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

by W. G. Sebald

  EW: You include many photographs with your text—of the people, the places, cityscapes or landscapes, and they’re very evocative, they’re haunting. In the narrative they seem to trigger a search. You see a photograph or you look at an album or someone shows you something, and then that takes you somewhere.

  WGS: Well, the pictures have a number of different sources of origin and also a number of different purposes. But the majority of the photographs do come from the albums that certainly middle-class people kept in the thirties and forties. And they are from the authentic source. Ninety percent of the images inserted into the text could be said to be authentic, i.e., they are not from other sources used for the purpose of telling the tale.

  I think they have possibly two purposes in the text. The first and obvious notion is that of verification—we all tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters. Once you bring up a photograph in proof of something, then people generally tend to accept that, well, this must have been so. And certainly even the most implausible pictures in The Emigrants would seem to support that, the more implausible they are. For instance, the photograph of the narrator’s great-uncle in Arab costume in Jerusalem in 1913 is an authentic photograph. It’s not invented, it’s not an accident, not one that was found and later inserted. So the photographs allow the narrator, as it were, to legitimize the story that he tells. I think this has always been a concern in realist fiction, and this is a form of realist fiction. In the nineteenth century, certainly in the German tradition, the author is always at pains to say, well, this is where I got it from, I found this manuscript on top of a cupboard in this or that town in such and such a house and so on and so forth, in order to give his whole approach an air of legitimacy.

  The other function that I see is possibly that of arresting time. Fiction is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient, and it is very, very difficult in that particular form in the narrative to arrest the passage of time. And as we all know, this is what we like so much about certain forms of visual art—you stand in a museum and you look at one of those wonderful pictures somebody did in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this—they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. I think that is something that is positive, slowing down the speed of reading, as it were.

  EW: One critic describes you as a ghost hunter. Do you see yourself that way?

  WGS: Yes, I do. I think that’s pretty precise. It’s nothing ghoulish at all, just an odd sense that in some way the lives of people who are perhaps no longer here—and these can be relatives or people I vaguely knew, or writer colleagues from the past, or painters who worked in the sixteenth century—have an odd presence for me, simply through the fact that I may get interested in them. And when you get interested in someone, you invest a considerable amount of emotional energy and you begin to occupy this person’s territory, after a fashion. You establish a presence in another life through emotional identification. And it doesn’t matter how far back that is in time. This seems to be quite immaterial somehow. And if you only have a few scraps of information about a certain sixteenth-century painter, if you are sufficiently interested, it nevertheless allows you to be present in that life or to retrieve it into the present present, as it were.

  One of the first things I wrote was a long prose poem [After Nature] about the early sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald, about whom we know hardly anything at all apart from his pictures. And it’s these lacunae of ignorance and the very few facts that we have that were sufficient somehow for me to move into this territory and to look around there and to feel, after a while, quite at home. It interests me considerably more than present day . . . I mean, going to Rio de Janeiro or to Sydney is something that I find entirely alien. You couldn’t entice me there. The fact that I’m now in America seems extremely strange to me.

  EW: One of your subjects in The Emigrants is a former schoolteacher of yours named Paul Bereyter. What made you want to get beyond your own, as you put it, very fond memories and discover the story that you didn’t know?

  WGS: In the town in which I grew up—we moved when I was seven or eight years old from a village to the nearest small town—this is where I went to the primary school where I was taught by this particular teacher. And in this town throughout the postwar years when I grew up, between the ages of eight and eighteen, no one ever mentioned that this man had gone through years of persecution, had been ousted from his teaching post in 1935, and then had come back after 1945 to pick up the loose threads again. Everybody knew about it. A small town that had, I don’t know, eight thousand inhabitants—everybody knew everybody else’s business. The teacher himself of course—and that is the most perplexing aspect of that whole tale—never mentioned it either. And so clearly, as I was very attached to him as a boy—I admired this man greatly—I did want to find out the truth about it. And at that level you might describe it almost in the first instance as a piece of investigative journalism. Once you get hold of a thread you want to pull it out and you want to see, you know, what the colors of the pattern are. And the more difficult it gets—as it did in this case, because nobody in the town was prepared to talk to me about that life—the more intrigued you become, the more you know that there is something buried there. And the less you want to give up on it.

  EW: Why wouldn’t they to talk to you? This is forty, fifty years later.

