Preface
1. As I was nearing the end of this study, Henry Sussman called it my book on Sebald’s vision. I have taken that phrase as a gift, bearing as it does all the uncertainty of what this work might claim to be about.
2. These are the obvious readings of the German phrase: Nach der Natur which can suggest either that which follows Nature temporally or also, as in the phrases draw or paint from nature (nach der Natur zeichnen), an art that imitates its natural object. Many of Sebald’s readers take us through these and other ambiguities of the title. Dorothea von Mücke (“History and the Work of Art in Sebald’s After Nature”) and Claudia Öhlschläger (“Der Saturnring oder Etwas vom Eisenbau”) would be just two highly articulate examples. Eva Hoffman (“Curiosity and Catastrophe”) gives a particularly beautiful formulation of this:
But on another level, the poem is an exploration of the relationship between art and reality—and, not incidentally, an implicit gloss on various connotations of the book’s title phrase. Grünewald’s art, with its tormented imagery of death, extreme anguish and physical decomposition, is made “after nature,” Sebald implies, in that it faithfully imitates the conditions the medieval master saw in his world—the “pathological spectacle” of crippled bodies, gangrenous diseases and the brutality of the Peasants’ War. But the iconography of Grünewald’s paintings and sculptures was also imbued with a more eschatological, apocalyptic conception of a post-natural world, a vision fed by portents and premonitions of “the ending of time.”
3. Andrea Köhler’s eloquent statement on vision as Sebald’s most critical theme reads as follows: “Probably there is hardly a theme in his work as central to it as eyes are. . . . [The] dimming of vision and the penetration of darkness are the key metaphors in all his books for his most intimate concern: the work of remembrance, the work of witness, in the torrential flux of time” (Köhler, “Penetrating the Dark,” 95–96).
4. Sebald’s Vision takes up his work cognizant of a number of questions and poses them, neither by way of a historical, political, and sociological contextualization of his works nor by aligning Sebald’s writings with the theoretical thinkers of the twentieth century. These approaches have been enormously successful in producing other understandings of the work. I am thinking in particular of J. J. Long’s W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. An admirable piece of scholarly writing and broad historical and cultural thinking, it is concerned with Sebald’s work in relation to a long view of the concept of modernity, or, in his own words, “the seismic social, economic, political and cultural transformations” in Europe (ibid., 1). Eric Santner’s exceptionally intelligent and original book, On Creaturely Life: Rilke/Benjamin/Sebald, is conceived as a continuation of his volume on Franz Rosenzweig, from which the concept of neighbor love is central for the new work. Under the rubric of the creaturely, Santner magisterially puts Sebald’s work in contact with that of previous writers and thinkers, not only Benjamin and Rilke but also Freud, Schmitt, Kafka, Scholem, Celan, Lacan, Heidegger, Agamben, Foucault, and others. Rather than looking elsewhere, the attempt here is to concentrate on the particularities of Sebald’s poetry and prose, with occasional detours into the writings of authors explicitly embedded within his work.
5. One should think as well of those striking instances where the open, seeing eye is challenged by the different or even troubled sight of its counterpart: the image of Frank Auerbach, which only appeared in the German edition of The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten 240G), showing the black lines of a face with one eye closed and the other open, but unclearly so; the dog at the end of Sebald’s essay on Tripp, one eye averted and in shadow, the other, we read, attentively fixed on us (“As Day and Night” 94E and “Wie Tag und Nacht,” 188G); Saint Dionysius of Grünewald’s painting whose open glance toward Saint George is strangely contradicted by the severed head with closed eyes he holds in his hands (After Nature 7E, 8G); the extended reminder in Austerlitz that the sight of the narrator is divided between a clear-sighted eye and another threatened at its core by black hatching.
6. This is only one strand of the argument. Sebald certainly doesn’t let things rest with such assertions.
7. At about the same time he was writing the Tripp essay, Sebald says of his own writing that “every fiction, if it doesn’t wish to be insipid, must pass over on the edge into the fantastic and mysterious. It is from that it lives ultimately. Thus realism to which I am very attached on the one hand is not sufficient; one always has to transgress it at certain points” (“jede Fiktion [muß], wenn sie nicht platt sein will, irgendwo so am Rande in die Phantastik und ins Mysteriöse übergehen. . . . Davon lebt sie letzten Endes. Also Realismus, dem ich ja sehr verhaftet bin, einerseits, reicht nicht aus, man muß ihn immer an bestimmten Punkten übertreten.). “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis,” 98. A related passage on realism from a conversation with Sven Boedecker (1993) would also be of interest here (ibid., 107).
8. Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject (Interview),” 80. And, in conversation with Jean-Pierre Ronda: “For me, it’s that one can write about this horrific German history of the twentieth century or the first half of the twentieth century only from a certain distance, approaching the subject obliquely, tangentially, referring to it here and there” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 216).
9. “And of course what one also knows from a distance and what one didn’t know, at least what I didn’t know when I was there growing up, was the horrors that were associated with these places and that one really only afterwards, so to speak, learned to grasp from historical study” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 226).
10. We might also think in terms of someone who has visions, something akin to what happens in the last section of the final poem of After Nature in which the narrator speaks to God of the visionlike dream he has had.
11. “Now I know, as with a crane’s eye / one surveys his far-flung realm” (After Nature 115 E, 98G).
12. Sebald used the name Aurach for the character in the German edition, but switched to Ferber in the English out of respect for the protests of the living artist on whom the character was based (Frank Auerbach). Aurach came too close to home.
13. Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject (Interview),” 80.
14. In “Curiosity and Catastrophe” Hoffman writes: “The language of ‘After Nature,’ as conveyed in Michael Hamburger’s flawlessly clear translation, is almost classically lucid: No verbal games here, no self-conscious ironies.” It is indeed neither simply a game nor a flatly self-conscious irony that drives the richness of the German original in particular, critical, moments of the poem: still, one finds a complexity in Sebald’s use of Grünewald’s name that should not be ignored. (Sebald was obsessed both with his own name and that of others throughout his works.)
15. I make the leap from glossing chapter 3 to chapter 5 here (returning to chapter 4 in the subsequent pages) simply to maintain the clearer logic of the theoretical argument. Any reader of Sebald, however, knows how distracting such gestures can be.
1. “Like the snow on the Alps”
1. Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, II, 139–42, translation modified.
2. This alternative to Michael Hamburger’s translation (“all turns as white as / the snow on the Alps”) might better enable us to see what Sebald is about.
3. In an essay on Nach der Natur, thoroughly admirable for its careful readings and its meditation on crucial theoretical issues, Dorothea von Mücke has this to say of the opening lines: “The first sentence doesn’t just say what can be seen but rather what happens if one closes the altar’s left shutter and encloses the carved figures in their housing. The opening sentence invites the reader of the poem to imagine herself in front of the altar of the parish church of Lindenhardt. . . . Yet, while the poem draws attention to the concrete material object or vehicle of the work of art, in the same sentence it also draws attention to the imaginary aspect of the representational work of art” (von Mücke, “History and the Work of Art” 9). Thus we are reminded, here as elsewhere in this essay, of the role of the reader. It is the last lines of “Like the snow on the Alps,” as we shall see, that call the reader to an even more radical role.
Way beyond this reading of the opening lines, von Mücke’s essay offers an extensive analysis of the complex register of “Like the snow on the Alps,” taking up repeatedly the ways in which Sebald casts aside the received views of art history with respect to the biographical Grünewald “and engages with the painter and his oeuvre in order to pursue questions about the relationship between artist and work of art and about the relationship between the work of art and history” (von Mücke, “History and the Work of Art” 8).
4. A more literal, if clumsier translation would read: “him, on the left panel, St. George approaches.” Andrea Köhler (“Penetrating the Dark” 95) reminds us that Georg is one of Sebald’s given names, as does Dorothea von Mücke. It is also the name of the subject of the second poem in After Nature, “Und blieb ich am äussersten Meer” (“And if I remained by the outermost sea”), Georg Wilhelm Steller. It is the understood name of the last section as well, devoted as it is to a double of W. G(eorg). Sebald.
5.
Wer die Flügel des Altars
der Pfarrkirche von Lindenhardt
zumacht und die geschnitzten Figuren
in ihrem Gehäuse verschließt,
dem kommt auf der linken
Tafel der hl. Georg entgegen.
(Nach der Natur 7G)
6.
Zuvorderst steht er am Bildrand
eine Handbreit über der Welt
und wird gleich über die Schwelle
des Rahmens treten. Georgius Miles.
(Nach der Natur 7G)
7.
in der Mitte des rechten Flügels
des Lindenhardter Altars in Besorgnis
den Blick auf den Jüngling auf der anderen
Seite gerichtet jener ältere Mann, dem ich selber
vor Jahren einmal an einem Januarmorgen
auf dem Bamberger Bahnhof begegnet bin.
Es ist der heilige Dionysius,
das abgeschlagene Haupt unterm Arm.
(Nach der Natur 8G)
8. This is not an unusual claim for Sebald. In Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle.) the narrator encounters, among others, Dante in the Gonzagagasse (35E, 41G), King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Venice (Vertigo 53E, 61G), and also twins with an uncanny resemblance to pictures of Kafka as an adolescent (Vertigo 88E, 101G).
9.
Immer dieselbe
Sanftmut, dieselbe Bürde der Trübsal,
dieselbe Unregelmäßigkeit der Augen, verhängt
und vesunken seitwärts ins Einsame hin.
. . .
Es seien dies merkwürdig verstellte
Fälle von Ähnlichkeit, schrieb Fraenger,
dessen Bücher die Faschisten verbrannten.
Ja, es scheine, als hätten im Kunstwerk
die Männer einander verehrt wie Brüder,
einander dort oft ein Denkmal gesetzt,
wo ihre Wege sich kreuzten.
(Nach der Natur 7–8)
See, for example, the image of Sebald’s eyes in Unrecounted (Unerzählt) (76E, 70G). One might add to these resemblances the figure of Sebald who, like Grünewald, emerges again and again as witness and commiserator.
The face of the unknown
Grünewald emerges again and again
in his work as a witness
to the snow miracle, a hermit
in the desert, a commiserator
in the Munich Mocking of Christ.
(After Nature 5)
Grünewald taucht stets wieder auf
in seinem Werk als das eines Zeugen
des Schneewunders, eines Einsiedlers
in der Wüste, eines Mitleidigen
in der Münchner Verspottung.
(Nach der Natur 7)
10. See, for example, the image of the dog in Jan Peter Tripp’s “Déjà vu or the Incident,” described in Sebald’s “Like Day and Night: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp (“Wie Tag und Nacht—Über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps”), and discussed in chapters 6 and 7, who also jumps a centuries-long gap in historical time as well as moving in and out of the frame of the painting on which he is depicted.
11.
Zuunterst in der linken Ecke kauert
der von syphilitischen Schwären
überzogene Leib eines Insassen
des Isenheimer Spitals. Darüber
erhebt sich eine doppelköpfige
Und mehrarmig verzwitterte Kreatur,
im Begriff, dem Heiligen mit einem
Kieferknochen den Garaus zu machen . . .
Rechterhand ein stelzenbeiniges Vogeltier,
das mit menschlichen Armen
einen Prügel erhoben hält. Hinter
und neben diesem, gegen die Mitte des Bildes . . .
(Nach der Natur 23)
12. After Nature is the only major piece among Sebald’s literary works that has no images within the text. The first edition included six bookend photographs of bleak landscapes.
13. Perhaps this explains the website that places the images of Matthaeus Grünewald side by side with Sebald’s “Like the snow on the Alps”: http://www.wgsebald.de/gruenewald.html. Thus, also, understandably, von Mücke chooses to support her reading of Sebald with images of Grünewald’s paintings.
14.
Der panische Halsknick,
überall an den in Grünewalds Werk
vorkommenden Subjekten zu sehen,
der die Kehle freigibt und das Gesicht
hineinwendet oft in ein blendendes Licht,
ist der äußerste Ausdruck der Körper dafür,
daß die Natur kein Gleichgewicht kennt,
Experiment macht ums andre
und wie ein unsinniger Bastler schon
ausschlachtet, was ihr grad erst gelang.
(Nach der Natur 24)
15.
Wahrscheinlich hat Grünewald
die katastrophale Umnachtung,
die letzte Spur des aus dem Jenseits
einfallenden Lichts nach der Natur
gemalt und erinnert, denn im Jahr 1502,
. . .
glitt zum 1. Oktober der Mondschatten
über den Osten Europas von Südpolen
über die Lausitz, Böhmen und Mecklenburg,
und Grünewald, der wiederholt mit dem Aschaffenburger
Hofastrologen Johann Indagine in Verbindung stand,
wird diesem von vielen mit großer Furcht
erwarteten Jahrhundertereignis der Sonnenverfinsterung
entgegengereist und Zeuge geworden sein
des heimlichen Wegsiechens der Welt,
in welchem ein geisterhaft Abendwerden
mitten im Tag wie eine Ohnmacht sich ausgoß
und im Gewölbe des Himmels,
über den Nebelbänken und den Wänden
der Wolken, über einem kalten und schweren
Blau ein feuriges Roth aufging und Farben
umherschweiften glanzvoll, wie nie
sie ein Auge gesehen und die der Maler
fortan nicht mehr aus dem Gedächtnis bringt.
(Nach der Natur 26–27)
16.
Mitte des Mai, Grünewald
war mit seinem Gesprenge
in Frankfurt zurück, war
das Korn weiß zur Ernte,
zog die geschärfte Sichel
durch das Leben eines Heers von fünftausend
in der sonderbaren Schlacht von Frankenhausen
. . .
Als Grünewald am 18. Mai
diese Nachricht erreichte,
ging er nicht mehr außer Haus.
Er hörte aber das Augenausstechen,
zwischen dem Bodensee
und dem Thüringer Wald.
Wochenweis trug er damals
eine dunkle Binde
vor dem Gesicht.
(Nach der Natur 31)
17. Sebald talks of his preoccupation with his birthday in an interview with Joseph Cuomo (Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald” 97).
18. Sebald also speaks in an interview of the play on the initials of his own name: “reference to an eighteenth-century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials that I have” (Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald” 99).
19.
Die Bewandtnis mit der Signatur M. N.
über dem Rahmen des Fensters sei die,
daß sich der in den Archiven entdeckte,
durch eigene Arbeit sonst aber nicht nachweisliche Maler
Mathis Nithart hinter dem Namen Grünewald verberge.
Darum die Initialen M. G. und N. Auf dem Schnee-
Altar in Aschaffenburg. . . .
. . .
Und in der Tat geht die Figur des Mathis Nithart
in den Dokumenten der Zeit in einem Maß
in die Grünewalds über, daß man meint,
der eine habe wirklich das Leben
und zuletzt gar den Tod
des anderen ausgemacht.
(Nach der Natur 16–17)
20.
Zu Grünewalds Zeit . . .
. . .
Nachts, am Sonntag um vier schon,
werden sie eingeschlossen, und
gehen dürfen sie nirgends,
wo ein grüner Baum wächst,
weder auf dem Scheidewall
noch im Roß, noch auf dem Römerberg
oder in der Allee. In diesem Ghetto
war das Judden Enchin zuhause gewesen,
eh sie, wenige Monate vor der Feier
der Hochzeit mit Mathys Grune,
dem Maler, auf den Namen
der heiligen Anna getauft wurde.
(Nach der Natur 13)
21.
Daß aber er die ihm ein Jahr später
angetraute Anna zum Wechsel
des Glaubens bewegt hat, dafür
findet sich nirgends ein Anhalt.
Vielmehr scheint es, sie selber
habe sich den zu jener Zeit
von besonderer Entschlußkraft
oder Hoffnungslosigkeit zeugenden
Schritt dadurch erleichtert,
daß sie dem Maler mehrfach
in die Augen sah, vielleicht zuerst
sich auch bloß in seinen grünfarbenen
Namen verliebte . . .
(Nach der Natur 14)
22. The loss of the green of the trees was already there in section 5: “while behind us already the green / trees are leaving their leaves” (“während hinter uns schon die grünen / Bäume ihre Blätter verlassen”; After Nature 27E, 24G).
23. “Odenwald” is omitted from the English translation, but repeats that syllable Wald—a green-colored name (it means woods or forest). Among the many reverberations in the three poems, Odenwald will also appear in the last section of the final poem (After Nature 113E, 97G).
24.
und stets zwischen dem Blick
des Auges und dem Anhub des Pinsels
legt Grünewald jetzt eine weite
Reise zurück, unterbricht auch viel öfter,
als er sonst gewohnt, den Fortgang der Kunst,
um sein Kind in die Lehre zu nehmen
in der Werkstatt und draußen im grünen Gelände.
Was er selbst dabei lernte, ist nirgends berichtet,
nur daß das Kind im Alter von vierzehn Jahren
aus unbekannter Ursach auf einmal
gestorben ist und daß der Maler es
nicht um viel überlebte.
(Nach der Natur 32–33)
25.
Späh scharf voran,
dort siehst du im Grauen des Abends
die fernen Windmühlen sich drehn.
Der Wald weicht zurück, wahrlich,
in solcher Weite, daß man nicht kennt,
wo er einmal gelegen . . .
(Nach der Natur 33)
26. In the opening eight lines of section 6, we once again encounter a scene in which the eye is challenged and the green of the landscape is devoured.
a landscape reaching so far into the depth
that our eye is insufficient to see its limits.
A patch of brown scorched earth
whose contour like the head of a whale
or an open-mouthed leviathan
devours the pale green meadow plains . . .
(After Nature 29)
eine so weit in die Tiefe hineingehende Landschaft,
daß unser Auge nicht ausreicht, sie zu ergründen.
Ein Stück brauner verbrannter Erde,
deren Umriß wie der Kopf eines Walfisches
oder Leviathans mit offenem Maul
die fahlgrünen Wiesenplane . . .
. . . verschlingt . . .
(Nach der Natur 26)
In the final section of the poem, however, by the time the forest recedes, the green has already been left behind.
27. James Martin has written intelligently on the polar landscapes of Sebald and notes the allusion to Dante here (Martin, “Campi deserti,” 145).
28.
In view of this it seems to me
that the ice age, the glaringly white
towering of the summits in
the upper realm of the Temptation
is the construction of a metaphysic . . .
(After Nature 31E)
In Anbetracht dessen dünkt mich
die Eiszeit, das hellweiße
Turmgebäude der Gipfel im oberen
Bereich der Versuchung,
die Konstruktion einer Metaphysik . . .
(Nach der Natur 28G)
29.
und das Eishaus
geht auf, und der Reif zeichnet ins Feld
ein farbloses Bild der Erde.
So wird, wenn der Sehnerv
zerreißt, im stillen Luftraum
es weiß wie der Schnee
auf den Alpen.
(Nach der Natur 33)
30. We find this mode of creating images in Aurach/Ferber’s manner of painting in The Emigrants / Die Ausgewanderten, and later in that of Novelli in Austerlitz.
31. Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter” 53.
32. In a 1992 interview with Piet de Moor, Sebald describes the evolution of his first prose literary work, Vertigo. The passage begins with Sebald’s reminder that his first role as writer was as a literary critic. What enables the writing of the prose book and, presumably, that shift away from an academic writing that merely describes the work and author concerned, is the recognition of a series of coincidences, of dates, of place, first between the lives of Stendhal and Kafka, but then between those lives and his own. Thus the work moves from a writing about others to a search for himself.
I am no writer in the actual sense of the word. . . . For many years I was active only academically: to be sure I always kept notebooks in which I made very chaotic entries. . . . I knew Kafka’s work well, not Stendhal’s and yet a curious coincidence touched me immediately: Stendhal was born in 1783, Kafka in 1883; Stendhal stayed in northern Italy in 1813, Kafka in 1913. After that I wrote two literary-biographical essays on the two authors whom I wanted to bring face to face with one another. While I was still writing, it suddenly occurred to me that in 1980 I too had traveled through northern Italy.
(“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 71)
33. From the opening line it speaks of Windsheim in Franken, making geographical connection with that place, which also appears in the two other sections of the poem. It is in the Windsheim woods (“Windsheimer Wälder,” After Nature 34E, 30G) that Grünewald spoke to his brother artists of the tearing of the coat and the end of time. It is also in Windsheim that Sebald’s mother realizes that she is pregnant with Sebald (After Nature 86E, 74G), and in the same place that Steller was born. Sebald himself comments on something of this coincidence in an interview, as well as on the shared initials with Steller. He tells this in the context of a book he just happened to read:
reference to an eighteenth-century German botanist and zoologist called Georg Wilhelm Steller, who happens to have the same initials that I have [audience laughter], and happened to have been born in a place which my mother visited when she was pregnant in 1943, when she was going from Bamberg . . . down to the Alps . . . She couldn’t go through Nuremberg, which is the normal route, because Nuremberg had just been attacked that night and was all in flames. So she had to go around it. And she stayed in Windsheim, as that place is called, where a friend of hers had a house.
(Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” 99).
