they perceive could become an interpretative turnaround. Reinhard Mohr, for instance, sums up nicely what he criticizes as the specifically national tone of the current anti-war movement in Germany: “Since 1945, the moral stance of the Germans and their spiritual home has been under the bomb 2

On the Natural History of Destruction, 12. In Sebald’s own words, “People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided – out of sheer panic at first – to carry on as if nothing had happened” (41).

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and never in the bomber. Indeed, most people seem concerned about their own ‘spiritual home’: always victims, never perpetrators.”3 Bernstein’s reasoning displays, in a nutshell, the classic collection of arguments, or articles of faith, of someone who is accustomed to occupying that very moral high ground he fears can be intoxicating, be it only to others. He displays a visible concern that the moral measuring stick to which we are accustomed could grow a new branch as a result of this public response. But if the line “it all began in Coventry” was already sounding too much like a “classic” for the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman in 1946 (24), what role does this cliché serve today? What else does “it all began in Coventry” achieve but to prevent a balanced account of the predicament of German civilians from reaching a contemporary public by which it then could be scrutinized and evaluated? Certainly, the line illustrates what Wolfgang Sofsky criticized as “reflexes of a standardized memory” and “bisected recollection.”4 On a broader scale, the uneasiness and surprise Bernstein expresses regarding the noisy media spectacle that both celebrates and criticizes Friedrich’s hefty book results from the stark contrast of this noise with the widespread silencing that had hushed any public debate on the Allied area bombing prior to the last few years. The uncomfortable question today seems to be whether Germans – and, respectively, the Allies – can play both parts on this stage of the eternal struggle of good versus evil. That is to say, do Germans and Allies share at least occasionally the responsibility for illegal or illegitimate means employed in World War II, or must our historical consciousness continue to assign the responsibility for all war crimes, those committed by Germans and those committed by the Allies, solely to Nazi-Germany? The greatest challenge in this respect, of course, is to find an appropriate language that simultaneously achieves two goals: to describe accurately the historical events at stake without cloaking them, for instance, in what Sebald calls a “rhetoric of fatalism.”5 At the same time, this language must leave no doubt that we are not faced with yet another introductory chapter of German recidivism. Thus, for Bernstein, it is especially Friedrich’s language that 3

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See also Joschen Bölsche’s criticism, “Sie haben Jahrzehnte geschwiegen,” Spiegel, 29 January 2003. Sofsky is quoted by Joachim Güntner, “Der Bombenkrieg findet zur Sprache”; Güntner himself points to the “discrepancy between public and private remembrance,” pointing to the enforced taboo that sanitizes the public sphere and made a debate impossible by suppressing the air war. In Sebald, “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte.”

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“has stirred perhaps the greatest amount of criticism.” He observes that while describing the air raids on German cities, “Mr. Friedrich uses language that until now has been reserved to describing the Holocaust.” The occasional linguistic proximity to the Holocaust with which Friedrich described German victims of air raids led the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler to write that Friedrich’s language is not “disciplined enough,” resulting in “semantic derailments” in his book.6 The biblical principle of retribution that Bernstein’s position mobilizes on behalf of the western Allies recalls the very “reasoning” Royal Air Force Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris employed, as the head of Britain’s Bomber Command between 1942 and 1945 and chief proponent of Britain’s strategy of area bombing. In an attempt to justify somehow, or come to terms with, this unprecedented systematic destruction of civilian habitat, he asserted to the British public during the various planning stages of the developing night area bombing campaign that the Germans had sown the wind and were now about to reap the whirlwind. As we will see, Harris’s pithy remark is more than a British cockalorum in 1942 when England had no other powerful means of waging war against Nazi-Germany’s well-oiled war machine. Harris’s position is a preparatory step in constructing a public opinion (and ultimately memory) that reigns largely unchallenged today. How was one to address a devastation carried out not only in the name of freedom and democracy, but, and this is important, in the name of the American and British people who, in turn, were kept uninformed of the immensity of the destruction?7 Instrumental in this early construction of public opinion are war correspondents such as Janet Flanner and Martha Gellhorn as they describe life in Germany’s ruins for the first time for mass audiences outside of Germany. In 1945, their coverage from Germany’s devastated citycenters reached millions in the English-speaking world with journals such as The New Yorker Magazine or Collier’s Weekly. As we will see, they 6

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Hans-Ulrich Wehler in Spiegel, 6 January 2003, and in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 December 2002. He fears that Der Brand “emotionalizes” the issue by de-contextualizing it, claiming that Friedrich promulgates the “cult of the victim.” The “danger to reckon up” looms large. Wehler does not reject the possibility of looking at the raids as crimes of war, but asks: “what does one win by that?” Ultimately, Wehler hopes that the issue will not be “exploited” but rather that the debate will have a “cleansing” effect. His worst scenario would be: “A cult of the victim that would present the German people as stigmatized.” “The British public” Alexander McKee asserts, “had not the faintest idea of the facts of the air war over Germany” (63).

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shrug off the overwhelming immensity of the destruction and its aftermath, and declare it self-inflicted and deserved. These reports set the tone for any further discussion. Germany’s “delayed collective recall” (Schneider) today is misunderstood as an attempt either to diminish the barbarity of the Holocaust, or as a bid to transfer Germany’s past into a history of victimization. In contrast, Grass’s Crabwalk especially offers repeated gestures that point out the necessity of finally wresting this German past from revisionists. The assumption that an intoxicated Germany seeks to occupy the moral high ground must therefore be disputed. Rather, I suggest that today’s literary and political events challenge the largely undisputed allotment of roles that were established and consolidated at the end of World War II. The texts by Sebald, Friedrich and Grass thwart the seemingly natural – or shall we say visceral? – occupation of this moral high ground by the United States in 1945. Sebald’s and Friedrich’s works on the bombing war, or in Grass’s case on the refugees in the Eastern provinces, partake in the dynamics of social memory and relate, on another level, to wider social and political issues. German national identity and Germany’s past are negotiated anew. We observe, to borrow a structural grid from Elizabeth Heineman’s investigation of women’s experiences during the socalled crisis years of 1943–48, shifts in the location of memory. What used to represent the counter memory of subordinate groups in the Federal Republic has evolved during the late 1990s into popular memory and will eventually become, as it seems, official memory of a recently reunited German nation. “It is probably the creditably peaceful and democratic reunification of Germany,” Christopher Hitchins speculates accordingly, “that has impelled – or perhaps permitted – Sebald and other writers to revisit a half-buried past. Even Günter Grass … who could never utter a public word on local politics without emphasizing Auschwitz, has now published a novel (Crab Walk) about the suffering of German refugees in the closing months of the war” (187). Peter Schneider argues likewise, alluding to an ostensible qualification of Germany as a nation that now feels compelled and justified to demand recognition for its own victims. “Probably it is only possible now, after the realization of the terrible things that the Germans did to other nations, to remember the extent to which they themselves became the victims of the war they unleashed” (Schneider). The public “realization” of Germany’s role as aggressor in World War II, an essential part of the nation’s complete and lasting conversion to democratic principles in full view of the world community, serves to elucidate the current interest.

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However, I would prefer a more specific explanation for the resurfacing of repressed memory during the recent years. In the aftermath of the dissolution of a common Soviet enemy and its own unification, Germany’s quest for a renewed national identity plays out as emancipation from the United States. This emancipation seems to require addressing the suppressed experiences of the German civilians killed, maimed, or bombed out during the destruction of their cities by Allied bombers. The absence of their memory is contested today by attempts to find a usable language of destruction. Sebald is “someone who remembers injustice,” as Charles Simic put it, someone “who speaks for those who can no longer speak.” That such a challenge more than half a century after the end of the war produces widespread surprise or even concern should not be astonishing; neither should the diversity within the debate itself. While Sebald, for instance, readily admits that the taboo was self-imposed and a direct result of a German population devoid of any empathy, eager only to return to some sort of petty-bourgeois normalcy, both Grass and Friedrich leave open for debate the reasons for the silence blanketing postwar Germany’s ruins. In fact, we find traces in both texts pointing to the obvious: that the Allies were not and are not keen on looking back on the havoc they unleashed on non-combatants in the name of humanity, freedom, and democracy.

The principle of retribution The apologetic rhetoric of early reports by Allied war correspondents can hardly conceal the shocking magnitude of the destruction that characterized Germany in the spring of 1945. Entering the devastated German cities with the advancing armies from the West, they were the first foreign non-combatants to observe firsthand the results of the Allied bombing campaign. In their desire to end the war quickly, the Allies had unleashed an aerial Armageddon – especially after the invasion in Normandy – when the resistance of the German Luftwaffe was diminished to the point of no return. The ugly reality of what these correspondents encountered we can probably not even imagine. Their reports, published in newspapers and magazines, provide only glimpses into a new chapter of technological innovation in the service of warfare. The advent of the heavy bomber, long discussed in the interwar years and heralded by some as a weapon to save civilization because it could wage a swift war without again sacrificing millions of young men in costly

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trench warfare,8 left endless heaps of rubble in its path of destruction, in which those who survived the attacks lived like troglodytes for years to come. When the hot summer months had passed, the stench of rotting corpses trapped underneath several floors of walls and furniture slowly began to leave Germany’s cities. It disappeared eventually together with the fat rats, maggots and flies that reigned in many cities for months after a powerful attack. Makeshift crosses, placed on houses-turnedtombs, however, were still standing while fresh weeds sprouted out of charred ruins, hinting at new life. If any inhabitants had survived, they scribbled their new addresses with chalk on the remains of walls, not knowing whether anyone would come or even care. Janet Flanner, writing for The New Yorker Magazine, confidently expects to encounter a furious enemy, that is, a hateful local population in the face of the desolation caused by more than three years of systematic heavy bombing. Upon entering Cologne with the advancing army, she observes that the city was plowed under in such a fashion that city maps are no longer needed. The streets, places, and parks these maps once identified have ceased to exist. Her Letter from Cologne from March 19th, 1945, begins with the following words: “Cologne-on-the-Rhine is now a model of destruction … Cologne and its heavy, medieval pomp were blown up. By its riverbank, Cologne lies recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat. Through its clogged side streets trickles what is left of its life, a dwindled population in black and with bundles” (92–93). She visits the cellar room of an older couple. “It looked and smelled orthodox in the circumstances – damp, dark, crowded with a mixture of bedding and skillets, family photographs, and mud-stained clothes. The mud of Cologne is part wallpaper from the city’s bombed homes, part window panes, part books, part slate roofs fallen from fine old buildings, and surely part blood from the two hundred thousand dead, the fourth of Cologne’s population in peace” (94).9 “There was something awesome about the ruins of Cologne,” remembers another correspondent, Alan Moorehead, “something the mind was unwilling to grasp, and the cathedral spires still soaring miraculously to the sky only made the debacle below more difficult to accept … As the first of those GIs crunched their way over broken glass and concrete, they were increasingly dismayed at what 8 9

See J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated. The number of casualties Flanner suggests is too high. However, Flanner’s figure bespeaks the extent of the devastation.

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they saw and smelled. From below the rubble came the stench of putrescent bodies … a wall of suffocating, foetid heat – the smell of human flesh.”10 It quickly dawns on Flanner that Cologne’s wasteland of bricks, wallpaper, and blood will be typical for what the advancing armies will discover in city after city on their march towards Berlin, and their dismay, as Moorehead put it, might become a political issue. She displays concern that the soldiers, in the face of such misery, may very well be appalled by the obvious effect of indiscriminate area bombing and feel empathy with an enemy that the Allied governments had so thoroughly desubjectified in their long propaganda campaign.11 What concerns Flanner (and Martha Gellhorn as well, as we will see in a moment) is to set straight from the start the question of responsibility. Or better: to stay away from that question and possibly the debate on the moral or strategic legitimacy of the bombing as far as possible. It is a curious logic Flanner puts forth to address (or avoid) the question of agency. She concludes her no doubt powerful and vivid report of Cologne’s stone jungle with this rationale: “It is reasonable to think that Cologne’s panorama of ruin will be typical of what our rapidly advancing Army will see in city after city. Because Germany is populous, more cities have been maimed there than in any other country in Europe … However they decide to divide Germany, her cities, if they are like Cologne, are already divided into morsels of stone no bigger than your hand” (Flanner, 97–98). In such journalism, agency disappears when the destroyed object, the city and its inhabitants, is highlighted for the public at home as if it had thrown itself in the way of the bombs. In such rhetoric, the cities are not in ruins because British air forces had, since 1942, dropped onto them, according to scientific calculations, the perfect combination of incendiary and high explosive bombs. Germany’s cities are morsels of stone because Germany is densely populated. Were it not, it would not look so bad. That the emerging public discomfort at home needed to be checked had become obvious just about one year earlier. On March 6, 1944, the New York Times reported on its cover page on “Obliteration Raids on German Cities.” Pacifist efforts within the United States characterized the so-called precision bombings on targets in German cities as a “carnival of death,” celebrated with the condoning silence of the American 10 11

Quoted in Eric Taylor, Operation Millennium, 20. See Peter Haidu, “The Dialectics of Unspeakability.”

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and British public.12 In apprehensive anticipation of a possible postwar public condemnation, General Ira Eaker, commander of the 8th US Air Force, warned that “we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.”13 He foresaw that the devastating activities would not only lead to the condemnation of Harris and his bombers, but of the United States as well. Public opinion polls indicate that especially during the critical 1950s, when most Germans viewed the American presence with more and more aversion, it was the stain of terror bombing that characterized the image of an America prone to excessive violence.14 In his study on the history of strategic bombing, Lee Kennett points out that once Japan and Germany were occupied, “the enormity of the destruction became apparent [and] it produced a certain uneasiness. That uneasiness,” he concludes, “has lingered” (188). In his own time, Eaker also foresaw what was going to happen in England. The lack of prestige faced by Harris’s Bomber Command in the immediate aftermath of the war is indicated by the fact that its men did not receive a Campaign Medal. Once the postwar Labor government under Atlee was in place, Harris’s veterans were confronted with their own, British version of an imposed taboo, which prompted Air Marshall Harris to write a defense of his ruinous work, rather than a memoir.15 In 1945, Stephen Garrett asserts, “the general attitude of many … seemed to be that it would be best to forget [Bomber Command’s] activities as quickly as possible.”16 12

13 14 15 16

“Obliteration Raids on German Cities Protested in U.S,” New York Times, 6 March 1944. Under-Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson rebuts the anti-bombing plea in a short statement on 11 March 1944. Statement from January 1945 in Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment, 92. Geyer, “America in Germany,” 130. See Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, (1947). Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II, 84. How sore this wound of “Bomber Harris” in fact still is in modern Europe could be seen in the last decade of the twentieth century. In June of 1992 the controversial debate around the merits or ethical failure of Bomber Command flared up when the Queen Mother finally unveiled a statue honoring Sir Arthur Harris and the 55000 Allied Bomber Command aircrew killed in action. Ten demonstrators were arrested when they shouted “Harris was a mass murderer” – and it would be of interest to know whether the demonstrators were thinking of the victims in Germany, or whether they accused “Butcher” Harris because of the near suicide missions he had sent his often inexperienced crews on. On the dedication ceremony, see “Ten Arrests at Unveiling of ‘Bomber Harris’ Statue,” Financial Times, 1 June 1992. See also the debate that ensued during the planning stages. William Tuohy, “New Statue to Bomber Chief raises German Ire,” Los Angeles Times, 25 October 1991.

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Martha Gellhorn, writing from Cologne for Collier’s Weekly just about one month after Flanner’s reports were published, smothers any potential public discussion from the start when she identifies responsibility for the destruction even more bluntly. “After the tidy village, Cologne is a startling sight. We are not shocked by it, which only goes to prove that if you see enough of anything you stop noticing it. In Germany, when you see absolute devastation you do not grieve. We have grieved for many places in many countries but this is not one of the countries. Our soldiers say, ‘They asked for it.’”17 The principle of retribution makes German suffering not only acceptable but necessary. “You do not grieve” is therefore as much description as it is prescription for those who might feel inclined to grieve, if not for the “Krauts” then for the German civilians killed during the bombings, most of them women, children, and the elderly. In Gellhorn’s jawboning report it is the common soldier, both the expert in warfare and the guy from around the corner, who has to lend his support to get things right. “Krauts don’t act nice for nothing,” explains one. And another soldier from New Zealand assures the reader that humanity has nothing to do with Germany, for the Germans are “not human at all.” Finally, a sober voice of reason concludes this sequence in Gellhorn’s insouciant narrative. “A man who was lying on the grass near him now spoke up thoughtfully: ‘You can’t really like those people … unless they’re dead’” (Gellhorn, 169). Troublesome for Gellhorn’s naïve attitude is that the Germans they do encounter and exchange words with seem to be anything but hateful. They display what she disdainfully describes as “a desire to be chummy.” To illustrate that, Gellhorn shares with her audience the story of a man whose forty-two relatives were all killed when buried in a cellar during an air raid. She expresses astonishment that this person even talks to them, and especially how he does it. He brings pictures and explains, while pointing at one specific photograph, that they found only the torso of a sister of his. Gellhorn comments for a possibly touched, or troubled, audience: “The two soldiers and I sat in the jeep and wondered why he talked to us; if forty-two members of our families had been killed by German bombs we would not talk pleasantly to Germans” (165–66). Of course, this passage is not meant to convey the suffering of the German civilian population; it also is not supposed to question the means employed by the Allied air forces, to perhaps cast a shadow of doubt on 17

Gellhorn, “Das Deutsches (sic) Volk,” reprinted in Gellhorn, The Face of War, 1988, 165.

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the representatives of the western civilized world and humanity. The fact that this man even talks to them despite the British and American bombs only helps her to disqualify further that never-changing, ever-obedient and despicable character of the “Kraut” that Gellhorn is eager to identify and verify for the audience at home. Germans, we learn, are spineless creatures who embrace the former enemy as long as they need him for survival, no matter what was done to them. Nobody complains, nobody asks for explanations, or even yells for revenge. And how could they ask, given what was done in the name of their country? The German troglodytes, if they are permitted to talk at all, act chummy when they crawl out of their caves. What they want are not explanations, retaliation, or forgiveness. What they want are chocolate and cigarettes, preferably from a new master. Yet, by and large there is just silence in Cologne. “Silence … emptiness … stillness, a kind of cemetery stillness,”18 as Moorehead writes. In the words of Janet Flanner: “the silent German people appropriate to the silent city. Most of the people have little to say” (94). One of the few contemporary critics of this kind of journalism was Stig Dagerman, writer and journalist for the Swedish newspaper Expressen. He was asked to go to Germany in the fall of 1946 in order to document life there after the fall of the Third Reich. What upset Dagerman was not only how Germans were viewed simply as tokens of national disgrace or guilt; he was appalled by a more subtle mechanism of suppression of narrative that made it impossible for the outside world to even realize the extent to which Germany had been destroyed and its people dehumanized. For weeks, Dagerman collected his impressions while talking to numerous people in a variety of places. He visited them in their wet cellars and dark bunkers, bunkers that for many months had been their inhospitable homes. Dagerman develops as much contempt for German self-pity as for the practice of many Allied observers who render the life of these human beings invisible with the convenient adjective “indescribable.” He writes explicitly against the indifference created by his Allied colleagues who support an official or unofficial policy of apophasis, of not speaking, or of silencing particular affairs. By evoking the principle of retribution, the Allies stifle any public debate and instead remind the world of Germany’s collective guilt and national disgrace. Eighteen months after the end of the war, Dagerman decides to describe what he saw and heard in these locations in detail. He describes, encountering, among others, a woman standing ankle-deep in cold water 18

Eric Taylor, Operation Millennium, 20.

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in some dark basement. She is cooking a few meager potatoes while somewhere in the background her three tubercular children are hoarsely coughing. Dagerman writes: Doctors who talk to foreign interviewers about the eating habits of these families say that what they boil up in their pans is indescribable. It is not indescribable at all, any more than their whole manner of existing is indescribable. The anonymous meat, which in one way or another they come across, or the dirty vegetables they find God knows where, are profoundly unsavory, but the unsavory is not indescribable – only unsavory. We can in the same way meet the objection that the sufferings, which the children in these cellar-pools must undergo, are indescribable. If one wants to describe them, they can be described quite perfectly. (7)

One must describe, Dagerman insists, the allegedly “indescribable” classroom activities of shoeless German children,19 as much so as the “indescribable” feelings of that mother of those three who are hungry and ill. It would therefore not be surprising for Dagerman that she, like so many other members of this German population, “liberated” as they might be on paper, identifies the years 1944–47, closely followed by 1947–50, as the worst years of their lives.20 A journalist who hears in one these damp cellars that the family was better off under Hitler particularly enrages Dagerman as he conveys a picture of the German state of mind to the outside world that is, at best, void of any realism. It is well worth quoting it at length. Our autumn picture of the family in the waterlogged cellar also contains a journalist who, carefully balancing on planks set across the water, interviews the family on their views of the newly reconstituted democracy in their country, asks about their hopes and illusions, and, above all, asks if the family was better off under Hitler. The answer that the visitor then receives has this result: stooping with rage, nausea and contempt, the journalist scrambles hastily backwards out of the stinking room, jumps into his hired English car or American jeep, and half an hour later over a drink or a good glass of real German beer in the bar of the Press hotel composes a report on the subject “Nazism is alive in Germany.” … If you ask someone who is starving on two slices of bread per day if he was better off when he was starving on five you will doubtless get the same answer. Each analysis of the ideological position of the German people during this difficult autumn will 19

20

As did Victor Gollancz, a Jewish socialist who visited Germany in 1947. His remarkable book In Darkest Germany recounts countless observations of hunger, malnutrition, shortage, and disease in the British occupation zone. Along the lines of Sebald’s interpretation, Michael Geyer analyzes German affairs based on the opinion polls performed by the OMGUS and HICOG. He interprets this sentiment solely as an expression of “denial and self-pity,” the motors of a “general refusal to deal with the consequences of war and defeat.” See Geyer, “America in Germany,” 123.

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be deeply misleading if it does not at the same time convey a sufficiently indelible picture of the milieu, of the way of life to which the human beings under analysis were condemned.

Dagerman’s journalism exposes the workings and effect of the desubjectification of the German “Kraut” or “Hun” and instead points to human beings. Moreover, he expressly and courageously rejects the principle of retribution that is instrumentalized to justify both the measures of the past campaign, whether of German or Allied origin, and the current conditions. Of the cruelties of the past practiced in and out of Germany, there can be only one opinion, since of cruelty in general, of whatever kind and whoever practices it, there can be only one opinion. But it is another matter to ask if it is now right, if it is not indeed a cruelty, to regard the sufferings of the Germans as justified on the ground that they are the undoubted results of a German war of aggression that failed. Even from a judicial point of view, such an argument is quite untenable because the German distress is collective whereas the German cruelties were, despite everything, not so. (9–12)

The rhetoric of fatalism While the principle of just retribution grants biblical justice for the Allied bombing campaign in order to vindicate it not militarily but morally, we observe a similar removal of agency, a rhetoric of fatalism, in many of the early literary productions coming out of Germany. As early as 1982, in an essay on Germany’s post-war literature that spans from Hans Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang (1943) to Alexander Kluge’s Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt (1977), Sebald expresses his bewilderment regarding the silence that surrounds the havoc caused by area bombing.21 In the early 1980s, however, Sebald operates mostly outside the theoretical and rhetorical frame of trauma, taboo, and repression, themes that become of central importance for his later lectures and his repression hypothesis. His obvious discontent with literary reactions to and transformations of the bombing raids, especially those by Hermann Kasack and, partially, Nossack, were then centered on the aesthetic notion of a new concept of literature appropriate for these unique experiences. Sebald is curious 21

In 1982, Sebald set out to “answer the more than overdue question why the air attacks on German cities … and the societal life forms radically changed by the catastrophic destruction, was rarely ever discussed in German literature.” Sebald, “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte,” 345.

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about the “objective reality of the time, especially the devastation of Germany’s cities” (347), and the consequence of witnessing such devastation on the individual’s mental health or, on a far broader scale, the effects of this devastation on social patterns of behavior. Yet, perusing the available literature he finds that he cannot gain access to the quiddity of the experience or its aftermath. According to Sebald, the literary representations of total destruction by and large reveal a frequent tendency to translate what must have been a most horrific reality of destroyed habitat into the narrative of a mythological no-man’s-land, an aesthetic transformation which renders undetectable what it is supposed to make visible. It is precisely the “rhetoric of fatalism that bars the view onto the technological undertaking of the destruction … Because of this constellation it also was not possible to reflect upon the agents of the destruction. Like Serenus Zeitblom in his Freising hermitage, Nossack perceives the strategy of the Allied air forces as God’s justice making an example of Germany” (351). Although Sebald as a whole appreciates Nossack’s text on the destruction of Hamburg, Der Untergang confirms what he fears happens all too quickly: the absence of a language capable of capturing a gruesome reality that exceeds our common understanding is compensated for by “mythical conjectures.” According to Sebald, Nossack’s Untergang unfortunately camouflages the strategy of the Allied air forces and “disintegrates on occasion … to the almost habitual transformation of the extreme social situations into myth.” Nossack’s “overwriting” and his tendency to aestheticize go beyond the detailed description of the experience, the cherished “ideal of the truth” (350, 355). A discussion centering on notions of agency and responsibility, in keeping with Sebald’s rationale, becomes unfeasible due to a language that bars access to the historical players by removing them into transcendence. Kismet hides, along with the technological and organizational apparatus, the factual decision-making within the bombing campaign.22 After all, the resolution to attack civilian targets in case of armed conflict was not made in the midst of a bloody war, was not the emotional product of war fever. Rather, the strategic bombing doctrine was a policy de-

22

For a concise overview of the administrative development of the campaign in England, see Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II. For the United States, see Schaffer, Wings of Judgment. Tami Davis Biddle compares both British and US ideas about strategic bombing in Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare. For a brief yet precise history, see Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing. For the interwar debates, see McKee, Dresden 1945, 46–68.

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veloped in the interwar years and was based on cool calculations. It was supported by governments throughout Europe (and especially in Britain), and was made possible with the help of technological advances. Thus, what seems to descend upon Germans like the wrath of God is nothing but the product of the sober work of scientists and technicians. The historically new experience that superseded all-artistic imagination, Sebald concludes, required a culture of writing that did not exist at the time. The writers responded to the unknown by employing their old, familiar and, given the extraordinary circumstances, hopelessly unsuitable artistic tools. The language of fatalism and historical justice overtaxed or even replaced both the descriptive powers and the faculty of judgment. “The interpretive pattern of the apocalypse” was, as Ursula Heukenkamp asserted, the “language of a petrified experience.”23 Hermann Claasen’s Gesang im Feuerofen24 unites the sensation of an existential abyss and loss of language in exemplary fashion. Claasen, born 1899 in Cologne and professional photographer since the late 1920s, documented the devastation of his hometown in 1947 with “rubble photography.” Besides Köln – Tragödie einer Stadt it was especially the illustrated book Gesang im Feuerofen that brought him into contact with the then mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who lent his support for the distribution of Claasen’s book. The introduction to Gesang im Feuerofen, by Franz A. Hoyer, is dominated by one central notion: the recent past, with its hubris and deceptive distortions of language, can only be redeemed by the existential decision to return to the everlasting transcendent order of the Creator. The beginning of such a homecoming to an order purified of man’s hubris begins with a sober glance at the reality of Cologne’s ruins. Claasen stresses repeatedly that the written word is incapable of bringing about the “Entscheidung” (decision) necessary for any further life in these ruins. The written word is discredited not only by the “impudence of Babel,” but also by its necessary “failure” in the face of such disaster. “This book contains images,” Hoyer writes, “before which language fails … Language, the mirror of everything that is alive and that exists, … falls silent at the edge of the chasm; language lies nearly slain from its fall into the abyss; and language, used to set forth 23

24

Heukenkamp observes “symptomatic difficulties of expression” (470). She argues that a prevailing gender dichotomy leads to the exclusion of women’s bombing experiences in post-war Germany (475). Hermann Classen, Gesang im Feuerofen, ix-xiv. All the following quotations from this introduction.

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that which makes sense, remains silent before the emergence of the senseless.” What the book promises is immediate access to the reality. “Whoever opens this volume and observes the photographs,” the introduction begins, “will be granted entrance into a reality that can hardly be grasped more directly in an immediate encounter. What is reflected in these images is certainly not a city anymore … What happened?” It is this question that the book sets out to answer. Yet, although Claasen intends to push the ugly and uncomfortable reality of Cologne’s destruction onto the viewer, the introduction answers the question as to “what happened” in apocalyptic terms. With his photography, Claasen desires to reflect an unmediated reality. While he rejects the explanatory and interpretive thrust of language in order to “face reality” and “fight the continued existence of any form of illusion,” the introduction to the volume nonetheless seeks refuge in the Christian master narrative of sin and redemption. The Germans, after their “fall” from grace, can reach a “possible purification” only when they decide, in Kierkegaardian fashion, to throw themselves into the abyss, hoping that a forgiving God will accept their humble return into His kingdom. Only “hope” in God’s forgiveness will allow redemption for a German people that is “on its way to return to the magnificent order of God’s creation.” The bombing war is not mentioned anywhere. In fact, the reader can find not even the word “bomb.” Instead, he reads of the recent “Flood” that came over Babel (Germany) due to the hubris and grandiose presumptuousness of its people. “What happened?” “The demon played a truly demonic game” with the Germans. In the introduction to Claasen’s collection of photographs, the principle of retribution and the rhetoric of fatalism merge into a messianic super-narrative. The very concrete cause and effect of years of area bombing, part of the reality Claasen’s Gesang intends to capture with photographs alone, vanishes in a mythological construction that ironically verifies Claasen’s own suspicion about language’s feeble power. On a few introductory pages, Hoyer cloaks years of bombing and the following reality of Cologne ineradicably. Whatever image may follow, for the interpreting viewer they will point beyond his reality to a Christian master narrative of retribution and redemption. Only the appearance of Alexander Kluge’s Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 in the 1970s transforms the boundary-event into knowledge.25 Sebald identifies Kluge as the first to unearth the “trau25

See Saul Friendländer’s concept of “boundary-event” (“Grenzereignis”) in his 1992 essay “Kitsch und Tod.”

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matic and shock-like experiences, which – in complicated and suppressive procedures – were handed over to amnesia by those affected.” Sebald’s brief and unmediated excursion into trauma and memory argues that Kluge’s text “is based on the insight that experience in a true sense was simply not possible due to the overwhelming swiftness and entirety of the destruction” (“Zwischen Geschichte,” 357–58). Sebald’s language already points to the direction his argument will take. When he, in On the Natural History of Destruction, harkens back to the absence of literary reflections on the bombing raids his focus has shifted from a discussion of literary models to that of taboo and repression. The aesthetic verdict transforms into a socio-political commentary and a confession of morals, and this modification changes the language he employs.

The language of destruction With On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald returns to the interplay of air war and literature in the late 1990s. There he maintains that the real condition of Germany’s physical and moral annihilation was not supposed to be described, and that because of a universally binding and tacit agreement. The terror of area bombing, ultimately aimed at “dehousing” the German worker, allegedly caused those who suffered to be speechless. Already the earlier essay had pointed out that the language of the time revealed itself as too feeble to capture the dreadful experiences endured by the Germans. In his later argument, however, Sebald dwells not only on the missing language but also and predominately on the alleged unwillingness to describe and remember on the part of the German population. In Sebald’s analysis, the German people counter their own apathy and disinterest in what just happened to them by expressing “their intention of rebuilding their country.”26 Only very few authors “ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction.” The gruesome experiences were relegated to “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression.” A “desire to close down the senses” responded to the need to learn facts about the raids. “The quasinatural reflex, engendered by feelings of shame and a wish to defy the victors, was to keep quiet and look the other way,” Sebald asserts. The 26

Sebald, Natural History, 6. See also Andreas Huyssen, “On Rewritings and New Beginnings.”

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muteness of the Germans, their “silence” and “instinctive looking away,” is the reason why we know so little about the experiences of the bombing raids. Ultimately, however, the scarcity of descriptions has its roots in the “tacit imposition of a taboo” covering up the “legacy of an existence among the ruins that was felt to be shameful.”27 The experience of devastation and loss, Sebald tirelessly insists, never left the realm of primary memory due to that shame. And this shame causes the ostensibly shocking inability of the Germans to mourn, the refusal to come to terms with their past.28 According to Sebald, the Germans collectively avoided the subject, acted as if nothing had happened, and decided to move on. It was a mutual agreement, publicly articulated in many rubble films of the time, which made them want to close their eyes before the apparent annihilation of the proclaimed master race. Sebald’s thesis employs “taboo” as a willingly embraced, self-imposed censor of undesirable German memories. On the Natural History of Destruction succeeds in lifting the quarantine under which the bombing raids had been placed. Sebald correctly observes that the violent deaths of more than half a million civilians and the destruction of more than three million homes had not found an adequate voice in German literature. To suggest, however, that Germany’s transition to a consumer society alone aided the welcomed collapse of witnessing by supporting an initial forgetfulness is misleading.29 Sebald’s conviction that the ashamed German population was eager to return to their narrow-minded orderliness and thus imposed upon themselves a taboo on what they did not want to remember however neglects the political reality of postwar Germany.30 Much in his essay relies too much on this somewhat stereotypical assessment of the psychosocial deficiencies of the German petty bourgeois, stereotypes one would 27 28

29

30

Sebald, Natural History, 11–12; 23; 30–31; 34–36. Moeller’s recently published War Stories deviates from the pattern of analyses claiming a general collapse of memory in postwar Germany. Instead, he argues that Germans remembered “selectively,” turning the stories of German POWs and expellees into a narrative of German victimization. For Sebald, however, the causality is that clear, even in the realm of politics. The “reconstruction of the country … prohibited any look backward. It did so through the sheer amount of labor required … pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past,” (Natural History, 7). Some of those affected display a “lack of moral sensitivity bordering on inhumanity” as they seem, scandalously, determined “to drink coffee in the normal way on Hamburg balconies” in July 1943. (Natural History, 42).

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prefer to see dispelled in favor of a more balanced analysis. In On the Natural History of Destruction it is the apathetic and willfully amnesic population that turns away from an ugly reality, a reality it hides with a pledge of secrecy. The story of the bombing war, for Sebald, is one of a persistent avoidance of the subject on the part of its victims. One decides, whether with cold-blooded calculation or in genuine shame, to carry on as if nothing had happened. Those surviving the bombing campaign in Germany seem to have experienced the taboo after 1945 in a quite different manner. One woman, for instance, writes the following to Dieter Forte: “The extent of loneliness that came about because many questions were not allowed to be asked, because so many issues were taboo, because neither in history nor in literature were we allowed to draw parallels – this degree of loneliness was hard to endure.”31 Sebald’s rather selective historiography has its roots in the complex difficulties of presenting Germans as victims at all.32 Although he expresses an interest in adding a new chapter to the public memory of the Second World War, he does not want to rewrite history.33 He urges that the “majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived” (Natural History, 103). The difficulty and anxiety, perhaps especially for a member of the so-called second generation like Sebald himself, of describing the historical fact that over half a million German civilians were killed in the air raids, leads Sebald’s argument astray insofar as it incorrectly confines the responsibility for this narrative void to German shame and self-pity. To put it more bluntly: Sebald’s study itself bears the mark of a taboo typical of the “bad conscience” of the Federal Republic of Germany. He himself is not a victim of the psychological taboo he observes on the part of his elders; rather, his interpretive wings are clipped from the start by the political taboo he himself grew up with. The political taboo on criticizing the Allies for the attacks on civilians is the blind spot of his own observations. Both his fierce rejection of revisionist positions, and the pressure to generate politically correct asser31 32

33

Dieter Forte, “Menschen werden zu Herdentieren.” See, for instance, Omer Bartov’s discussion of Schlink’s The Reader: “Germany as Victim.” In particular, Sebald’s angry response to the numerous letters and reactions his theses triggered, a response that comprises the entire second half of Natural History of Destruction where he defends himself determinedly, signifies how profoundly the fear of revisionism parallels his laudable desire to raise the issues of taboo and repression in the post-1945 context.

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tions leads him to produce an inaccurate historical assessment. One can hardly object to the contention that the bombing campaign was swept under the carpet by the Allies.34 Any confrontation with the immediate past, any question relating to the issue of agency and responsibility, could not avoid acknowledging the piles of rubble that were, for many years, part of the new Germany. What was not supposed to be described was therefore war as such. To avoid the recent technological massmurder in the process of cultural reorganization was, for obvious reasons, very much in the interest of victors who were decidedly unwilling to look back. Allied cultural officers, responsible for the educational manifestations that were permitted to reach the light of day, controlled the media at the time. Sebald’s unspoken internal taboo, exclusively at work among the ashamed and disillusioned German population, this inner and self-inflicted mechanism of suppression reserved for the defeated “Herrenvolk,” fails to acknowledge or recognize, for instance, the restrictions imposed by Allied cultural politics in occupied Germany. Their claim to be the cradles of democracy and humanity is at stake amidst the ruins of cities like Cologne, Hamburg, or Dresden. Sebald’s later essayistic piece is decidedly more political than his critical work of the early 1980s. Even though Sebald’s argument cannot withstand a thorough analysis, On the Natural History of Destruction has succeeded in bringing the extent of the area bombing into the public consciousness. It challenges the stubborn silence on both sides of the conflict pertaining to this gloomy chapter of twentieth-century warfare. Sebald wishes to convey what a bombing raid meant for those enduring it. “Sebald … feels compelled,” as Peter Schneider states in agreement with Sebald’s line of argument, “to retrace the whole extent of the horrors experienced and then suppressed by the German civilian population.” But how to speak of the unspeakable? With regard to Sebald’s other prose, the writer Linda Grant, for instance, is struck by Sebald’s “calm prose that packed an extraordinary emotional charge … There are no fireworks; he’s the opposite of showy.” Byatt finds his tone “perfectly judged: it’s a mournful, crab-wise, tactful way of getting at history.” Hoffman admires Sebald’s delicacy: “He doesn’t feel an entitlement to go at history frontally; he goes at it from an oblique angle.”35 Referring to his work on the Holocaust, Sebald himself acknowledged this: “I knew 34

35

“There was,” as Garrett asserts for England, “a seeming effort to discourage … detailed examination of Bomber Command’s activities.” (34). Grant, Byatt, and Hoffman are quoted by Jaggi, “Recovered Memories.”

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that writing about the subject [the Holocaust], particularly for people of German origin, is fraught with dangers and difficulties. It is all too easy to commit tactless, moral, and aesthetic lapses. It was also clear you could not write directly about the horror of persecution in its ultimate forms, because no one could bear to look at these things without losing their sanity.”36 Yet, the explicit language Sebald uses to approach the repressed memory of the bombing war stands in stark contrast with his other writing. On the Natural History of Destruction opts to detail the gruesome reality of mangled, maimed, or burnt bodies with both verbal and visual images. Accordingly, we read how mothers rescue the charred remains of their babies out of the inferno and how these babies tumble out of suitcases onto the platform of train stations packed with panicstricken refugees; finger-long maggots and fat rats feed off corpses that could not be recovered while copulating flies roam lazily on sunny windowpanes. Indeed, in the late 1990s, when his aesthetic concern about literary models has been politicized into an investigation of the anxious control and suppression of this kind of testimony and memory, Sebald finds his own mesh of language and photography with which to approach the ‘ideal of the truth’ mentioned earlier. He purposely uses graphic language and photographs to illuminate the shortcomings of a postwar literature that, in his view, sanitized the bombing war and its effects. There is certainly nothing overly tactful or delicate in Sebald’s descriptions of the suffering of the German civilians. The reader of Sebald’s later essay cannot help but sense strong criticism and even outrage expressed in his language. Christopher Hitchins realized that “even as Sebald underlines a very direct moral connection between the charnel house of Dresden and the revolting crimes of Nazism, he appears to be making his own subtle challenge to the official and unofficial ‘script’.” But Sebald is not interested in any quarrelling over who “started it,” does not demand recognition for the suffering of German victims so that they can occupy a moral high ground in order to set German suffering apart from the suffering of others. What truly shocks Sebald is the extent of man’s moral degradation and aberration, whether it is of Nazi- or Allied origin. His target is the abyss of universal inhumanity. Only within this framework does Sebald raise strong objections against the horror and inhumanity of the Allied bombing campaign. Yet, while at times Sebald directs his indignation particularly at the destructive work of “Bomber” Harris, an all-out assault on the osten36

Maya Jaggi, “The last word.”

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sible legitimacy of the Allied bombing campaign is out of the question for him. Sebald opts not to investigate the crucial interwar debates on strategic air war, for instance, and specifically the British position in favor of a concentrated assault on German cities in the event of another war. I would therefore take issue with Schneider’s notion that Sebald does not share “postwar authors’ political fears of a ‘myth of German victimhood’” (Schneider). On the contrary, Sebald remains faithful to a taboo he himself grew up with in the Federal Republic of Germany: The taboo against criticizing the Allies for their conduct during World War II. This taboo ultimately tames his investigation by assigning final responsibility for the destruction of life and property to Nazi Germany. At the very end of On the Natural History of Destruction, and like a good pupil,37 he mitigates his own criticism and reminds readers once again that Guernica, Warsaw, Belgrade, and Rotterdam established the Germans as pioneers in area bombing. What the Allies did, we are told, is what the Germans would have done. How much Sebald’s position adheres to the official script we see in Hitchins’ remark: “thinking Germans obviously understood that their late Führer not only brought this devastation on them but actually wished it on them” (Hitchens). Once again we find a complex development attributed solely to Hitler, a figure who bears all responsibility. It is this view that bars access to an investigation of the technological undertaking of the bombing war. And it is this attitude that underscores the comfortable suppression of the whole story by the Allies.

37

The “memoirs” of Peter Wapnewski (born 1922), part of the recent debate, could serve as a prime example of the re-education success. “No calls for revenge against the bombing Allies. One felt solidarity with them; they would destroy the very system that we ourselves had created, and that we lacked the strength to destroy … Indeed, we saw in them our future liberators, and that their avant-garde bombed murderous paths into our country that we deemed legitimate.”

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On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz Maya Barzilai

Introduction Roland Barthes, in his influential essay on photography, Camera Lucida, undertakes a succinct comparison between photography and memory. After having arrived at the understanding that a photograph is essentially “an emanation of past reality,” indexically attesting to the existence of the referent, Barthes proceeds to claim that “not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.” He then recollects an occasion that validated this claim: “One day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left … The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed” (Barthes, 91). In other words, the photographic image leaves no room for imaginative elaboration or fabrication; it reveals the thing as it was, arrested and intractably preserved in the photographic moment. The relationship between photography and memory, as it appears in Camera Lucida, becomes highly problematic when considered in conjunction with such works as W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) and Austerlitz in which photographic images are reproduced and embedded in narratives that directly address the question of “how do we remember, and what is it we don’t find in the end?” (Austerlitz, 204).1 Barthes seems to be referring to a specific notion of personal memory 1

I have slightly amended the English translation, adding the word “don’t” in accordance with the German: “wie erinnern wir uns, und was entdecken wir nicht am Ende?” (Austerlitz, 295; emphasis added).

