But turn the page: here are the ghosts. A photo of Uncle Kasimir as a young man, soon after his apprenticeship as a tinsmith. It is 1928, and only once in that terrible year, Kasimir recounts, did he get work, “when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg.” In the photo Kasimir and six other metal workers are sitting at the top of the curve of a great dome. Behind them, crowning the dome, are three large sculptures of the six-pointed Star of David. “The Jews of Augsburg,” explains Kasimir, “had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War, and it wasn’t till ’28 that they had the money for a new roof.” Sebald offers no comment concerning the fate of those patriotic Jews and their synagogue a decade on, in 1938, in the fiery hours of the Nazis’ so-called Kristallnacht. But Kasimir and the half-dozen tinsmiths perched against a cluster of Jewish stars leave a silent mark in Sebald’s prose: what once was is no more.
After the roofing job in Augsburg, Kasimir followed Fini and Theres to New York. They had been preceded by their legendary Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was already established as a majordomo on the Long Island estate of the Solomons family, where he was in particular charge of Cosmo Solomons, the son and heir. Adelwarth helped place Fini as a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres as a lady’s maid to a Mrs. Wallerstein, whose husband was from Ulm in Germany. Kasimir, meanwhile, was renting a room on the Lower East Side from a Mrs. Litwak, who made paper flowers and sewed for a living. In the autumn succahs sprouted on all the fire escapes. At first Kasimir was employed by the Seckler and Margarethen Soda and Seltzer Works; Seckler was a German Jew from Brünn, who recommended Kasimir as a metal worker for the new yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue. “The very next day,” says Kasimir, “I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher.”
So the immigrants, German and Jewish, mingle in America much as Germans and Jews once mingled in Germany, in lives at least superficially entwined. (One difference being that after the first immigrant generation the German-Americans would not be likely to continue as tinsmiths, just as Mrs. Litwak’s progeny would hardly expect to take in sewing. The greater likelihood is that a Litwak daughter is belly-dancing beside Flossie in Tucson.) And if Sebald means for us to feel through its American parallel how this ordinariness, this matter-of-factness, of German-Jewish coexistence was brutally ruptured in Germany, then he has succeeded in calling up his most fearful phantoms. Yet his narrative continues as impregnable here as polished copper, evading conclusions of any kind. Even the remarkably stoic tale of Ambros Adelwarth, born in 1896, is left to speak for itself—Adelwarth who, traveling as valet and protector and probably lover of mad young Cosmo Solomons, dutifully frequented the polo grounds of Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, and the casinos of Monte Carlo and Deauville, and saw Paris and Venice and Constantinople and the deserts on the way to Jerusalem. Growing steadily madder, Cosmo tried to hang himself and at last succumbed to catatonic dementia. Uncle Adelwarth was obliged to commit him to a sanatorium in Ithaca, New York, where Cosmo died—the same sanatorium to which Adelwarth, with all the discipline of a lifetime, and in a strange act of replication, later delivered himself to paralysis and death.
The yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue, the Solomons, Seligmans, Wallersteins, Mrs. Litwak and the succahs on the Lower East Side—this is how Sebald chooses to shape the story of the emigration to America of his Catholic German relations. It is as if the fervor of Uncle Adelwarth’s faithful attachment to Cosmo Solomons were somehow a repudiation of Gershom Scholem’s thesis of unrequited Jewish devotion; as if Sebald were casting a posthumous spell to undo that thesis.
