How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.
—W. G. Sebald, Vertigo
Travel, Kierkegaard claimed, is the best way to avoid despair. But for the German writer W. G. Sebald, it leads, as often as not, from one state of despair to another. In his first novel, Vertigo (1990),[1] translated two years ago, Sebald’s lightly fictionalized alter ego explains that “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a country which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.” Yet without his routines of work in his garden or with his books, he finds himself at a loss. During ten days of compulsive walking, he is incapable of moving outside a precisely defined sickle-shaped area. The narrator begins hallucinating; he sees Dante walking ahead of him, then figures from his childhood. He escapes to Venice where, preoccupied by the “ever widening and contracting circles” of his thoughts, he is again temporarily incapacitated before fleeing to Verona, then on to Riva.
A similar, if not the same, narrator, in Sebald’s third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995), seeks release through a journey. “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” But on his pilgrimage he is traumatized by traces of destruction, both recent and ancient. A year to the day from the beginning of his journey, he is immobilized with horror and hospitalized.
Yet travel, in Sebald’s writing, does prove more than a panacea—however self-defeating—for existential crises. It also offers occasions for elaborate historical, literary, even metaphysical speculation. In the first section of Vertigo, entitled “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet,” the narrator retraces the steps of Marie-Henri Beyle (before he became Stendhal or Henry Brulard or any of a hundred pseudonyms) through Italy during and after the Napoleonic campaigns. In the third section, “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” he follows Kafka’s 1913 trip from Vienna to a spa on Lake Garda. Sebald uses the opportunity to present the two men’s various theories of love. Stendhal, chronically prone to infatuation, compares the growth of love and its necessary illusions to the crystallization of salt upon a twig, which, when interred for a time in a salt mine, will glitter as if covered with diamonds. Another theory offered is that of Mme Gherardi, Stendhal’s traveling companion in On Love and probably a figment of his imagination. Mme Gherardi, according to Stendhal—in Sebald’s version—puts little faith in love. She believes it is a chimaera created by the civilized mind and a solipsistic “passion that pays its debts in coin of its own minting.” Dr. K., as Sebald refers to Kafka, echoing the slipperiness of Stendhal’s and his own literary identity, evolves what Sebald describes as a “fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement.” Embodied love is inevitably false, for all lovers—Dr. K. himself included—are compelled by desire to recall the image of the lover with “the whole gamut of variations and repetitions” until it is extinguished under the strain.
The theme of love appears in a muted, indirect fashion in the second and fourth sections of Vertigo, “All ’estero” (Abroad) and “Ritorno in Patria” (Return to the Homeland). We are led to believe discreetly, through allusions, that the despair the narrator is trying to evade has been caused by complications of the heart. Center stage in these sections are fictionalized events from Sebald’s travels and his past, such as an amusing encounter with the Italian police after a hotel receptionist mislays his passport and his return after an absence of three decades to his childhood village “W.” in the Alps. As he revisits the sites and figures of his past, some of his childhood memories are demystified and others made more mysterious.
Kafka’s story “The Hunter Gracchus” provides a unifying theme for Vertigo. In this story, the Hunter Gracchus falls to his death in the Black Forest while chasing a chamois. He eagerly boards the boat that is to ferry him to the shores beyond, but the helmsman is briefly distracted and fails to make the crossing. Now Gracchus is fated to sail the world forever, accompanied by a flock of pigeons. Occasionally, Gracchus will be carried ashore on a bier, his body draped with a flowered shawl, as in the story’s opening in Riva. He always sets sail again, however. “My boat has no rudder,” Gracchus concludes, “it is driven by the wind that blows in the deepest regions of death.”
Elements from this metaphysical horror story fill Vertigo. Sebald has Stendhal and Mme Gherardi witness the docking of an old boat with a fractured mast and dirty yellow sails in Riva.[2] Two men descend carrying a bier with a body under a flower-patterned cloth. In Verona, the narrator stops in a pizzeria whose proprietor’s name is Cadavero. Outside this pizzeria, which is complete with a flock of pigeons on its balcony, he experiences a hallucinatory vision of a bier with a corpse under a floral-patterned drape. In “W.,” in an attic he was forbidden to enter as a child, he finds the dusty uniform of an Austrian chasseur from the early nineteenth century. He also recalls an incident from his childhood in which the body of a local hunter, Hans Schlag, is brought into town on a sled after he died in a fall to the bottom of a ravine. In this instance the figure of Schlag not only echoes Gracchus, but is subjected to a further aestheticization as the Sebaldian narrator incorporates elements from a story by Adalbert Stifter—a fatal fall into a ravine, a lap-dog who survives the fall but is driven insane and shot by the rescuers, a doctor’s verdict that the cause of death was exposure and not the actual fall—into his presumably autobiographical narrative.