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that, in contrast to photography, is a pliable, constructed human phenomenon which undergoes constant modifications en route from past to present. However, the opposition that Barthes creates between memory and photography does not necessarily apply in all circumstances. Barthes’s sense that his childhood photographs robbed him of his early recollections raises the question: what is the relationship between photography and memory when childhood memories are already lost due to traumatic dislocation and/or separation? How can photography block memory when memory is already blocked and inaccessible? Although Barthes’s claim may be intuitively compelling, Sebald’s works call for a rethinking of the notions of personal memory, photography, and their interrelations. In what follows I argue that the narratives of The Emigrants and Austerlitz urge us to consider the similarities rather than the differences between photographs and memories.2 The two books revolve around the main characters’ and their narrators’ belated endeavors to reconstruct a past that has been virtually obliterated due to historical, political, and personal circumstances. In these attempts, photographs often function as conduits that prompt the retrieval of memory or verify certain recollections. Furthermore, photographs not only awaken in the narrator and the characters “a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them,” but may also partially supplant those life-stories, functioning as fragments of memory in their own right (Emigrants, 71). When images of the past can no longer confirm or evoke certain memories in the observer – as is the case when Jacques Austerlitz is confronted with photographs of himself and his parents taken in Prague before the Second World War – then these images, in turn, may seem to “[remember] us, [remember] the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives” (Austerlitz, 182–83). Yet, the main focus of this essay is not the function of photography within the various narratives as a means of accessing or substantiating memories of the past, or even of playfully validating the narrators’ “present” travels. Rather, I shall examine the structural and aesthetic correspondences between photography and personal memory in order to explore a certain form of re-emergent memory as it appears in both The 2

Since this paper was first presented at the 2003 Sebald Symposium at Davidson College, several essays have appeared concerning Sebald’s employment of photography in Austerlitz in particular. For further reference, see, for example, Pane and Horstkotte.

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Emigrants and Austerlitz. Indeed, Sebald’s writing draws attention to the resemblance between those reminiscences that uncannily return after having long been buried in the protagonists’ psyches and old photographs that have captured with great exactitude the specters of the past. Through the analysis of certain textual and photographic examples as well as of self-reflexive comments that appear in Austerlitz, I wish to demonstrate in the subsequent section of this essay how Sebald reinforces, and even directly advances, the conceptual analogy between photography and the return of long-forgotten personal images. The manner in which Sebald embeds old black-and-white photographs within the different narratives not only encourages a comparison between memory and photography, but also allows the readers to gain, experientially, a sense of the disruptive effect of the belated return of the past. Sebald thus succeeds in replicating on the affective-aesthetic level the characters’ and narrators’ experience of unexpectedly facing certain previously inaccessible recollections. In the final section of this essay I shall therefore attempt to theorize briefly the experience of reading Sebald’s works as it is shaped by the inclusion of photographs, using the notion of traumatic or deep memory. In “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten” J.J. Long argues that the integration of photographs into the narrative sequence can be compared to the characters’ attempts “to take possession and control of [‘traumatic’] memories,” for it allows these visual images “to lose some of their compulsive character and take their place as elements of a past that is recognized as past” (125). In what follows I emphasize, by contrast, Sebald’s insistence on the analogy between traumatic memory and photography through the lack of integration between text and image and through his specific choice of photographs.

Frozen in the Past: Memory as Photography The main male protagonists of Sebald’s narratives have often lived most of their lives in a state of disavowal or avoidance of their pasts, “turning away from [themselves] and the world” (Austerlitz, 123). Dr Henry Selwyn, for instance, changes his Jewish name and hides the secret of his origins from his wife (Emigrants, 54). These characters, however, are finally driven by internal forces and external coincidences to attempt to face their past and their family histories as well as to relate their newly discovered recollections to others. Ambros Adelwarth’s recovery of his

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memories, as reported by his niece, Fini, occurs late in life. Thus Fini recalls: Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. (100)

Similarly, Paul Bereyter’s childhood recollections return to him only late in life, after a cataract operation, “with the greatest clarity, as one sees [things] in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him” (51). Hence the form of unearthed memory in The Emigrants and Austerlitz may be characterized as follows: until they emerge from oblivion, these recollections are hidden, inaccessible, as if buried in the depths of the protagonists’ psyches. Nevertheless, as their memories surface, it also becomes evident that they had existed all along, lurking beneath the surface, or in the shadows of consciousness. Furthermore, when they finally reappear, the memories are surprisingly clear and precise, preserved in their detailed exactness despite the length of time that has elapsed. In addition to these characteristics, Max Ferber’s disclosures to the narrator regarding his relationship to Germany and his familial past may help to understand the psychological effects of the return of buried memories on the protagonists. Germany, for Ferber, “is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place, inhabited by people whose faces are both lovely and dreadful” (Emigrants, 181). The “lovely and dreadful” faces of the people who inhabit these realms of memory seem to reflect Ferber’s ambivalent response to the experience of facing a traumatic past. For Ambros Adelwarth, the telling of stories is “as much a torment … as an attempt at self-liberation,” and Ferber himself senses the “strangely threatening” force of those childhood scenes and images that he succeeds in retracing during a trip to Switzerland after years of avoidance (Emigrants, 100, 173). The awakening of such forceful and, at times, ambivalent emotions partially accounts for the decision of three out the four main protagonists in The Emigrants to take their own lives after a period of self-recognition and remembering. Ferber’s direct references to his memory processes thus bring to the fore the haunting and “obsessive” quality of those “fragmentary scenes” (“die bruchstückhaften Erinnerungsbilder”) from the past that return in a vivid and non-linear manner, evoking an intense mixture of fear and attraction (Emigrants, 181, 270).

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Several correspondences can be traced between the form of recovered memory that Sebald depicts and the medium of photography as it appears in his two books and, perhaps, more generally. The clarity and precision of the emerging recollections evokes the accuracy of photographic replication. Moreover, photographs are fragmentary in nature, whether viewed as thin “slices” of time removed from a continuous temporal sequence, or as visual evidence of the splintered, fragmentary nature of time itself that consists of isolated bursts of events (Baer, 3–5). As frozen fragments of time and space, photographic images, similar to such reminiscences, may survive, untouched, for lengthy periods. And just as the return of past memories for Sebald’s protagonists is always incomplete, leaving conspicuous patches of blindness or “lagoons of oblivion” in their psyches, so the photographic frame not only allows the reader to see what has been preserved but also to sense that much remains unknown, outside of the frame (Emigrants, 174).3 Finally, it is important to note that the analogy between photography and memory also extends to the potential falsification, whether deliberate or not, that may take place during both types of “exposure.” Just as the reliability of returning memories cannot be taken for granted in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, so through the occasional use of photographs that have undergone various kinds of manipulations,4 Sebald also suggests the human factor involved in the production of these so-called “emanations of past reality.” In keeping with the notion of certain forms of memory as visual imprints on the mind, Sebald’s characters refer to their returning recollections in visual terms: the scenes that haunt Max Ferber are called “Erinnerungsbilder” (literally, memory-pictures), and Paul Bereyter’s recollections consist primarily of a highly detailed visual image of his father’s “emporium” where he played as a child (Emigrants, 51–52). Ambros Adelwarth’s postscript to his Agenda book also employs a visual metaphor in order to describe memory as the sight of the earth that one 3

4

For example, in contradistinction to Ferber’s exact, pictorial recollection of the Oberwiesenfeld airport itself where he parted from his parents for the last time, he cannot remember the scene of parting itself or the image of his parents at the time (Emigrants, 187). Through the mention of Korsakov’s syndrome, “an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions,” as well as the reproduction of the forged photo of the book burning in Nazi Würzburg, Sebald alerts the reader’s attention to the potential fabrication involved in both the production of photographic images and in the process of recollection (Emigrants, 102, 183–4).

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glimpses from the top of a tower that hovers high in the sky. The flattened, two-dimensional vision of the earth seen from above is reminiscent of a photograph or painting, in contrast to the more dynamic notion of memory as a “[look] back down the receding perspectives of time” (Emigrants, 145). If in Austerlitz Sebald developed various themes that appeared in a more nascent form in the different narratives of The Emigrants, so too the connections between photography and uncovered memory are more fully articulated in the later book. The main character himself is an amateur photographer who takes, develops, and collects photographs, many of which are said to be reproduced in the text before us. In a revealing passage concerning his early experiments in the dark room, Austerlitz reflects that “in [his] photographic work [he] was always especially entranced … by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long” (77).5 The chiastic simile in this sentence moves the reader to consider each term in relation to the other: like late-night memories, the photographic shadows appear suddenly, rise to the surface; and, at the same time, like over-developed photographic prints, memories darken if one tries to cling to them. Hence, if, for Sebald, photography is clearly emblematic of memory’s belated return, this comparative sentence also indicates that the process of recovering memories may, in turn, illustrate the entrancing work of photography. In other words, the various descriptions in these texts of the delayed and often unexpected return of past recollections that lay buried and undisturbed in the individual’s psyche assists in envisioning the photographic procedure whereby a past image that was preserved on film suddenly materializes on a piece of paper. Moreover, Austerlitz’s comment explains his early fascination with the photographic medium at a period when he had no access to his childhood memories, while also illuminating the difficult course of exposure

5

“Besonders in den Bann gezogen hat mich bei der photographischen Arbeit stets der Augenblick, in dem man auf dem belichteten Papier die Schatten der Wirklichkeit sozusagen aus dem Nichts hervorkommen sieht, genau wie Erinnerungen, sagte Austerlitz, die ja auch inmitten der Nacht in uns auftauchen und die sich dem, der sie festhalten will, so schnell wieder verdunkeln, nicht anders als ein photographischer Abzug, den man zu lang im Entwicklungsbad liegenläßt” (Austerlitz, 117).

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and self-exposure that Austerlitz undergoes as he talks to the narrator. Thus the analogy between photography and memory should take into account the very process of photographic production and not only the photograph as finished product. The phrase “shadows of reality” used to describe the photographic images as well as the difficulty of capturing these shadows reveal that the comparison between photography and personal memory in Sebald’s works includes the spectral quality of the returning image or recollection. In order to explore further the multi-faceted correlation that Sebald’s texts urge us to make between resurrected memory and photography, I would like to invoke Freud’s analysis of the uncanny in his 1919 “Das Unheimliche,” which underscores both the frightening and alluring effects of the unexpected return of a past desire or belief. As defined by Freud, “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). What was once familiar – an old desire, anxiety, or belief – has been repressed, and thus alienated from the self. The frightening, and potentially seductive, affect of the uncanny may be attributed to the alienation or distancing that has kept these innermost forces in the dark-room, as it were. Indeed, Freud’s initial semantic investigation leads him to recognize the underlying proximity between the familiar and what appears to be unfamiliar, so that the term “unheimlich” is revealed as a sub-species of the term “heimlich” or “heimisch” that already includes the idea of something hidden and dangerous (226). The distinguishing factor, then, between the two notions is that rather than remaining secret and hidden (repressed), everything “unheimlich” “has come to light” or, more exactly, “has come to the fore” (225). Both returning memory and photography in Sebald are remains of the distant past that have come out of the dark, out of hiding, in a manner similar to Freud’s “Unheimliches.” Moreover, the memories brought up from the depths of the protagonists’ psyches and the reproduced photographs share the uncanny quality of something that was once familiar but that, over time, has become alien or strange. Max Ferber’s description of the Germany that he has preserved in his psyche as “a curiously extraterritorial place” exemplifies this very alienation from the former Heim that becomes in Ferber’s mind, a site of potential insanity (Emigrants, 181). Similarly, through the act of photography, the subject or scenery is captured and defamiliarized, turned into an object for contemplation. Moreover, in Barthes’s renowned formulation, every photograph involves “that terrible thing: the return of the dead,” for the photograph both induces a belief that the object is alive by attesting to

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its reality and “suggests that it is already dead” through the shift of this reality to the past (9, 79). The idea of photography as the site of the return of the dead contributes to the uncanny impact of this medium since, as Freud writes, “many people experience the [uncanny] feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (241). Like the discovery of the frozen remains of the alpine guide Johannes Naegeli seven decades after his disappearance, both photographs and reminiscences in these works seem to arrive from a great distance or depth. They are haunting fragments of a once familiar past that have been preserved in time and space and have thus become alienated from the self, emerging out of “nothing” as it were (Emigrants, 23; Austerlitz, 77). Two images of Jacques Austerlitz’s deceased mother, Agáta, illustrate, with the help of the text into which they are inserted, the unheimlich quality of the images that Sebald has chosen to reproduce. They also demonstrate the analogous relationship between photography and unearthed memory in his writing. Austerlitz’s search for concrete evidence of Agáta’s almost two-year stay in the Thereisenstadt ghetto leads him to obtain a slow-motion copy of a German propaganda film in which he hopes to recognize her. In this horrifically drawn-out “subterranean world” of the ghetto, suddenly “the face of a young woman appears, barely emerging from the black shadows around it, which is why [Austerlitz] did not notice it at all at first” (251). Like recovered memory, the maternal image surfaces from “the shadows of oblivion,” or from the ghetto underworld, previously unnoticed but nonetheless existing there all along. Returning to this scene of discovery and supposed recognition through the act of retelling it, Austerlitz describes in the present tense how he “gaze[s] and gaze[s] again at that face which seems to [him] both strange and familiar [fremde und vertraute]” (251, 359). Hence this image or still, arrested and detached from the continuous flow of the film, poignantly conveys not just the passage of time but “time’s relentless melt” – that is, what was formerly most familiar, the mother’s body, has become strange, uncanny, through traumatic separation and subsequent repression (Sontag, On Photography, 15).6 Moreover, the mother’s image 6

It should also be noted in this context that Freud posits the woman’s genitals and body in general as another potential site of the uncanny, for it reminds certain men of “the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings,” that is of the mother’s body (245). In Austerlitz’s case, the image of the mother appears also to be an uncanny source of both attraction, fascination and of fear, since he

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remains fundamentally unfamiliar even after being recognized by Austerlitz, since in the next scene Vera, Austerlitz’s former nursery maid and neighbor in Prague, shakes her head doubtfully after examining the still for some time, thus casting a veil of uncertainty over the identity of the woman in the Ghetto. On the following pages yet another “shadow of reality” emerges: it is supposedly a photograph of Austerlitz’s mother that he finds in the Prague theatrical archives (253). The white face appears here against a solid black background; yet without completely arriving, it seems like a ghostly mask disconnected from any whole head or body. Unlike the previous image that matched only Austerlitz’s own faint recollections, this photograph, authenticated by Vera, provides not a life-like vision of Agáta in her surroundings but another, and perhaps more striking, example of the return of the deceased mother as an evanescent specter. Furthermore, as Austerlitz and the narrator take leave of each other, Austerlitz hands this image of his mother over to the narrator as a “memento” (253). Hence through and around this image, the mother is both unearthed from the darkness “as she had been then” and put to rest now, her face and memory bestowed on another, the narrator. In the context of Austerlitz’s attachment to photographic images, and especially his struggle to find his mother’s face in the Thereisenstadt film, his gesture is surprising yet understandable. The beauty of this ghostly white face, marked by the mother’s penetrating eyes and ominous expression, heightens the ambivalent response toward this form of the return of the dead that threatens to haunt and torment the protagonist. Similarly, Max Ferber bestows upon the narrator his mother’s “truly wonderful” childhood memoirs, perhaps in order to alleviate his unending, compulsive “remembering, writing and reading” (Emigrants, 193).

Photography as “Deep Memory”: The Reading Experience In The Emigrants and Austerlitz photography thus functions not only as a means for attempting to access the past but also as an emblem for the uncanny reemergence of the past. Accordingly, through the descriptions of the photographs, the protagonists’ relationships toward them, and the images themselves, the readers may gain insight into the nature of certain has apparently repressed his longing for the “former Heim” of his childhood in Prague.

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memory processes that result from persecution, loss, and/or dislocation. At the same time, reproduced within the text, and not merely described, the photographs may also haunt the readers who are themselves potential addressees for these spectral pieces of evidence. This section will focus, therefore, on the often unexplicated and not fully integrated manner in which Sebald introduces photographs into his texts. Sebald thereby reproduces, I shall argue, on the level of the reading experience the disruptive resurgence of the past for his characters. Indeed, Sebald heightens the uncanniness of photography in his texts by choosing to duplicate only black-and-white photographs, some of them quite old and distant, and by inserting them in such a manner that they become attributed to certain figures and places with which the readers are familiarized through the stories. At the same time, devoid of captions and often unaccompanied by direct words of explanation, the black-and-white images may be viewed as passing, shadowy emigrants, not fully integrated into the body of the text, yet dependent on the narrative for their significance. What is more, the recurrence of images that recall death and memorial – exhibiting characters already deceased, graveyards, gravestones and even skulls and skeletons – self-consciously reinforces the uncanny sensation that Sebald’s use of photography may evoke in the readers (for example, Austerlitz, 131, 294). In certain instances, this lack of integration, the relatively independent status of the image, becomes more pronounced through the reproduction of images that do not necessarily illustrate the story of the narrator’s travels or the life-stories that he uncovers along the way but, rather, as Long observes, “possess no such stable referentiality” (132). Photos such as the opening graveyard picture of The Emigrants refer to the text thematically and symbolically, or they can refer to other images within the text; however, they do not directly illustrate segments of the narrative. The relatively free-floating status of such photographs (which appear in Austerlitz as well) also shapes our reception of other images included in the books and raises the questions: where do they come from? what is their role in this context? Disrupting the linear flow of the narrative, often without any immediate explanation, the black-and-white images seem to arrive out of oblivion, unannounced and, at times, unjustifiable from a purely story-oriented perspective. An indirect reflection on this uncanny effect of the appearance of photographs within the text occurs in Austerlitz when the protagonist describes a form of “memory game” that he conducts with his photography collection:

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Austerlitz told [the narrator] that he sometimes sat [there] for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then, one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left on the gray tabletop, or he felt exhausted by the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman. (119)

This passage may be read as a metaphor of the reader’s own encounter with the photographs incorporated in the novel as a whole: with each new photograph that appears as the reader turns the page, a sense of surprise and unfamiliarity arises. Moreover, Sebald’s constant play with the format of the included photographs, with their size, shape, frequency, and position on the page, does not allow for a regular pattern of photographic embedding to develop;7 with each image, the readers face once again the shocking visitation of a past-image that cannot be fully naturalized through its relationship to the surrounding context. Nevertheless, just as Austerlitz attempts to arrange the photographs according to their resemblances, so the images that Sebald has chosen to reproduce partially correspond thematically or aesthetically to other images, allowing for various visual patterns to emerge through cross-referencing within the books as wholes.8 The photographs thus accumulatively provide an alternative form (or game) of memory: rather than projecting a linear, chronologically progressing story that connects past and present, Sebald’s use of photographs demonstrates how memory often consists of unordered and unassimilated bits and pieces which need to be patiently, incessantly reorganized through an “effort of thinking and remembering” (Austerlitz, 119). If Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” has helped to highlight the spectral quality shared by both resurgent memory and photography in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, contemporary studies concerning post-traumatic memory provide a further model for describing the relationship between the photographs and the text into which they are inserted. Various theorists of trauma, working from psychiatric, psychological, and literary 7

8

In Austerlitz this phenomenon is even more accentuated as, for unstated reasons, certain images are enlarged and spread across two entire pages, thus completely bringing to a halt the flow of the narrative (see, for example, 56–7, 86–7, 106–7, 248–9). See Long’s useful analysis of this phenomenon in “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten” (134–7).

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perspectives, tend to distinguish between “common” or “narrative” memories and “deep” or “intrusive” memories that have become “fixed in the mind and are not altered by the passage of time, or the intervention of subsequent experience” (Langer, 6; van der Kolk and van der Hart, 172). According to Lawrence Langer in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, the traumatic experience of the camps is preserved in deep memory “as it was then,” whereas common memory attempts to reconcile past and present, and views past experiences from “the vantage point of today” (6).9 The two forms of remembering, Langer stresses, are interlinked in the individual testimonies, to the point of intruding on one another and “disrupting the smooth flow” of the narrative. “Deep memory,” he writes, “thus suspects and depends on common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express” (6). Accordingly, Barthes’s opposition between photography and memory with which this essay opened can now be rephrased: photography possibly “blocks” common or narrative forms of memory, and yet rather than becoming a “counter-memory,” it is comparable to the second type of memory, to the “deep” or “intrusive” presence of the past in the present. Indeed, photography preserves an image from the vantage point of “then,” and it is this phenomenon that explains the potentially shocking effect of the photograph on the viewer-reader. Moreover, deep memories are often envisioned as literal imprints on the individual’s psyche, imprints that remain “unassimilated” or “fixed” throughout time and so are analogous to photographs that capture the past and preserve it in a fragmentary, unassimilated, yet exact form. In Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, for instance, Ulrich Baer takes up this model of trauma and its impact on memory processes in his formulation of the parallelism between the workings of the camera and “the structure of traumatic memory” (8). In Baer’s view, just as a traumatic event may leave its imprint on the psyche without being consciously acknowledged, so the photograph can mechanically record in the most exact manner events that could not have been known and experienced at the time of their occurrence. Whereas an investigation of the assumptions underlying these models of traumatic memory falls outside the scope of this essay, I would like to 9

It should be noted that Langer’s distinctions in the opening chapter of his book, Holocaust Testimonies, are based on Charlotte Delbo’s reflections on her camp experience in Auschwitz et aprés and on her differentiation between “mémoire profonde” and “mémoire ordinaire” (see Langer, 3–6).

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suggest that these models inform, whether deliberately or not, Sebald’s portrayal of his main protagonists’ belated attempts to face their haunting pasts as well as his conception and deployment of photography. In terms of the readers’ experience, the combination of images and text, of spatially static frames and relatively continuous narrative is comparable to the interdependent co-existence of common and deep memories in the testimonies examined by Lawrence Langer. On the one hand, as Long claims, the positioning of the visual image or moment “within a sequence of experiences that precedes and follows [it]” allows for the partial control or taming, through incorporation in the narrative, of this otherwise “compulsive” form of memory (125). Yet, on the other hand, the very reproduction of the photographs, a relatively unusual device in fiction, suggests that the narrative text cannot tell, represent, or even know the entire story, or that narrative memory is suspect. Thus, partially illustrating Sebald’s texts, the captionless black-andwhite images he uses ultimately function as a disruptive force that relentlessly severs the narrative flow, reminding us of the existence of “another world where the departed are” (Sebald, “The Questionable Business”). Just as Austerlitz must slow down the Theresienstadt film and finally bring it to a standstill in order to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face as she may have appeared at the time, so with each new image the readers are compelled to arrest the motion of a reading that takes place in time and space in order, perhaps, to see a facet of the past that otherwise may hardly be recognized. Moreover, in a manner analogous to Austerlitz’s inability to verify the match between the face of the young woman in the ghetto and his faint recollections of Agáta, the readers of Sebald’s narratives are also finally left with the open question of whether or not there is an actual correspondence between image and text. Due to the generic undecidibility of these books, even those photographs that seem to match the textual descriptions and illustrate them still raise the question: Are the people in the photographs really who we think they are? Through the incorporation of the photographs the readers are asked, therefore, not only to look down from the tower of memory at foreign lands and people, as they appeared at the time the photo was taken, but also to realize the “dumb” aspect of memory – that is, the limits of our ability to know what took place in the past, especially when that past encloses a traumatic experience. As Baer writes, “The startling effect (and affect) of many photographs … results not only from their adherence to conventions of realism and codes of authenticity. … It comes as well from photography’s ability to confront the viewer with a moment that had the

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potential to be experienced but perhaps was not” (8). From this viewpoint, the introduction of this medium into the narrative sequence may accentuate, rather than subdue, the startling and uncanny affect already induced by photography in itself. The final result is not necessarily an integrated work, or an imagetext,10 but rather “ein mißratenes Stückwerk” (Die Ausgewanderten, 345).

10

W. J. T. Mitchell uses the term “imagetext” to designate “composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text” (89).

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Realism, Photography, and Degrees of Uncertainty Lilian R. Furst

The writings of W. G. Sebald are of such striking, indeed bewildering originality that any attempt to site them in the landscape of literary criticism, let alone to pigeonhole them risks doing violence to them. On the other hand, to place Sebald, however tentatively in the context of literary traditions can also be a means of arriving at a better understanding of the particularity of his genius. In trying to site him in relation to the practices of realism, I certainly do not wish just to apply a to label him, to classify him, as it were, but rather to pinpoint how his adherence to and his departure from the strategies of realism helps to appreciate the singular qualities of his writing. In any analysis of the extent of Sebald’s realism, special consideration has to be given to the role of the photographs interspersed in his narratives, one of the distinctive hallmarks of his work. Using a readeroriented methodology, I aim to ascertain the impact of the descriptions and photographs on readers’ construction of the text. The focus will be “Max Aurach,” the last and longest of the four stories that make up Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants).1 One of Sebald’s finest works, it is in many ways paradigmatic of his narrative strategies in both its realism and its detours into associative labyrinths. Initially “Max Aurach” conforms largely to the basic conventions of realism. The narrative is firmly grounded in place and time. For instance, it opens on a meticulously detailed description of the narrator’s arrival at night at Manchester’s Ringway airport on a flight from Kloten, Zurich, and of his journey into the city through the suburbs of Gatley, North-

1

The name Max Aurach became Max Ferber in the English translation to avoid reference to the emigré painter Frank Auerbach, who painted in a manner similar to the fictional Aurach in a studio in a rundown urban area of London. The translated version “Ferber” resonates with the German word Farbe (color).

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enden, and Didsbury. All these districts are well known to anyone (like myself) who has lived in Manchester, thereby suggesting right at the outset the verisimilitude of realism. Manchester is the primary location, for Aurach has settled there and it is where the narrator encounters him. The narrative also includes extensive evocations of the first person narrator’s explorations of various areas of the city on his Sunday walks. Later he also travels to the Kissingen area of Germany, from which Aurach’s mother came; the journey involves changes of train in Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, and lengthy waits in Aschaffenburg and Gemünden. Again, the introduction of recognizable geographic names buttresses the impression of realism. Mention is made too of a number of famous hotels: the Palace in Montreux, the Victoria Jungfrau in Interlaken, the Midland in Manchester, the Palace in Buxton, and the Terminus Bristol on the Place de la Gare in Colmar. All these are actual sites that anchor the narrative to an extraneous, preexistent reality. In this respect Sebald adheres closely to the strategies of realism. What is more, of the twenty-nine photographs in “Max Aurach,” the majority, seventeen, are of places. The handling of time is also predominantly in consonance with the usages of realism. The temporal parameters are carefully set. The narrative begins in autumn 1966 with the narrator’s arrival in Manchester (clearly an autobiographical strand). When he leaves Manchester and loses sight of Aurach, there is a long hiatus until 1989 when he comes across an article about the painter on the occasion of his first major exhibition in London. Between 1989 when the narrator goes back to Manchester to seek out Aurach and his final visit to him in hospital in 1991 the narrator reads the memoirs of Aurach’s mother, which date back to the First World War. While such a long intercalated flashback is not very common in realism, within this capsule the progression is once more linear. The only infraction of sequential time occurs when the narrator writes of his walks with Aurach in the summer of 1966, nine months after their first meeting. He had, however, met him in autumn 1966, (their walks must have been in the summer of 1967). This is not merely a casual error but rather an oblique demonstration of the uncertainty of memory, one of the central themes of “Max Aurach.” The interspersal of photographs into the text creates a dimension of complexity because they are open to starkly contradictory interpretations. They can be seen as confirmations of Sebald’s realism since photographs have generally been regarded as a mode of documentation and continue to carry this denotation. We carry a photograph of ourselves in our driver license, our passport, our college card, and we are

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constantly challenged to present a document with photograph to establish our identity. The photograph remains the primary means of authentification. A signature can too readily be forged, fingerprints and DNA are too complicated for use in daily life. In considering Sebald’s use of photographs, we need to bear in mind this automatic, conditioned response to the visual representation. We must still reckon with the predominant acceptance of the photograph as a true image. Such a (naïve) association of the photograph with reality can be traced back to its origins in the daguerreotype of 1839. Interest in photography as a reproduction of the real reached its peak in the mid- to laternineteenth century, the heyday of realism in literature and the visual arts. The mirror, which was also thought to transmit an accurate image, was the realists’ favorite metaphor to characterize their novels. In the second chapter of Our Mutual Friend Dickens invokes the “great lookingglass” (24) that fiction offers, while Stendhal maintains in the epigraph to the seventeenth chapter of Le Rouge et le noir that a novel is “un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin” (a mirror that is walked along a road), a phrase that he attributes to a seventeenth century French historian Saint-Réal (who was, incidentally, his own invention!). To such aspirations to an accurate mimesis of reality photography obviously held tremendous appeal in its promise to fulfill precisely what the realists were purporting to do. The key word there is purporting. I do not wish to imply that copying some extraneous reality is what they actually did. That would be a crass reduction of the subtle, even insidious art of realism.2 Already in the theory of realism the slippage is early initiated in George Eliot’s concession that her novels are “a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in the mind” (171), and in Zola’s parallel formulation, “un coin de la nature vu à travers un temperament” (a corner of nature seen through a temperament) (140). The subjective element in the writer’s mind or vision, not to mention the potential deceptiveness or distortions resulting from the mirror itself, moderates the ideal of an unmediated transparent correspondence between object and representation that was assumed to have its incarnation in the photograph. As a professor of European literature (and himself an enthusiastic photographer), Sebald was surely aware of this tradition. My argument is that he simultaneously drew on it and subverted it in his own use of photographs.

2

See Lilian R. Furst, “All is True”: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction.

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Subversion of the idea of the photograph as an accurate image of reality has become quite common through widespread digital manipulation which has bred a fundamental distrust of images. Instead of creating the closure of certainty, as was assumed in the nineteenth century, photographs may nowadays be perceived as a source of doubt. The recent publication Underexposed (2002) points in its subtitle “Pictures Can Lie and Liars Use Pictures” to the possibilities of exploiting slanted photographs for political or other propaganda purposes (Jacobson). In other words, our consciousness that images may be “doctored” suspends photographs in an indeterminate space between skepticism and a continuing acceptance of their veracity. Such elision of fact and fiction must, however, be acknowledged as standard practice in realism already. For example Balzac in Eugénie Grande mounts the (fictional) story of her life onto the history of her father’s acquisition of wealth in post-Revolutionary France, which is based on verifiable economic data. Similarly, in both Madame Bovary and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the fictive location, the small provincial towns of Yonville-L’Abbaye and Middlemarch respectively, is situated in relation to such known actual places as Rouen and Paris in the French novel and to London, Paris, Rome, etc. in the English one. The uncertainty regarding the borders of fact and fiction, which is so acute in Sebald’s writings, is discernible long before, forming an integral strand of realism. Before turning to the photographs, the nature of Sebald’s verbal realism needs to be addressed. On the surface his narratives exhibit a hyperrealism as each object is described with a profusion of detail that is nothing short of compulsive. The tea-making/alarm clock gadget that the landlady of the Arosa Hotel (an actual hotel at the time) demonstrates to the narrator as a welcoming gesture is a fine instance of Sebald’s usage: Apparently by way of a special welcome, she brought me, on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before. She explained that it was called a teas-maid, and was both an alarm clock and a tea-making machine. When I made tea and the steam rose from it, the shiny stainless steel contraption on its ivorycoloured metal base looked like a miniature power plant, and the dial of the clock, as I soon found as dusk fell, glowed a phosphorescent lime green that I was familiar with from childhood and which I had always felt afforded me an unaccountable protection at night. That may be why it has often seemed to me as I thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea-maker brought to my room by Mrs. Irlam – you must call me Gracie, she said – as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a

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deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become completely submerged. Very useful, these are, said Gracie as she showed me how to operate the teas-maid that November afternoon. (154–55)3

The long sentences with their many encapsulated subclauses aim for the utmost precision in introducing readers to this curious object. Built out of a carefully constructed mosaic of details, the text is as it were cinematically set in motion. The description spans a wide emotional spectrum from the casualness of conversation to the temptation of suicide. It undoubtedly comprises a streak of dark humor in the lengthy elaboration of a seemingly insignificant domestic “contraption” which nonetheless carries hidden significance for the narrator. Gracie’s “Very useful, these are,” refers, of course to the teas-maid’s overt function as an alarm clock and tea-maker, yet her comment conceals irony in the tea-maker’s primary role for the narrator as a comforting reminder of his childhood sense of security. Parody may be hinted too, parody of the entrenched British belief in the consoling powers of a cup of tea, not just on waking on a chilly, damp, dark November morning in the North of England but in any distressing situation such as the narrator faces in his early days in a strange country. And this description is accompanied by a close-up photograph (227, 154).4

3

4

“Sie brachte mir auf einem Silbertablett offenbar als besondre Willkommensbezeigung ein elektrisches Gerät von mir unbekannter Art. Es war, wie sie mir auseinandersetzte, eine sogenannte teas-maid, Weckeruhr und Teemaschine zugleich. Die auf einer elfenbeinfarbenen Blechkonsole aufgebaute, aus blitzendem rostfreiem Stahl gefertigte Apparatur glich, wenn beim Teekochen der Dampf aus ihr aufstieg, einem Minaturkraftwerk, und das Zifferblatt der Weckeruhr phosphoreszierte, wie sich in der hereinbrechenden Dämmerung bald schon zeigte, in einem mir aus der Kindheit vertrauten stillen Lindgrün, von dem ich mich in der Nacht immer auf unerklärliche Weise behütet fühlte, darum vielleicht ist es mir, im Zurückdenken an die Zeit meiner Ankunft in Manchester so gewesen, als sei der von Mrs. Irlam, von Gracie – You must call me Gracie, hatte sie gesagt – , als sei der von Gracie mir auf mein Zimmer gebrachte Teeapparat, dieses ebenso dienstfertige wie absonderlich Gerät, es gewesen, das mich durch sein nächtliches Leuchten, sein leises Sprudeln am Morgen und durch sein blosses Dastehen untertags am Leben festhalten ließ damals, als ich mich, umfangen, wie ich war, von einem mir unbegreiflichen Gefühl der Unverbundenheit, sehr leicht aus dem Leben hätte entfernen können. Very useful, these are hatte Gracie darum nicht zu Unrecht gesagt, während sie mir an diesem Novembernachmittag die praktische Handhabung der teas-maid vorführte” (226–28). Page numbers for photographs discussed in this essay refer first to the German, then the English edition.

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This passage clearly illustrates two aspects of Sebald’s art. First, his cultivation of what Barthes calls “l’effet de reel.” In his famous article under that title Barthes cites the presence of the barometer in Flaubert’s “Un Coeur simple” as an instance of the gratuitous inclusion of an object solely in order to create the reality effect. The barometer fulfills no function in the story other than to reinforce the reality of the décor. The teas-maid in “Max Aurach” can be juxtaposed to the barometer in “Un Coeur simple.” It, too, has no part in the development of the plot; at most it conveys the narrator’s sense of alienation in this land and city where he has just arrived, a young man far away from home for the first time, whose loneliness is mitigated by Gracie’s motherly ministrations, for which the teas-maid is at once a metonymy and a metaphor. However, the teas-maid raises another question that is ultimately of far greater import. Why, six pages into “Max Aurach,” should we come upon a two-page description plus a photograph of an object that never recurs in the story and that has no further role in the subsequent narrative? Again the comparison to Flaubert is illuminating. Where Flaubert halts the progress of his narrative in Madame Bovary to open it out into expansive set-pieces such as the description of Emma’s wedding, her wedding-cake, or of the agricultural fair with its long-winded, vacuous speeches, these apparent digressions have a well-defined bearing on the novel as a whole. Obliquely they shed light on the values in this environment, on the characters’ psychology, ideals, attitudes, and social level. The teas-maid does this only to an extremely limited extent by affording a glimpse of the narrator’s feelings on his arrival in Manchester. But how important is this in the totality of “Max Aurach”? I would like to suggest that the teas-maid is a kind of will-o’-the-wisp. Its appropriation of readers’ attention is complicated by the photograph, the first in this story. So it initiates and exemplifies a degree of uncertainty that readers experience throughout Sebald’s writings. One cardinal source of this uncertainty devolves from the difficulty in assessing the relative importance of the copious information that confronts us. The case of the teas-maid is fairly simple: it is an incidental curiosity that carries some minimal psychological undertones but then vanishes without trace. If this particular long description may soon be forgotten, yet throughout Sebald’s work we face repeatedly, indeed constantly, similar doubts as to the relevance of the various parts: how do the incidents and objects fit into the whole? Sometimes, as with the teas-maid only quite peripherally. This problem is at its most extreme in the dense labyrinths of Sebald’s last completed novel, Austerlitz, which roams all over the place

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figuratively as well as geographically, overloading readers with an abundance of frequently technical details in sentences pages long (one extends over nine pages), details that pose a tough challenge to readers’ capacity to process, let alone to accommodate them in the totality by means of interpretation. This is a realism gone wild. Things are juxtaposed associatively, in an apparently random manner as a reflection of a universe full of bewildering objects and chance encounters, a world governed in the last resort not by any comprehensible order but by a disconcerting contingency. And this is where Sebald differs fundamentally from Flaubert for whom the world did have an order, albeit a negative one dominated by the Homais and their idées reçues. How, then, do the photographs relate to Sebald’s realism, a term that now has to be put into quotation marks? If the prevalent concept of photographs is the earlier one of having an authenticating function, they should help to provide confirmatory certainties. But, on the contrary, they prove to be unsettling and troubling, and increasingly so the more closely they are scrutinized. To begin with, they lack the customary explanatory captions except for the picture of Courbet’s oak-tree, “Die Eiche des Vercingetorix,” (268, 180) a title taken from Courbet himself. This one caption serves to raise awareness of the absence of others. Assuming a link between text and photograph, readers are driven to pay especially careful attention to both in order to ascertain the connection. They are thereby induced, or incited to a more active participation in the construction of the text (that is, words plus images). Sometimes that task is not difficult: for instance in the picture of the teas-maid, in the image that bears the words “Rückfahrkarte” and “Motorbootfahrt Bad Kissingen-Saline G.m.b.H.” (338, 226), and in the accompanying photograph of the Turkish woman “who generously allowed me to take her picture” (339, 226).5 In all these cases the images are quite readily interpretable without hesitation because, despite the lack of captions, the conjunction between image and text is in one way or another articulated. Nevertheless, far from simplifying the process of construction, the photographs add a level of complication between text and reader. All such cautious approaches, and with them the realism of the photographs are radically subverted by a revelation within the text, namely that the alleged photograph of the book-burning on the Residenzplatz in Würzburg in the evening hours of 10 May 1933 is faked. This is so absolutely crucial a passage that it warrants full citation before 5

“die es mir grosszügiger Weise gestattete, ein Bild von ihr aufzunehmen” (339).

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discussion: Aurach’s uncle Leo, a twin of his mother’s, who had taught Latin and Greek at the Gymnasium in Würzburg until he had on 31 December 1935 been driven “compulsorily” (184)6 into retirement (here, too, the details are circumstantial) takes out a newspaper cutting: That photograph, said Uncle, was a forgery. The burning of the books took place on the evening of the 10th of May, he said – and he repeated it several times – the books were burnt on the evening of the 10th of May, but since it was already dark, and they couldn’t take any decent photographs, they simply took a picture of some other gathering outside the palace, Uncle claimed, and added a swathe of smoke and a dark night sky. In other words, the photographic document published in the paper was a fake. And just as that document was a fake, said Uncle, as if his discovery were the one vital proof, so too everything else had been a fake, from the very start. But Father shook his head without saying a word, either because he was appalled or because he could not assent to Uncle Leo’s sweeping verdict. At first I too found the Würzburg story, which Ferber said he was only then remembering for the first time, somewhat on the improbable side; but in the meantime I have tracked down the photograph in question in a Würzburg archive, and as one can easily see there is indeed no doubt that Ferber’s uncle’s suspicions were justified. (183–84)7

A plethora of contradictory information clusters around the central assertion that the picture is “a fake,”8 a word that recurs four times within a short space. Each factor for or against this claim is balanced by another that potentially cancels it out. For instance, the uncle is an eminently re6 7

8

“zwangsweise” (275). “Der Onkel bezeichnete diese Fotografie als eine Fälschung. Die Bücherverbrennung, so sagte er, habe in den Abendstunden des 10. Mai – das wiederholte er mehrmals – , in den Abendstunden des 10. Mai habe die Bücherverbrennung stattgefunden, und weil man aufgrund der zu diesem Zeitpunkt bereits herrschenden Dunkelheit keine brauchbaren Fotografien habe machen können, sei man, so behauptete der Onkel, kurzerhand hergegangen und habe in das Bild irgendeiner anderen Ansammlung vor der Residenz eine mächtige Rauchfahne und einen tiefschwarzen Nachthimmel hineinkopiert. Das in der Zeitung veröffentlichte fotographische Dokument sei somit eine Fälschung. Und so, wie dieses Dokument eine Fälschung war, sagte der Onkel, als stelle die von ihm gemachte Entdeckung den entscheidenden Indizienbweis bei, so war alles eine Fälschung von Anfang an. Der Vater schüttelte aber wortlos nur den Kopf, sei es aus Entsetzen oder weil er dem Pauschalurteil des Onkels Leo nicht beipflichten mochte. Auch mir war die von Aurach, wie er sagte, jetzt zum erstenmal wieder erinnerte Würzburger Geschichte zunächst eher unwahrscheinlich erschienen, doch habe ich seither die Fotografie, um die es sich handelt, in einem Archiv in Würzburg ausfindig machen können, und es besteht, wie leicht zu sehen, tatsächlich kein Zweifel, daß der von Aurachs Onkel ausgesprochene Verdacht gerechtfertigt gewesen ist.” (274–75) “eine Fälschung.”

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spectable high-school teacher, but on account of his dismissal (of which the exact date is given), he has reason for wanting to discredit the regime. His certainty about the specificity of time and place (“on the evening of the 10th of May, he said; he repeated it several times”9) counters the recipients’ doubts as to its veracity. The photograph comes from a newspaper, which should be a reliable source of information, but can be another vehicle for propaganda. Aurach’s father shakes his head either in horror or disbelief or denial at the uncle’s blanket judgment of fakery. The narrator, too, finds it hard to believe the accusation, but comes to accept what he at first sees as Leo’s suspicions (“Verdacht”) after checking the photograph in a Würzburg archive and actually (“tatsächlich”) becoming convinced that Leo’s contention was justified. Thus the protagonists within the fiction act as models of skeptical disbelief in not trusting what they are told. The text is thereby further destabilized internally, a destabilization that is transferred onto readers. The context of this passage coalesces with the mode of narration to breed uncertainty. The incident springs from Aurach’s memory: “I now remember, said Ferber” (183).10 However, his memory is throughout shown to be patchy, erratic, probably unconsciously resistant to unpleasant things so that he suddenly remembers this striking incident for the first time only late in life. To compound the uncertainty, Aurach is reporting second-hand what he recalls his uncle saying: “so he said,” “so Uncle said,” “so Uncle claimed.”11 The reminder that this is a report is reiterated three times in one page. Such transmission by a word of mouth chain is reminiscent of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître where Jacques “disait que son capitaine disait” (said that his captain said) and so forth (35). These tactics expose the dubiousness of the doctrine of fatalism to a satirical irony. The same enframing and distancing is used in “Max Aurach” where the core story of the painter’s life is recounted by Aurach to the narrator in a series of spurts. The narrative is punctuated, as if chorally, by the repeated “he said” (“sagte er”). In the key passage cited above the remoteness of the report is doubled, indeed tripled by its filtering from the uncle to Aurach, on to the narrator, and finally to us the readers. The suggestion that the photograph is faked is the Archimedean point in “Max Aurach.” Its place in the story is also of immense importance. It forms part of the three-day conversation between the narrator 9 10 11

“in den Abendstunden des 10. Mai-das wiederholte er mehrmals.” “Ich erinnere mich jetzt, sagte Aurach” (273). “so sagte er,” “so sagte der Onkel,” “so behauptete der Onkel.”

