Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

If the Emperor’s visit to the fruit woman as evening falls already has about it something of an echo of the Annunciation, then the description of his astonishing ascent is even richer in biblical associations. There is talk of the exile of the children of Israel, of the Holy Land and the blessed Virgin, and, perhaps most important of all, of the return of a youthful hero across a sea full of enemy ships, bringing with him peace and a new order. The messianic calling is unmistakable, and clearly takes precedence over the claims of the ancient ruling houses, to whom Napoleon, as is well known, gave somewhat short shrift. For a while at least, then, Hebel’s political hopes, too, were pinned on the French Emperor. Among the progressively minded conservatives of his day, this view was by no means unusual. The battles fought by Napoleon appeared initially, even in Germany, in a different light from the horrifying bloodbath of the Revolution. They were not tainted by the stigma of civil war and irrational violence, but appeared almost as if suffused in the light of a higher reason, and served, so it was believed, to promote the dissemination of the ideas of equality and tolerance. It is not wholly without irony, though, that our Almanac author reports that when the call went out for the Great Sanhedrin in Paris, there were some among the Jewish population in France who believed that the Emperor intended “to send the Jews back to their old homeland on the great mountain of Lebanon, by the river of Egypt and by the sea.” The longer the Napoleonic wars continue, however, the more Hebel’s optimism fades. In a short piece omitted from the Almanac of 1811, the Hausfreund , who is after all good with figures, calculates matter-of-factly how many hundred thousand men and x thousand horses Napoleon has got through each year, and how many hundred millions the mustering and equipping of his armies continue to swallow up. In another piece, also not included in the Almanac, he illustrates the madness of warfare in terms of what it takes to build a single one of the ships which are, on the whole, destined before long to be sunk in a naval battle: “1,000 mighty oak trees, as one might say a whole forest; further 200,000 pounds of iron. For the sails it takes 6,500 ells of canvas; the weight of the ropes and rigging is 164,000 pounds, and once they have been coated in tar, as they need to be, they would weigh 200,000 pounds. The total weight of the whole ship amounts to 5 million pounds or 50,000 hundredweight, without the crew and provisions, not counting the powder and lead for the ammunition.” The Almanac author, accustomed to thrift and good housekeeping, is aghast at the idea of such wastefulness, the mere thought of which “makes his hair stand on end.” In 1814, when the tide has finally turned, he declares his horror at the pointless destruction, under the heading “World Events” [ Weltbegebenheiten ], in a report on the conflagration in Moscow, at that time the greatest city in the world: “Four districts of the inner city and thirty suburbs with all the houses, palaces, churches, chapels, taverns, shops, factories, schools, and government offices went up in flames. Previously, the city had four hundred thousand inhabitants and was over twelve leagues across,” writes the Hausfreund , and continues, “If one stood and looked down from a height, as far as the eye could see there was nothing but sky and Moscow. Thereafter, nothing but sky and flames. For hardly had the French occupied the city than the Russians themselves set fire on all sides. A steady wind quickly spread the flames into every quarter of the city. In three days the greater part of the latter was reduced to rubble and ashes, and for anyone passing that way, there was nothing left to see but sky and desolation.” Later on in his report on these epoch-making world events, Hebel reminds his Almanac readers of the order issued in Berlin on the sixth of May 1813, according to which, should the Battle of the Nations go against them, all men under the age of sixty were to arm themselves, all women, children, and official persons, surgeons, civil servants, and so on to conceal themselves from the enemy, and all livestock and provisions to be disposed of. “All the fruits of the field, all ships and bridges, all villages and mills are to be burned, all wells blocked up, so that the enemy may nowhere find either abode or succor. Never before,” writes the Hausfreund , “has such a dreadful and drastic measure been taken for the destruction of one’s own country.” In our own times we can get a sense of something of the horror which befell the Almanac author as he gazed down into the already gaping maw of history if we remind ourselves how, toward the end of the 1920s, the German Wehrmacht, under the direction of Colonel Stülpnagel, drew up a plan for a war of revenge against the French which — as Karl-Heinz Janßen reports, in an article *about the files discovered by the Hamburg historian Carl Dirks in the American National Archives — in a curious mixture of revolutionary idealism à la 1813 and hardheaded pragmatism, stipulated that the ur-enemy was to be provoked into invading Germany, there enmeshed in an endless series of partisan