Quarrel & Quandary
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Nabokov gleefully derides Dostoyevsky’s sentimental conventions: “I do not like this trick his characters have of ‘sinning their way to Jesus.’ ” Ridiculing Raskolnikov’s impetuous “spiritual regeneration,” Nabokov concedes that “the love of a noble prostitute … did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 … as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically.” Yet the doctrine of redemption through suffering came to be the bulwark of Dostoyevsky’s credo. He believed in spiritual salvation. He had been intimate with thieves and cutthroats; he had lived among criminals. He had himself been punished as a criminal. Even as he was writing Crime and Punishment, he was under the continuing surveillance of the secret police.
The secret police, however, are not this novel’s secret. Neither are the ukases and explosives of that Czarist twilight. Murder and degradation; perversity, distortion, paralysis, abnormal excitation, lightning conversion; dive after dive into fits of madness (Raskolnikov, his mother, Svidrigailov, Katerina Marmeladova); a great imperial city wintry in tone, huddled, frozen in place, closeted, all in the heart of summertime—these are not the usual characteristics of a work dedicated to political repudiations. Crime and Punishment is something else, something beyond what Dostoyevsky may have plotted and what the scholars habitually attend to. Its strangeness is that of a galloping centaur pulling a droshky crowded with groaning souls; or else it is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria, confined, churning, stuttering. St. Petersburg itself has the enclosed yet chaotic quality of a perpetual dusk, a town of riverbank and sky, taverns, tiny apartments cut up into rented cabins and cells, mazy alleys, narrow stairways, drunks, beggars, peddlers, bedraggled students, street musicians, whores—all darkened and smudged, as if the whole of the city were buried in a cellar, or in hell.
This irresistible deformation of commonly predictable experience is what fires Dostoyevsky’s genius. Nabokov dislikes that genius (I dislike it too) because its language is a wilderness and there are woeful pockets of obscurantist venom at its center. But in the end Crime and Punishment is anything but a manifesto. Citizenly rebuttal is far from its delirious art. In the fever of his imagining, it is not the radicals Dostoyevsky finally rebukes, but the Devil himself, the master of sin, an unconquerable principality pitted against God.
The Posthumous Sublime
There is almost no clarifying publisher’s apparatus surrounding The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald’s restless, melancholy, and (I am almost sorry to say) sublime narrative quartet. One is compelled—ludicrously, clumsily—to settle for that hapless term (what is a “narrative quartet”?) because the very identity of this work remains murky. Which parts of it are memoir, which fiction—and ought it to matter? As for external facticity, we learn from the copyright page that the original German publication date is 1993, and that the initials W.G. represent Winfried Georg. A meager paragraph supplies a handful of biographical notes: the author was born in Wartach im Allgäu, Germany; he studied German literature in Freiburg (where, one recalls, Heidegger’s influence extended well into the nineteen-seventies), and later in Francophone Switzerland and in Manchester, England, where he began a career in British university teaching. Two dates stand out: Sebald’s birth in 1944, an appalling year for all of Europe, and for European Jews a death’s-head year; and 1970, when, at the age of twenty-six, Sebald left his native Germany and moved permanently to England.
It cannot be inappropriate to speculate why. One can imagine that in 1966, during the high period of Germany’s “economic miracle,” when Sebald was (as that meagerly informative paragraph tells us) a very young assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester—a city then mostly impoverished and in decline—he may have encountered a romantic attachment that finally lured him back to Britain; or else he came to the explicit determination, with or without any romantic attachment (yet he may, in fact, have fallen in love with the pathos of soot-blackened Manchester), that he would anyhow avoid the life of a contemporary German. “The life of a contemporary German”: I observe, though from a non-visitor’s distance, and at so great a remove now from those twelve years of intoxicated popular zeal for Nazism, that such a life is somehow still touched with a smudge, or taint, of the old shameful history; and that the smudge, or taint—or call it, rather, the little tic of self-consciousness—is there all the same, whether it is regretted or repudiated, examined or ignored, forgotten or relegated to a principled indifference. Even the youngest Germans traveling abroad—especially in New York—know what it is to be made to face, willy-nilly, a history of national crime, however long receded and repented.
