by W. G. Sebald
over postretirement plans—all took on unintended irony and unwelcome poignancy. But I was unsure whether these new associations were instructive or merely distracting.
Writing before Sebald’s death, I hadn’t felt the need to devote much space to the book he was working on. Now that the book would never be born, I wondered if my jottings on his remarks (like an architect’s unbuilt doodle) possessed a new value. And what about his future? In two years he would have been able to step down with a full pension from his position teaching literature at the University of East Anglia. Because he wrote so eloquently about the sense of dislocation, I had asked if there was any place he had ever felt at home, and that line of talk had led to his musing about where he might spend his final years. Did those dreams, brutally foreclosed, become irrelevant or somehow more important?
Thinking about Sebald, I slipped into Sebaldian logic. The boundaries between the dead and the living, the planned and the accomplished, the remembered and the real, came to seem arbitrary. In one of our conversations, he had approvingly described the custom in traditional Corsican households of consulting the portraits of ancestors before making important decisions. “These borders between the dead and the living are not hermetically sealed,” he said. “There is some form of travel or gray zone. If there is a feeling, especially among unhappy people, that there is such a thing as a living death, then it is possible that the revers is also true.” That the book and the retirement would never occur didn’t much change the valence of the material. Reading Sebald, you feel the excitement of exploring a strange new landscape. The bits I had gathered could serve as road markers—or, at least, travel posters—for the territory of his mind.
Sebald was “Proustian,” people often said. Since his tone was elegiacal and his sentence structure was serpentine, that pigeonholing arose predictably. Furthermore, Sebald and Proust were alike in their creation of a unique format; one might aptly say of Sebald’s books, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of Proust’s, that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” That said, it strikes me that the differences between Sebald and Proust are more instructive than the similarities. When people call something Proustian, they are usually referring to Proust’s fascination with involuntary memory, the way in which sensory associations conjure up the past. Yet the French writer elaborated just as extravagantly on the joys and tortures of anticipation. (The present moment is what disappointed him.) Sebald, temperamentally, preferred to keep his eyes averted from the future, which for him impended heavily with disaster. And he accumulated his recollections not in windfalls, but through diligent dredging and mining. Having been born in Germany in 1944 and raised in a society that willed itself into amnesia, he regarded remembering as a moral and political act. He described for me his first visit to Munich in 1947, as a three-year-old with his parents. While their village in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps escaped the war undamaged, Allied bombing devastated Munich. “You might have a few buildings standing intact and between them an avalanche of scree that had come down,” he recalled. “And people didn’t comment on it.” He would not have thought to ask about the debris, and if he had, his parents would have evaded the question. “It seemed to me the natural condition of cities,” he said, “houses between mountains of rubble.” His father, an officer promoted up through the ranks, never discussed his wartime experiences. When I said offhandedly that by now his mother, in her late eighties, could probably no longer remember the war years, he replied quickly, speaking of his mother’s generation: “They could remember if they wanted to.”
Scrutinizing documents—photographs, diaries, war records—launched Sebald into a receptive state. (In The Emigrants, he wrote that looking at photographs, we feel “as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.”) He chose the objects of his attention intuitively. Unlike a professional historian, who goes into a library with a research plan, he foraged impulsively, then moved on. “I can’t afford to sit in the Munich War Archive for two years,” he told me. “So I have to rush in and sit there for a week or two and collect things like someone who knows he has to leave before too long. You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house, which means very randomly.” He accumulated postcards from junk shops, maps from archives, passages from memoirs. He tore photos from magazines or snapped them himself with a little Canon. He used these images as a research tool or an inspirational device, but he then chose to incorporate them into his books. “It’s one way of making obvious that you don’t begin with a white page,” he said. “You do have sources, you do have materials. If you create something that seems as if it proceeded seamlessly from your pen, then you hide the material sources of your work.”
Insidiously, the photographs also make the text appear to be not fictional but real, despite the widespread knowledge that even in the predigital age, photographs could be manipulated. In The Emigrants a character remarks that a photograph published in the Nazi press that showed a book burning in Würzburg in 1933 was fraudulent. Because the bonfire raged at night, the cameras failed to record it; so a plume of smoke and a nocturnal sky were added to a daytime shot of another gathering. The narrator says that he was skeptical of this report until he unearthed the photograph himself and observed the obvious falsification. And at this point in the text, Sebald includes the image. “I had that 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. The process of making a photographic image, which purports to be the real thing and isn’t anything like, has transformed our self-perception, our perception of each other, our notion of what is beautiful, our notion of what will last and what won’t.” For Sebald, there could be no better touchstone for the importance and difficulty of getting to the truth than a doctored document of the Nazi destruction of the written word.