And now on to Max Ferber, Sebald’s final guide to the deeps. Ferber was a painter Sebald got to know—“befriended” is too implicated a term for that early stage—when the twenty-two-year-old Sebald came to study and teach in Manchester, an industrially ailing city studded with mainly defunct chimneys, the erstwhile black fumes of which still coated every civic brick. That was in 1966; my own first glimpse of Manchester was nine years before, and I marveled then that an entire metropolis should be so amazingly, universally charred, as if brushed by a passing conflagration. (Later Sebald will tell us that in its bustling heyday Lodz, in Poland—the site of the Lodz Ghetto, a notorious Nazi vestibule for deportation—was dubbed the Polish Manchester, at a time when Manchester too was booming and both cities had flourishing Jewish populations.) At eighteen Ferber arrived in Manchester to study art and thereafter rarely left. It was the thousands of Manchester smokestacks, he confided to the newcomer Sebald, that prompted his belief that “I had found my destiny.” “I am here,” he said, “to serve under the chimney.” In those early days Ferber’s studio, as Sebald describes it, resembled an ash pit: “When I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust … that process of drawing and shading [with charcoal sticks] on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust.”
And in 1990, when Sebald urgently undertook to search out the life of the refugee Max Ferber and the history of his lost German Jewish family, he seemed to be duplicating Ferber’s own pattern of reluctant consummation, overlaid with haltings, dissatisfactions, fears, and erasures: “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 the narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable act of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages.… By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.”
All this falls out, one imagines, because Sebald is now openly permitting himself to “become” Max Ferber—or, to put it less emblematically, because in these concluding pages he begins to move, still sidling, still hesitating, from the oblique to the head-on; from intimation to declaration. Here, terminally—at the last stop, so to speak—is a full and direct narrative of Jewish exile and destruction, neither hinted at through an account of a loosely parallel flight from Lithuania a generation before, nor obscured by a quarter-Jew who served in Hitler’s army, nor hidden under the copper roof of a German synagogue, nor palely limned in Uncle Adelwarth’s journey to Jerusalem with a Jewish companion.
Coming on Max Ferber again after a separation of twenty years, Sebald is no longer that uncomprehending nervous junior scholar fresh from a postwar German education—he is middle-aged, an eminent professor in a British university, the author of two novels. Ferber, nearing seventy, is now a celebrated British painter whose work is exhibited at the Tate. The reunion bears unanticipated fruit: Ferber surrenders to Sebald a cache of letters containing what is, in effect, a record of his mother’s life, written when the fifteen-year-old Max had already been sent to safety in England. Ferber’s father, an art dealer, and his mother, decorated for tending the German wounded in the First World War, remained trapped in Germany, unable to obtain the visas that would assure their escape. In 1941 they were deported from Munich to Riga in Lithuania, where they were murdered. “The fact is,” Ferber now tells Sebald, “that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark.” Thus the latter-day explication of “I am here to serve under the chimney,” uttered decades after the young Sebald loitered, watchful and bewildered, in the exiled painter’s ash-heaped studio.
The memoir itself is all liveliness and light. Sebald recreates it lyrically, meticulously—from, as we say, the inside out. It begins with Luisa and Leo Lanzberg, a little brother and sister (reminding us of the brother and
sister in The Mill on the Floss) in the village of Steinach, near Kissingen, where Jews have lived since the sixteen-hundreds. (“It goes without saying,” Sebald interpolates—it is a new note for him—“that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbors and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all.”) Friday nights in Steinach juxtapose the silver Sabbath candelabrum with the beloved poems of Heine. The day nursery, presided over by nuns, excuses the Jewish children from morning prayers. On Sabbath afternoons in summer, before the men return to the synagogue, there is lemonade and challah with corned beef. Rosh Hashana; Yom Kippur; then the succah hung with apples and pears and chains of rosehips. In winter the Jewish school celebrates both Hanukkah and the Reich. Before Passover “the bustle is dreadful.” Father prospers, and the family moves to the middle-class world of Kissingen. (A photo shows the new house: a mansion with two medieval spires. Nevertheless several rooms are rented out.) And so on and so on: the blessing of the ordinary. Luisa grows into a young woman with suitors; her Gentile fiancé dies suddenly, of a stroke; a matchmaker finds her a Jewish husband, Max’s father. “In the summer of 1921,” Ferber’s mother writes, “soon after our marriage, we went to the Allgäu … where the scattered villages were so peaceful it was as if nothing evil had happened anywhere on earth.” Sebald, we know, was born in one of those villages.
