A beautiful protocol, an exact protocol. I will write a protocol of the sort that one doesn’t experience every day.
(Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog, Dir.)
Remembrance is fundamentally nothing but a citation.
(“Like Day and Night” 90E, 184G)
Facing the title page of the Fischer Verlag’s edition of W. G. Sebald’s’ The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen) the following blurb appears, written, no doubt, with the best of intentions, but inevitably and understandably with an eye to selling books to the German public: “With great sensitivity of feeling he describes the life stories and stories of suffering of four Jews driven from their European homeland. . . . W. G. Sebald writes in order to preserve memory. Consequently he did research and had conversations, gatherered photos and documents as well as visiting the scenes.”1
Leave aside for the moment what it means to describe (schildern); discount the value of photos and documents to guarantee the worth of the accounts in question.2 How can it be they have gotten it all wrong—and in doing so have gotten it right?—“four Jews driven from their European homeland”? Four Jews, four chapters, a full count.3 Does it matter that Ambros Adelwarth, great uncle to the narrator, butler to a wealthy Jewish American family, long years their son’s lover, was himself no Jew? Does it make a difference that Paul Bereyter, dismissed by the National Socialists as schoolteacher, because he was only “three quarters an Aryan” (The Emigrants 50E, 74G) and called back to serve in the motorized artillery since “the draft notice . . . was also sent to three-quarter Aryans” (The Emigrants 55E, 81G), was only a quarter Jew?4 What does it mean to be a quarter Jew? What does it mean that instead of four Jews there are only two and a quarter in The Emigrants? And what does it mean to count like a publisher? What is a Jew, and how does one make him count?
GHOST QUARTER
From the story entitled “Dr Henry Selwyn”:
Thus they turn back, the dead.
(The Emigrants 23E, 36G)
How shall we quarter them, these dead who seem to come back? Is this not what The Emigrants is about, the question of quartering? In a volume subtitled “Four Long Stories,” Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Aurach find,5 perhaps, a place to reside or at least to leave their residue and gain their due—a remnant, the last that one might say about them. And yet the first that one might say about them, the epigraph to the volume’s first chapter, is a call to destroy the remnant—while sparing, it seems, what Sebald calls memory (Erinnerung):
Destroy the remnant
Not the memory.6
(The Emigrants 1E, 5G)
Then what shelter can be offered? And are these stories not like the Jewish quarter (Judenviertel) that the narrator encounters in Manchester, emptied before one’s arrival of their inhabitants? “Little by little my Sunday walks would take me beyond the city centre to districts in the immediate neighbourhood, such as the one-time Jewish quarter. . . . This quarter had been a centre for Manchester’s large Jewish community until the inter-war years, but was given up by those who lived there who moved into the suburbs and the district had meanwhile been demolished by order of the municipality” (The Emigrants 157E).7 What quarter can be given, what clemency shown, since there is no way to spare the lives of those already gone?8
From the story entitled “Max Aurach”:
They come when night falls to search after life.
(The Emigrants 147E, 217G)
Does he fail, then, this narrator, does he fail those ghosts who inhabit the four divisions of his volume, by not bringing those seekers to life? At the moment of twilight (im Abenddämmer), he writes, in the afterlife, if I might shift the emphasis of the phrase nach dem Leben, in the wake, as well, of the day’s clarity, they seek. Does he fail, this narrator, who pens himself as W. G. Sebald, Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, whose friends called him Max—and so shall I? For I, too, want to befriend, however belatedly, the dead. Still, they may not return to life so much as turn us ever again to them.9
From the story entitled “Paul Bereyter”:
Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back or as if we were on the point of passing away into them.
(The Emigrants 45–46E, emphasis mine).10
Here, as Sebald’s publishers promised, the “photos” gathered that will “reconstruct” “the past” (publisher’s blurb). And, if they are the same “documents” we encounter in The Emigrants, ever again, after as before, forward and backward, we too are called on to leaf through the album Sebald leaves us whose pages offer the same alternatives: either the dead return or we must be prepared for our own Eingehen—our passing away into their realm of image.
There are other leaves that have the same draw—those outside the window of the narrator’s new house in the opening chapter. “The trees stood scarcely fifteen meters from the house, and the play of the leaves (Blätterspiel) seemed so close that at times, when one looked out, one believed oneself to belong therein” (The Emigrants 18E, Die Ausgewanderten 30G).11 What does it mean in The Emigrants—on looking at the photographs, on leafing through the pages—that either the dead return or we are called into their photographic abode? In what way might these be alternatives or equivalents? What is an image? What does it mean to look at an image? What is a photograph, those signature interspersions—I do not say documents, nor even illustrations—of Max’s writing?