34. The pastures, of course, bring back the green resignedly lost at the end of “Like the snow on the Alps.”
35. The gray evening of the first poem, also returns as well: “there you see in the greying of the nightfall / the distant windmills turn” (“dort siehst du im Grauen des Abends / die fernen Windmühlen sich drehn”) (After Nature 37E, 33G).
36. As well as the “the glaringly white / das hellweiße” in the scene from the Temptation cited in note 29.
37.
und weiter noch in der Ferne
das im schwindenden Licht sich
auftürmende Schnee- und Eisgebirge
des fremden, unerforschten und
afrikanischen Kontinents.
(Nach der Natur 99)
38. Speaking with Eleanor Wachtel about The Emigrants, Sebald had said: “You just try and set up certain reverberations in a text and the whole acquires significance that it might not otherwise have” (Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter” 54).
39. It was the ekphrastic language in the first poem that made visualizing the object of the text’s narrative a daunting challenge.
40. The first part of Sebald’s next book, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) also closes with snow, ice, and the Alps. At the end of the story of Dr. Henry Selwyn, his dear friend, Johannes Naegeli, rises up from the glacier on which, seventy-two years earlier, he had lost his life. The third chapter also ends with snow—and, this time, not blindness but dumbness, not a call for us to look closely, but rather an invocation, one of so many in Sebald, of the bird’s-eye view: “My great-uncle also noted that late the previous afternoon it had begun to snow and that, looking out of the hotel window at the city, white in the falling dusk, it made him think of times long gone. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds” (The Emigrants 145E, 214–15G).
41. Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald” 96–97.
42. Ibid., 108.
2. What Does It Mean to Count?
1. To be sure, in the second of the chapters Sebald has Paul Bereyter engage in similar activities: “It was only in the last decade of his life . . . that reconstructing those events became important to him. . . . [He] spent many days in archives, making endless notes” (The Emigrants 54E, 80G). And the narrator also seems to take his cue from photographic documents: “Mme Landau put before me a large album which contained photographs documenting not only the period in question but indeed, a few gaps aside, almost the whole of Paul Bereyter’s life, with notes penned in his own hand” (The Emigrants 45E, 68G).
2. Chapter 7 takes up these issues again by way of Sebald’s interviews.
3. Mark McCulloh understands this (McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 55). A review by Nicole Krauss in the Partisan Review (“Arabesques of Journeys”), however, a publication that surely has no interest in selling books (which may undercut my cynicism in reading the Fischer Verlag blurb) makes a similar claim, speaking of “the stories of four twentieth-century Germans of Jewish descent who left their country.” But Henry Selwyn was not German and Ambros Adelwarth was not Jewish.
4. We read of “the fact that . . . old Bereyter was what was termed a half Jew, and Paul, in consequence, only three quarters an Aryan” (The Emigrants 50E, 74G).
5. Sebald changed the name from Aurach to Ferber in the English translation. Aurach is the name used in the course of this book.
6. Thomas Stachel wisely suggests another, possible, translation here: “Do not destroy the remnant/the last thing, (which is) memory.”
7. “Allmählich kam ich auf meinen sonntäglichen Exkursionen über die Innenstadt hinaus in die unmittelbar angrenzenden Bezirke, beispielsweise in das . . . vormalige Judenviertel. Bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit hinein ein Zentrum der großen jüdischen Gemeinde von Manchester, war dieses Quartier von seinen in die Vororte übersiedelnden Bewohnern aufgegeben und seither von der Stadtverwaltung dem Erdboden gleichgemacht worden” (Die Ausgewanderten 231–32G).
8. Or are the inhabitants of Sebald’s tale, Jews and non-Jews alike, already lost to us? Of Manchester, in general, he writes: “One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum” (The Emigrants 151E, 223G).
9. In a conversation with Burkhard Baltzer (1993) Sebald had this to say: “Yes. I believe that literature to a not small extent consists in holding conversations with the departed and setting off for the dark side of life.” Sebald, “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis,” 81.
10. “Einmal ums andere, vorwärts und rückwärts durchblätterte ich dieses Album an jenem Nachmittag und habe es seither immer wieder von neuem durchblättert, weil es mir beim Betrachten der darin enthaltenen Bilder tatsächlich schien und nach wie vor scheint, als kehrten die Toten zurück oder als stünden wir im Begriff, einzugehen zu ihnen” (Die Ausgewanderten 68–69G, emphasis mine).
11. And these, in turn, perhaps have something to do with the advice of Paul Bereyter’s doctor that “peaceful spells spent simply looking at the moving leaves would protect and improve his eyesight” (The Emigrants 58E, 85G).
12. “Wie meistens die Toten, wenn sie in unseren Träumen auftauchen, waren sie stumm und schienen ein wenig betrübt und niedergeschlagen. . . . Näherte ich mich ihnen, so lösten sie sich vor meinen Augen auf und hinterließen nichts als den leeren Platz, den sie soeben noch eingenommen hatten” (Die Ausgewanderten 180–81G).
13. One might compare in this regard the scene in Vertigo in which the narrator goes into the past with another gesture. He touches the centuries-old uniform on an old tailor’s dummy only to watch it turn to dust: “But when I stepped closer, not entirely trusting my eyes, and touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror it crumbled into dust.” Sebald, Vertigo and Schwindel. Gefühle., 227E, 248G.
14. “als dort ein Mann mittleren Alters auftauchte, der ein weißes Netz an einem Stecken vor sich hertrug und ab und zu seltsame Sprünge vollführte. Der Adelwarth-Onkel blickte starr voraus, registrierte aber nichtsdestoweniger meine Verwunderung und sagte: It’s the butterfly man, you know. He comes round here quite often. Ich glaubte einen Ton der Belustigung aus diesen Worten herauszuhören, und hielt sie daher für ein Zeichen der . . . Besserung” (Die Ausgewanderten 151G).
15. The sections that close After Nature (Nach der Natur) and Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle.) also engage obvious figures of the author.
16. “I came across a sign on which TO THE STUDIOS had been painted in crude brush-strokes. It pointed in to a cobbled yard” (The Emigrants 160E, 236G).
17. “Wenn er versuche, sich in die fragliche Zeit zurückzuversetzen, so sehe er sich erst in seinem Studio wieder bei der mit geringen Unterbrechungen über nahezu ein Jahr sich hinziehenden schweren Arbeit an dem gesichtslosen Porträt Man with a Butterfly Net, das er für eines seiner verfehltesten Werke halte, weil es, seines Erachtens, keinen auch annähernd nur zureichenden Begriff gebe von der Seltsamkeit der Erscheinung, auf die es sich beziehe” (Die Ausgewanderten 259–60G).
18. Just as the return of Naegeli’s body is on the way to Lake Geneva.
19. In the closing chapter, when the narrator arrives at the hotel Arosa, Mrs. Irlam asks: “And where have you sprung from?” (The Emigrants 152E, 224G), making him and perhaps Sebald himself something of a Butterfly Man.
20. “Die Arbeit an dem Bild des Schmetterlingsfängers habe ihn ärger hergenommen als jede andere Arbeit zuvor, denn als er es nach Verfertigung zahlloser Vorstudien angegangen sei, habe er es nicht nur wieder und wieder übermalt, sondern er habe es, wenn die Leinwand der Beanspruchung durch das dauernde Herunterkratzen und Neuauftragen der Farbe nicht mehr standhielt, mehrmals völlig zerstört und verbrannt” (Die Ausgewanderten 260G).
21. And yet this is not total obliteration for we are left haunted by the sense, if not of an individual, then of a long line of ancestors: “an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper” (The Emigrants 162E, 239–40G).
22.
During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had (in other words, mostly at the so-called weekend and at night), I was working on the story of Max Ferber given above. It was an extremely arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and 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 my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated to the point of unreadability by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a “final” version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.
(The Emigrants 230–31E, 344–45G)
Moreover, already in 1989, before he finds Aurach’s paintings in the Tate, the narrator says: “but I never succeeded in picturing him properly. His face had become a mere shadow” (The Emigrants 177E, 264G). Ambros Adelwarth is no less an artist of this sort. A photograph of his diary shows his letters layered over one another (The Emigrants 132E, 194–95G). In the German edition the image of Adelwarth’s “Agenda” overlays the double pages of Sebald’s book in a gesture of coincidence. See both Die Ausgewanderten 194–95G and 200–1G.
23.
Da er die Farben in großen Mengen aufträgt und sie im Fortgang der Arbeit immer wieder von der Leinwand herunterkratzt, ist der Bodenbelag bedeckt von einer im Zentrum mehrere Zoll dicken, nach außen allmählich flacher werdenden, mit Kohlestaub untermischten, weitgehend bereits verhärteten und verkrusteten Masse, die stellenweise einem Lavaausfluß gleicht und von der Aurach behauptet, daß sie das wahre Ergebnis darstelle seiner fortwährenden Bemühung und den offenkundigsten Beweis für sein Scheitern. Es sei für ihn stets von der größten Bedeutung gewesen . . . daß nichts an seinem Arbeitsplatz sich verändere . . . und daß nichts hinzukomme als der Unrat, der anfalle bei der Verfertigung der Bilder, und der Staub, der sich unablässig herniedersenke und der ihm, wie er langsam begreifen lerne, so ziemlich das Liebste sei auf der Welt.
(Die Ausgewanderten 237–38G)
24. This returns us as well to the scene in Vertigo cited in note 14, reminiscent as well of Aurach’s enterprise.
25. The narrator, too, speaks of “fragmentary recollections” (The Emigrants 42E, 63G) as does Luisa Lanzberg (The Emigrants 208E, 312G). This follows a scene in which the passage of time is carefully marked out. Here as in Austerlitz, conventional and inevitable measures of narrative time are juxtaposed with reminders of their artificiality. See, for example, the temporal guideposts that follow Austerlitz’s long disquisition on arbitrary concepts of time (Austerlitz, 100–2E, 149–52G).
26. The play on Staub (dust) and Bestäubung is mine, but in the chapter on Ambros Adelwarth, at the site of those whose thoughts go wild, one can almost imagine hearing it. The narrator visits the now decaying mental institution in which his uncle had passed away, tortured to death in the name of science by an electric shock assault that passed for therapy. Here Dr. Abramsky lives on in regret, no longer practicing institutional violence. He keeps bees and acknowledges his own madness (The Emigrants 110E, 161G), and in his role as apiarist his thoughts cannot be far from pollination/Bestäubung. The impending collapse of Samaria Sanatorium will take place with the help of the “mouse folk,” the “woodworm and deathwatch beetles” (The Emigrants 112E, 165G). “And that is precisely what does happen in my dream, before my very eyes, infinitely slowly, and a great yellowish cloud billows out and disperses, and where the sanatorium once stood there is merely a heap of powder-fine wood dust, like pollen” (The Emigrants 113E, 166G). That Bestäubung might coincide with a certain liberation, despite its obvious destructive thrust, is something with which one must come to terms.
27. The names of characters transgress not only the chapter divisions but also the individuality of Sebald’s works. (In this Sebald’s practice is not unlike that of Werner Herzog, who, in elaborate acts of cross-film citation, carries over his actors and sometimes his characters from film to film.) Thus a Bereyter appears in Vertigo, and does so, tellingly, in the context of one person standing as a cipher for many others. “La Ghita, who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle’s later work, is a mysterious, not to say ghostly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher for various lovers such as Adèle Rebuffel, Angéline Bereyter, and not least for Métilde Dembowski, and that Mme Gherardi, whose life would easily furnish a whole novel . . . in reality never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence” (Vertigo, 21–22E, 26G, emphasis mine).
28. The scene haunts each of the volume’s stories. Paul Bereyter and Lucy Landau have also been in the mountains and have seen the landscape of Lake Geneva. It passes by less perceptibly elsewhere as well: as when Adelwarth works in a hotel in Montreux, near the Grammont (The Emigrants 77–78E, 113G), and returns to Lake Geneva in 1911 with Cosmo (The Emigrants 91E, 132G), as when Aurach returns to Manchester after the war and looks down on the city with a bird’s-eye view (The Emigrants 168E, 249–50G), which is not unlike a scene we are about to encounter in Herzog’s film Kaspar Hauser. Moreover, Nabokov, already an important figure in the opening chapter, spent the last seventeen years of his life in Montreux.
29. A twinned image makes its appearance even before the opening lines of the first story. We see the photograph of a great tree spreading its branches among the tombstones of a cemetery. A remarkably similar tree appears in the final chapter, the reproduction of Courbet’s The Oak of Vercingetorix, which the narrator speaks of as “the point of departure for [Aurach’s] study of destruction” (The Emigrants 180E, 268–69G). This tree, so very similar to the first, lacks, however, the grave markers. Twinned images, once again, like the two glacier scenes in which the version marked by death precedes the double that restores the departed (in a newspaper photograph) or eradicates the remembrance of their loss (in a painting).
30.
Als der Zug, langsamer werdend, über die Aarebrücke nach Bern hineinrollte, ging mein Blick über die Stadt hinweg auf die Kette der Berge des Oberlands. . . . Eine Dreiviertelstunde später, ich war gerade im Begriff, eine in Zürich gekaufte Lausanner Zeitung . . . beiseitezulegen, um die jedesmal von neuem staunenswerte Eröffnung der Genfer Seelandschaft nicht zu versäumen, fielen meine Augen auf einen Bericht, aus dem hervorging, daß die Überreste der Leiche des seit dem Sommer 1914 als vermißt geltenden Berner Bergführers Johannes Naegeli nach 72 Jahren vom Oberaargletscher wieder zutage gebracht worden waren.–So also kehren sie wieder, die Toten.
(Die Ausgewanderten 36G)
31. Other guides, notably blind, traverse these tales: the blind guide who shows Ambros and Cosmo er-Riha (The Emigrants 142E, 210G) and the blind Berber leader in Kaspar Hauser’s final story, though the latter is never explicitly mentioned by Sebald’s narrator.
32. It may be coincidental, but not irrelevant, that the word for screen here, Leinwand, is that used in the story of Aurach for canvas.
33. This is not quite possible, since Nabokov was there not in spring of 1971 but in August of 1971, as the actual appearance of the photo in the Swiss press shows.
34. Hersch was the original name of Henry Selwyn before he changed it to Henry (The Emigrants 20E, 33G).
35. “Der im Süden die Ebene überragende, über zweitausend Meter hohe Berg Spathi wirkte wie eine Luftspiegelung hinter der Flut des Lichts. . . . Auch vor diesem Bild saßen wir lange und schweigend, so lang sogar, daß zuletzt das Glas in dem Rähmchen zersprang und ein dunkler Riß über die Leinwand lief. Der so lange, bis zum Zerspringen festgehaltene Anblick der Hochebene von Lasithi hat sich mir damals tief eingeprägt, und dennoch hatte ich ihn geraume Zeit hindurch vergessen gehabt” (Die Ausgewanderten 28–29G).
36. “Wiederbelebt ist [der Anblick] worden erst ein paar Jahre darauf, als ich in einem Londoner Kino das Traumgespräch sah, das Kaspar Hauser mit seinem Lehrer Daumer . . . führt und wo Kaspar, zur Freude seines Mentors, zum erstenmal unterscheidet zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit, indem er seine Erzählung einleitet mit den Worten: Ja, es hat mich geträumt. Mich hat vom Kaukasus geträumt” (Die Ausgewanderten 29G).
37. “Es hat mich geträumt” is at best outmoded and certainly strange to the ear. Literally translated, it could read: it dreamed me, though, no doubt, I dreamed is more of what Kaspar has in mind. “Es träumte mir” is a phrasing that appears elsewhere in The Emigrants (for example Die Ausgewanderten 179G, 261G). For Freud even this phrasing gives a sense of alienation. “Our scientific consideration of dreams starts off from the assumption that they are products of our own mental activity. Nevertheless the finished dream strikes us as something alien to us. We are so little obliged to acknowledge our responsibility for it that [in German] we are just as ready to say ‘mir hat geträumt’ [‘I had a dream,’ literally ‘a dream came to me’] as ‘ich habe geträumt’ [‘I dreamt’]. What is the origin of this feeling that dreams are extraneous to our minds?” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 77). Kaspar dreams a scene he could not possibly have known in reality (“in Wirklichkeit”) and returns the narrator to a Crete he has also never known.
38. “Kaspar Hauser” opens with a scene of writing in which a young man with no identity learns without understanding to write his name. This is its point of origin. An unnamed figure forces the inmate to write his name (for he writes by himself as little as he later dreams for himself): “Write, Wrr-ite. Note this: write!” These are the first distinct words uttered in the film entitled Kaspar Hauser, about whom we are reminded repeatedly: “The riddle of his origins remains unsolved to this day.”
39. Flickering images run throughout Austerlitz as well, often the sign of ghostly presences.
40. This is the same alternative, almost, as that we read of before: “as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of passing away into them” (The Emigrants 46E, 69G, emphasis mine).
Das Wadi Halfa war durchstrahlt von einem flimmernden . . . Neonlicht . . . [ich] sehe . . . Aurach, wenn ich zurückdenke an unsere Begegnungen in Trafford Park, ein jedes Mal sitzen, stets auf demselben Platz, vor einem von unbekannter Hand gemalten Fresko, das eine Karawane zeigte, die aus der fernsten Tiefe des Bildes heraus und über ein Wellengebirge von Dünen hinweg direkt auf den Betrachter zu sich bewegte. Infolge der Ungeschicktheit des Malers und der schwierigen Perspektive, die er gewählt hatte, wirkten die menschlichen Figuren sowohl als die Lasttiere in ihren Umrissen leicht verzerrt, so daß es . . . tatsächlich war, als erblicke man eine in der Helligkeit und Hitze zitternde Fata Morgana. Und insbesondere an Tagen, an denen Aurach mit Kohle gearbeitet und der pudrig feine Staub seine Haut mit einem metallischen Glanz imprägniert hatte, schien es mir, als sei er soeben aus dem Wüstenbild herausgetreten oder als gehöre er in es hinein.
(Die Ausgewanderten 243G, emphasis mine)
41. This is a reappearance of the desert caravans of which Cosmo and Ambros speak (The Emigrants 97E and 141E, 141G and 209G) and the caravan of Kaspar Hauser’s tale.
42.
Im übrigen, so fuhr er . . . fort, erinnere ihn die Verdunkelung seiner Haut an eine Zeitungsnotiz, die ihm unlängst untergekommen sei, über die bei Berufsfotografen nicht unüblichen Symptome der Silbervergiftung. Im Archiv der Britischen Medizinischen Gesellschaft werde beispielsweise, so habe in der Notiz gestanden, die Beschreibung eines extremen Falls einer solchen Vergiftung aufbewahrt, derzufolge es in den dreißiger Jahren in Manchester einen Fotolaboranten gegeben haben soll, dessen Körper im Verlauf seiner langjährigen Berufspraxis derart viel Silber assimiliert hatte, daß er zu einer Art fotografischer Platte geworden war, was sich, wie Aurach mir vollen Ernstes auseinandersetzte, daran zeigte, daß das Gesicht und die Hände . . . bei starkem Lichteinfall blau anliefen, sich also sozusagen entwickelten.
(Die Ausgewanderten 244G)
43. Litz as heddle—a part of the warp on the web frame.
44. Sebald’s description refers to an exhibition at the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main (the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt) to which I extend my gratitude for permission to use the images they provided. These were also gathered in the catalogue: “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit.” The photograph of Genewein is on p. 76, that of the weavers on p. 119.
45. The Austrian-born Walter Genewein eagerly joined the NSDAP early in 1933 and worked in the Łódź ghetto from 1940 until its closure in 1944. In 1943, when ordering five hundred slide frames, he described his project as archival documentation. Still, he clearly regarded his photographs not only as a service to the German cause but also as an aesthetic accomplishment that placed him in the avant-garde of color photography. His correspondence with IG Farben Berlin, with its insistent complaints about the disappointing quality of the color of their film, attests to his artistic aspirations (Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit” 54).
In 1947 he was brought before the Austrian Volksgericht for his role at Litzmannstadt. In addition to being starved, worked to death, and deported for annihilation, with Genewein’s help the Jewish population was continuously charged for the services and provisions they received and in other ways systematically robbed of the little they had in goods and funds (Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit” 22–23, 45) Genewein denied that the ghetto was a concentration camp, denied ever having shown the photographs, denied profiteering from his position in the ghetto administration (“Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit” 54). The 1998 film Photographer directed by Dariusz Jablonski documents Genewein’s slides and his trial statements along with the counternarration of a ghetto survivor, Arnold Mostowicz.
46. “Hinter einem lotrechten Webrahmen sitzen drei junge, vielleicht zwanzigjährige Frauen. . . . Wer die jungen Frauen sind, das weiß ich nicht. Wegen des Gegenlichts, das einfällt durch das Fenster im Hintergrund, kann ich ihre Augen genau nicht erkennen, aber ich spüre, daß sie alle drei herschauen zu mir, denn ich stehe ja an der Stelle, an der Genewein, der Rechnungsführer, mit seinem Fotoapparat gestanden hat“(Die Ausgewanderten 355G).
The difficult light through the window, the obscurity, bring us back to Aurach’s studio where contact with the past is equally problematic: “where Ferber had set up his easel in the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades” (The Emigrants 161E, 237G).