In 1991—fifty years after the memoirist was deported to Riga—Sebald visits Steinach and Kissingen. (I almost want to say revisits, so identified has he become with Ferber’s mother’s story.) In the old Jewish cemetery in Kissingen, “a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movements of the air,” he stands before the gravestones and reads the names of the pre-Hitler dead, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligmann, Goldstaub, Baumblatt, Blumenthal, and thinks how “perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” He finds a more recent marker: a relative of Max Ferber’s who, in expectation of the outcome, took her own life. (The third suicide in Sebald’s quartet.) And then he flees: “I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.” A sign on the cemetery gates warns that vandals will be prosecuted.
The Emigrants (an ironically misleading title) ends with a mental flash of the Lodz Ghetto—the German occupiers feasting, the cowed Jewish slave laborers, children among them, toiling for their masters. In the conqueror’s lens, Sebald sees three young Jewish women at a loom, and recalls “the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.” Here, it strikes me, is the only false image in this ruthlessly moving and profoundly honest work dedicated to the recapture of phantoms. In the time of the German night, it was not the Jews who stood in for the relentless Fates, they who rule over life and death. And no one understands this, from the German side, more mournfully, more painfully, than the author of The Emigrants.
The Impossibility of Being Kafka
Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost. In two incomplete yet incommensurable novels, The Trial and The Castle, he submits, as lingering spirits will, a ghastly accounting—the sum total of modern totalitarianism. His imaginings outstrip history and memoir, incident and record, film and reportage. He is on the side of realism—the poisoned realism of metaphor. Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an archive of our era: its anomie, depersonalization, afflicted innocence, innovative cruelty, authoritarian demagoguery, technologically adept killing. But none of this is served raw. Kafka has no politics; he is not a political novelist in the way of Orwell or Dickens. He writes from insight, not, as people like to say, from premonition. He is often taken for a metaphysical or even a religious writer, but the supernatural elements in his fables are too entangled in concrete everydayness, and in caricature, to allow for any incandescent certainties. The typical Kafkan figure has the cognitive force of a chess master—which is why the term “Kafkaesque,” a synonym for the uncanny, misrepresents at the root. The Kafkan mind rests not on unintelligibility or the surreal, but on adamantine logic—on the sane expectation of rationality. A singing mouse, an enigmatic ape, an impenetrable castle, a deadly contraption, the Great Wall of China, a creature in a burrow, fasting as an art form, and, most famously, a man metamorphosed into a bug—all these are steeped in reason; and also in reasoning. “Fairy tales for dialecticians,” the critic Walter Benjamin remarked. In the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan “K” attaches not to Keats, but to Kant.
The prose that utters these dire analytic fictions has, with time, undergone its own metamorphosis, and only partly through repeated translations into other languages. Something—fame—has intervened to separate Kafka’s stories from our latter-day reading of them two or three generations on. The words are unchanged; yet those same passages Kafka once read aloud, laughing at their fearful comedy, to a small circle of friends, are now markedly altered under our eyes—enameled by that labyrinthine process through which a literary work awakens to discover that it has been transformed into a classic. Kafka has taught us how to read the world differently: as a kind of decree. And because we have read Kafka, we know more than we knew before we read him, and are now better equipped to read him acutely. This may be why his graven sentences begin to approach the scriptural; they become as fixed in our heads as any hymn; they seem ordained, fated. They carry the high melancholy tone of resignation unabraded by cynicism. They are stately and plain and full of dread.
And what is it that Kafka himself knew? He was born in 1883; he died, of tuberculosis, in 1924, a month short of his forty-first birthday. He did not live to see human beings degraded to the status and condition of vermin eradicated by an insecticidal gas.* If he was able to imagine man reduced to insect, it was not because he was prophetic. Writers, even the geniuses among them, are not seers. It was his own status and condition that Kafka knew. His language was German, and that, possibly, is the point. That Kafka breathed and thought and aspired and suffered in German—in Prague, a German-hating city—may be the ultimate exegesis of everything he wrote.