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and Aurach when they meet again in 1989 after an interval of twenty years. Aurach is by then seventy, an age for reminiscing. His earlier reticence about his past now yields to a flow of memories about the parades and demonstrations he had witnessed in Munich in 1933. Yet his parents chose never to speak about the escalating threat even after the confiscation of their furniture and his father’s six-week imprisonment in Dachau. Only Leo breaks the silence, he is the only one from whom Aurach hears “occasionally … outspokenly about the situation” (183).12 The euphemism the “so-called situation” (“die sogenannte Lage der Dinge”), is unfortunately missing in the English translation. The occasion when Leo comes fully into the open is telling too, after the funeral of Lily Lanzberg, Aurach’s grandmother, who had committed suicide. It is in keeping with the family’s custom of evasive denial: “of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing. Thus, for instance, all my family and relatives remained largely silent” (183)13 – in keeping then with this sustained denial, the reasons for the suicide are dismissed with the subterfuge that she had not been “quite in her right mind” (183)14 How could any Jewish person have been “ganz bei Trost” quite in his or her right mind in Germany in 1936? Among the matters unsaid and uncertain is the likelihood that Lily saw and understood the danger more clearly. This then is the context in which Aurach remembers how Leo broke the silence by exposing the photograph as a fake. That unmasking extends globally beyond this one instance as he asserts: “so too everything else has been a fake, from the very start” (184).15 The implications of “everything else” (“alles”) are surely the entire Nazi regime. Leo follows up logically on his insight by arranging to emigrate. So the uncertainty surrounding this image extends outwardly, opening up indirectly the political tensions implicit in “Max Aurach” and leading toward the collection’s central theme of emigration. How does the deeply disturbing unmasking of this one photograph affect the reality quotient invested in the others? If “the photographic document published in the paper was a fake” (183),16 what is the credi12 13

14 15 16

“bisweilen offener über die sogenannte Lage der Dinge” (273). “worüber wir nicht reden konnten, darüber schwiegen wir eben. So hat man sich in der Verwandtschaft weitgehend ausgeschwiegen” (273). “ganz bei Trost” (273). “so war alles eine Fälschung von Anfang an” (274). “[d]as in der Zeitung voröffentlichte fotografische Dokument sei … eine Fälschung” (274).

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bility of the other so-called documents in “Max Aurach” and in the corpus of Sebald’s work? In the German text the verb is in the subjunctive, “sei” (not “ist”); the subjunctive is, of course, grammatically appropriate because of the reported speech, but its thrust is also to reinforce the uncertainty. That uncertainty begins to encroach retroactively on our perception of other photographs: that of the Ship Canal, for example, (235; 159) in which the water looks touched up in its unnatural play of light and dark, and the similar effect in the design of the clouds drifting in from the Irish Sea (266, 179). It is impossible to draw any definitive conclusions about these images because of the nature of photography. It captures a moment, a moment that can be arranged through lighting, distance, positioning of the camera, etc. Photography is not merely a technique that provides an accurate representation, but an art form in itself that takes on a life of its own. In this respect, interestingly, it parallels realist narrative which likewise projects the claim that “all is true” while at the same time fashioning its own worlds. In both photography and realism, the tension is not an absolute polarity between “truth” and “fake”; at stake, much rather, is the interpenetration of the factual and the fictive in the often almost imperceptible slippages from the one into the other. Marianne Moore’s famous dichotomy of the imaginary frog in the real garden simply does not hold; both partake of the real and the imaginary in a seamless fusion. Analysis of Sebald’s art leads, therefore, to the realization that it defies any kind of facile categorization because of its innate paradoxicality. Both the photographs and the descriptions function in a complex, ambivalent manner. On the one hand, they appear to corroborate Sebald’s realism through the precision of the details and as graphic documents. On the other hand, they simultaneously provoke a degree of uncertainty through their sheer profusion and the possibility of fakery. This characteristic pattern of hyperrealism undercut by a current of uncertainty reiterates by mimicry the processes of memory, Sebald’s cardinal theme. Aurach and the narrator alike repeatedly insist that they are certain/uncertain, that they remember/do not remember. In their dualism the photographs reflect and objectify the unresolved penumbra of memory. Rather than affirm a solid reality, they ultimately and cumulatively intensify in readers the Vertigo (Schwindelgefühle) induced by Sebald’s writing. But in the very challenge created by our bewilderment lies the source of Sebald’s endless fascination. What he portrays is the quintessential, insoluble enigma of human existence.

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Section 3 History and Trauma

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The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Karin Bauer

Despite the narrator’s penchant for particulars and his often laborious attention to detail, Jacques Austerlitz remains an elusive and enigmatic figure steeped in an ambiguous blend of modern sensibilities and postmodern hybridity. Austerlitz’s congenial and eccentric character contributes much to the curious fascination that Sebald’s novel exerts upon the reader. The highly intelligent, interesting, educated, and yet humble and unassuming Austerlitz represents a partial resurrection of the figure of the solitary bourgeois outsider of modernity. Austerlitz draws – amongst other images – upon the figure of modern man; however, the novel does not revive the modern subject, but rather mourns its loss. While suggesting an affinity to the tradition of the melancholy science of modernity, Austerlitz does not merely reproduce the literary construction of modern fractured and alienated subjectivity in contemporary fiction.1 Rather, the novel reconstructs the damaged subject for postwar society. Oddly out of synch with its times, this unzeitgemäss subject has been damaged by the forces of (German) history that have left an abyss of silence so deep that it can be bridged only on rare occasions when flashes of insight illuminate moments of a forgotten past. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Austerlitz gazes with a mixture of curiosity and horror at the debris of history piling up before his eyes as he is blown backwards into an uncertain future that promises not a reconstruction of and contentment with a knowledge about the past, but more debris, more questions and disruptions.2 1

2

“The melancholy science” is the opening phrase of Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. The melancholy science (traurige Wissenschaft) can be seen as a contrast to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Fröhliche Wissenschaft). Written during his years of exile, Adorno’s text is, like Sebald’s novel, marked by his critical negativity and a profound sense of displacement. At the end of the second essay of his controversial Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction), Sebald cites at some length Benjamin’s angel of his-

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The novel’s rich texture derives from its myriad allusions to literature and cultural history, and, more concretely, from the multifarious references to Baroque, Romantic and modern literary tropes, traditions, and figures. However, the special role of the German-Jewish tradition of thought for Austerlitz must be underscored. In Logis in einem Landhaus, Sebald refers to the thought of Benjamin and the Frankfurt School as a “Jewish” school of thought that functioned as a counter-narrative to the German jargon of power and authenticity. Thus, it seems only fitting that in his depiction of a Jewish character – Austerlitz – he draws on Benjamin and the Frankfurt School as a paradigm of Jewishness in postwar Europe.3 Many of the literary and philosophical resonances of other writers and thinkers are not found in Sebald’s text as explicit references – although there are a fair number of those, too – but as negative imprints or traces of absent purport. They appear as negative evocations rather than positive citations, and the nostalgic melancholy emanating from the novel thus stems not so much from direct references or allusions to literary tropes and figures but from the obliteration of their – already tenuous and contested – utopian potential. In this sense, Austerlitz is closer to the unrelenting negativity of Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia than to the messianic hope of Benjamin. The following essay will draw on the figures of the flaneur and the cosmopolitan good European to demonstrate how Sebald’s text establishes its dystopian vision. At issue is in this context not an explication of the flaneur or the good European as found, for instance, in Benjamin,

3

tory. Sebald uses this Benjaminian image to criticize Alexander Kluge for postulating, according to Sebald, humanity as incorrigible. In view of what I outline as Sebald’s own intellectual affinity to Benjamin and his proclivity for dystopian visions, his critique of Kluge seems oddly misplaced and may be connected to Sebald’s blind spot in regard to the issues surrounding the portrayal of the air war in works of German literature. For a cogent discussion of the air war essay see Andreas Huyssen, as well as other essays in this volume. In his homage to Johann Peter Hebel in Logis in einem Landhaus, Sebald refers to Ernst Bloch, Kafka, and Benjamin explicitly as “Jewish” authors. He also indicates that the Frankfurt School played an important part in his own intellectual development: “Als ich 1963 in Freiburg mit dem Studium begann, war das [der Faschismus] alles noch kaum unter den Teppich gekehrt, und nicht selten habe ich mich seither gefragt, wie trüb und verlogen unser Literaturverständnis wohl geblieben wäre, hätten uns die damals nach und nach erscheinenden Schriften Benjamins und der Frankfurter Schule, die ja eine jüdische Schule zur Erforschung der bürgerlichen Sozial- und Geistesgeschichte gewesen ist, nicht andere Perspektiven eröffnet” (12).

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Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, Siegfried Kracauer, or Friedrich Nietzsche. Rather, these concepts are examined in their function as cultural codes and as prominent examples for Sebald’s negative evocation of the modern tradition. In modern literature and thought, the flaneur and the cosmopolitan are ambiguous figures that embody both the dark side of modernity as well as its hopes, the latter of which include mobility, progress, and rationality and the aspirations implied by transnationality, such as heterogeneous identities and global citizenship. In contrast to this ambiguity, Sebald’s novel presents a counter-figure drained of enlightenment’s and modernity’s emancipatory promise. The following investigation shows how Sebald’s novel undermines not only dominant enlightenment narratives of history and identity, but also the faint hopes for redemption and emancipation held out by modern counter-narrative of enlightenment found in thinkers such as Benjamin and Nietzsche. The absence of the hope of the hopeless and an utopian vision for a liberating potential of modernity results in the text’s melancholic vision of loss and displacement. The repudiation of the promises of progress and enlightenment is achieved precisely through the novel’s evocation of modernity, on the one hand, and the depletion of its emancipatory potential, on the other hand. The novel thus ends not with an outlook on the possibilities of Jewish life today and in the future, but with a look back into an abyss “into which no ray of light could penetrate” (297). As are many of the narrators and figures of Sebald’s earlier works, Austerlitz and his fictional biographer, too, are largely defined by and preoccupied with movement through time and space. While the goal of wandering in The Rings of Saturn – with its resonances of Georg Büchner’s Lenz – is to dispel madness, Austerlitz crisscrosses Europe in search for his own ever-elusive history and identity. Already the ruminations about his name indicate the impossibility of finding a stable identity. Despite its relative uncommonness, the name Austerlitz already opens up a web of possibilities and heterogeneous references, including the famous Napoleonic battle at Austerlitz, the real name of Fred Astaire, a train station in Paris, a witness in a Italian trial concerning the practice of euthanasia, and a small hunch-back in Kafka’s diary. In this way, Sebald’s novel is an inversed Bildungsroman that leads to perpetual wandering and not to a resolution, the discovery of the self, personal growth, or the comfort of home. Austerlitz – and the novel’s narrator, too – are, to use Susan Sontag’s claim regarding Sebald’s earlier works, fictional constructions of the “promeneur solitaire of many generations of romantic literature” (42). As Sontag, John Zilcosky, Andy Beckett, Mark McCulloh,

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and others point out, Sebald’s texts belong – albeit not exclusively – to the genre of travel writing. Literally and intellectually, Sebald follows the journeys of other writers including Franz Kafka, Casanova, Stendhal, Joseph Conrad, Diderot, Franz Grillparzer, and Robert Walser. There exists, too, a connection to the tradition of the travelogue as it is found in the work of Bruce Chatwin and Werner Herzog with a predilection for oddities, eccentric characters, seemingly insignificant details, and weird circumstance encountered far off the trodden path. This interest in the marginal is seen in the far-ranging nature of the musings of Sebald’s characters who are interested in the marginalia of such diverse subjects as architecture, archeology, botany, institutional history, art, mythology, medicine, philosophy, craftsmanship, religion, and zoology. Reflecting on his penchant for this accumulation of knowledge about the obscure aspects of these areas, Austerlitz claims that this activity served him as a substitute and compensatory memory that allowed him to conceal his blind spot about his own past (140). Austerlitz’s restless wanderings across space, time, and disciplines are paralleled by the narrative meanderings. The narrative moves from past to present and present to past, and the amalgam of proliferating stories and histories and mixing and mingling of literary genres and visual materials gives the narrative its nomadic character. Furthermore, Austerlitz’s incessant physical and intellectual voyages expose the demise of the leisurely strolling flaneur savoring the sights, sounds, and smells of the city and of the cosmopolitan European urbanite who finds liberation in the defiance of narrow definitions of national, racial, religious, and professional identity. Both thematically and structurally, the novel generates multiple layers of nomadism that point toward the dissolution of stable identities and linear narratives of history. An urban nomad, Austerlitz moves by foot and train toward the peripheries and away from the centers of the city and of Europe. Although he lives in London and visits Paris and Prague, he always wanders off to the margins. As John Banville points out, Austerlitz wanders not “the Europe of treaties and economic miracles and social progress … The places that he visits are not the grand boulevards, the glittering esplanades, the stated parks, but the unconsidered corners, the bricked-over wastelands and soulless architectural sites” (35). Plagued by sleeplessness, Austerlitz wanders around London at night, always walking toward the suburbs, the remote areas, and “outlying parts of the metropolis” (126). His solitary walks away from the city center are contrasted by his ride back to the center in the company of many: “and when dawn came I would go back to White-

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chapel on the Underground, together with all the other poor souls who flow from the suburbs toward the center at that time of day” (126). Austerlitz is a nocturnal flaneur of the margins: he walks at night, away from the crowds, displays, and turbulence of the city to the outskirts where the open space – the nomad’s proper place – meet the city. Traversing time and space, the novel – or more concretely, the narrator’s story – is an eloquent, and yet fragmentary and tentative attempt to overcome Austerlitz’s own handicap, namely his inability to come to grips with the heterogeneity of the materials he collected over the years. Although Austerlitz studies human constructions of order in the form of architectural monuments and historical narratives – he is knowledgeable about, for example, the architecture of train stations, factories, fortresses, museums, and Nazi prison camps – he is himself incapable of creating order. Recalling the plight of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, the architectural historian Austerlitz aspires to write a multi-volume, descriptive-analytic, speculative-philosophical work but is unable to come to grips with the thousands of pages of notes and drafts on such disparate topics as the architecture of penal institutions, profane temples, and zoological gardens, hygiene, light and shadow, departure and arrival, and fumes and gases. In a more or less obvious allusion to Benjamin’s incomplete and uncompleted Passagen-Werk, Austerlitz refers to his own notes as “Konvolute” and speaks of his stay in Paris, where he fails to realize his plan to assemble his fragmentary studies into a book.4 Like Benjamin, Austerlitz went daily to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and “in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labor, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses” (260). The footnotes are more interesting than the main text, and it is, again, the margins that capture Austerlitz’s attention and imagination.

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Like Austerlitz, Benjamin produced thousands of pages of notes and “Konvolute.” While working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in the 1930s, Benjamin began an elaborate filing system that nevertheless failed to establish a coherent, systematic philosophical work. For an insightful discussion of the organization and the spacial and temporal origin of the Passagen-Werk, see Susan Buck-Morss.

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In Paris, Austerlitz had attempted to arrange his notes as if in the pages of an album, the picture of a landscape, now almost immersed in oblivion, through which my journey had taken me. But the more I labored on this project over several months the more pitiful did the results seem. I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years. (122)

This topographical arrangement of his materials fails to produce a coherent conceptual order or a valid intellectual road map. His notes “now seemed misguided, distorted, and of little use” to him, and it takes him sometimes a whole day to compose one single sentence, only to find the next morning “the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring” at him from the paper (121–22). Writing turns into an impossible task through which the wanderer feels himself transformed into “a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other” and who is “stricken with terror at the realization” that he can easily lose his balance (123). Gradually, Austerlitz loses the ability to create any kind of order, he can not even arrange assorted objects in a drawer (123). While Austerlitz attempts to come to terms with his material like a wanderer traversing the countryside, he can not establish a definite path for his wanderings. In Sebald’s texts, wandering becomes the central metaphor for thinking, and the act of writing is envisioned as the charting of these intellectual, real, and imagined voyages. Like Benjamin, Austerlitz mixes his observations with reflections on his extensive studies of nineteenth-century sources, and, like Benjamin, he fails in his endeavor to construct a rational and coherent narrative from the multiplicity of notes, stories, observations, and commentaries with which he sees himself confronted. Austerlitz can be a flaneur of history, he can crisscross it like a wanderer, going back and forth in time and space, but he can not fully apprehend it or put it into a logical structure. Thus, to convey his story to the reader, Austerlitz needs a narrator who listens to him, records his stories, and puts his digression-filled narration into a cogent narrative. Although an examination of the role of the narrator goes beyond the scope of the present essay, in the context of the issues regarding the construction of Jewish identity, it is important to take cognizance of the Jewish-German dichotomy set up in the novel by the use of a Jewish chronicler and story teller, on the one hand, and a German narrator and writer who records his story, on the other. This Jewish-German dichotomy may be viewed as problematic in its – perhaps unwitting – reproduction of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the wandering Jew

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damned to an unproductive life of eternal movement and orality.5 In the novel, the task of writing and preservation falls upon the German narrator.6 Austerlitz is the antiquarian historian a la Nietzsche or the chronicler who, according to Benjamin, collects but does not categorize events and materials according to dominant perceptions of their relevance.7 For the chronicler, nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as unimportant, and the chronicler wants to rescue it from getting lost for history (“Theses,” 254). Because the chronicler and the antiquarian resist the cult of relevance, they are well equipped to keep the history of the “losers” from being subsumed under the history of the victors. According to Benjamin, only a redeemed humanity would receive “the fullness of its past” (“Theses,” 254). Austerlitz recuperates parts of the history of the losers , but forecloses the possibility for redemption. However, to rescue Sebald’s novel from falling under the sway of a gloomy doomsday scenario, it may be surmised that Austerlitz’s recuperation of the histories of marginalia contributes, nevertheless, to the hope of the hopeless by maintaining the hope that these histories are in some way important. Perhaps Austerlitz’s inability to write is attributable to his keen awareness of the association of writing and the totalitarian aspects of order and may indicate a refusal to participate in the context of delusion implied by any systematization and prioritization. Denying his complicity with the rational order of things, Austerlitz eventually destroys his notes, but – interestingly enough – not his photographs. It appears that Austerlitz trusts images more than words; one day, these black and white photographs will be “all that was left of his life” (294). Like Benjamin and Austerlitz, Nietzsche, too, was an itinerant intellectual, a retired academic, and wandering nomad who had plans for 5

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Oral history and storytelling are associated with the nomadic subject. Where storytelling implies a changing narrative that arises and is transformed depending upon the context in which it is told, writing implies permanence. Benjamin’s storyteller offers another, related perspective on the storyteller and the community out of which the stories arise. I am referring to the anti-Semitic stereotype as, for instance, evident in Richard Wagner’s “Jews in Music,” where Wagner argues that because of their supposed root- and homelessness, Jews are incapable of original artistic production. They can learn and imitate the languages and the music of their “host” cultures, but can not create in them. See Nietzsche’s differentiation of monumental, antiquarian, and critical history in “On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Austerlitz’s attention to details and footnotes betrays a tendency toward the antiquarian.

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many works but never quite managed to systematize his notes to produce a standard work. Nietzsche, too, associates the philosopher and thinker with the wanderer: “He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist” (Human, 203). Like the traveler, the thinker, too, is unsettled, perpetually moving between places and positions. Identifying wandering without a definitive goal or telos as a constituent part of the thought processes of the philosopher,8 Nietzsche contends that the movement through space must be augmented by a movement through time. “Whither we have to travel. – Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing” (Human, 267–68). Nietzsche, like Sebald, links the movement through space with the movement through time. Nietzsche’s mention of the flow of water in regard to our experience of history indicates the extent to which the past is a constituent and indistinguishable part of the present and points, furthermore, toward the interchange of time and space and the fluidity of historical perception. While one must never set out on a journey expecting to find a definitive answer, stable identity, or a final truth, Nietzsche reminds readers that they must be mindful of Heraclitus’s statement that “one does not step twice into the same river” (Human, 268). Austerlitz, too, compares the flow of time with the flow of water; and he, too, uses the image of the water’s movement through space to question the experience of time. For Austerlitz, time is an unquantifiable dimension that progresses in disregard of linear regularity. Austerlitz never owned a clock or watch and claims to have always resisted the power of time all his life. Clocks appear as ominous and violent instrument of oppression. At the Antwerp train station, the movement of the clock’s hand is “alarming” and “resembled a sword of justice … slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped” (9). Rather than perceiving history as a mere succession of time, Austerlitz finds time to be moments that are 8

For a general discussion of the various functions of walking, see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking which outlines some of the political, aesthetic, and social meanings attached to walking as well as the connection between walking and thinking.

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co-existing simultaneously; “I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking” (185). However, this inability to order time in linear terms, has serious consequences for Austerlitz’s selfperception. He feels as if he had no place in reality and he can not imagine “who or what” he was (185). Thus, like the river – and everything else – time must have its structure and its limits as well, and if it is to be thought as a river, Austerlitz muses, “then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent?” (100). Thus, time is not an objective and measurable quantity but a changing experience that depends upon the place in which it is experienced and the psychic disposition of the one experiencing it. London, Austerlitz contends, is ruled by time, but in the countryside and in certain other places and cultures, it is still possible to live outside the tyranny of time. Similarly, disruptions such as illness or personal misfortune can cut us off from the continuum of time and the recognition of the past and the future (101). For Benjamin, too, it is the experience of sudden disruption and shock that may blast us out of the continuum of history and time (“Theses,” 261). In order to understand the past, one must – Nietzsche maintains – travel like Herodotus and “go on a quest of the living remnants of historical epochs” (Human, 268). The traveler, flaneur, thinker, and wanderer all seek to find the manifestations of past epochs in the now, the experience of time in present, the Jetztzeit. As a historian of architecture, Austerlitz, too, observes the manifestations of the past in the present. However, his interests in the present are severely limited. “As far as I was concerned the world ended in the late nineteenth century,” Austerlitz reflects. He didn’t read newspapers, listened to the radio only at certain times, and developed a “quarantine or immune system” meant to protect him from revelations about his past (139). However, in tracing the history of architectural structures, he always encounters the past in the present as he investigates the shifting functions of these structures throughout history. To understand history properly, one must observe the present and comprehend the function of artifacts throughout history and in the now. To interpret properly one’s observations of the present requires an understanding of history. It requires also knowledge of the various functions of these artifacts and an understanding that these

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functions are not static but that they evolve and change. In this way, an understanding of the past is a precondition for understanding the present, and an understanding of the changing functions of the manifestations of the past in the present is a precondition for an understanding the past. While the former approach may be seen as the credo of the historian, the latter is the proper domain of the cosmopolitan flaneur, the wandering philosopher, and good European. Although in Nietzsche’s writings, the good European is at times an ironic figure or a figure with troubling anti-liberal attitudes and political views, the good European also functions as a figure of hope for a united Europe of the future, a Europe beyond provincialism and petty politics. The good European is cultured, multi-lingual, and a cosmopolitan opposed to the modern maladies of nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism. The good Europeans are very much a construct of a possible future in the vein of the “free spirits,”9 who are working toward liberating themselves from the constraints of their acculturation, are struck by a suspicion of the home and the familiar, and feel a rebellious and volcanically erupting desire for travel and strange places (Human, 7). The Europeans of the future yearn to overcome the narrow confines of the self, the city, and the nation; they prepare the way for a “new synthesis” and anticipate experimentally the European of the future (Beyond, 196). An alternative to the Nationalitätswahn that degrades European politics, the European of the future is at home everywhere and nowhere. We who are homeless. – Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense: it is to them that I especially commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza. For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them – but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition … We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.” We are, in one word – and let this be our word of honor – good Europeans … (Gay Science, 338–40)

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In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche constructs the “free spirits” as his ideal readers. The “free spirits” (Freigeister) are an utopian construct, and although they do not exist, Nietzsche nevertheless addresses himself to these sympathetic, yet independent reader.

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Against the myopic vision of those who want to delimit their territory and barricade themselves against each other, Nietzsche proposes a new European subject that stands above and moves across racial, physical, intellectual, and linguistic boundaries. The Europeans of the future aren’t just homeless in terms of place, but, significantly, they are homeless within their time, from which they feel alienated and disconnected. Overly indebted to the past and suspicious of the present, good Europeans are the bridge to the future. Nietzsche presents an intriguing scenario in which the Europe of the past and present might interact and co-exist with the Europe of the future and predicts the gradual emergence of “an essentially supra-national and nomadic type” of European (Beyond, 176). Envisioning European integration as a process that relies on the unobstructed flow and exchange across space and time – across nations, states, and races, on the one hand, and centuries and historical periods on the other – Nietzsche defines the European subject as one with multiple identities and no stable home. Claiming nomadism as Nietzsche’s philosophical practice, Gilles Deleuze points toward the subversiveness of nomadic thought and the proclivity of nomads to “continually evade the codes of settled people” (149). Traditionally associated with barbaric, savage, and uncivilized forces, nomads are seen as a threat to settled communities and traditions. In this way, the nomadic good European, too, may be seen to have a disruptive influence upon the norms maintaining the orderly status quo of the nation, the city, and the intellect. Moving outside the fixed order of place and time, the nomad privileges his freedom of movement. Read as the negative imprint of the lost ideal of the good European, Austerlitz’s story is symptomatic for the emotional and intellectual fallout of the disruptions and dislocations of wartime Europe. Disconnected from his heritage and a hybrid of cultures, languages, and religions, Austerlitz presents neither the old, negatively stereotyped European nor the utopian type of nomadic European that Nietzsche projected. As a wandering Jew, he continues the perpetual and compulsive movement that history and ideology have accorded to him for centuries; as a nomadic hybrid, he belongs to the new type of European who is essentially homeless in time and space. He is not a postmodern nomad celebrating the joyful wisdom of his heterogeneity and multiplicity, but the damaged subject unable to come to terms with the past. This post-Auschwitz type of European is no longer connected to the hope of overcoming boundaries and borders, of mixing and becoming a productive “new synthesis.” While Austerlitz moves seemingly effortless

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from one European country to the next, there emerges from the novel not a vision of an integrated Europe of the future but a Europe connected by a history of barbarism. As he examines in his architectural studies the multiple transformations of sites and landscapes, Austerlitz becomes keenly aware of Europe’s shared history of barbarism. Perceiving the past and the present as synchronic events, he imagines “that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish” (101). Constituting history as a moment of thought in the Jetztzeit, Austerlitz repudiates the construction of history as a static and monumental master-narrative. This synchronic experience of history marks Austerlitz’s encounter with the past at Liverpool Street Station. Experiencing the past as part of the present and the present as part of the past, Austerlitz contests so to say the “pastness” of the past. However, as Austerlitz himself points out, the simultaneity in the experience of time opens up the Benjaminian perspective of history as an permanent catastrophe producing piles of rubble and ruins at every moment in time, making clear that states of emergency are not the exception but the rule (“Theses,” 256). Austerlitz’s biography as well as his approach to architecture studies testify to Benjamin’s contention that there exists no cultural document that is not, simultaneously, a document of barbarism (“Theses,” 256). As Austerlitz crisscrosses Europe “with an unknown purpose” and “for an indefinite period (117), he uncovers this history of barbarism not in Europe’s famed monumental structures that memorialize the victors of history, but in the overlooked and ordinary structures and sites of European architecture, such as Antwerp’s Central station, the Belgian fortress of Breendonk, Broadstreet and Liverpool Street Stations in London, and the site of the new Bibliotheque National in Paris. Austerlitz exposes the entwinement of architecture and national and imperial power politics and the tragic arrogance guiding human civilization, but at the beginning of the novel he lacks yet any concrete insight into the entwinement of his own past with these vestiges of power. Investigating the transformation of usage and function of specific architectural sites and structures, Austerlitz uncovers, in the manner of an archeologist, layer upon layer of debris and layer upon layer of oppression. For example, the fortress Breendonk, was built and modified over the period of many years

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and is part of a colossal architectural structure that was transformed from a gigantic but ineffectual fortress for defense purposes to a Nazi prison camp, and in its latest incarnation, it serves as a Belgian museum of resistance. By connecting Breendonk and other the architectural monuments to their diverse history, i.e. multiple histories, Austerlitz presents a forceful account of historical victories and failures. In Austerlitz’s account, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris is another case in point. Austerlitz contains not only a damning critique of the new Bibliotheque Nationale’s architectural dysfunctionality, but also draws a connection to the property’s supposed past usage by the Nazis as the site of a gigantic warehouse for the expropriated possessions of Parisian Jews. This physical accumulation of barbarism of these various architectural sites provides support not only to Benjamin’s thesis that all documents of civilization are simultaneously documents of barbarism, but also lend credence to Nietzsche’s contention that the cause or origin of a phenomenon or thing stands divorced from its utility or employment and from the meaning and purpose that it is accorded over time. The form is fluid, Nietzsche asserts, “but the ‘meaning’ is even more so” (Genealogy, 77–78). The site of Austerlitz’s encounter with his own past, Liverpool Street station, is another multifaceted locality that underwent many historical transformations: It was at one time or another a swamp, a bleaching field, herb gardens, and the site of a grave yard, a hospital, a hotel, country homes, and a monastery. As layer upon layer is built and rebuilt, the past may be covered up but also leaves its trace. Like the skeletons of Broadstreet Station that resurface during an excavation, the past resurfaces in unexpected ways. Likewise the anguish of those who suffered in the past does not simply vanish but can be felt by the wanderer attuned to the past: “I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we passed through them” (129–30). Thus, it is not merely the physical existence of the cultural artifact or architectural monument that inevitably attests to the presence of the past; rather, it is the presence of the past experienced in the now that constitutes our connection to it. This experience of this past is, however, not an intellectual experience of the historian who accumulates knowledge about the past; rather it is a sensual, ephemeral event – the “cold breath of air” – occasioned by the physical manifestation of the past that serves as a trigger for the appearance of sensations and images.

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Austerlitz’s partial unearthing and connection to his past is thus depicted as a long and painful process involving a host of sensual, spiritual, and intellectual experiences. In a series of evocative flashbacks and epiphanies in a variety of places, such as a book store, the ladies’ waiting room at Liverpool Street station, and the streets of Prague, Austerlitz begins to remember fragments of his past. Evoking the maternal uterus and the birth canal, Austerlitz follows by a mysterious impulse a man with a turban into the hidden and debilitated ladies’ waiting room at Liverpool Street station via a labyrinth of hall and stairways. Alternating between visions of imprisonment and liberation, Austerlitz is unsure whether the renovation site he has entered is a ruin or the site of a new construction. The realization that a new station arises here from the old is paralleled by Austerlitz’s partial recognition of his past. Encountering his memories with an elusive promise of a rebirth, he is aware that in the ladies’ waiting room he is being “born, almost on the eve of my death” (137). The ladies’ waiting room is a large room flooded by dusty, pale, and “icy gray light” that Austerlitz enters by stepping past a heavy curtain. Together with Austerlitz’s mention of feeling like an “actor” alienated from a familiar play, this allusion to a stage accentuates the theatricality of the scene and the staged and perhaps illusory nature of memory. As he encounters the uncanny feeling of deja vu, Austerlitz feels “like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely and irrevocably forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part he has so often played” (134). As images appear to him and “scraps of memory” drift through his mind, he encounters “memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light, and which seemed to go on and on for ever” (136). Mimicking the architectural structure of the building, the fragments and images appear to him as he begins to watch himself – as one would watch an old, broken, and badly spliced film – as a young boy who arrives in Britain with a Kindertransport. It appears to him as if in these brief instances, this waiting room “contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes” (136). In Austerlitz as in Benjamin, flashes of insight about the past are triggered by an extraordinary experience, a shock, a moment of danger: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255). Memory, fleeting and incomplete, always constitutes itself in a present that brings to the past its own concerns and agendas.

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As these scenes from the past resurface in his mind, Austerlitz loses all connection to time, and he has no idea for how long he stands motionless in the waiting room, nor does he remember when and how he left. Significantly, this staging of memory and history takes place in the ambiguous space of a train station. While the train signifies transport, movement, mobility, and forced displacement, the station symbolizes the temporary arrest, delay, or the anticipation of movement. The train station can thus be understood as the embodiment of the intellectual maneuver surrounding what Benjamin described as the dialectic at a standstill (“Dialektik im Stillstand”). For Benjamin, historiography and thinking involve not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Through the experience of shock, an event or an era can be blasted out of the continuum of history; the particular and part can be blasted out of the homogenous stream of the whole. However, while Austerlitz recuperates moments of his past during these moments of standstill, this cessation of happening is not, as it is in Benjamin, a messianic cessation of happening, and Benjamin’s messianic promise of this recuperation of the past remains unfulfilled. Austerlitz negates the redemptive quality of Benjamin’s thought. Although he receives clues about his childhood with the help of an archive, he discovers his past, his language, and the house of his childhood through sensual experiences similar to the once that led him to follow the man with the turban at Liverpool Street station. “We take,” Austerlitz remarks, “almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious” (134). He is led to his childhood home very much in the manner of Benjamin’s flaneur, who experiences the past through his sensual encounters with the present. According to Benjamin, the flaneur remembers with the soles of his feet; his feet remember, for instance, the texture of thresholds and tiles. “The flaneur is led by the street into a time that has disappeared … It leads him down, if not to the mothers, so nevertheless to a past” (Passagen-Werk, 524), Benjamin writes. The street leads Austerlitz literally to both his mother and his past: “As I walked through the labyrinth of alleyways, thoroughfares, and courtyards between the Vlasˇská and Nerudova, and still more so when I felt the uneven paving of the Sˇporkova underfoot as step by step I climbed uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through my senses, so long numb and now coming back to life” (150). It is his senses and not his intellect that lead him to his past and to Vera. Faint at first, he recovers some mem-

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ories of the past, and he suddenly and almost miraculously regains his mother tongue. While in Prague, Austerlitz exhibits the sensibility of the flaneur who lets the soles of his feet guide him along the uneven pavement; his walks through Theresienstadt, however, demonstrate most clearly his areas of dissimilarity to the flaneur. Austerlitz visits Theresienstadt in search of clues about his mother, who vanished there, and it is only fitting that it is here in Theresienstadt where the reader encounters most poignantly the vanishing of the redemptive promises of modernity, including the emanicipatory promise of the flaneur. Austerlitz walks through Terezin, which supposedly is an ordinary town again and marvels at its depopulated state. In contrast to the flaneur who sees and is being seen, Austerlitz encounters only a mentally disturbed man. He is fascinated by the myriad of closed gates and door that give him an uncanny feeling of blocking access – ostensibly to the Hinterhöfe of the house, but presumably also to the Hinterhöfe of the mind, the hidden corners and back allies of history: “what I found most uncanny of all, however, were the gates and doorways of Terezin, all of them, as I thought I sensed, obstructing access to the darkness never yet penetrated” (190). Finally, Austerlitz is captivated by the display window of one of the two stores he finds in Terezin. Like the flaneur, Austerlitz takes aesthetic and contemplative pleasure in the display; but in contrast to the flaneur of the city, who admires a variety of consumer goods, the display window of Theresienstadt contains a disparate and odd assortment of trinkets and antique objects, including a little box of seashells, miniature barrel organ, paperweights, linen, an officer’s cap, a fishing rod, a hunter’s bag, a Japanese fan, a lampshade, a stuffed squirrel, and a figurine of a hero on horseback. “They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementoes stranded in the Terezin bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them” (197). While looking at these objects, Austerlitz sees his own reflection in the display window. Austerlitz’s image thus becomes superimposed upon these relics of the past. Like the image of the staging of memory at Liverpool Street Station, this image is powerful and poignant. The visual superimposition of the present onto the past through Austerlitz’s reflection on the display window of an antique store presents a visual image of the interlocking spaces of history. Reminding the reader of Nietzsche’s conten-

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tion that historical understanding is always guided by particular interests and Benjamin’s thesis about the constitution of the past in the now, the image of Austerlitz’s reflection onto the marginalia of the past pays heed to the complex and complicated intrusions, interventions, and projections at work in the interaction of present and past. The past remains, however, inaccessible to him. Although he is casting his own shadow onto the past, Austerlitz is at a loss for answers to the questions about the human fate behind the history of these objects. He waits around but the store never opens its doors. He does gain access to a museum, but he is at a loss to connect to a past he has not experienced himself. Watching a film about Theresienstadt and reading studies of daily life in the ghetto, he learns about the past but gains no access to it. He may reconstruct and comprehend his mother’s fate intellectually, but he is unable to reconstruct her identity. Like pieces of a puzzle that will never be complete, the images of the mother remain elusive. Austerlitz moves on to Paris and back to London crossing Europe’s seemingly permeable borders. Passing through Germany, a country he always avoided, it appears to Austerlitz that what he sees outside was “the original of the images” that had haunted him for years (224). In Nürnberg, he is impressed by the solid and sensible shoes and clothing the Germans are wearing. Austerlitz’s apparently nomadic existence and his homelessness in the eyes of settled (German) people is reiterated, when an elderly German woman mistakes Austerlitz – because of his Wittgensteinian back pack – for a homeless man and gives him a coin. As Austerlitz returns to Paris to search for traces of his father, his story becomes ever more deeply entangled with the European history of barbarism as he surmises that his father may have been deported from Paris. In the end, all there is to be expected is that Austerlitz may perhaps find a few more pieces to the puzzle of his and his parents’ past, but the puzzle will never be solved. Austerlitz himself concedes that it was of little use to him to have discovered the sources of his suffering, alienation, and loneliness, “reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement” (228). Although Austerlitz tells his story to the narrator, the novel communicates the sense of the essential inexpressibility of the trauma of history. Austerlitz maintains the “language of silence” that Ernestine Schlant defined not just as “strategies of avoidance or omission” but also as signs for the inability to give voice to the innermost suffering of the victims (234). Austerlitz reformulates the famous final sentence of

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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (“What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence”), to read in my translation, “what we cannot speak about because there are no words for it” (137).10 This reformulation frees Wittgenstein’s sentence from its metaphysical implication and moral imperative and puts the silence squarely in the court of language and its inability to apprehend the horrors of the human psyche. A nomadic Jew, Austerlitz dispenses with the utopian dimension of the European subject and the messianic hope for the redemption of European history. Sebald’s novel pronounces a devastating blow to the utopian figures of mobility and cosmopolitanism. Crossing seemingly permeable borders between urban and rural spaces, countries, cultures, histories, identities, and memories, Austerlitz is unable to find closure or reconciliation in his effort to uncover the layers of the past. With its myriad of allusions to German literature and to German-Jewish literature and criticism, Austerlitz constructs a nomadic narrative that mirrors the nomadic wanderings of the protagonist. Connecting stories, sights, photographs, drawings, images, a mixture of genres, film stills, observations, philosophical musings, personal reflections, architectural studies, cultural criticism, private and public histories, the vision emerging from Sebald’s novel is not one of postmodern bricolage, but, as Richard Eder remarked, one of “terrible connectedness” (10). The novel leaves but one hope of the hopeless: the eloquent humanity that speaks to the reader from ever page of this book. Yet, the narrative’s interweaving of past and present also demonstrates their interconnectedness and the way in which the past intrudes upon the present. Like the skeletons unearthed in the building of Broadstreet Station, the past can not be covered up indefinitely; its wreckage will inevitably surface again in the form of ruins, skeletons, fragments, and seemingly lost traditions.

10

The German reads: “ … worüber man nicht reden kann, weil dafür die Worte fehlen” (197). Although this is clearly an allusion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Anthea Bell’s English translation does not attempt to render Sebald’s sentence to make this allusion obvious.

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Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants Jan Ceuppens

In the following essay I would like to pursue a question that touches both upon the approach narrators of literary texts called “modern” take to the reality they purport to depict and our approach as readers to the text itself: the question of finding an appropriate distance. This issue becomes all the more pressing as we deal with a topic such as Sebald’s: the drama – or the trauma – of this age of extremes which is still our own. I would like to argue that this question of distance is also a persistent theme, one might even say: a program, in Sebald’s work. It takes on the form of a negotiation between two modes of representation – I am not referring to the obvious interaction between text and image, which requires an investigation of its own, but to the thematization of these two modes within the narrative. Furthermore, I hope to show how the measuring of this distance has ethical bearings and brings into play a whole tradition of reading, imagination and identification. To avoid getting caught in abstractions, I shall first be concentrating on a number of passages from The Emigrants. There is, however, a lesser known short text by Sebald, which will provide us with an ideal introduction to the theme at hand. It was published in a collection of stories by a host of internationally renowned authors accompanying drawings by book illustrator Quint Buchholz. Sebald’s contribution to the collection, entitled “La cour de l’ancienne école,” revolves around a picture reaching its real addressee by pure accident – something a more religious era would possibly have presented as a miracle, one of the many improbable coincidences in Sebald’s work, and an original variation on the theme of the “purloined letter”. The narrator, failing to come up with a fitting story for Buchholz’s drawing of an abandoned school yard, mistakenly puts the picture in an envelope containing a letter for a Corsican correspondent of his, a Madame Séraphine Aquaviva. In her reply, she asks him how the picture came into his possession, since it represents the

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yard of her old school at Porto Vecchio. What is most striking, however, are the final sentences of the text. They are presented in the typical strategy of embedded indirect discourses and quotations that has become Sebald’s hallmark: the narrator quotes Madame Aquaviva, who in turn quotes her old elementary school teacher. Prompted by the picture, she thinks back to her school days, but the only detail she can remember accurately are the words with which her teacher used to brandish her handwriting: “Ce que tu écris mal, Séraphine! Comment veux-tu qu’on puisse te lire?” (“La cour de l’ancienne école,” 16). This quotation, I would argue, is only one very explicit instance of the thematization of writing and reading that is omnipresent in Sebald’s work; moreover, because it is the final sentence of the text, one is tempted to assign it an ambiguous meaning: it may be more than just a rhetorical question, actually asking how one can be read. With this in mind, let us turn to The Emigrants. My starting point is a relatively straightforward presentation of the theme under discussion. In the opening pages of the “Paul Bereyter” episode, the narrator, having learned of his former school teacher’s suicide, tries to imagine the man’s life in the Bavarian town of S. The passage deserves to be quoted in full: […] belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like in the spacious apartment on the top floor of Lerchenmüller’s old house, which had once stood where the present block of flats is now, amidst an array of green vegetable patches and colourful flower beds, in the gardens where Paul often helped out of an afternoon. I imagined him lying in the open air on the balcony where he would often sleep in the summer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I imagined him skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him stretched out on the track. As I pictured him, he had taken off his spectacles and put them on the ballast stones by his side. The gleaming bands of steel, the crossbars of the sleepers, the spruce trees on the hillside above the village of Altstädten, the arc of the mountains he knew so well, were a blur before his shortsighted eyes, smudged out in the gathering dusk. At the last, as the thunderous sound approached, all he saw was a darkening greyness and, in the midst of it, needle-sharp, the snow-white silhouettes of three mountains: the Kratzer, the Trettach and the Himmelsschrofen. Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter. (Emigrants, 29)1 1

The German original is somewhat more elaborate in the last sentence: “[…] was ich von Paul Bereyter weiß und im Verlauf meiner Erkundungen über ihn in Erfahrung bringen konnte” (Die Ausgewanderten, 45) – the “Erkundungen,” investigations, being the main drive behind Sebald’s narratives.