47. The German racial laws concerning Mischlinge, if nothing else, would have taught him that.
48. Like Sebald’s, the narrator’s mother was Rosa (The Emigrants 76E, 110G), one of several echoes of the name in the text. Aurach’s mother, whose diary occupies so many of the last pages, was Luisa.
49. The English translation anglicizes the name to Luisa, but the parallel world of Poland’s Łódź Ghetto is important to maintain in its difference. If the Nazis germanified Łódź, the text pays them back in kind, transforming the German names Rosa and Luisa, to the Polish Roza, Lusia, and Lea. And lest we get caught up in the specificity of national identity, the narrative shifts to the mythic dimensions of the three Parcae.
50. “Die mittlere der drei jungen Frauen hat hellblondes Haar und gleicht irgendwie einer Braut. Die Weberin zu ihrer Linken hält den Kopf ein wenig seitwärts geneigt, während die auf der rechten Seite so unverwandt und unerbittlich mich ansieht, daß ich es nicht lange auszuhalten vermag. Ich überlege, wie die drei wohl geheißen haben—Roza, Lusia, und Lea oder Nona, Decuma und Morta, die Töchter der Nacht, mit Spindel und Faden und Schere” (Die Ausgewanderten 355G)
51. One need only think of Ambros Adelwarth who, in an institution removed from the eye of the public, willingly gives himself up to the cruel pseudo-experiments of a maniacal Eastern European doctor and his “annihilation method” (The Emigrants 114E, 168G).
52. There is a geographical version of this in which the structure of one thing becomes that of another—in which, suddenly, one terrain, Constantinople, becomes associated with the terrain of Allgäu, of Switzerland, and of the Judenviertel, the place where Jews are quartered (The Emigrants 130–31E, 192–93G).
53. The practice of cross-pollination was also the practice of Vertigo. Sebald had this to say in an interview with Andreas Isenschmid in 1990 about the interrelation of the stories in that text. “Yes, on the surface very heterogeneous, as we said at the beginning, four actually different, disparate, discrepant stories. Interrelation runs across the locations that come up over and over again, runs through the dates that cross one another, runs across the emotional identifications and the recurrent, repeating themes” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 68).
3. Frames and Excursions
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss makes a similar gesture in the opening pages of Tristes Tropiques, a text Sebald will go on to cite.
2. “An English Pilgrimage”/ Eine Englische Wallfahrt: the subtitle was dropped in the English translation.
3. We have seen this passage between life and death in The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) and we shall see it again in Austerlitz as well.
4. That is, this fragment “I am the beginning and the end and am valid in all places” (Rings of Saturn 23E, 35G) is a clue to decode the otherwise meaningless passage that follows. In Grimmelshausen’s work the speaker, Baldanders, as we shall also see, boasts he can teach Simplicius how to make silent things speak.
5. The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage resists both a satisfying sense of the circular path suggested by its title and the sense of purposeful direction invoked in its subtitle. In a book divided into parts (Teile) rather than chapters, the dust particles (Staubteilchen) of the epigraph that circle the planet Saturn might have something in common with its chapters as “traces of destruction” (Rings of Saturn 3E, 11G). This is all the more disconcerting since, a few pages into the narrative, dust menaces the novelist (or at least Flaubert) with an onslaught of irresistible stultification (Rings of Saturn 7–8E, 17G) where “all that which has been written by him up to now consists in a series of stringing together the most inexcusable . . . errors and lies” (Rings of Saturn 7E, 16–17G).
If the title speaks of circularity, doesn’t the subtitle promise the purpose and destination of a pilgrimage? At the feet of which saint, one might wish to ask, does the narrator set out to worship? In a text in which St. Sebolt alone is extensively invoked among the saints, any sense of direction is also bound to be something of a joke.
6. “I set off to walk through the county of Suffolk, in the hope of escaping the emptiness that expands in me whenever I have completed a major work” (Rings of Saturn 3E, 11G).
7. “At all events memory preoccupied me in the period that followed, not only of the wonderful sense of freedom but also of the paralyzing horror” (Rings of Saturn 3E, 11G). This reverses the seductive rhythm of Proust’s mémoire involontaire that pretends to vacillate between lived life and a return to it through written acts of remembrance. Walter Benjamin knew better, and Sebald, who moves here from writing as an emptying of experience to the gathering of new experience, now and then makes uncomfortably evident that in his work too the temporal relationship between experience and notation can often be unsettling. See Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust”; and Jacobs, “Walter Benjamin: Image of Proust,” especially 50–53.
8. “[Ich] stand dann gegen die Glasscheibe gelehnt und mußte unwillkürlich an die Szene denken, in der der arme Gregor, mit zitternden Beinchen an die Sessellehne sich klammernd, aus seinem Kabinett hinausblickt in undeutlicher Erinnerung, wie es heißt, an das Befreiende, das früher einmal für ihn darin gelegen war, aus dem Fenster zu schauen. Und genau wie Gregor mit seinen trübe gewordenen Augen die stille Charlottenstraße . . . nicht mehr erkannte . . . so schien auch mir. . . .” (Die Ringe des Saturn 13G, emphasis mine).
9. The narrator, like Gregor, is a traveler. We are reminded repeatedly in Kafka’s tale that Gregor is a traveler: “Samsa was a traveler.” “‘Oh God,’ he thought, ‘what a demanding profession I’ve chosen! Day in day out travelling’” (Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen, 56).
10. Victim, then, of a metamorphosis, rather like the Bombyx mori of part 10, the narrator’s self-definition comes through his resemblance to and transformation into a fictional character, in a story by Kafka that tells once again of such a transformation.
11. Parkinson studied the works of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, who, like Sebald, wrote under the sign of apocalyptic forebodings. One might consider Ramuz’s Présence de la mort, in this regard. Parkinson’s name, despite his long and difficult journeys on foot, haunts with a sense of the impaired gait of an all too tragic disease. Sebald himself, though perhaps not in this instance, plays on the coincidences of names. Writing of the attempt to harness the phosphorescence given off by dead herring: “Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon” (Rings of Saturn 58–59E, 76G). This is followed, unnoted, by the bizarre story of Major George Wyndham Le Strange who rewarded his housekeeper for thirty years of “Silent Dinners” (Rings of Saturn 63E, 81G). Rather than traveling the countryside, as Parkinson did, Dakyns seems to live on another planet, holding almost perfectly still in a landscape generated without intention. Obsessed with Flaubert and his fear “that he would never again be able to bring even a half-line to paper” (Rings of Saturn 7E, 16G), she lives buried in “lecture notes, letters, and pieces of writing” (Rings of Saturn 8E, 17G). A “paper flood,” a “paper landscape with mountains and valleys” that had moved to the edges of the writing table (Rings of Saturn 8E, 17G) “like a glacier when it meets the sea,” continuing onto the floor and onto other tables, with the new accumulations representing “so to speak the later epochs in the development of the paper universe of Janine” (Rings of Saturn 8E, 18G). It is a world of paper, covered with text, about a writer who feared the blank page.
12. This is not quite the “colloquy with the dead” by way of which, Sebald writes, Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyām, tried to bring us news of them (Rings of Saturn 200E, 238G).
13. But Frederick Farrar, the narrator’s recently deceased neighbor (Rings of Saturn 46E, 62–63G), St. Sebolt (Rings of Saturn 86E, 106G), Joseph Conrad (Rings of Saturn 104E, 126G), Conrad’s Marlow (Rings of Saturn 120E, 146G), and Edward FitzGerald (Rings of Saturn 204E, 242G), among others, take over the narrative voice often before we know it in that colloquy with the dead (Rings of Saturn 200E, 238G) only to then cede their role again to Sebald’s narrator and double.
14. Aren’t these the unspoken reverberations of the next image, the skull of Thomas Browne, resting its brain cavity on the works of the author, its jaws wired in place? See Dickey, “The Fate of His Bones,” where we are told that the photo was the frontispiece to the 1904 edition of Thomas Browne’s work.
15. Even a glance at the table of contents gives one a sense of this.
16. That is to say, that Sebald’s prose suggests the uncertainty of his narrator’s certainty. Still it is likely that Sebald consulted a rather imposing volume on Rembrandt’s painting that gave him reason to draw these conclusions: William S. Heckscher’s Rembrandt’s ANATOMY OF DR. NICOLAAS TULP, an Iconological Study. There one reads, for example: “It is possible that Dr. Tulp’s anatomy of 1632 attracted Descartes, who, after all, was himself an avid amateur anatomist. Perhaps also a young Englishman was present, one who at that time was enrolled as a medical student at Leiden University: Thomas, later Sir Thomas, Browne” (Heckscher, Rembrandt’s ANATOMY OF DR. NICOLAAS TULP, 26).
17. One might also ask what Sebald shows us. The image of Rembrandt’s painting shown here is from the Mauritshuis. The image in Rings of Saturn, however, is spread over two pages (Rings of Saturn 14–15E, 24–25G), which brings about a distortion: the loss in the fold, for example, of part of the face of the most central figure, holding a written document and just to the left of Dr. Tulp. One can get a sense of such distortion by looking at another of Sebald’s two-page images (figure 5.2).
18. “Und doch ist es fraglich, ob diesen Leib je in Wahrheit einer gesehen hat, denn die damals gerade aufkommende Kunst der Anatomisierung diente nicht zuletzt der Unsichtbarmachung des schuldhaften Körpers. Bezeichnenderweise sind ja die Blicke der Kollegen des Doktors Tulp nicht auf diesen Körper als solchen gerichtet, sondern sie gehen, freilich haarscharf, an ihm vorbei auf den aufgeklappten anatomischen Atlas” (Die Ringe des Saturn 23G).
19.
Die Blicke der Kollegen des Doktors Tulp [sind] nicht auf diesen Körper als solchen gerichtet, sondern sie gehen, freilich haarscharf, an ihm vorbei auf den aufgeklappten anatomischen Atlas, in dem die entsetzliche Körperlichkeit reduziert ist auf ein Diagramm, auf ein Schema des Menschen, wie es dem passionierten, an jenem Januarmorgen im Waagebouw angeblich gleichfalls anwesenden Amateuranatomen René Descartes vorschwebte. Bekanntlich lehrte Descartes in einem der Hauptkapitel der Geschichte der Unterwerfung, daß man absehen muß von dem unbegreiflichen Fleisch und hin auf die in uns bereits angelegte Maschine, auf das, was man vollkommen verstehen, restlos für die Arbeit nutzbar machen und, bei allfälliger Störung, entweder wieder instand setzen oder wegwerfen kann.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 23–26G)
20. “Der seltsamen Ausgrenzung des doch offen zur Schau gestellten Körpers entspricht es auch, daß die vielgerühmte Wirklichkeitsnähe des Rembrandtschen Bildes sich bei genauerem Zusehen als eine nur scheinbare erweist” (Die Ringe des Saturn, 26G).
21.
Und mit dieser Hand hat es eine eigenartige Bewandtnis. Nicht nur ist sie, verglichen mit der dem Beschauer näheren, geradezu grotesk disproportioniert, sie ist auch anatomisch gänzlich verkehrt. Die offengelegten Sehnen, die, nach der Stellung des Daumens, die der Handfläche der Linken sein sollten, sind die des Rückens der Rechten. Es handelt sich also um eine rein schulmäßige, offenbar ohne weiteres dem anatomischen Atlas entnommene Aufsetzung, durch die das sonst, wenn man so sagen kann, nach dem Leben gemalte Bild genau in seinem Bedeutungszentrum, dort, wo die Einschnitte schon gemacht sind, umkippt in die krasseste Fehlkonstruktion.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 27G)
22. See Richard T. Gray’s very careful reading of Rembrandt’s procedure which enables him to draw parallels between Rembrandt and Sebald’s narrator. Gray, “From Grids to Vanishing Points,” 512–13.
23. Although one could say, with a certain perversity, that Rembrandt copies the atlas at Kindt’s feet with great verisimilitude, its errors included.
24. Sebald could well have had this in mind, given the description of a similar situation in a painting in After Nature. Describing a panel of Grünewald’s Lindenhardt altar, Sebald writes:
Each of these,
The blessed Blasius, Achaz and Eustace;
Panthaleon, Aegidius, Cyriax, Christopher and
Erasmus and the truly beautiful
St. Vitus with the cockerel,
each look in different
directions without our knowing
why.
(After Nature 7, Nach der Natur 8–9)
25. Sebald does something similar both at the close of his essay on Jan Peter Tripp and also, most notably, several times in the chapter “All’estero” in Vertigo / Schwindel. Gefühle.
26. In an important and convincing contribution, Gray follows the grid systematically through The Rings of Saturn. He demonstrates Sebald’s use of the grid as a critique of Enlightenment rationality. Over and against the grid as a “sterile, rigid, rational order,” Gray points out suggestions of an “alternative form of cognition and representation,” more “subtle if complex forms of order” (“From Grids to Vanishing Points,” 508). The Rings of Saturn, Gray tells us, represents an experiment in a form of writing that escapes the confines of the grid (ibid., 523).
27.
Vielleicht war es der weiße Dunst, von dem er in einer späteren Notiz über den am 27. November 1674, über weiten Teilen Englands und Hollands liegenden Nebel behauptet, daß er aufsteige aus her Höhle eines frisch geöffneten Körpers, während er, so Browne im selben Zug, zu unseren Lebzeiten unser Gehirn umwölke, wenn wir schlafen und träumen. Ich entsinne mich deutlich, wie mein eigenes Bewußtsein von solchen Dunstschleiern verhangen gewesen ist, als ich, nach der in den späten Abendstunden an mir vorgenommenen Operation, wieder auf meinem Zimmer im achten Stockwerk des Krankenhauses lag.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 27–28G)
28. For Flaubert, Janine Dakyns has told the narrator, “clouds of dust” are related to a string of the most unforgivable errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable (Rings of Saturn 7E, 16–17G). They are related also, perhaps, to “the relentless spread of stultification which [Flaubert] had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head” (Rings of Saturn 7E, 17G).
29.
[Ich] sah . . . wie, anscheinend aus eigener Kraft ein Kondensstreifen quer durch das von meinem Fenster umrahmte Stück Himmel zog. Ich habe diese weiße Spur damals für ein gutes Zeichen gehalten, fürchte aber jetzt in der Rückschau, daß sie der Anfang gewesen ist eines Risses, der seither durch mein Leben geht. Die Maschine an der Spitze der Flugbahn war so unsichtbar wie die Passagiere in ihrem Inneren. Die Unsichtbarkeit und Unfaßbarkeit dessen, was uns bewegt, das ist auch für Thomas Browne, der unsere Welt nur als das Schattenbild einer anderen ansah, ein letzten Endes unauslotbares Rätsel gewesen.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 29G)
30. To see the body of Aris Kindt “in truth” (though the phrase is missing from the English translation, Rings of Saturn 13E, 23G), to escape the “rigid Cartesian gaze” (Rings of Saturn 17E, 27G), Rembrandt must be said to see both the body and the shadows: “He alone sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man’s eyes” (Rings of Saturn 17E, 27G).
31. Later, we find, just as the quincunx is everywhere to be encountered in the physical world, the thread of silk can turn up at any moment in The Rings of Saturn.
32.
It amazes me that even then, before the Industrial Age, a great number of people, at least in some places, spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which, perhaps because of its relatively primitive character, makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented. That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy . . . is understandable.
(Rings of Saturn 282–83E)
Dann nimmt es mich wunder, in welch großer Zahl, zumindest an manchen Orten, die Menschen bereits in der Zeit vor der Industrialisierung mit ihren armen Körpern fast ein Leben lang eingeschirrt gewesen sind in die aus hölzernen Rahmen und Leisten zusammengesetzten, mit Gewichten behangenen und an Foltergestelle oder Käfige erinnernden Webstühle in einer eigenartigen Symbiose, die vielleicht gerade aufgrund ihrer vergleichsweisen Primitivität besser als jede spätere Ausformung unserer Industrie verdeutlicht, daß wir uns nur eingespannt in die von uns erfundenen Maschinen auf der Erde zu erhalten vermögen. Daß darum besonders die Weber und die mit ihnen in manchem vergleichbaren Gelehrten und sonstigen Schreiber . . . zur Melancholie . . . neigten, das versteht sich.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 334–35G)
33. Paul North’s superb book, The Problem of Distraction, deals with a double register of distraction in a far more complex and profound way than is here the case. His second concept of distraction has “been released from its subordination to attention, to perception, to the subject” (North, The Problem of Distraction, 6), which is not really the case in our readings.
34. J. J. Long writes: “The universal resemblance that Browne discovers in The Garden of Cyrus is sustained by an extended metaphorical complex uniting the quincunx, the chiasmus and the net as the tertium comparationis that facilitates the perception of similitude across an incredible diversity of natural phenomena and cultural products” (Long, W. G. Sebald, 34).
35. Browne, “THE GARDEN OF CYRUS.”
36. The description may also suggest that as one builds decussation on decussation, in their progression, the cross that appears as interior to an imagined lozenge also builds the outer sides of new rhomboid forms.
37. His name is populated, overpopulated, with the letter A, which become so important in Austerlitz and itself resembles the inverted V.
38. Gray writes of taxonomy as the counterpart to the grid: “a rational scheme for systematizing knowledge according to categories” (Gray, “From Grids to Vanishing Points,” 499 and 513).
39. In other passages one reads “spruce” (Browne, “THE GARDEN OF CYRUS.” 188), “rooted,” “flourishing branch” (ibid., 190).
40. Elsewhere in The Rings of Saturn Sebald writes of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. There, in the facial designs of the Caduveo women of Brazil, something similar takes place. There is an unsettling dissolution of what seems like patterns of symmetry and balance and the marking out of spaces that include and contain in what Lévi-Strauss refers to as a conjuring trick. See Jacobs, Telling Time, 48–53.
41. In a long and remarkable piece that accounts for passages in so many of Sebald’s works and brings together the readings of a plenitude of scholars, Matthew Hart and Tania Lown-Hecht take us through a series of “close readings of . . . Sebaldian topoi” that “are both spatial and thematic” (Hart and Lown-Hecht, “The Extraterritorial Poetics of W. G. Sebald,” 217). What is strikingly astute throughout this study is the refusal of a static sense of the concept. What the authors understand is that in Sebald’s writings it is not just this but also that. “The attempt to reterritorialize language from within is both irresistible and inadequate” (ibid., 219). They understand that “the irony of Sebald’s style is that . . . points of view often overlap” (225). Reading Browne on the quincunx, one encounters an entirely abstract version of what Hart and Lown-Hecht have called Sebald’s extraterritoriality, a play between inclusion and exclusion. One might go on to suggest that Sebald’s play of breaking frames, both here and in The Emigrants, excising pieces of canvas, both here in The Rings of Saturn and also in the essay on Jan Peter Tripp (see chapters 6 and 7), could also be theorized as more abstract versions of the extraterritorial.
42. Browne, and Sebald in turn, pull the silk over our eyes. The description of the quincunx does not correspond with the frontispiece from Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus. Nowhere in this illustration is a five-pointed quincuncial form to be found “which is composed by using the corners of a regular quadrilateral and the point at which its diagonals intersect” (Rings of Saturn 20E, 31G). Either the middle (fifth) point of each diamond shape is missing or, if we take the basic module in this image to be a quadruple set of diamonds, the point in the center is formed by intersecting lines that depart, not from the corners of the equilateral rhombus, but from the mid-points of their sides. If the quincunx indeed partakes of a system with perfect conformity to natural law (Rings of Saturn 21E, 33G), the description of its law by Sebald’s narrator, following Browne (Garden of Cyrus 194–95), seems to falter.
Jeremiah S. Finch, on the other hand, offers a very clear definition of the quincunx: “The term derives from quinque-unciae, or five-twelfths of a unit of weight or measure, and was used by the Romans to denote an arrangement of five trees in the form of a rectangle, four occupying the corners, one the center, like the cinque-point on a die, so that a massing of quincunxes produces long rows of trees with the effect of latticework” (Finch, “Sir Thomas Browne and the Quincunx,” 274). Finch goes on to note that “the central idea of The Garden of Cyrus” is borrowed from the writings of others (ibid., 276) as is the diagram that serves as the frontispiece (282), along with the scholarly history in the first chapter (277).
Other readers of Sebald have noticed discrepancies between image and descriptive text in Die Ringe des Saturn. Claudia Öhlschläger writes of the failed “1:1 relation between text and image” when the narrator describes the herring (Öhlschläger, “Der Saturnring oder Etwas vom Eisenbau,” 199). Anja Lemke goes on to remark that the fish actually portrayed is a predator of the herring (ibid., 257). See also Holger Steinmann, who points out several errors in source attribution in the Thomas Browne citations. He also discovers that the image of what should be the diary of Roger Casement appears to be rather in the handwriting of Joseph Conrad (Steinmann, “Zitatruinen unterm Hundsstern,” 155). Ruth Franklin writes that for every photograph that seems to authenticate the text “there is another that firmly denies any easy correspondence” (Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” 124).
