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

CA: How do you feel about Germany now?

WGS: I still suffer from homesickness, of course. I take the train from Munich, and it turns the corner southwards, near Kempten, and I feel. . and then as soon as I get out of the railway station I want to go back. I can’t stand the sight of it. Nothing much has changed. They still have some pretty strange attitudes. You stand in Munich Pasing S-Bahn station at night, for instance, and some tramp rummages around in a bin. And some other chap who’s just come from work goes up to him and says, “You don’t do that here, you know. You ought to get a proper job.” There’s a lot of that about. And then there’s all the rest of it.

I went to a Jewish cemetery not long ago, in a small town near Freiburg with a mill, straight out of the Brothers Grimm. There’s this German forest and amongst it the Jewish graves. There’s no one there, hardly anyone comes to visit. But at the bottom there’s a camping site, where people come in the summer to grill their sausages and drink their beer. And there’s a notice which says that visitors to the cemetery are not permitted to enter the camping site. Not the other way around.

WE LAUGH,as there doesn’t seem much else to do. Then he tells me about his previous book [ Vertigo ], in the last part of which the narrator returns to the village where he grew up “and remembers many things.”

WGS: I thought I’d done it as discreetly as possible. But my mother was mortified to read details about families in our village. And ever since then she’s never gone back. Wertach is here [he puts his cigarettes on the table], and here’s Sonthofen [his matches]. There’s a mountain between them [his coffee cup], and you have to travel around it. [He draws a semicircle around the mountain with his finger.] It takes forty-five minutes by bicycle.

Occasionally she meets someone from Wertach who’s come to shop in Sonthofen, and if they don’t mention anything she’s reassured. She’s like so many people in that country — the most important thing is that your neighbors mustn’t think badly of you. There’s nothing you could describe as civilian courage. It just isn’t there. My mother couldn’t say: “This is my son. He’s now fifty-two years old, and he can do what he likes.” That would be completely impossible for her.

HE CAN TELL ME THIS,I think, because his mother will never read The Jewish Quarterly . Or his father, or anyone else from Wertach or Sonthofen. The cemetery and the camping site are separate worlds in his life too; he alone moves between them.

CA: And yet, though you’ve lived in England for thirty years, you still write in German.

WGS: I hardly knew any English at all when I came to Britain, and I am not a very talented linguist. I still have quite bad days even now, when I feel that I am a barbaric stutterer. But that’s not the main reason. I am attached to that language. And there’s a further dimension, I think. If you have grown up in the kind of environment I grew up in, you can’t put it aside just like that. In theory I could have had a British passport years ago. But I was born into a particular historical context, and I don’t really have an option.

THE MOUNTAIN BETWEENWertach and Sonthofen has no coffee left in it, and outside, the gray Norfolk clouds have thinned. So we decide to talk about The Emigrants under the trees. The book is full of plants and trees. Nature is a second victim it celebrates, after the Jews.

WGS: The Emigrants started from a phone call I got from my mother, telling me that my schoolteacher in Sonthofen had committed suicide. This wasn’t very long after Jean Améry’s suicide, and I had been working on Améry. A sort of constellation emerged about this business of surviving and about the great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you. I began to understand vaguely what this was all about, in the case of my schoolteacher. And that triggered all the other memories I had.

CA: So the schoolteacher in the second story, Paul Bereyter, and all the others, too, were real people? And these are their real stories?

WGS: Essentially, yes, with some small changes. . Dr. Henry Selwyn, for instance, lived in that house, not in Hingham, but in another village in Norfolk. His wife was just like that, Swiss and very shrewd. She’s still alive, I think, and so is Elaine, their most peculiar maid. Dr. Selwyn and his wife lived a smart county life for years. Terribly well spoken, he was, terribly well spoken. . he told me about Grodno, sooner than I say in the story, but very cursorily. The first time I thought, this is not a straight English gentleman , was at a Christmas party they gave. There was this huge living room and a blazing fire, and one very incongruous lady. Dr. Selwyn introduced her as his sister from Tel Aviv. And of course then I knew.

CA: What about Dr. Selwyn’s friend, the mountain guide Johannes Naegeli, and the extraordinary coincidence of your finding that article on a train, about the glacier releasing his body seventy-two years later? It’s such a perfect image of the whole book—“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”

WGS: Dr. Selwyn told me about his time in Switzerland before the First World War, about his friendship with a Swiss mountain guide, and how much it had meant to him. Later I couldn’t recall the name he’d mentioned, or if he’d mentioned any name at all. Nor did he say that his friend had disappeared. But I did find that article on a train, just when I was starting to write the story. A mountain guide, in the same year, in the same place. . It just needed a tiny little rapprochement to make it fit.

CA: Was Ambros Adelwarth, the subject of the third story, really your great-uncle?

WGS: Yes, absolutely. That wasn’t his name, of course.

CA: What was behind Adelwarth’s despair? Was it his homosexuality?

WGS: His story began with a photograph. When I was in the United States in 1981 I went to see my aunt, and we sat and looked at her photograph albums. You know how it is with family photos — usually you’ve seen them all before. But there’s always one you haven’t. And the photograph of Uncle Adelwarth in his Arab costume was one of those. I had known about this uncle, I’d met him as a boy, but he had never made any sense to me. Now, as soon as I saw that picture, I knew the whole story. . In a Catholic family that all gets repressed. It isn’t even ignored — it’s not seen, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t fit in anywhere at all.

CA: There’s also a diary in “Ambros Adelwarth,” which is itself photographed. Did your great-uncle really keep a diary?

WGS: Yes, in several languages.

CA: I know. You can just make out one of the entries, and it’s in English.

WGS: Ah. That, however, is falsification. I wrote it. What matters is all true. The big events — the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance — you might think those were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l’effet du réel .

CA: Or to provide a linking image, like the one of Nabokov?

WGS: I don’t know that Ambros saw Nabokov in Ithaca, but it’s entirely plausible. He lived there for ten or fifteen years. Everyone in Ithaca saw him at one time or another, with his butterfly net.

CA: But what about Max Ferber’s mother meeting him in Bad Kissingen in 1910? Did you actually find that in her diary?

WGS: That’s an episode from Speak, Memory . When I came across it I’d already read the memoir on which the diary is based, and in which there’s a Sunday-afternoon excursion in the country. What you need is just a tiny little shift to make it match up. I think that’s allowed. There are always elements that stray in from elsewhere. I take this to be a good sign. If you are traveling along a road and things come in from the sides to offer themselves, then you’re going in the right direction. If nothing comes, you are barking up the wrong tree.