The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Hunter

  Ghost Hunter

  Who Is W. G. Sebald?

  A Poem of an Invisible Subject

  A Chilly Extravagance

  A Conversation with W. G. Sebald

  Rings of Smoke

  I

  II

  III

  Conspiracy of Silence

  Crossing Boundaries

  CONTRIBUTORS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have completed this book without the extraordinary assistance of Arleen Zimmerle, reference librarian at Bryn Mawr College, whose proficiency, enthusiasm, esprit, and inexhaustible patience turned the search for materials on W. G. Sebald into an absorbing task. Not least among the discoveries I made over the course of our many Tuesday afternoons in the library was the pleasure of her company.

  I was also assisted by the able and amiable Joe Tucker, reference librarian at Bennington College, who gave so promptly and generously of his time and knowledge. And by Elizabeth Catanes, a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr College, who was efficient, helpful, and undaunted by the labyrinths of the Internet.

  Introduction

  by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  W. G. Sebald’s death in 2001 at the age of fifty-seven shocked his readers, certainly; it also left them feeling uncannily bereft. In the few years since The Emigrants, his first work translated from German into English, appeared in 1996, he had become, as if by stealth, an indispensable writer, one we could not afford to lose. More than anyone else writing today, he made it new. His undulating, hypnotic sentences (despite their antique cast) are paradigms of the modern sensibility, its tangled restlessness as well as its torpor. His dreamlike narratives, meandering yet meticulous, echo the lingering state of shock that is our legacy—not only from the wars of recent memory but from the century of colonialism that preceded them, indeed, history’s “long account of calamities.”

  He made history new as well: the gaze that took in broad swathes of “the clearly chronic process of . . . impoverishment and degeneration” also resurrected them with heartbreaking lyrical precision. His language and breadth of vision combined in a slow burn, and by the light of that combustion we could glimpse what we have come from and what we have arrived at. Even, in a few dark, prophetic passages, where we’re going: “For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” I found this in his last novel, Austerlitz, which I happened to open in mid-September of 2001—a coincidence eerily in keeping with Sebald’s own broodings on serendipity across time and space, and on “the imponderables that govern our course through life.”

  The protagonist of Austerlitz, “entrusting” his life story to the narrator, begins with a curious remark: “Since my childhood and youth . . . I have never known who I really was.” Sebald, though he had much in common with Jacques Austerlitz, in one sense knew exactly who he was, to his regret. In Vertigo, on hearing a bunch of rowdy German tourists beneath his Venetian hotel room, the narrator thinks, “How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all.”

  He was born in 1944 in the small village of Wertagh im Allgäu in southern Bavaria, in the Alps near the Swiss border. He did not know his father, an officer in the Wehrmacht, until the latter returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947. His closest attachment was to his maternal grandfather, a kindly man quite different from the austere, incurious father whom he could never forgive for his participation in the war and his later silence about it. His grandfather’s death when Sebald was twelve was a blow from which he said he never recovered.

  He studied German language and literature first at the University of Freiburg and then in Switzerland, but dissatisfaction, particularly with his ex-Nazi professors who never alluded to the immediate past, soon compelled him to leave the continent at twenty-one. He continued his studies in Manchester and remained in England; at the time of his death Sebald had been teaching for over thirty years at the University of East Anglia, where he was also the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He was married and left a daughter who survived the auto accident that killed him.

  Sebald wrote in his native German. In one of those enigmatic flukes of publishing, the order in which his books appeared in English is not the order in which they were written and published in German. In English, The Emigrants (1996), which won almost universal critical praise for its then unknown author, was followed by The Rings of Saturn in 1998, Vertigo in 1999, and Austerlitz in 2001. The long poem After Nature, which Sebald described as his first venture into nonacademic writing, appeared posthumously in 2002, and On the Natural History of Destruction, based on a 1997 series of lectures he gave in Zurich on the World War II destruction of German cities and the treatment of that subject—or, in his view, lack of treatment—by postwar German writers, in 2003. Campo Santo (2005), a collection of essays on his visits to Corsica as well as on various literary figures, was put together after his death.