For a German citizen to live with 1944 as a birth date is reminder enough. Mengele stood that year on the ramp at Auschwitz, lifting the omnipotent gloved hand that dissolved Jewish families: mothers, babies, and the old to the chimneys, the rest to the slave labor that temporarily forestalled death. —Ah, and it is sentences like this last one that present-day Germans, thriving in a democratic Western polity, resent and decry. A German professor of comparative literature accused me not long ago—because of a sentence like that—of owning a fossilized mind, of being unable to recognize that a nation “develops and moves on.” Max Ferber, the painter-protagonist of the final tale in Sebald’s quartet, might also earn that professor’s fury. “To me, you see,” Sebald quotes Ferber, “Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place.” It is just this extraterritorialism—this ineradicable, inescapable, ever-recurring, hideously retrievable 1944—that Sebald investigates, though veiled and at a slant, in The Emigrants. And it was, I suspect, not the democratic Germany of the economic miracle from which Sebald emigrated in 1970; it may have been, after all, the horribly frozen year of his birth that he meant to leave behind.
That he did not relinquish his native language or its literature goes without saying; and we are indebted to Michael Hulse, Sebald’s translator (himself a poet), for allowing us to see, through the stained glass of his consummate Englishing, what must surely be the most delicately powerful German prose since Thomas Mann. Or, on second thought, perhaps not Mann really, despite a common attraction to the history-soaked. Mann on occasion can be as heavily ornate as those carved mahogany sideboards and wardrobes—vestiges of proper German domesticity abandoned by the fleeing Jews—which are currently reported to add a certain glamorous middle-thirties tone to today’s fashionable Berlin apartments. Sebald is more translucent than Mann; he writes as Turner paints: “To the south, lofty Mount Spathi, two thousand meters high, towered above the plateau, like a mirage above the flood of light. The fields of potatoes and vegetables across the broad valley floor, the orchards and clumps of other trees, and the untilled land, were awash with green upon green, studded with the hundreds of white sails of wind pumps.” Notably, this is not a landscape viewed by a fresh and naked eye. It is, in fact, a verbal rendering of an old photograph—a slide shown by a projector on a screen.
An obsession with old photographs is what separates Sebald from traces of Mann, from Turner’s hallucinatory mists, from the winding reflections of Proust (to whom, in his freely searching musings and paragraphs wheeling cumulatively over pages, Sebald has been rightly and repeatedly compared), and even from the elusively reappearing shade of Nabokov. The four narratives recounted in The Emigrants are each accompanied by superannuated poses captured by obsolete cameras; in their fierce time-bound isolations they suggest nothing so much as Diane Arbus. Wittingly or not, Sebald evokes Henry James besides, partly for his theme of expatriation, and partly on account of the mysterious stillness inherent in photography’s icy precision. In the 1909 New York Edition of his work, James eschewed illustration, that nineteenth-century standby, and turned instead to the unsentimental fixity of photography’s Time and Place, or Place-in-Time. In Sebald’s choosing to incorporate so many photos (I count eighty-six in 237 pages of text)—houses, streets, cars, headstones, cobblestones, motionless schoolchildren, mountain crevasses, country roads, posters, roofs, steeples, hotel po
stcards, bridges, tenements, grand and simple rooms, overgrown gardens—he, like James with his 1909 frontispieces, is acknowledging the uncanny ache that cries out from the silence of solid things. These odd old pictures attach to Sebald’s voice like an echo that cannot be heard, no matter how hard one strains; they lie in the crevices of print with a terrible helplessness—deaf-mutes without the capacity to sign.