At the time of his death, Sebald was researching a book that would explore, among other subjects, his family history. “As they all came from the lower classes, there are often not even exact dates of birth or places of residence,” he told me. “This uncertainty begins two generations back.” His ancestors inhabited a forested region between Bavaria and Bohemia that had, from the time of the seventeenth century, been devoted to glassworks, and so Sebald could speculate with reasonable confidence about their working life. But even of that he was never quite certain. Like an archeologist reconstructing a pot from a couple of shards, he worked in a way that he characterized as “extremely tenuous and unreliable.” In The Rings of Saturn, he compared writers to weavers: melancholics working complex patterns, always fearful that they have gotten hold of the wrong thread. One of the threads he was tracing in his next book concerned a commander of the Red Army in the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Republic.
Executed in Munich in 1919, on a spot that is now a Hermès store on posh Maximilianstrasse, this man had the same name as Sebald’s mother’s family. While Sebald had not established a family connection, what was at the least a coincidence had caught his attention.
At other stages of his research, a surfeit of unreliable documentation would cloud the picture further. For the same book, he was reading through twenty-three volumes of diaries (each consisting of two hundred pages, written in a minuscule hand, in ink made from elderberry fruit) that had been kept from 1905 into the 1950s by the grandfather of a friend of his, a Frenchwoman his age named Marie, who grew up in Picardy. This diarist grandfather, a miller, “was obviously the family scribe and the family rememberer, and yet he wasn’t always accurate,” Sebald said. “He took notes and he didn’t always write them down at once, but in the evenings or on Sundays, because he was working.” Relatives offered variant versions of the same events. “So there are all these different narratives, and they have equal rights and equal status,” Sebald said. And in some places, of course, there are simply gaps. “You can say once or twice that the evidence is scarce, but you can’
t do that on every page—it becomes a bore. So you borrow things. You adulterate the truth as you try to write it. There isn’t that pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at the highest truth.”
Marie’s family in France had endured an intimately unhappy relationship with the Germans. Her grandfather’s village was located near St. Quentin, right on the German defensive trench line in the last year of World War I. During World War II, her father joined the Resistance and was murdered by the Nazis. “He was shot at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three and had his eyes gouged out,” Sebald said. Marie was born a few months later. Sebald showed me a photograph snapped by a Catholic priest of the austere stone building where the execution took place. “I think there is something there that you wouldn’t get hold of without the photograph,” he said. “Not necessarily to be put in the book, but for the working process. Certain things emerge from the images if you look at them long enough.”
He showed me a topographical map from 1918 used by the German army command: “This gives you an idea of the density of the trench system, the irrationality of it . . . The completely insane collective effort that marks this event—I don’t think I shall be able to understand it, but I want to marvel at it.” Whenever he visited Munich, Sebald would spend half a day at the War Archive, calling up volumes that no one had touched in decades. He recalled the first time that the files that he had ordered arrived on a trolley. “You have a visual sense of how much something weighs,” he said. “You try to pick this up, and you can barely lift it. It’s as if the specific weight of the paper they used is higher than the paper we use. Or it’s as if the dust has gotten in there and insinuated itself, so they have become like a rock. If you have any imagination, you can’t help but wonder about it. These are questions a historian is not permitted to ask, because they are of a metaphysical nature. And if one thing interests me, it is metaphysics.” He paused for a second. “I am not seeking an answer,” he said. “I just want to say, ‘This is very odd, indeed.’”
Much of modern life repelled Sebald. He told me that one of the chief reasons he departed Germany, first for French-speaking Switzerland, then for England, was that he “found it agreeable not to hear current German spoken all around me.” His literary models wrote in nineteenth-century German—Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Paul Richter. “The contemporary language is usually hideous, but in German it’s especially nauseating,” he said. He asked me if I knew the German word for “mobile phone.” With a look of horror, he told me: a handi.
He owned neither a fax machine nor a telephone answering machine. He was the only faculty member at the University of East Anglia without a computer in his office: he had declined the one allotted him, recommending that the money be used instead for student aid. (“Was it?” I asked. He shrugged. “Of course not.”) Amused by human foibles, his own very much included, he knew that there was something comical about his reactionary posture. “I hold with the wireless and the motor-car,” he proclaimed. “I don’t especially appreciate the blessings of technology.” Passively but stubbornly, he fought off the tawdry intrusions of the modern world. “There’s always an argument that is hard to resist,” he observed. “So your daughter says, ‘What if I get stranded in the middle of Thetford Forest in my not very reliable car—shouldn’t I have a mobile phone?’ The devil comes in with a carte de visite. That is always the way.”