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This passage provides the reader with a whole programme ex negativo: what the narrator is trying to avoid, is an imaginary plunge – by himself or the narratee – into the main character’s life, whose story he wants to tell. The repetition of the verbs “imagine” and “picture” – in the German original, “sehen” and “vorstellen” – emphasizes what is at stake: it is as if the narrator seeks to obey a Bilderverbot, a prohibition against picturing or imagining another person all too vividly. It may seem far-fetched to apply this term to a work that makes such abundant use of pictures, but in view of the rather uncommon qualities of those pictures, this needn’t be a contradiction – on the contrary: perhaps what we have here, is a use of Bilder which attempts to respect the Bilderverbot. Further, one could assume that in the passage quoted, Sebald is formulating a criticism of the kind of literature that German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” has favoured for some time, or indeed of much of the so-called holocaust literature bordering on kitsch in general. But leaving this literary historical question aside, what I would like to take a closer look at, is the strategy the narrator adopts to arrive at a less “presumptuous” approach – one we may call more respectful of its “object.” The opposition created here seems rather traditional at first: against a fictional, albeit mimetic story, in which the narrator imagines or intuits his main character’s life, he would seem to favour a report of facts, whose accuracy is guaranteed by relatives, friends and other eye witnesses as well as by authentic documents. One might even read the narrator’s programme as an inversion of the classical narratological opposition between “showing” and “telling”; it does indeed seem as if the narrator prefers not to make things too dramatic or palpable, despite the enormous amount of details he provides. There is another, connected, but perhaps less obvious aspect to the narrator’s endeavour: the report we are now getting is a written one, which therefore has to be read. The passage quoted above seems to oppose writing to picturing or imagining, or a cool and distanced approach to an empathic one. “I imagined him lying” – “as I pictured him”: the semantics of the visual and visualisation, used in an almost programmatical way throughout the “Paul Bereyter” episode, are already in place in these opening remarks; indeed, they are contained in the story’s motto, but in a rather ambiguous way: “There is mist that no eye can dispel” (Emigrants, 25).2 The connection to Bereyter’s loss of eyesight is obvious, but the motto is actually borrowed from Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik (64), and this opens a whole new layer of meaning, since Jean Paul brings it up in a 2

“Manche Nebelflecken löschet kein Auge aus” (Die Ausgewanderten, 39).

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reflection on the genius and on artistic creation, playing out “cold” and “mechanical” repetition of forms against the instinct-driven creativity of the genius. The broader context is the opposition between two equally erroneous forms of poetry: nihilistic or romantic poetry, in which the ego of the poet takes over completely, and materialist poetry which is just a mechanical reproduction of nature. Surely Sebald didn’t choose this motto haphazardly, as part of an intellectual postmodern game of namedropping; at the very least, it suggests that there are aspects to reality – or rather: to our relation with it – that are unavailable to the inspecting eye. Not only is this visualisation unhelpful in grasping Bereyter’s life, in certain cases, “Ausuferungen des Gefühls,” as the narrator calls them, they even lead him to a “wrongful trespass.” One is reminded of what Sebald has to say about Adalbert Stifter’s realism: he calls it “extremely visual,” characterizes this approach as “possessive and incorporative” and then approvingly quotes Gaston Bachelard’s theory on the similarity between the realist gaze and eating (or devouring) (Beschreibung, 26). Curiously, Sebald’s narrator intends to avoid these excesses by writing. What is at stake here is a quest for the appropriate distance with regard to the object under scrutiny. This cannot, I would suggest, be a question of the “juste milieu,” the golden mean, between devouring and respecting (and therefore never completely penetrating) that object, but a place that has to be renegotiated at every turn of the story. Or to put it another way: the neutral written word and the inviting image may be at two extremes, they are nevertheless interwoven, not just in the idiosyncratic use Sebald makes of them, but in a much more general way. The fact that Sebald makes this very insight an object of reflexion, of course, complicates things. Thus, the “Paul Bereyter” episode contains a large number of comments on representation. The first lesson the narrator, then nine years old, attends in Paul’s class, for example, is on how the living image can be constructed by highly mechanical means: the image of the stag’s leap is assembled from crosses, squares and dots. But the theme of writing is no less explicit in this episode. The narrator describes his first encounter with his fellow pupil Fritz Binswanger, who is always lagging behind with his exercises, as with this drawing; the narrator decides to help him: We exchanged silent glances, and I rapidly completed his fragmentary piece of work. From that day on, in the almost two years that we sat next to each other, I did most of his arithmetic, his writing and his drawing exercises. It was very easy to do, and to do seamlessly, as it were, chiefly because Fritz and I had the selfsame, incorrigibly sloppy handwriting, with the one difference that Fritz could not write quickly and I could not write slowly. (Emigrants, 31)

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This short fragment is echoed in the passage from “La Cour de l’ancienne école” mentioned earlier. It is tempting, too, to construct a kind of analogy between Paul’s inability to see clearly and the narrator’s inability to write readably. Here again, the notion of identification comes into play: “a silent glance” suffices to make the two children accomplices, and their cooperation is favoured by the identity of their handwriting. It doesn’t really come as a surprise, then, that the two should meet again for the first time after many decades in the British Museum reading room. A strange thought, really: identification through writing.3 Finally, Paul Bereyter’s shortsightedness again brings together the two modes of representation under discussion here: the state of his eyes is made worse by his unwillingness to give up his excessive reading and writing habits; he is constantly copying passages from the works of authors who have committed suicide or came close to it. Here again, the topic of writing is mentioned explicitely: to write faster, Paul uses socalled Gabelsberger shorthand. And after losing his eyesight, he has the works of Pestalozzi read to him by Lucy Landau. Attempts to approach a character through reading and writing rather than through imaginary empathy are thematized throughout The Emigrants, not only in the “Paul Bereyter” episode. Indeed, reading in Sebald seems to involve a moment one is almost tempted to call epiphanic. One instance of this can be found in the final sentences of “Dr. Henry Selwyn,” where the narrator, suddenly recalling Selwyn’s story, accidentally stumbles upon a text about the recovery of Johannes Naegeli’s remains in a Swiss glacier. Or again, when Ambros Adelwarth’s 1913 travel journal, written in tiny letters and undecipherable for a long time to anyone, suddenly opens itself up to the narrator: Deciphering his tiny handwriting, which not infrequently moved to and fro between several languages, was an arduous task, which I should probably never have accomplished if those words committed to paper almost eighty years before had not, as it were, opened up of their own accord (Emigrants, 127–28).4

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4

The motif points to another theoretical vein that undoubtedly underlies much of Sebald’s literary and theoretical work: Walter Benjamin’s notion of “non-sensible similarity” (“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit”); see his “Lehre vom Ähnlichen” (BGS, 204–210) and “Über das mimetische Vermögen” (BGS, 210–213). I investigate this more thoroughly, however, in my dissertation (Ceuppens). Die Entzifferung der winzigen, nicht selten zwischen mehreren Sprachen wechselnden Schrift hat nicht wenig Mühe bereitet und wäre wahrscheinlich nie von mir zuwege gebracht worden, hätten sich nicht die vor beinahe achtzig Jahren zu Papier gebrachten Zeilen sozusagen von selber aufgetan (Die Ausgewanderten, 188).

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Finally, the lost world of Max Ferber is revealed to the narrator when reading the painter’s mother’s journals. Of these, Ferber himself makes a remark that has often been quoted in reviews,5 which, however, make no mention of the somewhat enigmatic sentence structure: […] the memoirs, which at points were truly wonderful, had seemed to him like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun – in this case, the remembering, writing and reading (Emigrants, 193).6

The “remembering, writing and reading”: this last part of the sentence seems misplaced; one would expect the sentence to end with “until your heart breaks”. At least, the fact that the activity involved is mentioned, gives it a much stronger emphasis, as opposed to its result. However, at no point does the narrator wander off into picturing the events related in what one could call more “lifelike” colours; rather, he only repeats or re-narrates what others have given him to read, eventually quoting lengthy lists of names, places or interior decoration elements and creating what Iris Denneler (151) has actually described as artificial boredom – as mentioned earlier, the abundance of details does not necessarily lead to a more palpable presentation. It would seem, at any rate, that one has to choose between falling into the trap of subjective identificatory representation, possibly even kitsch, and remaining in the cold and distanced discourse of existing – partly written – sources. The point becomes even more striking when we look at the narrative frame: the four stories which make up The Emigrants could be said to function like Galton’s composite photographs7: by superposing a number of stories describing similar fates, one could expect a typical emigrant story to appear – which, on the other hand, would be as neutral and vague as

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See, for example, Drews and Wolff. Bei dieser zweiten Lektüre seien die stellenweise wirklich wunderbaren Aufzeichnungen ihm vorgekommen wie eines jener bösen deutschen Märchen, in denen man, einmal in den Bann geschlagen, mit einer angefangenen Arbeit, in diesem Fall also mit dem Erinnern, dem Schreiben und dem Lesen, fortfahren muß, bis einem das Herz bricht (Die Ausgewanderten, 289). Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), cousin of Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist who is probably best known for having coined the term “eugenics.” In 1878, he began using photography as a scientific tool and invented a technique he called “composite photography.” The aim of this method, not very different from certain late eighteenth-century physiognomical investigations, was to describe psychological types by projecting several portraits onto the same photographic plate and thus bringing out the typical traits of a certain ethnic or social group.

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most of Galton’s results. And indeed, this is what the most explicit and elaborate description of the narrator’s writing practice seems to imply. It’s in the Max Ferber episode and is itself a repetition of Ferber’s technique of constantly drawing new layers of faces and then erasing them again. Towards the end of the book, the narrator is overcome by scruples: During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had (in other words, mostly at the so-called weekend and at night), I was working on the account of Max Ferber given above. It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not unfrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a “final” version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched. So I hesitated to send Ferber my cut-down rendering of his life […]. (230–231)8

The narrator seems to have reached a dead end: perhaps he was able to avoid the “wrongful trespass” mentioned with regard to Paul Bereyter, but there seems to be no alternative but a constant reworking of the portrait, without final result. On the other hand, Sebald did finish The Emigrants – are we dealing, then, with a sort of unfelicitous speech act or a pragmatic contradiction? Of course, the book doesn’t quite end there and adds one more enigmatic scene, which may leave some space for a different conclusion. Before tackling this last turn in the narrative and connecting it to the act of reading, I would like to take a closer look at one more textual motif. 8

“Über die Wintermonate 1990/91 arbeitete ich in der wenigen mir zur freien Verfügung stehenden Zeit, also zumeist an den sogenannten Wochenenden und in der Nacht, an der im Vorhergehenden erzählten Geschichte Max Aurachs. Es war ein äußerst mühevolles, oft stunden- und tagelang nicht vom Fleck kommendes und nicht selten sogar rückläufiges Unternehmen, bei dem ich fortwährend geplagt wurde von einem immer nachhaltiger sich bemerkbar machenden und mehr und mehr mich lähmenden Skrupulantismus. Dieser Skrupulantismus bezog sich sowohl auf den Gegenstand meiner Erzählung, dem ich, wie ich es auch anstellte, nicht gerecht zu werden glaubte, als auch auf die Fragwürdigkeit der Schriftstellerei überhaupt. Hunderte von Seiten hatte ich bedeckt mit meinem Bleistiftund Kugelschreibergekritzel. Weitaus das meiste davon war durchgestrichen, verworfen oder bis zur Unleserlichkeit mit Zusätzen überschmiert. Selbst das, was ich schließlich für die “endgültige” Fassung retten konnte, erschien mir als ein mißratenes Stückwerk. Ich zögerte also, Aurach meine verkürzte Version seines Lebens zu übersenden […].” (344–45)

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Speaking in tongues “His tiny handwriting, which not infrequently moved to and fro between several languages”: a remarkable talent many of Sebald’s protagonists in The Emigrants share is their skill in acquiring languages. This is not only made visible by the constant insertion of foreign-language quotations – a large part of which is unfortunately lost in the English translation; in this sense, they are untranslatable –, it is also thematized throughout the book. And again, this may be considered a form of identification. It is as if the characters have gone through some kind of pentecostal rite. In Henry Selwyn’s case, the swift acquisition of the English language is made plausible by his feelings for his teacher, Lisa Owen – he learns the language “as if in a dream,” by “lapping up” every word “from her lips” (20). Paul Bereyter is said to have taught French to the narrator’s school class using a method which makes that language perfectly clear for his pupils; Lucy Landau characterizes Bereyter’s own French as “somewhat old-fashioned but absolutely correct” (43). The theme is perhaps most outspoken in the Ambros Adelwarth episode; the narrator’s great-uncle is said to have spoken “an apparently effortless German […] entirely free of any trace of our home dialect,” using “words and turns of phrase the meanings of which I could only guess at” (68). Actually, Sebald’s original German expression for “free of any trace of our home dialect” is “er redete mühelos nach der Schrift” (98) – an idiomatic expression, which does, however, fit nicely into the isotopy of writing. Adelwarth speaks French and English fluently, and he surprises Aunt Fini with his Japanese. In all these cases, the use of language is a form of mimicry, adaptation to the environment, to such an extent that the speaker no longer stands out and even disappears as a person. Adelwarth claims to have learnt languages “without any teaching aid,” “solely by making certain adjustments […] to his inner self ” (78). Rather than being camouflage as a means for self-preservation, in Adelwarth’s case this tendency – a form of discretion – actually comes down to self-obliteration, a “constant pleading for leave of absence” as Dr Abramsky has it (111). Both his perfect self-control and his fluency in foreign languages make him blend in, as it were, without a trace; and this could also warrant the analogy to writing as a tool which facilitates communication but is in constant risk of losing all personal traits. The theme of language acquisition or multilingualism seems much more implicit in “Max Ferber”: the narrator and the artist, although

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both of German origin, apparently use English throughout. Yet it is in this episode that we find an important clue as to the meaning of the variety of languages, when Ferber describes the compulsive phantasy which for him is linked to the concept “Germany”: One thing is certain: we never say a word. The scene is always a silent one. I think the grey lady only understands her mother tongue, German, which I have not spoken since I parted from my parents at Oberwiesenfeld airport in Munich in 1939, and which survives in me as no more than an echo, a muted and incomprehensible murmur. (182)

Far from suggesting what I just called pentecostal inspiration, the diversity of languages here seems to cause a Babylonian dispersion, or complete silence, which is really nothing but the mirror image of the linguistic abundance in Adelwarth or Bereyter. The only remainder of the original language, German, is an “incomprehensible murmur”: something too remote, or perhaps too close to be understandable. And again, we run up against a paradox or a contradiction: while the native language is no more a safe haven than the homeland, the mastery of foreign languages, however practical it may seem, offers no consolation or escape route either.

Models of reading, models of writing There is an almost obvious association to be made regarding the opposition – if that is what we have encountered here – between images and writing and/or language, an association I alluded to by using the word Bilderverbot. Images, it is often assumed in a very general way, belong to the Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, which seem to make no reservations in depicting both the human and the divine. By doing so, they violate one of the central laws of that other tradition at the root of our culture: the Jewish prohibition of images in general. The historical accuracy of this all too gross distinction may be arguable, but it has gained even greater importance since the events that are termed, for lack of a better word, “Holocaust” or “Shoa” (see, for instance, Tholen), and which, as has been pointed out often enough, apparently form the hidden core of Sebald’s work. My primary interest in this opposition, however, concerns the strategic use Jacques Derrida makes of it in his groundbreaking essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” originally published

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in 1964,9 whose importance has only become more acute since. In this text, Derrida confronts the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and makes a very explicit link between ethics – being Levinas’s main concern – and representation – being his main problem. The problem of representation also haunts much of the critical discourse on ethics, which was rediscovered in the course of the 1990s. Broadly, one could distinguish two camps here. On the one hand, there are those Denis Donoghue refers to as “epi-readers”: those who, to simplify things a bit, look at texts as though they were windows on another world which, while separate, is not so different from our own and therefore offers possibilities of identification and modelling (see also Eaglestone). Indeed, this is where literature finds its justification: it can offer a very practical laboratory for ways of behaving ethically – a “dry run” for real-life behaviour. To put it another way: these readers take texts as Vorbilder – one can learn something from literature and eventually become a better person. This seems to be the Aristotelian and humanist position taken by, for instance, Wayne Booth or Martha Nussbaum. On the other hand, the graphi-readers, a category broadly corresponding to what is conveniently called “deconstructionism,” take the text as text and refuse it any straightforward referential function. The ethics here would consist precisely in denying the text a clear view or meaning, in showing how there is always an element of dissonance in any attempt to create a coherent world view – but such an ethics would seem to remain in the negative, since it can only show the blind spots in any reading. Here, texts are seen as Bilder10 one has to keep returning to or, to use the more common term, one has to read – as opposed to understanding them and moving on. But actually, one can never be too sure one is only doing that: any reading is always at risk of jumping to conclusions, or, in this case, identifications. Merely offering a reading may already be too much. On the other hand, perhaps there are ways and means of escaping the seemingly nihilist position of graphi-reading without falling back into a mimeticist approach: in his doctoral dissertation, Robert Eaglestone has tried to show the direction in which such a reading practice 9

10

It was included in one of Derrida’s first and most (in)famous books (L’écriture et la difference); the English translation by Alan Bass was published in 1978. The following remarks on this very difficult text are partially inspired by Dirk De Schutter’s introduction to the Dutch translation. I borrow this distinction between “Bilder” and “Vorbilder” from Marc De Kesel’s discussion of Antigone and the tragic in general; differences between theatrical and narrative modes should, of course, be taken into account here.

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may lie and has connected deconstructionist theory with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Eaglestone warns us, however, to be wary of any simple “application” of Levinasian thought to the reading of literary texts – which brings us back to “Violence and Metaphysics.” Indeed, it seems somewhat strange that Levinas’s thought has been transplanted to the realm of art criticism, since his own attitude is quite suspicious, if not outright hostile, towards art, actually condemning it for being a representation of a non-thing and for being unable to assume any responsibility. The work of art, typically the sculpture – but Levinas leaves little place for a more positive assessment of the other arts –, tends to present us with a complete, dead image, reifying the otherness that lies in true experience, which is to say, mainly in the living language that opens up the face. Actually, it could be said – and Derrida does say – that Levinas is expanding on a certain Jewish tradition, that of language and the face to face relationship in discourse – against the Greek legacy of depiction; the authentic, living experience against the superficially beautiful but mortifying representation. Representation is also at work in literature: even though it is a work of language, literature nevertheless beguiles its reader, on the one hand by using “rhythm” – which Levinas opposes to the most common but authentic prose – and on the other by presenting a world that is closed off once and for all. By no longer talking to someone, as living speech does, but only about someone; by presenting a closed case, as it were. Derrida’s comment revolves, as could be expected, around concepts such as presence and authenticity, which for Levinas play an important role in his phenomenology of the face, the one “thing” that escapes the homogenizing prison-house of concepts and stands for transcendence. According to Derrida, any attempt to escape from these concepts – which both he and Levinas call, in a non-historical way, “Greek” – only reinstates those concepts all the more; or to put it differently: one cannot fight the system by pretending to be outside it. One is always already inside. The crucial question is whether this forecloses transcendence and the encounter with an other for good. For Derrida, the other is always already taken up into a certain economy through what he calls “transcendental violence”: if the other where not in some way presupposed by the ego, it/he simply would not register. This “transcendental violence” is supplemented by an “ontological violence,” a term derived from the discussion of Levinas’s treatment of Heidegger, meaning that being – Sein – can only be perceived through single beings – das Seiende – , but is at the same time betrayed by them: it is hidden at the same time it is revealed.

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Or else, in Heidegger’s own terms: the ontological difference always implies an “Auseinandersetzung,” an original polemics.11 How does all this relate to reading in practice? As readers, we cannot but attribute a certain coherent meaning to whatever we read – we underly a narrative based upon the conventions of language in general and narration in particular. But somehow, we will always be missing something, something that disrupts or contradicts any reading. We are put in a situation where we have to choose between two readings which are equally probable (or improbable), but which are nevertheless mutually exclusive. And that is where the text becomes readable, which is to say, unreadable: it thwarts understanding. With every new reading of a text, a new unreadability will be “produced” – this is in principle the unpredictable. One could call this state of affairs “undecidability,” “writing,” or, then again, “trauma” or “event,” but it cannot be avoided. If there is no “solution” to this dilemma and one necessarily misses what the other is trying to address (in all the senses of that verb), then the question remains what an appropriate approach might be. Perhaps there is a form of narration which at least tries to account for this unavoidable violence inflicted upon the other. Sebald’s insistence on “unreadability” as a theme at least seems to indicate that he is aware of the problem; whether he was influenced by either Levinas or Derrida in this respect, is irrelevant here. An indication for the author’s awareness may be found at the end of The Emigrants, where one last pattern is woven into the text. After having reached the conclusion that his writing doesn’t really do justice to Ferber’s predicament, the narrator learns that Ferber has been taken ill and returns to Manchester to visit the artist in hospital. Ferber can hardly talk – he actually has the voiceless voice of the enigmatic Odradek from Kafka’s “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” – , so we learn little about this final meeting of the two men. Instead, we are given one more instance of the destruction so omnipresent in Sebald’s works, this time, of the Midland Hotel, once an architectural marvel, a “tropical island of the blessed, reserved for mill owners”12 in the middle of the northern cold, but today “on the brink of ruin” (Emigrants, 233).

11

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For the use of this term, see, for instance, Heidegger (“Hegel”): while “Auseinandersetzung” commonly means conflict, polemics, the word can also be taken more literally as a “taking apart.” The German original, “eigens für Spinnerei- und Webereibesitzer reserviert” (Die Ausgewanderten, 349), already points towards the weaver motif on which the text ends.

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Not unlike the hotels at Deauville in the “Ambros Adelwarth” episode, this hotel, too, is inhabited or surrounded by strange, unreal characters, such as the “little opera singer” Siegfried, whose voice comes from a distance, perhaps from the past. The narrator, at least, is suddenly reminded of the photographs he saw at a Frankfurt exhibition – and this time, the one photograph that really matters is omitted. It is a slide from a whole series taken by the Litzmannstadt ghetto’s chief book-keeper, Austrian Walter Genewein (Sebald only mentions his last name and profession). What strikes the narrator most, are the countless faces, “who looked up from their work (and were permitted to do so) purposely and solely for the fraction of a second that it took to take the photograph” (Emigrants, 237). These slides do not, of course, show the horror of the Nazi destruction machinery; moreover, the view we are presented is a thoroughly staged one. But the viewer, or, in this case, the reader is forced into the position Genewein must have taken: the position of a book-keeper, really not interested in the people depicted, but focussed on the work they are attending to – a record of the exemplary organization of the ghetto. Yet in spite, or perhaps precisely because of this unsympathetic approach, the narrator is struck by the gaze of a young woman. She is in a picture with two other women making a carpet. The narrator cannot meet her gaze for long, and to ward it off, he tries to guess the women’s names – or rather, he constructs a narrative to fit it into. He tries to turn the woman and her two companions into the goddesses of fate: Nona, Decuma and Morta. This is so obviously contrived and unjust to these women, who most probably died shortly after, that the reader can only perceive it as a sort of screen, a mechanical aid from our common mythological tradition to lend some meaning to this picture. This narrative ploy adds one more layer or twist to the motif of reading: if existing texts and narratives offer us a mould for recounting our own or others’ experiences, they will every so often – and even by necessity – miss the singularity of a specific fate. But this should not and indeed does not take away the burden of having to read these stories. On the contrary.

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Landscape and Memory: Sebald’s Redemption of History David Darby

Movement through landscape is essential to the processes of memory enacted in Sebald’s writing. The discussion of his books under the rubric of travel writing, proposed in various contexts, suggests numerous possible interpretative paths through the spaces and times invoked in Sebald’s work. The project of this essay on Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is to explore one of those paths by considering the epistemological implications of the act of walking through and writing about landscapes, of collecting images and stories and writing them into a mappable topography. At stake in this process is the integration of the most diverse and fragmented remains of the history and memory of modernity, the fixing of modern experience in both geographic space and mnemonic process. These activities are of course of central organizational and thematic importance in The Rings of Saturn, among Sebald’s books the most readily recognizable in relation to a tradition of travel and landscape writing. My approach to Sebald’s “English pilgrimage” is comparative.1 It discusses Sebald’s text in relation to two very different walking and memory projects whose composition spans over a century and a half of modern experience, memory, and forgetting: Theodor Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Walks through the Mark Brandenburg), begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and finally published as a whole in 1892, and Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical city writing, in particular his memoirs Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood around 1900 dating from the early 1930s (Selected Writings [hereafter cited as BSW] 2: 595–637; 3: 344–413).2 My concern is with the connections between landscape and memory in these texts, using the first two 1

2

The English translation omits the German subtitle “Eine englische Wallfahrt” (Ringe, 3). Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften [hereafter cited as BGS], 6: 465–519; 7: 385–433.

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as a historical foil against which Sebald’s writing can be read.3 I propose to focus in particular on the act of moving through landscape, specifically of walking a topography and, through it, a history into a remembered or imagined coherence. Fontane is not an obvious point of reference for a discussion of Sebald, though a passing suggestion of a comparison on stylistic grounds has recently been made (Görner 23). The affinities between Benjamin and Sebald, some of which are discussed below, are manifold. References to Benjamin, explicit and oblique, occur throughout Sebald’s writing: especially remarkable among them is his acknowledgment in Logis in einem Landhaus of the debt of German literary scholarship to Benjamin and Frankfurt School (12), and the critical literature routinely gestures toward comparisons.4 Fontane, Benjamin, and Sebald are all vigilant inhabitant of worlds that are no more. They share a predominant focus on the nineteenth century, its changing landscape, and the future that it heralded. While describing different landscapes at different times in the history of modernity, their writings also share a redemptive project, the making of a landscape in the imagination, the collection and recording on paper, fragment by fragment, story by story, of worlds destined to pass beyond personal memory. In the course of decades that witnessed Berlin’s rapid modernization and industrialization, Fontane attempts in the project of his Wanderungen a leisurely recording of a disappearing, coherent, rural landscape of premodernity, saturated with the residual evidence of stories whose roots reach beyond the beginning of remembered time. In turn Benjamin, elsewhere concerned with the archaeology of modern Paris, assembles his disjointed thought-pictures of a Berlin that exists no more while his world hovers on the eve of catastrophe, attempting at the last possible moment to form in the fragments of memory and the landscape inherited from the late nineteenth century a fixable image of his own childhood. Sebald, 60 years later, moves through yet another landscape, an eroding, disappearing landscape scarred by the horrors of his3

4

This essay’s title is borrowed from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, which appeared in the same year as The Rings of Saturn (1995). While no less informed by an awareness of loss, the attitude of Schama’s project, which aims, “by revealing the richness, antiquity, and complexity of our landscape tradition, to show just how much we stand to lose” (14), offers a marked counterpoint to the melancholy end-time consciousness of The Rings of Saturn. In addition, a brief text by Benjamin exists under the title “The Ring of Saturn or Some Thoughts on Iron Construction” but shares little thematic interest with Sebald’s text (Arcades, 885–87; BGS, 5: 1060–63).

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tory and then abandoned, a landscape that often seems to be inhabited predominantly by ghosts, but a landscape that still permits – even as it gradually disintegrates and is lost beyond recall to time and tide – a final recollection and retelling of its stories. Fontane’s, Benjamin’s, and Sebald’s shared preoccupation with the nineteenth century does not of course imply a common historical perspective. Nevertheless, and despite the century or more that the writing of these texts spans, their view of history is informed by a shared melancholy sense of disruption and alienation from a world that was once whole and intact. Fontane’s Wanderungen, the various sections’ composition and first publication sprawling from the late 1850s to 1882 and the first complete edition appearing ten years after that, describe a world disappearing while Fontane wrote. The Wanderungen represent an ambitiously conceived, multivolume, encyclopaedic compendium of descriptive and narrative records. The walks around which the volumes are ordered document at walking speed the preindustrial world around Berlin, at a time when the city’s steel tentacles were already reaching out in all directions, irreversibly changing landscape, economy, demography, and custom. A half-century later, with a far more ominous future looming, come Benjamin’s memoirs of his childhood and youth in Berlin. Peering backwards, Benjamin first attempts to order and tell the story of what is gone in the form of a coherent prose chronicle; in his subsequent reworking of the material Benjamin resolves instead to produce from the fragments of the past a collection of evocative, finely crafted, poetic tableaux, unfixed in coherent, mimetic narrative, the redeemed and collected bits and bones of what is left of landscape, rooms, buildings, and people containing, according to Theodor W. Adorno, in their most obscure corners the seeds of the darkest future of modernity (Adorno, 111).5 The nineteenth century, beyond living memory for Benjamin, haunts the world in which he grew up, his childhood having been lived among the sedimented artifacts, values, and norms of its culture. The nineteenth century is of course also the subject and field of many of his intellectual perambulations, its clutter of remnants the impossible, unsystematizable contents of his Arcades convolutes. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn, a promeneur solitaire possessed of a melancholy spirit at least the equal of Benjamin’s,6 inhabits an end5

6

On the reorganization of Benjamin’s autobiographical material in these texts, see Darby. See Sontag, “A Mind,” 3.

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of-millenium landscape traced with the horrors of European and colonial history.7 Indeed, the statement at the very beginning of his text of the narrator’s situation “confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past” (Rings, 3) aligns the attitude of his writing closely with that of Benjamin’s.8 This book is painstakingly composed, almost overcomposed in a self-consciously literary register that rings more, as has been noted elsewhere, of Adalbert Stifter (one of Sebald’s interests as a scholar of German literature) than of more modern fashions (e.g., James Wood, “Right,” 40, Veraguth, 33, Boehncke, 48–49, Klüger, 95). Its composition is held together by a faith in “the mysterious survival of the written word” (Rings, 93),9 by a series of improbable associations and coincidences, and by an elaborately delicate web of leitmotifs, so tenuous and so delicate indeed, that it hovers, like its landscape and like the coherence of the history it offers, constantly on the brink of disintegration. Sebald’s thematic preoccupation with the history of silk production and weaving both informs and provides a metaphor for the book’s compositional order. Generations after Fontane and Benjamin, Sebald’s walking book determines a darker, more dangerous landscape, the redemption of whose stories and history is even harder won, the price exacted entailing at various points the risk of emotional and physical harm. Moving, specifically walking, through landscape is central to the memory books of all three writers. For Fontane, the walks take place over decades, and the compilation and organization of descriptions and narratives is patient to a fault. The key assumption is that the landscape and its stories can be recovered, recorded, and passed down to posterity, whole, rounded, cohesive. Fontane’s narratives are encompassed in a place still recognizable as home, within the finite and familiar world of the Mark Brandenburg, stretching back into and beyond the middle ages but always integrating and situating the past in its relation to the present-day landscape experienced by the walker. The topographic interre7

8

9

Sebald’s untranslated writing on solitary walkers includes, for instance, his biographical essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Logis in einem Landhaus (43–74); the same volume contains an essay on Robert Walser entitled “Le promeneur solitaire” (127–68), which one might imaginatively read as haunted by the longer essay on Walser that Susan Sontag wished Benjamin had written (Sontag, “Under,” 112); see BSW, 2: 257–61; BGS, 2: 324–28. “angesichts der … bis weit in die Vergangenheit zurückgehenden Spuren der Zerstörung” (Ringe, 9). “das rätselhafte Überdauern der Schrift” (Ringe, 120).

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latedness of the stories’ roots and settings, the confidence of being able to get from the site of one story to that of the next, speak of a confidence in geographical integrity, which, despite the compactness of Benjamin’s Berlin or Paris or of Sebald’s Suffolk coast, is somehow absent in the imagined landscapes of those later texts. These stories can even be plotted on a map: indeed, supplied with a modern edition of Fontane’s works is a map, a useful one that emphasizes the knowability, the coherence, of landscape and history, a map that might get you securely from anywhere to anywhere else in the Mark Brandenburg.10 Except that it is a map that dates from 1892, the year of the publication of the final version of the Wanderungen, and on it the network of lanes and paths is already cut with the heavier black network of railway lines, on which one can travel only elliptically, station to station, whereby the holistic sense of contiguous topography provided by walking has been terminally compromised during the preceding half-century. This map, then, acts both to confirm the landscape’s coherence and simultaneously to belie it. The cohesiveness of the landscape – its safe walkability, the fixable, mappable interconnectedness of the geography of its recorded stories – makes for the impression of an intact world. Benjamin also tries to map his landscape in the Berlin Chronicle, proposing the idea of fixing the sites of the remembered stories of his youth on a Pharus-brand street-map of the city. But the practice will no longer work. Marked intrusively on the 1903 Pharus map he might have used (Berlin), the black lines of the urban railway, punctuated with large red stations, dominate and divide the map. This is a landscape inhabited by memories, but the kind of walking that will reintegrate or recreate it and its stories is no longer what the mapped topography allows. The map has been overdrawn, and Benjamin finds in the Berlin Chronicle that you can simply no longer get there from here. The modern landscape, along with Benjamin’s modernist narrative consciousness of the relationship between past and present, is fragmented and alienated. His solution lay finally in collecting, shuffling, and reshuffling the collected miniatures, the provisionally juxtaposed images of places, transposed into words, of the Berlin Childhood. The connections are subjective or imagined, the mode of documentary narration attempted in the early chronicle inadequate, abandoned for good. The walk along the coast of Suffolk that Sebald’s book describes seems at first sight to be topographically transparent. The geographical 10

The map is found in a sleeve inside the back cover of the first volume of Fontane’s Wanderungen (Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9).

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places are precisely indexed and even sometimes accompanied by photographic representations. The train journey to Lowestoft and the presumed car journey back to Norwich connect the walk to a larger geography. The overall trajectory of the walk is linear, its form determined more or less by the shape of the coastline itself. This much seems objectively verifiable. This suggests that the walk could, with the help of a good map, be replicated. But it really could not. So much of the walk seems to follow paths that are improvised: the walker cuts across fields, climbs over walls, loses himself in labyrinths, real and metaphorical, wanders lost in circles, and nearly comes to grief, blinded in a sandstorm (Rings, 228–29).11 None of this is traceable on a map, and certainly not on the poorly reproduced and utterly unhelpful map of Orford Ness included in the text (Rings, 232).12 None of it can be held together by an act of objective representation. Many of Fontane’s walks are more or less still replicable today, as evinced by the numerous Fontane-Wanderwege (Fontane footpaths) that still run through the Brandenburg countryside; Benjamin’s book of childhood memory still conjures imaginations of the city before its twentieth-century catastrophes (the book’s continuing popularity is perhaps to some degree explained by this); but Sebald’s book will not serve such a documentary or pseudo-documentary purpose. The ground itself is beset with peril. It is a walk literally on the edge of an abyss, the eroding terrain ever crumbling away beneath the feet of the walker, dissolved by the elements. It is a landscape on borrowed time, a landscape that will one day be gone, its tenuous afterlife consisting exclusively in whatever memory is left of the stories still contained in its fraying fabric. It is not actually clear that Sebald’s narrator does get there from here, or even where “there” is, in the sense of a geographic destination. The walk ends in oblivion, a vision of a postapocalyptic landscape wasted by the hurricane that swept across southern England in October 1987, the trees destroyed, the people gone (Rings, 265–68).13 The walk just ends, and no telephone-summoned car arrives to carry the walker home. It is rather the spinning of stories, the pulling together of fragments of history and experience that carries on, and carries the narrative on, tracing a line that leads in the end back around to what one might, even if Sebald’s narrator doesn’t, call home. In the last chapter of The Rings of 11 12 13

Ringe, 284–85. Ringe, 289. Ringe, 329–33.

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Saturn it is not the walker, but rather the nineteenth-century silk-weavers with whose story and in whose company the last steps are traced, back to Norwich, their city and the city in which the narrative opens. The return, the redemption, lies not in the return to home and hearth. It is more tenuous than that: it lies in telling the stories until the line they trace points a way full-circle out of the wilderness. Even leaving aside the awkward notion of home, there is here no physical way back. The walk peters out in desolation. This return is on no possible map. The metaphors that cluster throughout the text around the task of the storyteller end with the silk weavers of Norwich, Willett and Nephew, but related motifs echo throughout this book. One thinks of the ghostwhite moths that haunt The Rings of Saturn and whose story is so bound up with the production of the weavers’ raw material. One thinks also of the labyrinths of different kinds into which the walker strays, and in which progress toward the destination, the closing of the book, is deliberately or accidentally retarded. They represent a deferral of ending in a world dominated by erosion and erasure, where both the physical environment and the consciousness of its stories are caught in an inescapable and relentless process of dissolution. But the labyrinths are also associated with a kind of panic (Rings, 172).14 They halt movement toward the end, but they too consist almost exclusively of dead ends themselves, and the knack is, by foul means or fair, to find one’s way back to some kind of garden (and the labyrinths are always in or adjacent to gardens), be it that at Somerleyton or be it Michael Hamburger’s, the poet, translator, and friend of Sebald. Here one thinks also of the almost Sisyphean patience of the figure of Thomas Abrams, who tinkers for years on the seemingly “meaningless and pointless project” of building a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, sitting in a cold barn in a deserted landscape (244).15 This too is concerned with working back to a beginning, collecting and relearning all that is known and recreating the temple perfectly, if only in miniature. What greets the narrator when he peers into the model is a view, “as if I were gazing into eternity” (Rings, 248), an escape from time and history, an absence of ending.16 This experience is followed by a moment of ecstasy unique in The Rings of Saturn, a wish that the road on which Thomas Abrams and the narrator 14 15

16

Ringe, 215. “sinn- und zwecklos[e] Bastelarbeit” (Ringe, 304); the corresponding figure in the German text is named Alec Garrard. “als schaute ich hinein in die Gefilde der Ewigkeit” (Ringe, 308).

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drive would continue, a momentary vision of a perfect but unending return, the wish “that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem” (Rings, 249).17 Within a page of his walk after a night at the Saracen’s Head, however, he becomes lost among The Saints, wandering almost directionless, forced by the labyrinthine network of footpaths to take unintended turns, eventually to leave the path altogether in order to get anywhere (249–50).18 Nothing will run on and on all the way to anywhere in Sebald’s landscape, in which so many things revolve: years circle; coincidences of dates, names, and places – “the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency” (Rings, 187)19 – bend time and space in circles; anaesthetic circulates in the blood (17); Sir Thomas Browne’s prose levitates and circles (19); windmills turn (30, 237); dancers circle on the pier at Lowestoft (48); swallows trace rings in the air, rings of which the structure and order of the world might seem, we read, to be made (67); the earth turns slowly into the dark (78); information circles the globe (92); the narrator inadvertently circles back on himself (171); the horizon spins (172); the sandstorm swirls (228–29); and so on and on.20 Leitmotifs and recurrent metaphors, almost impossible connections and intersections surprise us as they close narrative circles. The chapters circle (most remarkably that in the orbit of Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, and the history of the Belgian Congo (chap. 5), which seems to fly off tangentially only to return almost too perfectly at the end), and finally Sebald’s narrative also returns to Norwich, the place of its beginning. But it returns only by sheer force of imaginative will. This is not Fontane’s Mark Brandenburg, where all roads lead home because everywhere is already home, where the act of walking confirms the wholeness of the world, and the illusion of perfect contiguity governs both the landscape and the stories told in it. Nor is it comparable with the ordered chaos of Benjamin’s Arcades convolutes or the refined Berlin tableaux, the work of a deliberately aestheticized variety of mémoire volontaire. The centre of Sebald’s fictional world, if it has one outside of the imagination, doesn’t hold of its own accord, the birds would 17 18

19

20

“that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem” (Ringe, 309). Ringe, 309–10; the Saracen’s Head is found only in the English text: the narrator of the German text spends the night at the Swan Hotel (309). “die mich immer öfter durchgeisternden Phantome der Wiederholung” (Ringe, 233). Ringe, 26 (the sense of circulation is stronger in the German verb kreisen than in the English to course), 28, 42, 295, 64, 89, 101, 118, 214, 215, 284–85.

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not turn perfect circles but would fly away in widening gyres, were it not for the narrator’s rigour in forcing this landscape, its chaos of fragments of far-flung history, anecdote, memory, fact, and fiction into their literary form, a new, provisionally ordered text, composed of the unevenly sized and provisionally juxtaposed shards of more or less recognizable received genres. The narrative project here is one of radical concentration. The centre holds in this book only as long as it is made to hold. All of the patterns woven in the text are provisional. We read that there is always the possibility that one may be holding the wrong thread, and there is always the possibility of a daily undoing of what has been woven the day before (Rings, 283, 212).21 A world-saving feat is however performed in this act of storytelling, wherein it is not the connectedness of things that is terrible (see Eder), but rather their disintegration. According to Benjamin, spinning and weaving are more than just an obvious metaphor for narration. In his understanding these actions are essential to the survival both of stories and of the art of their telling: “storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to” (BSW 3: 149).22 Involved in The Rings of Saturn is a sustained juggling act, holding the fragments of lost worlds in a stable orbit, while their natural tendency is centrifugal. Like his counterpart in Sebald’s Vertigo, who is preoccupied with “the ever widening and contracting circles” of his thoughts (65), the narrator loses himself in thoughts that go round in his head incessantly (Rings, 171).23 This is no Benjaminian storyteller at work, nostalgically and harmoniously embedded in stable cultural, narrative, and economic traditions. The traces of this storyteller do not cling to this story “the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel” (BSW, 3: 149).24 They are gouged in by almost physical force. The marks of storytelling against all odds are clearly visible: in the coincidences, in the self-conscious prose and compositional infelicities for which Sebald’s book has on occasion 21 22

23

24

Ringe, 351, 264. “Geschichten erzählen ist ja immer die Kunst, sie weiter zu erzählen, und die verliert sich, wenn die Geschichten nicht mehr erzählt werden. Sie verliert sich, weil nicht mehr gewebt und gesponnen wird, während man ihnen lauscht” (BGS, 2: 446–47). “mit meinem teils immer weitere, teils immer engere Kreise ziehenden Nachdenken” (Schwindel, 74); Ringe, 214. “wie die Spur der Töpferhand an der Tonschale” (BGS, 2: 447).

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been criticized (e.g., Aciman, 46–47), but which nevertheless astonish in their surprising and often dazzling concentricity. The pieces of past and present, near and far, “the living and the dead,” “what bits and bones had remained of them” (Rings, 180, 40), are, then, held in orbit only so long as the act of concentration lasts.25 So much else in the book follows a linear, non-returning trajectory. While stories are spun in the narrating consciousness, the vicissitudes and epochal changes, the catastrophes and atrocities of history that mark the landscape cannot be undone. Neither can the lives and deaths told, nor the degradation of nature. The trees crushed by the wind, burned in the name of progress, or fallen from the crumbling cliffs, cannot be saved and resurrected. The overfished North Sea herring do not return, even if the ghosts of the dead may. None of this is caught and held for any longer than the act of its telling. The landscape itself is in the process of irreversible dissolution, and in the meantime we read in The Rings of Saturn that it holds within it weapons capable of ending history, of turning whole continents into “smoking heaps of stone and ash” (Rings, 227–28).26 This is, in a clear sense, the other end of modernity from that through which Fontane walks. It likewise resists analogy with that which Benjamin, retreating from the attempt to chronicle, distills and crafts by a process of nostalgic artisanship into moments, however illusory, of communicable experience, enacting at least partially the nostalgic reinvention of the art of storytelling. Like Michael Hamburger’s “Berlin childhood,” which Sebald’s text mentions, Benjamin’s consists of “phantasms, delusions” (Rings, 177).27 As Hamburger says, “in reality, of course, memory fails us” (Rings, 177).28 Nevertheless, Sebald’s narrator may yet have a melancholy ancestor in Benjamin’s modernist imaginary. The sandstorm, through which Sebald’s walker passes, “[g]asping for breath … the last survivor,” consists of fine dust, the last remnants of lost landscapes: “This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down” (Rings, 229).29 Saturn’s rings may be composed of 25

26 27

28 29

“die Lebendigen und die Toten,” “what bits and bones had remained of them” (Ringe, 225, 55). “rauchende Haufen von Stein und Asche” (Ringe, 284) “Berliner Kindheit,” “Phantasmen … Trugbilder” (Ringe, 220, 221). The words “Berliner Kindheit” directly echo the title of Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900. “in Wirklichkeit erinnert man sich natürlich nicht” (Ringe, 221). “Atemlos … der letzte Überlebende,” “Puder, welcher zuletzt übrigbleibt von der sich selber langsam zermahlenden Erde” (Ringe, 285).

