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

Then later on when I started at the university in 1964, ’65, for the first time these issues became public, in the sense that newspapers wrote about it a great deal. There was the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which went on for a long period of time, well over a year, and where there were daily full-page reports about these things. And I remember reading those reports every day and being absolutely astonished at the details that came out of them. Nevertheless, despite my interest, unavoidable interest in these questions, I couldn’t really imagine it at all; it was some form of abstraction; there were large numbers and you didn’t know who these people really were. Because it is inconceivable of course in this country somehow that there is in the heart of Europe a country where there aren’t any Jewish people. Or scarcely. There are some now, small growing communities again. In the 1960s you grew up there for twenty years and you never bumped into a Jewish person, so you didn’t know who they were. Just some kind of phantom image of them. And so I go to Manchester. I didn’t know anything about England nor about Manchester nor about its history or anything at all. And there they were all around me, because Manchester has a very large Jewish community, and very concentrated in certain suburbs, and the place where I lived was full of Jewish people. And my landlord was Jewish. I didn’t talk to him about that nor did he talk to me about it either. We all avoided the subject. Until his wife, who was a good Englishwoman, once told me, well, do you know, Peter is actually from Munich? And I didn’t know what I should do with this piece of information. But eventually, twenty years later, I went back and talked to him about it. And this is when all these things came out. And it turns out that as a small boy he was skiing in the same places where I went skiing. That somehow then sets you thinking. It’s the reality of it. That he left traces in the snow on the same hills. These are different kinds of history lessons. They’re not in the history books.

JC: When you were at university, I think you said somewhere that it was a very disturbing experience because most of the professors had gotten their jobs during the brown-shirt era, so there was a conspiracy of silence even there.

WGS: It’s certainly true. I went to university in ’63 from this place where I had grown up, which I had really never left before. I didn’t really know Germany. At any rate, I went to Freiburg, which was pretty much the nearest place where you could study. And I had a sense of discomfort there all the time, but I didn’t quite know why. It was simply that conditions for studying weren’t very good, so I decided to go to Switzerland, where it was much easier to get into libraries and the numbers of students were smaller and so on. I really left Germany for practical reasons in the first instance. It’s in retrospect that I seem to think — and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s true— that I did have a sense of discomfort about the whole thing. The humanities were particularly compromised. The law profession as well, practically all. . But certainly these people had all got their stars, as it were, in the thirties and forties. And if you then, as I have done subsequently, looked at what their Ph.D.’s were about, your hair stood on end. It really was a very unpleasant spectacle. Nobody mentioned it, but there was a very deeply ingrained authoritarianism, and as I have, I think, somewhere an anarchist streak in me, I couldn’t really put up with that.

JC: Do you think that’s why you didn’t go back once you left?

WGS: There were a number of reasons, but that certainly was one of them. Because obviously once you had been in England for a number of years you could see a difference in attitude. Ideology didn’t matter in England. You had colleagues who were extreme trade unionists and others who were Church of England all day long, and they all worked together and tolerated each other. But in Germany after the students’ rebellion in the late sixties, early seventies, well, if you had leftish tendencies you could do a Ph.D. only in Frankfurt, Berlin, or Bremen. If you had liberal tendencies, you could do it pretty much anywhere. But this was it. You had to choose the train you wanted to be on.

JC: I want to talk about another subject that’s in your writing, which is the moral difficulty of the writing process itself. In The Rings of Saturn , the narrator says,

Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways.

It reminds me of something the narrator says about writing the account of Max Ferber in The Emigrants:

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.

WGS: Well, yes, writing, as I said before. . you make something out of nothing. It is a con trick.

JC: But there seems to be quite a preoccupation with making what is written true.

WGS: That’s the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That’s the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it’s because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer’s block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that’s going to come out [ Austerlitz ]. I don’t know how many months I couldn’t get. . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it’s all right; you look at it the next day, it’s awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of one page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that’s how it is. And it’s very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one’s nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realize that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

Flaubert said at one point something like, “L’art est un luxe. Il faut des mains calmes et blanches.” And then he went on to say something like, “On fait d’abord une concession et puis deux et puis on sent fou completèment.” [Audience laughter.] And that’s very true: you make one concession, you make another one, and in the end, nothing matters anymore.