  In German, After Nature was published in 1988; it contains three sections, fictionalized riffs on the lives of Matthias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century German painter; Georg Wilhelm Steller, the eighteenth-century botanist; and Sebald himself. As for the prose works, if they are read in their order of composition, Vertigo, with its flights of invention taking off from the lives of Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova, shows the tortuous, associative Sebald strategy on a relatively small scale, except for its extraordinary final section on the narrator’s return visit to his native Bavaria, which gives a sense of postwar village life as it must have been during the author’s childhood.

  The Emigrants, which was written next, goes far more deeply into Sebald’s primary theme of exile and displacement, with each of its four sections devoted to characters who were forced to leave Germany, three because they were Jewish and one for more subtle personal reasons. Three of the four stories end in suicide. Instead of so many losses becoming diminished in effect, each death adds weight to the grief of the next.

  In The Rings of Saturn, to my mind Sebald’s best work, his imagination is given free rein and his digressive bent carried to its most extreme—almost comic—reaches. The swirling paths of thought cast a spell: if the reader is willing to submit, the author’s sensibility will carry him toward ever more tangled and distressing tales of decay, entropy, and destruction. The novel is shaped by a walking tour through the east of England; the narrator’s initial search for the skull of Sir Thomas Browne (the seventeenth-century author of Urn Burial) leads circuitously to a meditation on Joseph Conrad, to Belgian atrocities in the Congo, to the execution of Roger Casement, to Swinburne and Edward FitzGerald, and eventually loops to silkworm cultivation in China and its spread through Europe during the Enlightenment.

  The account of the Third Reich’s promotion of the silk industry, like so much else in Sebald’s work, becomes a metaphor for the unspeakable. Silkworm cultivation, according to the Nazis, will teach “the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to prevent racial degeneration.” He goes on to describe how the cocoons are finally destroyed in rising steam: “When a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed.” As André Aciman pointed out in a 1998 essay, “Sebald never brings up the Holocaust. The reader,
meanwhile, thinks of nothing else.” (This was written before the publication of Austerlitz; there Sebald spends many pages on a detailed description of the camp at Terezin.)

  Austerlitz is the closest Sebald comes to writing a “real” novel, with a protagonist driven to solve the mysteries of his lost past. Born in Prague, Jacques Austerlitz was evacuated by train at the age of four, along with other Jewish children, to escape the war. An emotionally frozen Welsh Calvinist couple raise him; in the silence and austerity of their airless house, he “forgets” his early years (much as the Germany of Sebald’s youth managed to “forget” the recent past). When the “vortex of past time” becomes too turbulent, he suffers a breakdown: “I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence . . . All my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.”

  Despite its having something resembling a plot, Austerlitz is typically meditative, digressive, undramatic, and shuns the techniques of the realistic novel, a genre for which Sebald felt impatience, even some contempt, as will be seen in the interviews. Austerlitz is my favorite after The Rings of Saturn, perhaps because as a novelist myself, I enjoy seeing how Sebald remakes the genre on his own terms. Some critics, though, including Arthur Lubow in the interview that follows, sense in Austerlitz “the author’s unconventional mind creaking against the walls of convention.” And Michael Hofmann finds the story “inevitably trite.”

  Like many writers of genius, Sebald dwells always on the same large themes. His favorite is the swift blossoming of every human endeavor and its long slow death, either through natural or man-made disaster, leaving a wealth of remains to be pored over, not to mention vast human suffering. His notions of time make this panoramic view possible. Like the spectral wanderers of his novels—all of them facets of Sebald himself, the prism—he sees time as plastic, irregular, subjective, “a disquiet of the mind.” Only our panic willfully orders it by the movements of the planets. Past and present might be concurrent or not, might stop and start with the erratic spasms of the mind, of memory. Why might we not have “appointments to keep in the past” just as we do in the future? But in our collective amnesia, we erase time as we go, forgetting what defines us. He has not forgotten; he pieces together the shards to remind us. And by some unfathomable sleight of hand, in making things clear and whole, he gives them the luster of mystery.

  The Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through. He spends sleepless, despairing nights in bleak hotel rooms, frequently in a state of emotional or physical collapse. Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around. He sees apparitions, figures from history gliding by. He visits deserted museums, “collections of oddities”; he photographs landscapes, streets, monuments, ticket stubs. Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage.

  Like the author, the narrator is German and left home young. Returning to his native town revives the unease—even disgust—that made him leave: “I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.” Sometimes he visits or merely recalls an old friend, and we hear the friend’s story, very like his own, in a voice like his own. All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator; as he explains in Arthur Lubow’s interview, “it’s all relayed through this narrative figure. It’s as he remembers, so it’s in his cast.”