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the rubble of worlds that are no more, evidence of some celestial cataclysm, but Sebald’s narrator, weaving his improbably fragile web of stories, walks his way back into the wind that blasts those fragments irresistibly toward the future. It is in the telling and unsuspected interweavings of stories that Sebald offers for the shadows that inhabit this landscape and for the wind-ravaged angel of our history a final possibility of redemption. His is a landscape of fragments, of stories of past time, which are intricately, often surprisingly, but perhaps also arbitrarily woven together in a melancholy narrating consciousness, producing a fabric whose integrity is always contingent on the composed concentration of the narrator’s voice. The walk, conversely, is through a disintegrating landscape. This is a world of the past, an end-time world, falling apart, a post-economic world of ravaged nature, broken, decaying buildings, ruined gardens, scarred nature, a landscape collapsing slowly but surely into the oblivion of the rising sea. But while the fictional world is characterized by things falling apart, the narrator’s activity is determined by a devotion to a defiant, almost magical bricolage. Benjamin’s is however not the only angel presiding over Sebald’s redemption of history. At stake under its protection is the construction of a better “paper landscape,” a “paper universe” (Rings, 8), to echo the description of an office at the University of East Anglia, at the centre of whose apparent chaos sat the literary scholar Janine Dakyns.30 Of the paper landscape Janine Dakyns inhabited, a landscape in constant creation, a landscape whose improbable order is determined by its changeability and precariousness, we read: “Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection” (Rings, 9).31 Though few and far between, records of other such refuges 30 31

“Papierlandschaft,” “Papieruniversum” (Ringe, 15, 16). “Als ich gelegentlich zu ihr sagte, sie gleiche, zwischen ihren Papieren, dem bewegungslos unter den Werkzeugen der Zerstörung verharrenden Engel der Dürerschen Melancholie, da antwortete sie mir, daß die scheinbare Unordnung in ihren Dingen in Wahrheit so etwas wie eine vollendete oder doch der Vollendung zustrebende Ordnung darstelle” (Ringe, 16–17). Cf. the notion ascribed to Henri Beyle of “a perfect system or at least one that was aspiring to perfection, and in which beauty and terror bore an exact relation to each other” (Vertigo 14); “ein vollendetes oder doch der Vollendung zustrebendes System, in dem Schönheit und Schrecken in einer exakten Relation zueinander standen” (Schwindel, 18).

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of melancholic order are held in the pages of Sebald’s books. Directly reminiscent of the paper universe created by Janine Dakyns is for instance the photograph and description of Jacques Austerlitz’s study in Bloomsbury in Sebald’s 2001 novel (Austerlitz, 32).32 The sense of modesty, intimacy, and human habitability that emanates from both workspaces suggests something of the nature of this irresolvably provisional order that tends toward – though in all likelihood can never reach – perfection. The opposite of this order is embodied in the stark, inhuman monstrosity of the structures depicted in the immediately preceding series of images of the fortress of Breendonk and then the “singular architectural monstrosity” of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, “the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe” (Austerlitz, 29).33 It is remarkable how clearly these images call to mind Benjamin’s likening of Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris to images of a crime scene (BSW, 2: 527).34 Photographs of other places of study stand in discordant proximity to each other at the other end of Austerlitz and in disturbing contrast to the image of Jacques Austerlitz’s study. First one encounters the wide embrace of the now uninhabited domed hall of the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the photograph of which leads across two pages (276–77), “with its green porcelain lampshades which cast such a soothing, pleasant light” (275): a place, coincidentally, with which Benjamin is so closely associated.35 One is then confronted by the forbidding, vertical representation of the monumentalist towers of the new library (279), an institution that is “unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings” and that “runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader” (276).36 The antipode of this monstrosity is perhaps the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, a favourite haunt of the narrator of The Rings of Saturn, which, with its idiosyncratic collection of curiosities assembled 32 33

34 35

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Austerlitz, 47. “dies[e] singulär[e] architektonisch[e] Monstrosität,” “die größte Anhäufung von Steinquadern in ganz Europa” (Austerlitz, 43, 42). BGS, 2: 385. Austerlitz, 386–87; “der Kuppelsaal mit den grünen Porzellanlampenschirmen, die ein so gutes, beruhigendes Licht gaben” (387–88). Austerlitz, 390; the text describes the journey “zu dem … in seiner ganzen äußeren Dimensionierung und inneren Konstitution menschenabweisenden und den Bedürfnissen jedes wahren Lesers von vornherein kompromißlos entgegengesetzten Gebäude” (388).

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unsystematically over decades, belongs as a place of thought and study among the galaxy of worlds in which Janine Dakyns and Jacques Austerlitz are most at home (Rings, 92–93).37 Another such world whose order is ever approaching perfection is that of Thomas Abrams.38 And yet another is that of the walking teller of stories in The Rings of Saturn itself. The stability and integrity of his world, however fragile and contingent, the coherence of the history and memories in its orbit, its redemption and deferred hope of perfection hold only so long as one step and one written sheet of paper can be made to follow another.

37 38

Ringe, 118–19. Michael Hulse’s translation, which refers to the completion – rather than perfection – of the model of the temple (Rings, 243), blurs the echo of the description of the order of Janine Dakyns’s office: the German text speaks of Vollendung in both cases (Ringe, 17, 302).

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Walter Abish’s How German Is It is prefaced by a quotation from JeanLuc Godard: “What is really at stake is one’s image of oneself.” This question is one that haunts not only the narrator of the novel, Ulrich Hargenau, but the German society the novel depicts. After six months in Paris, the narrator, a novelist, returns from “the edge of forgetfulness” (9) to confront the issue of how intrapersonal, interpersonal and societal memory interpenetrate. The novel thematizes the autobiographic endeavor of putatively independent self-fashioning defining itself against the backdrop of the colonization of individual experience by social narration (a synchronic rhetorical strategy); the inescapable pressure of societal history on individual self-definition (diachronic); and the ultimate impossibility of willfully disentangling these two individual and societal ways of emplotting experience. Modernism postulates that the quotidian is to be transformed, through art, in such a way that the meaning that has been drained from the quotidian is being reestablished in the artefact. In other words, modernism defines the daily lifeworld as that which is to be supplanted and transcended by an aesthetic exterior to that world. This binary opposition is exploded in postmodern fiction that locates itself at the intersection of societal and individual memories: the quotidian, both in its synchronic instantiation and its status of being located in a specific moment in a diachronic chain of events, imprints itself constantly on the fabric of the aesthetic without being sublated by it. Ultimately, individual selffashioning cannot overcome a lifeworld that asserts itself both in historical determinedness and instantial contiguity. Postmodern fiction bespeaks a process of selfinvention, but not one that is characterized by complete independence: it is bound by an imbeddedness in the everyday and the weight of societal history. One paradigmatic example of this tension is fiction that, like How

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German is It, engages the Holocaust at a historical remove, i.e., fiction which by necessity needs to problematize issues such as representation, the authentic, moral questions surrounding the aesthetic, and the aporias of memory and re-membering the past. As Andreas Huyssen has put it in his recent book, Twilight Memories: “Memory and representation … figure as key concerns at this fin de siècle when the twilight settles around the memories of this century and their carriers, with the memories of the Holocaust survivors only being the most salient example in the public mind … The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory” (2–3). What Huyssen expounds in this passage could be termed the dichotomy between a model of the past that allows for a simple (and simplistic) storage and retrieval process (the past exists, quasi-platonically, in toto and can be drawn upon unproblematically) and a model that posits the crucial importance of the category of cultural construction in any attempt to re-present the past. No text, non-fictional or otherwise, can claim to be an unmediated conduit of the past event itself but is inescapably subject to the sway the ex post facto embeddedness, in the form of memory being an activity of the present, exerts over the past. The question at hand, then, is, as Huyssen says, how “cultural memory … is articulated in institutions, in public debates, in theory, in art, and in literature” (Twilight, 4). The increase of fictional treatments of the Holocaust over the last 30 years does not reflect a triumph of individual subjectivity, fueled by a postmodern loss of belief in grand récits, over an objectivity capable of decisively dissolving the aporias of the meaning of the past. Rather, it is indicative of a general cultural distrust of the teleological capacities of writing history and fiction maintaining the possibilitiy of grounding itself in anything approximating the “historical record.” We currently seem to be witnessing a shift from history to memory, from representational determinacy to protean construction-in-progress. It could be argued that this shift represents a turn from the emphasis on the importance of remembering accurately to a reflection on the very processes that define and constitute the act of remembering itself. In other words, interest has shifted from memory as a tacitly implicit, yet unproblematized, precondition of representation to what could be termed a hermeneutics of memory. What could negatively be defined as the replacement of a unified attempt at explaining the world and the past by a multiplicity of approaches dependent on individual subjectivity can be seen, more fruitfully, I would suggest, as an interest in how we, in the absence of teleology, re-member the past. The narrative Wiederholung of the past is not a rhetorical repeti-

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tion aimed at representative accuracy as much as a recapitulation of past events that inscribes in itself an awareness of the parameters of its own construction. Thus, it is no surprise that over the last few decades a new concern with historicity, aesthetics, the narrative re-presentation of past events, and the conditions of remembrance has been emerging consistently (take, for instance, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants). This development does not necessitate, as Fredric Jameson seems to imply when discussing postmodernism,1 that these concerns are automatically aligned with an ideologically suspect variety of nostalgia. Instead, recent literature foregrounding the complexities of memory tries to eschew the exhaustion resulting from the desire to make the signified and the signifier coincide, and redefines the tentative nature of any relation between these two categories not as a regrettable aporia but as a constitutive parameter of the present engaging the past. Andreas Huyssen therefore hypothesizes that “in literature, the old dichotomy between history and fiction no longer holds. Not in the sense that there is no difference, but on the contrary in the sense that historical fiction can give us a hold on the world, however fictional that hold may turn out to be” (Twilight,101). In fact, Huyssen sees that type of literature as the last line of defense against the complete dissolution of historical consciousness into complete arbitrariness: “[S]uch literature can actually help maintain the tension between fiction and reality, aesthetic representation and history. It is in the attempt to maintain that tension, that dialectic, against the lure of the simulacrum that I see utopian energies at work in literature today” (Twilight,101). Along similar lines, I would like to argue that literature and art, far from being the falsifying agents destroying a putatively objective historical discourse, actually constitute the conduits of collective processes of memory. Writer Edgar Hilsenrath, regarding representing the Shoah, has said: “The important thing is not to take a photograph of Auschwitz or to write about Auschwitz. I intend to depict the zeitgeist. It suffices when [the novel] is set in a room in which Auschwitz is on everybody’s mind. More than anything else I want to write to cause something to happen in the readers’ heads. What really matters is the image that ultimately takes shape in the reader’s mind” (108; my translation). Thus, fictional texts about the Holocaust consist of a network of co-existing narratives that comment on each other, partially reflect each other, cancel 1

See Jameson, Postmodernism, 64–65.

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each other out in part and collectively inhabit a space of overdetermination in which irreducibility of all narratives to one master narrative is the rule. Is there, then, anything like an “authentic” representation of an historical event? Proponents of the inadmissibilty of what they consider to be fictional elements into an ontologically untroubled prelapsarian representational state would argue that the “authentic” is always and per definitionem coextensive with the non-fictional. However, as the Holocaust becomes increasingly subject to historical distance the synchronic element that underpins this argument is superseded by a diachronic one: the authentic, in other words, can no longer be the signified of the ontologically uncontaminated, but the discourse of memory and remembrance itself. What is represented in postmodern Holocaust fiction is, then, not necessarily the actual space of the historical event, but the locus of memory and discourse itself. The authentic is the present of remembering, and no longer the “as it really was” of the remembered event. The memory of a specific place collapses into the place of memory, much as the intended revivification of the past through the verisimilar representation of the event is superseded by a present that is forced to remember a past that is absent, annihilated, and ultimately only present through its absence.2 Again, Andreas Huyssen’s perspective is instructive in elucidating how, due to diachronic displacement, an exclusive concern with the proper protocols of representation has been supplanted by the hermeneutics of memory: The criteria for representing the Holocaust cannot be propriety or awe as would be appropriate in the face of a cult object. Awed and silent respect may be called for vis-à-vis the suffering of the individual survivor, but it is misplaced as a discursive strategy for the historical event, even if that event may harbor something unspeakable and unrepresentable at its core … If the Holocaust can be compared to an earthquake that has destroyed all the instruments for measuring it, as Lyotard has suggested, then surely there must be more than one way of representing it. The increasing temporal and generational distance, therefore, is important in another respect: it has freed memory to focus on more than just the facts … Without the facts, there is no real memory. But we are also free to recognize that the Holocaust has indeed become dispersed and fractured through the different ways of memorializing it. (Huyssen, Twilight, 256).

2

On this see Joachim Paech, “Erinnerungs-Landschaften,” in Köppen, 131–33.

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A memorialization intent on continually elucidating the constitutive and causal interconnectedness of all the elements that make up the object of memory, then, needs to be, almost by definition, an endeavor subject to the diachronically driven processes of redefinition: obviously, a survivor of the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi would approach the memorialization of the historical event via the nexus of individual memory to a specific life world, whereas much of the recent literature of the Holocaust cannot but acknowledge the culturally mediated ontology of what its texts engage. Any fictional treatment of the Holocaust thus locates itself, involuntarily yet inextricably, in a network of intertexts (survivors’ accounts, other fictional treatments, historical narrative, filmic representations), the existence of which is conditioned by factors of collective memorialization. If this intertextuality is indeed a function of both generational and epistemological remove from the event an sich, i.e., not subject to the whims of authors privileging individual expression over representational accuracy, but rather to the specific historical contingencies of memory transmission, the argument taking issue with the ostensibly indefensible nature of fiction on the Holocaust qua fiction displays not only epistemological naïvité but also a desire for the ossification of the processes of memory themselves. As temporal distance between the event and its representations increases, we are witnessing a shift towards what Paul Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative, has called “mimesis(3).” According to him, “mimesis(3) marks the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds its specific temporality” (1:71). Therefore, meaning does not communicate itself extraindividually by virtue of an implicit finality inscribed in the text but through a constitutive process impossible without the active involvement of the reader. Rather than reflecting indeterminacy on the level of their ontological status, fictional texts about the Holocaust per definitionem are subject to a status all texts, fictional or non-fictional, share, that of filling in gaps, Iserian Sinneslücken, to construct a contingent sense of meaning, depending as much on the individual reader’s interpretive strategies as on culturally transmitted expectations the general reading public brings to a specific type of texts and its respective communicative maneuvers. Following Iser, we could say that even in a text that deliberately deals with issues of an historical nature, it is never possible to engage in a process of mere Bezeichnung; the act of reading always incorporates trans-

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formation. Texts, he argues, “depragmatize [objects], for these objects are not to be denoted [Bezeichnung] but are to be transformed” (109). Texts that attempt to demonstrate “wie es wirklich gewesen ist” are ultimately closed texts, texts with all the questions answered and with the aporias of meaning artificially occluded by an imposed concept of determinacy. They offer thus an a priori rejection of what Ricoeur terms “the aesthetic and moral problem posed by a work” (3:173) and tend to establish monosemanticism where polysemanticism is not an aesthetic choice but a constitutive feature. The hermeneutics of reading are ultimately a dialectical process of establishing meaning and are thus isomorphic to the process of revaluating and reinterpreting by which historiography is defined and defines itself. There is limited efficacy in a stance that attempts to dichotomize between a permissible revaluative activity best left to historiography and a putatively immoral fictive relativization of historical events: both processes inevitably involve what could be characterized as aesthetic categories (one only needs to think of Hayden White’s term “emplotment”) and partake of similar aporias regarding the establishment of meaning. Paul Ricoeur speaks with reference to the Holocaust of “a ruinous dichotomy between a history that would dissolve the event in explanation and a purely emotional retort that would dispense us from thinking the unthinkable” (3:188). This is an interesting point: historiography, the discipline that rests on the attempt to induce a secular absolution from the horrors of history via exhausting the multiplicity of meaning by fixing the signified in the signifier also makes superfluous, at least in theory, any further discussion of what it purports be authoritative about. If historiography achieves its ultimate goal of explaining conclusively events of the past, the claim of having established an objective meaning also precludes disagreement and ultimately the very process of memory itself – that kind of history preempts, whereas memory is overdetermined in the sense of not allowing the fixation of meaning. Historiography, then, if it achieves its goal, ultimately ends in forgetting, whereas fiction, in its foregrounding of the aporias of meaning guards against this potentiality. Ricoeur makes a similar point: “[F]iction is placed in the service of the unforgettable” (3:189). I would argue that it is the very attempt to fix the unfixable, i.e., to establish an objectivity unachievable not merely because of an event’s inherently polysemantic nature but also because of the limitations of narrativity itself, that stultifies the process of memorialization: definitive circumscription of meaning must needs lead to the withering away of discourse and constructive interpretive discord.

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The above argument posits, among other things, that despite claims to the contrary, postmodernism at large and certain varieties of postmodern fiction have not completely abandoned concerns with and about the past, historicity, and, by extension, representation (pace JeanFrançois Lyotard). Neither will it do to see in the very heteroglossia such fiction espouses, merely a reaction “allergic to the priorities and commitments, let alone the responsibilities, of the various tediously committed kinds of partisan history” (Jameson, 369). Is is really the case, as Fredric Jameson further argues, that “the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known ‘sense of the past’ or historicity and collective memory)” (309)? Furthermore, can we fully subscribe to David Harvey’s dictum that “postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory” (54)? Earlier, I referred in passing to W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. I would like to employ this book as a paradigmatic case for refuting the argument, embodied in the short quotations from Jameson and Harvey, that postmodernism (in this case, postmodern fiction) and a “sense of historical continuity and memory” are, by necessity, mutually exclusive. The Emigrants unambigously partakes of what could be termed a postmodern narrative aesthetics: the book’s fourth section, entitled “Max Ferber,” like the three preceding it, appears at first to be a traveloguecum-biography-cum-autobiography. The first-person narrator, a “student who planned to settle in Manchester to pursue research” (a detail that is co-extensive with the author’s biographical data), peripatetically explores the city in ever-widening circles, which occasions ruminations on the precise ways in which historical development and individual experience are intertwined. Little by little my Sunday walks would take me beyond the city centre to districts in the immediate neighbourhood, such as the one-time Jewish quarter around the starshaped complex of Strangeways prison, behind Victoria Station. This quarter had been a centre for Manchester’s large Jewish community until the inter-war years, but those who lived there moved into the suburbs and the district had meanwhile been demolished by order of the municipality. All I found still standing was one single row of empty houses, the wind blowing through the smashed windows and doors; and, by way of a sign that someone really had once been there, the barely decipherable brass plate of a one-time lawyers’ office, bearing names that had a legendary ring to my ear: Glickmann, Grunwald and Gottgetreu. In Ardwick, Brunswick, All Saints, Hulme and Angel Fields too, districts adjoining the centre to the south, whole square kilometres of working-class homes had been pulled down by the authorities, so that, once the demolition rubble had been removed, all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets. (157)

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Upon one of these walks, the unnamed narrator meets Max Ferber, a painter, who “drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woolen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust …” (161–62). Despite their conversations, the narrator does not find out anything about Ferber’s biographical background until he returns to Manchester from a sojourn in Switzerland and reads about the painter in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement. Ferber, a Jew, it turns out, left Germany in 1939 and his parents were exterminated in the Holocaust in 1941. When the narrator visits him once more in Manchester, Ferber tells him in great detail his life history and says that “time … is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul. There is neither a past nor a future” (181). Upon departure, Ferber hands the narrator a package containing his mother’s memoirs of her youth and upbringing, written between 1939 and 1941 – a document where “remembering, writing and reading” (193) intersect. For the following twenty-five pages, the narrator gives way to Luisa Lanzberg, except for a few parenthetical interpolations designed to assure the reader that the narrator is not inventing the story related but only serving as a conduit for Luisa’s words. The memoir evocatively details Jewish life in Germany, a life in which Jewish faith and cultural assimilation in almost all other sectors of life was commonplace. In shul, at some point the students “have to guess the three things that give and take in infinite plenty. Of course no one knows the answer, which Herr Bein [the teacher] then tells us in tones of great significance: the earth, the sea and the Reich” (204). These memoirs impel the narrator to plan a trip to Steinach and Bad Kissingen, where Ferber’s family grew up – the remainder of this book’s section then concerns itself with “the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up” (225). One of the most prominent features of this section is the reliance on the putatively documentary evidence of photography. Obviously the photographs, as is the case with all of the photographs incorporated into the book’s various segments, are reproductions of “real” photographs, and document a reality whose existence could be verified without much effort. On the surface, these photographs, much like the narrator’s intrusions, during the rendition

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of Luisa’s memoirs, on the behalf of accurate representation, seem to function as elements that buttress the surrounding text’s verisimilitude. A recent flyer accompanying a retrospective of Jeff Wall’s work at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., characterizes the conventional photographer’s photographs (in contradistinction to Wall’s œuvre, as entities that “document or capture fragments of reality” (Viso). Undoubtedly, there is one level on which the photographs on these pages aim to provide a visual representation of the text: the top one on page 221, for instance, clearly depicts the “labour exchange” that had replaced the Bad Kissingen synagogue burnt to the ground during Kristallnacht. What we see on the pages of The Emigrants is not located within the precincts of a deliberately aestheticizing variety of photography, but squarely within the realm of the snapshot. All of these images bear the hallmark of the quotidian and are caught within the parameters of innocent uncomposedness (222), the accidentalities of false focus (223), inadvertent cropping (221, top), etc. And yet, the seeming ordinariness of the photographs masks a highly charged statement about the possibility of drawing a borderline between fact and fiction: they reside in the interstices of a text in which the narrator shares biographical data with the author; in which a memoir is imbedded in a fictional text that appeals to the verifying and documentary capacity of photographs; in which the narrators eloquence is paired with other characters’ silence; where riddle and revelation coexist without ever providing the final pieces of a puzzle whose completion history and its memorialization have prevented. For despite their superficial claims of representing a slice of contemporary reality only (be it the present-day pictures of Bad Kissingen or the 1930s-style portrait photographs of Max Ferber’s parents), these photographs are not only what has been called a “complex and personally and culturally encoded set of messages” (Hanson, 237), but also a prism through which to view not so much the present as the past: they record traces of one of history’s most devastating chapters, the Holocaust. This prism, then, is not one of color, designed to underscore the verisimilitude of the narrator’s account of a present, but are the very loci in which a black-andwhite past percolates, inevitably, with an efficacy that cannot be denied, up into that present. Arthur Danto, in an essay on Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” observed that the still dis-stills; the photographs that accompany The Emigrants portion on Bad Kissingen could be said to function similarly. They clearly do not fix or “make still” present reality (however constructed a slice of that reality they may represent in the first

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place), but dis-still it, in the sense of demonstrating the indivisible unity of past and present, i.e., the existence in toto of the former in the latter. When Max Ferber states that there was “neither a past nor a future,” he did not mean to indicate that he existed merely in the schizophrenia of a perpetual present; what he alluded to primarily was the envelopedness of the past in the present, the construction of present-day reality on the toxic waste site of recent, traumatic history. This these pictures document, although they are not documentary, despite their ostensibly corroborating placement in the text, in the OED sense of “providing evidence” of a visual sort for the narrator’s account. Rather than documenting the narrator’s words, then, which would have amounted to their being placed on the “exhibit” level, in the legal meaning, for the narrator’s accuracy, the photographs represent the very motivation for the narrator’s activities in Bad Kissingen: temporarily speaking, they do not reflect what happens after he arrives there, but are traces of what impelled him to undertake the trip in the first place, mainly an awareness of how the present is always pregnant with the past. The book’s German title makes subtle reference to this overdetermination of the presence by the past: The Emigrants’ original title is Die Ausgewanderten, not Die Emigranten or Die Auswanderer. This difference might seems slight, but makes all the difference: the first term would translate as the “the ones who emigrated,” whereas the second terms carries the exact same meaning as the English “the emigrants,” “the ones emigrating.” “Die Ausgewanderten” also implies a continuing process of immersion into a state of diasporic liminality, a state that ensures that those caught up in it can never arrive at the point where they switch – however tentatively and frailly – a past identity with a present one (all of which “die Emigranten” or “die Auswanderer” would suggest). The underlying metaphor, then, is one that does not support the temporally defined supplanting of one self by another, but one in which the self, inescapably is always in a state of limbo, in which the filaments of the past must needs show through the garment of the present, and not even the illusion of complete assimilation into the present is possible. As mentioned earlier, the prism through which the present is viewed is a gray one, one that refracts the light against the backdrop of emptied cities, the color of ashes, and the all-pervasiveness of dust, all of which are recurrent images of the “Max Ferber” section of The Emigrants. The pastness of history does not guarantee an escape from its maw. The narrator experiences this bond at Bad Kissingen’s Jewish cemetery: “A shock of recognition shot through me at the grave of Maier Stern, who died on

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the 18th of May, my own birthday; and I was touched, in a way I knew I could never quite fathom, by the symbol of the writer’s quill on the stone of Friederike Halbleib, who departed this life on the 28th of March 1912” (224). This realization, I would argue, extends beyond the narrator’s imagining of the universality of human experience – such a sentiment appears limited by virtue of attempting to extract metaphysical meaning from biographic coincidence. Seen against the backdrop of Jewish life in Germany contained in Luisa’s memoir and the cemetery’s “wilderness of graves, neglected for years” (223) it also bespeaks a loss that transcends the individual – a loss of a culture and a world whose only present traces are those of the past, where presence is indicated only by markers of absence. The phenomenal reality the photographs depict, then, is one that captures more than the present-day object: it captures an aura of the past, and is as accurate a depiction of ghosts as is possible to a device that depends on the chemical action of light exclusively. In this essay it was my intention to demonstrate that a text that clearly partakes of characteristics that are commonly ascribed to the literary arsenal of postmodernist fiction does not need to forgo the thematization of history, memory and the past. Jameson and Harvey are not only unnecessarily prescriptive in their analysis, but clearly are not as conversant with the principles of “cultural memory as it is articulated in institutions, in public debates, in theory, in art, and in literature” (Huyssen, 4), specifically in a postmodern dispensation, as might be wished. The preceding discussion of one segment from The Emigrants should have made abundantly clear that postmodern narrative techniques can indeed coexist with a subject matter that engages historicity and cultural memory. In addition, it brings to the fore, due to the chronological remove from the event, a number of questions we are going to have to ask of any contemporary work of fiction thematizing the Holocaust: whose memory is it?3 What forms will the collective memory of the Holocaust take in the twenty-first century, after the last survivors will have given testimony? How exactly do we write literature about the Holocaust and is there a need to disambiguate between morally permissible and irresponsible 3

See here Huyssen, Twilight Memories and James Young’s excellent The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, the latter of which notes that “memory of the Holocaust is finally as plural as the hundreds of diverse buildings and designs by which every nation and people house remembrance,” viii.

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evocations of the event in a fictional text? Finally, is there a tension between the awareness that culturally embedded and defined representations of the Holocaust exist and a widespread classification of the Holocaust as “unrepresentable”?4 The Emigrants embodies one of the constitutive conditions of writing about the Holocaust today: it engages the Holocaust not as it is experienced by its primary victims, but as it is perceived from a geographical distance or after the fact. Thus it provides one type of answer to the question, “What shall we allow ourselves to build on the scourged soil of the killing grounds?” (Busch, 13). I would like to argue that this book is emblematic of a shift from “[a]n obsessive focus on the unspeakable and unrepresentable, as it was compellingly articulated by Elie Wiesel or George Steiner … and as it informs the ethical philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard” (Huyssen, 256–257), toward a cautious expression of the need for uttering words that are appropriate, respectful, and, at the same time, mindful of the complex workings of memory and the process of remembering. The Holocaust forms the still point of the worlds depicted in The Emigrants, an event that can barely sustain direct mention, but informs the present, indelibly and without the potential solace of sublimation or Freudian working-through. To have made manifest that silent heart of the book, and to have demonstrated the circumstances of a present that is pregnant with the past, is one of merits of The Emigrants. Here, invocation of the Holocaust is consistently attempting what Larry Wolf said was “[to] make sense of a century so brutally ruptured by horror at its center.”

4

See Sicher, Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz.

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W. G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories Peter Fritzsche

The rings of Saturn consist of billions of tiny particles that orbit the planet. They are probably the icy debris of an ancient moon or wayward comet that broke apart in Saturn’s atmosphere many hundred millions of years ago. There have been many interplanetary collisions, but in our solar system no other planet except for Saturn exerts the gravitational force that keeps the evidence of catastrophe in view. This striking image, which is, of course, the title of one of Sebald’s books, is helpful to understand Sebald’s view of history. On one level, the astronomical metaphor is profoundly disturbing because it tends to naturalize history, and Sebald repeatedly introduces history as a natural event even as he warns against seeing it as a natural event. This warning is the motivation for Luftkrieg und Literatur, or “On the Natural History of Destruction,” in which he indicts (quite misleadingly, I think) postwar Germans for simply continuing on physically maimed without confronting personal pain. Only visiting foreigners looked out and gaped at ruined Hamburg, Sebald reports. At the same time, there is something exceptional and thus suggestively historical about Saturn. Its own rotation around the sun is accompanied by the discernible remnants of disaster. Sebald is fascinated with the terms of this accompaniment, which we know, when we look at the other planets, is not a necessary or permanent state of affairs. In other words, to move from outer space to our own times, the far-flung debris of history does not have to be the object of our attention, but it is. As a result, we inhabit a world in which we do see and in which we do draw toward us, like Saturn its rings, the broken stones of history. Here I want to explore the possibilities Sebald raises about the relationship between nature and history, which range from resemblance to resistance. I also want to consider Sebald’s views about the initial collision that leaves us with rings of wrecked material. Do World War II and the Holocaust represent a kind of event that makes our time unlike any other, overwhelmed with the evidence of disastrous history and thus different

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from other epochs as Saturn is from other planets? Or has the Holocaust so unsettled our understanding of history in general that the rings of Saturn, like Walter Benjamin’s backward-blown angel of history, serves as a fitting image by which to approach other centuries, not just the twentieth century? In this sense, the rings of Saturn would suggest a distinctly modern, somewhat melancholy appreciation of historical transformation, one that would not necessarily conform to historical perspectives in other places and other times. Thus, the question is posed: is the catastrophe at the heart of Sebald’s fiction and at the center of our own understanding of the past something generic or quite particular? The loving attention Sebald gives to the particular pieces of cast-off debris orbiting around us suggests to me the latter, that is, the phenomenal force of a datable, particular Holocaust in the years 1939–1945. But this attention to the identifiable world war is not in keeping with Sebald’s overall digressive method, which ranges across centuries, nor, I think, with his philosophical inclination, which is an empathetic rearranging of the stranded objects of history, the things that have survived mayhem and destruction over the course of centuries. Therefore, there is an enduring tension in Sebald’s work between nature and history, between the generic and the particular, between catastrophe and the Holocaust, between the dispersed evidence of history and the specific disasters of the twentieth century. This tension is unresolved, accumulating into an argument for uncertainty about the appropriateness of the means of representation of catastrophe and into a warning as well against the appropriation of any single method of representation. Nonetheless, the central role that catastrophe plays in Sebald’s epistemologies produces a lingering nostalgia. The ruins end up creating a more fabulous, enchanted place from which we are forever separated by the horrifying evidence of the dead. This nostalgia for another time does unsettle in critical ways the pieties of the present day and it recalls for us the marginalized figure of the fugitive who has not found a home. But Sebald’s nostaglic correspondences also make the past enchanted and reveal the present to be completely disenchanted so that the contemporary reader feels oddly out of place, uninvited or simply late. Perhaps the aesthetization of prior catastrophe is, in fact, how historical narratives operate, in which case we need to consider in what ways the genre of history itself is dependent on the aesthetization of death. Like the models of crumbling Greek and Roman statuary with which eighteenth-century connisseurs liked to landscape their gardens, history is relentlessly crumbling. This is the mood that Sebald evokes in the first

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scenes of Rings of Saturn, in which the “heaviest stone of melancholy” for man is the knowledge that he is at the “end of his nature,” which is death (Rings, 26). Sebald introduces us to Thomas Browne and his skull, “gnaw’d out” of the grave (Rings, 11), and to Janine’s study, Flaubert, for whom “sand conquered all,” “penetrating into the tiniest crevices” (Rings, 8). Coastlines erode forests, rivers silt up, storms destroy settlements, as was the case of Dunwich where a New Year’s Eve storm in 1285 effaced any sign of “where the land ended and the sea began. There were fallen walls, debris, ruins, broken timbers, shattered ships’ hulls, and sodden masses of loam, pebbles, sand and water everywhere” (Rings, 157–58). It is not simply that Dunwich no longer shows where land ended and sea began, Dunwich’s hand-hewn history of timbers is folded into a hydrological landscape of water, sand, and pebbles so that its eventful history (New Years Eve, 1285) becomes part of nature’s strenuous work. This is a very composed view, in which nature overtakes history; things happen, but nothing changes much. Again and again, in Sebald’s books, the works of men (and it is usually men) crumble, they fall apart, or they disappear in ways that are made to correspond to a natural history. As he walks around Lowestoft, again in the Rings of Saturn, Sebald reflects on the great ships of the seventeenth century: “for a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas,” bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, and Victory, “and then they were gone” (Rings, 78). The word “only” is the particular evidence of nature and its creatures, not history and its strangers. The fishermen along the shore are also compared to a soon-to-be extinct species: they “are dying out,” Sebald observes (Rings, 53). Lowestoft itself is in decline, “the damage … smouldering underground,” and then catching “like wildfire.” Even the terrible Nazis are compared to botanical samples, appearing suddenly to young Max Ferber in The Emigrants “as if a new species of humanity … was evolving before our very eyes” (Emigrants, 182). Moreover, generic descriptions of “the new laws” and “those special trains” which upended Paul Bereyter’s life in the same collection, appear to arrive with the force of nature, and without the specificity of German history in 1935 and 1942 (Emigrants, 48, 50). In The Rings of Saturn, one “terrible sight of Nature,” which is the “vast shoals of herring” cast onto “the beaches by the wind and the tides,” gives way to another sight, “the dying woodlands between Lowestoft and Southwold,” and then to another, available to us only in a disturbing spliced-in photograph that seems to correspond to an earlier image of mounds of herring, but depicts bodies rotting among the trees at

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Bergen-Belsen, something witnessed by the recently deceased Major George Wyndham Le Strange, “whose great stone manor house in Henstead stood beyond the lake” (Rings, 55, 59). The fishermen and the bodies have been naturalized into indefinite fishermen, bodies, extinct beings. In The Rings of Saturn at least, Sebald is not at all coy about likening in the last pages the process of history to an unending catastrophe, “a long account of calamities,” to which perhaps the only response is to wear black (Rings, 295). This is an unmistakably eighteenth-century pose in which the worst evil imaginable in the present was the earthquake in Lisbon, an occurrence straight out of the book of nature. An account of Sebald’s imagery is inadequate, however. Sebald is also moving, walking, exposing; he is on the road, usually alone, feeling that he must take the arduous journey, for example to Kissingen and Steinach in order to learn about Max Ferber. It is an effort that goes well beyond the passive observations and chain of associations around Lowestoft: “I travelled via Amsterdam, Cologne, and Frankfurt,” he writes, “and had to change a number of times … with every change, the trains were slower and shorter, till at last, on the stretch from Gemünden to Kissingen, I found myself in a train … that consisted only of an engine and a single carriage” (Emigrants, 218). In Austerlitz both the narrator and Austerlitz himself are in constant motion across the European continent, and they reach out to collect the peculiar things that have “outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction” (Austerlitz, 197). It is on these journeys that the violence of displacement, the evidence of history, becomes more and more evident. But this violence is not plain to see; it is no longer simply the erosion of a woodland or the extinction of fishermen or the endless motions of emigrants. It is violence that is hidden, disruptive, traumatic. The restless fixation onto an obscure or unknown object of desire is one of the principal ways that Sebald’s accounts for loss in the twentieth century. The insufficiency and longing that is the premise for the journey away perforates the main subjects of the ouevre, the narrator himself as well as the studies he introduces. It is clear that Sebald’s characters are wounded or traumatized, but their individual search for lost time is also the effort to pierce through the imperatives and self-evidency of the present so that their particular losses serve the larger work of memory. All around the evidence of forgetting is unmistakable, and Sebald’s journeys to recover past lives are a way back to the practices of memory as much as they are a way back to an emigrant’s or a child’s autobiography. Already in The Rings of Saturn,

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Sebald raises the question he explores more fully in his essay, Luftkrieg und Literatur, that is: why, “to my astonishment,” and here he assumes the voice of a British veteran, though later he will ask the question himself, “no one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterwards recorded their memories” about the horrific air raids that destroyed German cities in World War II (Rings, 39). But it is not only the Germans who lack memory, efficient as they were, surmises Sebald, in getting on with the process of reconstruction (Emigrants, 225). In Austerlitz, it is the Jewish survivor Austerlitz who avoids for a long time confronting the fragmented knowledge of his own despair. Here it becomes apparent that the process of destruction is incomplete without an account of how it contains also the potential of the destruction of memory itself. “The world is … draining itself,” Sebald writes in Austerlitz, “the history of countless places and objects, which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on” (Austerlitz, 24). Austerlitz’s journeys, and Sebald’s as well, are undertaken to counteract this abandonment with acts of collecting, recollecting, and remembering. The French memoirist Chateaubriand, who Sebald portrays in the loneliness of the ambassador’s return to foreign-looking London in the 1820s, insisted on the difference between death in nature and the exile of history. Chateaubriand compared the migrations of a bird, who “sets out with its neighbors,” “leaves nothing behind,” and “returns, at last, to die on the spot which gave it birth,” with the man “driven from his native home,” who, by contrast, “knocks, but no one opens;” the “proscription which has banished him from his country seems to have expelled him from the world,” writes Chateaubriand about the exiles of the French Revolution (Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, 152–53). This is the displacement of history, not the destruction of nature, and it constitutes an acknowledgement that, as Thucydides described it for the Athenians, “the quiet life” cannot be preserved, that self-sufficiency is not attainable, and that things are left behind (70). History depends not on the reiteration of the same, the action of tides and storms, but on the startling presence of the “other,” the stranger who stays, the disaster that lingers, and it must account for why and in what ways today is no longer like yesterday and why we know this to be so. Herodotus’s histories begin with encounters, often sea voyages, trading expeditions, or naval raids, which destroy enclosed island spaces; Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War too is about what happens when Athenians leave Athens; countless other histories are founded upon arrivals and departures, conquests and

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reclamations, exilings and discoveries. History is therefore constituted in large part by testimonies of loss, and it is written on the open road, on which raiders and fugitives and refugees travel and along which the travellers account for their own displacement, surveying scenes of terrible destruction and imagining the places they once possessed. The witnesses to history are, in the end, exiles, who know they will not return to their homes or recover their former lives. It is not surprising that Sebald himself returns repeatedly to train stations which are haunted with “the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places” (Austerlitz, 14). With the historical perspective that the journey facilitates, the natural calamities of wind and storm give way to secret, traceable histories of pain and loss in which matters remain unsettled and the protagonists restless. In Austerlitz, it is not Elias’s church tales of righteous punishment, but Evan’s ghost stories about untimely death (Austerlitz, 54) that evoke layers of concealed history. If we are inclined to hear ghost stories instead of church tales, the world looks very different, and very unnatural. Of course, we need to be so inclined, which is the gift of the historical point of view. Ghost stories scatter the world with the debris of former lives and lost wholes, debris which is still available in the collections of oddities, the encyclopedias of wonder, and the memories of childhood and loss. In this sense, it is history, the desire for and the recognition of history and its wrenching displacements, that corresponds to the gravitational force that keeps the ruins, the rings of Saturn, in view. Sebald is, I think, inclined to collect history as such. He has Austerlitz speak “at length about the marks of pain, which … trace countless fine lines through history” (Austerlitz, 14). Yet it is precisely in this sonorous collective invocation of history as “countless fine lines,” here, there, everywhere, that the ruins of Manchester, Lowestoft, or the great houses of the English gentry acquire a natural, ordinary aspect. However, what keeps his work from shifting over to an undifferentiated melancholy, which is strongest in The Rings of Saturn, are the specific ruins of World War II and the Holocaust. Sebald, and readers with him, repeatedly bump into losses of the war from the generic references to “the laws” and “those special trians” in the emigrant story of Paul Bereyter to the glimpse of the photograph of Gracie Irlam, the pretty Salvation Army girl, dated 17 May 1944 in the run-down Manchester hotel (Emigrants, 152), to William Hazel, the Somerleyton gardener who recalled watching the British bombers take off to raid Germany (Rings, 39). And, of course, the emigrants Paul Bereyter and Max Ferber, and Austerlitz himself, are the intended victims and unlikely survivors of the Holo-

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caust. World War II thus functions as a great machine of dispersion, more relentless and more thorough and more extravagant than the force of nature. There is the anguished separation of parents and children, the pain at the center of Austerlitz’s life, and there is the casting off of emigrants to England and America. In places like the great house at Somerleyton it is, in fact, World War II that divides the present, in which “there was nothing any more,” from the prewar time when “furnishings, equipment, and impedimenta of every description” arrived from London: “the new piano, curtains and portières, the Italian tiles and fittings for the bathrooms … cases of hock and Bordeaux, lawn mowers and great boxes of whalebone corsets and crinolines” (Rings, 31). Here Sebald kinks time with extraordinary force so that readers are forced to confront the very specific history of World War II and the Holocaust. Sebald’s “before” is a busy place, in complete contrast to the emptiness afterward of, say, postwar Manchester or Lowestoft. From the imagined forth and back of the small railway station at Somerleyton Hall to the crowded harbor at Manchester to the glamorous spa at Deauville to the noisy dinning room of the Great Eastern Hotel in London, “before” is filled with vast piles of things and inhabited by great clumps of people. Again and again the prewar photographs that Sebald introduces as prologues show people together whereas postwar images show them to be alone or in small groups. “The dead almost always walked alone,” Evan says about his ghost stories (Austerlitz, 54) and, implicitly, about the present day. It is World War II that is the dramatized hinge forever separating the rich lives before and the lonesome ones afterward. It is here that Sebald begins to aestheticize the catastrophe, which serves to keep the prewar world in view. Indeed, the clutter of prewar lives is the medium of recollection and the object of desire. Sebald lovingly attends to the things of the 1920s and 1930s and recalls them for us in sharp detail. Throughout his works we are introduced to oddities such as Henry Selwyn’s hot-plate trolley (Emigrants, 13), Mrs Irlam’s teas maid (Emigrants, 154), “the hoya plant on the cane table” (Emigrants, 196), and the “old-fashioned interior” of Manchester’s delapidated Midland hotel, which reminds Sebald of the “wine-red velvet lining” of a jewelry box or violin case (Emigrants, 234). These are not simply the left-over items that have outlived their owners and constitute the items in Sebald’s vast collection; they are also the very sort of objects that release memory. When Austerlitz begins at long last to recall his childhood in Prague, he assembles a very similar collection of old-fashioned images. One by one, he remembers the “finely

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wrought window grating, the iron handle of a bell pull, or the branches of an almond tree,” “half-relief set … blue dog … hazelnut-shaped iron knobs” (Austerlitz, 150–51). The materiality of the 1930s, therefore, serves as a privileged medium for memory. Moreover, the very materiality of this method introduces the idea that memory can in fact be recovered. This connection between prewar objects and postwar memory is given theoretical backing when Austerlitz explains why he takes such pleasure in the photographs that he is so busy taking. They reveal, he says, the “self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters … the molding of a stone arch … the tangled precision” of blades of dry grass (Austerlitz, 77). There is an uncommon correspondence between the survival of prewar objects, the associations of memory, and the method of photography which gives the past a nostalgic luster and richness and assigns to the present the force of effacement and dispersion. Sebald constructs a world in which he inhabits the particular ruins of pre-World War II Europe and in which the postwar period is one of unrelieved, extraordinary disintegration. There are no equivalents to World War II in the present, which is a vast postwar emptiness filled only with the wealth of recollected prewar images. In this view, World War II is the singular disaster. Its ruins are the rings of Saturn. What is dangerous about this proposition of a postwar present rich only with prewar debris is that the only way to relieve the disenchantment of the present is to collect the debris of lost lives just like the collectors of the nineteenth century assembled their botanical specimens, architectural drawings, and encyclopedia articles which drift in and out of Sebald’s books. The ruin of the past becomes the tasty morsel of the present, like the apples and asparagus grown in Henry Selwyn’s ruined, neglected garden. The secret histories of death and dispersion are strange, and fabulous, “bewitching” and dream-like to a time that, as Susan Sontag wondered, no longer really thought “literary greatness still possible”. The present, in which we live, depends on these stories for enchantment. All the people we meet in Sebald’s work are survivors and witnesses who refer back to the 1930s and 1940s. There are no contemporary versions of the prewar spa world at Deauville, the richness at Somerleyton, or the theater life in Prague; nothing but the simulacra of the interwar years. And there is no evidence of postwar displacement either in 1968 or 1989, or in the turbulence of globalization, to merit a comparison with the wreckage of World War II. History has come to an end. One gets the sense that Sebald collects these stories because he believes he is the last person to be able to do so, and that the more general

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fate we are about to endure is to be finally covered by the particles of Flaubert’s sand or to be drained entirely of memories and ghosts and screams. In this way, Sebald’s history is the unlikely product of the untimely death of the Belle Epoque. We are forever cast out, so much so that there is not the possibility of finding and experiencing new, postwar homes which we might also stand to lose in a new installment of history. Empathy does not extend to the present. There is something quite serious about this unguardedly blasphemous proposition stating our need for World War II and the Holocaust: we do need to ask about the extent to which the aesthetics of our own desire for history and memory are complicit in the deaths and losses of the Second World War. Of course there are many gateways to history, but Hitler and the Holocaust are pretty big ones. To what degree are our attractions shaped by the knowledge of catastrophe and the debris that post-catastrophe reveals? Of course, there are alternative readings to Sebald, who counters the nostalgia for the abundance of empire with an account of Roger Casement in the Congo, and who qualifies the grandeur of the nineteenth-century creations with premonitions of their extinction. Nonetheless, Sebald returns again and again to the “salles des pas perdus” (Austerlitz, 7) in order to hear the footfalls and whispers that are immersed in time, unbearably sad, and irretrievably lost. In this sense, vividness and robustness are properties of the past, not the present, our time which can only recollect what was once vivid and robust, so that the grativational force of Saturn keeps the ruins in view but also singles out the rings of Saturn and not other planets and moons, or other constellations which might or might not exist in the present. This gravity may be the sightfulness but also the ignorance of history. Both reveal kinds of violence, the extraordinary historical record of war and death and displacement in the twentieth century and also the strain of this violence on the historian’s story and on her depiction of before and after in ways that deplete the present and the future. By ending history in this way, in the great crash-up of World War II, Sebald threatens to undo the historical work of recovery that he has laboriously accomplished. He ties the years of his prewar lives off in what can only be taken as the finality of a natural disaster. Sebald’s rings of Saturn orbit against the silence of black space.

