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

by W. G. Sebald

  The conflict between fact and fiction reaches its epitome in the voice that narrates all these stories of loss. Sebald seems to encourage us to think of this persona as something like his own. His narrator (the books share a single voice) occasionally offers biographical details that are identical to Sebald’s own life: he is married, he lives in East Anglia, he was born toward the end of World War II in an Alpine German town, and came to England in the 1960s. Yet these details, like the photographs, obscure as much as they reveal. There are moments of startling intimacy, but even as Sebald’s narrator seems to bare his soul, he tells us nothing about himself. And he favors a particularly disorienting narrative device: most of Sebald’s characters tell their stories through direct encounters with the narrator, in monologues. At a crucial moment in some of the monologues, Sebald will switch from third person to first person, so that the narrator vanishes, leaving the character behind. Since he does not use quotation marks, the shift is seamless. This is not an “unreliable narrator,” it is an unreliable narrative.

  But even as Sebald builds layer upon layer of disguise, his books stumble over their own sentences in their desire to explain themselves to the reader, as the crushing pile of symbols in the opening to Austerlitz illustrates. The books search for patterns in nature and in human life, and as they do so they obsessively repeat themselves. To take one instance: The Rings of Saturn begins with a quotation from an encyclopedia that describes the planet’s rings as “consist[ing] of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.” The circular motif is repeated throughout the book, in everything from the déjà vu the narrator experiences visiting a friend’s apartment to an extraordinary vision that is one of Sebald’s most beautiful and mystical moments: “At earlier times, 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.” The momentum created by the piling of image upon image, of figure upon figure, is so powerful that when one reaches the end of the book—I have experienced this with all of Sebald’s books, and others have mentioned it as well—one feels an irresistible compulsion to turn it over and begin again.

  Yet there is something unsettling about the spell that Sebald’s books weave; and it is not only the disequilibrium that is constantly evoked by the differences between fact and fiction, art and life—a state in which Sebald’s narrator continually finds himself and that Sebald seeks to induce in the reader as well. It is a deeper paradox. In the first chapter of Vertigo, Sebald traces the adventures of the young Stendhal (then known as Marie Henri Beyle) in Napoleon’s army, and comments on the writer’s own difficulty in recollecting them: “Even when the images supplied by memory are true to life one can place little confidence in them.” Years later Beyle will discover that he had replaced his own mental image of Ivrea with that of an engraving of the town. “This being so,” Sebald concludes, “Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.”

  Art is the preserver of memory, but it is also the destroyer of memory: this is the final tug-of-war in Sebald’s work and the most fundamental one. As he searches for patterns in the constellation of grief that his books record, he runs the risk that the patterns themselves, by virtue of their very beauty, will extinguish the grief that they seek to contain. Sebald’s peculiar alchemy of aestheticism and sorrow unwittingly underscores its own insubstantiality. Even as he investigates the roots of memory, Sebald, like the weavers whom he finds so emblematic, continually unravels his own creations.

  II

  For English readers, Sebald’s books have an extra layer of circularity, because they appeared in translation out of order. Vertigo, his first prose book, was published in the United States after The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz followed in 2001. Sebald’s first literary work to be published in German, After Nature, was his last to appear in English. This displacement is actually a boon to English readers, because After Nature benefits immensely from being read after Sebald’s other work. It is a panorama of many of his great themes, but they appear in embryonic form.

  Like Sebald’s other books, After Nature confounds genre: it has been called a prose poem, but while the language in places has the feel of prose, technically it is free verse. Each of the three sections has its own title and can be read as a distinct poem, but Sebald seems to have thought of them as a single entity. (In German the book is subtitled Ein Elementargedicht, “an elemental poem.”) The volume’s title refers to the practice of creating a work of art from a living subject (the poem mentions painting “after nature”), and the subject who is patiently submitting is Sebald himself: each of the three characters presented is a self-portrait of the writer. The first section is a biographical meditation on Matthias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century painter known for altarpieces that depict the crucifixion and other torments of the flesh and the soul with harrowing fidelity. (Max Ferber, the painter of The Emigrants, seems to speak for Sebald when he says that “the extreme vision of that strange man, which was lodged in every detail, distorted every limb, and infected the colors like an illness, was one I had always felt in tune with.”) The second section follows eighteenth-century explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller (who shares Sebald’s initials) on an Arctic journey led by Vitus Bering. And in the third Sebald investigates his own family history and early memories, much of which will prove fertile ground for the later works as well.