43. In this regard we should turn to the scene in The Emigrants (17E, 28–29G) in which the glass over a photographic slide cracks or to Jan Peter Tripp’s picture of the cracked glass over the etched portrait of a man in “As Day and Night” (82E, 176G).
44. “so beschließt er mit einer schönen Wendung seine Schrift—das Sternbild der Hyaden, die Quincunx des Himmels senkt sich bereits hinter den Horizont and so it is time to close the five ports of knowledge We are unwilling to spin out our thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, making cables of cobwebs and wildernesses of handsome groves” (Die Ringe des Saturn 32G).
45. It is a question, particularly, of the eyes, of course, which make it possible to observe the quincunx.
In an exceptional reading of Browne’s relation to Sebald in Rings of Saturn, Anne Fuchs reminds us that sense perception is explicitly privileged in Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus (Fuchs, “Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte,” 99–107). Still her reading rightly insists that this empiricism of Browne is also bound up with a speculative principle. Fuchs’s reading of the Browne-Sebald connection includes a careful theorization of intertextuality and an ethics of remembering and is exemplary in its linguistic sensibility alongside scholarly erudition.
46. Before turning to Grimmelshausen, the narrator also speaks briefly of Borges.
47. Theisen, “A Natural History of Destruction,” 566–67.
48. In Grimmelshausen’s words: “da ich doch alle Zeit und Täge deines Lebens bin bey dir gewesen.” Grimmelshausen, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 506.
49. This begs us to think back on the narrator’s dubious musings of where the spectators, Browne, and we might have stood before the “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp” (Rings of Saturn 13E, 23G, 17E, 27G).
50. “Ob ich nichts mehr von dessen Fundament sehen kundte, wurde aber nichts dergleichen gewahr, sonder, dieweil ich einen Hebel fande, den etwan ein Holzbaur ligen lassen, nahme ich denselben und stunde an dise Bildnuß, sie umbzukehren, umbzusehen, wie sie auff der andern Seiten eine Beschaffenheit hette; ich hatte aber derselben den Hebel kaum unterm Halß gesteckt, und zulupffen angefangen, da fieng sie selbst an sich zuregen und zusagen: lasse mich mit frieden ich bin Baltanders” (Grimmelshausen, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 505–6).
51. And the first thing Baldanders has to say for himself, even as he names himself is “Leave me in peace. I am Baldanders” (Grimmelshausen, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 506), an expression of a will to be precisely what he never is: still.
52.
Dann verwandelt sich Baldanders vor den Augen des Simplicius der Reihe nach in einen Schreiber, der folgende Zeilen schreibt
Ich bin der Anfang und das End
und gelte
an allen Orthen
. . . .
Und dann
in einen großen Eichenbaum, in eine Sau, in eine Bratwurst, in einen Bauerndreck, in einen Kleewasen, in eine weiße Blume, in einen Maulbeerbaum und einen seidenen Teppich. Ähnlich wie in diesem fortwährenden Prozeß des Fressens und des Gefressenwerdens hat auch für Thomas Browne nichts Bestand.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 34–35G)
53.
Das wunderbarste Stück aber . . . ist ein vollkommen unversehrtes Trinkglas, so hell, als habe man es soeben geblasen. Dergleichen von der Strömung der Zeit verschonte Dinge werden in der Anschauung Brownes zu Sinnbildern der in der Schrift verheißenen Unzerstörbarkeit der menschlichen Seele. . . . Browne [sucht] unter dem, was der Vernichtung entging, nach den Spuren der geheimnisvollen Fähigkeit zur Transmigration, die er an den Raupen und Faltern so oft studiert hat. Das purpurfarbene Fetzchen Seide aus der Urne des Patroklus, von dem er berichtet, was also bedeutet es wohl?
(Die Ringe des Saturn 38–39G)
54. For an answer to this question that is both intelligent and convincing see the section entitled “Seide” in Hutchinson’s W. G. Sebald–Die dialektische Imagination, 133–35.
55. Mark McCulloh, in Understanding W. G. Sebald, like so many other readers of Sebald, has taken up this theme: he rightly emphasizes that not only in the theme of silk but also throughout Sebald’s work one is lured into thinking one can trace the connections that run through his texts. Thus he speaks of “thematic threads [that] are taken up again and again” (74), of a “kaleidoscopic continuum of associations” (82), of “everything [fitting] into a continuum” (149), of “all things [seeming] to be interconnected” (150). See also pp. 3–4. The seeming continuities, however (this is what silk teaches us), are disturbingly disruptive. See Long on “the dense web of motivic repetitions” in Vertigo (Long, W. G. Sebald, 105–7).
56. The herring nets in chapter 3 are made of black silk (Rings of Saturn 56E, 73G). In part 5, when Joseph Conrad’s father burns his manuscripts, a flake of ash goes up in the air like a “scrap of black silk” (Rings of Saturn 108E, 131G). In part 6 the Dowager Empress offers a sacrifice of silk to the gods, not to mention chapter 10, which is largely devoted to the subject. Anja Lemke gives us an excellent run-through of many of these instances of silk. (Lemke, “Figurationen der Melancholie,” 264).
57.
Und Thomas Browne, der als Sohn eines Seidenhändlers dafür ein Auge gehabt haben mochte, vermerkt an irgendeiner, von mir nicht mehr auffindbaren Stelle seiner Schrift Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in Holland sei es zu seiner Zeit Sitte gewesen, im Hause eines Verstorbenen alle Spiegel und alle Bilder, auf denen Landschaften, Menschen oder die Früchte der Felder zu sehen waren, mit seidenem Trauerflor zu verhängen, damit nicht die den Körper verlassende Seele auf ihrer letzten Reise abgelenkt würde, sei es durch ihren eigenen Anblick, sei es durch den ihrer bald auf immer verlorenen Heimat.
(Die Ringe des Saturn 350G)
58. Fifteen pages earlier the narrator describes the “pattern catalogues” of the silk manufacturers, filled with pieces of woven material, somewhere between scrap and whole cloth. A two-page image is devoted to this space where silk and writing converge (Rings of Saturn 284–285E, 336–337G). This, he goes on to say, is the single true book. “That, at any rate, is what I think when I look at the marvelous strips of colour in the pattern books, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols. . . . Until the decline of the Norwich manufactories towards the end of the eighteenth century, these catalogues of samples, the pages of which seem to me to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival, were to be found in the offices of importers” (Rings of Saturn 283–86E, 335–38G).
59.
The first photo already, for example, shows this, an image of the hospital window . . . “strangely [hung] with a black net” which also could be viewed as a sideways lightly distorted, squared writing surface, bearing a cloud pattern but otherwise empty, on whose edge a pencil seems to lie. The photo whose signifieds, cut-out piece of sky/writing surface, substitute for one another become a picture puzzle in the style of Magritte. For just as in the work of this painter represented image surfaces and represented exterior world, signifier and signified, are often indistinguishable so in the photo presented by Sebald the cut out piece of sky can be regarded as a writing surface and also the reverse. This ambiguity of the image can in turn also be read as an allegory of Sebald’s text which as it gives an account of the journey cannot get around also speaking of the process of its writing.
(Albes, “Die Erkundung der Leere,” 297)
60. As Mark Anderson has so suggestively noted, Sebald uses Celan’s last address, “6, avenue Émile-Zola,” as Austerlitz’s. Anderson, “The Edge of Darkness,” 107. Moreover, Sebald mentions Celan in two interviews of 2001 (Sebald, “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis,” 201 and 256).
61. In The Rings of Saturn the view out the window is a test of whether the narrator’s past experience, the subject matter of what he has yet to write down, is still to be found.
62. Celan, “Conversation in the Mountains” and “Gespräch im Gebirg.” “Still wars also, still dort oben im Gebirg. Nicht lang wars still, denn wenn der Jud daherkommt und begegnet einem zweiten, dann ists bald vorbei mit dem Schweigen, auch im Gebirg. Denn der Jud und die Natur, das ist zweierlei, immer noch, auch heute, auch hier” (Celan, “Gespräch im Gebirg” 169–70).
63. The English translation has been radically altered here and there.
Da stehn sie also, die Geschwisterkinder, links blüht der Türkenbund, blüht wild, blüht wie nirgends, und rechts, da steht die Rapunzel, und Dianthus superbus, die Prachtnelke, steht nicht weit davon. Aber sie, die Geschwisterkinder, sie haben, Gott sei’s geklagt, keine Augen. Genauer: sie haben, auch sie, Augen, aber da hängt ein Schleier davor, nicht davor, nein, dahinter, ein beweglicher Schleier; kaum tritt ein Bild ein, so bleibts hängen im Geweb, und schon ist ein Faden zur Stelle, der sich da spinnt, sich herumspinnt ums Bild, ein Schleierfaden; spinnt sich ums Bild herum und zeugt ein Kind mit ihm, halb Bild und halb Schleier.
Armer Türkenbund, arme Rapunzel! . . . Zunge sind sie und Mund, diese beiden, wie zuvor, und in den Augen hängt ihnen der Schleier, und ihr, ihr armen, ihr steht nicht und blüht nicht, ihr seid nicht vorhanden.
(Celan, “Gespräch im Gebirg” 170)
64. We might well think Celan’s “Gespräch im Gebirg” in relation to the question of hatching/Schraffur and the eyes of the narrator as described in Austerlitz.
65. It says something as well about the way Sebald’s text moves in and out of unsettlingly disparate “subject matter”—bringing together historically, geographically, and conceptually unrelated texts, memories, images. What Austerlitz has to say about time and space has much to do with this (Austerlitz 98–102E, 144–48G).
4. Toward an Epistemology of Citation
1. Julia Hell understands the problem well. “What is Sebald’s oeuvre all about,” she writes, “if not the refusal of realism?” (Hell, “Eyes Wide Shut,” 28), in which she expands in the pages that immediately follow with intelligence and insight.
2. James Wood, “An Interview with W. G. Sebald,” Brick: A Literary Journal 58 (Winter 1998): 26 (cited in Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals,’” 350).
3. Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject (Interview),” 80.
4. Even later, as historians documented what happened: “the images of this horrifying chapter of our history have never really crossed the threshold of the national consciousness” (“Air War” 11E, 19G]).
5. A phrase and title that Sebald took from Solly Zuckerman, the title of a book Zuckerman wanted to write but never did.
6. The eagle’s-eye perspective closes After Nature, has its place in The Emigrants, and is also there at a number of critical points in Rings of Saturn, as we will go on to note.
7. Sebald, The Emigrants and Die Ausgewanderten.
Voller Verwunderung schaute ich . . . hinunter auf das . . . sich erstreckende Lichternetz, dessen orangefarbener Sodiumglanz mir ein erstes Anzeichen dafür war, daß ich von nun an in einer anderen Welt leben würde. . . . In einer letzten Schleife und unter immer stärker werdendem Brausen der Motoren ging es über das offene Land hinaus. . . . Spätestens jetzt hätte man Manchester in seiner ganzen Ausdehnung erkennen müssen. Es war aber nichts zu sehen als ein schwaches, wie von Asche nahezu schon ersticktes Glosen. Eine Nebeldecke . . . hatte sich ausgebreitet über die . . . von Millionen von toten und lebendigen Seelen bewohnte Stadt.
(Die Ausgewanderten 220–21G, emphasis mine)
8. “Nossack feels that the strategy of the Allied air forces was the work of divine justice. Nor is this process of revenge solely a matter of retribution visited on the nation responsible for the Fascist regime; it is also concerned with the need for atonement felt by the individual, in this case the author, who has long yearned to see the city destroyed” (Campo Santo 74E, 78G).
9.
The revulsion at this new life, at the “horror teeming under the stone of culture” to which Nossack gives expression in one of the most terrible passages of this text, is a pendant to the fear that the inorganic destruction of life by the firestorm, which (according to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between bloody and nonbloody violence) might yet be reconcilable with the idea of divine justice, will be followed by organic decomposition caused by flies and rats.
(Campo Santo 81E, 85G)
Kluge’s literary record of the air raid on Halberstadt is also a model of its kind from another objective viewpoint, where it studies the question of the “meaning” behind the methodical destruction of whole cities, which authors like Kasack and Nossack omit for lack of information, and also out of a sense of personal guilt, or becomes mystified as divine justice and long overdue punishment.
(Campo Santo 86E, 90–91G)
10.
Die neutralste Form der Mythologie in diesem Zusammenhang wäre wahrscheinlich die Vorstellung, dass es sich um einen Akt göttlicher Intervention handelt, wofür ja Feuer und Wasser immer die zentralen Instrumente waren. Also blutlose Gewalt von oben im biblischen Sinne. Aber selbst das, glaube ich, ist in diesem Zusammenhang und aus dieser Erfahrungsgeschichte heraus in keiner Weise aufrechtzuerhalten.
Der Erzähler in meinen Texten entschlägt sich aber jeder Deutung. Er macht sich die Möglichkeiten der Erklärung der Katastrophe nicht zu nutze, er verweist darauf, dass die Leute früher in dieser oder jener Weise darüber nachgedacht haben. Was ihn selber betrifft, glaube ich sagen zu können, dass er keine Antwort auf diese Form der radikalen Kontingenz hat. Er steht dem ratlos gegenüber, kann nur beschreiben, wie es aussah, wie es dazu kam.
(Köhler, “Katastrophe mit Zuschauer”)
11. “It was the quasi-natural reflex, determined by feelings of shame and defiance against the victors to keep silent and turn away” (“Air War” 30E, 37G)
12. Thus Julia Hell has written, “W. G. Sebald thought of his 1997 lectures ‘Air War and Literature’ as his essay on poetics” (Hell, “The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes,” 361). Hell’s essay is a magisterial piece of criticism and scholarship whose concerns intersect with those of this chapter in more places than I pinpoint here. It concentrates on Sebald’s description of the destruction of the 1943 Hamburg air raids and also reads with meticulous care the closing passage in which Sebald turns to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. Along the way, with a remarkably convincing overview, Hell is able to read and account for a broad spectrum of Sebald criticism and to cast all that she does into the even larger and more complex framework of postwar literature and its reception. She fully understands that we encounter here “the central concerns and constitutive conflicts of Sebald’s postwar authorship” (ibid., 361).
13. See the superb essay by Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals,’” in this regard.
14. Hell wishes to separate these two exigencies in Sebald, the concrete and the documentary, which makes for an interesting reading, but is perhaps not always the case in Sebald’s text (Hell, “The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes” 367).
15. “Das Ideal des Wahren, das in seiner, über weite Strecken zumindest, gänzlich unprätentiösen Sachlichkeit beschlossen ist, erweist sich angesichts der totalen Zerstörung als der einzige legitime Grund für die Fortsetzung der literarischen Arbeit. Umgekehrt ist die Herstellung von ästhetischen oder pseudoästhetischen Effekten aus den Trümmern einer vernichteten Welt ein Verfahren, mit dem die Literatur sich ihrer Berechtigung entzieht” (“Luftkrieg” 59G)
16. Barthes, Mythologies, 145–46.
17.
“Die Bevölkerung (hätte), bei offensichtlich eingeborener Erzählkunst, die psychische Kraft, sich zu erinnern, genau in den Umrissen der zerstörten Flächen der Stadt verloren.” Selbst wenn es sich bei dieser einer angeblich realen Person zugeschriebenen Vermutung um einen von Kluges berühmten pseudodokumentarischen Kunstgriffen handeln sollte, hat es sicher seine Richtigkeit mit dem solchermaßen identifizierten Syndrom, haftet doch den Berichten derer, die mit dem blanken Leben davongekommen sind, in aller Regel etwas Diskontinuierliches an, eine eigenartig erratische Qualität, die so unvereinbar ist mit einer normalen Erinnerungsinstanz, daß sie leicht den Anschein von Erfindung und Kolportage erweckt.
(“Luftkrieg” 31–32G)
18. “It seems improbable [to us] that anyone . . . who saw the panorama of the burning city with sparks flying around them would have come away with an undisturbed mind” (“Air War” 25E, 32G).
19. In his 1997 interview with Andrea Köhler (Köhler, “Katastrophe mit Zuschauer”), we find this exchange:
AK: Ultimately that would mean that only someone who wasn’t there is capable of narrating the horrific.
WGS: More or less, yes. Those who have been saved cannot narrate it. Those who have survived have the least clear picture of how it was.
20. Perhaps we should take the term concrete in its etymological senses of various elements grown together in contradistinction to the quality as mentally abstracted or withdrawn from substance.
21. Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals.’”
But I suggest that in his “synoptic and artificial view” of the firebombing of Hamburg, Sebald creates a modernist form of realism that has the effect of being “concrete” and “documentary” while radically opening up the domain of the real and the historical by way of the imaginary and the fictional. The modernism of Sebald’s account does not derive from any sort of “linguistic radicalism” but rather from the multiplicity of contingent and simultaneous perspectives and the formal, literary aspects of emplotting the modernist event.
(Ibid., 352–53)
What is remarkable about Sebald’s description of the firebombing of Hamburg is the fact that no eyewitness could have possibly seen or experienced it in this way. In a single “synoptic” view, Sebald has spliced together information and experiences culled from a multiplicity of perspectives. . . . His description oscillates between global and local views, perspectives from above and below, points of view within and external to the bombing, and, finally knowledge gained, before, during, and after the catastrophe. No one who was there could have seen what he describes, and yet—or for exactly this reason—it is strikingly real.
(Ibid., 354)
Even while it is ultimately incomplete, it offers a “synoptic view” (and there may be many synoptic views) of the totality of the destruction through the multiplicity and simultaneity of its many contingent perspectives. . . . This view is utterly “artificial,” because no eyewitness could have possibly seen it as it is described. It is an imaginary, artificially constructed view of a real historical event.
(Ibid., 356–57)
22. Ibid., 356.
23. Also in Campo Santo we read: “In such conditions writing becomes an imperative that dispenses with artifice in the interests of truth, and turns to a ‘dispassionate kind of speech’ reporting impersonally as if describing ‘a terrible event from prehistoric time’” (81–82E, 86G).
24. Part of what Sebald/Nossack have in mind here is the return of the population to a prehistorical stage of human civilization, reduced as it is from a highly developed industrial state to hunters and gatherers (“Air War” 36–37E, 43–44G).
25. Julia Hell connects this phrasing (and similar phrasing also appears elsewhere in the essay) with Leopold von Ranke’s “So had it been” (“Air War” 52E, 58G; Hell, “The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes,” 367; also Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals,’” 343), in which case Sebald would seem to be ironizing himself by becoming the most naive of historians, at least according to Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Sebald turns to Benjamin’s theses (which also cite Ranke) at the close of the lectures.
26. “Der Ton, in dem hier berichtet wird, ist der des Boten in der Tragödie. Nossack weiß, daß man solche Boten oft hängt. Eingebaut in sein Memorandum zum Untergang Hamburgs ist die Parabel von einem Menschen, der behauptet, erzählen zu müssen, wie es war, und der von seinen Zuhörern erschlagen wird, weil er eine tödliche Kälte verbreitet” (“Luftkrieg” 58G, emphasis mine).
27. It was Sebald, of course, who wrote “So ist es gewesen.” (“Luftkrieg” 58G) and who thereby (along with Nossack) claims that he is telling it as it was.
28.
Wir befinden uns in der Nekropole eines fremden, unbegreiflichen Volks, herausgerissen aus seiner zivilen Existenz und Geschichte, zurückgeworfen auf die Entwicklungsstufe unbehauster Sammler. Stellen wir uns also vor “fern, hinter den Schrebergärten, über den Bahndamm hinausragend . . . die verkohlten Ruinen der Stadt, eine zerrissene finstere Silhouette” [a footnote tells us this is a citation from Böll], davor eine Landschaft aus niederen, zementfarbenen Schuttbergen . . . einen einzelnen Menschen, der im Geröll herumstochert, [another note tells us this is from Nossack], die Haltestelle einer Bahn, mitten im Nirgendwo, Leute, die sich dort einfinden und von denen man, wie Böll schreibt, nicht wußte, woher sie auf einmal kamen, die aus den Hügeln gewachsen schienen, “unsichtbar, unhörbar . . . aus dieser Ebene des Nichts . . . Gespenster, deren Weg und Ziel nicht zu erkennen war. . . .” [Yet another note refers us to Böll]. Fahren wir mit ihnen zurück in die Stadt, in der sie leben, durch Straßenzüge, in denen die Schutthalden bis zum ersten Stockwerk der leergebrannten Fassaden sich türmen. Wir sehen Menschen, die sich im Freien kleine Feuerstellen gebaut haben (als seien sie im Urwald, schreibt Nossack). . . . So ungefähr muß es ausgesehen haben, das Vaterland, im Jahr 1945.
(“Luftkrieg” 43–44G, emphasis mine)
29. The multiplicity of narrative modes should be thought in relation to the fluctuations of critical perspective discussed in chapter 7.
30. Is this gesture, like many in the essay, a plea to leave behind the economy of retribution (Vergeltung) so bound up with theologizing in speaking of war?
31. “[They] are merely the setting for the superordinate plan, which is to mythify a reality that in its raw form defies description” (“Air War” 48E, 54–55G).