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Going Astray: Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Mark Ilsemann

Sebald’s fictional world is populated with people who suffer. Whereas the reader can be certain that their suffering is real, it is for the most part far from clear what they are suffering from. They themselves do not know. When Gwendolyn, Austerlitz’s foster mother, slowly dies, it is evident that she succumbs to a sadness whose sources are unknown to her. “What was it that so darkened our world,” she asks at last, and all her husband can reply is: “I don’t know, dear, I don’t know” (Austerlitz, 64). And yet, the very shroud of mystery that envelops these characters’ suffering may tell us something about the nature of their condition. Fear and sorrow, Robert Burton says, are “the most assured signs, inseparable companions, and characters of melancholy.” Those who are affected, Burton adds, can be recognized by the unmistakable symptom “that without a cause, timent de non timendis” (Burton, 385) – they are afraid of things that are not frightening.1 There is no doubt that throughout his work, Sebald makes abundant use of ideas and images traditionally associated with melancholy. These references to melancholic symptoms, such as the constant brooding over an unrecoverable past, are often couched in allusions to either natural history or astronomy – a fact that will not surprise anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with the cultural history of the four temperaments (Klibansky; Schings). Next to contemplating dead objects and gathering together vast natural historical collections, which is what the occupants of Andromeda Lodge in Austerlitz do (Austerlitz, 83), astronomy may well be the favorite leisure-time activity of all melancholics. To give some examples from Sebald: the just-mentioned dream1

For the tradition of defining melancholy as fear and sadness without sufficient cause, see Radden, 10–12.

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like dwelling-place where Austerlitz’s boarding school friend Gerald lives is named after a galaxy Andromeda; when Austerlitz and Gerald visit the old country estate Iver Grove, they discover that one of the ancestors of the present owner installed an observatory on the roof to measure the moon; and the title of Sebald’s fictional account of a walking tour through East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn, pays tribute to the planet that throughout the middle ages was held responsible for the saturnine mood. And yet, it seems wrong to assume that the ailment with which so many of Sebald’s characters are afflicted can be qualified as melancholy – and thus, according to Burton, as fear and sorrow without cause. For surely, the reasons for their despair could hardly be more compelling: Jacques Austerlitz, as well as his literary companions in The Emigrants, suffer from the violence done to them and their families during the Holocaust. Their condition, more than just a general suffering from an inevitable transitoriness, addresses something that has been done to them, by someone. Its origin, in Austerlitz’s case, is the moment when he was sent to England from his hometown Prague at the age of five as a participant in the Kindertransport. For that reason, one may argue, his suffering should be labelled post-traumatic rather than melancholic – for is it not obvious that it is a traumatic experience that constantly occupies his fictional mind? It is remarkable that the two readings contradict each other while both seem perfectly justified at first glance. Judging from the account given by the narrator, Austerlitz appears to oscillate between two conceptions of psychological suffering that are as mutually exclusive as the two conceptions of history to which they correspond: a man-made history, one that involves the distinction between a victim and a perpetrator and in which the concepts of free will and responsibility make sense; and a history that is driven by anonymous, irrational, quasi-natural forces and governed by a law that remains utterly impenetrable for the human mind. By establishing a causal chain between the Holocaust and the mental condition of its protagonist, the novel prepares to tell an episode from the history of mankind; but judging from the energy it invests in obliterating the cause, the story of Austerlitz’s life reads rather like a natural historical curiosity. In what appears to be a first sign that all readings of the novel based on psychology – be they psychoanalytic or trauma-theoretic – must eventually fail, it proves impossible to resolve the ambiguity by integrating Austerlitz’s frequent display of melancholic temperament into a narrative of psychological recovery. His condition is not altered by the fact that his prolonged repression of resurfacing childhood memories is fin-

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ally lifted during his visit to his birthplace Prague.2 On the contrary, even after that visit, where he learns all the facts about his early childhood, he remains the melancholic he always was. The following episode may serve as evidence: in December 1996, three years after his stay in Prague and two years after he has recovered from his subsequent collapse,3 Austerlitz meets the narrator at the Royal Observatory in London. While the two protagonists are “studying the ingenious observational instruments and measuring devices, quadrants and sextants, chronometers and regulators” (Austerlitz, 98) – unmistakable tools of the melancholy astronomer – Austerlitz embarks on a “disquisition of some length on time” (Austerlitz, 100), again disclosing his obsession with the anonymous forces that govern life. Although his investigation enables him to uncover the origins of his suffering, the suffering itself remains, as well as the conviction that not fellow humans but natural forces are to blame. The tension inherent in the novel’s main character, and in its representation of history, can only be resolved if we refrain from insisting that Austerlitz commits itself to a depiction of either melancholy or post-traumatic disorder. For what the novel really demonstrates is precisely the transition from trauma to melancholy, or from a biographical to a sociological approach to history. Whereas to be traumatized is something purely individual in the sense that the condition is contingent upon personal experience – which is true even in cases of collective trauma – melancholy is more universal, less explicable, and less biographical. In accordance with this fundamental difference, the melancholic and the victim of trauma – not as real persons, but as rhetorical devices in a literary text – refer to history in very different ways. The victim of trauma is a synecdoche, in the sense that his biography, granting access to history from below, is itself history in miniature; the life of the melancholic, on the other hand, is so completely invaded by the forces of history that he embodies where the victim of trauma can only signify. Through the lens of Austerlitz’s body, history reveals itself as history’s other: it becomes indistinguishable from natural history. 2 3

For Austerlitz’s repression, see Austerlitz, 139–40. In spring 1993, almost a year after his breakdown in summer 1992 (Austerlitz, 140), Austerlitz enters a used book store in London and listens to a radio broadcast about the Kindertransport (Austerlitz, 141–42). Although his report does not say so specifically, it must be assumed that Austerlitz visits Prague immediately afterwards. He returns to London in late March or early April, soon suffers another breakdown, and is hospitalized. He is finally discharged from hospital in early April 1994 (Austerlitz, 231).

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If we want to observe how the dialectic between history and nature operates, we must only take a look at Sebald’s literary anthropology, in which the human being has only emerged halfway from its brutish, even inanimate, beginnings. In a short essay about Rousseau, for instance, the narrator shares the philosopher’s fascination with a book by a certain Johann Joachim Becker, entitled Physica subterranea, in which Becker claims to have isolated glass particles “from the ashes of plants and animals.” When the author maintains that “man is made of glass and, like all animals, can return to glass” (Logis, 65), we get an idea of Sebald’s own interpretation of the “great chain of being,” in which the mineral world extends into the human body. Besides, if we consider that the delusion of being made of glass, and of being constantly on the verge of breaking, is a frequent fantasy in accounts given by melancholics (Schings, 59, 321), we realize that the purpose of Sebald’s repeated references to the history of melancholy is not at all to define a merely psychological state but to signify a much more profound dependency on the elements, an extension into human life of early forms of inanimate organization. Sebald’s anthropology is so indebted to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka as to warrant more than one footnote to Benjamin’s famous essay on that author from 1934. Sebald’s characters, just like Kafka’s, are deeply affected and transformed by the social processes that determine their fate. Constantly covered by the veil of melancholy, submerged like the village Llanwddyn beneath the Vyrnwy Reservoir (Austerlitz, 51–53), their environment resembles a “swamp world,” where they live as amphibians and where prehistory “extend[s] into the present” (BSW, 2:808–09). In Sebald’s novel as well as in Kafka’s stories, “[o]blivion is the container from which [this] inexhaustible intermediate world [Zwischenwelt] […] presses toward the light” (BSW, 2:810). This oblivion, of course, is not an individual forgetting; in Austerlitz, it is the rigor with which the novel bars itself against any intrusion of psychology, choice, and comprehensible causality.4 By transforming a traumatized mind into a body that has been invaded by nature, the novel depsychologizes suffering, turning it into a universal condition of the modern age. In Austerlitz modern society relapses into prehistory, and as I will show in the following section, it is precisely an excess of rationalization that causes the return of incomprehensible, apparently irrational laws of nature, an idea formulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment and countless 4

For the motif of natural history in Benjamin and Adorno, see Hanssen.

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other places. More specifically, the ambiguity of Austerlitz’s condition is indebted to Adorno’s double-edged postulate, in a lecture entitled “The Idea of Natural History” and presented to the Kant society in Frankfurt in 1932, “to sublate [aufzuheben] the usual antithesis between nature and history” (Adorno, “Idee,” 345).5 Whereas trauma keeps the antithesis intact, melancholy does away with it. Although Sebald never mentions Adorno’s text, he makes reference to its subject matter in an earlier version of his well-known essay On the Natural History of Destruction entitled “Between History and Natural History” (“Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte”). In the remainder of my article, I shall refer to two instances in Sebald’s work which allow for a close examination of the pervasive turn from trauma to melancholy, or from a psychologically contingent to a universal mode of suffering. In his non-fictional texts about the allied air-raids against the German population during World War II, which are the subject of the following section, it becomes evident that as long as they remain unaccompanied by a more comprehensive sociological analysis, testimonies by or reports about survivors of trauma, for Sebald, are too weak to serve as a vehicle for the full extent of modern despair. The focus on Sebald’s non-fiction will then be complemented, in the final section, by an interpretation of Austerlitz as a non-testimonial, non-biographic text. Among the seismic shifts set off in the conceptual fabric of Sebald’s works by the transformation of trauma into melancholy, the one that concerns the author’s assessment of historical catastrophe is perhaps the most potent. For Sebald, catastrophes are the critical moments in which the equivalence of social organization and the laws of nature, latent in modern societies, comes to the fore. In those who are affected by them, the sudden leap from latency to actuality manifests itself in a lack of comprehension and, generally, a pattern of behavior typical for people who are undergoing a traumatic experience. It is undeniable that in the many episodes of extraordinary cruelty that figure so prominently in Sebald’s work, the breakdown of “the usual antithesis between nature and history” often occurs in individual minds; for in these episodes, the sheer magnitude of death and destruction is so completely out of proportion with everyday experience that it seems to be caused by a natural 5

Adorno rewrites this text some forty years later in a chapter of his Negative Dialectics entitled “World Spirit and Natural History” (354–60).

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catastrophe. Examples are Sebald’s long discussions, in “Between History and Natural History” (“Geschichte,” 357–63) and On the Natural History of Destruction (Natural History, 60–68), of Alexander Kluge’s “The Air Attack on Halberstadt,” which begins with a forceful description, in a series of eye-witness accounts, of futile attempts by the inhabitants of Halberstadt to integrate the sudden devastation of their city into their everyday routine (Kluge, 62–63). Sebald and Kluge are convinced, however, that the dialectic of history and nature is only inadequately portrayed as long as the portrayal is limited to the victims’ point of view. For what this focus on the individual conceals is that the “naturalization” of the disastrous event, which expresses itself in his inability to grasp its purpose, is complemented, on the side of the attackers, by a lapse of rational organization into irrational conduct. In his text, Kluge takes this double-sidedness into account when he adds to his survey of impromptu survival techniques adopted by one of Halberstadt’s citizens, in a section entitled “strategy from below,” another section which, under the corresponding heading “strategy from above,” reconstructs the organizational structure underlying the attacks (Kluge 43, 48). Sebald, too, dismisses the focus on the victims as incomplete and concentrates on the dehumanization that results from the supersession of human agency by increasingly automatic processes. In On the Natural History of Destruction, for instance, the narrator maintains that the systematic air raids against the German civilian population continued even after their military effectiveness had become dubious. The Royal Air Force carried on, the narrator says, even when selective attacks could be made from the air, with far greater precision, on targets like factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions, and the main transport arteries – operations which, as Albert Speer commented in his memoirs, would very soon have paralyzed the entire system of production. (Natural History, 17)

In his search for the reasons of this erratic behavior, the narrator discovers that it ceases to appear irrational if one looks at it from a different angle: the enterprise, which required an enormous logistic apparatus, could not simply be stopped because it had developed a momentum of its own, similar to the automatism inherent in every single attack wave (Kluge, 62–63; Natural History, 65). The effort to adjust the armaments industry and the military to a new strategy would just have been too costly, in terms of both time and money (Natural History, 17–20). Thus, the story is intended to illustrate the inhumanity inherent in a form of rationality that disregards such human attributes as freedom and the

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ability to suffer. It describes how the final causes of the bombings shifted further and further away from the human beings involved, those who were killed as well as those responsible for their violent death. In another episode concerned with the maddening logic of war and war-related production, Sebald shows that by marginalizing humans and by relinquishing the power of shaping history to automatic, self-perpetuating processes, modern societies relapse into a prehistoric, quasinatural, uncivilized state. Consider the following description of a sea battle between the English and the Dutch in The Rings of Saturn: The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required – from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth – to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. (Rings, 78)

In reflecting on the battle, it is not only the extent of human suffering that “defeat[s] our powers of comprehension” – it is also the apparent absurdity of spending a staggering amount of natural resources and human labor on something that was “predestined for destruction.” Of course, the narrator realizes that the battle was fought to push a very real political agenda: “to extort trading advantages” (Rings, 78), as he puts it. But the fact that the battle is immediately followed by Holland’s swift decline and England’s rise, two inexplicable events given that the conflict itself ended in a stalemate, suggests that it is not human skill at all that determines the course of history, but tiny, unforeseeable shifts in the texture of the natural world: perhaps England, the narrator says, solely owes its supremacy on the oceans “to the vagaries of the wind and the waves that day” (Rings, 78). Kluge and Sebald’s texts about the allied air raids thus pursue a double strategy. From the distance of several decades – Kluge’s account was published in 1977, Sebald’s texts appeared in 1982 and 1999, respectively6 – the two authors attempt to make accessible the experience of the victims on the one hand and the socio-political conditions behind the attacks on the other. What this twofold approach forcefully demonstrates is that the dialectic of history and natural history can be observed on both levels, while individual experience and historical analysis nonetheless remain ultimately incompatible. When the inhabitants of Halberstadt, in the critical moment when the bombardment occurred, per6

Sebald’s essay “Luftkrieg und Literatur” is the German published version of lectures given in Zurich in autumn 1997.

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ceived it as a natural catastrophe, they were unable to conceive of it as a logical result of the excess of rational organization characteristic of modern societies. It is crucial to note that it is the second aspect, and not the first, that gives rise to the idea that permeates so many of Sebald’s works and especially the novel Austerlitz: the idea that even in peaceful times, social organization approximates the laws of nature. No new catastrophe is needed to make history relapse into prehistory; from the perspective of the twentieth century, history itself is a constant catastrophe. Austerlitz’s melancholy, then, is the state of mind that corresponds to a view of history that is painfully aware of the latency of catastrophe in our age. As such, his suffering is fundamentally different from that of survivors of trauma, in the sense that it cannot be cured by a process of “remembering, repeating, and working through” (Freud, “Erinnern”); it will persist as long as the social conditions on which it depends remain unchanged. As I will show in the next section, Austerlitz depsychologizes suffering in much the same way as Kluge and Sebald’s texts about the air war, in which the individual perspective of the survivors is complemented by a more objective “strategy from above.” To demonstrate that suffering in Austerlitz is more than just an after-effect of a traumatic individual experience, I shall focus on what is a crucial trope not only in the novel but also in many of Sebald’s stories: the image of exile. Austerlitz’s involuntary voyage to England in 1939, which appears to be the repressed cause of his despair, is subject to a transformation that eliminates its causal character. Converted into a psychologically unfounded, completely unspecific feeling of disorientation, a feeling that the protagonist shares with almost all the other characters in Sebald’s novel and beyond (including those who never had a “traumatic” experience), the biographical contingency becomes a universal experience, weighing on all those who confront history. This transformation involves the creation of a highly sophisticated topography, a system of spatial metaphors that revolves around the leitmotif of disorientation or “going astray” and which includes such familiar images as the labyrinth, walking, ghosts, the starry sky, the comet, and the bird’s-eye view. Let me make it clear first that suffering, in Austerlitz, has a topographical dimension. A good place to start is the following little anecdote about the raccoon in the Antwerp Zoo:

Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz 309 I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world [der falschen Welt] in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. (Austerlitz, 4)

There can be no doubt that the bizarre behavior of the raccoon hints at the kind of disorder Sebald’s protagonist is suffering from. Endlessly repeating a senseless act, the little animal desperately tries to come to terms with the fact that it has somehow gone astray. Surrounded by the “unreal world” of the zoo, to which it cannot adapt, it feels misplaced. The idea of “going astray,” which is already implied in this image, is later reinforced by the fact that the zoo’s Nocturama is superimposed, in the memory of the narrator, on the Salle des pas perdus in the Central Station – the very place where Austerlitz and the narrator meet for the first time. This superimposition, which transforms the Nocturama into an ominous “hall of lost steps” and the raccoon into Austerlitz, is the first indicator that disorientation, in Sebald, is not meant metaphorically but literally: it has something to do with walking. Later in the book, we encounter the following episode about dying moths, which is even more topographical than the previous one: I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief [am Ort ihres Unglücks] even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony. (Austerlitz, 93)

Like the raccoon in the previous example, and like Austerlitz himself, the moths “have lost their way” and find themselves surrounded by a falsche Welt, where they slowly die or “come to grief ” because that world is impossible to comprehend. In his essay on Kafka, Benjamin writes: “One can understand, then, why Kafka never tired of hearing about the forgotten from animals. They are not the goal, to be sure, but one cannot do without them” (BSW, 2: 810). The same applies to Sebald, who often makes use of animals when he is in need of a metaphor for the human condition. When his narrator in the novel chooses to describe Austerlitz’s forlorn state indirectly, by transferring its symptoms to animals, he demonstrates that Austerlitz’s feeling of being exiled now permeates the natural world, of which he himself has become a part. The recurring episodes involving animals show that in the fictional world of the novel, the intrusion of the natural world into the human being is so complete that nature ab-

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sorbs all the properties of the human mind. As a figure devoid of inner life, Austerlitz himself is like an animal. By turning the psychological event of Austerlitz’s experience of being exiled into an absolute spatial metaphor,7 “going astray,” it demonstrates the loss of any inner life in an inhuman age. The metaphor is absolute because disorientation, in Sebald, does not signify anything beyond itself. When Austerlitz appears to have lost his way, this impression cannot simply be translated into a specific mental disorder; it just means, well, that he has lost his way. If we, as readers, want to understand the figure Austerlitz, we have to follow the advice Benjamin gives for interpreting Kafka: that any such interpretation must refrain from applying a convenient psychological framework and focus on the author’s images instead (BSW, 2: 806–07). At the same time, it is impossible to connect the glimpse of hope that we catch in Sebald’s novel to any concrete political program, or even any personal prospect of redemption. There is no doubt, however, that such a glimpse of hope exists. Curiously, the topography of hope and despair in Austerlitz reads like a twisted version of the two “strategies” associated with the air war. In order to visualize the desire to be removed from the course of history, which Austerlitz and his fellows perceive as vertiginous and, quite literally, labyrinthine, Sebald’s topographical metaphors reproduce an essential constructional feature of every labyrinth: the distinction between the “maze-treader” and the elevated onlooker, who has the privilege of viewing the labyrinth from above (Doob, 1). This detail is made clear in yet another episode involving animals. Whereas the moths and the raccoon embody an unspecified forlornness, a flock of pigeons becomes a moving image of perfect orientation. The birds belong to Gerald, Austerlitz’s fellow student at Stower Grange. He mostly admires them, as he says, “for their navigational abilities, which set them apart from all other living creatures” (Austerlitz, 113), and he continues: You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin. (113–14)

7

I use the term “absolute metaphor” according to Hans Blumenberg’s definition (Blumenberg, 9).

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Owing to their ability never to get lost, the pigeons become an allegory for the ideal of perfect orientation. They embody precisely what their fellows in the animal world, as well as their human counterparts, painfully lack: the supernatural skill of always finding a way back home. It is therefore not surprising that in Gerald’s imagination, as in the Christian iconographic tradition, the pigeon appears as an incarnation of the Holy Ghost: He kept imagining them suddenly sailing down to him out of the sky, with sunlight filtered through the feathers of their motionless, outstretched wings, and landing with a faint coo in their throats on the sill of the window where, as he said, he often stood for hours on end. (114)

We get an impression of how desperately Sebald’s characters wish to impersonate that ideal themselves, and how cruelly their desire remains unfulfilled, if we consider Gerald’s further destiny. Partly due to scientific speculations that “pigeons take their bearings from the constellations” (114), Gerald studies astronomy and later uses his share from the sale of Andromeda Lodge to buy – a Cessna. This episode provides further proof that we are dealing with an intricate topography: an ideal dwelling-place, which is named after a galaxy, is transformed into a plane in order to bring about another transformation, the transformation of the astronomer Gerald into a pigeon, which is supposed to endow him with the supernatural gift of being perfectly oriented at all times. Stars, home, walking, place, misplacement, disorientation – these are some of the themes that are at stake in a spatial imagery that is constructed around two axes, the vertical view and the view from above. Whereas the moths and the raccoon are confined to the vertical view, only the pigeons can transcend it, and Gerald’s attempt to imitate them ends tragically. His Cessna crashes in the Alps, establishing the bitter truth that humans, too, are prisoners of the horizontal gaze. Let me finally hint at another remarkable twist that the image of exile performs in Sebald’s novel: here and elsewhere in the author’s works, the activities of writing and walking are curiously tied together while the text itself becomes the labyrinth that leads writer and reader astray. Confronted with the dizzying, irrational course of history, authors who appear in Sebald’s works find themselves in the same position as his character Gerald: confined to an impenetrable maze, they strive to assume the position of a privileged onlooker, only to be thrown back into the labyrinth. Whenever the idea of walking becomes thematic, which is frequently the case in Sebald’s texts, the motif occurs under the auspices of psycho-

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logical suffering. Much in the same way as the narrator in “All’estero” (Vertigo, 33–37), who feels the inexplicable urge to spend whole days walking through Vienna up to the point of complete exhaustion, Jacques Austerlitz feels compelled to spend his nights wandering through London precisely in a moment of personal crisis: when the repressed memories of his childhood in Prague begin to resurface. Clearly, his nightly excursions represent just another irreversible translation of mental properties into spatial relations, equivalent to the absolute visualization of uprootedness and disorientation that we saw in Sebald’s literary zoo. What makes this example special is not so much that it is set in the world of humans; it is the fact that Sebald uses it to compare disorientation to aphasia. Shortly before Austerlitz takes up his restless wanderings, he experiences a serious crisis in his dealings with words. What starts as a writer’s block soon extends to all activities involving language, even reading. Very much like Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, he experiences a rapid decrease in his sense of semiotic continuity, a disintegration of texts into smaller and smaller particles: I could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame. (Austerlitz, 124)

The gradual dissolution of meaningful sentences into an unreadable “trail” left behind by a snail-like creature reveals that the invasion of the natural world has become so rampant that it now occupies another truly essential human domain: language. Elsewhere in the text, we get the final confirmation that the progressive atomization of language experienced by Austerlitz not only anticipates his desperate attempts to reach the exit or the center of the maze that is London, but that language itself has become the maze, the “unreal world” that imprisons him. Austerlitz imagines language as a city in which he has lost his way: If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, […] then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. (Austerlitz, 124)

But if we interpret Austerlitz as a failed writer, who “cannot find his way through this urban sprawl” of language, what, then, is Sebald’s image of the writer who succeeds and who, like Rousseau, Stendhal,

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Hebel, and Sebald himself, apparently manages to subdue language and to exert control over it? After what we have seen, it should come as no surprise that Sebald chooses a metaphor from the field of astronomy to depict his ideal of authorship: namely, the comet. “There Is a Comet in the Sky” is Sebald’s title for his little piece about Johann Peter Hebel, and he leaves no doubt that Hebel and the comet are one and the same thing. Curiously, the image of the comet is superimposed on another one, which is far less optimistic: the image of the ghost. Both the comet and the narrator trace their trail of light across our violence-disrupted lives; they see everything that happens down below, but from the greatest conceiveable distance. This strange constellation, in which empathy and indifference become unified, is, one could say, the professional secret of the chronicler. (Logis, 20) [Hebel], despite his didactic tendency, never stands as the preceptor in the center, rather he is always a bit to the side, like the ghosts, several of which wander through his stories, and who are known to have a habit of observing life from their eccentric position in silent amazement and resignation. (Logis, 19)8

The expression “eccentric position,” which is very likely a reminiscence of Hölderlin’s description of Hyperion’s life as “eccentric path” (Hölderlin, 47), enables Sebald to establish a link between the depictions of the author as a ghost and a comet. Detached from everyday life and directed at it from the outside, both embodiments of the authorial gaze are suspended between “empathy and indifference,” between the vertical view and the view from above, between life and death. Looking at life from a cosmic perspective, the author temporarily assumes the position of the privileged onlooker; eventually, however, he must reenter the maze of history and play his part in it. The image of the comet contains this double perspective as well as that of the ghost; after all, a comet is a wandering star.

8

“Beide, der Komet und der Erzähler, ziehen ihre Lichtspur über unser von Gewalt entstelltes Leben, sehen alles, was drunten geschieht, aber aus der denkbar größten Distanz. Die seltsame Konstellation, in der Mitleidenschaft und Indifferenz sich solchermaßen vereinen, ist sozusagen das Berufsgeheimnis eines Chronisten …” (Logis, 20) “Überhaupt steht er [Hebel] trotz seiner didaktischen Neigung nie als Präzeptor in der Mitte, sondern immer ein Stückchen abseits, wie die Gespenster, von denen mehrere umgehen in seinen Geschichten, und die es bekanntlich gewohnt sind, das Leben von ihrer exzentrischen Position aus zu betrachten in stummer Verwunderung und Resignation.” (Logis, 19)

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Thus, Sebald’s story of the author Hebel follows the same logic as his story about the character Gerald. Both episodes represent the impossibility of escaping from the maze of history, or to make sense of a history that has been invaded by nature. Hope, in Sebald, is nothing but the movement of a meteoric rise followed by a falling star that informs the Hebel and Gerald episodes. By realizing his own conception of the ideal author, Sebald himself wants to create a literary practice that would give rise to such hope. Whenever it approaches history, his language, just like Hebel’s, oscillates between involvement and detachment, between the factual and the fictitious, between what I have called the vertical view and the view from above. Whoever tends to understand Sebald as a political author, or to read a specific psychology into his works, should be aware that his views on history as well as his depictions of human suffering are tied up with an aesthetic practice that transforms them into autonomous images within a literary text. It has become apparent, then, that W. G. Sebald’s prose is deeply concerned with the erosion of interiority that characterizes human life in the twentieth century. Released into a fully mechanized world, Sebald’s characters have lost themselves too entirely for their suffering to be described in psychological terms. To capture the full extent of their despair, the author falls back on the melancholic syndrome, combining its powerful imagery with fantasies about the body’s transformation into animal as well as inorganic matter. Ultimately, the narrator’s language itself falls prey to the inescapable vortex of externalization: the last word about Austerlitz’s condition is that he has “gone astray,” an expression that refuses to signify anything beyond itself. In this respect, Sebald shares with other modern authors the experience of falling silent. For him, language has become a collection of empty shells, wondrous yet lifeless, just like the specimens in a natural historical archive. To break the spell of silence that seems to reside at the very center of his literary enterprise, Sebald occasionally allows his prose to embark on a soaring flight, high above the meandering course of storytelling to which it is usually confined. Yet, unfortunately for us and for him, our high-flying hopes to make sense of history can only result in a hard landing.

No Foothold. Institutions and Buildings in W. G. Sebald’s Prose

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No Foothold. Institutions and Buildings in W. G. Sebald’s Prose Michael Niehaus

“I live in a ghost town. Lots of people live here. You know how it is. Somebody finds a place. Words get round. Everybody moves in. It’s a good life.” (David Thomas, Erewhon, 1996)

The following reflections consider the relation that the characters in the books of W. G. Sebald establish with institutions. But first of all: What is meant by the term “institutions”? In English this word is used little differently than in German. In English you can say, for instance, that Ambrose Adelwarth from the third narrative of The Emigrants, died “in a mental institution.” In German, in this case you speak of an “Anstalt.” Sebald uses this word, too (Die Ausgewanderten, 150); the English translation uses the term “sanatorium” (Emigrants, 103), but “insane asylum” would be more correct. So institutions are something you can die in. But how can you live in them and with them? And how can you live without them? According to the very general and seemingly simple sociological conception of “institution,” institutions grow from the process of institutionalization. Forms of social behavior are institutionalized when they become a habit, when they take on an obligatory character and achieve a structure of their own. In this sense every subject functions as a point of intersection for many institutions. According to the main theorist of institutions in Germany, Arnold Gehlen, regular written correspondence exemplifies the concept of the institution (Gehlen, 199). Institutions unburden us by directing our actions. They tell us what we have to do. This force affects various spheres of one’s life, from private correspondence to the institutions of marriage or military service. Institutions are a necessary simplification of the world. With them in force, we do not have to ask for reasons to do something. The institutions provide us a reason.

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On the other hand, it is said that institutions have something to do with alienation. If the participants step back, a given institution may face us as something which has a reality of its own, a reality which stands opposite to man as an exterior and obliging fact (Berger and Luckmann, 59–60). They are in the position of the Third. This raises a question: What kind of reality is it that is said to stand in front of us and to be independent from us? You cannot see institutions in the literal sense. So it is not clear what it means to stand in front of an institution (in a similar way it is not clear what in Kafka’s legend Vor dem Gesetz is meant by: to stand “in front of the law,” as Jacques Derrida has pointed out [Derrida, 43–45]). You can only stand in front of a building – in front of the school, the university or the mental institution in Ithaca. The one who steps into the building that houses the institution in some way does not immediately join the institution. Nevertheless the building gives us an image of the institution, of a certain aspect of the institution. The institution is visualized as a place which could be entered. If you do so you cross a border. For instance, if you join the army you assume certain responsibilities and gain certain rights. In this sense an institution is more than the result of an institutionalization, of a process of habitualization. The limitation is the prior condition of the legal institutions (which must be established by other legal institutions). On the one hand there’s the institutionalization, which is perceived only if you step back; on the other side there may be the legal institution which you can join as if you would step into a building. We must keep both sides in mind when we approach the question of the institutional in W. G. Sebald’s œuvre. It can easily be seen that the institutions offer no ground and no support to the figures presented in the books of Sebald. They seem to be extraneous to the institutional order. One could say that this is already an implication of their status as emigrants. This emigrant status is a characteristic of more or less all the figures who are allowed to speak in these texts. They have the emigrant status already before they emigrate. For instance Paul Bereyter in the second narrative of The Emigrants: he is a primary school teacher in his uncanny homeland (Unheimliche Heimat is a volume of collected essays by Sebald). The first-person narrator, his former pupil, describes Bereyter in his institutional function. But the report is only concerned with the unconventional teaching methods and the unusual subject matters performed by this extraordinary teacher. It makes clear that Paul Bereyter is an examplary teacher exactly because he emigrated from his institutional function. This is represented especially through his fre-

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quent leaving of the school building during the lessons (in his review the narrator associates him with the “Wandervogelbewegung” (Die Ausgewanderten, 61; “the German Wandervogel hiking movement,” Emigrants, 40) from the beginning of the twentieth century). When the lessons cannot take place outdoors, he prefers to teach the children standing at the open window, “half facing the class and half turned to look out” (34).1 In his teaching, Paul Bereyter relies neither on school as an institution nor on the institutionalized practices of instruction. At the same time, this stance makes him unstable; “at any time,” explains the narrator “– in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings – he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who always was in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself ” (42).2 In Sebald’s texts, the characters’ relationship to an institutional structure is more named than described. There is not much said about Kafka as “Vicesekretär der Prager Arbeiterversicherungsanstalt” (Schwindel, 163) in the third narrative of Vertigo, nor about Dr. Henry Selwyn as unsuitable husband in the first story of The Emigrants, or further regarding Jacques Austerlitz as university teacher. None of the figures in Sebald’s texts is in its place within the institution. On the contrary, the figures always seem to be some type of foreign body and their place within the institution is obstructed rather than furnished. The photograph of Austerlitz’s workplace shows a sort of “a stockroom of books and papers with hardly any space left for himself […] among the stacks piled high on the floor and the overloaded shelves” (Austerlitz, 32).3 As described at the beginning of The Rings of Saturn, the room for the lecturer in Romance languages Janine Dakyns has become a glacial “paper landscape” (Rings, 8; “Papierlandschaft,” Ringe, 18) where she has a place to write only on an “easychair drawn more or less into the middle of her room” (Rings, 9).4

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“halb der Klasse, halb dem Draußen zugewandt” (Die Ausgewanderten, 52). “[ J]ederzeit, mitten im Unterricht, während der Pause oder wenn wir unterwegs waren, geschehen, daß er abwesend und abseits irgendwo saß oder stehenblieb, als wäre er […] in Wahrheit die Untröstlichkeit selbst,” (Die Ausgewanderten, 62). [Ein] “Papiermagazin […], in dem zwischen den am Fußboden und vor den überfrachteten Regalen sich stapelnden Konvoluten kaum Platz gewesen ist für ihn selber” (Austerlitz, 47). “ein mehr oder weniger in die Mitte des Büros gerückter Sessel” (Ringe, 18).

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Descriptions like these approach the level of allegory, because they present a tableau which seems to be out of time.5 An isolated foreign body is wrapped up in a sort of cocoon and follows its own way. The case of Janine Dakyns is similar to that of the teacher Paul Bereyter in that there is no real relation to the surrounding institution, and there is no confrontation with it that could be narrated. Such allegorising tableaus are exeptions. They are islands in the report of the first person narrator. As is well known, Sebald’s writings structure this report through different ways of traveling. One can say that in these books traveling achieves an ontological quality. It is in a way derived from the emigrant status. Ambrose Adelwarth is a traveller not only because Sebald presents us the diary of his journey to Jerusalem. He is a traveller until he has reached Ithaca. The emigrants are travellers because they are not able to live in the sense that they cannot create a comfortable place for themselves. Their domicile is uninhabitable. This is also the case for characters who never leave their home, such as the members of the Irish family named Ashbury in The Rings of Saturn. While staying with the Ashburys, the first person narrator has the impression that they live in their house “like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle down in the place where they have ended up” (Rings, 210).6 The bare walls of the Ashbury-house remind of one “of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked” (210).7 Jacques Austerlitz’s apartment is nearly empty too. Altogether, there are very few residences in Sebald’s texts and they are only described if they are uncomfortable. The best example occurs in the last narrative of The Emigrants and involves a description of Max Ferber’s (originally Max Aurach’s) studio in Manchester. This is not a room in which one lives, it is just the place where the painter does his lonely work, where nothing changes over the years and where, in his own words, nothing is added except “the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously 5

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In an interview Sebald has stated, “daß der realistische Text sich ansatzweise in allegorisches Erzählen vorwagen darf, sich ansatzweise in Allegorien verdichten muß” (Boedecker, 236) (“that the realistic text is allowed to move partially toward allegorical narration, it must concentrate itself partially in allegories”). For the allegorical in Sebald’s prose, see also Oliver Sill. “wie Flüchtlinge, die Furchtbares mitgemacht haben und die es nicht wagen, an dem Platz, an dem sie gestrandet sind, sich niederzulassen” (Ringe, 250). [die] “bewundernswerten Karten des höchsten Nordens, auf denen fast gar nichts verzeichnet ist” (Ringe, 250).

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fell” (Emigrants, 161).8 The narrator in The Rings of Saturn gives a similarly sparse account of Michael Hamburger’s house that includes nothing but a photograph of a writing table that has fallen into disuse and of “the jiffy bags and packages” (Rings, 184)9 piled up in a corner. And he wastes no words on the living quarters of the habitations of Uncle Kasimir and Aunt Fini, who have settled down in Cedar Glen West. When the narrator visits them to learn something about the emigration of Ambros Adelwarth and their own emigration he only points out, “that the bungalow condominiums were indistinguishable from each other” (Emigrants, 72)10 and that this “old peoples’ town” (Emigrants, 72; “Altenkolonie,” Die Ausgewanderten, 106) “is laid out in a strictly geometrical pattern” (Emigrants, 73; “streng nach den Grundsätzen der Geometrie angeordnet,” Die Ausgewanderten, 106). The included photo of Uncle Adelwarth’s living room in Mamaroneck appears, “as if Uncle Adelwarth was expecting a stranger to call at any moment” (Emigrants, 102; “als rechne der Onkel Adelwarth jederzeit mit dem Eintreffen eines fremden Gastes,” Die Ausgewanderten, 148), who certainly never came.11 The apartments and homes in Sebald’s books are not places to meet or to encounter other people, they are not part of a social environment. The characters have not established their inner selves, their living quarters or their habits. They lack the support structure of institutionalized ways to behave. This comes to light if you compare this world of the emigrants with the single counter-example that can be found in the work of Sebald. It is a matter of the childhood memories later on recorded by Max Ferber’s mother. The narrator compares them with “one of those evil German fairy tales”12 (Emigrants, 193), because they represent a common rustic life of Christians and Jews about 1900 that is refuted by the future. In these sketches of remembrances from childhood the sentences have the following form:

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“der Unrat, der anfalle bei der Verfertigung der Bilder, und der Staub, der sich unablässig herniedersenke” (Die Ausgewanderten, 238). “Versandcouverts und Kartonagen”(Ringe, 219). “daß die jeweils für vier Parteien gebauten Bungalow-Condominiums so gut wie ununterscheidbar voneinander waren” (Die Ausgewanderten, 106). Of course, the living room of Uncle Adelwarth has this trait in common with many other middle class living rooms. But in the case of Uncle Adelwarth this characteristic is a symptom that signifies the emigrant status. To the end he keeps a scrupulous order in the externals. “eines jener bösen deutschen Märchen” (Die Ausgewanderten, 289).

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On Sunday afternoon Papa does his accounts. He takes a small key out of the leather pouch, unlocks the gleaming walnut bureau, opens the centre section, puts the key back into his pouch, sits down with a certain ceremony, and, settling himself, takes out the hefty account book (Emigrants, 199).13

The records of the childhood in Steinach are written entirely in present tense. This tense indicates the arrangement and in some way the institution of life: The regularly repeated and therefore institutionalized procedures and the interior decoration form a unity. Life is established. It becomes a tableau. By contrast, the emigrants cannot establish themselves. It is not enough to explain this on a psychological or sociological level. It must be analyzed on a topological level as well. One can say that the emigrants in Sebald’s works experienced an event that prevents them from feeling at home and that they remain bachelors who are beyond pleasure principle. But what does it mean to be beyond pleasure principle? The point at issue is that they are external to themselves, that they don’t understand the things that happen to them. Before entering more into particulars on the topological level, first a few remarks about the scenes of communication in Sebald’s texts. From a formal point of view, these communicative exchanges comprise a large portion of his prose. Henry Selwyn, Madame Landau, Uncle Kasimir und Aunt Fini, Dr. Abramsky, Max Ferber, Jacques Austerlitz – all speak with the first person narrator. Moreover, they only speak with him; significantly, there is no situation with three persons: the place of the third is not occupied. Nevertheless, the reader has the impression that there is a total lack of communication. The communication between characters is but a report that is a kind of monologue and thereby detaches from a genuine faceto-face exchange. Sebald uses no quotation marks at all in his narrative texts. Of course there is often indirect speech, which eliminates the need for direct quotation. But this isn’t the only reason this punctuation is absent. The lack of quotation marks is also connected with the fact that there is no dialogue at all. Especially in Austerlitz, dialogue is absent and the monologues are ostentatiously inserted into one another. In this frame narrative, Austerlitz reports to the first person narrator what his 13

“Am Sonntagnachmittag macht der Papa seine Geschäftsbücher. Er holt ein Schlüsselchen aus einem Lederetui, sperrt den in seinem Glanz ruhig immer dastehenden Nußbaumsekretär auf, klappt das Mittelteil heraus, gibt das Schlüsselchen ins Etui zurück, setzt sich mit einer gewissen Feierlichkeit zurecht und nimmt den Kontokurrentfolianten zur Hand” (Die Ausgewanderten, 298).

