Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of Private Property , published in 1884, put forward the view that the transition — long predating our historical memory, in an era shrouded in myth — from a matriarchal and polygamous society to a patriarchal and monogamous one was determined by the acquisition of property whose inheritance could only be assured with certainty by means of a system of monogamy. In accordance with this theory, in many ways still extremely plausible today, one might say that even as high capitalism was spreading like wildfire in the second half of the nineteenth century, Keller in his work presents a counterimage of an earlier age in which the relationships between human beings were not yet regulated by money. In one of his childhood reminiscences, Heinrich Lee recalls how, as a boy, he often used to spend time in a dark hall or warehouse filled with every kind of junk and bric-a-brac imaginable. And, as always when Keller has the opportunity of indulging his love for all things antique, there follows an incomparable description of all the outmoded, useless, and arcane objects piled high on top of and in front of each other, beds and tables and all kinds of assorted implements, and how sometimes on the upper planes and slopes, and sometimes on the perilous lonely peaks of this bric-a-brac mountain, here an ornate rococo clock and there a waxen angel lead a quiet and as it may be posthumous existence. In contrast to the continuous circulation of capital, these evanescent objects have been withdrawn from currency, having long since served their time as traded goods, and have, in some sense, entered eternity. The sovereign and soul of this empire of junk is a stout, elderly woman in an old-fashioned costume who always sits in the same spot in her ill-lit emporium and from there oversees a white-haired old man and a whole host of other underlings coming and going around the hall. She always wears snow-white sleeves pleated in the most artful way, after a fashion no longer seen. Not only in this does she somewhat resemble a priestess: the to-ings and fro-ings before her armchair throne on the part of the male assistants and of the customers suggest that law and order are invested in her very person. As to a governor or to an abbess, we read, “the people … would bring the most diverse gifts … field produce and tree fruit of every kind, milk, honey, grapes, ham, and sausages are brought to her … and these stores are the foundation of a life of dignified ease.” Wonderful, too, is the passage in which Keller describes how Frau Margret, who is scarcely able to decipher the printed word and has never learned to reckon in Arabic numbers, using no more than four Roman numerals does her nonexistent books with a piece of soft chalk on a large tabletop by setting up long columns and, by means of a complicated series of transmutations, converts large sums of small amounts into smaller sums of larger denominations. Her system of signs and symbols, so the narrator tells us, would have appeared to any other observer like ancient heathen runes, and in truth Frau Margret, who is interested in the Christian religion only for its intercalated apocrypha and the speculations of the sectarians, seems to embody a much earlier stage of social development than that which had already been attained in her day. For this reason, the concept of capital is entirely alien to her. Any surplus she accumulates and does not need for immediate outgoings is taken out of the current purse, changed into gold, and put away in the treasure chest. It never occurs to her to let the capital work for her. It is true that she sometimes gives credit, but she does not lend money for interest. In the vaults of her emporium, then, we are a long way from the effects, so lamented by Keller, of the money market on the economic and moral constitution of his compatriots. The preference Keller shows here, in his portrait of Frau Margret, for a system of barter over trading for profit reveals the extent of his aversion to the pace of developments taking place pell-mell all around him. It is, too, a particularly attractive trait in Keller’s work that he should afford the Jews — whom Christianity has for centuries reproached with the invention of moneylending — pride of place in a story intended to evoke the memory of a precapitalist era. In the evening, when the warehouse is closed, Frau Margret’s house becomes a kind of hostelry, offering shelter not just to favored local people but to itinerant traders, for example the Jewish peddlers, like nomads still traveling with their wares from place to place, who, after setting down their heavy packs, without a word being spoken or a written pledge exchanged, entrust their purses to the landlady for safekeeping and stand at the stove brewing a coffee or baking a piece of fish. If then talk should turn among those present to the misdemeanors of the Hebrew peoples, to the abduction of children or the poisoning of wells, or if even Frau Margret herself should claim that she once saw the restless Ahasaver in person leaving the Black Bear where he had spent the night, the Jews merely listen to these scaremongering tales, smile good-humoredly and politely, and refuse to be provoked. This good-natured smile on the part of the Jewish traders at the credulity and foolishness of the unenlightened Christian folk, which Keller captures here, is the epitome of true tolerance: the tolerance of the oppressed, barely endured minority toward those who control the vagaries of their fate. The idea of tolerance, much vaunted in the wake of the Enlightenment but in practice always diluted, pales into insignificance beside the forbearance of the Jewish people. Nor do the Jews in Keller’s works have any dealings with the evils of capitalism. What money they earn in their arduous passage from village to village is not immediately returned to circulation but is for the time being set to one side, thus becoming, like the treasure hoarded by Frau Margret, as insubstantial as gold in a fairy tale. True gold, for Keller, is always that which is spun with great effort from next to nothing, or which glistens as a reflection above the shimmering landscape. False gold, meanwhile, is the rampant proliferation of capital constantly reinvested, the perverter of all good instincts. Keller warned early on against its temptations, and one can only speculate as to what he might have had to say about the shady deals perpetrated by the Swiss banks a mere two generations after his death, let alone about the gold, purchased at the expense of the immeasurable suffering of the Jews, which was to serve as a christening present for the generation of Swiss children born after the Second World War.

