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

Sebald’s talk often turned to death, which he regarded with the same dry, wry eye that he cast on life. When I asked him casually why he had changed publishers, expecting the usual tale of finances and contracts and agents, he instead explained that it had all begun with the mysterious suicide of his German publisher, who hopped the S-Bahn to the mountains outside Frankfurt, drank half a bottle of liquor, took off his jacket, and lay down to die in the snow. “When hypothermia sets in, it’s apparently quite agreeable,” Sebald said. “Like drowning,” I said. To which Sebald replied, with a nod, “Drowning also is quite agreeable.”

He dated his own fascination with the no longer living to the death of his maternal grandfather. At the time Max was twelve, and his gentle, soft-spoken grandfather had been his hiking companion and confidant. “My interest in the departed, which has been fairly constant, comes from that moment of losing someone you couldn’t really afford to lose,” he said. “I broke out in a skin disease right after his death, which lasted for years.” Was that where his interest in death began? A few moments later, paging through a family photo album from 1933, he pointed to a photograph that his father took of a fellow soldier who had died in a motor accident. Lying on his back, his unseeing eyes staring upward, the dead young man is surrounded by flowers. Seeing this picture for the first time at the age of five, Max had “a hunch that this is where it all began — a great disaster that occurred, which I knew nothing about.” So perhaps this image of a corpse is where it commenced, his fascination with both photographs and death. Then he turned to another photograph, a finely detailed print of two women in mid-calf-length dresses and a man in lederhosen and loden jacket standing in a neatly tended flower garden in front of a tile-roofed Bavarian-style chalet. These are Sebald’s parents and a woman whose husband has snapped the picture. The photograph was taken in August 1943 in a park near Bamberg. The women are chic, cheerful, and prosperous looking. There are no swastika banners, no signs of wartime privation, and certainly no Jews in striped uniforms. You would not guess that less than thirty miles away is Nuremberg, seat of the Nazi Party rallies, a medieval city fated to be laid waste by Allied bombers the next year. Or that the man, Sebald’s father, is home on an army furlough. But the Nazi regime flickers in this picture as a ghost image: everything here has been state approved, including the name Winfried Georg, which would be given to the child conceived on this furlough, a boy who would rather be called Max.

According equal status to the living and the dead — after all, they jostled side by side for space in his mind — Sebald would perhaps view his own passing with equanimity. He is spared the labor of writing the next book. For the rest of us, not having that book to look forward to is a blow, a subtracted hope. I am reminded of Sebald’s account of an experiment that intrigued him. “They put a rat in a cylinder that is full of water and the rat swims around for about a minute until it sees that it can’t get out and then it dies of cardiac arrest,” he told me. A second rat is placed in a similar cylinder, except that this cylinder has a ladder, which enables the rat to climb out. “Then, if you put this rat in another cylinder and don’t offer it a ladder, it will keep swimming until it dies of exhaustion,” he explained. “You’re given something — a holiday to Tenerife or you meet a nice person — and so you carry on, even though it’s quite hopeless. That may tell you everything you need to know.” He chuckled. Disconsolately, merrily, companionably, bitterly, resignedly, darkly, theatrically, dourly, inconsolably? One is in no position to say.

CAROLE ANGIER was educated at McGill, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. She is the author of Jean Rhys: Life and Work and The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography . In 2002 she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the founder and teacher of The Practice of Biography at Warwick University and now teaches modern biography at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is currently working on Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir .

JOSEPH CUOMO has recently completed his first novel. He is also the director of Queens College Evening Readings, which he founded in 1976.

RUTH FRANKLIN has been an editor at The New Republic since 1999. Her criticism also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Slate , and other publications. She is currently at work on a book about literature on the Holocaust.

MICHAEL HOFMANN was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent ’s Foreign Fiction Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001). He edited The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (2005), and his most recent work is the translation of the selected poems of Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast (2006).

ARTHUR LUBOW is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine , where he writes on cultural subjects. He is the author of The Reporter Who Would Be King , a biography of Richard Harding Davis, the American war correspondent and fin-de-siècle novelist.

TIM PARKS was born in Manchester, England, in 1954, grew up in London, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy, where he has lived ever since. He has written eleven novels, including Europa, Destiny, Rapids , and Cleaver , as well as three nonfiction accounts of life in northern Italy (most recently, A Season with Verona ), a collection of narrative essays, Adultery and Other Diversions , and a history of the Medici bank in fifteenth-century Florence, Medici Money . His many translations from the Italian include works by Alberto Moravia, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Calasso. He lectures on literary translation in Milan.

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT is host and producer of public radio’s premier literary talk show, Bookworm , which he created for KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, California, in 1989. Since that time, with the funding of the Lannan Foundation, Bookworm has achieved a national audience and reputation. Mr. Silverblatt has conducted nearly nine hundred interviews with many leading American and international writers. He was born in New York and educated at the State University in Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, where he worked in public relations and script development for the motion picture industry.

CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. Since 1967 he has published twenty books of his own poetry (most recently The Voice at 3:00 A.M. and My Noiseless Entourage ), seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. He is poetry editor of The Paris Review and professor emeritus of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.

ELEANOR WACHTEL is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Based in Toronto, she is the host of CBC Radio’s Writers & Company and The Arts Tonight . Three books of her interviews have been published: Original Minds, Writers & Company , and More Writers & Company .