The thesis frequently held by the “internal emigrants” that genuine literature had employed a secret language under the totalitarian regime is thus proved true, in this as in other cases, only insofar as its own code accidentally happened to coincide with Fascist diction. The vision of a new educational field proposed by Kasack, as it also was by Hermann Hesse and Ernst Jünger, makes little difference to the fact, for it too is only a distortion of the bourgeois ideal of an association of the elect operating outside and above the state, an ideal which found its ultimate corruption and perfection in the ordained Fascist elites.
(Campo Santo 71E, 75–76G)
32. Presner, “Synoptic and Artificial View” 353.
33. This section was written after having given the lectures in Zurich and partly to report on and meditate the response to those initial lectures.
34. In the opening lines of the first lecture Sebald writes: “Born in a village in the Allgäu Alps in May 1944, I am one of those who remained almost untouched by the catastrophe then unfolding in the German Reich. . . . I tried to show . . . that this catastrophe had nonetheless left its mark on my mind” (“Air War” vii–viiiE, 5G). In contrast to this, the destruction “seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness” (“Air War” 4E, 12G).
35.
Was den Luftangriff auf Sonthofen betrifft, so entsinne ich mich, im Alter von vierzehn oder fünfzehn Jahren den Benefiziaten, der auf dem Oberstdorfer Gymnasium Religionsunterricht erteilte, gefragt zu haben, wie es sich mit unseren Vorstellungen von der göttlichen Vorsehung vereinbaren lasse, daß bei diesem Angriff weder die Kasernen noch die Hitler-Burg, sondern, sozusagen an ihrer statt, die Pfarrkirche und die Spitalskirche zerstört worden sind, kann mich jedoch nicht mehr an die Antwort erinnern, die ich damals erhielt.
(“Luftkrieg” 80G)
36. One of the most subtle takes on “Air War and Literature” is to be found in the several pages devoted to it by Rebecca Walkowitz (Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 155ff.). She places much of Sebald’s work under the star of “vertigo,” which will also be one of the overt gestures of Sebald’s lectures (“Air War” 74E, 79–80G). Thus she understands that “Sebald’s combination of panoramic and microscopic views produces a relentless vertigo” (ibid., 155). A careful commentator on Sebald’s very precise use of language (see also her insights on Sebald’s “unassimilation” of proper nouns [ibid., 160–61]), as well as on the role of the reader in his works, she continues later in the text with the following remarkable comment:
Preferring a more transient vision, Sebald suggests that aerial and documentary views need to be supplemented by speculative descriptions. Writing of the firebombing of Dresden, Sebald values subjunctive observation: what someone might have seen if someone could have seen it. He will imagine the destruction not only of buildings, trees, and inhabitants, but also of “domestic pets” and “fixtures and fittings of every kind.” . . . By including these objects in his narrative, Sebald hopes to rectify that paralysis (by asking readers to think and feel about loss, including the loss of rationality) and also to imitate it (by asking readers to learn about details whose significance cannot be rationalized).
(Ibid., 157)
37. The structure of the lectures themselves, Sebald claims, came together as something of a jumble. At least he calls them “an unfinished gathering of diverse observations, materials and theses” (“Air War” 69E, 75G). It is perhaps not irrelevant that throughout Sebald’s work, and there are several instances of it in the air war lectures, he is intrigued by and plays with coincidences of dates and names, especially those that echo his own birthday and name (ibid., 78E, 84G). Andrea Köhler speaks in 2003 of “how often Sebald gave the date of his birth to his figures as the date of their death” (Köhler, “Die Welt im Auge des Kranichs”).
38. “Über den zugeschütteten Grundstücken und den durch die Trümmerwelt verwischten Straßenzügen ziehen sich nach einigen Tagen Trampelpfade, die auf legere Weise an frühere Wegverbindungen anknüpfen” (“Luftkrieg” 73G, emphasis mine).
39. Narrative distance is also at stake in the passage that follows from Campo Santo. (It refers to Nossack’s Bericht eines fremden Wesens über die Menschen.) “The wide distance between the subject and object of the narrative process implies something like the perspective of natural history, in which destruction and the tentative forms of new life that it generates act like biological experiments in which the species is concerned with ‘breaking its mold and abjuring the name of man’” (Campo Santo 77E, 81–82G).
40.
Die ironische Verwunderung, mit der er die Tatsachen registriert, erlaubt ihm die Einhaltung der für jede Erkenntnis unabdingbaren Distanz. Und doch rührt sich sogar in ihm, diesem aufgeklärtesten aller Schriftsteller, der Verdacht, daß wir aus dem von uns angerichteten Unglück nichts zu lernen vermögen, sondern, unbelehrbar, immer nur fortmachen auf Trampelpfaden, die auf legere Weise an die alten Wegverbindungen anknüpfen. Kluges Blick auf seine zerstörte Heimatstadt ist darum, aller intellektuellen Unentwegtheit zum Trotz, auch der entsetzensstarre des Engels der Geschichte, von dem Walter Benjamin gesagt hat. . . .
(“Luftkrieg” 73G, emphasis mine)
41. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1.3.1232.
42. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” 392E, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 697G. The connection between fascism and progress appears several times in “On the Concept of History.” See, for example, also: “This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor scarcely considers the question of how its products could ever benefit the workers when they are beyond the means of those workers. It recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism” (ibid., 393E, 699G).
43. “Between History and Natural History”/“Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte” was written in 1982. Andreas Huyssen, in an intriguing and thought-provoking essay, “On Rewritings and New Beginnings: W. G. Sebald and the Literature about the Luftkrieg,” reads this earlier piece in contrast to “Air War and Literature,” viewing it as still holding out the possibility of a learning process that the later Zurich lectures, he tells us, have given up (ibid., 88–89). Other passages in the early text, however (cited shortly in this chapter), also seem skeptical about this (Campo Santo 80–81E and 89–90E, 84–85G and 94G). And there are passages in “Air War and Literature” that might suggest we are still between history and natural history.
44.
Die Perspektive, die sich hier für einen unter Umständen möglichen, anderen Ablauf der Geschichte auftut, versteht sich, ihrer ironischen Einfärbung zum Trotz, als ernstgemeinter Appell für eine, gegen alle Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, zu erarbeitende Zukunft. Gerade Kluges detaillierte Beschreibung der gesellschaft lichen Organisation des Unglücks, die programmiert wird von den beständig mitgeschleppten und beständig sich potenzierenden Fehlleistungen der Geschichte, beinhaltet die Konjektur, daß ein richtiges Verständnis der von uns in einem fort inszenierten Katastrophen die erste Voraussetzung darstellt für die gesellschaftliche Organisation des Glücks.
(“Luftkrieg” 70G; see also the slightly variant Campo Santo 95G)
45. “An dieser Divergenz, die freilich dann auch von den ‘Gehirnen von morgen’ nie ausgeglichen wird, bewahrheitet sich das Diktum Brechts, daß der Mensch durch Katastrophen soviel lerne wie das Versuchskaninchen über Biologie, woraus sich wiederum ergibt, daß der Grad der Autonomie des Menschen vor der von ihm bewerkstelligten tatsächlichen oder potentiellen Zerstörung artgeschichtlich nicht größer ist als der des Nagetiers im Käfig des Experimentators” (Campo Santo 94G, emphasis mine).
46. This chapter follows the concept of “natural history” as Sebald presents it in the Campo Santo essay “Between History and Natural History.” Eric Santer, in his book On Creaturely Life, has this to say of “natural history: “The theme of the ending of time within time, a constant of the apocalyptic imagination, clearly haunts Sebald’s writing and the figures that populate his work.” And he goes on to add: “But there is a more specific sense of natural history at work in Sebald’s vision of the nexus of the natural and the human, one that Walter Benjamin developed over the course of his career. . . . Sebald’s writing is deeply indebted to the Benjaminian view that at some level we truly encounter the radical otherness of the “natural” world only where it appears in the guise of historical remnant” (ibid., xv). “In Benjamin’s parlance,” Santner continues later, “Naturgeschichte has to do with . . . the breakdown and reification of the normative structures of human life and mindedness. It refers, that is, not to the fact that nature also has a history but to the fact that the artifacts of human history tend to acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life” (ibid., 16). This certainly is what is at issue in the passage from “Air War and Literature,” although the issue of epistemology will enlarge the stakes beyond that of artifacts to what Santner may have in mind when he writes of “human . . . mindedness.” Santner’s theoretical erudition takes us in other directions as well, not only to Benjamin, but also to Freud, Schmitt, Lacan, Rilke, Heidegger, Agamben, Foucault, and others, to place Sebald’s natural history and also his understanding of creaturely life in a context that deeply enriches his writings and forces us to read them anew.
47. There is a footnote to Kluge here, but it refers only to the citation. It is Sebald who has introduced the phrases on the dominant species.
Die Primitivisierung des menschlichen Lebens, die damit beginnt, daß, wie Böll später erinnert, “am Anfang dieses Staates ein im Abfall wühlendes Volk stand”, ist ein Anzeichen dafür, daß die kollektive Katastrophe den Punkt markiert, auf dem Geschichte in Naturgeschichte zurückzufallen droht. . . . Die Tatsache, daß es sich in der in eine Steinwüste verwandelten Stadt bald schon wieder zu rühren beginnt, daß sich Trampelpfade übers Geröll abzuzeichnen beginnen, die–wie Kluge dann vermerkt–“auf legere Weise an frühere Wegverbindungen anknüpfen”, hat in dem Nossack’schen Bericht allerdings wenig Tröstliches, ist es doch zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch nicht ausgemacht, ob die überlebenden Reste der Bevölkerung oder die die Stadt beherrschenden Ratten und Fliegen aus dieser regressiven Phase der Evolution als die dominierende Gattung hervorgehen werden.
(Campo Santo 84–85G)
48.
Die Geschichte der Industrie als das offene Buch des menschlichen Denkens und Fühlens—läßt die materialistische Erkenntnistheorie oder irgendeine Erkenntnistheorie überhaupt sich aufrechterhalten angesichts solcher Zerstörung, oder ist nicht diese vielmehr das unwiderlegbare Exempel dafür, daß die gewissermaßen unter unserer Hand sich entwickelnden und dann anscheinend unvermittelt ausbrechenden Katastrophen in einer Art Experiment den Punkt vorwegnehmen, an dem wir aus unserer, wie wir so lange meinten, autonomen Geschichte zurücksinken in die Geschichte der Natur?
(“Luftkrieg” 72G, emphasis mine)
49. See Hell, “The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes” on this issue.
50. The precise title of the essay is “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte,” followed by the subtitle, in smaller print, “Über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung” (Campo Santo 69G). “Between History and Natural History” followed by “On the Literary Description of Total Destruction” (Campo Santo 65E, 69G).
51.
Kluges Blick auf seine zerstörte Heimatstadt ist darum, aller intellektuellen Unentwegtheit zum Trotz, auch der entsetzensstarre des Engels der Geschichte, von dem Walter Benjamin gesagt hat, daß er mit seinen aufgerissenen Augen “eine einzige Katastrophe [sieht], die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.”
(“Luftkrieg” 73–74G)
52. The temporality of the dialectic image is that of the instant. The temporality of the angel of history is that of longing to return to the past. See Hell, “The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes.”
53. Benjamin, The Arcades Project 473E, Das Passagen-Werk 591–92G.
54. In a 1992 interview Sebald speaks of the many citations that found their way into Vertigo: “The text is one great homage to Kafka, an author whom I always, and ever again read. But in the novel in fact many smaller homages to other authors are hidden. These are testimonies of respect in the form of citation that have simply slipped themselves into the text” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 77). The citations here seem to slip themselves into the text as though they had a will independent of the writer. One might compare this to the way in which the pictures of the Halberstadt photographer make their way into Kluge’s text.
55. The English translation fails to register either of these phrases, “into memory” and “into experience.”
56. Huyssen quite astutely notes that, “unmistakably, Sebald’s essay is not just an analysis of those earlier writers’ work, but a hidden rewriting of both Nossack and Kluge’s texts themselves” (Huyssen, “On Rewritings and New Beginnings,” 83). He goes on to speak of this in terms of “Sebald’s treatment of memory and his incorporation of photographs into all of his texts [as] clearly reminiscent of Kluge’s text/image strategies in Neue Geschichten” (ibid., 83). Huyssen attributes this to the fact that Sebald, born in 1944, unlike Kluge, born in 1932, had no early childhood memories of the Third Reich, “no access to the experience or memory of the air war except through these earlier texts which he is compelled to rewrite” (ibid., 84). Perhaps one might add to this that Sebald meditates on the fact that no generation had access to experience in any simple, linguistically expressible way, not even that first generation of observers. The epistemological problems of that quandary, along with the impossibility of learning either from one’s own experience or from the experience of others, are acted out in Sebald’s use of citation, as Huyssen himself notes.
57. Sebald’s After Nature does end from a crane’s point of view: “with a crane’s eye/one surveys his far-flung realm” (After Nature 115E, 98G), a superordinate position Sebald seems to abandon as a closing moment of his texts.
5. A is for Austerlitz
1. Antwerp is the city in which the narrator first meets the man for whom his text is named. A is for Andromeda Lodge, the home of Austerlitz’s good friend Gerald Fitzpatrick whose father is Aldous, uncle Alphonso, and mother Adela (all four of whom share the letters A and L). A is also for Alderney Street where Austerlitz resides in London. Ashman is the owner of Iver Grove, visited by Austerlitz and his teacher, André Hilary, who had given him “a triple starred A” (Austerlitz, 73E, 111G) on an essay. Two of the four characters in Die Ausgewanderten also point to Sebald’s propensity toward the first letter of the alphabet: Ambros Adelwarth and Max Aurach. Agáta Austerlizová, with its five A s, lies just at the middle of the book (Sebald, Austerlitz, 146E, 210G).
2. The consequences of the encounter with Tereza will ultimately lead Austerlitz to Terezín.
3. As Austerlitz, having found his past, retraces the train ride of the Kindertransport that first brought him to England, Sebald plays on this possibility: “Zwischen Würzburg und Frankfurt . . . ging die Strecke durch eine baumreiche Gegend, kahle Eichen- und Buchenstände” (Austerlitz 324G). The play of words (Aychen-, Eichen-, Buchen-) does not carry over into the English translation: “it was between Würzberg and Frankfurt that the line ran through a densely forested region with leafless stands of oak [Eichen-] and beech [Buchen] trees” (Austerlitz 224E). And lest one have missed the dark suggestion, a few lines later, Sebald intersperses the syllable Wald: he speaks of the “gänzlich von finsteren Waldungen überwachsenen Land” that “war das Original der so viele Jahre hindurch mich heimsuchenden Bilder” (“land . . . entirely overgrown by dark forests which . . . was the original of the images that had haunted me for so many years”; Austerlitz 224E, 324G). Earlier the ABCs of trees is also at play when Austerlitz describes the excursions he made with Hilary: “nach langem Herumwandern in einem mit jungem Ahorn- und Birkengehölz dicht zugewachsenen Park” (“after walking for a long time in a park densely overgrown with young sycamore and birch trees”; Austerlitz 154G, 103E, emphasis mine).
4. Thus the title of a 2001 essay/interview in the Guardian is “Recovered Memories.”
5. The Austrian writer Jean Améry left his homeland behind, but not the bitterness of his memories. Sebald’s narrator leaves this story untold, but it adds yet another name beginning with A to those that are already explicitly at play throughout the book. After the war he rearranged the letters of his name from the stereotypical Austrian Mayer to its logogriph Améry where all the bitterness of his ressentiment might crystallize. The name is an obvious play on the French for bitter, amer, and bitterness, amertume. Sebald had written about Améry’s bitter resentment elsewhere (Sebald, “Verlorenes Land,” 142).
6.
[Er] stellte, so gut es ging, ein Lexikon ihrer fast nur aus Vokalen und vor allem aus dem in unendlichen Variationen betonten und akzentuierten Laut A bestehenden Sprache zusammen. . . . Später, in sein Heimatland zurückgekehrt, begann Novelli mit dem Malen von Bildern. Das Hauptmotiv, dessen er sich dabei in immer neuen Ausprägungen und Zusammensetzungen bediente . . . war das des Buchstabens A, den er . . . hineinkratzte . . . in eng in- und übereinander gedrängten Reihen, immer gleich und doch sich nie wiederholend, aufsteigend und abfallend in Wellen wie ein lang anhaltender Schrei.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
(Austerlitz, 43–44G)
7.
I can see that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries these conclusions would have suggested to me.
(Austerlitz 44E)
[Ich sehe,] daß allein mein Name und die Tatsache, daß mir dieser Name bis in mein fünfzehntes Jahr vorenthalten geblieben war, mich auf die Spur meiner Herkunft hätten bringen müssen, doch ist mir in der letztvergangenen Zeit auch klargeworden, weshalb ein meiner Denkfähigkeit vor- oder übergeordnete und offenbar irgendwo in meinem Gehirn mit der größten Umsicht waltende Instanz mich immer vor meinem eigenen Geheimnis bewahrt und systematisch davon abgehalten hat, die naheliegendsten Schlüsse zu ziehen und die diesen Schlüssen entsprechenden Nachforschungen anzustellen.
(Austerlitz 68–69G).
8. Amir Eshel, in a stunning and carefully reflective essay makes the connection between Austerlitz and Ulysses, though on another basis than that I am suggesting here. Eshel speaks of “Austerlitz’s Ulyssian journey back to his past,” “to Prague, where, much like Ulysses, he encounters his childhood in the figure of his nursemaid” (Eshel, “Against the Power of Time,” 78). The irony in this particular passage, which marks the moment when Austerlitz first consciously hears of the Kindertransport, is that Austerlitz is already with his Penelope, Penelope Peacefull, and he makes his trip to Prague by leaving her and leaving behind what little peace he has. For the trip “home” to Prague, which follows upon the summer of 1992 breakdown, will precipitate an even greater breakdown. The return home to Prague has all the ambiguity of Odysseus’s embrace of Telemachus, accompanied as it is by their shrill cries which are compared in book 16 (216–19) of Homer’s text to that of birds whose children had been stolen away.
9. “Im Alter von viereinhalb Jahren, in den Monaten unmittelbar vor dem Ausbruch des Krieges, die Stadt Prag verlassen zu haben mit einem der damals von hier abgehenden, sogenannten Kindertransporte und deshalb in das Archiv gekommen sei in der Hoffnung, die in der Zeit zwischen 1934 und 1939 in Prag wohnhaften Personen meines Namens, bei denen es gewiß nicht um allzu viele sich handle, mit ihren Anschriften aus den Registern heraussuchen zu können” (Austerlitz 216G).
10. “Daß die Einwohnerregister aus der fraglichen Zeit vollständig erhalten seien, daß der Name Austerlitz in der Tat zu den ungewöhnlicheren gehöre und es darum keine besonderen Schwierigkeiten bereiten dürfte, die entsprechenden Auszüge für mich bis morgen nachmittag anzufertigen“(Austerlitz 217G).
11. Alongside broader reflections on the concept of the archive in Sebald, J. J. Long gives us a highly intelligent meditation on the archive in Austerlitz in particular. See for example the section entitled “The Archive as Substitute Memory” in chapter 8. Long (W. G. Sebald, 152ff). What Long so cannily shows is that Austerlitz’s sense of the archive has nothing of the apparent simplicity of his archival success in Prague. Rather, Long writes: “Austerlitz’s substitution of scholarship for memory forms part of his wider efforts to resist the power of linear time by stressing the radically relative nature of temporality” (ibid., 154).
12. If at first the writing of the name proved something of a stumbling block to the fifteen year old, it is the spelling of the name alone which initiates the restoration of his past. With no missteps along the way, Austerlitz finds his childhood apartment by searching for his name in the state archive. “And so . . . , no sooner had I arrived in Prague than I found myself back in the place of my early childhood, every trace of which had been expunged from my memory” (Austerlitz 150E, 216G). A little later he calls all the details of the Sporkova 12 “pure letters and signs from the type case of forgotten things” (“lauter Buchstaben und Zeichen aus dem Setzkasten der vergessenen Dinge”; Austerlitz 151E, 222G).
13. Austerlitz is sixty-two at the end of Sebald’s volume.
14. In his KCRW interview Sebald underscores the necessity of narrating indirectly and confirms his stylistic debt to Thomas Bernhard. Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject (Interview),” 80 and 82.
15. “Věra [war] selber, unwillkürlich, wie ich annehme, sagte Austerlitz, aus der einen Sprache in die andere übergewechselt, und ich, der ich . . . nicht . . . auch im entferntesten nur auf den Gedanken gekommen war, vom Tschechischen je berührt worden zu sein, verstand nun wie ein Tauber, dem durch ein Wunder das Gehör wiederaufging, so gut wie alles, was Věra sagte” (Austerlitz 227G).
16. See Presner’s excellent reading of this passage in Mobile Modernity, 273–75.
17.