  The suggestion of self-portraiture is evident from the opening lines of After Nature, which depict a person closing one of Grünewald’s altar panels. As the panel folds in upon itself, the face of St. George becomes visible on the outside, “about to step over the frame’s / threshold.” George’s “silver / feminine features” are those of Grünewald himself, whose face “emerges again and again / in his work.” We are reminded of Sebald’s own face and voice appearing over and over in his characters; and it heightens the analogy that the shape of the closed altar panel is reminiscent of a book, with the face of St. George—that is, of Grünewald—in the spot where the author’s name should be.

  Grünewald’s face, Sebald continues, displays “always the same / gentleness, the same burden of grief, / the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled / and sliding sideways down into loneliness.” Holbein the Younger, too, has depicted him in a painting of a female saint:These were strangely disguised

  instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger

  whose books were burned by the fascists.

  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 where their paths had crossed.

  One could hardly ask for a better description of Sebald’s own enterprise. Starting with this book, he would practice a somber cartography, mapping out in his own works of art the crossing paths, real or imagined, of Stendhal, Kafka, Nabokov, and the countless others whose suffering is stenciled on his work: “the marks of pain,” as he put it in Austerlitz, “which . . . trace countless fine lines through history.”

  As the glancing reference above to “the fascists” shows, even when the events of World War II are not front and center in Sebald’s book, they never recede far into the background. “We know there is a long tradition / of persecuting the Jews,” the poem declares a bit later in this section and goes on to describe the torments suffered by the Jews of Frankfurt in the Middle Ages: a fiery massacre, the wearing of yellow rings, their confinement to a ghetto in which they were locked each night, and “on Sundays at four in the / afternoon.” Grünewald would have witnessed this persecution, Sebald continues, because his futu
re wife was reared in the ghetto, though she later converted to Christianity. But the persecution of the Jews is just a tile in the mosaic of human suffering, a mosaic that in this poem includes Grünewald’s personal torments—his marriage was unhappy, possibly because “he had more of an eye for men”—as well as those of the patients in the hospital at Isenheim, the site of Grünewald’s masterpiece, whose horrible disfigurements may have inspired some of the artist’s work; and the massacre of five thousand peasants in the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525, which Grünewald learns of after meeting two painters who are brothers, Barthel and (yes) Sebald Beham. In Sebald’s account Grünewald refused to leave his house after hearing of this, buthe could hear the gouging out

  of eyes that long continued

  between Lake Constance and

  the Thuringian Forest.

  For weeks at a time he wore

  a dark bandage over his face.

  But the dominant event is the solar eclipse of 1502, a “catastrophic incursion of darkness”:on the first of October the moon’s shadow

  slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg

  over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,

  and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch

  with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann

  Indagine,

  will have travelled to see this event of the century,

  awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

  so will have become a witness to

  the secret sickening away of the world,

  in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk

  in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit

  poured through the vault of the sky,

  while over the banks of mist and the cold

  heavy blues of the clouds

  a fiery red arose, and colors

  such as his eyes had not known

  radiantly wandered about, never again to be

  driven out of the painter’s memory.

  These colors unfold as the reverse of

  the spectrum in a different consistency

  of the air, whose deoxygenated void

  in the gasping breath of the figures

  on the central Isenheim panel is enough

  to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which

  comes the mountain landscape of weeping

  in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze

  into the future has prefigured

  a planet utterly strange, chalk-colored

  behind the blackish-blue river.

  Despite what the medievals may have thought, it is impossible now to see an eclipse as “catastrophic”: the event simply does not merit the implication of horror. Sebald understands the eclipse, however, not as a single dreadful incident, but as part of a plumb line that descends through history, linking all the horrors that would take place in the same physical location, up to and including the Holocaust.

  Later in the poem, similarly, Sebald discusses Altdorfer’s painting of Lot and his daughters fleeing Sodom, in reference to the sight of Nuremberg in flames under the Allied bombs, and the epigraph to this section, from Virgil’s Eclogues, draws the reader back even further: “and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops / and from high mountains the greater shadows fall.” Though the conflagrations are distant from one another in every way—temporally, geographically—they are aesthetically part of a greater universal pattern of fiery massacre, a pattern that circles around infinitely, changed slightly upon each recurrence but not fundamentally altered. In later works Sebald has accomplished this kind of pattern tracing more effectively—here the layers can feel a bit slapped together—but the fundamental idea is the same: that when great suffering takes place somewhere, generation after generation, the sorrows are trodden in the soil.

  But there is a crucial difference between the self-portrait and the artist: by witnessing one of the horrors that took place in this locale (the eclipse), Grünewald becomes a witness to them all. Sebald, on the other hand, witnessed none of World War II; and he feels this gap in his experience as painfully as most people feel the experience of trauma.

