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

So I think he must have felt quite an acute sense of discomfort in France. And of course by the late summer of 1939 one began to have an idea that, well, things were going to be very critical soon. So perhaps he did return to Germany because simply this was the place he knew best. And also I think, as the text makes clear at one or two points, he was very much in the German mold, this young teacher. An idealist coming out of the Wandervogel movement, as it were, a little bit like the young Wittgenstein when he went to upper Austria to teach the peasant children there, full of idealism, educational zeal, and so on. And this return to Germany in that sense is not altogether surprising.

The curious thing of course is that he was then drafted into the German army — as a three-quarter Aryan you were allowed, it was possible to serve in the army — and that he survived the whole war and did go back to the town where he had begun his career as a schoolteacher. That is to my mind the more puzzling side of this particular person’s life: the return to Germany in 1945 or the staying there, and repressing, as it were, or being silent about all those dreadful things.

EW: And then even later, after he retired, Paul Bereyter went to Switzerland. But he kept a flat in that same town where at this point he loathed the people.

WGS: Yes, quite.

EW: Could you understand why?

WGS: Well, it’s all in the nature of the double bind, isn’t it? The psychologists know all about this. You want nothing more than to leave your parents, but you can’t bring yourself to do it because you fear that they will despise you for leaving them alone. It’s that sort of pattern. I mean, whatever you do is going to be wrong. And I think double binds govern to a greater or lesser extent almost all lives. Of course this is a particularly devastating form of double bind, if you are bound, as it were, to the nation that has done harm to you. But there are many Jewish-German stories which are exactly of that ilk.

EW: A friend of Bereyter’s talks about “the contrarieties that are in our longings.”

WGS: Yes. The history of Jewish-German assimilation, which goes back to the late eighteenth century, is full of this kind of ambivalence. Jewish names like Schiller and Lessing for instance — Jewish people took those on in admiration of the writers who they saw as the champions of enlightenment and tolerance. There was a very, very close identification between the Jewish population in Germany and the gentile population. And especially between the Jewish population and the country, the topography of the country, through their surnames. They were called Frankfurt or Hamburger or Wiener. They were, as it were, identified with these places. And it must have been extremely hard for them to abandon all this and to forget about it.

I’m essentially interested in cultural and social history, and the relationship between the Jewish minority in Germany and the larger population is one of the most central and most important chapters of German cultural history from the eighteenth century to the present day in one form or another. And if you have a wish to understand, as I did have quite early on, the cultural environment in which you’re brought up, with all its flaws and terrible aspects, then there is no way past this issue. I talked before about the conspiracy of silence in, for instance, my hometown. And of course when I went up to university at the age of nineteen, I thought it might be different there. But it wasn’t, not at all. The conspiracy of silence certainly dominated German universities throughout the 1960s.

At the same time of course, i.e., precisely at the time when I began to use my own brain, as it were, the great war crime trials, the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt which lasted for many months, the Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf, and various other trials of this kind took place, and the problem for the first time for my generation became a very public one. It was in the newspapers every day, there were lengthy reports about court proceedings and so on. And so you had to contend with this. There was evidence of what had occurred, evidence in no uncertain terms. And yet at the time you were sitting in your seminars at university, you know, reading a piece of romantic fiction, E.T.A. Hoffmann or something, and never referring in any of those cases to the real historical background, to the social conditions, to the psychological complications caused by social conditions and so on. That is, what we were doing at university was pure and unadulterated philology, and this didn’t get us any closer to what we wanted to know. Certainly for me it was always so. I think all children know this — if something is withheld from you, you want it all the more. And certainly from the age of eighteen or nineteen onwards, I was always, as it were, bent on trying to find out about these matters.

EW: Many of your family chose to emigrate to America, but you chose England eventually. Why?

WGS: In a historical accident. As a boy, my ambition was to go to America because America was the sort of ideal type country, at that time. But later on I had this, as it were, anti-American phase, which was part of growing up in Europe in the 1960s, where everything was very anti-American, and that must have cured me of my desire to go to America. When I was about twenty-one — this is round about the time when I left the European continent — I had no clear idea as to where I wanted to go. And Manchester, which is where I ended up, happened quite accidentally. I was looking for a job which would allow me to earn some money and continue my studies. I knew there were these language-assistant posts in British universities, and I wrote off to some of them and Manchester replied positively. So I packed my case and went there thinking that I might be there for a year or two or three until I got a doctorate and so on. But then eventually I got stuck in that country, because as it turned out, it’s even nowadays a very pleasant country to live in.

EW: Although at one point, after studying in Manchester, you said you tried to live in Switzerland and also in Munich, and it didn’t work. Why not?

WGS: The episode in Switzerland was in the German-speaking part, in a small town called Saint Galle. I taught at a private school there, which was run by some mafioso, you know, who got much more money from the students per month, or from one student per month, than he would pay a teacher. The whole setup was bizarre, and I knew from the first day I was there that I wouldn’t do it for more than nine months, and this was what happened. Also the German part of Switzerland, beautiful though it is still — you do come across an enormous number of people who are terribly interfering. If you dig your garden on a Sunday, they’ll come and denounce you to the police and say, he’s digging his garden on a Sunday. I just cannot live with this kind of thing.

The year I spent in Munich and thereabouts I was working for a German cultural institute, the quite well-known Goethe-Institut. This was after I had taken my doctorate in England and I was looking for a career, and I thought I might do that. But as it turned out, I found it too officious, representing, however obliquely, Germany in a public sort of way abroad. I felt, when I saw it from closer up, that it wasn’t me and that I’d rather go back and live in hiding, as it were.

EW: In hiding?

WGS: Well, where I am now is very much out in the sticks. It’s in a small village near Norwich in the east of England. And I do feel that I’m better there than I am elsewhere in the center of things. I do like to be on the margins if possible.

EW: What attachment do you feel to Germany now?

WGS: Well, I know it’s my country. Even after all those years. I’ve been out of it now for. . it must be well over thirty years by now. Longer out of it than in it. Although of course I come from the edges, as it were, the southern edges of Germany — my granddad’s house was on the Austrian border almost directly. I hardly knew Germany. When I left it I knew the territory where I had grown up and I knew Freiburg and I had been to Munich once or twice. But one didn’t really travel terribly much in the midsixties or early sixties. And so I hardly knew it. I didn’t know Frankfurt, I didn’t know Hamburg, I didn’t know anything in the north or the middle — Hanover, Berlin were all totally alien to me. So in a sense it’s not my country. But because of its peculiar history and the bad dive that history took in this century or, to be more precise, from about 1870 onwards because of that, I feel you can’t simply abdicate and say, well, it’s nothing to do with me. I have inherited that backpack and I have to carry it whether I like it or not.