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

by W. G. Sebald

  There was, as it were, a décalage or discontinuity in time so that in a sense in the late forties and early fifties in the Alps, you lived in the eighteenth century, for a few years. It’s changed very rapidly. There was this unevenness of time. It’s now very difficult to find any spaces where the twenty-first century isn’t as yet. Certainly Germany has all been leveled out. Even in the 1960s, the frontier tracks in the east towards Czechoslovakia were, way back in time, underdeveloped, predeveloped. And that has all changed. So I think we move out of our earlier forms of existence or arrangements with nature at a price, always. There is always something we have to give up.

  JC: Yes, I was feeling that today. I was typing up some of the notes here, and the computer program I was using was changing the letters. I would type a lowercase “a” because it was at the left margin of the poem, and the computer would change it to a capital. [Audience laughter.] I would go to the next line, and it would do the same thing.

  WGS: Yes, my translator in the book that’s coming out in the autumn [Austerlitz] has some Czech bits in it, which I found quite hard to write. At any rate, I haven’t got a machine but the translator had a machine, and whenever she put those Czech bits in, the computer then put a one-and-a-half space for the next line, without explanation, without rhyme or reason. He’s not answerable. This is the strange thing, that there’s the same gap of incomprehension between us and these machines as there is between us and the animals we look at in the zoo. [Audience laughter.] There is a gap of incomprehension. We guess at what they might think about us, but we’re not entirely sure.

  JC: The fault line in your work seems to be the conflict between nature and civilization, and for you the fear is that nature is going to be destroyed. . . .

  WGS: Well, in one sense, organic nature is going to vanish. We see it vanishing by the yard. It’s not very difficult—I mean, you can hear the grass creak. Once you have an eye for it, if you go to the Mediterranean you can see that there used to be forests all along the Dalmatian coast. The whole of the Iberian Peninsula was wooded; you could walk from the Atlas Mountains to Cairo in the shade at the time of Scipio. It’s been going on for a long time, it’s not just now. There are pockets, Corsica, for instance, where you can see what these forests looked like. The trees were much taller. They were like the American trees, straight up, some sixty yards. But there are only pockets of it left. And you can see that it’s a process of attrition that’s gone on for a long time and that organic nature is being replaced through the agency of the psychozootic power, whatever one might call them, i.e., us—it’s being replaced by something else, by chemistry, dust, and stones, which function in some form or other. And we don’t know what it’s going to be. On the whole, the thing evolves under its own steam. There’s very little we can do to steer it.

  JC: Of the four books which I know in English, The Emigrants seems to be the one that’s least like the others in structure. There are four sections about four individuals, all of whom are more or less drawn from life. You’ve used the term “documentary fiction” to describe The Emigrants. I was wondering if that same description fits the other three novels at all.

  WGS: Not really. They’re all different. I think this one [Austerlitz ] is much more in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy. The first one, Vertigo, has very strong autobiographical elements, i.e., it looks at a period of disturbance in the narrator’s life and tries to intimate how that might have come about. And it is also in the nature of crime fiction, in the sense that there are unresolved crimes. Which really happened—these gruesome murders in Italy which are described in that book—I mean, these are authentic elements.

  JC: And the death of Schlag the hunter at the end of Vertigo?

  WGS: That is also how it happened to me as I grew up in that village. But the image of the hunter is projected backward in the text in an illicit sort of way. So there are a few instances, certainly in the Stendhal and in the Kafka story, where some kind of legerdemain arranges things in a way suitable for the text.

  JC: There is the effect in Vertigo when we read the last section—the narrator returning to his home town, W., which is also first the initial of your hometown—where we suddenly see what we’ve read before in a new light, and this turns around our perception of the earlier chapters. Was that something that came to you when you got to the last chapter?

  WGS: No, that happens. For instance, as in psychoanalysis, when the narrative is finished, its beginnings show up in a new light. And in fact it happens with all forms of tales and stories, that the end really provides . . . I mean, after the tock comes the tick again.

  JC: Was The Emigrants, then, very different from the other books, in the writing of it?

  WGS: Different in the sense that Vertigo was very much a thing I did by myself, but with The Emigrants I had interlocutors, i.e., people whom I had known and was talking to, as it were, after their death, remembering who they were. Or people who, as in the case of the last story, were still alive. The last story is based on two figures, on a well-known contemporary painter and on a landlord I had in Manchester who was an émigré and came to Manchester in 1933; all the details about the childhood of his mother are from his mother. And this was for me quite a momentous experience, this whole Manchester business, because growing up in Germany you do perhaps learn the odd thing or did at the time . . . I mean, one didn’t really talk about the Holocaust, as it is called, in the 1960s in schools, nor did your parents ever mention it, God forbid, and they didn’t talk about it amongst themselves either. So this was a huge taboo zone. But then pressure eventually saw to it that in schools the subject would be raised. It was usually done in the form of documentary films which were shown to us without comment. So, you know, it was a sunny June afternoon, and you would see one of those liberation of Dachau or Belsen films, and then you would go and play football because you didn’t really know what you should do with it.

  Then later on when I started at the university in 1964, ’65, for the first time these issues became public, in the sense that newspapers wrote about it a great deal. There was the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which went on for a long period of time, well over a year, and where there were daily full-page reports about these things. And I remember reading those reports every day and being absolutely astonished at the details that came out of them. Nevertheless, despite my interest, unavoidable interest in these questions, I couldn’t really imagine it at all; it was some form of abstraction; there were large numbers and you didn’t know who these people really were. Because it is inconceivable of course in this country somehow that there is in the heart of Europe a country where there aren’t any Jewish people. Or scarcely. There are some now, small growing communities again. In the 1960s you grew up there for twenty years and you never bumped into a Jewish person, so you didn’t know who they were. Just some kind of phantom image of them. And so I go to Manchester. I didn’t know anything about England nor about Manchester nor about its history or anything at all. And there they were all around me, because Manchester has a very large Jewish community, and very concentrated in certain suburbs, and the place where I lived was full of Jewish people. And my landlord was Jewish. I didn’t talk to him about that nor did he talk to me about it either. We all avoided the subject. Until his wife, who was a good Englishwoman, once told me, well, do you know, Peter is actually from Munich? And I didn’t know what I should do with this piece of information. But eventually, twenty years later, I went back and talked to him about it. And this is when all these things came out. And it turns out that as a small boy he was skiing in the same places where I went skiing. That somehow then sets you thinking. It’s the reality of it. That he left traces in the snow on the same hills. These are different kinds of history lessons. They’re not in the history books.

  JC: When you were at university, I think you said somewhere that it was a very disturbing experience because most of the professors had gotten their jobs during the brown-shirt era, so there was a conspiracy o
f silence even there.

  WGS: It’s certainly true. I went to university in ’63 from this place where I had grown up, which I had really never left before. I didn’t really know Germany. At any rate, I went to Freiburg, which was pretty much the nearest place where you could study. And I had a sense of discomfort there all the time, but I didn’t quite know why. It was simply that conditions for studying weren’t very good, so I decided to go to Switzerland, where it was much easier to get into libraries and the numbers of students were smaller and so on. I really left Germany for practical reasons in the first instance. It’s in retrospect that I seem to think—and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s true— that I did have a sense of discomfort about the whole thing. The humanities were particularly compromised. The law profession as well, practically all . . . But certainly these people had all got their stars, as it were, in the thirties and forties. And if you then, as I have done subsequently, looked at what their Ph.D.’s were about, your hair stood on end. It really was a very unpleasant spectacle. Nobody mentioned it, but there was a very deeply ingrained authoritarianism, and as I have, I think, somewhere an anarchist streak in me, I couldn’t really put up with that.

  JC: Do you think that’s why you didn’t go back once you left?

  WGS: There were a number of reasons, but that certainly was one of them. Because obviously once you had been in England for a number of years you could see a difference in attitude. Ideology didn’t matter in England. You had colleagues who were extreme trade unionists and others who were Church of England all day long, and they all worked together and tolerated each other. But in Germany after the students’ rebellion in the late sixties, early seventies, well, if you had leftish tendencies you could do a Ph.D. only in Frankfurt, Berlin, or Bremen. If you had liberal tendencies, you could do it pretty much anywhere. But this was it. You had to choose the train you wanted to be on.