The Austro-Hungarian monarchy, ruled by German-speaking Habsburgs until its dissolution in the First World War, was an amalgam of a dozen national enclaves. Czech-speaking Bohemia was one of these, restive and sometimes rebellious under Habsburg authority. Since the time of Joseph II, who reigned between 1780 and 1790, the imperial parliament—centered in Vienna—had governed in German; all laws were published in German; all outlying bureaucracies and educational systems were conducted in German; German was the language of public offices and law courts; all official books and correspondence were kept in German. Though later rulings ameliorated these conditions somewhat, the struggle for Czech language rights was ongoing, determined, and turbulent. Prague’s German-speaking minority, aside from the official linguistic advantage it enjoyed, was prominent both commercially and intellectually. Vienna, Berlin, Munich—these pivotal seats of German culture might be far away, but Prague reflected them all. Here, in Bohemia’s major city, Kafka attended a German university, studied German jurisprudence, worked for a German insurance company, and published in German periodicals. German influence was dominant; in literature it was conspicuous.
That the Jews of Prague were German-identified, by language and preference—a minority population within a minority population—was not surprising. There were good reasons for this preference. Beginning with the Edict of Toleration in 1782, and continuing over the next seventy years, the Habsburg emperors had throughout their territories released the Jews from lives of innumerable restrictions in closed ghettos; emancipation meant civil freedoms, including the right to
marry at will, to settle in the cities and enter the trades and professions. Among Bohemia’s Jews of Kafka’s generation, ninety percent were educated in German. Kafka was privately tutored in Czech, but in his academically rigorous German elementary school, thirty of the thirty-nine boys in his class were Jews. For Bohemian patriots, Prague’s Jews bore a double stigma: they were Germans, resented as cultural and national intruders, and they were Jews. Though the Germans were as unfriendly to the German-speaking Jews as the Czechs were, militant Czech nationalism targeted both groups.
Nor was modern Czech anti-Semitism without its melancholy history. With the abolition of the ghettos and the granting of civil rights, anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out in 1848, and again in 1859, 1861, and 1866. In neighboring Hungary in 1883, the year of Kafka’s birth, a blood-libel charge—a medieval canard accusing Jews of the ritual murder of a Christian child—brought on renewed local hostility. In 1897, the year after Kafka’s bar mitzvah observance, when he was fourteen, he was witness to a ferocious resumption of anti-Jewish violence that had begun as an anti-German protest over the government’s denial of Czech language rights. Mark Twain, reporting from Vienna on the parliamentary wrangling, described conditions in Prague: “There were three or four days of furious rioting … the Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.” In Prague itself, mobs looted Jewish businesses, smashed windows, vandalized synagogues, and assaulted Jews on the street. Because Kafka’s father, a burly man, could speak a little Czech and had Czech employees—he called them his “paid enemies,” to his son’s chagrin—his sundries shop was spared. Less than two years later, just before Easter Sunday in 1899, a teenage Czech girl was found dead, and the blood libel was revived once more; it was the future mayor of Prague who led the countrywide anti-Jewish agitation. Yet hatred was pervasive even when violence was dormant. And in 1920, when Kafka was thirty-seven, with only three years to live and The Castle still unwritten, anti-Jewish rioting again erupted in Prague. “I’ve spent all afternoon out in the streets,” Kafka wrote in a letter contemplating fleeing the city, “bathing in Jew-hatred. Prašivo plemeno—filthy brood—is what I heard them call the Jews. Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?… The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of the cockroach, which also won’t be driven out of the bathroom.” On that occasion, Jewish archives were destroyed and the Torah scrolls of Prague’s ancient Altneu synagogue were burned. Kafka did not need to be, in the premonitory sense, a seer; as an observer of his own time and place, he saw. And what he saw was that, as a Jew in Central Europe, he was not at home; and though innocent of any wrongdoing, he was thought to deserve punishment.
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