From the story entitled “Ambros Adelwarth”:
They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. . . . If I approached them, they dissolved before my very eyes, leaving behind them nothing but the vacant space they had occupied.
(The Emigrants 122–23E).12
So this is what happens when we draw close to them, when we pass too precipitously into their space.13 This is not to say that we err if we believe ourselves “to belong therein” (The Emigrants 18E, 30G) or if we stand “on the point of passing away into them” (The Emigrants 46E, 69G). But we err if we think it easy to capture the souls of the dead, with photographs, with documents, with memories, with drawings, those souls that European mythology wisely casts as butterflies.
Perhaps this is what flits by in the mockery of the narrator’s great-uncle. Aunt Fini visits Adelwarth at the mental sanitorium he has chosen for his end: “when a middle-aged man appeared, holding a white net on a pole in front of him and occasionally taking curious jumps. Uncle Adelwarth stared straight ahead, but he registered my bewilderment all the same and said: It’s the butterfly man, you know. He comes round here quite often. I thought I caught a tone of mockery in the words, and so took them as a sign of . . . improvement” (The Emigrants 104E).14 Adelwarth, of course, does not get better; but then, again, he was never mad.
So what is it that Sebald is after? And do we not find an image of him in Max Aurach (Ferber in the English translation), the artist, prominently placed as the volume’s last entry,15 in which narrator and author seem so drawn to one another. Just as the narrator, wandering through Manchester finds a sign that guides him to Max the artist,16 isn’t Aurach the sign that might guide us to Max the writer? And what if we catch sight of him in the story of Aurach’s most difficult work—a portrait of the butterfly man, the image that runs through The Emigrants from beginning to end? The Butterfly Man is an irrecuperable ghost from the past whose gesture, in turn, is to catch the souls of the departed and even to save the living from falling into the realm of the dead. He is the figure whose mode is unexpected recurrence and who, nevertheless, obscures the particularity and possibility of memory. A chasm of amnesia separates the artist from the actual encounter with his subject. “For what reason and how far this lagoon of remembrancelessness had spread in him had remained a riddle to him, despite his most strenuous thinking about it” (The Emigrants 174E, 259G). Aus welchem Grund, for what reason, has the lagoon of oblivion taken him over?—but, also, out of what ground? For the man with a butterfly net unsettles any sense we have of ground, in art, in reason.
“If he tried to think back to the time in question, he could not see himself again till he was back in the studio, working at a painting which took him almost a full year, dragging on with minor interruptions—the faceless portrait ‘Man with a Butterfly Net.’ This he considered one of his most unsatisfactory works, because in his view it conveyed not even the remotest concept of the strangeness of the apparition it referred to” (The Emigrants 174E).17 No way to go back to the time in question. A lesson perhaps for the dead who return searching for life and for the living who, feeling they belong to an earlier world, are prepared to pass away into it. When Aurach tries to displace himself into the past of that encounter, chasing after the man who forever chases, he finds he has already been at work on the faceless portrait, which will prove one of his most ill-conceived works. No meeting the past here, much less the object of his art, only the rupture of memory, the long experience of failing to have met him, to draw him, to capture him in an image, as in a net. Perhaps this is why it is the strangeness of the appearance, more precisely “the apparition,” and not the man himself that Aurach attempts to but cannot produce.
Max travels to the Swiss Alps “to take up there once again a trace of experience that had long been buried and which [he] had never dared disturb” (The Emigrants 172E, 256G). He climbs to the summit of the Grammont, as he had done with his father in 1936 (The Emigrants 173E, 258G), and finds himself drawn to the world below, the landscape of Lake Geneva.18 It is, perhaps, not entirely unlike the lagoon of remembrancelessness that will soon gain ground within him. He would have fallen, it seems, become one of the dead, had not the man with the butterfly net caught him, rising up before him—“like someone who’s popped out of the bloody ground” (The Emigrants 174E, 259G).19 This is, after all, what his net (which pops up so unexpectedly throughout the tales) captures—less the butterfly souls of the departed than the folly of feeling “compelled to fall into them” (The Emigrants 174E, 259G), the simple passing away (Eingehen) into them (Die Ausgewanderten 69G). And is this not what the canvas (Leinwand) cannot subsequently contain—the play between catching and falling, production and destruction?