  JC: I want to talk about another subject that’s in your writing, which is the moral difficulty of the writing process itself. In The Rings of Saturn, the narrator says,Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways.

  It reminds me of something the narrator says about writing the account of Max Ferber in The Emigrants: 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 paralyzing 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.

  WGS: Well, yes, writing, as I said before . . . you make something out of nothing. It is a con trick.

  JC: But there seems to be quite a preoccupation with making what is written true.

  WGS: That’s the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That’s the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it’s because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer’s block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that’s going to come out [Austerlitz]. I don’t know how many months I couldn’t get . . . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it’s all right; you look at it the next day, it’s awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of one page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that’s how it is. And it’s very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one’s nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realize that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

  Flaubert said at one point something like, “L’art est un luxe. Il faut des mains calmes et blanches.” And then he went on to say something like, “On fait d’abord une concession et puis deux et puis on sent fou completèment.” [Audience laughter.] And that’s very true: you make one concession, you make another one, and in the end, nothing matters anymore.

  JC: I was wondering if what the narrator in The Emigrants says in the Paul Bereyter section had some bearing when you were writing Austerlitz:I imagined him, stretched out on the track [where he committed suicide]. . . . Such endeavors 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 seem 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.

  He was a teacher of yours.

  WGS: Yes, a primary-school teacher.

  JC: And Austerlitz is dealing with a similar subject as in The Emigrants: a man, Jacques Austerlitz, left Czechoslovakia in 1939 as a young boy, and then he doesn’t remember most of what had happened until he’s at a more advanced age. First of all, was this someone that you did know, as in The Emigrants?

  WGS: The Austerlitz character has two models and bits from other lives also. There was a colleague of mine, a distant colleague in London—London is a hundred miles from Norwich, but I had some contacts there—and I had bumped into this man a number of times fortuitously, in Belgium of all places, in the late 1960s, in unlikely places. He was an architectural historian, somewhat older than me, about ten, twelve years older, a born, very gifted teacher. And whenever we met I just listened to him. Before I came to England I hadn’t had any teachers apart from this primary schoolteacher who I wanted to listen to. And this chap was interested in the architecture of the capitalist era—opera houses, railway stations, that sort of thing—and he could go on endlessly about the most fascinating details. Then I lost sight of him for a while, and in the 1990s we made contact again. So this is one foil of the story.

  But there is another foil, which is the life story of a woman, and that story I came across, as one does sometimes, on television. You know how ephemeral these appearances are on television—you see a film or you don’t see it, and then it vanishes forever and you can’t get a copy of it despite your best efforts. But there was this story of a woman who together with her twin sister had also come to Britain on one of these Kindertransporte , as they were called, trains with very young children leaving Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria just before the outbreak of war. And those two girls were, I think, two-and-a-half to three years old. They came out of a Jewish Munich orphanage and they were fostered by a Welsh fundamentalist childless couple who then went on to erase their identity. And both foster parents ended tragically, as one might say, the father in a lunatic asylum, the mother through an early death. And so the children never really knew who they were. This is just one strand, as it were, of the story which I then put together with that other life history.

  JC: I was wondering if that fear of presumption is what was so inhibiting in the writing of Austerlitz.

  WGS: Well, it’s always there. I think certain
ly for a German gentile to write about Jewish lives is not unproblematic. There are examples of that, writers attempting this in Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and many of these attempts are—one can’t say it really otherwise—shameful. In the sense that they usurp the lives of these people. Perhaps not consciously so; they might be done with the best of intentions, but in the making it comes so that it isn’t right, morally not right. That is, something is spun out of the lives of these victims which is gratifying for the author or for the author’s audience. It’s very, very difficult terrain. I don’t know whether I succeed in this, but I was certainly conscious from the beginning that even in talking to the people who you perhaps might want to portray, there are thresholds which you cannot cross, where you have to keep your distance. It’s difficult and every case is different. Yet at the same time, of course, the likes of us ought to try to say how they receive these stories. But there isn’t a self-evident way of going about it. It’s a more acute variation of a problem that all writers have. So one has to be very careful.