Winfried Sebald - Campo Santo

Wartime Christmas as Goebbels envisaged it, and as recalled to memory by Kluge and Reitz, flares up again in Herbeck’s poetry. A poem entitled “Ins Stammbuch” (“Taken to Heart”) and beginning with the lines “der Tag ist auf die gut Deutsche / Eiche Tot der vergangen Heid” (“the day is risen the good German / oak Dead the departed heathen”) gives us more to think about than does the professional disposal of our burden of guilt and the past. It seems to me actually uncanny that Herbeck wrote the following poem in that historic year 1989. I wish all my countrymen would take it to heart.

Das Schwert ist eine seriöse deutsche

Waffe und wird von den Gothen und

wird von den ausserstehenden Germanen

verwendet; bis auf den

heutigen Tag. Dies im gesamtdeutschen

Raum (Germanien) .

(The sword is a serious German

weapon used by the Goths

and used by the Germanic

peoples farther afield; up to the

present day. And this in the whole

German area [Germania].)

However, I do not mean to write on Ernst Herbeck’s concept of national history here, but on his attempts to record the history of his own family and descent in complex mythological terms. In her book Die Ver-rückung der Sprache (“The Dis-placement of Language”), Gisela Steinlechner has shown that the work of Herbeck is full of anthropomorphic portraits of animals. One reason for this is that the poet’s psychiatrist often gave him titles such as “The Zebra,” “The Giraffe” as exercises, so that the patient could write about them. Since Herbeck in general kept closely to the subjects he was offered, he produced a whole bestiary — a child’s primer confirming, if ironically, the general validity of the taxonomic order we have devised. “The raven leads the devout,” “The owl loves children,” “The zebra runs through broad fields,” and “The kangaroo leans on its support”—none of this is very disturbing. Yet Herbeck also writes of unknown species not listed in zoological encyclopedias, making us suspect that the animals are not so very different from each other, or we ultimately as different from them as we would like to think. We come upon a being that is half lamb, half cat in Herbeck, as we do in the synagogue mentioned by Franz Kafka.

Much more mysterious than these strange creatures, however, is the symbolic hare in Herbeck’s work, a creature that the author related to the question of his own origin. He gives only the most cursory and singular facts about his early history. Everything to do with the family and relations is a mystery to him. “One question, please!” he writes. “Are the son-in-law’s children father-in-law to their siblings? I can’t work it out! Please tell me, and thank you.” In fact to Herbeck, doomed to lifelong celibacy, the most inscrutable feature of these relationships was the idea of married life, on which he makes only a few vague and extremely innocent comments.

Die Ehe ist vorbildlich f. Mann und Frau

in jeder Hinsicht. Sie wird meistens ein

gegangen und geschlossen. Nach der Verlobung

und. Je länger sie dauert desto

kürzer und länger das Dasein. Eines Hasen

oder so .

(Marriage is the model for man and wife

in every respect. You usually enter into

it, you celebrate it. After the engagement

and. The longer it lasts the

shorter and longer the existence.

Of a hare or suchlike.)

What happens after that “and” and the full stop is something the writer cannot or will not envisage. On the other hand, he knows that conjugal life may eventually produce a hare. It is not so easy to describe how the act of procreation works. Perhaps it is not so much a sexual act as a kind of spontaneous reproduction, even magic.

Der Zauberer zaubert Sachen:

Kleine Hasen. Tücher. Eier .

Er zaubert wiederholt .

Er steckt das Tuch in den Zylinder

und zieht es wieder heraus

es ist ein zahmer Hase dabei .

(The conjuror conjures things up:

little hares. Scarves. Eggs.

He keeps on doing magic.

He puts the scarf in the top hat

and brings it out again

with a tame hare in it.)

The hare so miraculously produced from the top hat is undoubtedly the totem animal in which the writer sees himself. The harelip with which he was born, and which was operated on several times, probably played a crucial part as a premorbid disability in the genesis and particular development of Herbeck’s schizophrenia and the specific form it took. It is an identifying mark; in his mind, Herbeck takes this blemish much further back in time than his childhood. When he is asked to write a poem on “the embryo,” he forgets that strange new word, and instead writes the following lines on an unborn fabulous animal more closely related to him, which he calls the empyrum.

Heil unserer Mutter! Ein werdendes

Kind im Leibe der Mutter. Als ich

ein Empyrum war, hat sie mich

operiert. Ich kann meine Nase

nicht vergessen. Armes Empyrum .

(Hail to the mother! A future

child in the mother’s womb. When I

was an empyrum, she operated

on me. I can’t forget

my nose. Poor empyrum.)

Gisela Steinlechner, in her studies of the work of Ernst Herbeck, was the first to try to describe the preexistential trauma that, to the damaged subject, later became his own myth. Among other sources, she drew on the three-page autobiographical account written by Herbeck in 1970, in which he describes how at the age of eleven he was in a Pathfinder group under a leader called Meier; their group was called the Pigeons, unlike the others, who were Eagles or Stags.

The Pathfinders organization is one of the last in which human beings give themselves the names of totem animals, but this odd little fact is less important in itself than Herbeck’s Pathfinder reminiscence of only a few lines which, in an entirely agrammatical context, uses the very odd word Thierenschaft (“beastship”). The old German spelling Thier , instead of modern Tier for “animal” (the “h” long ago became silent), suggests a time before human beings were even capable of speech.

Since in the history of our species ancient strategies of thinking and mental organization regularly occur in those described as mentally ill, it is not at all far-fetched to look back to the basic rules governing the totemic imagination in order to find out what Herbeck meant. Gisela Steinlechner has interpreted the harelip as the symbol upon which Herbeck himself fixed for his divided personality. In this connection she looks at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that in American Indian myths the harelip was the remaining trace of a twin who was never actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. But part of the messianic vocation is to be elect in the context of salvation, and at the same time ostracized and persecuted in the secular world. Not for nothing did Ernst Herbeck, who probably felt the grief of the despised more than any sense of mission as the Son of Man, place four exclamation marks after the title that he was given for a poem one day, “The Hare.” The poem runs as follows:

Der Hase is ein kühnes Tier!

Er läuft bis ihm die Strappen

fassen. Die Ohren spitzgestellt; er

lauscht. Für ihn — ist keine Zeit

zum Rasten. Lauf läuft läuft .

Armer Hase!

(The hare is a bold animal!

He runs until the snare