W. Sebald - The Emergence of Memory - Conversations with W.G. Sebald

Who is W. G. Sebald? I had just read a book called The Emigrants , and that’s all I wanted to know. The Emigrants contains four stories of exile from Germany. Each is longer and fuller than the last but still as coldly, heart-stoppingly clear, like a lake that keeps getting deeper and darker, but you can still see right down to the bottom. The first and last of the emigrants — the narrator learns slowly and painfully over many years — are Jews; the second is one-quarter Jewish. The third doesn’t seem to be Jewish at all, yet his history is deeply interwoven with that of Jewish émigrés; in fact, in his story, the Jewish themes are strongest of all. The Emigrants is about many universal issues: time, memory, art, loss. But its main subject is the tragedy of the Jews and Germany.

It is one of the most hermetically sealed, yet one of the most open-ended works of art I have ever encountered. The four stories reflect each other like a hall of mirrors. Certain dates, like the summer of 1913, obsessively recur. There are beheadings in two stories and hermits in three. Most striking of all, Vladimir Nabokov appears in all four: sometimes as man, sometimes as boy, harbinger now of death and now of joy, but always carrying his butterfly net and evoking the great pursuit of his

Originally appeared in The Jewish Quarterly , Winter 1996-97.

autobiography, Speak, Memory . At the same time The Emigrants is fully, firmly grounded in reality. All four stories are illustrated with photographs from their subjects’ albums. And large parts of the last two stories are taken up with extracts from people’s diaries — which nonetheless contain some of the book’s most beautiful writing and one of Nabokov’s appearances.

What is going on? This is the opposite of a tricky, self-conscious, postmodern novel. It is exquisitely written; but it is modest and quiet and does not draw attention to itself at all. And yet this book raises the question of its own status more vividly, more directly, than any frivolous literary game. It doesn’t matter historically. Only crazy people doubt the Holocaust happened, and puzzles about two or three survivors’ stories cannot alter that. But if I have no historical questions about The Emigrants , I do have literary ones and personal ones. Is it fact or fiction? How did Vladimir Nabokov get into all the stories, even into Max Ferber’s mother’s diary? And who is W. G. Sebald?

It says on his door that he is professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. The man who opens it looks more English than German. He has also changed his name. It was Winfried Georg Maximilian; now it’s Max. When we start to talk, however, a German intellectual — even a Munich intellectual — of the 1960s emerges: liberal, anticlerical, defining himself against the past. He still has his soft south German accent, too. I start by asking him about his antifascism, and in particular about his identification with the Jewish tragedy. How did that start? Not at home or at school, he says, with an ironic smile. Like all Germans of his generation, he was shown a film about the concentration camps at school, but hurriedly, without explanation. “I didn’t know what to make of it at all.”

W. G. SEBALD: I could easily say now that even as a boy I felt uncomfortable in that country. But whilst I was at school I didn’t think about it. I had my mates, my girlfriends, I went swimming and riding in the summer. . it took the first separation from home to change anything. When I went to the University of Freiburg to read German literature, I couldn’t get anything out of the teachers there. It was totally impossible, because they all belonged to that generation. They’d all done their doctorates in the 1930s and 1940s. And of course they were all democrats. Except that it later emerged that they were all ardent supporters of the regime in one way or another. . There was something completely disingenuous about the whole setup of the humanities in the universities at that time, and I didn’t like it at all. When I’d graduated, I remembered that there were such things as language assistantships in universities abroad. So I blindly applied to various places in this country and got my job in Manchester.

IN MANCHESTER,Sebald ended up renting a room from D., a Jewish refugee from Munich. This was quite by accident—“I met his wife in a greengrocer’s.” Although she said, “You know, D. is actually from Munich,” the two exiles never talked about what had made them both, in their different ways, leave Germany.

WGS: People like Peter Weiss and Wolfgang Hildesheim were starting to write then, and I was beginning to think about these things. And yet, when I was confronted by them in reality, it was a different matter. There was a sort of shyness, a sort of paralysis on both sides. It has taken all these twenty or thirty years for the paralysis to fade. In one sense I regret it, because Withington and Didsbury were full of German and Austrian Jews, whom I could have talked to. But in another sense I don’t, because I would certainly have said all the wrong things then. I think I might even say all the wrong things now.

HE SMILES—not his ironic smile, but an open, very charming one, and suddenly his face changes completely. I think that he still has the shyness and reserve he had with D., and that he mostly keeps his face a blank in case it, too, might say the wrong thing.

He studied Carl Sternheim for his M.A., and Alfred Döblin for his Ph.D., both writers with troubled relationships to their Jewishness. Later he taught Austrian literature — which is practically a history of assimilation, with writers like Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus. Of course. I’m not surprised that this shy, clever man should make this most difficult journey in books.

But I can’t leave him there. Although I feel the same shyness, the same paralysis, come over me, I clear my throat and ask, “What about your family? They weren’t madly opposed to the whole thing?”

WGS: Oh no, they weren’t opposed. I come from a very conventional, Catholic, anti-Communist background. The kind of semi-working-class, petit bourgeois background typical of those who supported the fascist regime, who went into the war not just blindly, but with a degree of enthusiasm. They all fell up the ladder in no time at all, and until 1941 they all felt they were going to be lords of the world. Absolutely, there’s no doubt about it, though nobody ever says it now. My father was in the Polish campaign, and he must have seen a thing or two. . His unit was camped out in the woods behind the Polish border, perhaps eight weeks before it all started. It’s all in our family albums. The first photos have a boy-scout atmosphere — they’re all sitting outside their tents mending their shirts, and underneath there are jokey captions like “Who needs women?” Then the order came, and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead, razed to the ground, with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child. It was only later. . I only go home once a year, for two days, and I look at them now, and I think, “Good Lord, what is all this?”

CAROLE ANGIER: Can you talk to your parents about it?

WGS: Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five. . it’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds. I always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration — it’s the same thing. But they cannot understand that.