  WGS: Yes. Well, you know, the conspiracy of silence still lasts. It is something which people in other countries can scarcely imagine. It continues to puzzle me that when I grew up there, even when I was beginning to be capable of rational thought, as it were, at the age of sixteen or seventeen or so, this was scarcely fifteen years after the war. If I think back from the present moment in time, from 1997, sixteen or seventeen years back to 1980, it seems to me like yesterday. And so for my parents, for my teachers in 1960 or thereabouts, these calamitous years from 1941 to 1946, 1947, or so must have seemed like yesterday. And if you imagine that you have gone through such a dreadful phase of history, implicated in it in the most horrendous way, you might think that there might be an urge to talk about it. But I think that conspiracy of silence . . . it just came about, as it were. And it held, I think, even between married partners. I cannot imagine my parents, for instance, ever talking about these matters between themselves. It was just a taboo zone which you didn’t enter. I think these self-generated taboo zones are always the most powerful ones.

  EW: Because Bereyter was one-quarter Jewish he was not allowed to teach, he was rejected by the townspeople, he went to live abroad. But then he came back to Germany in 1939. Why?

  WGS: I think there are quite good reasons for that, if you imagine the actual scenario. He must have been about twenty-two, twenty-three at the time. There is a photograph in the text which shows him with this family near Besançon on a Sunday afternoon, where he had gone to be a private tutor in a middle-class household after he had been ousted from his teaching post. He looks extremely thin and emaciated in that picture. One can conclude even just from that, that he must have been through what for him was quite a harrowing transition. Now, if you imagine France in the late 1930s and the young—what he was to all intents and purposes—a young German, partly Jewish schoolteacher sharing the dinner table of his employers every day, having taught the children in the morning, listening to the conversation around that dinner table, extended conversations as they tended to be in France . . . Midday meals would last for a couple of hours, and there would be plenty of opportunity for the paterfamilias to hold forth about his political views and opinions. And in French middle-class life I think the general inclination at the time was very much toward the right, i.e., the messages which came out of Germany through the news, through the radio, through the papers were very frequently endorsed: This is how you do it, this is what
we should be doing. So by going to France, in a sense he didn’t escape it. Ironically, all these things have come very much into the foreground over the last few weeks and months. Today in The New York Times you have a report about the Maurice Papon trial in Bordeaux. And this is all, as it were, connected with this particular tale.

  So I think he must have felt quite an acute sense of discomfort in France. And of course by the late summer of 1939 one began to have an idea that, well, things were going to be very critical soon. So perhaps he did return to Germany because simply this was the place he knew best. And also I think, as the text makes clear at one or two points, he was very much in the German mold, this young teacher. An idealist coming out of the Wandervogel movement, as it were, a little bit like the young Wittgenstein when he went to upper Austria to teach the peasant children there, full of idealism, educational zeal, and so on. And this return to Germany in that sense is not altogether surprising.

  The curious thing of course is that he was then drafted into the German army—as a three-quarter Aryan you were allowed, it was possible to serve in the army—and that he survived the whole war and did go back to the town where he had begun his career as a schoolteacher. That is to my mind the more puzzling side of this particular person’s life: the return to Germany in 1945 or the staying there, and repressing, as it were, or being silent about all those dreadful things.

  EW: And then even later, after he retired, Paul Bereyter went to Switzerland. But he kept a flat in that same town where at this point he loathed the people.

  WGS: Yes, quite.

  EW: Could you understand why?

  WGS: Well, it’s all in the nature of the double bind, isn’t it? The psychologists know all about this. You want nothing more than to leave your parents, but you can’t bring yourself to do it because you fear that they will despise you for leaving them alone. It’s that sort of pattern. I mean, whatever you do is going to be wrong. And I think double binds govern to a greater or lesser extent almost all lives. Of course this is a particularly devastating form of double bind, if you are bound, as it were, to the nation that has done harm to you. But there are many Jewish-German stories which are exactly of that ilk.

  EW: A friend of Bereyter’s talks about “the contrarieties that are in our longings.”

  WGS: Yes. The history of Jewish-German assimilation, which goes back to the late eighteenth century, is full of this kind of ambivalence. Jewish names like Schiller and Lessing for instance—Jewish people took those on in admiration of the writers who they saw as the champions of enlightenment and tolerance. There was a very, very close identification between the Jewish population in Germany and the gentile population. And especially between the Jewish population and the country, the topography of the country, through their surnames. They were called Frankfurt or Hamburger or Wiener. They were, as it were, identified with these places. And it must have been extremely hard for them to abandon all this and to forget about it.

  I’m essentially interested in cultural and social history, and the relationship between the Jewish minority in Germany and the larger population is one of the most central and most important chapters of German cultural history from the eighteenth century to the present day in one form or another. And if you have a wish to understand, as I did have quite early on, the cultural environment in which you’re brought up, with all its flaws and terrible aspects, then there is no way past this issue. I talked before about the conspiracy of silence in, for instance, my hometown. And of course when I went up to university at the age of nineteen, I thought it might be different there. But it wasn’t, not at all. The conspiracy of silence certainly dominated German universities throughout the 1960s.