The heard language of these four stories—memories personal, borrowed, invented—is, as I noted earlier, sublime; and I wish it were not—or, if that is not altogether true, I admit to being disconcerted by a grieving that has been made beautiful. Grief, absence, loss, longing, wandering, exile, homesickness—these have been made millennially, sadly beautiful since the Odyssey, since the Aeneid, since Dante (“You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread”); and, more venerably still, since the Psalmist’s song by the waters of Babylon. Nostalgia is itself a lovely and piercing word, and even more so is the German Heimweh, “home-ache.” It is art’s sacred ancient trick to beautify pain, to romanticize the shadows of the irretrievable. “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again”—Thomas Wolfe, too much scorned for boyishness, tolls that bell as mournfully as anyone; but it is an American tolling, not a German one. Sebald’s mourning bell is German, unmistakably German; when it tolls the hour, it is almost always 1944. And if I regret the bittersweet sublime Turner-like wash of Beauty that shimmers over the whole of this volume, it is because sublime grieving is a category of yearning, fit for that which is irretrievable. But 1944 is always, always retrievable. There stands Mengele on the ramp, forever lifting his gloved hand; and there, sent off to the left and the right, are the Jews, going to the left and the right forever. Nor is this any intimation of Keats’s urn—there are human ashes in it. The posthumous sublime is discordant; an oxymoron. Adorno told us this long ago: after Auschwitz, no more poetry. We resist such a dictum; the Psalmist by the waters of Babylon resisted it; the poet Paul Célan resisted it; Sebald resists it. It is perhaps natural to resist it.
So, in language sublime, Sebald is haunted by Jewish ghosts—Europe’s phantoms: the absent Jews, the deported, the gassed, the suffering, the hidden, the fled. There is a not-to-be-overlooked irony (a fossilized irony, my professor-critic might call it) in Sebald’s having been awarded the Berlin Literature Prize—Berlin, the native city of Gershom (né Gerhardt) Scholem, who wrote definitively about the one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the Vaterland itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated—until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured.
Or, if not conjured, then come upon by degrees, gradually, incrementally, in hints and echoes. Sebald allows himself to discover his ghosts almost stealthily, with a dawning notion of who they really are. It is as if he is intruding on them, and so he is cautious, gentle, wavering at the outer margins of the strange places he finds them in. In “Dr. Henry Selwyn,” as the first narrative is called, the young Sebald and his wife drive out into the English countryside to rent a flat in a wing of an overgrown mansion surrounded by a neglected garden and a park of looming trees. The house seems deserted. Tentatively, they venture onto the grounds and stumble unexpectedly on a white-haired, talkative old man who describes himself as “a dweller in the garden, a kind of ornamental hermit.” By the time we arrive at the end of this faintly Gothic episode, however, we have learned that Dr. Henry Selwyn was once a cheder-yingl—a Jewish schoolchild—named Hersch Seweryn in a village near Grodno in Lithuania. When he was seven years old, his family, including his sisters Gita and Raya, set out for America, like thousands of other impoverished shtetl Jews at the beginning of the century; but “in fact, as we learnt some time later to our dismay (the ship having long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London.” The boy begins his English education in Whitechapel in the Jewish East End, and eventually wins a scholarship to Cambridge to study medicine. Then, like a proper member of his adopted milieu, he heads for the Continent for advanced training, where he becomes enamored—again like a proper Englishman—with a Swiss Alpine guide named Johannes Naegeli. Naegeli tumbles into a crevasse and is killed; Dr. Selwyn returns home to serve in the Great War and in India. Later he marries a Swiss heiress who owns houses in England and lets flats. He has now completed the trajectory from Hersch Seweryn to Dr. Henry Selwyn. But one day, when the word “homesick” flies up out of a melancholy conversation with Sebald, Selwyn tells the story of his childhood as a Jewish immigrant.
The American term is immigrant, not emigrant, and for good reason, America being the famous recipient of newcomers: more come in than ever go out. Our expatriates tend to be artists, often writers: hence that illustrious row of highly polished runaways, James, Eliot, Pound, Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway. But an expatriate, a willing (sometimes temporary) seeker, is not yet an emigrant. And an emigrant is not a refugee. A cheder-yingl from a shtetl near Grodno in a place and period not kind to Jews is likely to feel himself closer to being a refugee than an emigrant: our familiar steerage image expresses it best. Sebald, of course, knows this, and introduces Dr. Selwyn as a type of foreshadowing. Displaced and homesick in old age for the child he once was (or in despair over the man he has become), Dr. Selwyn commits suicide. And on a visit to Switzerland in 1986, Sebald reads in a Lausanne newspaper that Johannes Naegeli’s body has been found frozen in a glacier seventy-two years after his fall. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes.