battles, and finally defeated by a strategy of scorched earth. To facilitate the action, writes Janßen, special maps of destruction were drawn up expressly for this purpose for the whole area of the Reich, and were called to mind again in 1945 in the final, suicidal weeks of the war. Possibly Hebel already had a sense, in 1812/13, that the fall of Napoleon and the rise of the German peoples signaled the beginning of a downward path which, once embarked upon, would not be easy to halt, and that history, from that point on, would amount to nothing other than the martyrology of mankind. At any rate, I can imagine that the Almanac author felt somewhat ill at ease when, in January 1814, he composed a six-page Patriotisches Mahnwort [patriotic exhortation] in which he — otherwise apt to observe matters with a certain detachment — adopts the impassioned martial tones which were everywhere in vogue at the time. “Behold,” it says there, “here arises and has already arisen — fully armed — all Germany from the sea to the mountains. All the noble tribes of German blood, the Prussians, the Saxons, the people of Hessen, the Franks, the Bavarians, the Swabians, all who speak and are German, along the length of the Rhine and far away on the Danube, all are one man, one courage, one Bund and one oath: Deutschland shall be free from foreign yoke and curse!” Hebel then goes on to describe the protection of the Heimat and the rebirth of the nation, the five million muskets, axes, pikes, and scythes which shall rise up in Germany, the vagaries of fate, blood sacrifice, and sacred sites, and exhorts his cousin, to whom this epistle is addressed as his brother, fellow countryman, and German comrade-in-arms, to enlist in the ranks of the defenders of the Fatherland and thus enter into God’s salvation. The chauvinistic registers Hebel draws on here are those of the new nationalist rhetoric, whose resonance, growing ever stronger over the course of the following hundred years, so distracted German society that it would eventually seek to replicate the Napoleonic experiment of the reorganization of Europe under the leadership of another dictator obsessed with the unconditional will to power. In 1996, Jean Dutourd of the Académie Française published a deliberately politically incorrect essai about the era 1789–1815, written from the viewpoint of an unreformed monarchist. Entitled Le Feld-maréchal von Bonaparte , it starts from the premise that during the pre-1789 monarchic order of Europe, in which the ruling houses were, without exception, all interrelated through marriage and family ties, armed conflicts had as a rule to be kept within limits, and that while these confrontations served the pursuit of particular territorial or other concrete advantages, they were never governed by one overarching abstract idea. Only with the invention of revolutionary patriotism (thus Dutourd) did history get caught up in an ever-accelerating maelstrom of destruction. For that reason, Dutourd writes, it would have been more sensible if the garrison at the Bastille had opened fire on the insurgents, thus aborting from the outset the transformation — during the Revolution — of a population of honest and hardworking subjects into a nation of savages, and consequently also preventing the rise of the parvenu from Corsica. The latter, says Dutourd, was indeed possessed of all the necessary at tributes for the model of a successful usurper — ambition, genius, willpower, covetousness, obsession with fame and order, and a complete and utter lack of sensitivity — but in order truly to become Emperor of the Western world, “il lui fallait tomber dans une société éclatée.” The blood shed in this era between 1789 and 1815, Dutourd claims, not only changed the nature of the French themselves, as well as the face of their country; from its smouldering ruins there also arose the new and terrifying Deutschland . In the earlier, innocent Germania, Dutourd believes, no philosopher would ever have had the idea of exclaiming Allemagne, réveille-toi! “Pour la tirer de sa léthargie, il ne fallait pas moins que les canons de l’empéreur des Français. Cette Allemagne qui est devenue si formidable au XXe siècle, c’est bien nous, hélas! qui l’avons faite, qui l’avons tirée du néant.” Perhaps the violence of the historical currents which Dutourd discusses in his unorthodox treatise can most readily be measured if one remembers that they moved the Almanac author to compose not only his unfortunate patriotic exhortation of 1814, but also an eschatological vision unparalleled in German literature. The scene we must imagine is the Basel road between Steinen and Brombach at night. The father— der Ätti —and his young son are traveling in the slow oxcart pulled by the faithful oxen Merz and Laubi— “Hörsch, wie der Laubi schnuuft?” [“Listen, how Laubi snorts”] says the boy at one point — and their conversation turns to the transience of earthly existence, of all human endeavor, the houses and villages in which we live, the great cities, Nature in all her greenery, and of the whole world. When the boy asks whether their own house, up there on the hill with the lights glinting in its windowpanes, will meet the same fate as the castle of Rötteln, which is now nothing but a dark and dismal ruin, the father answers: