by W. G. Sebald
Jo, wegerli, und’s Hus wird alt und wüest;
der Rege wäscht der’s wüester alli Nacht,
und d’Sunne bleicht der’s schwärzer alli Tag,
und im Vertäfer popperet der Wurm.
Es regnet no dur Bühni ab, es pfift
der Wind dur d’Chlimse. Drüber tuesch du au
no d’Auge zue; es chömme Chindeschind,
und pletze dra. Z’letzt fuults im Fundement,
und’s hilft nüt me. Und wemme nootno gar
zweitusig zehlt, isch alles z’semme g’keit.
[Yes it’s true, and the house is growing old and dirty too; the rain washes it dirtier every night and the sun bleaches it blacker every day and the beetles tick in the wainscots. The rain will come through the loft, the wind will whistle through the cracks. Meantime you will have closed your eyes, too, and your children’s children will come and patch it up. At long last it will get the rot in the foundations and then there’ll be no help for it. And by the year two thousand everything will have tumbled down.]
A little later in this Alemannic discourse on decay and death, the father comes to speak of the future fate of Basel—“e schöni, tolli Stadt” [“a fine town, a grand town”], yet it too must fall:
’s eitue, Chind, es schlacht e mol e Stund,
goht Basel au ins Grab, und streckt no do
und dört e Glied zum Boden us, e Joch,
en alte Turn, e Giebelwand; es wachst
do Holder druf, do Büechli, Tanne dört,
und Moos und Farn, und Reiger niste drinn—
’s isch schad derfür!
[There’s nothing for it, son, the hour will strike when even Basel will go down to the grave, too, and just poke up a limb here and there out of the ground, a beam, an old tower, a gable; the elder will grow on it, beeches here, firs there, and moss and fern, and herons will nest in it—such a pity!]
The Almanac author, who sometimes in his stories hints that his true home was once a less bigoted Orient, and whom I can easily imagine wandering around in turban and flowing robes among Turks and Jews, includes in this beautiful valedictory image of Basel elements which are distinctly reminiscent of Petra and the other ruined cities of the East, even though the fir trees and elder bushes, the ferns and moss growing on the ruins, are more at home in the Black Forest and the Alps. The peace which has descended on Basel, though, is that of nature untouched by human hand, where abandoned channels and water-meadows are allowed to flood at will and herons circle overhead. Far more terrifying, though, is the next image that the father evokes, of war and destruction and a world going up in flames, completely in accordance with the apocalyptic doctrine of the end of the world, which bourgeois philosophy has suppressed as irreconcilable with the higher principles of rational thought. Since, though, it is precisely the emancipation of the bourgeoisie—of which Hebel was of course a member—which established the economic and philosophical prerequisites for the catastrophes capable of turning whole continents upside down, the terrible fire and lightning blazing through the following lines is not just a reflection of biblical eschatology—with whose metaphorical arsenal the Almanac author and Baden cleric was naturally fully conversant—but also the doom-laden glimmering of a new age which, even as it dreams of humanity’s greatest possible happiness, begins to set in train its greatest possible misfortune. Nothing now is left of the consolations of nature which suffuse the earlier image of the ruin of Basel:
Es goht e Wächter us um Mitternacht,
e fremde Ma, me weiß nit, wer er isch,
er funkelt, wie ne Stern, und rüeft: “Wacht auf!
Wacht auf, es kommt der Tag!”—Drob rötet si
der Himmel, und es dundert überal,
z’erst heimlig, alsg’mach lut, wie sellemol,
wo Anno Sechsenünzgi der Franzos
so uding gschosse het. Der Bode schwankt,
aß d’Chilchtürn guge; d’Glocke schlagen a,
und lüte selber Bettzit wit und breit,
und alles bettet. Drüber chunnt der Tag;
o, b’hüetis Gott, me brucht ke Sunn derzue,
der Himmel stoht im Blitz, und d’Welt im Glast.
Druf gschieht no viel, i ha jez nit der Zit;
und endli zündet’s a, und brennt und brennt,
wo Boden isch, und niemes löscht.
[A watchman will go out at midnight, a foreign chap nobody knows, he’ll glitter like a star and cry, “Awake! Behold, the day is come!” and the sky will turn red and there’ll be thunder everywhere, first soft, then loud like that time in ninety-six when the French bombarded so fiercely. The ground will shake so that the church towers will rock, the bells will sound and ring out for the service by themselves to all and sundry, and everyone will pray. Then the day will come; O God preserve us, there will be no need of any sun, the sky will be nothing but lightning and the world will be all afire. And a lot more will happen that I’ve no time for now, and at last it will catch fire and blaze and blaze, wherever there is any land, and no one to put it out.]
In its closing passage, Hebel’s poem on the transience of the glories of the world becomes wholly identified with the vision of the Book of Revelations. In it we hear of a city hidden among the stars, which the boy, if he is good, may eventually enter:
Siehsch nit, wie d’Luft mit schöne Sterne prangt!