  I grew up,

  despite the dreadful course

  of events elsewhere, on the northern

  edge of the Alps, so it seems

  to me now, without any

  idea of destruction,

  he writes in the poem’s final, autobiographical section. Born in the penultimate year of the war in a remote German village, he was shielded from the destruction by virtue of his youth; but still as a child he imagined within him “a silent catastrophe that occurs / almost unperceived / . . . this / I have never got over.”

  Like Jacques Austerlitz and Max Ferber, Sebald sees himself as a child brought up unaware of his own identity, a Kaspar Hauser-like figure. The poem never fully reveals the source of the “silent catastrophe,” the absent memory, but each part of this last autobiographical section sifts through a different time period in Sebald’s life in search of clues. “For it is hard to discover / the winged vertebrates of prehistory / embedded in tablets of slate,” the section begins, as if continuing a conversation, which in a way it is.

  But if I see before me

  the nervature of past life

  in one image, I always think

  that this has something to do

  with truth.

  “How far, in any case, must one go back / to find the beginning?” Sebald asks. And the “beginning” for which he searches is that of his own prehistory. After passing over the day his grandparents were married and a few other potential “beginnings,” he settles on the day before his father left to serve in Dresden, “of whose beauty his memory, as he / remarks when I question him, / retains no trace.” The next night Nuremberg was attacked, and his mother, on her way back to the Allgäu, was stuck at a friend’s house in the town of Windsheim, where she discovered that she was pregnant. The narrator’s life, then, is indelibly intertwined with the last days of the war. And yet he can retain no memory of it; he was too young.

  “I nearly went out of my mind,” Sebald says of his reaction to seeing Altdorfer’s painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Austerlitz will use exactly the same words to describe revisiting sites in Prague that he had not seen since childhood. Mourning the loss of a memory that he never had, Sebald turns to Altdorfer as a surrogate. When memory is lacking, art will suffice; but art is a shorthand, not a substitute. Sebald aestheticizes history, but he never mistakes history for art.

  III

  After Nature, the first of Sebald’s literary works, inaugurates the search for “the nervature of past life” that would form the sub-text of all his books. The character obsessively driven by a quest for knowledge—a quest rooted in his or her personal life—is a constantly recurring figure. Janine, a French professor in The Rings of Saturn, studies Flaubert’s novels with “an intense personal interest” that is never explained. Jacques Austerlitz, a retired art history professor, has spent much of his life working on an investigation into the “family likeness” between various monuments of Europe, a topic that he feels compelled to pursue by an “impulse which he himself . . . did not really understand.” Sebald’s narrator can also be included in this category: though we encounter him at various points along his wanderings through Europe and America, we are never told why he makes his journeys.

  But Sebald did write a book in which he explained what it was that possessed him so; and in doing so he ignited a controversy in Germany that one critic compared to the storm about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Invited in 1997 to give a series of lectures at the University of Zurich, Sebald boldly put forth the thesis that postwar German literature had failed to represent adequately the devastating effects of the Allied bombing campaign for the German nation. The lectures were extensively covered in the Swiss and German media, and Sebald published them in book form in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur.

  The sc
ale of the destruction caused by the bombings, Sebald argues, is difficult “to even halfway comprehend,” but they “appear to have left hardly a trace of pain in the collective consciousness.” 1 Not only did few German novelists concern themselves with the air war against Germany, Sebald says, but there exist almost no testimonies of the war written by Germans; the majority of the information about the destruction comes from foreign journalists reporting from the bombed-out nation. Trummerliteratur, the “rubble literature” movement that emerged in the years immediately following World War II, is most notable for what Sebald calls its “collective amnesia.” Even now that historians have begun to document the destruction of the German cities, “the images of this harrowing chapter of our history have not truly crossed the threshold of the national consciousness.” Sebald describes a “tacit but universally valid agreement” among writers not to record the “true state of material and moral annihilation” in which the nation found itself—in other words, a conspiracy in German culture, the effects of which have lasted to this day.

  What is needed to counteract this tendency, Sebald argues, is a “natural history of the destruction.” He is generous with statistics: 1 million tons of bombs dropped, 131 cities hit, 600,000 civilians dead, 3.5 million homes destroyed, 7.5 million Germans left homeless. He cites Hans Erich Nossack on the streams of refugees that “noiselessly and incessantly flooded everything,” bringing the chaos of the urban bombing into the quiet villages of the countryside. He devotes pages to the sudden flourishing of the parasites that feed off corpses: the rats, “bold and fat,” that “cavorted in the streets”; the flies, “huge, iridescent green, as had never been seen before.” And he remarks mordantly that “the striking paucity of observations and commentary on this matter can be explained by an unspoken taboo that is more understandable when one considers that the Germans, who had taken upon themselves the cleansing and hygienization of all of Europe, must have had to shield themselves from the mounting fear that they themselves were in fact the ‘rat nation’ [Rattenvolk].”