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

In the Paul Bereyter story, for example, there are echoes of Wittgenstein in his period as a schoolteacher in Austria: the whistling, for instance, or, on the one hand, sacrificing himself to these peasant children and, on the other hand, feeling abhorrence for them. My schoolteacher did remind me of Wittgenstein; he had the same moral radicalism. But these details in the story come from Wittgenstein.

CA: And Ferber?

WGS: Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber’s escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D.’s. The second model is a well-known artist.

HE SPEAKS AS QUIETLYas ever, but I suddenly feel slightly dizzy. “Which of the two, then,” I ask, “is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?” He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, “Neither.”

“Ninety percent of the photographs are genuine,” he adds quickly, like someone throwing a life belt to a drowning man. But that leaves 10 percent which aren’t. . And what about the other “documents?” The message on Adelwarth’s visiting card, for example—“Have gone to Ithaca”? He went to Ithaca, all right; but Sebald wrote that too. And Ambros’s travel diary? Sebald wrote about half of it.

This is the answer to my question, then: The Emigrants is fiction. And the photographs and documents are part of the fiction. It’s a sophisticated undertaking, and perhaps a dangerous one, given its subject. But I agree with Sebald that novelizing the Holocaust (“a quick chapter about Auschwitz, then back to the love interest again”) is much worse. If literature can be made of this subject, it must be like this, solidly grounded in the real world. Besides, he himself has more doubts than anyone, which he expresses in Max Ferber. (“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.”)

So the reader does not need defending. He may feel a bit dizzy, like me, but that is a small price to pay for the elation of reading an extraordinary book. But I do have one doubt left: what about its models?

WGS: Yes, this whole business of usurping someone else’s life bothers me. And of course I’m never certain I haven’t committed errors of tact, of judgment, of style. . But — unless they’re dead — I ask them. I show them what I’ve written before I publish it; and if anyone objects, I don’t do it. In this way, for example, D. endorsed my use of his story and also of his aunt’s autobiography, which he had given me, and which I used for Max Ferber’s mother. In the case of the lady at Yverdon [who tells the narrator about the later years of Paul Bereyter], it was more complicated. It took me a long time to convince her that what I was up to was actually all right.

CA: Has anyone ever objected?

WGS: Yes, the artist who was the other model for Max Ferber did.

CA: But you still used him?

WGS: I changed his name from the German version, where it was quite close to the original, to something completely different. He doesn’t want any publicity whatsoever, and I respect that. On the other hand, he is a public figure, and I got all my information about him from published sources, mostly from a huge tome about him by an American. If one is describing a creative process, one must be able to use material of this sort.

CA: It’s the combining of the two stories that’s the problem. I can just see people recognizing the artist and then believing that this is his life story forever after.

WGS: Exactly. So one has to be very careful.

I TRY TO PRESS HIMon this. But all he says is: “I think the vast majority of factual and personal detail that I use is very viable.” At first I wonder if “viable” isn’t a fudge word, used (perhaps unconsciously) to evade. But then I realize that he means it quite precisely. He simply isn’t thinking any longer of the effect of his book on his models, no matter how hard I try to make him do so. He’s just thinking of his book.

As we stroll back across the grass, I reflect that it could hardly be otherwise. If he didn’t put his writing first, The Emigrants wouldn’t be the great work of art it is. Curiously, the final proof of this for me is not a photograph, but the absence of one. The book ends with a description of three young women sitting at a carpet loom in the Lodz ghetto in 1940 , weaving literally (but as we know, in vain) to save their lives. I am convinced that I have seen their photograph on the last page; I remember the loom, their hands, their faces. But it isn’t there.

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I’m honored to have as my guest W. G. Sebald, the author of some of the most important prose writing of the century, including the novels Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn , and now, Austerlitz . The prose has the breaths and cadences of poetry, and I wanted to begin by asking, were you influenced by German poetry?

W. G. SEBALD: No, not at all by German poetry. The influence came, if from anywhere, from nineteenth-century German prose writing, which also has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say, social background or plot in any manifest sense. And this nineteenth-century German prose writing even at the time was very provincial. It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning. But it’s always been very close to me, not least because the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from. Adelbert Stifter in Austria. Gottfried Keller in Switzerland. They are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieved a very, very high intensity in their prose. One can see that for them it’s never a question of getting to the next

Bookworm interview, KCRW, Santa Monica, CA, December 6, 2001.

phase of the plot, but that they devote a great deal of care and attention to each individual page, very much the way a poet has to do.

What they all have in common is this precedence of the carefully composed page of prose over the mechanisms of the novel such as dominated fiction writing elsewhere, in France and in England, notably, at that time.

MS: When I started reading The Emigrants I was thrilled to encounter a kind of sentence that I had thought people had stopped being able to write, and I felt great relief at its gravity, its melancholy, but also its playfulness, its generosity. How did you find the way to reinvent such a sentence? It’s not of this time.

WGS: It’s not of this time. There are hypotactical syntax forms in these sentences which have been abandoned by practically all the writers now for reasons of convenience. Also because simply they are no longer accustomed to it. But if you dip into any form of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century discursive prose — the English essayists, for instance — these forms exist in previous ages of literature and they simply have fallen into disrepair.

MS: The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favorite of the English essayists, de Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one center of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts. This I think is among the loveliest qualities, especially in the new book, Austerlitz .

WGS: Well, certainly, moving from one subject, from one theme, from one concern to another always requires some kind of sleight of hand.