Any description of Sebald’s writing is bound to make it sound disjointed and overcrowded. He is, however, able to weave a multitude of apparently disparate strands into elegant, unified tapestries. There are nonetheless lapses. His explication of Gracchus’s fate in conjunction with Dr. K.’s theory of disembodied love and the cryptic nature of guilt in Kafka’s fiction is forced. Sebald offers his reading in a passage of a density that is unusual even by his standards.
The question of who is to blame for this undoubtedly great misfortune remains unresolved, as indeed does the matter of what his guilt, the cause of his misfortune, consists in. But, as it was Dr. K. who conjured up this tale, it seems to me the meaning of Gracchus the huntsman’s ceaseless journey lies in a penitence for a longing for love, such as invariably besets Dr. K., as he explains in one of his countless Fledermaus-letters to Felice, precisely at the point where there is seemingly, and in the natural and lawful order of things, nothing to be enjoyed.This interpretation is, in the context of the book, thematically expedient and aesthetically pleasing but not entirely convincing. Yet such lapses are infrequent and for the most part highlight the mastery of the rest of his writing.
The most celebrated and accessible of Sebald’s early fiction is The Emigrants (1992). Although he relates the fates of four exiles buffeted by the forces of history in a much more conventional fashion, Sebald’s search for traces of their lives is presented within a network of echoes and coincidences no less effective for its greater subtlety. The Rings of Saturn is the most Sebaldian of the three novels in its dance of associations and complex interweaving of themes. Portraits of Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century essayist obsessed with “patterns which recur in the seemingly infinite diversity of forms,” Joseph Conrad, Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, the English poet and translator Michael Hamburger, and the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi, among others, are bound together by meditations on the development of the silkworm industry, the natural history of the herring, King Leopold’s savage reign in the Belgian Congo, the rapaciousness of the rising bourgeoisie, and the decline of great country mansions. And, of course, there are discreet, elusive scenes from Sebald’s own life.
Sebald has received almost unanimous, ecstatic praise for his intriguing fictional hybrids. He has effectively created a new genre by combining travelogue, biography, memoir, speculation, literary criticism, and erudite detail into an elaborate structure founded on the restless sensibility of a melancholic aesthete. André Aciman, whose own brand of nostalgia runs in a more saccharine vein, perhaps captures it best with his term essai noir. Sebald punctuates his precise, elegant prose with grainy black-and-white photographs of people, details from paintings, pages from diaries, train tickets, receipts, and documents, many of which are tainted with a faint air of dubious authenticity. These illustrations simultaneously reinforce and undermine the narrator’s credibility.
In all three of his early fictional works a narrator who shares the author’s name and, like Sebald, was born in Bavaria in 1944 but left for England in his twenties where he lives to this day, embarks on a journey. He is ostensibly searching for traces of people he has known or read about, or even simply in search of peace of mind. In truth, however, each quest is undertaken for nothing less than metaphysical certainties.
They are hard to find, especially those of a higher order. In Vertigo, near the end of his journey, the narrator confesses to an equally saturnine former neighbor that
over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.Faced with history, which “staggers blindly from one catastrophe to the next,” the only certainty Sebald can establish is a variation of Nietzsche’s eternal return that he calls the “phenomenon of apparent duplication.” Instead of being condemned endlessly to repeat our past, we are continuously pursued by the “ghosts of repetition.”