The gigantism of modernity—the scale of the buildings, the acceleration of pace, the profusion of choices—afflicted Sebald with a kind of vertigo. Ill at ease with the time in which he lived, he may have felt most comfortable in a place in which he was foreign. “I don’t feel at home here in any sense,” he said of Norwich, where he lived for thirty years. Drawn repeatedly to the stories of people whose accents, native landscapes, and histories mirrored his own, he never failed, when he visited his mother in the town in which he was raised, to be disgusted by “all the nasty people in the street” who were “as boxed in as they have always been.” His favorite subject was the Germans who had been cast out of their boxes, often Jews who had been forced to flee Nazi Germany. He insisted, persuasively, that he was not interested in Judaism or in the Jewish people for their own sake. “I have an interest in them not for any philo-Semitic reasons,” he told me, “but because they are part of a social history that was obliterated in Germany and I wanted to know what happened.” He felt a rapport with displaced people in general, and in particular, with outcast writers. “I can read the memoirs of Chateaubriand about his childhood in Brittany and find it very moving,” he told me. “I can feel a closeness to him that may be greater than the proximity I feel to the people I find around me.” His desire to know just a few people and places probably stemmed from this profound sense of dislocation. He derided the promiscuity of contemporary travel. “That is what is so awful about our modern life—we never return,” he said. “One year we go to India and the next year to Peru and the next to Greenland. Because now you can go everywhere. I would much rather have half a dozen places that meant something to me than to say, at the end of my life, ‘I have been practically everywhere. ’ The first visit doesn’t reveal very much at all.”
When I asked if there was any place in which he had ever felt at home, he thought of one spot, which not coincidentally has a literary pedigree: the island of St. Pierre in the Lac de Bienne in Switzerland, famous as the refuge of Rousseau in 1765. “I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world,” he said. “One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I don’t like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think it’s an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me both an aesthetic and moral ideal.” Although St. Pierre was not a realistic retirement choice, Sebald thought he might spend his final years in a French-speaking region, probably Switzerland. “With someone like me, you always have two sides,” he said. “‘Oh, I’ll just move to the most beastly part of northern France and live in rented accommodations in St. Quentin or Combray and see if I survive.’ But naturally there is another part of me that thinks of moving near Neuchâtel in Switzerland. I know that drawing up a plan makes no sense, because plans are never followed. It will be a question of constellations.”
Although he made his living within the academy, Sebald made his reputation by deviating from the academic path. His first nonconformist book, After Nature, was a prose poem that resembled a Cubist self-portrait. In it, he discusses the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald, who was from Würzburg, not far from Sebald’s hometown, and a young botanist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who not only hailed from southern Germany but also shared Sebald’s initials. The book ends with what Sebald described to me as “this pseudobiographical part about growing up in southern German in the postwar years.”
Again and again, Sebald returned to figures who were rooted in or somehow connected to southern Germany. Like many lesser writers, he was primarily interested in himself; what redeemed this solipsism was the extraordinary and capacious nature of that self. The form that he devised for his writing (which he called, with uncharacteristic inelegance, “prose fiction”) was a rumination or meditation in which all of the characters shared the rueful, melancholic tone of the narrator. In Austerlitz, he tried to cleave more closely to the structure of a traditional novel, propelling the narrative forward with the saga of a man’s search for his parents, and you could feel the author’s unconventional mind creaking against the walls of convention. The new book promised to return to the free-ranging, more musical structure of the earlier ones, as seemed natural for someone who deprecated the ability of the old-fashioned novel to function in modern times. “There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which
somewhere along the line tends to falter,” he said. “The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along is fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on. Very often you don’t know who the narrator is, which I find unacceptable. The story comes through someone’s mind. I feel I have the right to know who the person is and what his credentials are. This has been known in science for a long time. The field of vision changes according to the observer, so I think this has to be part of the equation.” He cautioned that the narrator was of course not to be confused with an “authentic person.” In other words, the narrator of Sebald’s novels was not to be mistaken for Sebald himself.
Notwithstanding the disclaimer, the joy of reading Sebald is the pleasure of stepping into the quirky treasure-house of his mind. “I don’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “It’s like someone who builds a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. It’s a devotional work. Obsessive.” His books are like some eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, filled with marvelous specimens, organized eccentrically. Even without the inclusion of the blurry black-and-white photographs that became a trademark, they would feel like journals or notebooks. Sebald himself, when I asked why every character in his novels sounded like the narrator, said, “It’s all relayed through this narrative figure. It’s as he remembers, so it’s in his cast.” He credited the monologues of Thomas Bernhard, in which the layers of attribution can run four deep, as an influence. Like an old-fashioned newspaper reporter in the era before blind quotes, Sebald believed in naming sources. “Otherwise, there’s either the ‘she said with a disconsolate expression on her face’ or ‘as thoughts of regret passed through her mind,’” he complained. “How does he know? I find it hard to suspend my disbelief.” He was a literary magistrate who admitted nothing but hearsay as evidence. Or, to put it more precisely, he thought that a statement can no longer be evaluated once it is prised from the mind which gives it utterance.