  Among the relentless examples of “the insatiable urge for destruction,” the most urgent is the physical and metaphysical damage of the war waged by the Reich. With his enveloping suspicion of something having been hidden from him and the resulting sense of alienation, a theme he returns to frequently in the interviews, it is hardly surprising that Sebald became the chronicler of the displaced, the exiles, those who imagine, like Jacques Austerlitz, that they are living the wrong life, who sense a ghostly twin beside them.

  Sebald was exceptionally fortunate in his English translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell, with whom he collaborated closely and whose task cannot have been simple, given the length and elaborate—one might say baroque, even perverse—architecture of his sentences. Michael Hulse translated The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo. Anthea Bell translated Austerlitz, On the Natural History of Destruction, and Campo Santo. The poet Michael Hamburger, who was a friend of Sebald’s and also appears as a character in The Rings of Saturn , translated the poems After Nature and Unrecounted (also published posthumously). All three make the books read as if they were conceived and written in English; there can be no higher achievement for a translator.

  Because Sebald invented a new form of prose writing that makes tangible the contemporary blurring of borders between fiction and nonfiction, critics have puzzled over what to call his works, with their mélange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture, military fortifications, and more. Sebald himself used the term prose narratives. Baffling classification, they take the shape of the author’s consciousness. What unifies them is the narrator’s distilled voice—melancholy, resonant as a voice in a tunnel, witty: the effluvia of their author’s inner life. And against all odds, from these stories of exile and decay, the voice wrests a magical exhilaration. Several of the writers included here mention the urge to go back and read his books over as soon as they reach the final page. They are not only magnetic, drawing you back. They are evanescent, evaporating as the pages turn, exactly like the lives and settings they brood on. As Sebald writes of a landscape “dissolved in a pearl-gray haze”: “it was the very evanescence of these visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.”

  Always, the world is veiled, seen through fog and mist: a “veil of rain,” a “veil of ash,” “a profusion of dusty glitter.” An exiled German painter in The Emigrants loves the accumulation of dust in his studio, “the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little into nothingness.” After a dust storm, the narrator observes, “although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth had ground itself down.” Instead of feeling crushed by the image, we feel oddly sustained. It is the sustenance offered by truth, however somber.

  In several of the interviews that follow, Sebald mentions the porousness of the border between the worlds of the living and the dead; in parts of Corsica, he says, people imagine the dead returning to get a piece of bread from the pantry. As a boy, Jacques Austerlitz listens to the village cobbler’s tales of seeing the dead “who had been struck down by fate untimely . . . marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum.” The cobbler shows the boy a piece of black veil his grandfather saved from one of their biers: “Nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world.”

  Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story passionately lucid. What is perplexing is the narrator’s relationship to him. Gradually that, too, comes to light. Austerlitz “must find someone to whom he could tell his own story . . . and for which he needed the kind of listener I had been.” In the interviews, Sebald speaks of the ambiguous position of the listener absorbing the exiles’ stories until he takes on the burden of the tale. More than mere witness, by his unstinting attention he shares, if not the storyteller’s fate, at least his memory. Toward the end of his story, Austerlitz gives the narrator the key to his apartment, passing on his life for safekeeping. The novel is the key Sebald passes on to us.

  In an essay on the work of Peter Weiss, Sebald writes that “the arti
stic self engages personally in . . . a reconstruction, pledging itself . . . to set up a memorial, and the painful nature of that process could be said to ensure the continuance of memory.” He repeats this more poignantly in The Emigrants, in the voice of the exiled Max Ferber, who leaves the narrator a memento, along with words that augur the task Sebald assumed in his writing. His mother’s memoirs, Ferber says, “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. That is why I would rather you took this package.”

  I chose the pieces that follow from an enormous number of interviews, reviews, and essays; many major American and British critics and novelists have been moved to write about Sebald—and no wonder, given his originality and his sudden appearance, fully formed, as if out of nowhere. As a rule I don’t cherish interviews: I find writers explaining themselves and their methods not only less interesting and polished than the works themselves, but also less trustworthy. In the case of Sebald, however, like many other readers, I felt cheated out of those unborn books that surely would have given more of what Stephen Daedalus called “enchantment of the heart.” I had expected to be reading new ones for years to come.