Sometimes these ghosts appear in human form, such as the identical twins who bear an uncanny resemblance to the young Kafka with whom Sebald shares a bus ride in Italy, or as Naegeli, the mountain guide whose body resurfaces seventy-two years after his death on a glacier and sixteen years after the guide’s friend had described him to Sebald. At other times they manifest themselves in coincidences of time and place such as the intersections of his life with that of Michael Hamburger, another German exile and a man and writer for whom Sebald has a particularly strong “elective affinity.” Sebald finds it incomprehensible that he and his friend Michael, born twenty-two years apart, should have met the eccentric scholar Stanley Kerry in Manchester in 1944 and 1966, respectively, when each was twenty-two years old. Perpetually and eagerly unsettled by such overlapping of lives and times, Sebald remarks,
No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of this kind occur far more often than we suspect, since we all move one after the other, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency.
Prominent as they are, the patterns of recurrence, eerie similarities, and the obscure laws of coincidence are not the most important element in Sebald’s writing, for the patterns are teasingly portentous but ultimately unfathomable. It is the act of remembering the dead, the recalling of things lost or destroyed that is most significant. For Sebald, as for Chateaubriand, a presiding spirit of The Rings of Saturn, “from the very outset, recapitulating the past can have only one end, the hour of deliverance.” Whether or not this deliverance comes only with death, the dead are ever returning to guide those willing to follow.
Sebald’s revenants are unsettling, but far worse than being haunted by history’s ghosts is having them exorcised. The Holocaust’s “poisonous canopy” overshadows his trilogy. Sebald evokes it continuously, both indirectly in his elegies of its victims and directly in his pursuit of the past. The narrator in The Emigrants notes with quiet horror, for example, that the upright citizens of small German towns with once thriving Jewish communities like Steinach “have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbors and whose homes and property they appropriated.” Yet the Sebaldian narrator is also repeatedly subject to mounting panic when faced with a more generalized sanitizing of the past. After several days in Steinach, he leaves abruptly because “the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up” were taking its toll on his sanity. In Vertigo he is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape.
Sebald’s latest novel, Austerlitz,[3] examines the corrosive effects of history’s suppression on a more intimate level. Jacques Austerlitz has been haunted for decades by a past that had been erased just as effectively as modern Germany’s. In 1939, at the age of four, he was sent on a Kindertransport from Prague to England. There he was adopted by a dour Welsh Calvinist minister and his wife, and renamed Dafydd Elias. He did not learn of his true name until he was fifteen, by which time his adoptive mother was dead and the minister, unable to cope without her, institutionalized. All the traces of his origins seemed to have vanished, until, in his late fifties, he overhears a radio interview of two women who were on a similar transport. The few memories their stories awaken offer him a crucial link in unearthing his family’s fate.
In the novel a nameless—but familiarly Sebaldian—narrator recounts Austerlitz’s odyssey into this past, which, once the trails he had pursued as a teenager proved dead-ends, he had strenuously avoided. Despite feelings of “wrenching inside [him], a kind of heartache which,” he later realized, “was caused by the vortex of past time,” he engaged in a constant “self-censorship of the mind,” refusing to acknowledge anything that related to his personal past. “As far as I was concerned, the world ended in the late nineteenth century, I dared go no further than that.” Thus, Austerlitz, almost inconceivably, as he himself admits, reached middle-age, a respected lecturer in a London institute of art history, having spent decades compiling his investigations into the history of bourgeois architecture and civilization, knowing next to nothing about “the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up.” He eventually, painstakingly, reconstructs his parents’ final years, up to his mother’s deportation to Theresienstadt in 1944 and his father’s internment in 1942 in the French camp of Gurs.
In Austerlitz, Sebald covers much the same intellectual territory as in his earlier novels: an anonymous, neurasthenic narrator who shares many biographical details with the author serves as a foil to reflect, with elaborate asides, the lives of history’s victims. Yet, with its cohesive story line, Austerlitz is the least obtrusively constructed and the most emotionally powerful of his four novels. Austerlitz himself is a complex and convincing character, and less of a pawn in the illuminating, but highly cerebral literary chess games of Sebald’s earlier fiction.
The fascinating digressions in Austerlitz serve, within the more cohesive context of this book, more effectively as metaphors for the human condition than do his earlier fictional diversions. The narrator expounds, for example, theories of fortification from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the increasing complexity of which culminated in the star-shaped fortresses of Neuf-Brisach and Breendonk. Such fortresses, almost always obsolete before they were completed, embody man’s limited ability to learn from experience and illustrate the fact that it is “our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.” Sebald also portrays François Mitterand’s new Bibliothèque Nationale in its Babylonian proportions and inefficiencies as hostile not just to readers, but to the books it is meant to preserve as well. It is nothing less than an “official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past.”