“Work on the picture of the butterfly catcher had taken more out of him than any previous painting, for when he started on it, after countless preliminary studies, he not only painted over it time and again but also, whenever the canvas could no longer withstand the continual scratching-off and re-application of paint, he destroyed it and burnt it several times” (The Emigrants 174E).20 Perhaps all of Max’s work is like that. Failed portraiture. The past, the person, replaced by the process of its reproduction. The “butterfly man” who is, after all, no one in particular and many in his multiplicity. A gesture toward “the picture of . . .” (The Emigrants 174E, 260G), then again and again painted over,21 scratched down, reapplied, finally, yet repeatedly destroyed. This is, of course, also the way Max Sebald works, or at least his narrator, and never more so than when he writes a portrait of Max Aurach.22
The scene of production, his “manner of working” (The Emigrants 162E, 239G), is less the canvas than what falls away from it, drawn, it seems, by the same seductive force of gravity against which and in the name of which the Man with the Butterfly Net pops out of the bloody ground.
Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick at the centre and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him . . . that nothing should change at his place of work . . . and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world.
(The Emigrants 161E)23
Aurach’s failures are thus his success.
Art does not capture a lost object. It is not in search of times past, it is neither testimony, nor recovered memory—at least not only, not simply. It takes place when matter, the charcoal sticks Max uses up as he draws, the paint scratched off from the canvas, the coal dust that falls from the “continual wiping of that which is drawn” (The Emigrants 162E, 239G), “when the matter, little by little, dissolves into nothing” (The Emigrants 161E, 238G)” or almost nothing. His work “was in reality nothing but a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night” The Emigrants 162E, 239G).24
BUTTERFLY WORK
And yet, this is no doubt too precipitous. We cannot leave it there, on the floor, under the easel of what the narrator calls Aurach’s study of destruction (The Emigrants 180E, 269G). Let us rethink this production of dust. Aurach, on seeing the narrator after a hiatus of many years, has this to say: “There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary images of memory by which I am haunted have the character of compulsory ideas” (The Emigrants 181E, 270G).25 For Aurach there is neither past nor future, rather, memory’s fragmentary and compulsive images: remnants that come home to spook not only Aurach but the entire text of The Emigrants, crossing the borders of its four stories, disrupting the frames of the four portraits, making strange leaps and fissures, running through the text like the butterfly man, popping up here and there out of its bloody ground.
“Dust production,” then, but as Bestäubung,26 as cross-pollination—what, say, a butterfly might accomplish as it flits erratically from flower to flower—here a cross-pollination of memory’s fragmentary images from one chapter to another; such are the ghosts of The Emigrants. There is a kinship here with the haunting reappearance of snow in After Nature and the many other gestures we traced there, the crossings of borders or instances of resemblance and interrelation, that teach us to read otherwise. Perhaps this explains why Max’s portraits, belonging to no individual, can have no face, no definitive identity: their greatest achievement is their refusal to portray, won by long labors of obliteration.27 The butterfly chaser, the mountain scene overlooking the land beneath, the landscape of Lake Geneva, unbound to the particularity of singular identity: like the dead, they are ever returning to us.
We find these same revenants flit through the first of the stories.28 The narrator and Clara join Dr Henry Selwyn and his friend Edward Ellis for dinner. The scene is set, like others as well, with blind mirrors, flickering lights, and uncertain images. “High on the walls mirrors with blind patches were hung, multiplying the flickering of the fire and letting unsteady images appear in them” (The Emigrants 12E, 21G).
The foreigners who grew up in the mountains are asked their impression “of England, and particularly of the flat expanse of the county of Norfolk” (The Emigrants 12E, 21–22G). No need to delineate, really, since the unsteady images, a flickering of who is who and where is where, have already transformed the flatland of Norfolk into the Alps. “The light of the west still lay on the horizon, though, with mountains of cloud whose snowy formations reminded me of the loftiest alpine massifs” (The Emigrants 13E, 22G). “Dusk fell” (The Emigrants 12E, 22G). It is, as always in The Emigrants, the hour of ghosting.
