Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

FOREWORD

1 recollection of thingsThe phrase “Aufzählen der Dinge” (recounting or recollection of things) would seem to be a reference to the title of the 1993 catalog of Jan Peter Tripp’s work in which this essay was first published: Jan Peter Tripp, Die Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten: Arbeiten von 1985—92 (Offenburg: Reiff-Schwarzwaldverlag, 1993). Part of the essay on Robert Walser appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on May 23, 1998. The essay on Mörike was given as an acceptance speech for the Mörike Prize in Fellbach (near Stuttgart) on April 22, 1997 (see Mörike-Preis der Stadt Fellbach: Ein Lesebuch 1991–2000 [Fellbach, 2000]), while the essay on Rousseau was first published, with minor variants, under the title “Rousseau auf der Île de Saint-Pierre” in Sinn und Form 50:4 (July/August 1998); neither of these includes any images.

A COMET IN THE HEAVENS

1 the feuilleton which Walter Benjamin wroteWalter Benjamin, “Johann Peter Hebel (I): On the Centenary of His Death,” English translation by Rodney Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1913–1926 , vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) ( Gesammelte Schriften , vol. II.i, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, pp. 277—80).

2 Robert Minder(1902–1980), French scholar of German and comparative literature, was born in Alsace to French-speaking parents at a time when Alsace-Lorraine was under German rule. During his university career he was a tireless promoter of Franco-German cultural cooperation, the historical vicissitudes of the twentieth century notwithstanding. His publications focus particularly on writers from the Rhineland. The essay referred to here is “Heidegger und Hebel oder die Sprache von Messkirch,” in Dichter in der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966). For Heidegger’s other articles on Hebel, see the Bibliography.

3 BlochOn Ernst Bloch’s reception of Hebel, see the article by Johann Siebers, “Aufenthalt im Unerhörten: Bloch’s Reading of Hebel (1926—65),” in Remembering Johann Peter Hebel: Anniversary Essays , eds. Julian Preece and Robert Gillett, Oxford German Studies 40:1 (2011). This special anniversary issue of OGS contains a number of further interesting articles on Hebel.

4 Föhn … Wermuth The Föhn is a warm Alpine wind blowing from the south. Wermuth (wormwood) denotes vermouth or absinthe.

5 flowering of the wheatThis metaphor, with the promise of a good harvest, is a reference to the tale “Die Weizenblüte” in the Kalender of 1814. An equivalent English saying would be “my ship has come in,” or, to continue the botanical analogy, “being in clover.”

6 “For to count the stars”“Für die Fixsterne zu zählen gibt’s nicht Finger genug auf der ganzen Erde” (“Die Fixsterne”).

7 “The great Emperor Napoleon”“Das sah der große Kaiser Napoleon wohl ein, und im Jahr 1806, ehe er antrat die große Reise nach Jena, Berlin und Warschau, und Eylau, ließ er schreiben an die ganze Judenschaft in Frankreich, daß sie ihm sollte schicken aus ihrer Mitte verständige und gelehrte Männer aus allen Departementern des Kaisertums” (“Der Große Sanhedrin zu Paris”). Compare the standardizing translation by John Hibberd (see Hebel, Treasure Chest , p. 29).

8 The words areAs quoted in the German original.

9 the rules of German syntaxStandard German word order places the verb at the end of a subordinate clause. Note that Sebald’s own usage on occasion also deviates from this rule, particularly in longer sentences, a feature on which German critics are fond of commenting.

10 the gold backgroundWalter Benjamin, “A Chronicle of Germany’s Unemployed: Anna Seghers’ novel Die Rettung ,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings , vol. 4, pp. 126—33 (German text in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. III, pp. 530—38).

11 that home, in factProbably a reference to Ernst Bloch at the end of Das Prinzip Hoffnung: “etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat” (Bloch, Werkausgabe: vol. 5: Das Prinzip Hoffnung [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985], p. 1628). English translation by Neville Plaice et al.: “something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland” (The Principle of Hope , vol. 3 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], p. 137).

12 Weltfrömmigkeit The term was coined by J. W. von Goethe in Wilhelm Meister ( Wanderjahre , II, ch. 7).

13 in a warm roomSebald omits Hebel’s description “warm” here. In Hebel’s original (“Traumbilder,” in Werke , vol. I, p. 495) the date of this dream is given as November 6, 1805.

14 “Esslingen”The battle actually took place at Essling (on the Danube near Vienna), but no doubt Esslingen (a town on the Neckar in Württemberg) would resonate more readily with a local Alemannic readership. (“Die Kometen.”)

15 Das Unglück der Stadt Leiden The pun in the title on Unglück (misery, disaster) and Leiden , which in German means suffering or sorrows, is untranslatable here.

16 “if only all men would cultivate”Johann Kaspar Hirzel, Die Wirtschaft eines philosophischen Bauers (Zurich, 1761): see Hannelore Schlaffer, ed., Johann Peter Hebel: Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds; Ein Werk in seiner Zeit (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag Hermann Leins, 1980), note p. 364.

17 “il lui fallait tomber”“He had to chance upon a fractured society.”

18 Allemagne, réveille-toi! “Germany, awake!” “To shake it from its lethargy, it took nothing less than the cannons of the French Emperor. This Germany which became so terrible in the twentieth century, it is we, alas, who created it, who made it from nothing.”

19 “Jo, wegerli, und ’s Hus”There are variant orthographies of the Alemannic dialect in this poem, “Die Vergänglichkeit” (“Transience”). What is reproduced in the German edition of A Place in the Country (the source for the present edition) differs from the edition of Hebel’s work in Sebald’s library: see Hebel, Werke , vol. 2: Gedichte: Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1968), pp. 122—26. English translation (“Transience”) by Leonard Forster, in The Penguin Book of German Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 281—82.

J’AURAIS VOULU QUE CE LAC EÛT ÉTÉ L’OCÉAN—

1 SeelandThe Seeland (literally “sea land,” or more accurately “lake land”) is a region in Switzerland, at the foot of the Jura Mountains and bordering the cantons of Bern, Fribourg, Neuchâtel, and Vaud, comprising the three lakes of Morat (Murten), Neuchâtel, and Bienne (Biel) — the Lac de Bienne (or Bielersee) referred to here. It is a bilingual area on the linguistic boundary between French- and German-speaking Switzerland, and for this reason the city of Biel, Robert Walser’s birthplace, is in the present translation referred to in the essay on Walser by its German name, while in the essay on Rousseau it appears in the French form, Bienne. Seeland is also the title of one of Walser’s early collections of short prose pieces first published in 1919. Like Schattenrain (literally “shadow ridge”), Seeland is a “speaking name,” denoting a place but also having a clear literal meaning, as well as a literary echo, within the German text.