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

Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story passionately lucid. What is perplexing is the narrator’s relationship to him. Gradually that, too, comes to light. Austerlitz “must find someone to whom he could tell his own story. . and for which he needed the kind of listener I had been.” In the interviews, Sebald speaks of the ambiguous position of the listener absorbing the exiles’ stories until he takes on the burden of the tale. More than mere witness, by his unstinting attention he shares, if not the storyteller’s fate, at least his memory. Toward the end of his story, Austerlitz gives the narrator the key to his apartment, passing on his life for safekeeping. The novel is the key Sebald passes on to us.

In an essay on the work of Peter Weiss, Sebald writes that “the artistic self engages personally in. . a reconstruction, pledging itself. . to set up a memorial, and the painful nature of that process could be said to ensure the continuance of memory.” He repeats this more poignantly in The Emigrants , in the voice of the exiled Max Ferber, who leaves the narrator a memento, along with words that augur the task Sebald assumed in his writing. His mother’s memoirs, Ferber says, “had seemed to him like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun — in this case, the remembering, writing and reading. That is why I would rather you took this package.”

I chose the pieces that follow from an enormous number of interviews, reviews, and essays; many major American and British critics and novelists have been moved to write about Sebald — and no wonder, given his originality and his sudden appearance, fully formed, as if out of nowhere. As a rule I don’t cherish interviews: I find writers explaining themselves and their methods not only less interesting and polished than the works themselves, but also less trustworthy. In the case of Sebald, however, like many other readers, I felt cheated out of those unborn books that surely would have given more of what Stephen Daedalus called “enchantment of the heart.” I had expected to be reading new ones for years to come.

The interviews do indeed offer more: his preoccupations, his literary forebears and tastes, his background, and the sources of his grave outlook, that insistence on probing “the traces of decay.” They have the added curiosity of showing how Sebald sounds extemporaneously — quite different from the elaborately webbed constructs in his writing. He is more colloquial than one might expect; he is also incisive and direct, cooperative and adaptable. That is, in almost Zelig-like fashion, he adapts his responses to the tone of the interviewer. Where I anticipated a grim reserve, even taciturnity or grumpiness, he is congenial. Listening to him on tape reveals a low, gravelly voice, serious, occasionally ponderous, but more often witty and at times even verging on the lighthearted.

In interviews of this kind there is bound to be some repetition, and at first I planned to edit this out. Thinking it over, though, I decided that the recurrence of certain themes was useful: it demonstrates to what extent Sebald was possessed, even haunted, by specific motifs from his life and the life of his country. For Germany, which he left so early on, is his country, as he says in Eleanor Wachtel’s interview, whether he likes it or not, and he does not like it. Sooner or later, in most of the interviews, will arise his abhorrence of his parents’ silence about the war and, by extension, of his country’s “collective amnesia.” Inevitably, too, he talks about his frustrating university days, where he sensed something amiss in his professors’ evasion of the past (elsewhere, less discreetly, he calls them “dissembling old Nazis”); about the difficulty of writing, especially the moral ambiguities involved in the kind of writing he did; about the destruction of the natural world and the graceless incursions of technology; about the overriding significance of memory.

Eleanor Wachtel’s and Carole Angier’s interviews took place in 1997, when only The Emigrants had been published, in English. Angier’s appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and concentrates on the Jewish characters in that book — all based on people Sebald knew — and on his relation to them and their stories. Wachtel’s is concerned with the form and sources of the book and examines the background of its real-life models. Arthur Lubow visited Sebald in Norwich in August 2001 in preparation for an essay whose publication was delayed because of the September 11 attacks and finally came out in truncated form three days before Sebald’s death. What appears here is Lubow’s fuller description of their encounter, reinterpreted with unfortunate hindsight. Joseph Cuomo’s wide-ranging conversation with Sebald in March 2001 was preceded by the author’s reading from The Rings of Saturn as part of the Queens College Evening Readings series. From that late vantage point, it covers almost all of his work, its major themes and ramifications. Michael Silverblatt’s radio interview was done in November 2001, a month before Sebald’s death; it focuses on his style and its derivations, and has crucial insights into Sebald’s relation to his subject, particularly the victims of Nazi atrocities.

I chose the four essays with a view to offering cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books. Ruth Franklin’s deals in detail with After Nature and On the Natural History of Destruction ; Charles Simic’s discusses the latter book, among others; and Tim Parks’s concentrates on Vertigo . All three view his themes in the broadest possible of contexts and also shed light on the ambiguities and perils implicit in his approach and his subject matter. Franklin’s piece, in particular, points out the risks involved in what she sees as Sebald’s aestheticizing of collective disaster and outlines, with admirable evenhandedness, her discomfort with his handling of the air war against Germany.

On the Natural History of Destruction aroused controversy when it was published on the grounds that Sebald did not place his account of German suffering in the larger context of Germany’s aggression. I believe that Sebald assumed — maybe too naively — that his readers would supply the context, and in fact he says as much in the postscript he added later. The remoteness or coldness critics have noted evinces savage indignation under tight control, especially in his critiques of postwar German writers; the words seem to emerge through gritted teeth. I suspect Sebald is expressing his own view in Austerlitz , when we hear, thirdhand, that the protagonist’s father, killed by the Nazis, “did not in any way believe that the German people had been driven into their misfortune; rather, in his view, they had entirely re-created themselves in this perverse form, engendered by every individual’s wishful thinking. . and had then brought forth, as symbolic exponents of their innermost desires, so to speak, the Nazi grandees.”

Charles Simic’s piece takes the opposite view of Franklin’s, and I felt it useful to set these two persuasive arguments side by side. Simic also places the destruction of the German cities in a historical context — the ceaseless killing of civilians in warfare, up to the present venture in Iraq.

Finally, I was drawn to these writers because they connect Sebald’s themes to events in their own lives — Simic to his childhood experience of war, Franklin to the loss of family members, and Parks to a piquant personal memory that echoes Sebald’s fascination with coincidence. Parks, incidentally, is the only writer to mention Sebald’s humor, which glimmers slyly through his pessimism and is often overlooked. (Joseph Cuomo’s interview is punctuated by bursts of laughter from the audience at Sebald’s wry remarks and deadpan delivery.)