Erst unlängst habe ich, an der Schwelle des Erwachens, in das Innere eines solchen Terezíner Kasernenbaus hineingesehen. Er war von den Netzen dieser kunstreichen Tiere Schicht um Schicht ausgefüllt, von den Fußböden bis hinauf an die Decken. Ich weiß noch, wie ich im Halbschlaf versuchte, das . . . erschauernde Traumbild festzuhalten und zu erkennen, was in ihm verborgen war, aber es löste sich immer mehr auf und wurde überlagert von der zugleich in meinem Bewußtsein aufgehenden Erinnerung an die blinkenden Schaufensterscheiben des ANTIKOS BAZAR.
(Austerlitz 280–81G, emphasis mine)
18. Thus the narrator tells of Austerlitz’s fascination with network as possible system: “But then again, it was also true that he was still obeying an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to an early fascination that made itself apparent with the idea of a network such as that of the entire railway system” (Austerlitz 33E, 52–53G).
19. “Sehen konnte ich freilich nur, was in den Auslagen zur Schau gestellt war. . . . Aber selbst diese vier, offenbar vollkommen willkürlich zusammengesetzten Stilleben, die auf eine, wie es den Anschein hatte, naturhafte Weise, hineingewachsen waren in das schwarze, in den Scheiben sich spiegelnde Astwerk der rings um den Stadtplatz stehenden Linden, hatten für mich eine derartige Anziehungskraft, daß ich mich von ihnen lange nicht losreißen konnte und, die Stirne gegen die kalte Scheibe gepreßt . . .” (Austerlitz 282–83G).
20. The phrase suggesting relationships that cannot be explored is omitted in the English translation. The textual entryway to the Antikos Bazar and its unfathomable interrelations is a surreptitious, slightly aberrant visual experiment, unlike anything else we encounter in the volume. Rather than image as illustration, the implicit, if often failed concept throughout Sebald’s works, the photos here take on a life of their own.
Elsewhere and a few pages earlier they seem to suggest a straight and inevitable narrative line in contrast to the involutions in the display windows to come. In a series of five photographs, as nowhere else in the volume, the images follow one another (Austerlitz 190–93E, 276–79G). Under a double window in a decaying building we see a long row of numbered garbage pails stretching from one edge of the photo to the other. This is followed by four images that seem to morph from one to the next as the conceptualization of the window is slowly transformed.
A door with a window on either side: a door with a single window above it; the sunlit doorways of the last two shots replaced now by a darkened doorway with a narrow, black, rectangular windowlike form above it that has lost all sense of translucence; and, finally, a door of sorts, barricaded shut with black metal strips. The window form that in the earlier pictures was above or to the side of the doorway is now a small square at the top of the door itself: it gives off a brightness suggestive not of daylight but of flames within. The path of Terezín, we might be led to conclude, leads inexorably to the gas chambers and the incinerators.
21. “[Die] elfenbeinfarbene Porzellankomposition, die einen reitenden Helden darstellte, der sich auf seinem soeben auf der Hinterhand sich erhebenden Roß nach rückwärts wendet, um mit dem linken Arm ein unschuldiges, von der letzten Hoffnung verlassenes weibliches Wesen zu sich emporzuziehen und aus einem dem Beschauer nicht offenbarten, aber ohne Zweifel grauenvollen Unglück zu retten” (Austerlitz 284–85G).
22. “[Ich studierte] die hundert verschiedenen Dinge . . . als müßte aus irgendeinem von ihnen, oder aus ihrem Bezug zueinander, eine eindeutige Antwort sich ableiten lassen auf die vielen, nicht auszudenkenden Fragen, die mich bewegten” (Austerlitz 282–83G, emphasis mine).
23. “Auf einem Aststummel hockend [war] dieses ausgestopfte, stellenweise schon vom Mottenfraß verunstaltete Eichhörnchen, das sein gläsernes Knopfauge unerbittlich auf mich gerichtet hielt und dessen tschechischen Namens–veverka–ich nun von weit her wieder erinnerte wie den eines vor langer Zeit in Vergessenheit geratenen Freunds” (Austerlitz 284G).
24. “Wenn wir zu der Seite kamen, sagte Věra, sagte Austerlitz, auf der davon die Rede war, daß der Schnee durch das Gezweig der Bäume herabrieselt und bald den ganzen Waldboden bedeckt, hätte ich zu ihr aufgeblickt und gefragt: Aber wenn alles weiß sein wird, wie wissen dann die Eichhörnchen, wo sie ihren Vorrat verborgen haben?. . . . Ja, wie wissen die Eichhörnchen das, und was wissen wir überhaupt, und wie erinnern wir uns, und was entdecken wir nicht am Ende?” (Austerlitz 295G).
25. “It was six years after our farewell outside the gates of the Trade Fair in Holešovice, so Vera continued, that I learned how Agáta was sent east in September 1944.” (“Es war sechs Jahre nach unserem Abschied vor dem Tor des Messegeländes in Holešovice, so berichtete Věra weiter, daß ich erfuhr, daß Agáta im September 1944. . . . nach Osten geschickt worden war”; Austerlitz 204E, 295G).
26. Still, when Austerlitz thinks back on Terezín, what comes to mind is a somewhat gentler version: “the framed ground plan . . . in soft tones of gray-brown” figuring “the model of a world made by reason and regulated in all conceivable respects” (Austerlitz 199E, 288G).
27. No reader of Sebald can fail to recognize the critical importance of this figure of interconnection throughout his work. Anne Fuchs, in Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte, is particularly astute in this regard. She notes that structure in the Quincunx of Browne (ibid., 101), in anatomical structures such as blood vessels (102) in the image of train tracks compared to strands of muscles and nerves in Austerlitz (48). But she understands that the net in Sebald’s writings is not simply the naming of a physical structure but also a textual practice, what she calls a network aesthetic (74), that might bring together literature and natural history, and biography, for example (77). She develops her sense of the net as a mode of thinking and writing in Sebald in a section entitled “Topographical Networks in Austerlitz” (47–54).
28. The play here, once again, is on Buchenwald and Eichenwald, with its echo of Aychenwald, the family name of Austerlitz’s father.
29. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the Greenwich Royal Observatory.
30. “Auch wenn ich heute an meine Rheinreisen denke, von denen die zweite kaum weniger schrecklich als die erste gewesen ist, dann geht mir alles in meinem Kopf durcheinander, das, was ich erlebt und das, was ich gelesen habe, die Erinnerungen, die auftauchen und wieder versinken, die fortlaufenden Bilder und die schmerzhaften blinden Stellen, an denen gar nichts mehr ist” (Austerlitz 327G).
31. W. G. Sebald, “Kafka Goes to the Movies,” in Campo Santo 156E, 198G.
32. The Ghetto Museum is only one of such destinations: there are, also, the Greenwich Royal Observatory, the veterinary museum at Maisons-Alfort, and Breendonk.
33. Like many others, Eshel documents the parallels between Sebald and the narrator figures in his work.
34.
Tripp hat mir damals einen von ihm gefertigten Stich als Geschenk mitgegeben, und auf diesen Stich, auf dem der kopfkranke Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber zu sehen ist mit einer Spinne in seinem Schädel—was gibt es Furchtbareres als die in uns immerfort wuselnden Gedanken?—auf diesen Stich geht vieles von dem, was ich später geschrieben habe, zurück, auch in der Art des Verfahrens, im Einhalten einer genauen historischen Perspektive, im geduldigen Gravieren und in der Vernetzung, in der Manier der nature morte, anscheinend weit auseinander liegender Dinge.
(“Ein Versuch der Restitution,” Campo Santo 243–44)
35. See Klaus Jeziorkowski’s wonderfully intelligent commentary on the concept of web in Austerlitz (“‘Peripherie als Mitte’”), although, to be sure, the tone and gesture of the essay are in many senses a counterpoint to rather than a confirmation of what is written here. Thus he speaks of a Lesbarmachen (a making readable), or of the idea of a network that is to be thought of as all encompassing, or, in the title as in the closing line, of the periphery as middle, which seems to solidify the concept of periphery in a manner Sebald astutely avoids.
36. “Es nutzte mir offenbar wenig, daß ich die Quellen meiner Verstörung entdeckt hatte, mich selber, über all die vergangenen Jahre hinweg, mit größter Deutlichkeit sehen konnte als das von seinem vertrauten Leben von einem Tag auf den anderen abgesonderte Kind; die Vernunft kam nicht an gegen das seit jeher . . . und jetzt gewaltsam aus mir hervorbrechende Gefühl des Verstoßen- und Ausgelöschtseins” (Austerlitz 330G).
37. His earlier, initial, breakdown finds its retelling only towards the end of the text, given the endless involutions of narration, and disruptions of linear time.
38. It also recalls the far more benign version of such displays at Gerald’s home (Austerlitz 82E, 125–26G). It is in this collection that Austerlitz’s namesake, Jaco, has his place, though in a cardboard box rather than in glass.
39.
Weitaus am entsetzlichsten jedoch, so sagte Austerlitz, ist die in einer Vitrine rückwärts in dem letzten Kabinett des Museums zu sehende lebensgroße Figur eines Reiters, dem der . . . Anatom und Präparator Honoré Fragonard auf das kunstvollste die Haut abgezogen hat, so daß, in den Farben gestockten Blutes, jeder einzelne Strang der gespannten Muskeln des Kavaliers sowohl als des mit panischem Blick vorwärts stürmenden Pferdes vollkommen deutlich zutage tritt mitsamt dem blauen Geäder und den ockergelben Sehnen und Bändern.
(Austerlitz 378–80G, emphasis mine)
40. “Vor Beginn der Bauarbeiten an den beiden nordöstlichen Bahnhöfen, wurden diese Elendsquartiere gewaltsam geräumt und ungeheure Erdmassen, mitsamt den in ihnen Begrabenen, aufgewühlt und verschoben, damit die Eisenbahnstrassen, die auf den von den Ingenieuren angefertigten Plänen sich ausnahmen wie Muskel- und Nervenstränge in einem anatomischen Atlas, herangeführt werden konnten bis an den Rand der City” (Austerlitz 194G).
41. “Fragonard . . . muß . . . Tag und Nacht über den Tod gebeugt gewesen sein, umfangen von dem süßen Geruch der Verwesung und bewegt offenbar von dem Wunsch, dem hinfälligen Leib durch ein Verfahren der Vitrifikation und somit durch die Umwandlung seiner in kürzester Frist korrumpierbaren Substanz in ein gläsernes Wunder wenigstens einen Anteil am ewigen Leben zu sichern“(Austerlitz 380G, emphasis mine).
42. W. G. Sebald, “The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin,” in Campo Santo 177E, 219G.
43. “Dem hinfälligen Leib durch ein Verfahren der Vitrifikation und somit durch die Umwandlung seiner in kürzester Frist korrumpierbaren Substanz in ein gläsernes Wunder wenigstens einen Anteil am ewigen Leben zu sichern. In den Wochen, die auf meinen Besuch in dem Veterinärwissenschaftlichen Museum folgten, [so setzte Austerlitz, {den Blick nach draußen auf den Boulevard gerichtet,} seine Geschichte fort,] war es mir unmöglich, mich an irgend etwas von dem, was ich soeben erzählt habe, zu erinnern” (Austerlitz 380–81G, emphasis, parentheses, and brackets mine).
44. This is the inverse of the Jan Peter Tripp image of a man behind a cracked glass: the crack in the glass, and it alone, reminds us that what we see is not a photograph (“As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese” and “Wie Tag und Nacht,” 82E, 176G).
45. This becomes all the more clear in a later passage that speaks this time of remarkable, perfect recall and remembers to name both the boulevard and the window through which Austerlitz gazes: “Austerlitz quoted from memory, as he looked out of the brasserie window at the Boulevard Auguste Blanqui” (Austerlitz 283E, 400G).
46.
In den Wochen, die auf meinen Besuch in dem Veterinärwissenschaftlichen Museum folgten, [so setzte Austerlitz, {den Blick nach draußen auf den Boulevard gerichtet,} seine Geschichte fort,] war es mir unmöglich, mich an irgend etwas von dem, was ich soeben erzählt habe, zu erinnern, denn es war auf dem Rückweg von Maisons-Alfort, daß ich in der Métro den ersten der später mehrfach sich wiederholenden, mit einer zeitweiligen Auslöschung sämtlicher Gedächtnisspuren verbundenen Ohnmachtsanfälle erlitt.
(Austerlitz 380–81G, parentheses and brackets mine)
47. “Wieder zu mir gekommen bin ich erst in der Salpêtrière, in die man mich eingeliefert hatte und wo ich nun, irgendwo in dem riesigen, über die Jahrhunderte sozusagen aus sich selber herausgewachsenen und zwischen dem Jardin des Plantes und der Gare d’Austerlitz ein eigenes Universum bildenden Gebäudekomplex, in welchem die Grenzen zwischen Heil- und Strafanstalt von jeher unsicher gewesen sind, . . . lag” (Austerlitz 382G).
48. These linguistic propensities are already there in Austerlitz’s first description of such excursions: a reverse alphabetical list of five metro stations is followed by the stammers of St . . . St . . . St . . . “When she was not in Paris, which always cast me into an anxious mood, I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city, taking the Métro out to Montreuil, Malakoff, Charenton, Bobigny, Bagnolet, Le Pré St. Germain, St. Denis, St. Mandé, or elsewhere” (Austerlitz 264E, 376G). This makes the precision of stuttering and alphabetization all the more manifest in the later passage.
49. Iéna, Solferino, Stalingrad are the names of battles (with the Gare d’Austerlitz significantly omitted, named after, of course, the Battle of Austerlitz); Campo Formio is the place of the treaty of Campo Formio, Crimée is named after the Crimean War; the Musée de l’Armée at Invalides is touted as having the most important military collection anywhere in the world. Oberkampf has the German word for battle in it. And Elysées of course is the place in Greek mythology where heroes go after death—which is more or less the subject matter of the lines that follow. Simplon, although the connection is far more tenuous, is the pass in Switzerland in an area that has one of the world’s longest railroad tunnels—a link, then, to the train in Austerlitz, rather than the military. In a 2000 interview with Volker Hage, Sebald speaks of the Paris metro as the locus of “a French history of glory [Ruhmesgeschichte]” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 188).
50. Austerlitz’s counterpart is a roofer who has felt the moment when the roof of his mind, so to speak, was suddenly torn: a critical, recurring point of Austerlitz and the narrator’s experience. “Occasionally I talked to one or the other of the hospital patients, a roofer, for instance, who claimed he could recollect with perfect clarity the moment when, in the middle of his work, something that had been stretched too taut inside him snapped at a particular spot behind his forehead, and for the first time he heard, coming over the crackling transistor wedged into the batten in front of him, the voices of those bearers of bad tidings” (Austerlitz 230–31E, 333G).
51.
Genau kann niemand erklären, was in uns geschieht, wenn die Türe aufgerissen wird, hinter der die Schrecken der Kindheit verborgen sind. Aber ich weiß noch, daß mir damals in der Kasematte von Breendonk ein ekelhafter Schmierseifengeruch in die Nase stieg, daß dieser Geruch sich, an einer irren Stelle in meinem Kopf, mit dem mir immer zuwider gewesenen und vom Vater mit Vorliebe gebrauchten Wort “Wurzelbürste” verband, daß ein schwarzes Gestrichel mir vor den Augen zu zittern begann und ich gezwungen war, mit der Stirn mich anzulehnen an die von bläulichen Flecken unterlaufene, griesige und, wie mir vorkam, von kalten Schweißperlen überzogene Wand.
(Austerlitz 41G, emphasis mine)
52. And then, again, the narrator places his forehead against the iron band of the medical equipment (Austerlitz 38E, 60G) at the ophthalmologist’s and also leans his head against the wall at the Great Eastern Hotel (Austerlitz 39E, 61G) where, soon thereafter, he meets Austerlitz again after twenty years.
53. As they do both on the ferry they share back to England and in scene of Van Valckenborch’s painting of ice-skating on the Schelde, as Austerlitz describes it to the narrator.
54. The reader doesn’t know this yet. Austerlitz describes his crisis only later in the book, although it took place several years before this encounter.
55.
Ich befand mich damals gerade in einiger Unruhe, weil ich beim Heraussuchen einer Anschrift aus dem Telephonbuch bemerkt hatte, daß, sozusagen über Nacht, die Sehkraft meines rechten Auges fast gänzlich geschwunden war. Auch wenn ich den Blick von der vor mir aufgeschlagenen Seite abhob und auf die gerahmten Photographien an der Wand richtete, sah ich mit dem rechten Auge nur eine Reihe dunkler, nach oben und unten seltsam verzerrter Formen—die mir bis ins einzelne vertrauten Figuren und Landschaften hatten sich aufgelöst, unterschiedslos, in eine bedrohliche schwarze Schraffur.
(Austerlitz 54–55G)
56. We have seen this theme at work in Sebald’s writings since the opening chapter, “Like the Snow on the Alps.” In a 1992 interview Sebald spoke of his own fears, of “this feeling of being blinded [Blendung], the fear of no longer being able to see” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 74).
57. As laden as the name Gregor seems with unlikely Kafkan overtones, Zdeňek Gregor maintained, at the time of this writing, a place in what we call reality—or at least a virtual place on the Web. After all, what difference would there be in Sebald? (The entry was subsequently modified, for who can trust to the stability of the Net?)
Zdenek J Gregor. Area(s) of specialism/subspecialism: Vitreoretinal Surgery and Medical Retina. (diabetic retinopathy, macular surgery, retinal detachment . . .)
58. Retina: from the Latin RETE = net.
59. “[Es] herrsche weitgehend Unklarheit, sagte Zdenek Gregor. Man wisse eigentlich nur, daß sie fast ausschließlich auftrete bei Männern mittleren Alters, die zuviel mit Schreiben und Lesen beschäftigt seien. Im Anschluß an diese Konsultation mußte zur genaueren Bestimmung der schadhaften Stelle in der Retina noch . . . eine Reihe photographischer Aufnahmen meiner Augen oder vielmehr . . . des Augenhintergrunds durch die Iris, die Pupille und den Glaskörper hindurch [gemacht werden]” (Austerlitz 59–60G).
60. The technical assistant assigned to this task, an exceptionally noble man who wore a white turban (Austerlitz 38E, 60G), has an uncanny resemblance to the gatekeeper of Austerlitz’s past, the porter at the Liverpool Street Station who also wore a snow white turban (Austerlitz 132E, 196G) and who opens to view for Austerlitz the scene of his first arrival from Prague on the Kindertransport.
61.
Ich bildete mir ein, ich sähe dort draußen in der zunehmenden Dunkelheit die von ungezählten Straßen und Bahnwegen durchfurchten Areale der Stadt, wie sie sich ostwärts und nordwärts übereinanderschoben, ein Häuserriff über das nächste und übernächste und so fort . . . und daß nun auf diesen riesigen steinernen Auswuchs der Schnee fallen würde . . . bis alles begraben und zugedeckt wäre . . . London a lichen mapped on mild clays and its rough circle without purpose . . . Einen ebensolchen, an seinem Rand ins Ungefähre übergehenden Kreis zeichnete Zdenek Gregor auf ein Blatt Papier, als er mir . . . die Ausdehnung der grauen Zone in meinem rechten Auge zu veranschaulichen suchte.
(Austerlitz 58–59G)
62. Watts, “Fragment.”
63. This is, perhaps, a visual metaphor for Sebald’s insistence that all must be narrated indirectly.
64. There is, for example, no correct correspondence between the number of windows the childhood house in Wales appears to have from the outside and how many actually allow access to the view of an outside from within.
65. The praise of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is suggested, perhaps, by the last lines of the book that inscribe the name of Lob, Marcel de St. Nazaire (Austerlitz 298E, 421G).
66.
Weiter in der Geschichte Moses, sagte Austerlitz, hat besonders der Abschnitt mich angezogen, in dem berichtet wird, wie die Kinder Israel eine furchtbare Einöde durchqueren. . . . Ich . . . versenkte mich, alles um mich her vergessend, in eine ganzseitige Illustration, in der die Wüste Sinai mit ihren kahlen, ineinander verschobenen Bergrücken und dem grau gestrichelten Hintergrund, den ich manchmal für das Meer und manchmal für den Luftraum gehalten habe, ganz der Gegend glich in der ich aufgewachsen bin. Tatsächlich, sagte Austerlitz bei einer späteren Gelegenheit, als er die walisische Kinderbibel vor mir aufschlug, wußte ich mich unter den winzigen Figuren, die das Lager bevölkern, an meinem richtigen Ort. Jeden Quadratzoll der mir gerade in ihrer Vertrautheit unheimlich erscheinenden Abbildung habe ich durchforscht. In einer etwas helleren Fläche an der steil abstürzenden Bergseite zur Rechten glaubte ich, einen Steinbruch zu erkennen und in den gleichmäßig geschwungenen Linien darunter die Geleise einer Bahn. Am meisten aber gab mir der umzäunte Platz in der Mitte zu denken und der zeltartige Bau am hinteren Ende, über dem sich eine weiße Rauchwolke erhebt. Was damals auch in mir vorgegangen sein mag, das Lager der Hebräer in dem Wüstengebirge war mir näher als das mir mit jedem Tag unbegreiflicher werdende Leben in Bala, so wenigstens, sagte Austerlitz, dünkt es mir heute.