But of exactly what is Dr. Selwyn a foreshadowing? The second account, entitled “Paul Bereyter,” is a portrait of a German primary-school teacher—Sebald’s own teacher in the fifties, “who spent at least a quarter of all his lessons on teaching us things that were not on the syllabus.” Original, inventive, a lover of music, a scorner of catechism and priests, an explorer, a whistler, a walker (“the very image … of the German Wandervogel hiking movement, which must have had a lasting influence on him from his youth”), Paul Bereyter is nevertheless a lonely and increasingly aberrant figure. In the thirties he had come out of a teachers’ training college (here a grim photo of the solemn graduates, in their school ties and rather silly caps) and taught school until 1935, when he was dismissed for being a quarter-Jew. The next year his father, who owned a small department store, died in a mood of anguish over Nazi pogroms in his native Gunzenhausen, where there had been a thriving Jewish population. After the elder Bereyter’s death, the business was confiscated; his widow succumbed to depression and a fatal deterioration. Paul’s sweetheart, who had journeyed from Vienna to visit him just before he took up his first teaching post, was also lost to him: deported, it was presumed afterward, to Theresienstadt. Stripped of father, mother, inheritance, work, and love, Paul fled to tutor in France for a time, but in 1939 drifted back to Germany, where, though only three-quarters Aryan, he was unaccountably conscripted. For six years he served in the motorized artillery all over Nazi-occupied Europe. At the war’s end he returned to teach village boys, one of whom was Sebald.
As Sebald slowly elicits his old teacher’s footprints from interviews, reconstructed hints, and the flickering lantern of his own searching language, Paul Bereyter turns out to be that rare and mysterious figure: an interior refugee (and this despite his part in the German military machine)—or call it, as Sebald might, an internal emigrant. After giving up teaching—the boys he had once felt affection for he now began to see as “contemptible and repulsive creatures”—he both lived in and departed from German society, inevitably drawn back to it, and just as inevitably repelled. All his adult life, Sebald discovers, Paul Bereyter had been interested in railways. (The text is now interrupted by what appears to be Paul’s own sketch of the local Bahnhof, or train station, with the inscription So ist es seit dem 4.10.49: This is how it has looked since the fourth of October 1949.) On the blackbo
ard he draws “stations, tracks, goods depots, and signal boxes” for the boys to reproduce in their notebooks. He keeps a model train set on a card table in his flat. He obsesses about timetables. Later, though his eyesight is troubled by cataracts, he reads demonically—almost exclusively the works of suicides, among them Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Klaus Mann, Koestler, Zweig, Tucholsky. He copies out, in shorthand, hundreds of their pages. And finally, on a mild winter afternoon, he puts on a windbreaker that he has not worn since his early teaching days forty years before, and goes out to stretch himself across the train tracks, awaiting his own (as it were) deportation. Years after this event, looking through Paul’s photo album with its record of childhood and family life, Sebald again reflects: “it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back”—but now he adds, “or as if we were on the point of joining them.”
Two tales, two suicides. Yet suicide is hardly the most desolating loss in Sebald’s broader scheme of losses. And since he comes at things aslant, his next and longest account, the history of his aunts and uncles and their emigration to the United States in the twenties—a period of extreme unemployment in Germany—is at first something of a conundrum. Where, one muses, are those glimmers of the Jewish ghosts of Germany, or any inkling of entanglement with Jews at all? And why, among these steadily rising German-American burghers, should there be? Aunt Fini and Aunt Lini and Uncle Kasimir, Aunt Theres and Cousin Flossie, “who later became a secretary in Tucson, Arizona, and learnt to belly dance when she was in her fifties”—these are garden-variety acculturating American immigrants; we know them; we know the smells of their kitchens; they are our neighbors. (They were certainly mine in my North Bronx childhood.) The geography is familiar—a photo of a family dinner in a recognizable Bronx apartment (sconces on the wall, steam-heat radiators); then the upwardly mobile move to Mamaroneck, in Westchester; then the retirement community in New Jersey. To get to Fini and Kasimir, drive south from Newark on the Jersey Turnpike and head for Lakehurst and the Garden State. In search of Uncle Adelwarth in his last years: Route 17, Monticello, Hurleyville, Oswego, Ithaca. There are no ghosts in these parts. It is, all of it, plain-hearted America.