There is another way, too, in which the history of the Jews, as depicted in Keller’s work, mirrors that of the people they live among. As a result of the political upheavals and the expansion of the market economy — which created at least as many bankrupts as it did nouveaux riches — all through the nineteenth century a growing number of Germans and Swiss found themselves forced to emigrate for a life in the diaspora, ending up just as far from home as any of the guests from the East in Frau Margret’s house. For this reason, no doubt, in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel of emigration the Germans are referred to as the Jews of America. Only on foreign soil is it brought home to them what it means to be cut off from one’s homeland and treated with contempt abroad. The fact that after the failure of the 1848 revolution, eighty thousand people emigrated to America from the region of Baden alone shows that the emigrants of that time were not merely adventurers, fortune seekers, or a few desperate individuals. Keller’s analysis of this social phenomenon, too, is more accurate and more sympathetic than that of most of his literary contemporaries. While Heinrich Lee is learning about hardship firsthand abroad, back at home meanwhile his uncle has died, his children long since scattered in the bustle and confusion of the highways, along which, he notes with characteristic irony, they went dragging their little ones in carts behind them as in former times the Children of Israel in the wilderness. Then there is the famous scene in which, standing to attention on the parade ground, Heinrich can only look on, his heart lurching in his breast, as the coach carrying the emigrants passes by, among them the woman who could have been mother, sister, and lover to him. The chapter is entitled “Judith Goes Too” [“Auch Judith geht”]. The fact that this episode follows immediately upon Anna’s funeral makes it clear that for those left behind, Judith’s departure, too, is like a death. Indeed, at that time it was generally as rare for emigrants to return home as for the dead to come back to life. For every one who, like Martin Salander, succeeded in making his fortune in Brazil, there were dozens who never managed to scrape together enough money working in the coffee plantations to pay their fare back home. Even Salander pays no small price for his success. Or we need only think of the young unmarried Swiss women, many of whom, as we know from the autobiographical writings of Conrad or Nabokov, could only find positions as governesses or tutors in lands far distant from their home cantons. Imagine their isolation as they stood gazing out of their windows at dusk, year after year, on some estate in the Ukraine or outside St. Petersburg, for a moment believing that they could see, in the gathering clouds, a glimpse of the far-distant snow-white Alps. Fräulein Luise Rieter, for example, to whom Keller fruitlessly declared his affection, spent a long time in Paris and in the household of a doctor in Dublin. And how many more, down to and including Robert Walser and his siblings, did not end up scattered Lord knows where. In Keller’s own case, his stays in Munich and Berlin were quite enough to give him a taste of the bitterness of exile. For this reason, Heinrich Lee’s dreams of home, which take up a whole chapter and more in Der grüne Heinrich , are filled in equal measure with beauty and fear. He sees himself walking along the highway, staff in hand, and in the distance, on an interminable road which intersects with his own, catches sight of his long-dead father with a heavy knapsack on his back. Exile, as Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory located just outside this world. Anyone who has visited it will forever after be a stranger in his own country. When, in his dream, Heinrich finally arrives back home and mounts the steps hand in hand with his childhood sweetheart, he finds all his relations assembled in the living room, his uncle, his aunt, all his cousins, the living and the dead together. Without exception they all wear contented, cheerful expressions, and yet this homecoming is anything but reassuring. Oddly, all those present are smoking long clay pipes filled with sweet-smelling tobacco, as a sign perhaps that in this in-between region, different customs prevail. The way, too, in which they cannot stay still for a moment but are compelled to wander ceaselessly up and down and back and forth while an assortment of animals — hunting dogs, martens, falcons and doves — scurry along the floor in the opposite direction: all of this strange and restless to-ing and fro-ing would seem to suggest that these poor departed souls are anything but quiet and at one with their lot. Keller did, though, seek in another passage to rise above his fear that the return from exile, like exile itself, amounts to a premature encounter with death, in the wanderer fantasy in which we see Heinrich Lee heading for home through a nocturnal Germany. “I went through woods, across fields and meadows,” Lee writes, “past villages whose dim outlines or faint lights lay far from my path. At midnight, as I was going over some wide open fields, the deepest solitude reigned over the earth, and the skies, interspersed with the slowly turning stars, became the more full of life, as invisible swarms of migratory birds passed high overhead with an audible rustling of wings.”