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nurse Vera has reported to him about his father Maximilian. On the one hand the first person narrator gives no answers to the stories and explanations told by his witnesses or informants. On the other hand, these people do not address the first person narrator in their speeches. He virtually fails to exist in the others’ speech. For example with Paul Bereyter, there is only the level of content aspect, but no relationship aspect, no level for an interpersonal connection. As a result, the relation between the first person narrator and Austerlitz remains totally abstract (the pure coincidence of their meetings is repeatedly stressed and this indicates that the possibility of an institutionalized relationship between them does not even come into question). It is spoken. But there are no replies, no clarifications, no doubts.14 The first person narrator, one could say, is only the place in the narrative structure in which a story or a statement is laid down. Without addressing to him, Max Ferber hands over his deceased mother’s records to the narrator and comments: “Deswegen gebe ich das Kuvert jetzt lieber aus der Hand” (Die Ausgwanderten, 289); in the English translation there is an address to the narrator added: “That is why I would rather you took this package,” Emigrants, 193).15

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There may be one major exception: In the first story of The Emigrants there is an indirect report of some kind of communicative acting; it is significant that this is the only scene taking place in the home of the first person narrator, in the living rooms of his “almost totally empty house” (Emigrants, 18; “noch fast ganz leeren Haus,” Die Ausgewanderten, 30). The passage is intricate and strange enough to be quoted here: “On one of these visits, Clara being away in town, Dr Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick. I could not think of any adequate reply, but Dr Selwyn, after a pause for thought, confessed (no other word will do) that in recent years he had been beset with homesickness more and more. When I asked where it was that he felt drawn back to, he told me […].” (Emigrants, 18; “Bei einer dieser Gelegenheiten, Clara war in die Stadt gefahren, gerieten wir, Dr. Selwyn und ich, in eine längere Unterhaltung, die davon ausging, daß Dr. Selwyn mich fragte, ob ich nie Heimweh verspüre. Ich wußte darauf nichts Rechtes zu erwidern, Dr. Selwyn hingegen machte nach einer Bedenkpause mir das Geständnis – ein anderes Wort träfe den Sachverhalt nicht –, daß ihn das Heimweh im Verlauf der letzten Jahre mehr und mehr angekommen sei. Auf meine Frage, wohin es ihn denn zurückziehe, erzählte er mir […],” Die Ausgewanderten, 30). One cannot find out whether the narrator and Austerlitz say “Sie” oder “Du” to each other. It is surprising, when one notices by the way that Max Aurach and the first person narrator say “Sie” to each other: “Deutschland, müssen Sie wissen, erscheint mir als ein zurückgebliebenes, zerstörtes, irgendwie extraterritoriales Land […]” (Die Ausgewanderten, 270). In Austerlitz nothing like this can be found. One can draw the conclusion that the avoidance of all direct addresses has only here become part of the poetological rules.

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Therefore the narrator, who is listening to the reports, doesn’t move into the position of a therapist. It doesn’t help Austerlitz at all that he confides the story of his life to the narrator, and nothing the silent narrator could say to Austerlitz would help him. In Sebald’s world there is no talking cure, language possesses no healing powers. Speech is not communicative. Words fail to reach and affect the emigrants. Marie de Verneuil describes Austerlitz during their unhappy days in Marienbad as a “machine working by some unknown mechanism” (Austerlitz, 303).16 To learn something about the mechanism of the emigrants, one has to refer to the topological level. It is the otherness of the places and of the buildings from their travels that take the place of the social Other that has disappeared for the emigrants. Austerlitz emphasizes the institutional dimension of the buildings. Near the beginning and close to the end of this book two monumental buildings are (also photographically) presented: the courthouse in Brussels, “the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe” (Austerlitz, 38)17, and the newly-built Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In both cases, the monstrous buildings represent an institution. But this representation is misplaced. From the beginning, this representation fails because the building of the courthouse “began in the 1880s at the urging of the bourgeoisie of Brussels, over hastily”(Austerlitz, 29ff.)18 and because the national library is “inspired by the late President’s wish to perpetuate his memory” (Austerlitz, 276).19 But the buildings are in and of themselves also misplaced. This is minutely depicted in Austerlitz’s visits as an architectural historian. The interior of the Belgian courthouse turns out to be a heterotopal labyrinth with stairs leading to nowhere and with “doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority” (Austerlitz, 39).20 The edifice fails in its representative function because the sanctioned power that should be represented is an internal exterior. 16

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[eine] “Maschine, deren Mechanismus man nicht kennt” (Austerlitz, 307). It is an exception that this state of affairs is stated at all. In fact, Marie de Verneuil is the only person in Sebald’s books really trying to hit the interlocutor with her words. It seems as if only a woman could do so. “die größte Anhäufung von Steinquadern in ganz Europa” (Austerlitz, 42). “auf Drängen der Brüsseler Bourgeoisie überstürzt in Angriff genommen” (Austerlitz, 43). [inspiriert vom] “Selbstverewigungswillen des Staatspräsidenten” (Austerlitz, 388). “die von niemandem je zu betreten seien und deren ummauerte Leere das innerste Geheimnis sei aller sanktionierten Gewalt” (Austerlitz, 43).

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That is to say it is not only an empty but also an inaccessible place that cannot be represented. Paradoxically by containing the inaccessible place, this monstrous building can function as an allegory of the institution that should be represented. The description of the courthouse in Austerlitz is a good example how Sebald unfolds the question of institutions on a topological level. In another way the national library in Paris exceeds the logic of representation. Austerlitz’s description of this gigantic edifice characterizes it as externally “unwelcoming” (Austerlitz, 276)21 whereas internally it seems to be established “on purpose to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers” (Austerlitz, 278; “eigens zur Verunsicherung und Erniedrigung der Leser,” Austerlitz, 391). The building transforms the users into foreign bodies. From the outside with its four towers it represents a complete, regulated functionality. La tour des lois, La tour des temps, la tour des nombres and la tour des lettres are associated with the Four Ministries in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Orwell’s novel shows, totalitarian systems surpass representation. In NineteenEighty-Four, the ministries function contrary to their title (e.g. the ministry of love is the place of torture). In the national library of Paris the “size” (“Größendimensionierung”) and the “degree of complexity of the” – invisible – “information and control system inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability” (Austerlitz, 281ff.).22 Jacques Austerlitz, the traveller, the emigrant, enters and exits these buildings as a visitor. They are nothing more than peculiarly lucid and horrific examples in a long series of buildings that contain institutions and engage the subject. In most cases, the emigrants feel in some way disgusted when they are confronted with institutional buildings. Perhaps the strongest expression of this disgust is the complete listing over two pages of all those institutions that infested the apocalyptic Jerusalem in Ambrose Adelwarth’s Agenda. Here, the pure quantity disqualifies the institutions. They give no foothold. Overall, Sebald’s characters always seem to be visitors of the institutions in which they reside. This is the case not only for the numerous 21 22

“menschenabweisend […]” (Austerlitz, 388). “daß […] die allumfassende, absolute Perfektion des Konzepts in der Praxis durchaus zusammenfallen kann, ja letztlich zusammenfallen muß mit einer chronischen Dysfunktion und mit konstitutioneller Labilität” (Austerlitz, 394–395).

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museums, libraries and memorials referenced in Sebald’s books but also for the boarding school Max Ferber attends. At first, this building reminds him of a “prison or mental asylum” (Emigrants, 189)23 and he fears a short stay could drive him insane. But the “regime of the school” (Emigrants, 189)24 turns out to be “in fact fairly lax” (Emigrants, 189; more precisely: “weitgehend unreglementiert […],” Die Ausgwanderten, 283). It is not only through the school-uniform, what Sebald calls a “fool’s motley” (Emigrants, 189; “Narrenkleid,” Die Ausgewanderten, 283), that this regime borders on the “Karnevalistische” (Die Ausgwanderten 283; not well translated with “point of anarchy,” Emigrants 189). The institution does not attempt to control or suppress the subjects and therefore is connected with the terms “Verwilderung” and even “Gefühl der Freiheit” (Die Ausgewanderten; 285, “sense of freedom,” Emigrants, 190). The boarding school Jacques Austerlitz attends also suffers from a strange weakness of the institution (this may call to mind the “Institut Benjamenta” in Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser, one of Sebald’s favourite authors). The description of this weakness borders on a virtual repetition of the description of anarchy, an “often almost carnivalesque lawlessness” (Austerlitz, 60; eine “oft ans Karnevalistische grenzende […] Gesetzlosigkeit,” Austerlitz, 88). It is not the teachers but the pupils who have the command. And even in the cases of corporal punishment you could gain “the impression that the victim was temporarily granting the headmaster who inflicted the punishment a privilege due in fact only to him, the boy who had reported to take it” (Austerlitz, 59; “als räumte das Opfer dem Vollstrecker der Strafe zeitweise ein eigentlich nur ihm, dem zur Bestrafung Angetretenen, zustehendes Vorrecht ein,” Austerlitz, 86). The institution has been perverted into a sort of containment facility. It is a building that is unable to institute the subjects within it and is unable to structure the relations between the inhabitants. The emigrants leave these institutes more or less untouched. And that’s not the worst, for Sebald. The mental hospitals in Sebald’s works similarly receive the emigrants and let them go. The emigrants do not become real inmates, but rather seem to maintain a distance to the institution and its representatives. A peculiarly subdued atmosphere presides as Austerlitz wanders the corridors of the St. Clement’s hospital in a medication-induced

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“Straf- oder Irrenanstalt” (Die Ausgewanderten, 283). “Regime des Instituts” (Die Ausgewanderten, 283).

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“curiously remote state of mind” (Austerlitz, 230).25 A similar strangeness prevails as he receives the as yet uninterrupted visits of Marie de Verneuil in one of the men’s wards of the Salpêtrière, a gigantic complex of buildings, where the borders between hospital and penitentiary have always been blurred” (Austerlitz, 269).26 In the first case it is the regular gardening, in the second case it is a small pharmacopeia from the eighteenth-century that guides Austerlitz back into his special way of life. But it’s never some communicative relation that raises or ruins these characters. To the end, Ambrose Adelwarth obediently goes to electroshock therapy carried out without a word. Even this destruction seems to be more a voluntary act than an act of violence initiated by the institution. Even in death he still appears to be an integral visitor in Ithaca, “in patent-leather boots, wearing full uniform, so to speak” (Emigrants, 116).27 The relation between the emigrants and the places they visit can be characterised with the help of a distinction conducted by the French ethnologist Marc Augé in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. He draws a (problematic) distinction between the so-called anthropological places and the non-places. The anthropological place is defined as the “concrete and symbolic construction of space” (Augé, 51). People refer to this as construction, because it assigns them a place. Anthropological places include on the one hand the inherent unity and privacy of the home, and on the other hand the market square as a place of exchange and a place to meet. The anthropological place has a certain “stability” (Augé, 54); it cannot immediately be removed, because it is anchored in the symbolic construction of space and in the practices of a social group. One therefore could say that anthropological places are institutions in a full sense. By contrast, the “traveller’s space” is “the archetype of non-place” (Augé, 86). For Augé, the culminating point, the “last pose” of the traveller is the abolition or the sublation of place (Augé, 89). Paradigmatically, it takes place on “the deck of a ship putting out to sea.” The “description of the vanishing land is sufficient to evoke the passenger still straining to see it: soon it is only a shadow, a rumour, a noise” (Augé, 89). In the Agenda of Ambrose Adelwarth such a moment is recorded describing the departure from Venice: “The lights of the city 25 26

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[in einer] “seltsam abgehobenen Verfassung” (Austerlitz, 328). “in welchem die Grenzen zwischen Heil- und Strafanstalt von jeher unsicher gewesen sind” (Austerlitz, 378). “in Lackstiefeln und sozusagen in voller Montur” (Die Ausgewanderten, 171).

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receding into the distance under a veil of rain. The islands of the lagoon like shadows” (Emigrants, 128).28 The travel journal then significantly includes an unmarked Chateaubriand citation in French: “Mal du pays. Le navigateur écrit son journal à la vue de la terre qui s’éloigne” (Emigrants, 128; Die Ausgewanderten, 188).29 But the non-place is more than the sublation of place realized through the growing distance between the lonely spectator and his land. First of all, for Augé, the notion of non-place designates an actual space. It includes all those places the subject crosses without ever returning. All those places Sebald extensively catalogues are non-places: the waiting rooms, the hotels, the museums, the airports, the tourist sights, the memorials, the railway stations, the highways. According to Augé, the multiplication of non-places is a characteristic of supermodernity. While the anthopological places induce organic social structures, the non-places produce a kind of solitary contractual relation (Augé, 94). The isolated subject is spoken to as client, passenger or user. They tend to address him only when he enters and when he leaves a given space or area – at the check-in and the check out, at the reception desk or at the ticket offices whose tickets Sebald reproduces in his texts (Schwindel, 83; Austerlitz, 373). 28

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“Die sich entfernenden Lichter der Stadt unter einem Regenschleier. Die Inseln in der Lagune wie Schatten” (Die Ausgewanderten, 188). Just like Ambros Adelwarth and Cosmo the Vicomte de Chateaubriand travelled from Venice to Jerusalem. The Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem (1811) was the result of this journey. Chateaubriand was the travelling writer par excellence. It is not by chance that Marc Augé explains his ideas about the abolition of place in travelling by example of Chateaubriand: “one thinks at this point of Chateaubriand, who travelled incessantly, who knew how to see, but who saw mainly the death of civilizations, the destruction or degradation of once-glittering landscapes, the disappointing shards of crumbled monuments.” (Augé, 87; see also 87–91) In the pages dedicated to Chateaubriand in Die Ringe des Saturn Sebald gives a listing of his numerous travelling stations (Rings, 257, Ringe, 305). In Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire, the departure from Venice by ship is described as follows: “A mesure que la barque s’éloignait, je voyois s’enfoncer sous l’horizon les lumières de Venise, et je distinguois, comme les taches des flots, les différentes ombres des îles […]” (Oeuvres, 5: 111). The quotation Sebald uses in The Emigrants is from Chateaubriand’s famous Mémoires d’outre-tombe. It is related to travelling in a figurative sense: “Dans combien de lieux ai-je déjà commencé à les écrire, et dans quel lieu les finirai-je? Combien de temps me promènerai au bord des bois? Mettons à profit le peu d’instants qui me restent; hâtons nous de peindre ma jeunesse, tandis que j’y touche encore: le navigateur, abandonnant pour jamais un rivage enchanté, écrit son journal à la vue de la terre qui s’éloigne et qui va bientôt disparaître” (I: 77). The words “Mal de Pays” are added by Sebald.

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Non-places assign no places to the subjects. They are unable to regulate or structure the relations between the people who enter them and leave them. At the beginning of Austerlitz, the first person narrator by chance becomes acquainted with Austerlitz in the waiting room of the railway station in Antwerp. Waiting rooms are the unparalleled non-places because strictly speaking they are nothing more than empty boxes. One enters them only to leave again. But Austerlitz enters into a relation with this non-place. It is transformed into an object of his studies in the history of architecture (and this leads to his acquaintance with the narrator). The characters in Sebald’s narratives cross non-places and transform the places they cross into non-places. But at the same time there is the possibility that they feel themselves addressed by these non-places.30 There is the possibility that things that occur or the things that they perceive during their travels cause them to lose their foothold. They are attacked suddenly by a sense of vertigo when they see the bark of the Jäger Gracchus or see the butterfly-man Nabokov. In “All’Estero,” the first person narrator loses his balance in a pizzeria in Verona and must flee. The non-places become buildings primarily when they become places of memory. In The Rings of Saturn the non-places face the visitor as relics of castles or military establishments, from which the past must be disclosed and integrated in the universal history as catastrophe. The Rings of Saturn demonstrate that every non-place can be changed into a forgotten place of memory. But this can be only done if it is undertaken by an individual unprogrammed and beyond institutionalization.31 What does this mean for the position of the subject? This question leads us to the center of Austerlitz, Sebald’s last book. At first, Jacques Austerlitz is more than just a professional at laying bare the places of memory. His inquiries into the history of architecture are but a symptom that indicates Austerlitz is external to himself. He is therefore the quintessence of all emigrants – in a way, the conclusion that can be drawn from the emigrant status. 30

31

The transformation of a place into a non-place on the one hand and the fact that the subject feels itself addressed by this non-place on the other hand takes place paradigmatically in the last story of Vertigo when the first person narrator returns to his hometown which turns out to be an “unheimliche Heimat.” The narrator staying in the guest-house Engelwirt during his visit especially is disturbed by the frescos of the painter Hengge that were sinister to him in his childhood, too. For the term “places of memory” see the works of Pierre Nora, who has published Les lieux de mémoire in several volumes. The lieux de mémoire (being non-places) arise because there are no milieux de mémoire any more (Nora, 11).

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Austerlitz is external to himself because the institutions are external to him. For him there is no anthropological place to meet the social Other or to place the subject. Under this condition, the question of the instituting Third, which shows the subject its proper role, emerges on the topological level. Of course, it is Austerlitz’s own childhood that is closed to him: From age five he grows up in Wales in a joyless rectory with a family that rarely speaks to him. It is not until the rector’s wife has died and the rector gone insane that the child discovers his real name is Jacques Austerlitz. But he still doesn’t know anything about his origins. Indeed, we all have difficulty remembering the first years of our life. What transforms Austerlitz’s past into an inaccessible room are therefore not the missing memories but the missing discourses that grant him access to his past. His experience is characterized by the absence of the symbolic order that provides continuity and assigns place. This is the background for the crucial question in the center of this book: What takes place when Austerlitz pushes open the door to the Ladies Waiting Room of Liverpool Street station? Austerlitz had always felt drawn to this railway station. He had experienced “a kind of heartache […] caused by the vortex of past time” (Austerlitz, 129).32 At first this leads him to efforts to rediscover the history of the space occupied by the railway station that is now up for a major reconstruction. He tries to imagine where the rooms of the hospital for the insane had stood for centuries. And he asks himself, whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station halls und up and down the flights of steps (Austerlitz, 130).33

Such remarks, which encapsulate time in space can be found repeatedly in Austerlitz. For example, in another passage Austerlitz has the impression, “as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher stereometry” (Austerlitz, 185).34 In the 32

33

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“eine Art Herzweh, […] verursacht vom Sog der verflossenen Zeit” (Austerlitz, 186). “ob das Leid und die Schmerzen, die sich dort über die Jahrhunderte angesammelt haben, je wirklich vergangen sind, ob wir sie nicht heute noch, wie ich bisweilen an einem kalten Zug um die Stirn zu spüren glaubte, auf unseren Wegen durch die Hallen und über die Treppen durchqueren” (Austerlitz, 187). “als gäbe es überhaupt keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie verschachtelte Räume” (Austerlitz, 265).

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disused Ladies Waiting Room this experience of place is transferred to the topology of the subject through a metaphysical experience. It is ambigous in a fundamental way. Among other things it is reported by Austerlitz (in a very complicated syntax, even for Sebald): From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and collonades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storeyed structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on. I saw viaducts and footbridges crossing deep chasms thronged with tiny figures who looked to me, said Austerlitz, like prisoners in search of some way of escape from their dungeon, and the longer I stared upwards with my head wrenched painfully back, the more I felt as if the room where I stood were expanding, going on for ever and ever in an improbably foreshortened perspective, at the same time turning back into itself in a way possible only in such a deranged universe. (Austerlitz, 135)35

This vision of a room lets us think of Piranesi’s Carceri; but at the same time it is a vision of remembrance: Memories […] came back to me in the disused Ladies’ Waiting-Room of Liverpool Street station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty grey light, and which seemed to go on for ever. In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained […]. (Austerlitz, 136)36 35

36

“Kaum einen Lidschlag lang sah ich zwischendurch riesige Räume sich auftun, sah Pfeilerreihen und Kollonaden, die in die äußerste Ferne führten, Gewölbe und gemauerte Bogen, die Stockwerke über Stockwerke trugen, Steintreppen, Holzstiegen und Leitern, die den Blick immer weiter hinauszogen, Stege und Zugbrücken, die die tiefsten Abgründe überquerten und auf denen winzige Figuren sich drängten, Gefangene, so dachte ich mir, sagte Austerlitz, die einen Ausweg suchten aus diesem Verlies, und je länger ich, den Kopf schmerzhaft zurückgezwungen, in die Höhe hinaufstarrte, desto mehr kam es mir vor, als dehnte sich der Innenraum, in welchem ich mich befand, als setzte er in der unwahrscheinlichsten perspektivischen Verkürzung unendlich sich fort und beugte sich zugleich, wie das nur in einem derart falschen Universum möglich war, in sich selber zurück” (Austerlitz, 194). “Erinnerungen […] waren es, die mich ankamen in dem aufgelassenen Ladies Waiting Room des Bahnhofs von Liverpool Street, Erinnerungen, hinter denen und in denen sich viel weiter noch zurückreichende Dinge verbargen, immer das eine im andern verschachtelt, gerade so wie die labyrinthischen Gewölbe, die ich in dem staubgrauen Licht zu erkennen glaubte, sich fortsetzten in unendlicher Folge. Tatsächlich hatte ich das Gefühl, sagte Austerlitz, als enthalte der Wartesaal, in dessen Mitte ich wie ein Geblendeter stand, alle Stunden meiner Vergangenheit, all meine von jeher unterdrückten, ausgelöschten Ängste und Wünsche […]” (Austerlitz, 196).

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And so he also has a vision of himself as a four-and-a-half-year-old boy sitting on a bench in this waiting room, just arrived from a children’s transport from Prague – as if it were a “time-image” (Deleuze) in a film by Theo Angelopoulos.37 The crucial point is that this kind of metaphysical experience can only proceed from a non-place and this non-place must be a building. The ambiguity of this experience is indicated poignantly in the text, which refers to it as simultaneously a “vision of imprisonment and liberation”38 (Austerlitz, 135). On the one hand by opening this door Austerlitz gains access to his own hidden past. Following a simple and perhaps obvious interpretation this could lead him to his liberation, to a process of reconstruction of the self and of finding a place. But this does not occur. The disclosure of his own traces provides no liberation. After his return from Prague, Austerlitz summarizes: “It was obviously of little use that I had discovered the sources of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings” (Austerlitz, 228).39 On the topological level, it is immediately clear why this is the case: Austerlitz opens the door to an interior space. This room is a non-place which can only function as a prison. It is a vision of liberation only in the sense that the encounter with the immeasurableness of this prison discloses it. In other words: What takes place here, is not the liberation from the topological constitution of this figure, of this book, or of Sebald’s œuvre, but its explication. In a figurative sense the interior of this building, the immeasurable prison Austerlitz enters is himself. The entrance into an interior space which corresponds to the interior world of the subject is found more than once in the texts of Sebald. In Vertigo, on a visit to a salt mine, Henri Beyle claims that the process of cristallisation is an allegory of the growth of love in the salt mines of our souls.40 In The Rings of Saturn the first person narrator recounts a dream in which he knows with absolute 37 38 39

40

See especially his recent films Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998). [eine] “Gefängnis- und Befreiungsvision” (Austerlitz, 195). “Es nutzte mir offenbar wenig, daß ich die Quellen meiner Verstörung entdeckt hatte, mich selber, über all die vergangenen Jahre, sehen konnte als das von seinem vertrauten Leben von einem Tag auf den andern abgesonderte Kind” (Austerlitz, 326). “Prozeß der Kristallisation”; “Allegorie für das Wachstum der Liebe in den Salzbergwerken unserer Seelen” (Schwindel, 32).

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certainty that the labyrinth he had just narrowly escaped is nothing other than a “cross-section of my brain” (Rings, 173).41 When Austerlitz opens the door to the waiting room, he stands in a figurative sense confronted by his external interior because he is external to himself. At the same time, however, this crossing marks the dissolution of the border between the interior and the exterior – both in a figurative and in a nonfigurative sense. Haunted by the hallucinations triggered by the observation of the ladies room, the crossing of the threshold initiates a breakdown of the subject. Austerlitz is not aware what will happen to him when he opens the door. Therefore the text superimposes the allegorical presentation of self-observation with the presentation of a traumatic experience. Literally, a trauma is nothing other than a violation of an established border or limit. As a perforation, it leaves the subject defenseless.42 This situation is only traumatic because it is a repeated remembrance of another situation: a child torn away from his familiar life suddenly finds himself in a waiting room only to be whisked away by the strangers who from that point forward will replace his parents. Is this a traumatic scene? The case seems to be analogous to the structure Sigmund Freud outlines in his early traumatic theory of neurosis. According to this theory, a traumatic hysteria presupposes at least two events (Freud, “Zur Ätiologie,” 55–58). The first event retroactively becomes traumatic through the recall of a memory activated in some way by the second event. 41 42

“Querschnitt […] durch mein Gehirn” (Ringe, 206). Austerlitz extensively reflects upon this complex in his digressions on the history of fortifications. But it may be noted that the case is more difficult here than it seems to be. Essentially, fortifications like the fortress of Breendonk which is placed at the beginnng and at the end of Austerlitz are no buildings but borders or barriers (and therefore they cannot represent institutions). Considering their function, they have no interior but discriminate the interior from the exterior. The crucial point is not the perforation of the fortress, the crucial point is the distance – the empty space – between the outworks and the citadel at the center (so the traumatic incident is the perforation of the citadel). The fortifications become inadequate “because of the longer range of modern guns and the increasingly destructive power of explosives” (Austerlitz, 22; wegen “der inzwischen größer gewordenen Reichweite der Geschütze und der zunehmenden Zerstörungskraft der Sprengstoffe,” Austerlitz, 26). They only become institutions when they fall into disuse and get places of memory. After all, the fortifications are not able to allegorize the structure of the subject but only the deconstruction of the structure of the subject.

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In Austerlitz, the scene with the boy sitting on the bench can only be read retrospectively. It signifies the interruption of his life. It means that for Austerlitz his origin and history have become a separated, sealed up room. Strictly speaking there is no traumatic event, neither for Austerlitz, nor for the other emigrants in Sebald’s works, nor for his first-person narrator. It is not a single event that has removed the ground of his existence and made him an emigrant without foothold, but the continued absence of speech. Those two people who picked him up in this non-place did not explain what was happening and why; they didn’t provide him with reasons. This provides a background for one final return to this waiting room. What causes this scene? Austerlitz himself tells the reader that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all these past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death (Austerlitz, 194).43

Austerlitz may say that he had never really been alive, that he had remained seperated from life or that he had never found a place in life. But how can he speak of being born now? Who has given birth to him? There are two answers. According to a psychological-biographical reading this “being born” is simply a metaphorical expression that signifies that Austerlitz reconstructs his identity through the disclosure of his memories and finds a way to reconstruct his true identity. According to the second, the topological-institutional reading, the phrase “being born” has to be taken more seriously. In this case, the question is which instance grounds the subject named Austerlitz, which instance has given birth to him in the sense of the latin vitam instituere. No one gives birth to himself. This instance can only be the non-place itself. It can only be the building that functions as an empty screen and in which the subject confronts itself, as in a mirror. In this mirror the subject faces the experience of being divided and alienated. As Pierre Legendre has pointed out, the 43

“daß mir, indem ich den Knaben auf der Bank sitzen sah, durch eine dumpfe Benommenheit die Zerstörung bewußt wurde, die das Verlassensein in mir angerichtet hatte im Verlauf der vielen vergangenen Jahre, und daß mich eine furchtbare Müdigkeit überkam bei dem Gedanken, nie wirklich am Leben gewesen zu sein oder erst jetzt geboren zu werden, gewissermaßen am Vorabend meines Todes” (Austerlitz, 198).

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“status of the mirror” is “that of a dividing third instance” (Legendre, 225) which relates the subject to alterity. It enables Austerlitz to identify himself as a non-place.44 And this is the reason why this incident at the same time can occupy the place of the trauma. In a logical sense, there is no place for the trauma. It cannot be put in order. But if Sebald employs the figure of Austerlitz to explicate the emigrant status one could paradoxically say that it also initiates the trauma. It grounds Austerlitz as a character and provides him with reasons. With the other characters in Sebald’s texts, with the other emigrants, there is no identifiable, no localizable traumatic event. The trauma has no place. From the distance through which the first person narrators collect their traces and describe their lives, they appear to be victims of a trauma, but without a trauma. They are ungrounded and cannot provide the reasons for the things that happen to them. On the contrary, Austerlitz has a reason to follow the traces of his parents or to plunge into the history of the concentration camp Theresienstadt. He does things the first person narrator otherwise does – these are the things that establish Sebald’s poetic mode (Niehaus, 186). Austerlitz, Sebald’s last character, embodies an almost allegorical manifestation of this poetic mode.

44

“When the question of the mirror is transposed to the terrain of identity, the question of the mirror makes it possible to conceive of the neccessity of a subjective void – a distance, interval or separation through which identity is organised as a relation of identification” (Legendre, 237).

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The Experience of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature Susanne Vees-Gulani

When W. G. Sebald chose to address German literature and the air war during World War II in his poetics lectures in Zurich in 1997, he did not venture far from the dominant concerns within his œuvre. Sebald has continuously investigated the role of memory and the underlying hidden presence of past events in people’s lives as well as the various ways writers communicate this condition. He showed particular interest in experiences which lie outside of established human patterns of existence. At the same time, however, his lectures broke new ground by launching a public discussion regarding the role of large area bombing experiences in postwar German society. Sebald argues that there is a deficit of adequate presentations of the air raids in German postwar literature. He explains this lack by postulating the establishment of a taboo about the events right after the war by the German population, including German authors, which was diligently adhered to by everyone: There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged. (Natural History, 10)1

1

“Der wahre Zustand der materiellen und moralischen Vernichtung, in welchem das ganze Land sich befand, durfte aufgrund einer stillschweigend eingegangenen und für alle gleichermaßen gültigen Vereinbarung nicht beschrieben werden. Die finstersten Aspekte des von der weitaus überwiegenden Mehrheit der deutschen Bevölkerung miterlebten Schlußakts der Zerstörung blieben so ein schandbares, mit einer Art Tabu behaftetes Familiengeheimnis, das man vielleicht nicht einmal sich selber eingestehen konnte” (Luftkrieg, 18). Titles and page numbers of translations are noted in parenthesis, all other translations are provided by the author.

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The debate after Sebald’s lectures mostly followed one of two tracks. While all agreed, including Sebald (though he does not explore the question in detail), that the topic is necessarily difficult to discuss among those responsible for the murder of millions of people in concentration camps, the critics were split in their assessment of what kind of reactions were appropriate. One group applauded Sebald’s move to speak out against the silence surrounding the events, since the topic deserves more attention from writers and readers because of its large impact on the population. In one of the first articles on the subject, for example, Volker Hage in Der Spiegel emphasizes that one obviously cannot write responsibly about the bombings without also writing about the Holocaust, but he does not see this fact as a valid reason not to talk about either one (141). In addition, he notes that the silence about the events has left German writing and writers with a sense of emptiness – a state he sees manifested both by Sebald’s move to bring up the topic in his lectures on poetics and by the fact that German contemporary literature has been described by some as pale and unexciting because it does not explore the German past as much as it could (140–141). Frank Schirrmacher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung confirms this assessment of the missing historical element in German literature. He views the lack of descriptions of the bombings as part of a larger trend of avoiding important but painful and difficult historical events of the recent past. While Schirrmacher does not expect German postwar literature to find words to describe the Holocaust adequately, he sees the overall treatment of World War II by German authors as disappointing: The list of omissions is long. Up to this date there is no literary representation of the expulsion from the East; literature describes nothing about the years of occupation by the Red Army in the East. […] All of this has not been told which means not resolved. It is still working itself out within the deep structures of even the most forgetful society. (265)2

In contrast to these positive evaluations of Sebald’s endeavor, a second group of critics questioned the legitimacy of writing literature about the air raids, since talking about the topic could send the general message that German crimes were atoned for by the suffering endured during and after the bombings or, even more dangerously, could be used by authors 2

“Die Verlustliste ist groß. Es gibt bis heute keine literarische Verarbeitung der Vertreibung; die Literatur weiß nichts von den Okkupationsjahren des Ostens durch die Rote Armee. […] All das ist unerzählt, also: unerlöst. Es arbeitet weiter in den Tiefenstrukturen auch der vergeßlichsten Gesellschaft.”

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to try to divert attention away from their own involvement in the Nazi era by describing the suffering they had lived through during and immediately after the war. As Maxim Biller puts it: “With war, the lie entered […] our literature” (279).3 According to these critics, the absence of literature about the bombings, and the lack of discussion of German suffering during the war is thus neither as surprising, nor as big a loss, as Sebald suggests: “The silence might have hidden a state of shame which is more precious than literature itself” (Harpprecht, 269).4 The objections raised against the exploration of a topic such as the bombing of German cities by writers, readers, and critics are understandable and not completely unfounded. They correctly point out that talking about German suffering is necessarily always under suspicion of trying to revise history in a way that could show Germans in a more favorable light or even as victims themselves, suppressing the idea that “As bad as it was what we went through, there was always worse – there was true evil” (Harpprecht, 268).5 A number of critics actually challenge the very notion of the supposed silence in German postwar society about the bombings and their effects. Joachim Güntner in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, for example, insisted that there was never a literary taboo surrounding the bombings, even though he contends that there was no vast readership for the works concerned (275). Yet while the validity of his assessment has been questioned, Sebald still insists in the publication of Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction) two years after his lectures that his original argument remains true. However, one is left to wonder whether he reaches this conclusion on the basis of the available material or rather from the point of view of a preconceived hypothesis he refuses to adjust. Not only does he underestimate the level of complexity of the postwar situation for authors in respect to both the issues of guilt and the consequences of the bombing trauma, but he also broadly leaves out or dismisses some of the most important literary attempts that have been made.6 In fact, underneath the surface of a critical analysis lurks a very personal quest by Sebald. Born in 1944, Sebald belonged to a generation 3 4 5

6

“Mit dem Krieg kam […] die Lüge in unsere Literatur.” “Das Schweigen verbarg vielleicht eine Scham, die kostbarer ist als alle Literatur.” “So böse es war, das unsereiner überstanden haben mag: es gab immer das Bösere – es gab das Böse schlechthin.” For detailed studies of the literature about aerial bombardments during World War II see my monograph Trauma and Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany and Volker Hage, Zeugen der Zerstörung.

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of Germans that were never exposed directly to Nazism and the war, but whose lives had as a constant undercurrent the memories and consequences of both. Searching for what he considers “adequate” literary representations of the bombings by other writers is thus also an attempt to find a way to live through experiences one never had, to drag these shadows into the open and make them controllable. There is no doubt that Sebald asks valid questions in Luftkrieg und Literatur when he explores the impact of the bombing experience (or lack of it) on postwar German society. The heavy bombardments which German cities and their inhabitants were subjected to for several years during World War II manifested themselves in both vast external and internal destruction. Sebald is correct that, despite the necessarily longlasting effects of the events, they neither became a dominant theme of postwar German literature nor indeed was there intense public discussion of the air raids in society as a whole. For Sebald, this limited attention to the topic, particularly among German writers, is a “scandalous deficiency” (Natural History, 70) and his judgment of German authors is harsh.7 Preoccupied with redefining themselves after the Nazi years, with concerns of how they would be perceived by others, they neglected to describe the realities of the war experience (Natural History, ix). They thus did not record history for posterity, which, according to Sebald, is part of the author’s responsibility.8 In the larger context, however, this assessment appears simplistic. Not only does it neglect the fact that most writers did not actually experience the bombings on German cities, be it because they were soldiers, exiles or because they were living in places that were not affected by the air raids, but it also does not consider the severity of the psychological and social pressures under which authors found and find themselves when trying to address the air war in their works. Clearly, the bombardments cannot be separated from the atrocities committed by Germany during the Nazi era and many writers felt deep shame about their country and themselves. These personal feelings of guilt are coupled with external definitions of collective guilt built around a strict division into victims

7 8

“skandalöses Defizit” (Luftkrieg, 82). Particularly in the context of postwar German literature, the connection between writing and political and historical responsibility has been strongly emphasized. However, it is, of course, debatable whether literature must play such a central role in the recording of events and their transmission, or in fact have any purpose at all.

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and perpetrators, which leaves little room to explore events that cannot be clearly assigned to one or the other. Instrumentalized from the start by various groups, writing about the air raids is not only an extremely demanding, but also a highly political, task. In West Germany, rightwing forces have continuously presented German suffering under the bombs as atonement for the crimes committed under National Socialism. In the East, the destruction of German cities, particularly Dresden, was presented as proof of the Imperialist-Fascist intentions of the Western powers. Whether justified or not, writing about the bombings is thus always under suspicion of trying to revise history in a way that could show Germans in a more favorable light or as victims themselves. In fact, Sebald’s own text exemplifies the problematic nature of the bombing theme. Sebald has never minimized Germany’s role in the past; the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Nazi era have been central concerns in his work. When addressing the controversial issue of the air raids in Luftkrieg und Literatur, he also does not intend to suggest that the suffering incurred lessens the burden of the crimes Germany committed, but rather wants to spur a discussion about this part of the war. However, even though Sebald shows sensitivity to these concerns in his other works and deals with them on a highly complex level, his lectures often appear surprisingly naive concerning the questions that could be raised about the bombing theme. When lamenting the lack of representation of the bombardments and their effects in German literature, Sebald mentions many instances of German suffering under the air war, but only a few which deal with the pain inflicted by Germans. While one could assume the atrocities committed by Germany and their role in provoking the bombings to be permanently engrained in one’s view of the war (103), as Sebald emphasizes in the third part of the essay, which he added to the book publication, his approach can at times be viewed as insensitive. This suspect situation is amplified by certain formulations, such as describing the bombings as “destruction, on a scale without historical precedent” (4).9 Not only does this statement suggest that one can establish a “ranking” of destruction and suffering, but it supports the troublesome notion that the bombings can be singled out as the most horrible experiences of the war. The danger of these expressions did not only become apparent in some critics’ unease with Sebald’s standpoint, but, as Sebald himself reports in the third part of his essay, were taken by a number of his readers as lending support to 9

“[d]ie in der Geschichte bis dahin einzigartige Vernichtungsaktion” (Luftkrieg, 12).

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their ideas of German victimhood or even Jewish conspiracy theories (98–103). The reactions Sebald’s own text provoked, which made it necessary for him to qualify his approach in the publication of his book through additional commentary, highlights the complexity of the guilt issues when addressing the bombs even today. This additional chapter resembles a form of “damage control” as Sebald here clarifies the role of Germans in the war. Instead of concentrating almost exclusively on images of the destruction of German cities, he now repeatedly reminds his readers about the proper order of responsibility for the air war and ends his essay with images of German bombings: The intoxicating vision of destruction [Hitler’s about London] coincides with the fact that the real pioneering achievements in bomb warfare – Guernica, Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam – were the work of the Germans. And when we think of the nights when the fires raged in Cologne and Hamburg and Dresden, we ought also to remember that as early as August 1942, when the vanguard of the Sixth Army had reached the Volga […], the city of Stalingrad, then swollen (like Dresden later) by an influx of refugees, was under assault from twelve hundred bombers, and that during this raid alone, which caused elation among the German troops stationed on the opposite bank, forty thousand people lost their lives. (104)10

The available works about the bombings reveal that the process is further complicated by the deep personal traumatization many were left with after the air war and which made talking and writing about it an extremely trying and psychologically challenging task. The texts that were published about the bombings often appeared in press well after the war was over and many are characterized by various instances of suppression and intrusion of the events – symptoms which comply with what psychiatrists today in psychiatric literature and their Diagnostic Manual DSM-IV-TR define as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. The literary accounts movingly depict how the horror of going through the air raids day after day leaves people passive and deathlike, requiring them to distance 10

“Die rauschhafte Zerstörungsvision [von Hitler über London] geht in eins damit, daß auch die tatsächlichen Pionierleistungen im Bombenkrieg – Guernica, Warschau, Belgrad, Rotterdam – von den Deutschen vollbracht wurden. Und wenn wir an die Brandnächte von Köln und Hamburg und Dresden denken, dann sollten wir uns auch in Erinnerung rufen, daß bereits im August 1942, als die Spitzen der sechsten Armee die Wolga erreicht hatten […], die Stadt Stalingrad, die zu jenem Zeitpunkt wie später Dresden von Flüchtlingsströmen angeschwollen war, bombardiert wurde von zwölfhundert Fliegern, und daß dort während dieses Angriffs, der Hochgefühle auslöste unter den am anderen Ufer stehenden deutschen Truppen, vierzigtausend Menschen ihr Leben ließen” (Luftkrieg, 120).

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themselves emotionally from the events to be able to cope with them. It can turn into a continuous attempt to suppress the past traumatic experiences, an avoidance, with which one also attempts to control the frequent and painful reemergence of the trauma through thoughts, dreams, or even reliving. Overcoming these tendencies and facing the events by trying to convey them through literature is a difficult and laborious step and these challenges color the texts that emerge. The works are characterized by techniques which help protect the writers from getting too involved in their own memories – be it by interpreting the bombings as a positive turning point in their writing, by hiding behind the perspectives or quotations of others, or by pulling back into a more abstract realm of narration when the focus on the individual becomes too painful. Expressing the horror is similarly challenging. In order to write about the air raids, traumatic events, which are usually stored as visual images, have to be translated into language, a step that, as medical research confirms, is extremely demanding. For example, Kurt Vonnegut, who certainly had no burden of a German social taboo, describes the challenging task of writing about the bombings he experienced as a POW in an interview in 1974: “I came home in 1945 and started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT” (Allen, 163). This agony is echoed in the first chapter of his Dresden novel Slaughterhouse-Five as well: “When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen […]. But not many words about Dresden came to my mind then. […] And not many words come now, either […]” (2). It is particularly surprising that Sebald does not acknowledge these aesthetic difficulties in regards to the bombings, since he himself faced them in his own literary output about traumatic past events. As an answer he developed a new style relying on the interplay of text and photography to address what often defies full expression through language. These photographs can enhance or subvert, support or oppose the written text. In this manner, Sebald adds spaces in which meaning can arise that would otherwise fall into the gaps, and also illuminates the sensory and non-verbal quality of many traumatic memories. Writing about the bombings thus means overcoming several factors one would prefer to suppress, particularly the awareness of the atrocities committed by Germany that cause feelings of shame and guilt, the deep personal trauma and its effects, and the difficulty of creative aesthetic production about events beyond ordinary human experience. Under

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these circumstances and pressures, it is understandable that the bombings have not become a dominant postwar national theme in Germany and that many narrations took decades to appear. However, contrary to what Sebald suggests, the topic has not been completely draped in silence. In fact, even throughout his own essay, Sebald is required to reject more and more evidence to justify his original assessment. At first he still includes the private sphere, the “individual […] amnesia” of the German population (10),11 in his thesis, describing the exclusion of the destruction as an absence in any media, not just literature, “a self-imposed silence, an absence also typical in other areas of discourse, from family conversations to historical writing” (Natural History, 70).12 Later, however, Sebald excludes this arena of private memory: “Leaving aside family reminiscences, sporadic attempts to make literary use of the subject, and […] books of reminiscences, one can speak only of a persistent avoidance of the subject, or an aversion to it” (93).13 Yet Sebald’s extreme thesis not only fails to capture the situation in the private sphere, the literary accounts also disprove his idea of writers collectively adhering to a social taboo against the air raids. Nevertheless Sebald holds on to his hypothesis even though it requires further exclusions. To mention just some examples, two of the most effective and impressive literary depictions of the bombings, Gert Ledig’s Vergeltung and Dieter Forte’s autobiographical novels Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen and In der Erinnerung, all available at the publication of Luftkrieg und Literatur in 1999, do not receive the close attention they deserve. Both authors manage to give moving accounts of the short and long-term traumatic effects of the bombings. However, Sebald treats Ledig’s work briefly and superficially in his essay. While he acknowledges Ledig as an author whose “novels [are] in no way inferior to those of other authors of the 1950s” (96),14 he at the same time dismisses his novel vaguely for its supposed aesthetic weaknesses which he leaves unexplained (95). Forte, who fills two novels with the experience of the bombings and 11 12

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“individuelle […] Amnesie” (Luftkrieg, 18). “als ein Sich-Ausschweigen, als eine Absenz, die auch für andere Diskursbereiche vom Familiengespräch bis hin zur Geschichtsschreibung bezeichnend ist” (Luftkrieg, 82). “Wenn man Familienreminiszensen, episodische Literarisierungsversuche und […] Erinnerungsbüche[r] […] beiseite läßt, so kann man nur von einer durchgehenden Vermeidung oder Verhinderung sprechen” (Luftkrieg, 108). “Romane […] in nichts den Arbeiten anderer Autoren der fünfziger Jahre […] nachstehen” (Luftkrieg, 111–12).