Like Aurach after him, in the pages that follow, it is of the Alps that Selwyn will speak, and this, too, is a tale of falling. Bern, 1913, and Selwyn is “more and more addicted to mountain climbing” (The Emigrants 13E, 23G)—addicted as well to the friendship of his alpine guide: “Nothing fell so hard upon me . . . as the departure of Johannes Naegeli” (The Emigrants 14E, 24G). This is a loss soon to be doubled when, a few months later, Naegeli, in an accident, falls “into a crevasse in the Aare glacier” (The Emigrants 15E, 24G). Selwyn is left in “a deep depression” during which it was as if he “was buried under snow and ice” (The Emigrants 15E, 25G). Here Sebald places a photo of the glacial scene: it is duplicated, more or less, at the close of the chapter, though, in a second incarnation. A man has popped up in the originally deserted snowscape: his back to us, he poses faceless. He offers us the shoe he extends behind him.
FIGURE 2.1 Glacier. Copyright © W. G. Sebald. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC (The Emigrants 14).
FIGURE 2.2 Newspaper. Copyright © W. G. Sebald. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC (The Emigrants 22).
Between these twin images,29 like the covers of a slim volume, like the placement of the photographs in the first edition of After Nature, we find the story of Dr. Selwyn’s life, the home in Lithuania that he must leave behind, his childhood in London, a failed marriage, the Heimweh that subsequently overwhelms him, his suicide. Before that life and after, as preface and afterword, the mountain scenes that flicker in all their multiplicity. Not least the passage that closes the chapter in which the second photo appears as a critical document. It is July 1986. The narrator takes the train from Zurich to Lausanne. “As the train slowed to cross the Aare bridge, approaching Berne, I gazed way beyond the city to the chain of mountains of the Oberland. . . . Three quarters of an hour later, not wanting to miss the landscape around Lake Geneva, which never fails to astound me as it opens out, I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I’d bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. Thus they turn back, the dead“(The Emigrants 23E).30
How do they come back, these dead?—unhoped for, unsuspected, less in body than in letters, less in the landscape of their disappearance, which the narrator is bent on not missing, than in the scriptscape of the newsprint that actually catches his eye, the tale of a “guide disparu,”31 the documentation of a repeated image that now calls on us to consider the remains of Naegeli as a pun on the dead man’s name. “Sometimes . . . they come out of the ice and lie on the border of the moraine, a small heap of polished bones, and a pair of hobnailed [genagelter] boots” (The Emigrants 23E, 36–37G, emphasis mine.)
SLIDE SHOWS
A few pages before this alpine tale, the narrator and Clara, that vague promise of light and clarity, attend a slide show presented by Selwyn and his friend Edward Ellis (Edwin Elliott in the English translation). They revisit the mountains of Crete on a wood-framed screen that finds its appropriate place, before the mirror.32 “Once or twice, Edwin was to be seen with his field glasses and a container for botanical specimens, or Dr Selwyn in knee-length shorts, with a shoulder bag and butterfly net. One of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gstaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before” (The Emigrants 15–16E, 26G).33
As the narrator says of another butterfly man, we have “not even the remotest impression of the strangeness of the apparition” (The Emigrants 174E, 260G)—all the more so when one returns to the pages that precede it. Between the photograph dustcovers that enclose Selwyn’s life story, alongside that tale that begins in the Alps and ends in the pages of a Swiss newspaper, other mountains come flickering to us in a manner so natural (or is it so artful?) we forget their origin. With Nabokov on the scene, the mountains of Crete slide to those of the Alps, and again, soon, to those of the Caucasus. The Greek, the Western European, and the Asian are as interchangeable as the names Selwyn gives his old horses: Hippolytus, Humphrey, Herschel, the last a version of Hersch and Henry in a study of the letter H.34
Aurach’s Grammont, Naegeli’s Oberaar, Nabokov’s Gstaad are reflected miragelike, in the view from the heights around the Lasithi plateau in Crete that Selwyn wishes to share. It is a view that cannot but strike the onlooker at Selwyn’s dinner party, and, all the more so, the reader. “To the south, lofty Mount Spathi, two thousand metres high, towered above the plateau, like a mirage beyond the flood of light. . . . We sat looking at this picture for a long time in silence too, so long that the glass in the slide shattered and a dark crack fissured across the screen. That view[ing] of the Lasithi plateau, held so long till it shattered, impressed itself deeply on me at the time, yet I forgot it for a considerable time thereafter” (The Emigrants 17E).35
The image that trembles lightly on the screen now bursts (zerspringt) its frame: it breaks not only the glass of the slide but sends that crack—perhaps not unlike the fissure into which Nageli has fallen—to the wood-framed screen on which the image is projected, the deep impression of which shatters, in turn, the view of the narrator. He is left like Aurach before that other white canvas in a state of remembrancelessness (Erinnerungslosigkeit; Die Ausgewanderten 259G). Whereas Aurach sets about to re-produce the lost figure (of the Butterfly Man), the narrator’s vision of the scene is brought to life once again—not by a return of the windmills of Lasithi but by a dream force outside him, another landscape that dreams him involuntarily back to Lasithi. It comes to him, if not under the pale green veil (Die Ausgewanderten 26G) of Crete, then overcast by another sort of film. “It was not until a few years afterwards that [the view] returned to me, in a London cinema, as I followed a conversation between Kaspar Hauser and his teacher, Daumer. . . . Kaspar . . . was distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality, beginning his account with the words: Ja, it dreamed me. I dreamed about the Caucasus” (The Emigrants 17E, translation somewhat forced).36
Not es träumte mir37—for Kaspar, it seems, is both dreamer and the dreamed. “The camera then moved from right to left, in a sweeping arc, offering a panoramic view of a plateau ringed by mountains, a plateau with a distinctly Indian look to it, with pagoda-like towers and temples . . . in a pulsing dazzle of light, that kept reminding me of the sails of those wind pumps of Lasithi, which in reality I have still not seen to this day” (The Emigrants 17–18E, 29G).