’s isch jede Stern veglichlige ne Dorf,
und witer obe seig e schöni Stadt,
me sieht si nit vo do, und haltsch di guet,
se chunnsch in so ne Stern, und’s isch der wohl,
und findisch der Ätti dört, wenn’s Gottswill isch,
und’s Chüngi selig, d’Muetter. Öbbe fahrsch
au d’Milchstraß uf in die verborgeni Stadt,
und wenn de sitwärts abe luegsch, was siehsch?
e Röttler Schloß! Der Belche stoht vercholt,
der Blauen au, as wie zwee alti Türn,
und zwische drinn isch alles uße brennt,
bis tief in Boden abe. D’Wiese het
ke Wasser meh, ’s isch alles öd und schwarz,
und totestill, so wit me luegt—das siehsch,
und seisch di’m Kamerad, wo mitder goht:
“Lueg, dört isch d’Erde gsi, und selle Berg
het Belche gheiße! Nit gar wit dervo
isch Wisleth gsi; dört hani au scho glebt,
und Stiere g’wettet, Holz go Basel g’füehrt,
und brochet, Matte g’raust, und Liechtspöh’ g’macht,
und g’vätterlet, bis an mi selig End,
und möchte jez nümme hi!”
[Do you see how the sky is splendid with bright stars? Each star is as it might be a village, and farther up perhaps there is a fine town, you can’t see it from here, and if you live decent you will go to one of those stars and you’ll be happy there, and you’ll find your father there, if it is God’s will, and poor Bessie, your mother. Perhaps you’ll drive up the Milky Way into that hidden town, and if you look down to one side, what’ll you see—Rötteln Castle! The Belchen will be charred and the Blauen, too, like two old towers, and between the two everything will be burnt out, right into the ground. There won’t be any water in the Wiese, everything will be bare and black and deathly quiet, as far as you can see; you’ll see that and say to your mate that’s with you: “Look, that’s where the earth was, and that mountain was called the Belchen. And not far away was Wieslet; I used to live there and harness my oxen, cart wood to Basel and plow, and drain meadows and make splints for torches, and potter about until my death, and I wouldn’t like to go back now!”]
The view from the Milky Way back down to the bleak and blackened ruins of the earth spinning in space could not appear more strange, and yet the childhood we spent on it, and which echoes through the words of the Hausfreund, seems scarcely more distant than the day before last.
* * *
* CF. Die Zeit, MARCH 7, 1997. [FOOTNOTE BY WGS.]
J’AURAIS VOULU QUE CE LAC EÛT ÉTÉ L�
�OCÉAN—
On the occasion of a visit to the Île Saint-Pierre
At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north crisscrossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake, which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another thirty-one years before this plan could be realized and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain’s cap, smoked Indian bidis, and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale’s back—or so it is generally said. The ship which took us along the edge of the Jura massif where it plunges steeply into the lake was called the Ville de Fribourg. Among the other passengers on board were the gaudily attired members of a male-voice choir, who several times during the short crossing struck up from the stern a chorus of “Là-haut sur la montagne, Les jours s’en vont” or another such Swiss refrain, with the sole intention, or so it seemed to me, of reminding me, with the curiously strained, guttural notes their ensemble produced, of how far I had come meanwhile from my place of origin.
Apart from a single farmstead, there is now only one dwelling on the Île Saint-Pierre—an island with a circumference of some two miles—and that is a former Cluniac monastery which now houses a hotel and restaurant run by Blausee AG. After walking there from the landing stage, I sat for a while drinking coffee with my companion in the shady trellised courtyard, until it was time for him to take his leave and I watched from the gate as he made his way slowly down the white path, just like a sailor who, I thought to myself, after years of sailing the high seas finds himself washed up on the unfamiliar mainland once more. The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly two hundred years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here, at least until the Berne Petit Conseil drove him out from even this last outpost of his native land. “By Saturday next,” as an edict sent to the Bailli in Nidau stated, “the said M. Rousseau is to remove himself from your Excellencies’ territories and shall not be permitted to return save under pain of the severest penalty.” In the decades after Rousseau’s death, when his fame had spread throughout Europe and beyond, an endless procession of illustrious personages visited the island to see for themselves the place in which the philosopher, novelist, autobiographer, and inventor of the bourgeois cult of romantic sensibility was for a brief period—as he claims in the fifth Promenade in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker—happier than in any other place. The adventurer and confidence trickster Cagliostro, the French conseiller du Parlement Desjobert, the English statesman Thomas Pitt, diverse kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Bavaria, all came to the island, not least among them the former Empress Joséphine. Early in the morning of the thirtieth of September 1810, hours before the arrival of the most beautiful woman of her day, a crowd a thousand strong was already waiting by the shore, and on the lake itself the ships and boats garlanded with flowers and flags thronged together in such numbers that the water could scarcely be seen. And when, twenty years later, the Poles arrived in Switzerland after the violent suppression of their uprising, the island on more than one occasion served as a meeting place where the refugees—for many a source of admiration—and the liberals who sympathized with their cause organized ceremonies to commemorate those who had fallen in the fight for freedom. On one such occasion in 1833, as Werner Henzi recalls in his prospectus of the Rousseau island, an enthusiastic crowd surrounded an altar set up between two chestnut trees, covered in black cloth, on which the book of the Rights of Man lay shrouded in black crêpe while the nearby trees were decorated with the Lithuanian coat of arms and the White Eagle, emblem of the ancient Polish nation. Throughout the nineteenth century, too, other, private individuals included Rousseau’s island on their itineraries, sensitive and cultivated readers such as, for example, the young Englishwoman Caroline Stanley, who visited the Lac de Bienne in the summer of 1820 and painted this view of the Île Saint-Pierre—along with the Grindelwald glacier and other wonders of the Swiss landscape—in her watercolor album, which I came across recently in an antiquarian bookshop in Zurich.