(Austerlitz 85–88G)
67. Forschung (research) has a strange resonance throughout the work as a failed attempt at restitution and connection—and not only in relation to Austerlitz’s writings on the history of architecture: as when Austerlitz speaks of his failure to research his past—“that I had blocked off the investigation [Erforschung] of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my own accord” (Austerlitz 339G), or when Vera’s Nachforschung to trace the family didn’t work, or when Austerlitz speaks of the unfathomable connections (unerforschliche Zusammenhänge, a phrase omitted in the English translation) of objects in the Antikos Bazar window (Austerlitz 285G).
68. “Jedenfalls war eines Tages dann unter der Post diese Ansichtskarte aus den zwanziger oder dreißiger Jahren, die eine weiße Zeltkolonie zeigte in der ägyptischen Wüste, ein Bild aus einer von niemandem mehr erinnerten Kampagne, auf dessen Rückseite nichts stand als Saturday 19 March, Alderney Street, ein Fragezeichen und ein großes A für Austerlitz” (Austerlitz 173–74G).
69. “Nein, man sah auch, so sagte Věra, berichtete Maximilian, aus der Vogelschau eine im Morgengrauen bis gegen den Horizont reichende Stadt von weißen Zelten, aus denen, sowie es ein wenig licht wurde, einzeln, paarweise und in kleinen Gruppen die Deutschen hervorkamen und sich in einem schweigsamen, immer enger sich schließenden Zug alle in dieselbe Richtung bewegten, als folgten sie einem höheren Ruf und seien, nach langen Jahren in der Wüste, nun endlich auf dem Weg ins Gelobte Land” (Austerlitz 247–48G).
70. J. J. Long notes the return of the figure of the tent in Austerlitz (Long, W. G. Sebald, 164).
71. They are like the Nazi followers in the earlier passage who go singly, in couples, and in groups.
72. Nowhere is the capacity for the shift of the network from plan to confusion clearer than in Austerlitz’s description of a scholar’s work in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale:
I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale . . . and usually remained in my place there until evening . . . losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly description of reality to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications.
(Austerlitz 260E, 370–71G)
73. Presner shows this both by way of extended theoretical reflections on the nature of memory and narrative in Sebald and also by way of specific readings in Austerlitz. His commentary on Austerlitz at Breendonk as he speaks of the experience of Jean Améry is a particularly beautiful example: Presner, Mobile Modernity, 266–68.
74. This language of the river and its flow that is about to become so central to Austerlitz’s critique of linear time continues into the next lines: “Then we walked the rest of the way in silence, going on downstream from Wapping and Shadwell to the quiet basins which reflect the towering office blocks of the Docklands area, and so to the Foot Tunnel running under the bend in the river” (Austerlitz 98E, 147–48G).
75.
Wenn Newton gemeint hat, sagte Austerlitz und deutete durch das Fenster hinab auf den im letzten Widerschein des Tages gleißenden Wasserbogen, . . . wenn Newton wirklich gemeint hat, die Zeit sei ein Strom wie die Themse, wo ist dann der Ursprung der Zeit und in welches Meer mündet sie endlich ein? Jeder Strom ist, wie wir wissen, notwendig zu beiden Seiten begrenzt. Was aber wären, so gesehen, die Ufer der Zeit? Wie wären ihre spezifischen Eigenschaften, die etwa denen des Wassers entsprächen, das flüssig ist, ziemlich schwer und durchscheinend? In welcher Weise unterscheiden sich Dinge, die in die Zeit eingetaucht sind, von solchen, die nie berührt wurden von ihr? Was heißt es, daß die Stunden des Lichts und der Dunkelheit im gleichen Kreis angezeigt werden? Warum steht die Zeit an einem Ort ewig still und verrauscht und überstürzt sich an einem andern? Könnte man nicht sagen, sagte Austerlitz, daß die Zeit durch die Jahrhunderte und Jahrtausende selber ungleichzeitig gewesen ist?
(Austerlitz 150–151G)
76.
Und unter all diesen Symbolbildern, sagte Austerlitz, stehe an höchster Stelle die durch Zeiger und Zifferblatt vertretene Zeit. An die zwanzig Meter oberhalb der . . . Treppe . . . befinde sich genau dort, wo im Pantheon in direkter Verlängerung des Portals das Bildnis des Kaisers zu sehen war, die Uhr; als Statthalterin der neuen Omnipotenz rangiere sie noch über dem Wappen des Königs und dem Wahlspruch Eendracht maakt macht. Von dem Zentralpunkt, den das Uhrwerk im Antwerpener Bahnhof einnehme, ließen sich die Bewegungen sämtlicher Reisender überwachen, und umgekehrt müßten die Reisenden alle zu der Uhr aufblicken und seien gezwungen, ihre Handlungsweise auszurichten nach ihr.
(Austerlitz 21–22G)
Earlier, in the Antwerp station, Austerlitz declares the buffet attendant the goddess of past time. Behind her a clock, decoratively one with the insignias of power, performs repeated executions.
And on the wall behind her, under the lion crest of the kingdom of Belgium, there was indeed a mighty clock, the dominating feature of the buffet, with a hand measuring some six feet traveling round a dial which had once been gilded. . . . During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of that hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing after-quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.
(Austerlitz 8–9E, 16–17G)
77. “Es war für mich von Anfang an erstaunlich, wie Austerlitz seine Gedanken beim Reden verfertigte, wie er sozusagen aus der Zerstreutheit heraus die ausgewogensten Sätze entwickeln konnte, und wie für ihn die erzählerische Vermittlung seiner Sachkenntnisse die schrittweise Annäherung an eine Art Metaphysik der Geschichte gewesen ist, in der das Erinnerte noch einmal lebendig wurde” (Austerlitz 22–23G).
78. “Er deutete auf das breite, in der Morgensonne blinkende Wasser hinaus und sprach davon, daß auf einem gegen Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts . . . gemalten Bild die zugefrorene Schelde vom jenseitigen Ufer aus zu sehen sei. . . . und dort draußen auf dem Strom, auf den wir jetzt vierhundert Jahre später hinausblicken, sagte Austerlitz, vergnügen sich die Antwerpener auf dem Eis” (Austerlitz 23–24G).
79.
Im Vordergrund, gegen den rechten Bildrand zu, ist eine Dame zu Fall gekommen. Sie trägt ein kanariengelbes Kleid. . . . Wenn ich nun dort hinausschaue und an dieses Gemälde und seine winzigen Figuren denke, dann kommt es mir vor, als sei der von Lucas van Valckenborch dargestellte Augenblick niemals vergangen, als sei die kanariengelbe Dame gerade jetzt erst gestürzt oder in Ohnmacht gesunken . . . als geschähe das kleine, von den meisten Betrachtern gewiß übersehene Unglück immer wieder von neuem, als höre es nie mehr auf und als sei es durch nichts und von niemandem mehr gutzumachen.
(Austerlitz 24G)
80.
Alle Momente unseres Lebens scheinen mir dann in einem einzigen Raum beisammen, ganz als existierten die zukünftigen Ereignisse bereits und harrten nur darauf, daß wir uns endlich in ihnen einfinden, so wie wir uns, einer einmal angenommenen Einladung folgend zu einer bestimmten Stunde einfinden in einem bestimmten Haus. Und wäre es nicht denkbar, fuhr Austerlitz fort, daß wir auch in der Vergangenheit, in dem, was schon gewesen und größtenteils ausgelöscht ist, Verabredungen haben und dort Orte und Personen aufsuchen müssen, die, quasi jenseits der Zeit, in einem Zusammenhang stehen mit uns?
(Austerlitz 367G)
In another passage time also gives way to space and the promise of the interpenetration of the present and the past. “It does not seem to me, said Austerlitz, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like” (Austerlitz 185E, 269G).
81. See Presner’s beautiful reading of three photographs in relation to this sense of layering: Presner, Mobile Modernity, 279–82.
82.
Manchmal, sagte Lemoine, sagte Austerlitz, sei es ihm als spüre er heroben die Strömung der Zeit um seine Schläfen und seine Stirn, doch wahrscheinlich, setzte er hinzu, ist das nur ein Reflex des Bewußtseins, das sich im Laufe der Jahre in meinem Kopf ausgebildet hat von den verschiedenen Schichten, die dort drunten auf dem Grund der Stadt übereinandergewachsen sind. Auf dem Ödland zwischen dem Rangiergelände der Gare d’Austerlitz und dem Pont Tolbiac, auf dem heute diese Bibliothek sich erhebt, war beispielsweise bis zum Kriegsende ein großes Lager, in dem die Deutschen das gesamte von ihnen aus den Wohnungen der Pariser Juden geholte Beutegut zusammenbrachten.
(Austerlitz 406–10G)
83. Throughout Austerlitz the repeated stratification of time arouses a sense of “disjunction and of having no ground beneath [one’s] feet” (Austerlitz 109E, 161G).
84. This is the title of the 1956 movie by Alain Resnais about the Bibliothèque Nationale: The Complete Memory of the World; see Austerlitz 286E, 404G.
85.
Es war gegen halb vier Uhr nachmittags und die Dämmerung senkte sich herab, als ich die Sternwarte mit Austerlitz verließ. Eine gewisse Zeitlang standen wir noch auf dem ummauerten Vorplatz. Man hörte in der Ferne das dumpfe Mahlen der Stadt und in der Höhe das Dröhnen der großen Maschinen, die in Abständen von kaum mehr als einer Minute sehr niedrig und unglaublich langsam, wie es mir erschien, aus dem Nordosten über Greenwich hereinschwebten und westwärts nach Heathrow hinaus wieder verschwanden.
(Austerlitz 152G)
86.
Und als man diese Paravents . . . im Herbst 1951 oder 1952 entfernte und er zum erstenmal seit zehn Jahren das Kinderzimmer wieder betrat, da, sagte Ashman, hätte nicht viel gefehlt, und er wäre um seinen Verstand gekommen. Beim bloßen Anblick des Eisenbahnzugs mit den Waggons der Great Western Railway und der Arche, aus der paarweise die braven, aus der Flut geretteten Tiere herausschauten, sei es ihm gewesen, als öffne sich vor ihm der Abgrund der Zeit . . . und ehe er auch nur wußte, was er tat, habe er draußen auf dem hinteren Hof gestanden und mehrmals mit seiner Flinte auf das Uhrtürmchen der Remise geschossen.
(Austerlitz 160–61G)
87.
Es war, als sei hier die Zeit, die sonst doch unwiderruflich verrinnt, stehengeblieben, als lägen die Jahre, die wir hinter uns gebracht haben, noch in der Zukunft, und ich entsinne mich, sagte Austerlitz, daß Hilary, als wir mit Ashman in dem Billardzimmer von Iver Grove gestanden sind, eine Bemerkung machte über die sonderbare Verwirrung der Gefühle, die selbst einen Historiker überkämen in einem solchen, vom Fluß der Stunden und Tage und vom Wechsel der Generationen so lange abgeschlossen gewesenen Raum.
(Austerlitz 160G).
88. Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom.
89.
Die gesamte von Heschel auf den Enkel gekommene Hinterlassenschaft besteht aus einem Taschenkalender, einem russischen Ausweispaper, einem abgewetzten Brillenfutteral, in welchem nebst den Brillengläsern, ein verblaßtes, halb schon zerfallenes Fetzchen Seide liegt, und aus einer Studiophotographie, die Heschel zeigt. . . . Sein eines Auge, so wenigstens scheint es auf dem Einband des Buchs, ist verschattet; im anderen kann man, als ein weißes Fleckchen, das Lebenslicht noch erkennen, das erlosch, als Heschel . . . an einem Herzschlag verstarb.
(Austerlitz 419G)
90. They appear both in Austerlitz and elsewhere in Sebald’s writings. See chapters 6 and 7 where one of the eyes of a painted dog lies in shadow.
91. “Yes, there . . . are an incredible number of hidden, obliterated citations,” Sebald says to his interlocutor Walther Krause (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 152), referring to a line borrowed from Büchner’s Woyzeck. And it is here he makes clear the attention he pays to the smallest nuances of linguistic shadings, emphasizing as he does the power of the grammatical error in Büchner’s sentence: “Ja, wenn einer gelehnt steht an den Strom der Zeit.” We already touched upon the role of citation while reading “Air War and Literature” as we thought through the role of the Halberstadt photographer and Sebald’s gesture of closing his texts with a citation.
92.
1941 kamen [die Forts] in deutsche Hand, auch das berüchtigte Fort IX, in dem zeitweise Kommandostellen der Wehrmacht sich einrichteten und wo in den folgenden drei Jahren mehr als dreißigtausend Menschen ums Leben gebracht wurden. . . . Bis in den Mai 1944 hinein, als der Krieg längst verloren war, kamen Transporte aus dem Westen nach Kaunas. Die letzten Nachrichten der in die Verliese der Festung Gesperrten bezeugen es. Nous sommes neuf cents Français schreibt Jacobson, habe einer von ihnen in die kalte Kalkwand des Bunkers geritzt. Andere hinterließen uns bloß ein Datum und eine Ortsangabe mit ihren Namen; Lob, Marcel, de St. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44.
(Austerlitz 421G)
93. See Andrea Köhler, among others: Köhler, “Penetrating the Dark,” 99–100. As we have seen elsewhere, Sebald plays with the coincidence of dates quite often. One of the richest examples is the passage about the narrator’s visit to Michael Hamburger in The Rings of Saturn.
94. Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, 161.
95. As any reader of Sebald knows, the eighteenth of May appears elsewhere in his works—In After Nature see, for example section VII of “Like the snow on the Alps.”
96. It is presumably a question of Adler’s Theresienstadt.
97. Sebald often seems to pigeonhole evil as the highly rational and organized. Here is the longer version of the passage cited earlier: “I saw balance sheets, registers of the dead, lists of every imaginable kind, and endless rows of numbers and figures, which must have served to reassure the administrators that nothing ever escaped their notice. And whenever I think of the museum in Terezín now, said Austerlitz, I see the framed ground plan of the star-shaped fortifications . . . the model of a world developed by reason and regulated in all conceivable respects” (Austerlitz 199, 287–88G).
98. This is so despite the temptation to contrast, for example, the rigidly organized file room at Theresienstadt (Austerlitz 284–85E, 402–3G) and Austerlitz’s office with its endearing professorial helter-skelter (Austerlitz 32E, 51G).
99. “I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwellings built to rectangular grid patterns for the labor force” (Austerlitz 33E, 52G). Still, the description of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, an architectural monstrosity in the style of the capitalist era, also, it seems, suffers from a compulsive sense of disorder (Austerlitz 29–30E, 46–47G).
100. It would be easy enough to try to organize not only text but also images from Austerlitz according to such an order: the different architectural plans, for example, of fortresses—Breendonk (Austerlitz 21E and 24E, 3G and 40G), Saarlouis (Austerlitz 15E, 26G), Theresienstadt (Austerlitz 234–35E, 336–37G)—in contrast to the pixelated images from the slowed-down version of the Theresienstadt film (Austerlitz 248–49E, 354–55G; 251E, 358G). This could be extended in comparisons of such doubles as the blanket of snow-white anemone blooms in Prague to the disturbing image of intertwined roots that precedes it (Austerlitz 163E, 238–39G).
1. “In order to call on [death] the painter had to pass over the border. On the way to the other side. . . .” (“As Day and Night” 86E, 180G).
2. The accident that took Sebald’s life left behind, actually, not one but two shorter projects published in close proximity to the final major work. In their questioning of the relation between the text and what one observes, they are remarkably similar both to Austerlitz and also to one another, yet also at odds with one another. Unerzählt appeared in 2003. Reminiscent of the first images in Austerlitz, thirty-three pairs of eyes by Jan Peter Tripp, who also determined the order of the pages (Köhler, “Penetrating the Dark,” 97), stare out, accompanied by thirty-three brief poems by Sebald, written between 1999 and 2001. An English edition (Sebald and Tripp, Unrecounted) with translations by Michael Hamburger, came out soon thereafter (2004). Shortly before his death in 2001, his collaborative work with Tess Jaray, For Years Now, had been published: Poems by W. G. Sebald, Images by Tess Jaray.
Most of the poems appeared in both volumes. No doubt, they raise once again Sebald’s question—What’s the point of literature?—and raise it more profoundly if we juxtapose the two volumes. The abstract artwork of Jaray might consist of rows of repeated dots or of small marks suggesting woven material or, say, evenly bespeckled rectangles repeated within a larger enclosure. No act of imagination can with any certitude take these out of an abstract field into a scene of representation. We cannot help but link these figures with the flecks and hatch marks of Austerlitz’s world and with the quadrilateral of Browne’s quincunx and the figure of woven cloth in Rings of Saturn. The Tripp volume, however, seems at least to land us squarely in clear-sighted, realistic reproduction, bordering, as Tripp’s work so often does, on the illusion of photographic fidelity. That it is the organ of sight that is figured here has an inescapable irony. One tends to place Tripp’s images on the side of clarity, order, representation in its most seductive form. Sebald’s essay “Like Day and Night” is about this if nothing else. Still, on the cover of Unrecounted the image of Sebald gives us the whole show and unsettles that proclivity: not just his eyes but a full sense of the man, it reveals, as Tripp’s work more rarely does, the strokes and marks of the artist’s hand, perhaps a hatchwork after all.
The two books have this in common: each poem of Sebald alternates with an image produced by the artist. In Unrecounted text and image lie on facing pages, as though to solicit the obvious response. For Years Now presents a more complex pattern: blank page, poem, double-paged image—alternating with a poem facing a single-page image. This purposeful choice of repeated form, first confronting text with an emptiness and then with a visual figure, reminds us there is no steadfast, implicit claim of juxtaposing text with its apparent illustration or image with its apparent textual description. It suggests that the written word may or may not have a counterpart in a more tangible world—and, even when it does, that relation is at best a mystery. A glance at the abstract art in For Years Now could have told us so, though its wit now and again teases with a suggested correlation to the text (“my grandfather’s coffin,” for example, juxtaposed with a light brown shape suggestive of that form). In Unrecounted this is made all the more complex: we strain toward the possibility of linking image and text, a possibility made infinitely richer by the accompanying list: the names of the writers, artists, scraps of pilfered artworks, and even that of Maurice (Moritz), that most loyal of pet dogs, to whom the eyes presumably belong. They are displayed in the table of contents, an excuse to believe text and image purposeful. Still, Andrea Köhler, in the beautiful essay entitled “Penetrating the Dark” (“Die Durchdringung des Dunkels”) that closes the volume, reminds us of Tripp’s and Sebald’s intentions: “their declared aim was that text and image should not explain, let alone illustrate, each other but enter into a dialogue that would leave each his own space for reverberations” (Köhler, “Penetrating the Dark,” 97).
Perhaps the most instructive meditation on those spaces for reverberation is to be found in the translator’s note of Michael Hamburger: it prefaces the English edition of Unrecounted. He casts a veil of uncertainty over the whole project, even as he introduces it, and one feels his sense of shock. A number of the texts in Unrecounted, he warns us from the outset, overlap with those in For Years Now. Moreover, it was Tripp who asked Hamburger to translate (not Sebald). Hamburger speaks guardedly of “enigmas, conflicts and contradictions” (Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 1) in the last years of Sebald’s life that might explain the duplicity of the project. That Hamburger suggests a moral lapse is perhaps understandable, particularly from his own personal point of view. “[Sebald] never so much as mentioned the writing of these miniatures to me and gave me no copy of For Years Now (ibid., 2), he goes on to write. His “total reticence about these texts” (ibid.), “his collaboration with two very different artists,” begins to bespeak a betrayal. “The mere duplication of some of these texts for the two projects is out of character in the Max I knew, scrupulous as he was in all his dealings and so meticulous over the editing of his writings that he spent hundreds of hours on the checking of their English versions” (ibid., 1). That betrayal extends, then, to the question of translation and to its theory as fidelity to an original. “Again, I had to establish for myself that the English versions in For Years Now were done by Sebald himself, with a freedom or latitude I could not allow myself as translator of the German texts. No translator’s name appears” (ibid., 2). Sebald’s translations of his own German originals show a deviation that Hamburger could never have permitted himself. Thus, whereas earlier translation projects always required the careful oversight and approval of the author, now different translated versions of the same German poem are striking in their dissimilarity. The trajectory of the lament goes from (in)fidelity to a friend, to lack of fidelity in translation, and now, in this rather brilliant reflection on to the relation of literature and life, a question of the responsibility of the literary work to its source of inspiration.
What “distinguished Sebald the imaginative writer from Sebald the scholar” was a “freedom from literalness” (ibid., 3). Hamburger himself had noted that in the imprecise account of their meeting described in Rings of Saturn where factual accuracy bows to the demand of “such departures from the source material,” for this is “the very nature of all Sebald’s [imaginative] writings” (ibid., 3). Thus Hamburger claims himself happy “to be a character in [Sebald’s] work of fiction” (ibid., 4). One senses less joy or at least greater puzzlement in the contradictory sense of the seemingly same piece in the two volumes of poetry. In the Tess Jaray volume, “stars . . . guide us / only under / a dark sky” (For Years Now 48), whereas, true to the German text, Hamburger is forced to write “only / in brightest daylight” (ibid., 3). Michael Bates (“Unerzählt”) notes other wild deviations between the volumes. Can night and day be interchangeable?