  At the same time of course, i.e., precisely at the time when I began to use my own brain, as it were, the great war crime trials, the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt which lasted for many months, the Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf, and various other trials of this kind took place, and the problem for the first time for my generation became a very public one. It was in the newspapers every day, there were lengthy reports about court proceedings and so on. And so you had to contend with this. There was evidence of what had occurred, evidence in no uncertain terms. And yet at the time you were sitting in your seminars at university, you know, reading a piece of romantic fiction, E.T.A. Hoffmann or something, and never referring in any of those cases to the real historical background, to the social conditions, to the psychological complications caused by social conditions and so on. That is, what we were doing at university was pure and unadulterated philology, and this didn’t get us any closer to what we wanted to know. Certainly for me it was always so. I think all children know this—if something is withheld from you, you want it all the more. And certainly from the age of eighteen or nineteen onwards, I was always, as it were, bent on trying to find out about these matters.

  EW: Many of your family chose to emigrate to America, but you chose England eventually. Why?

  WGS: In a historical accident. As a boy, my ambition was to go to America because America was the sort of ideal type country, at that time. But later on I had this, as it were, anti-American phase, which was part of growing up in Europe in the 1960s, where everything was very anti-American, and that must have cured me of my desire to go to America. When I was about twenty-one—this is round about the time when I left the European continent—I had no clear idea as to where I wanted to go. And Manchester, which is where I ended up, happened quite accidentally. I was looking for a job which would allow me to earn some money and continue my studies. I knew there were these language-assistant posts in British universities, and I wrote off to some of them and Manchester replied positively. So I packed my case and went there thinking that I might be there for a year or two or three until I got a doctorate and so on. But then eventually I got stuck in that country, because as it turned out, it’s even nowadays a very pleasant country to live in.

  EW: Although at one point, after studying in Manchester, you said you tried to live in Switzerland and also in Munich, and it didn’t work. Why not?

  WGS: The episode in Switzerland was in the German-speaking part, in a small town called Saint Galle. I taught at a private school there, which was run by some mafioso, you know, who got much more money from the students per month, or from one student per month, than he would pay a teacher. The whole setup was bizarre, and I knew from the first day I was there that I wouldn’t do it for more than nine months, and this was what happened. Also the German part of Switzerland, beautiful though it is still—you do come across an enormous number of people who are terribly interfering. If you dig your garden on a Sunday, they’ll come and denounce you to the police and say, he’s digging his garden on a Sunday. I just cannot live with this kind of thing.

  The year I spent in Munich and thereabouts I was working for a German cultural institute, the quite well-known Goethe-Institut. This was after I had taken my doctorate in England and I was looking for a career, and I thought I might do that. But as it turned out, I found it too officious, representing, however obliquely, Germany in a public sort of way abroad. I felt, when I saw it from closer up, that it wasn’t me and that I’d rather go back and live in hiding, as it were.

  EW: In hiding?

  WGS: Well, where I am now is very much out in the sticks. It’s in a small village near Norwich in the east of England. And I do feel that I’m better there than I am elsewhere in the center of things. I do like to be on the margins if possible.

  EW: What attachment do you feel to Germany now?

  WGS: Well, I know it’s my country. Even after all those years. I’ve been out of it now for . . . it must be well over thirty years by now. Longer out of it than in it. Although of course I come from the edges, as it were, the southern edges of Germany—my granddad’s house was on the Austrian border almost directly. I hardly knew Germany. When I left it I knew the territory where I had grown up and I knew Freiburg and I had been to Munich once or twice. But one didn’t really travel terribly much in t
he midsixties or early sixties. And so I hardly knew it. I didn’t know Frankfurt, I didn’t know Hamburg, I didn’t know anything in the north or the middle—Hanover, Berlin were all totally alien to me. So in a sense it’s not my country. But because of its peculiar history and the bad dive that history took in this century or, to be more precise, from about 1870 onwards because of that, I feel you can’t simply abdicate and say, well, it’s nothing to do with me. I have inherited that backpack and I have to carry it whether I like it or not.

  EW: And you still write in German.

  WGS: And I still write in German, yes. There are very few writers who write in two languages, even people as accomplished as Nabokov in more than one language. Once Nabokov had moved across from Russian to English, he stayed in English. He still used Russian for translation purposes. But he didn’t, as far as I know, write in that language after he had made the transition. Making the transition as Nabokov does, say, is a very, very risky and harrowing business. And so far I have tried to avoid making that decision. There aren’t many other writers that I can think of who had to contend with that particular problem. There is Elias Canetti, who lived for many decades in London before he returned to Zurich, who spoke English perfectly well but never wrote a line in English, to the best of my knowledge. I think it is quite difficult to reach a level of sophisticated competence in a language. Even if you can babble on, it doesn’t mean that you can write it well. That’s quite a different proposal.