Winfried Sebald - Campo Santo

Soon afterward he sets off again to Hauptwil in Switzerland, accompanied by friends through the wintry Schönbuch to Tübingen, then alone up the rugged mountain and down the other side, on the lonely road to Sigmaringen. It is twelve hours’ walk from there to the lake. A quiet journey across the water. The next year, after a brief stay with his family, he is on the road again through Colmar, Isenheim, Belfort, Besançon, and Lyon, going west and southwest, passing through the lowlands of the upper Loire in mid-January, crossing the dreaded heights of the Auvergne deep as they are in snow, going through storms and wilderness until he finally reaches Bordeaux. You will be happy here, Consul Meyer tells him on his arrival, but six months later, exhausted, distressed, eyes flickering, and dressed like a beggar he is back in Stuttgart. Receive me kindly, stranger that I am . What exactly happened to him? Was it that he missed his love, could he not overcome his social disadvantage, had he after all seen too far ahead in his misfortune? Did he know that the fatherland would turn away from his vision of peace and beauty, that soon those like him would be watched and locked up, and there would be no place for him but the tower? A quoi bon la littérature?

Perhaps only to help us to remember, and teach us to understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic, for instance the connection between the former princely residence of Stuttgart, later an industrial city, and the French town of Tulle, which is built on seven hills— Elle a des prétentions, cette ville , a lady living there wrote to me some time ago, That town has grand ideas of itself— between Stuttgart, then, and Tulle in the Corrèze region through which Hölderlin passed on his way to Bordeaux, and where on June 9, 1944, exactly three weeks after I first saw the light of day in the Seefeld house in Wertach, and almost exactly a hundred and one years after Hölderlin’s death, the entire male population of the town was driven together in the grounds of an armaments factory by the SS Das Reich division, intent on retribution. Ninety-nine of them, men of all ages, were hanged from the lampposts and balconies of the Souilhac quarter in the course of that dark day, which still overshadows the memories of the town of Tulle. The rest were deported to forced-labor camps and extermination camps, to Natzweiler, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, where many were worked to death in the stone quarries.

So what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet in these lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship. A place that is at the service of such a task is therefore very appropriate in Stuttgart, and I wish it and the city that harbors it well for the future.

Born as I was in the Allgäu in 1944, I did not for some time perceive or understand any of the destruction that was present at the beginning of my life. Now and then, as a child, I heard adults speak of a coup, but I had no idea what a coup was. The first glimmerings of our terrible past came to me, I believe, one night at the end of the 1940s when the sawmill in the Plätt burned down, and everyone ran out of the houses on the edge of town to stare at the sheaf of flames flaring high into the black night. Later, at school, more was made of the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon than of what then lay only fifteen years in the past. Even at university I learned almost nothing of recent German history. German studies in those years were a branch of scholarship stricken with almost premeditated blindness, and as Hebel would have said, rode a pale horse. For a whole winter semester we spent a proseminar stirring The Golden Pot , without once discussing the relation in which that strange story stands to the time immediately preceding its composition, to the fields of corpses outside Dresden and the hunger and epidemic disease in the city on the Elbe at that period. [12] E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Goldne Topf of 1814. Only when I went to Switzerland in 1965, and a year later to England, did ideas of my native country begin to form from a distance in my head, and these ideas, in the thirty years and more that I have now lived abroad, have grown and multiplied. To me, the whole Republic has something curiously unreal about it, rather like a never-ending déjà vu. Only a guest in England, I still hover between feelings of familiarity and dislocation there too. Once I dreamed, and like Hebel I had my dream in Paris, that I was unmasked as a traitor to my country and a fraud. Not least because of such misgivings, my admission to the Academy is very welcome, and an unhoped-for form of justification.

STRANGENESS, INTEGRATION, AND CRISIS

1 Peter Handke, Kaspar , Frankfurt 1969, p. 12 Eng., Plays: 1, Kaspar , tr. Michael Roloff, New York and London, 1969, 1972, p. 57.

2 Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser , Frankfurt, 1968, p. 5; Eng., Caspar Hauser , tr. Michael Hulse, Harmondsworth, Eng., 1992, p. 3.

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen , Stuttgart, 1964, p. 101; Eng., Unmodern Observations , ed. W. Arrowsmith, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 88.

4 Ibid., p. 109; Eng., p. 91.

5 Caspar Hauser , p. 16; Eng., p. 13.

6 Ibid.; Eng., p. 14.

7 Cf. Kaspar , p. 99; Eng., Kaspar , p. 139; Caspar Hauser , p. 20; Eng., p. 18; Rudolf Bilz, Studien über Angst und Schmerz — Paläoanthropologie vol. 1/2, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 278.

8 Franz Kafka, Erzählungen , Frankfurt, 1961, p. 158; Eng., Stories 1904–1924 , tr. J.A. Underwood, New York, 1981, p. 222.

9 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Terzinen—Über die Vergänglichkeit , Frankfurt, 1957, p. 16.

10 David Cooper, Death of the Family , London, 1971, p. 11.

11 Peter Handke, “Die Dressur der Objekte,” in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms , Frankfurt, 1972, p. 145.

12 Ibid., p. 144.

13 Ibid., p. 145.

14 Peter Handke, Ritt über den Bodensee , Frankfurt, 1972, p. 95; Eng., Plays: I, The Ride Across Lake Constance , tr. Michael Roloff, London, 1973, p. 227.

15 Cf. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften , Berlin, 1930, p. 496; Eng., The Man Without Qualities , tr. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser, London, 1954, vol. II, p. 318.

16 Kaspar , p. 20; Eng., p. 64.

17 Ibid., p. 21; Eng., p. 65.

18 Lars Gustafsson, “Die Maschinen,” in Utopien , Munich, 1970, p. 39.

19 Kaspar , p. 50; Eng., p. 93f.

20 Ibid., p. 75f.; Eng., p. 117f.

21 Ibid., p. 55; Eng., p. 99.

22 This and the two following quotations are from ibid., p. 56; Eng., p. 100.

23 Ibid., p. 57; Eng., p. 101.

24 This and the following quotation are from ibid., p. 58; Eng., pp. 101, 102.

25 This and the following quotation are from ibid., p. 92; Eng., p. 133.