Into The Emigrants Sebald inscribes Kaspar Hauser, a narrative, we are repeatedly told, that leaves unsolved the enigma of origin.38 He substitutes instead the gestures of Bestäubung (cross-pollination), returning the narrator only by way of a film to Lasithi, which in reality he has never seen. This takes place by bursting and fragmenting the frame of narration among various narrators, realities, views, viewers, and images.
It seems we’ve been at the flicks, the motion pictures. The flickering on the movie screen that disturbs the images of Kaspar’s Caucasus dream is that of the unsteady images that Sebald’s narrator, too, insists on.39 It returns once more, as Kaspar lies dying. His final act is that of narration: a story, as Kaspar tells it, of which he knows the beginning but not the end. A caravan passes through a desert, that is surrounded, of course, you will have guessed it, by mountains, even if the mountains are declared, for this is the point of his fragment: to be nur eure Einbildung. The mountains are a question of imagination.
The caravan approaches the spectator: human figures, camel legs, seem to graze the focal point of the lens and step out this, our, side of the screen, bursting the bounds, violating the rules, of the cinematic contract. The same violation—to the point of madness—takes place in Cosmo Solomon’s retelling of a scene from the film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. It is the spectacle staged by a hypnotist who produces “a collective hallucination in his audience” (The Emigrants 97E, 141G): a caravan passes from the mirage of an oasis onstage out into the audience, drawing Solomon with it as it leaves the hall. Kaspar is right: his story has no end and has no limit. It steps into Sebald’s narrative, here in the story of Henry Selwyn, there in that of Ambros Adelwarth, and again in that of Max Aurach.
It oversteps the border of the final chapter as well. In the story of Max Aurach, narrator and painter sit in the flickering light of the Wadi Halfa café.
The Wadi Halfa was lit by flickering, glaringly bright neon light . . . and when I think back on our meetings in Trafford Park, it is invariably in that same place that I see Ferber, always sitting in front of a fresco painted by an unknown hand that showed a caravan moving forward from the remotest depths of the picture, across a wavy ridge of dunes, straight towards the beholder. Because the painter lacked the necessary skill, and the perspective he had chosen was a difficult one, both the human figures and the beasts of burden were slightly distorted so that . . . the scene looked like a mirage, quivering in the heat and light. And especially on days when Ferber had been working in charcoal, and the fine powdery dust had given his skin a metallic sheen, he seemed to have just emerged from the desert scene, or to belong in it.
(The Emigrants 164E, emphasis mine)40
And have we not come full circle—to our question of how to quarter the dead? Difficult to say if Aurach has come out of the desert image [Wüstenbild],41 or whether, though denizen of this side, he nevertheless belongs within. Hovering between, or perhaps straddling both at once, in this flickering light it’s hard to tell. He is neither saved by the markings that create the picture nor sent back to the unskilled fresco of unknown hand. But this his portrait tells us: Aurach becomes his own work of art: his fate, perhaps, that of the photographer whom he finds in a similar fix, in the pages of yet another newspaper.
But anyway, he went on . . . the darkening of his skin reminded him of an article he had recently read in the paper about silver poisoning, the symptoms of which were not uncommon among professional photographers. According to the article, the British Medical Association’s archives contained the description of an extreme case of silver poisoning; in the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact . . . that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.