We expect too much, or is it too little, of a literary text—when we imagine that it might reliably record and explain the world (visualized or lived) or, at the very least, as a translation, echo its textual source. This has much to do with the works that came before and is surely the complex lesson of reading Sebald’s last two volumes side by side. They seem to reprise the clarity of sight in contrast to the flecks and hatch marks that in Austerlitz challenge the narrator’s vision and challenge the sanity of his character. The volumes themselves are no standard-bearers of either view. They come as something of an epitaph or, if not that, they come as what Sebald, writing of Tripp, spoke of as a Hinterlassenschaft, an estate (“As Day and Night” 80E, 174G). He left them behind, though for which inheritors it is difficult to say. Perhaps we have to relinquish, as Sebald goes on to suggest, perhaps we must give up not our will to know but what Sebald spoke of as our all too facile will to know.
3. Logis in einem Landhaus first appeared in 1998 but “Wie Tag und Nacht” was first published in 1993 in Tripp, Die Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten.
4.
Und vorab als Leser entrichte ich darum im Folgenden meinen Tribut an die vorangegangenen Kollegen in Form einiger ausgedehnter und sonst keinen besonderen Anspruch erhebenden Marginalien. Daß am Ende ein Aufsatz steht über einen Maler, das hat auch seine Ordnung, nicht nur weil Jan Peter Tripp und ich eine ziemliche Zeitlang in Oberstdorf in dieselbe Schule gegangen sind und weil Keller und Walser uns beiden gleichviel bedeuten, sondern auch weil ich an seinen Bildern gelernt habe, daß man weit in die Tiefe hineinschauen muß, daß die Kunst ohne das Handwerk nicht auskommt und daß man mit vielen Schwierigkeiten zu rechnen hat beim Aufzählen der Dinge.
(Logis in einem Landhaus 7G)
5. It was Thomas Fries, who, in a superb paper given in Zurich in spring of 2008, made me aware of the strangeness of this phrase, the modesty of Sebald speaking of his own commentary as “marginalia” combined with claiming himself the colleague of such pivotal figures in world literature.
6. Michael Hamburger translates Sebald’s title as “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp” because, as he explains in his translator’s note, as chalk and cheese is the British idiom that would best render the German “wie Tag und Nacht.” The American usage “as different as night and day” is much closer to the German (Hamburger, “Translator’s Note,” 6–7).
7. Sebald, “As Day and Night” and “Wie Tag und Nacht.”
8. “Und das in einen Text (oder in ein Bild) einmontierte Zitat zwingt uns . . . zur Durchsicht unserer Kenntnisse anderer Texte und Bilder und unserer Kenntnisse der Welt. Das wiederum erfordert Zeit. Indem wir sie aufwenden, treten wir ein in die erzählte Zeit und in die Zeit der Kultur” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 184G).
9. A counterpart in this, no doubt, to Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes.
10. Throughout the essay Sebald plays on Erklären and Erklärung (explain and explanation or declaration). The most obvious instance is the German of Déclaration de guerre, Kriegserklärung (186G). We see elsewhere the weight Sebald places on Erklärung. See chapter 7.
11.
Versuchen wir das zuletzt zu zeigen an dem 370 x 220 cm messenden Bild ‘La déclaration de guerre’, auf welchem ein feines Paar Damenschuhe zu sehen ist, das auf einem gekachelten Fußboden steht. Das blaßblau-na-turweiße Ornament der Kacheln, die grauen Linien der Verfugung, das Rautennetz der Bleiverglasung eines Fensters, das vom Sonnenlicht über den mittleren Teil des Bildes gebreitet wird, in welchem die schwarzen Schuhe zwischen zwei Schattenbereichen stehen, all das ergibt zusammen ein geometrisches Muster von einer mit Worten nicht zu beschreibenden Komplexität.
(“Wie Tag und Nacht” 184–85G)
12. We might think of this as well as the struggle between a positive presence of an object (the tile, the shoes) and the absence of an object (the window frames). Those frames leave their mark as shadow, the light they refuse to let pass.
13. “Aus diesem, den Schwierigkeitsgrad der verschiedenen Verhältnisse, Verbindungen und Verstrickungen illustrierenden Muster und dem mysteriösen Paar schwarzer Schuhe entsteht eine Art Bilderrätsel, das der Betrachter, der die Vorgeschichte nicht kennt, kaum wird auflösen können. Welcher Frau haben die Schuhe gehört? Wohin ist sie gekommen? Sind die Schuhe übergegangen in den Besitz eines anderen?” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 185G, emphasis mine).
To be sure, there is the throwaway answer that follows: “Or, ultimately, are they nothing more than the paradigm of that fetish which the painter is forced to make out of everything he produces?” (“As Day and Night” 91E, 185G). But this formal explanation, held onto for a moment, completely disappears.
14.
Zwei Jahre später allerdings rückt der Maler sein Rätselbild ein Stückchen weiter wenigstens in die Öffentlichkeit. In einem Werk von bedeutend kleinerem Format (100 x 145 cm) taucht das große Bild noch einmal auf, nicht bloß als Zitat, sondern als vermittelnder Gegenstand der Darstellung. Es hängt, die oberen zwei Drittel der Leinwand ausfüllend, offenbar jetzt an seinem Platz, und vor ihm, vor der ‚Déclaration de guerre’ sitzt, vom Betrachter abgewandt, seitwärts auf einem weißgepolsterten Mahagonisessel eine flammend rothaarige Frau. Elegant ist sie gekleidet, aber doch jemand, der müd ist am Abend von des Tages Last. Sie hat einen ihrer Schuhe—und es sind dieselben, die sie betrachtet auf dem großen Bild—ausgezogen.
(“Wie Tag und Nacht” 185–86G)
15. “Das photographische Bild verwandelt die Wirklichkeit in eine Tautologie. . . . Roland Barthes sah in dem inzwischen omnipräsenten Mann mit der Kamera einen Agenten des Todes und in den Photographien so etwas wie Relikte des fortwährend absterbenden Lebens” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 178G).
16. All this assumes, of course, that the woman’s shoes were the source for Tripp’s first painting, its prehistory. Ultimately, can one say that this is the case? The painting of the two shoes, after all, preexisted the painting that incorporates it. Both are paintings. Perhaps the woman is the result of the pair of shoes; that is, she is their pretext.
17. “Ursprünglich, so habe ich mir sagen lassen, hat sie diesen ausgezogenen Schuh in der linken Hand gehalten, dann war er rechts neben dem Sessel am Boden gelegen, und schließlich war er ganz verschwunden” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 186G)
18. “Die Frau mit dem einen Schuh, mit sich und der rätselhaften Kriegserklärung allein, allein bis auf den treuen Hund an ihrer Seite, der sich freilich nicht interessiert für die gemalten Schuhe, sondern gerade herausschaut aus dem Bild und uns in die Augen . . .” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 186G).
The dog is not true to the painted shoes—in the Déclaration de guerre. True to what, then? Not her. He looks at us. Nor is there any obvious sign of marriage (whose fidelity the dog might be a symbol of) as in van Eyck’s painting of Arnolfini and his Giovanna Cenami.
19. “Inzwischen ist er unterwegs gewesen und hat eine Art Holzsandale herbeigebracht, aus dem 15. Jahrhundert beziehungsweise aus dem in der Londoner Nationalgalerie hängenden Hochzeitsbild, das Jan van Eyck 1434 . . . gemalt hat” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 186–87G, emphasis mine).
20.
[Der Hund] hat eine Art Holzsandale herbeigebracht, aus dem 15. Jahrhundert beziehungsweise aus dem in der Londoner Nationalgalerie hängenden Hochzeitsbild, das Jan van Eyck 1434 für Giovanni Arnolfini und die ihm in morganatischer Ehe ‚zur linken Hand’ angetraute Giovanna Cenami gemalt hat zum Zeichen seiner Zeugenschaft. Johannes de Eyck hic fuit heißt es auf dem Rahmen des Rundspiegels, in dem die Szene auf Miniaturformat reduziert von rückwärts noch einmal zu sehen ist. Im Vordergrund, nahe dem linken unteren Bildrand, liegt die hölzerne Sandale, dieses seltsame Beweisstück, neben einem kleinen Hündchen, das in die Komposition hineingeraten ist wahrscheinlich als ein Symbol ehelicher Treue.
(“Wie Tag und Nacht” 187G)
21. Could this be a case of those divergences and differences that distinguish art from photography of which Sebald spoke earlier in the essay (“As Day and Night” 84–85E, 178–79G)?
22. In an interview of 1993, the same year that the essay on Tripp was first published, Sebald made the following remark, which suggests that the citation of van Eyck by Tripp is also metaphorical for his own work.
Moreover, in the case of painters, for example, to my mind, it is a long cultivated virtue that they refer to one another in their works, that they take over themes from a colleague in their own work as a gesture, so to speak, of reverence. And that is something that I also enjoy doing as a writer.
Außerdem ist es bei den Malern zum Beispiel eine seit langem gepflogene Tugend, meines Erachtens, daß sie sich in ihren Werken aufeinander beziehen, daß sie Motive aus dem einen Werk eines Kollegen in das eigene Werk übernehmen, sozusagen als Geste der Ehrerbietung. Und das ist etwas, was ich also auch sehr gerne mache als Schreibender.
(“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 97–98)
23. It is a double gaze of left and right eyes similar to that of the narrator in Austerlitz.
24. “Aufmerksam ist sein linkes (domestiziertes) Auge auf uns gerichtet; das rechte (wilde) hat um eine Spur weniger Licht, wirkt abseitig und fremd. Und doch fühlen wir uns gerade von diesem überschatteten Auge durchschaut” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 188G).
25. The English translation has the odd but interesting choice of “unrelatedly” here.
26. “Die nature morte ist bei Tripp . . . das Paradigma unserer Hinterlassenschaft. An ihr geht uns auf, was Maurice Merleau-Ponty . . . den ‘regard pré-humain’ genannt hat, denn umgekehrt sind in solcher Malerei die Rollen des Betrachters und des betrachteten Gegenstands. Schauend gibt der Maler unser allzu leichtfertiges Wissen auf; unverwandt blicken die Dinge zu uns herüber. ‘Action et passion si peu discernable . . . qu’on ne sait plus qui voit et qui est vu, qui peint et qui est peint’” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 174G).
27. “Bedenkenswert daran scheint mir einzig . . . die . . . Vermutung, wonach die inhärente Qualität eines Bildes von Tripp, gerade in Anbetracht seiner, wie man meinen könnte, rein objektiven und affirmativen Beschaffenheit, sich wahrscheinlich nicht bestimmen läßt in der von allen Betrachtern unfehlbar bewunderten Identität mit der Wirklichkeit (oder ihrem photographischen Abzug), sondern in den weit weniger offensichtlichen Punkten der Abweichung und Differenz” (“Wie Tag und Nacht” 178G).
The almost identical phrase, but in the plural, “divergences and differences,” appears a page later.
7. A Critical Eye
1. It is Austerlitz who speaks of the possibility “that all moments of our life occupy the same space” (Austerlitz, 257E, 363G) or even that time does not exist at all, only various interlocking spaces (Austerlitz 185E, 265G). The narrator of After Nature tells us that figures in paintings step out of their frames to enter our world five centuries later, a jumping of centuries that the narrator of Vertigo also invokes. But for Sebald, whose literary activity spanned a scant decade and a half, justifications for reading his works side by side are perhaps in any case not necessary.
2. Several volumes of his interviews have been published: “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” and Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory.
3. Talking with Andreas Isenschmid in 1990 about Vertigo, Sebald explains that the sections on Stendhal and Kafka were those he wrote first.
SEBALD: Ja, ja. Those were the first two, because as a writer literature was not my point of departure, rather, actually, literary criticism.
ISENSCHMID: Because you are a professor of German literature, as I might say once more.
SEBALD: And, given that, I have naturally certain reservations about setting out to fabricate, as you can probably imagine. That’s a certain form of cheating and an absolutely unscientific procedure which one shrinks away from. Thus to begin with I wrote these two first texts, Kafka and Stendhal (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 64).
4. One need only read his scathing assessment of Kafka criticism. With a vituperative attack on the travesties of both scholarly endeavor and theory, he praises exclusively those critics who “[keep] to the facts alone and [refuse] to indulge in attempts at elucidation [Erklärung]” or the “fatal inclination to speculate about meaning [Bedeutung]” (“Kafka Goes to the Movies” 153–54E, 195–96G). What counts is “reconstructing a portrait of the author in his own time” (“Kafka Goes to the Movies” 154E, 196G). The remarkable, lengthy passage is cited below. How is it possible that the author could have written the lines that follow, around the same time as Schwindel. Gefühle., a volume in which lengthy sections are devoted to both Stendhal and Kafka and in which the reading is hardly, simply, sachlich, realistic, matter-of-fact, objective? One might say the same for Sebald’s writings on Matthaeus Grünewald in After Nature or Rembrandt in Rings of Saturn, not to mention Jan Peter Tripp, in which what we encounter is hardly criticism by way of reconstruction of a portrait of the author or painter. Still, this limited concept of the role of the critic is one that is always at play in Se bald’s work.
Unlike the general run of German critics, whose plodding studies regularly become a travesty of scholarship, and unlike the manufacturers of literary theory applying their astute minds to the difficulty of Kafka, Hanns Zischler confines himself to a restrained commentary which never tries to go beyond its particular subject. It is this restraint, keeping to the facts alone and refusing to indulge in attempts at elucidation, that we can now see, looking back, distinguishes the best of Kafka scholars. Today, if you pick up one of the many Kafka studies to have appeared since the 1950s, it is almost incredible to observe how much dust and mold have already accumulated on these secondary works, inspired as they are by the theories of existentialism, theology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, reception aesthetics, or system criticism, and how unrewarding is the redundant verbiage on every page. Now and then, of course, you do find something different, for the conscientious and patient work of editors and factual commentators is in marked contrast to the chaff ground out in the mills of academia. To me at least—and I cannot claim to be entirely innocent of the fatal inclination to speculate about meanings—[those who] have concentrated mainly on reconstructing a portrait of the author in his own time, have made a greater contribution to elucidating the texts than those exegetes who dig around in them unscrupulously and often shamelessly.
(“Kafka goes to the Movies” 153–54E, 195–96G)
One might look to a text like Judith Ryan’s The Novel After Theory as a response to this. Ryan carefully and expressly sidesteps the notion of “mechanical translations of a theoretical model into the fictional mode” (ibid., 7) or the crass application of theory to the literary text. What she is after, rather, is to “show how novelists themselves engage with theory” (ibid., 5). She does this elegantly and convincingly as she reads Sebald’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari. The irony of Sebald’s invective against theory in relation to Kafka is Ryan’s revelation about Sebald’s interest in those same theorists: “It is not clear to what extent Sebald knew other publications by the two theorists; the Kafka book is the only one of their works included among volumes from his private library currently housed in Marbach. He read and marked the Kafka book intensively. Careful study of his annotations reveals . . . how closely he read the book” (ibid.).
I would like to believe that the beautifully written and constructed essay by Mary Jacobus entitled “Pastoral, After History” might have escaped Sebald’s cynicism about literary criticism. It is an essay that floats among Rilke, Michael Hamburger, Sebald’s imaginary Michael Hamburger, Seamus Heaney’s translations, Hoffmannsthal, Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger, and much else as well. She touches upon a number of Sebald’s works, and one comes away feeling all the wiser (Jacobus, Romantic Things, 36–56).
5. See also Sebald’s conversation with Joseph Cuomo in which he compares his own “form of unsystematic searching” with “the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field” (Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” 94).
6. On the relation between the photograph and verification that seems to convince people, the photo and a legitimization of the story, see Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” 41.
7. Walkowitz, in Cosmopolitan Style, puts it this way: “And, second, there is the effort to generate, instead of judgment and order, an ethos of embodied uncertainty that is sometimes at odds with political action and the affects of critical theory” (169).
8. To conceive the function of photographs in Sebald simply as occupying two possible, polar positions—either as document or as falsification—is, of course, a blatant error, as this essay will go on to say. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (The Generation of Postmemory) takes us a long way in understanding the complexity of reading photographs. Her exceptional analysis of images in Sebald’s Austerlitz in relation to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (and these in relation to Roland Barthes) proves just how rich and problematic the uncertainty of images might be.
9. Speaking to Eleanor Wachtel of The Emigrants, Sebald says: “It’s a form of prose fiction . . . dialogue plays hardly any part in it at all. Everything is related round various corners in a periscopic sort of way. In that sense it doesn’t conform to the patterns that standard fiction has established. There isn’t an authorial narrator. And there are various limitations of this kind that seem to push the book into a special category. But what exactly to call it, I don’t know” (Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” 37). Later in the conversation Sebald calls it “a work of documentary fiction” (ibid., 39).
10. It is of course Kluge whom Sebald takes as his model for a “legitimate intellectual coming to terms with this German past.” “This same getting closer to the past . . . is much clearer in the case of Alexander Kluge who has always been a model author for me, whose work about the German past I value very very highly and which in my estimation demonstrates the only line of a legitimate intellectual coming to terms with this German past” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 257).
11. It is worth returning to Austerlitz’s account of his work in the Bibliothèque Nationale through regressive layers of footnotes: they move him from factual descriptions of reality to “the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications” (Austerlitz 260E).
12. We saw this in the ambiguities of works signed with different signatures; in the suggestion that Mathis Nithard and Matthaeus Grünewald might well have been one and the same; in a young Jewess who might at first have fallen in love with his “green-colored name”; and in Sebald’s play with the fragments of the last name, grün, Wald, once the artist’s end is in sight.
13. As they were in the diatribe against academic literary criticism in the essay “Kafka Goes to the Movies” (“Kafka im Kino”).
14. For a rather remarkable and productive meditation on genre in Sebald’s work, see Kilbourn, “The Question of Genre in Sebald’s Prose.”
15. Is it worth noting that Sebald writes the essay in 1993—just in the midst of his years of literary production? He wrote the first part of After Nature in 1986 and published Austerlitz in 2001.
16. There are elements of literary criticism in many of Sebald’s works. Sebald says this himself with respect to the sections on Stendhal and Kafka in Vertigo. But we also find descriptions of literary and art works in After Nature, in Vertigo, in “Air War and Literature,” and in Rings of Saturn as the narrator speaks of Rembrandt’s famous painting, of Browne’s Garden of Cyrus, and of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and various postwar writers.
17. In Rings of Saturn Baldanders also offered a puzzle, the text whose solution was readable by the selection of the first and last letter of each word. The answer to the puzzle, of course, is an ironic commentary on the desire to solve the puzzle in the first place.
18. This is similar to the shift in Austerlitz from the As of Novelli, from the impaired vision of the narrator and the hatch marks that pervade the text, to the recovered memories of the prose fiction’s unproblematic narrative in its central pages.
19. One needs to think this confrontation of Tripp’s dog with the spectator in relation to the role of the photograph throughout Sebald’s work. Over and over images speak to and compel the observer. In a 1997 conversation with Christian Scholz, Sebald put it this way. “Yes, but in the dead hours of the day I have rummaged about in such a box. Doing that it has always struck me that an enormous call goes out from these pictures; a demand directed at the observer to tell or imagine to himself what one might be able to narrate taking these pictures as a point of departure” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 165).
It is not only that the images call on the observer to stand apart and tell of them, leaving her untouched; the images call us as well into their world. We saw this especially in The Emigrants. “This feeling I always have with photographs, that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this enormous way so to speak lure him out of the real world into an unreal world, that is into a world in which one doesn’t exactly know how it is constituted, of which one however suspects that it exists” (“Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis” 167).
20. This, too, of course, is something of a tale, since, in actuality, the “domesticated eye” looks askance and not directly at the spectator.
21. Like the right eye of the narrator in Austerlitz who is plagued with a menacing crosshatching.
22. The essay on Tripp was first published in 1993, The Emigrants in 1992.
23. The boundary between the observer and the object observed, which often appears as a pane of glass, but not always, is also challenged throughout Sebald’s work. Sometimes that challenge comes with a sense of benign wonder, as in the opening lines of After Nature.
Foremost at the picture’s edge he stands
above the world by a hand’s breadth
and is about to step over the frame’s
threshold. Georgius Miles. . . .
(After Nature 5E, 7G)
Sometimes crossing that boundary is associated with an ominous threat, as in The Emigrants when Cosmo retells the scene from the film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler in which a caravan passes from the mirage of an oasis on stage out into the audience. Sometimes it comes in a moment of surprise, as when the glass slide cracks at Henry Selwyn’s slide show. This in turn echoes the “slight crack” in the image “Ein leiser Sprung” (1974), cited in the Tripp essay.
24. Cuomo, “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” 99.
25. Breaking the frame is rather what is called for: in the opening lines of After Nature, in the slide show in The Emigrants, in the travels of Tripp’s dog in Déjà vu or the Incident, not to mention all the variations on the frame in Rings of Saturn.