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their aftermath, is not acknowledged at all. Instead, the fragment Die Kathedrale by Peter de Mendelssohn, a document truly deserving of Sebald’s criticism and thus proving his point of a failure in representation, is discussed in great detail. For an objective literary and cultural analysis by a distanced critic, Luftkrieg und Literatur thus seems, while tackling important questions, at times strangely confused, unbalanced, and contradictory. The strictly critical approach is undermined consciously by Sebald when he uses the interplay of text and images he developed for his fictional works, and when he writes himself into the text, talking about his own relationship to the air raids. Yet he still at times underestimates how much his personal involvement influences his conclusions. For Sebald, despite not having lived through the war, the bombing experiences are inseparably bound to his own life, a life he represents as embedded between lasting childhood memories of cities in ruins (74) and the close proximity to his later home of the airfields from which the British bomber planes left for Germany during the war. Sebald strongly defines himself through the events: “Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge” (71).15 This identification with an experience one never had reaches a level that even Sebald views as somewhat perverse: I see pictures merging before my mind’s eyes – paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction – and [perversely] enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home […]. I know now that at the time, when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe, over the rearguard actions in east and west, over the ruins of the German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt […]. (71)16

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“Dennoch ist es mir bis heute, wenn ich Photographien oder dokumentarische Filme aus dem Krieg sehe, als stammte ich, sozusagen, von ihm ab und als fiele von dorther, von diesen von mir gar nicht erlebten Schrecknissen, ein Schatten auf mich, unter dem ich nie ganz herauskommen werde” (Luftkrieg, 83). “[…] vor meinen Augen [verschwimmen] Bilder von Feldwegen, Flußauen und Bergwiesen mit den Bildern der Zerstörung, und es sind die letzteren, perverserweise, und nicht die ganz irreal gewordenen frühkindlichen Idyllen, die so etwas wie ein Heimatgefühl in mir heraufrufen. […] Heute weiß ich, daß damals, als ich auf dem Altan des Seefelderhauses in dem sogenannten Stubenwagen lag und hinaufblinzelte in den weißblauen Himmel, überall in Europa Rauchschwaden in der Luft hingen, über den Rückzugsschlachten im Osten und im Westen, über

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In his essay on Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), Jonathan Long has fittingly connected the type of memory that Sebald displays in his works with Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory (122). With postmemory, Hirsch refers to the situation of a generation which has not lived through traumatic events of the past directly, but nevertheless feels strongly connected to, and influenced by, them. These past experiences are so monumental that they can replace one’s actual memories: “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation” (“Projected Memory,” 8).17 Hirsch’s assessment of the second generation experience accurately describes Sebald’s situation. With his knowledge of the devastation associated with the war, the pictures of the rather idyllic reality of his childhood and youth in the Allgäu mountains in postwar Germany are banned from consciousness into the realm of the unreal and “Heimat” for Sebald is instead evoked by completely nonexistent memories of destruction. Hirsch does not understand postmemory as an “identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection” (“Projected Memory,” 8–9). The problem Sebald faces is that the amount of cultural and public memory in Germany of the air raids after the war is not at all representative of the actual events and their effects. So even though the experience of the bombings is present as an undercurrent in society, the situation characterized by shame, guilt, and psychological trauma prevented the stories from becoming dominant narratives for postwar generations. Postwar German society did not offer much space or points of departure for “imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch, Family Frames, 22) with which some of the gaps between the actual experience and its avail-

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den Ruinen der deutschen Städte und über den Lagern, in denen man die Ungezählten verbrannte […]” (Luftkrieg, 83–84). While Hirsch developed her notion of postmemory in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, she expands its applicability beyond this particular group: “I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences” (Family Frames, 22). Consequently, Hirsch’s postmemory is a theory about indirect access to memory which is not attached to a specific event. Using her approach to assess a member of the German postwar generation should thus by no means be understood as an equation of the trauma of the Holocaust victims with German experiences of bombardments or other traumatizing events.

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able memories can be bridged for those who are only indirectly exposed to them. It is thus not surprising that Sebald searches almost relentlessly for any possibilities of access to the experiences, for gaining at least glimpses of the events. Many forms of destruction feature prominently in Sebald’s œuvre and the bombings and their effects also frequently appear directly. These passages illustrate the continuous presence and importance of the (non)experience of the bombings for the author from early on and emphasize his limited access to them. In his first work of literature, for example, Nach der Natur (After Nature), Sebald tries to establish a foundation for the strong connection he feels to the air raid experiences, by insisting on an almost biological link between the events and his being. He describes how his mother in 1943 observes the burning city of Nürnberg after a bomber attack, the same day that she finds out she is pregnant with him: During the night of the 28th 582 aircrafts flew in To attack Nürnberg. Mother, who on the next day planned to return to her parents’ home in the Alps, got no further than Fürth. From there she saw Nürnberg in flames, but cannot recall now what the burning city looked like or what her feelings were at this sight. On the same day, she told me recently, from Fürth she had traveled on to Windsheim and an acquaintance at whose house she waited until the worst was over, and realized that she was with child. (86)18

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“In der Nacht auf den 28. flogen/ 582 Maschinen einen Angriff /auf Nürnberg. Die Mutter,/ die am anderen Morgen nachhause ins Allgäu/ zurückfahren wollte,/ ist mit der Bahn bloß/ bis nach Fürth gekommen./ Von dort aus sah sie Nürnberg in Flammen stehen,/weiß aber heute nicht mehr,/ wie die brennende Stadt aussah/ und was für Gefühle sie/ bei ihrem Anglick bewegten./ Sie sei, so erzählte sie neulich,/ von Fürth aus am selben Tag noch/ nach Windsheim zu einer Bekannten/ gefahren, wo sie das Schlimmste/ abgewartet und gemerkt habe, /daß sie schwanger geworden sei” (Nach der Natur, 73–74).

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So while Sebald is inseparably linked to the experience, it also eludes him completely. Deprived of the actual experience, its lasting effects are perceived without any knowledge of the events. As Sebald describes in Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), they become part of one’s world view, which is, however, distorted by this complete divorce from the original cause: and almost every week [in the newsreels] we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin or Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered them a natural condition of all larger cities (Vertigo, 187).19

Consequently, at this point, what is actually located in postmemory cannot even be realized as being belated. Part of Sebald’s and his generation’s life, after they understand the belatedness of their position, is thus colored by the attempt to obtain an understanding of the origins of what they feel and perceive, of what they have seen in glimpses, but what has not become the topic of public discussion. In his works, Sebald describes several strategies with which he tries to access the actual experience of the bombings. One way is through personal eyewitness reports. However, the immediate family already fails to provide the information he craves. The mother, who is effectively witnessing the bombings for the unborn child, does not (or does not want to) remember and share what she saw and felt. Sebald describes other accounts as being full of stereotypical phrases and so does not think that they can truly demonstrate the realities of the bombardments.20 In Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn), Sebald attempts to gain insight into the events from another angle, namely by exploring the technical aspects of the bombings. At a visit to the Somerleyton house

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“in fast jeder Wochenschau sah man auch die Ruinenhaufen von Städten wie Berlin oder Hamburg, die ich lange nicht mit der in den letzten Kriegsjahren erfolgten Zerstörung, von der ich nichts wußte, in Verbindung brachte, sondern für eine sozusagen natürliche Gegebenheit aller größeren Städte gehalten habe” (Schwindel, 204). Although Sebald is very rigid in his dismissal of eye-witness reports, which seems to include also such semi-literary attempts to capture the bombings as Walter Kempowski’s quotation collection in Echolot: Fuga Furiosa (which Sebald, however, could not refer to directly as it was not yet published by the time Luftkrieg und Literatur was released), he is correct that many such stories cannot achieve the depth of experience he is looking for. This problem is often caused by both the difficulty to address and translate into language the trauma these witnesses lived through.

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and gardens in east England, the narrator strikes up a conversation with a gardener of the estate who tells him about his own obsession with the bombings. When he was young, he saw many bomber formations, which had taken off from the air fields nearby, fly over the area towards Germany. Yet even though he has insight into the technological requirements of the attacks, the events themselves stay abstract for him as well. He is able to recite the statistical information of the bombings, the duration of the air war, the use of gasoline, the number of bombs, and the number of casualties among pilots (Rings 38), but the effect he could and can only imagine and the destroyed cities were nothing more than dots on a map for him. The technical and strategic aspects of the bombings also fail to provide an idea of the actual experience of the events. The situation of Sebald and the British gardener become mirror images. Both only have access to the events from a distance, from the perspective of the outsider, even though each feels personally tied up with the experience and haunted by it. In fact, it is here that Sebald, through the words of the gardener, already formulates part of his thesis from Luftkrieg und Literatur in one of his literary works. The British gardener relates that he even learned German to be able to read reports about the bombings and the life in the ruins, but he does not succeed in finding out more about the reality of the bombing experience: “To my astonishment, however, I soon found the search for such accounts invariably proved fruitless. No one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterwards recorded their memories” (Rings, 39).21 Sebald’s deep disappointment with German postwar literature is closely related to this futile search for insight into the bombing experience. Like personal accounts or the technical and strategic aspects of the bombings, literature was another path through which Sebald was hoping to gain access to the events. He mentions that, while he was growing up, he was constantly under the impression that important information about his background was being kept from him. Sebald seems to feel that he is failed by society and cheated out of a knowledge he necessarily needs in order to understand himself and his place in the world. He is particularly angry with German writers, leading to a tone in his essay which Andreas Huyssen has described as resembling a “discourse of ‘Abwicklung’” (81). Sebald implies that their failure to produce texts about 21

“Zu meinem Erstaunen freilich mußte ich bald feststellen, daß die Suche nach solchen Berichten stets ergebnislos verlief. Niemand scheint damals etwas aufgeschrieben oder erinnert zu haben” (Ringe, 53–54).

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the bombings not only constitutes a literary problem, but also had a significant societal impact. According to Sebald, it is essential for postwar German authors to record history and to act as public witnesses, as it is the function of literature to keep historical events from being erased from memory (Natural History, ix-x). Yet he notes, “that if those born after the war were to rely solely on the testimony of writers, they would scarcely be able to form any idea of the extent, nature, and consequences of the catastrophe inflicted on Germany by the air raids” (69–70).22 He thus holds writers partially responsible for the lack of public discussion of one of the fundamental experiences of Germans during World War II, and particularly of leaving his generation robbed of an understanding about the underlying structures of their identity. Could literature really ever have filled this void? As Forte suggests, when writing about an experience which has such a deep traumatizing effect on the individual as the bombings, the notions of the responsibility for others are not necessarily on the author’s mind: “in such situations, the belief in future generations is severely damaged” (36).23 Despite these circumstances, Sebald needs to dismiss and exclude available material for his argument of Luftkrieg und Literatur to stand in its extreme form. However, it appears to be more than his wish to prove the soundness of his preconceived theory that leads him down this path. Sebald necessarily needs to keep insisting on the validity of his thesis, as for him personally, it remained true throughout his life. In literature, Sebald was not only looking for descriptions of the bombings, but for a possibility to live through and to experience first-hand the events whose full reality eluded him, but which cast such a strong shadow over his life. Hirsch convincingly argues that in post-memory one can try through imagination to get closer to the traumatic events, but the real experience can never be completely understood (Family Frames, 22). Even though the introduction of fiction and imagination opens up possibilities to get closer to these events, literature also cannot ever fulfill this role completely, even if the authors actually lived through the air war themselves. Events such as the bombings, which lie completely outside of normal

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“daß sich die Nachgeborenen, wenn sie sich einzig auf die Zeugenschaft der Schriftsteller verlassen wollten, kaum ein Bild machen könnten vom Verlauf, von den Ausmaßen, von der Natur und den Folgen der durch den Bombenkrieg über Deutschland gebrachten Katastrophe” (Luftkrieg, 81). “der Glaube an nachfolgende Generationen ist in solchen Situationen stark lädiert.”

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human experience, can never be fully conveyed through writing. The texts can offer interesting and affecting glimpses of the air raids and their effects, but they can never reproduce them in their totality as there is always horror beyond language. Reading about the bombings will thus never be the same as living through them. Luftkrieg und Literatur is an important text, calling attention to the bombings and their often neglected psychological effects on the people who went through them and on the immediate postwar generation. Sebald’s personal quest, however, which fundamentally defines the work, remains necessarily a disappointing one.

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W. G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist That No Eye can Dispel Christina M.E. Szentivanyi

“If the memory of what happened is to survive, it will not happen through official speeches, but through those who testified.” – Imre Kertész on the occasion of the Jean-Améry-Symposium in Vienna in 1992

Testimony and trauma as themes and poetic structures negotiate Sebald’s philological and literary texts as well as his interviews like Ariadne’s thread; they are put forth as his work’s raison d’être. The aim of this paper is to follow said thread by analyzing the concepts of testimony and trauma as well as the narrative structures and claims employed through readings of a paper the author presented in Brussels on “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” of “Paul Bereyter. There is mist that no eye can dispel,” the second narrative of The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) and to a lesser extent of a conversation with Carole Angier, which appeared in the Jewish Quarterly. Sebald presented “Jean Améry und Primo Levi” at a conference in Brussels held by the well-known Améry-scholar Irene HeidelbergerLeonards to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Améry’s suicide. The paper starts out by criticizing German postwar literature as shockingly insufficient for both aesthetic and moral reasons until well into the sixties. Even later efforts – with the marked exception of the work of a selected few like Peter Weiss and Wolfgang Hildesheimer – are viewed as only superficially committed to engage the topic of the Shoah while remaining characteristically indifferent to and unmoved by the feelings of the victims. This deficit is interpreted and judged as a telling sign for the lack of a fundamental intellectual change as well as a cultivated prolonged ignorance in German postwar culture. Following this assertion the essay proposes that most German writers during that period – like

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their socio-cultural surroundings – may be considered “constitutionally unable to tell or even look for the truth.” Through his introduction of the possibility of a constitutional inability as a viable explanation but not an excuse for a perceived lack in German literary history, Sebald’s text points towards notions of repression or even traumatization on the side of the German public as well as towards a cultural decline which this line of interpretation perceives as inevitable when a society falls short in its memory-work of finding adequate means of presentation. The possibility of repression or of traumatization is treated as a possible thesis in this essay, one that is neither confirmed nor proven wrong. It holds merit insofar as it introduces a pattern which allows the lack of awareness of a problem – in this case the deficiency of the German literary remembrance of the Shoah – to be read in terms of a trace indicating an underlying crisis without the necessity of being able to grasp this remembrance entirely. The text’s seemingly tentative introduction of a psychological explanation does not aim to find an excuse for the German postwar society to alleviate blame or to deny truth. There is no question whether German society to be held responsible for its cultural output and frame of mind and to be judged as severely deficient on an aesthetic as well as on a moral level. Blame or truth is neither ascribed nor lessened through the text’s suggestion; the essay deals with a problem of reference. The notion serves as an entrée to psychoanalytic discourses of developing a sensitivity for reading and describing repressions, displacements and traumatic absences in order to utilize the methods developed in this context for its own interpretation of (literary) history. This becomes obvious when the essay puts forth the claim that the historical cultural lacuna inherent in German literary history, which had previously been successfully camouflaged by compensatory literary gestures, became radically apparent when viewed in relation to the far more authentic voice of a witness: the voice put forth in the writings of Jean Améry. Sebald’s essay states that, while the German postwar literary landscape serves as a frame of reference, its concern is first and foremost a commentary on testimony as it was written and embodied by primary victims of persecution and traumatization like Jean Améry and Primo Levi (116). What allowed Jean Améry’s and Primo Levi’s testimony to an impossible history whose events could not be experienced and that thereby seemingly eliminated the possibility of witnessing? The phrase coined by Levi – and cited by Sebald in his paper (121) – explains that those who survived could never be considered as complete witnesses, “whose deposition would have [had] general significance” as opposed to

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those who “have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute.” Those who survived have to be viewed as “an anomalous minority,” who speak “in their stead, by proxy” (Levi, 83–84). Sebald’s text considers writing and thereby testifying as literarily vital to both authors. It offered them relief by exteriorizing and thereby partially rationalizing their frightful non-narrative memories in writing. But it also views their writing as a further trial for both Améry and Levi since it forced them to distort what they held to be true.1 They are viewed as carriers of a history where testimony could only occur through a visibility of an absence of witnessing.2 Following Sebald’s analysis Améry and Levi were fulfilling an imperative personal and social function by transforming their nonnarrative memories into narration but they were also thereby concealing the patterns of amnesia and hypermnesia, of dissociation and latency characteristic of the trauma they suffered. They were filtering, organizing, blending, associating and constructing their own recollections. They knew that they unavoidably had to falsify their personal non-narrative traumatic memories of the past and the more truthful testimony of muteness and of the dead in order to bear witness. Sebald’s paper views the periods of depression that haunted Améry continuously and Levi towards the end of his life as inevitable recurrences of and returns to muteness. Suicide, finally also becoming physically one of the dead and thereby a “complete witness,” is seen as a consistent continuation of that frame of mind (122).3 Sebald’s paper succeeds in bringing visibility to the lacunae of trauma and witnessing in the work and life of Améry and Levi and thereby in it’s own way commemorates the dead. In order to do this Sebald crosses a border separating scholarly and fictional writing in a philological sense: his textual strategy of combing a partially detailed historiographical contextualization and biographical as well as fictional texts, thereby establishing an effet de réel sustaining the following details and conclusions should feel familiar to readers of Se1

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For similar observations see Geoffrey Hartman’s The Longest Shadow. In the Aftermath of the Holocaust and other texts written in the context of the Yale Testimony Project. A notion that in contemporary cultural theory can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, for example. It would be interesting to reread Austerlitz with regard to the presence of the Belgian torture chamber at Breendonk in light of a shift in paradigms of trauma-theory (Leys). In Austerlitz the recovery of memory of the traumatic, that seemed impossible in The Emigrants, is successful but not sufficient to free the carrier, Austerlitz, of its power (Görling, 5).

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bald’s prose. He achieves his goal by reading the similar constellations in the works and biographies of these writers as evidence of the pathological trauma suffered by the surviving victims of the Shoah on the one hand and the self-interest responsible for the cultivated blindness towards the continued suffering and death and thereby towards their own guilt by the German public as well as the socio-cultural implications for the following generation on the other hand as affiliated reaction to the same – for varying reasons – never fully experienced historic event. On the one hand Sebald’s text refers to the literary work of Jean Améry and Primo Levi and on the other hand to psychoanalytic work on trauma by authors such as Wilhelm Reich and the case studies of William Niederland as conclusive evidence to validate his point. In doing so it constructs a particular psychoanalytically inclined history relying on fiction as testimony and thereby firmly places itself within the intellectual parameters of New Historicism’s view of historiography transgressing the timeworn borders between history and fiction by consciously selecting its structure of narration. Remarkably Sebald utilizes the psychoanalytic configuration characteristic of latency and trauma in his interpretation in terms of a “pregeneric plot-structure” (White, 61) in order to establish reference between events which otherwise could be misconstructed – and this would be viewed as moral and aesthetic ruin – as seemingly unconnected. Sebald’s text turns the historiographic data into a “story of a particular kind” (62) – a story of trauma and testimony.4 By linking the fates of prominent writers Jean Améry and Primo Levi to the fates of those they speak for “by proxy” Sebald’s interpretation points towards trauma as a cultural pathology instead of towards the notion of individual tragedy. He points towards history and memory-work’s other pattern of narration: “The events that comprise […] disaster, remain outside of history, if by history, we mean our understanding of events. Events remain historical, however,. if we understand that they exert pressure upon that understanding, one that registers in discursive form, but that cannot be read as representation of the event itself” (Bernard-Donals, 164).

4

The subtext – that apart from interviews runs through Sebald’s work itself – of psychoanalytic trauma theory associated with cultural studies supporting this particular path of reading of the author’s prose was taken up in exemplary fashion by Anne Parry in her short evaluation of Sebald’s achievement as well as by Axel Duncker – although without connecting it to New Historicism.

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This constellation is also in evidence in the first photograph of the second story of The Emigrants (27) that shows railroad tracks disappearing into the woods, possibly those – an assumption strengthened by the interplay of text and photograph, history and fiction and the reader’s expectation of connection – where Bereyter ended his life, but at the same time revealing nothing that would allow that assumption of arriving après coup to become a certainty. A significant blurring at the lower end draws attention to the chosen medium’s influence on what is shown. The photograph inserted in the text serves as a reminder of the incomprehensibility of the Shoah in rational terms, “we are led into a site, that, in the end, excludes us” (Baer, 66). Walter Benjamin wrote, “it is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical-unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (243). The railroad tracks point not only towards Paul Bereyter’s fate but also towards the beginnings of trauma-theory – that came into sight when medicine was puzzled by the belated symptoms of physically uninjured train wreck victims – creating a heterotopic as well as heterochronotopic space. In placing the reader in a textual situation where he – like the narrator – is challenged to question his point of view, modes and conventions of perception in relation to the photograph’s fundamental inaccessibility the photograph places it’s viewer in relation to the Shoah (67), it facilitates a belated self-aware commemoration and witnessing on part of the viewers. Sebald’s texts “connects with immense pain, only to say you can’t connect; he tries to make you imagine things that he then delicately says are unimaginable” (in Görner, 26). Absence exhibits its presence through this play with potentiality. “Paul Bereyter” and its motto “There is mist that no eye can dispel”5 is a premier example of Sebald’s development of fictional testimony in his literary work that commemorates exemplary life-histories without claiming impossible historic objectivity or the sort of empathic understanding that the narrator refers to as “wrongful trespass” (29).6 In Bereyter Sebald created a figure that is a representative of the Jewish-German tradition National Socialists sought to eradicate. He becomes a victim and a per5

6

“Manche Nebelflecke löset kein Auge auf.” “Spots of Mist” is a more accurate if less elegant translation of “Nebelflecke”; this paper views them as the blind spots of history that no eye can penetrate. The eye’s limitation refers to the problem of the referent as well as to an inadequacy of comprehension based on rationality. Ölschläger has pointed out that the blurring in the picture signifies the deconstruction of a claim to Bereyter’s view as it would have be reversed in order to represent his short-sightedness.

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petrator, participating in both histories and discourses and as a literary figure inquiring into problems of the referent of memory-work. At the beginning of the second story the narrator, who is – for obvious reasons – not to be confused with the author, is informed of the suicide of his former teacher. Sebald’s tendency to play mirror-games with author and narratorroles has been duly noted since the reception of his early work, but with regard to the questions of trauma, testimony and memory-work at hand it seems to be in order to cite an interview he gave Carole Angier with that observation in mind. When interviewed for the Jewish Quarterly W. G. Sebald refers to two decisive interconnected factors he classified as vital to his writing of The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten): On the one hand his scholarly work on Jean Améry and on the other his own lifehistory. Sebald stated that upon being informed by his mother of his former teacher’s suicide that interconnected him on a personal level he had immediately associated that occurrence with the preceding suicide (1978) of the Austro-Jewish writer Jean Améry, the figurehead of the German literary tradition of testimonial writing regarding the Shoah. While this should be read cum grano salis it seems relevant to note that he pointed out a similar pattern of both life-stories as the connecting factor with regard to the “sort of constellation [that] emerged about this business of surviving, and about the great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you” (13). A telling bifurcation of emphasis can be perceived in Sebald’s presentation of his recollections as related to Angier. According to him, remembering his teacher’s life with Améry’s story in mind led to breakthroughs concerning his own remembrance and perception of obscure personal recollections. More specifically it allowed him to commemorate his own lack of comprehension of his past. In the interview Sebald reminisced extensively about his family background. In his view there was a telling absence of guilt in the recollections of his parents that was characteristic for the majority of the German population of that generation. They were enthusiastic supporters of the Fascist regime up to 1941 and later made themselves out to have been not “passive collaborators” but “passive resisters” when Sebald stressed, “it’s the same thing” (11). He pointedly recollected looking at family photographs of razed villages from his father’s service in the Polish campaign. They appeared in no way remarkable to him as a child and later – on his sparse trips home – never failed to alarm him along with the continued failure of communication between him and his parents regarding his distress. Awareness of this inherited, deeply dis-

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turbing gap in testimony becomes an ethical necessity in The Emigrants. It is possibly enabling in terms of belatedly bearing witness – through text – to the non-narrative history of muteness and trauma of the victims of National Socialism and the attempts to eradicate them from German cultural history. This constellation – that at it’s core carries a hope and need for attempts of cultural atonement – is made particularly obvious in the descriptions of the first and the later meetings between the narrator and Max Ferber (Max Aurach) in The Emigrants. The recognition of the patterns of traumatization and the moral obligation and socio-cultural necessity for a writer to testify to this observation – in the same vein as Felman and Laub who view literature as an “alignment of witnesses” (2) – stand undisputed in Sebald’s œuvre to bear witness through remembrance and awareness of obscurities and absences in the institutionalized collective memory and the responsibility of literary memorywork to develop more adequate means of representation. The connection of one life-history with the other is portrayed to have lead to a heightened awareness of continued interconnectedness of the narrator/ author and (German) readers to the Third Reich – due to their being heirs to a heritage of denied guild, concealed violence and failure of witnessing. A heritage of “phantoms” (Abraham) connected to and implicated in but never identical with that of surviving primary victims of National Socialism and their progeny. The understanding of both becomes interconditional and affiliated as exemplary life-histories of a specific socio-cultural environment. The distinctive combination of biographic and literary elements appears consistently in the author’s literary work as well as in his scholarly essays on Améry. Sebald’s utilization of his personal motives, experiences and reminiscences of the society he grew up in and later voluntarily exiled himself from is very self-referential and always mediated by his implementation of highly visible narrator-figures and the obvious bringing into play of archival and literary material. The justification for and significance of including the biographic element springs from its linkage to history (Klüger, 99). Sebald’s ability and motivation for attempting to come to terms with the Shoah – according to his own analysis – sprang from his own psychological make-up that was irreversibly influenced by the secrets kept by his parents and the environment he grew up in.7 Becoming aware of inherited blind spots through his scholarly examination of German-Jewish literary 7

In his evaluation of the writer Rüdiger Görner even calls Sebald a belated victim of trauma (26).

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and testimonial writing allowed him to listen and write, not – as Caruth describes it in her analysis of Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour – from a site of own trauma (56), but nevertheless from a site of missing the event, of an absence of understanding that is implicated in the trauma of the Shoah and vice versa. “[I]t is in the event of this incomprehension and in […] departure from sense and understanding that […] witnessing may indeed begin to take place” (56). In “Paul Bereyter” the narrator’s awareness of certain blind spots in his and the town’s version of the teacher’s life-story springs from his reading of the deceased’s obituary, which contains no reference to the fact that he committed suicide either voluntarily or due to a self-destructive compulsion, two possible explanations being offered in the narrator’s commentary (27). The official version fails to reveal the telling manner of his passing (putting his head on the railroad line). It merely records Bereyter’s popularity, unfailing dedication to his pupils’ wellbeing and certain special skills before noncommittally mentioning that he was banned from teaching during the Third Reich – offering neither clarification nor commentary. The attentiveness to the deceitfulness of public discourse, to his own lack of knowledge and to secrets surrounding apparently important aspects of the well-loved deceased’s vita and furthermore the drastic manner of his suicide motivate the narrator’s search for testimony to Bereyter’s life-history that augments his own returning recollections as a means “to discover the story I did not know” (28). He starts out by returning to his hometown after a prolonged absence, where – not unlike a detective seeking to solve a crime – he discovers that while Bereyter had been keeping a flat there, he also had been coming back only for short visits and had been living elsewhere at a place unknown to the rural community. Bereyter’s general behavior is pigeon-holed by those he talks to as seemingly incomprehensible and he is labeled an “eccentric” (28) by the population of S., who judge his suicide as the regrettable but likely outcome of his personality problems, thereby absolving themselves of any involvement or guilt, saying that “things had happened as they were bound to happen” (28). The narrator comes to the conclusion that a comprehension of Bereyter’s psyche and life-history can neither be obtained through the cover-up story nor by effort of the imagination, but possibly through an awareness and scrutiny of the lacunas in the official story and viewing them in relation to the disturbing and contradicting pieces in his own incongruous recollections. He remembers that as a child Bereyter seemed to him to be an integral part of school life. Only now has be come to recognize that the

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town’s habit of referring to Bereyter as Paul implied a kinship that was a “fabrication of our minds” (28) since while Bereyter understood them, they “had little idea of what he was or what went on inside him” (28–29). He also even then perceived him as speaking from a “position on the periphery” laboring under “a slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the larynx but from somewhere near the heart” (34–35). While Bereyter seemed like the ideal teacher in many aspects and “the very image (as I [the narrator] realize only now as I look back) of the German Wandervogel hiking movement” (40) he also remembers him as disproportionably and distressingly vulnerable, angry, and desolate especially when confronted with “inbred and willfully acquired” (35) “stupidity” (37), which upon occasion caused Bereyter to act seemingly out of character. The narrator recollects fearing that his teacher was “a mechanical human made of tin” that “might be put out of operation by the smallest functional hitch” (35). A deeper insight into the reasons for Bereyter’s psychological condition and the historic context responsible for it becomes possible for the narrator as the story unfolds through the recounting and thereby witnessing of the teacher’s narration of his life-history and the lacunas therein by his confidante Mme. Landau and the narrator’s interfacing with the testimony he listens to with his own fragmentary memories. The descriptions of different constellations of oral testimony in “Paul Bereyter” allow Mme. Landau as well as the narrator to become listeners to accounts of trauma and through the retelling to claim a place in the “alignment of witnesses.” Landau herself – the readers are told – emigrated from Germany as a child in 1933 accompanying her father. She, as well as photographs and excerpts she provides, tell the narrator about Bereyter’s seemingly idyllic childhood in S., his difficult calling to become a teacher, his boundless idealism, his first teaching position and his blissful association with a young Jewish woman from Vienna. The future Bereyter imagined for himself was irreversibly crushed when he was banned from teaching in 1935. “For the first time, he experienced that insuperable sense of defeat that was so often to beset him in later times and which, finally, he could not shake off ” (49) (“Er spürt, spürte damals zum erstenmal jenes unüberwindliche Gefühl der Niederlage, das ihn später so oft heimsuchen sollte und dem er zuletzt nicht mehr auskam” [72]). Landau is unsurprised that the narrator is unaware of Bereyter’s partially Jewish heritage. She interprets the cultivated ignorance concerning this aspect of Bereyter’s life-story – the “systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent after the war, kept their secrets and even, I some-

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times think, really did forget” (50), as Landau puts it – as a continuation of the population’s support of and collaboration with the Fascist regime and as unwillingness to accept responsibilities for their complicity in the crimes committed (50). Bereyter irreversibly lost his social ties, his home, even both of his parents, his heritage and an aspect he could – possibly due to feelings of guilt, Landau assumes – only remain mute to, Helen (49), who was deported along with her mother. In 1939 he returned from exile and moved to Berlin – a disturbing turn of events to Landau –, possibly because he had had trouble finding a position as a German in France at that time, possibly out of blind anger or perversion, so she speculates and thereby portrays her own puzzlement and the absence of an explanation in what Bereyter related to her (55). After working as a clerk, the teacher who had been considered too Jewish to teach, but Aryan enough for military service, joined up to go from victim to collaborator. Mme Landau offers only her own explanation, that Bereyter did so because he was “a German to the marrow” (57). Even while he had been momentously discriminated against and hated the specific socio-historic context he had grown up in and his countrymen, he still felt a part of it and saw in the discourse available to him at the time no basis for identifying with being either Jewish or exiled. Reading “Paul Bereyter” one is almost inevitably reminded of Améry’s famous essay “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew” (“Über Zwang und Unmöglichkeit, Jude zu sein”). Améry felt he was proclaimed to be a Jew by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935: “Society, concretized in the National Socialist German State […], had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me” (85). He wrote: “To be a Jew, that meant for me […] to be a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not yet were he properly belonged; and so it has remained, in many variations, in various degrees of intensity, until today” (86) (“Judesein, das hieß für mich von diesem Anfang an ein Toter auf Urlaub sein, ein zu Ermordender, der nur durch Zufall noch nicht dort war, wohin er rechtens gehörte” [135]).

Sebald’s essay on Jean Améry and Primo Levi excludes being Jewish in a religious sense as a shared defining factor of these life-stories stating that while Judaism played in a role in Primo Levi’s family-background before the Third Reich, for Jean Améry (a.k.a. Hans Mayer) it had held only the most abstract meaning. Their lives and deaths were shaped, linked and governed by the violence they were forced to suffer. The text emphasizes that Jean Améry’s psyche was even more severely shattered than Levi’s

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due to the torture visited upon him and the fact that his torturers where representatives of a socio-historic context and culture he had considered himself to be a part of and was now not only exiled from but viciously persecuted by. In Sebald’s paper Jean Améry’s life takes on an allegorical quality pointing towards the National Socialists attempt to eliminate any trace of a German-Jewish culture and history. While Levi could return to Italy after being released from Auschwitz, Améry spent his remaining years exiled mostly in Brussels, but writing in German before he – in Sebald’s view consequently – returned to Austria to commit suicide. The text markedly identifies the self-incriminating and eventually self-annihilating passing of judgment as the symptom of a pathology that leads to death and that Améry and Levi were victims of (120). Bereyter’s participation in the war on the German side, the narration suggests, can be seen as an effort to affirmatively belong to a society that had ostracized him as well as an attempt at self-annihilation. Due to this unbearable frame of mind “with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract” (56) (“mit jedem Pulsschlag, unbegreiflicher, eigenschaftloser und abstrakter” [83]). The text at this point incorporates two pictures: The first (55) showing a soldier looking out of a truck-compartment, facing in the direction the vehicle seems to be pointing, while the viewer can discern a boot in the darkened background the placement of which on the side of the truck-bed allows for speculation whether the owner of the jackboot is alive at this point of time. The second picture (56) which shows a man – presumably the same man featured in the previous picture, possibly Bereyter, – bare-chested, wearing only a watch and a pair of sunglasses that completely obscure his eyes. He’s facing in the opposite direction and the sun-filled background does nothing to indicate an ongoing war. These pictures along with the text that accompanies them establish a sort of Doppelganger-motif that serves as a further representation of Bereyter’s self-estrangement and the incomprehension toward his own history. His return to S. after the war and resumption of employment there as a teacher can be viewed as attempts to deny the past and the wrongs committed by and against him. They are also depicted as consequences of the pathology suffered by him that caused persistently and increasingly recurring symptoms that left Bereyter bewildered and fearing for his sanity (43–44). Bereyter, the narration relates, was (again) forced to give up his chosen profession as a teacher. He became claustrophobic upon entering the school building and hallucinated that his pupils were creatures deserving his contempt

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and hatred, which caused him to feel urges toward irrational and boundless violence, all due to his own haunting history that found no space for articulation in public discourse, since his own victimization had been eliminated as a topic. His trauma led to a first attempt to commit suicide that Bereyter bracketed out as an “embarrassment of the first order which he was loath to recall” (44). He only felt obliged to inform Landau “so that she would know all that was needful concerning the strange companion at whose side she was so kind as to be walking” (44) (“damit sie richtig im Bilde sei über den seltsamen Wiedergänger, an dessen Seite sie freundlicherweise […] promeniere” [66]). Bereyter at this point is depicted as much part of a discourse that attempts to forget the atrocities committed, as he is an unwitting victim of his recurring psychological symptoms. Only during the last year of his life does the reconstruction of what passed, the correction of his “partial grasp” and “patchy knowledge of the past” become vitally important to him (54). Living with Landau, Bereyter began to research and to write annotations to pogroms like the one committed in Gunzenbach that had contributed to his father’s heart attack and the self-righteous combination of violence and greed evident in the archival material. He continued by persistently reading the works of writers who either committed suicide or came close to doing so, focusing on the life of these authors. Landau recounts her impression that he was collecting evidence for a trial whose outcome conclusively convinced him of belonging not in S. but to the exiled. Meyer, building on Kafka and the tense of “die Exilierten” (86) convincingly argues that in this context to belong to the exiled can only mean to belong to the dead (26). Following this assurance, Bereyter’s vision – that had troubled him ad finitum – further deteriorated, pointing out that he “doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear” (55–56) (“ein Herz oder Auge hält” [82]). Landau accompanied Bereyter to S. although troubled by a premonition that they had “arrived at the end of the world” (60). This came true in the sense that Bereyter had finally chosen to acknowledge or succumbed to the utter and irreversible destruction of his existence during and by National Socialism. He ended his life – possibly out of pathological compulsion or in order to bear witness to this knowledge – accordingly by utilizing the “very image and symbol of […] [his] German tragedy” (61): on a part of the railroad network indispensable for the mass deportation and slaughter during the Third Reich. He joined the long-ago murdered Helen and the millions of others in death and marked his own as a belated casualty of that period, and in Sebald’s narration becomes an allegory of traumatization.

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Looking back, both Landau and the narrator remember Bereyter’s railroad obsession, the significance of which, until this final gesture, they had remained largely oblivious to. In Bereyter’s story Sebald’s presents usually untold gradations of being German-Jewish and exiled. There are marked differences in the life-histories of Bereyter and Améry but also telling similarities. Unlike Bereyter, who participated in the war, Améry belonged to a Belgian resistance group and was tortured in Breendonk – an incident Sebald commemorates in Austerlitz – and was later deported to Auschwitz. The numerous apparent connections between both lives are due to the socio-pathological constellation and consequences of muteness and trauma Sebald stresses with regard to Jean Améry and Primo Levi. It is seen as imperative to draw attention to the inherent lacunae of history through witnessing its incomprehensibility. In “Paul Bereyter” Sebald’s text commemorates a formerly nameless teacher’s life and death and the muteness and cultivated silence that shrouded it. It reads and narrates the lacunae in and the inherited secrets surrounding that life-history as telling signs of trauma and of the cultural pathology responsible for it by implementing skills developed through his reading and analysis of the texts and life of another victim of National Socialism. In doing so he metatextually commemorates Améry. Sebald listens and responds from a site of absence of understanding to the deceased author’s appeal to following generations by acknowledging his own implication and incomprehension in a literature that lauds witnessing and aims at keeping remembrance “from the cold storage of history” (Améry xi).

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Short Titles and Abbreviations used in this Volume Sebald’s writings Die Ausgewanderten Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1992. Austerlitz Austerlitz. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2001. Austerlitz Austerlitz. Anthea Bell, transl. New York: Random House, 2001 Beschreibung Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke. Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz, 1985. Emigrants The Emigrants. Michael Hulse, transl. London: The Harvill Press, 1996. Luftkrieg Luftkrieg und Literatur. Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch. Munich: Hanser, 1999. Natural History On the Natural History of Destruction. Anthea Bell, transl. New York: Random House, 2003. Ringe Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine Englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1992. Rings The Rings of Saturn. Michael Hulse, transl. New York: New Directions, 1999. Schwindel Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1990.

Writings by Others BSW BGS

Porträt

Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Michael W. Jennings et al, eds. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1996–2003. Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols. (excl. supplements). Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, et al, eds. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989. Loquai, Franz, ed. Porträt: W. G. Sebald. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 1997.

A Note on Citation Page references after quotations from Sebald in English always refer to the English translations as listed in the bibliography; page references after the German quotations refer to the German editions.

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Works Cited By W. G. Sebald Books After Nature. Michael Hamburger, transl. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002. After Nature. Michael Hamburger, transl. New York: Random House, 2002. Austerlitz. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2001. Austerlitz. Anthea Bell, transl. London: Penguin, 2002. Austerlitz. Anthea Bell, transl. New York: Random House, 2001. Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. Carl Sternheim, Kritiker und Opfer der Wilhelminischen Ära. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969. Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins. Stuttgart: Klett, 1980. Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1992. Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter Bis Handke. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Salzburg: Residenz, 1985. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Einborn, 1992. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997. Logis in einem Landhaus: Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere. Munich: Hanser, 1998. Luftkrieg und Literatur. Munich: Hanser, 1999. Luftkrieg und Literatur. Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001. Nach der Natur. Nördlingen: Greno, 1988. Nach der Natur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995. On the Natural History of Destruction. Anthea Bell, transl. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction. Anthea Bell, transl. New York: Random House, 2003. Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1990. Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. The Emigrants. Michael Hulse, transl. London: The Harvill Press, 1996. The Emigrants. Michael Hulse, transl. New York: New Directions, 1996. The Rings of Saturn. Michael Hulse, transl. London: Harvill, 1998. The Rings of Saturn. Michael Hulse, transl. New York: New Directions, 1998. Unheimliche Heimat. Essays zur österreichischen Literatur. Salzburg und Wien: Residenz, 1991.

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Unheimliche Heimat. Essays zur österreichischen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995. Vertigo. Michael Hulse, transl. London: Harvill, 1999. Vertigo. Michael Hulse, transl. New York: New Directions, 2000.

Interviews and Articles “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch.” In On the Natural History of Destruction, Anthea Bell, transl. New York: Random House, 2003. 105–42. “Das unentdeckte Land. Zur Motivstruktur in Kafkas Schloß.” In Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke. Salzburg und Wien: Residenz, 1985. “Die Mädchen aus der Feenwelt – Bemerkungen zu Liebe und Prostitution mit Bezügen zu Raimund, Schnitzler, und Horvath.” Neophilologicus 67.1 (1983): S. 109–17. “Der Schriftsteller Alfred Andersch.” In Luftkrieg und Literatur. Munich: Hanser, 1999. “Jean Améry und Primo Levi.” In Über Jean Améry. Ed. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990: 115–23. “Kafka im Kino. Nicht nur, aber auch: Über ein Buch von Hanns Zischler,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 Jan 1997. “La cour de l’ancienne école.” In BuchBilderBuch. Geschichten zu Bildern, Quint Buchholz, ed. Zürich: Sanssouci, 1997. “Thanatos. Zur Motivstruktur in Kafkas Schloss.” Literatur und Kritik 8 (1972): 399–411. “The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in Das Schloß.” In On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, Franz Kuna, ed. London: Paul Elek, 1976. 42–58. “The Meaning of Coincidence.” Interview with Joe Cuomo. New Yorker: Online Only. Issue of 3 Sept. 2001, posted 27 August 2001, accessed last April 2006. www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/010903on_onlineonl y01. “The Questionable Business of Writing.” Interview with Toby Green. www.amazon.co.uk, [n.d.]. Accessed last April, 2006. “The Undiscover’d Country: The Death Motif in Kafka’s Castle.” Journal of European Studies 2 (1972): 22–34. “Tiere, Menschen, Maschinen. Zu Kafkas Evolutionsgeschichten.” Literatur und Kritik 21 (1986): 194–201. “Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W. G. Sebald.” Akzente. (1 February 2002): 35–41. “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte: Versuch über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung mit Anmerkungen zu Kasack, Nossack und Kluge.” Orbis Litterarum 37 (1982): 345–66.

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