(The Emigrants 164–65E)42
A martyr of sorts to his art of photography. That long practice of taking in silver. What does it mean to take in silver? And where does Sebald stand in all this? What does he develop? What his narrator tells is surely no “beautiful protocol, [no] exact protocol,” but he develops “a protocol of the sort that one doesn’t experience every day.” Such writing leaves its subject and subjects, the author too, an enigma, even if, by the light of publication, in the many documents and photographs, their memories may seem preserved.
The uncertainty of the light in which that leaves them all hardly escapes the narrator. It is the final pages of The Emigrants. He returns from visiting the ash-gray Aurach who, so close to death, has a voice like the rustling of dried up leaves (The Emigrants 231E, 345–46G) that recalls, in another incarnation, the leaves outside the narrator’s window. In a room he has taken in the Manchester Hotel where Aurach has also resided—an act of solidarity, perhaps? certainly not identity—in that room the Polish industrial center of Łódź, once known as the Polish Manchester (The Emigrants 235–36E, 352G), comes to him. Manchester—Łódź—or, as the Nazis renamed it, Litzmannstadt, a name that hints at the entangled web into which we have already entered.43
In the narrator’s imagination, then: “On those flats [of an infinitely deep stage], which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before.44 They were colour photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown, of the Litzmannstadt ghetto that was established in 1940 in the Polish industrial centre of Łódź, once known as polski Manczester” (The Emigrants 235–36E, 352G). Something of a second slide show, you see, whose relation to the first should be preserved. A color slide show out of memory and imagination. “The photographs, which had been discovered in 1987 in a small wooden suitcase, carefully sorted and inscribed, in an antique dealer’s shop in Vienna, had been taken for the purpose of remembrance by a book-keeper and financial expert named Genewein . . . who was himself in one of the pictures, counting money” (The Emigrants 236E, 352–53G).
FIGURE 2.3 Litzmannstadt Ghetto—chief accountant. By permission of the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main.
The ghetto’s chief accountant, bookkeeper, financial expert, “counter of money” (Geldzähler), and, as history judged him later (if not the courts), embezzler and thief of the worst order.45 Genewein obsessively documents the ghetto in almost four hundred color slides—to celebrate the Nazi sense of “organization.” “The photographer had also recorded the exemplary organization within the ghetto: the postal system, the police, the courtroom . . . the laying out of the dead, and the burial ground” (The Emigrants 236E, 354G.) He celebrates no less, and perhaps above all, what he regarded as his own cutting-edge photographic experimentation.
The last of these photographs, imaginary slides (Lichtbilder), fixes the narrator’s gaze. It is a question of how to frame all these documents, a question, you see it now, no doubt, of another screen and another frame, this time, and out of time, the frame of a loom.
“Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. . . . Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera” (The Emigrants 237E).46 Sebald places his narrator, himself, of course, too, on the spot—on the spot where the accountant, the Rechnungsführer, had stood, that keeper of books and financial expert, who was so good at taking in silver and no doubt knew all too well how to count by quarters.47
At stake are the names of the weaving young women, how they are woven together: with one another, with their German analogues,48 and what the shift from the individual to the abstract mythological frame might signify. Also what it might mean, as the publisher has it, to preserve memory, to collect photos and documents (see the opening lines of this chapter). “The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on her right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were—Roza, Lusia,49 and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, thread and scissors” (The Emigrants 237E).50 At the close of 350 pages the narrator stands in the place of Genewein. He is no longer, necessarily, like the besilvered Manchester photographer, a martyr to his art. He does not take a picture so much as await his fate.
FIGURE 2.4 Litzmannstadt Ghetto—weavers. By permission of the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main.
We cannot count on him. The Emigrants does not and cannot save Henry Selwyn, nor Max Aurach, nor the quarter of Paul Bereyter that is Jewish, nor the one-and-three-quarters gentiles whose fates are just as tragic.51 The dead cannot come back, nor can one go to them, whatever the temptation. Still in strong light (bei starkem Lichteinfall), something develops, even though we may have lost the negative—even though we may know neither the original story nor its end for sure.52 The interwovenness of all four, better still, their Bestäubung,53 their cross-pollination, the way in which anything can rupture into anything else, challenges a politics based on identity and bursts the gazes (of author, narrator, reader) that have been held fast: a liberation of sorts that shatters the frame and keeps alive the resistance—the resistance to thinking in terms of bio-logical definition, believing it might yet mean something to count as a Jew.