This drive towards historical amnesia is evident everywhere, not only in architectural or cultural monstrosities but also in the decreasing standards of contemporary art and scholarship. We ignore the dead at our peril. Sebald’s fiction is not merely an intricately ordered collection of fragments shored against our ruin—though it is beautifully and hauntingly that. Most importantly, it is Sebald’s own “historical metaphysic,” in which he brings the past to light as an effort to prevent it repeating itself either as tragedy or as farce.
Sebald has not confined himself to the realm of fiction. In 1997 he delivered a controversial series of lectures in Zürich entitled “Luftkrieg und Literatur”[4] in which he discussed, with excerpts from his fiction, the deep scars left on the psyches of even those, like himself, who were not direct witnesses to the horror of the Second World War. He also claimed that, despite all their efforts to come to terms with the past, the Germans have become “a people remarkably blind to history and lacking in tradition.” The Holocaust is not the German people’s only crippling historical legacy. The “true state of utter material and moral devastation in which the entire country found itself” at the end of the war was treated as a “shameful family secret marked with such a powerful taboo, that one could probably not even acknowledge it to oneself.” Even in the 1950s, when Sebald moved from the alpine village of Wertach to the city of Sonthofen nineteen kilometers away, nothing seemed more appropriate to him than the ruin-filled lots amongst the rows of houses. For ever since a trip to Munich, he explains, “nothing was so closely associated with the word city as mountains of rubble, fire-scorched walls and empty windows frames through which one could see the open sky.” The circumstances of this destruction were never openly discussed, and for most of his childhood Sebald felt that some secret was being kept from him “at home, in school, and even by the German writers [he] read in the hope of learning more about the horrors in the background of [his] own life.”
Sebald found that most historical studies and autobiographical accounts of the bombing raids recounted the complete devastation of Germany’s major cities and many of its minor ones only in the most general and superficial terms, if at all. The major postwar writers, the Group 47 and the inner émigrés, were more intent on justifying their decision to stay in Germany throughout the war and on shaping their images for future generations. Only a handful of writers, most notably Heinrich Büll in The Silent Angel, attempted to describe this society that lay in ruins and was “morally as good as discredited.” Yet even Büll’s novel, though written in the late 1940s, was not published for almost five decades.
There are a few autobiographical works that do attempt to express, frankly and directly, a reality that defies the imagination. Sebald cites passages from the diary of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, who was sent to Dachau for subversive comments shortly before the end of the war. Reck-Malleczewen describes how refugees from Hamburg in July, 1943 clad only in pajamas, wandered about aimlessly in a state of utter confusion and amnesia. Reck-Malleczewen also writes about an incident he witnessed a month later when a group of forty or fifty Hamburg refugees tried to storm a train in a station in northern Bavaria.
A cardboard box fell onto the platform and broke open, spilling its contents: toys, a manicure set, singed linen. Finally, the corpse of a child, completely charred, shrivelled like a mummy, which this half-demented woman had carried with her as the meager remains of a past, which, only a few days earlier, had been intact.“Never truly captured into words,” the horror of those years and its suppression will continue to work its effects, indirectly, insidiously, on the generations born after the war. The clamor raised for and against Sebald’s diagnosis led to the rediscovery of a novel by Gert Ledig entitled Retribution. Its singularity, of course, supports Sebald’s rule. Sebald is careful not to imply that the survivors have any obligation to describe their experiences and recognizes their “unassailable right to silence.” He compares their trauma to that of the survivors of Hiroshima who, according to Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes (1995), were still unable to speak of the explosion twenty years later. With every passing year, there is even less chance a work will be written that will adequately describe and so defuse this particular ghost of Germany’s history.
The past is another country, and it is always Sebald’s true destination. His geographical sites, however picturesque or fraught with significant correspondences, are merely gateways into a past that is most likely absurd and appalling. Out of his despair, Sebald has created a kind of refuge. We can find comfort in the beauty of his prose, but before long we, too, feel on our backs the wind from the deepest regions of death.
Notes
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Tess Lewis is a translator and essayist who writes frequently about European literature
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 December 2001, on page 85
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
