Memory's martyr - Books - Author W. G. Sebald

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Peter Heinegg

Je mehr von Heimat die Rede ist,

desto weniger gibt es sie.

(The more talk about home,

the less it exists.)

- W. G. Sebald from Unheimliche Heimat

Major Works by Winfried Georg Sebald:

1988 Nach der Natur (From Nature, untranslated)

1991 Unheimliche Heimat (Eerie Homeland, untranslated)

1992 Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 1997])

Die Ringe des Saturns (The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 1998])

1994 Schwindel Gefuhle (Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 2000]).

1999 Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature, currently being translated)

2001 Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001)

On December 14, 2001, the fifty-seven-year-old German-expatriate writer Winfried Georg Sebald was, as the media in his country put it, "mortally mishapped" (todlich verungluckt), i.e., killed when he lost control of his car--perhaps stricken by a heart attack -- and swerved into an oncoming truck in Norfolk, England. (His daughter Anna, riding with him in the car, was severely injured.) Critics and readers around the world mourned the loss of this deeply engaging, quirky, elegiac writer, who had moved in a few years from near-total obscurity at the University of East Anglia to the ranks of the Nobel Prize candidates, but Sebald himself seems to have expected something like this. (His alter-ego Jacques Austerlitz describes himself, shortly before the end of Sebald's very last book, as "thinking I was about to die of the weak heart I have inherited, from whom I do not know....")

All of Sebald's life was overshadowed by death. In one of the prose poems in his first publication Nach der Natur ([drawn or painted] From Nature), Sebald notes that on the day he was born, Ascension Thursday, 1944, there were storm clouds hanging over the Alps in his Bavarian hometown of Wertach im Allgau; and one of the baldachin-bearers in the church procession through the fields was struck dead by lightning. Elsewhere in Europe, of course, death was raining down from the skies in a far more devastating and frightful manner. Later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen Sebald recalls asking his religion teacher at the Oberstdorf Gymnasium how Providence could have allowed the air-raids on nearby Sonthofen (whither his family had moved in 1952) to destroy neither the barracks nor the Hitler Youth "fortress," but the parish church and the hospital chapel, killing about one hundred civilians. Whatever the priest's answer, Sebald was so unimpressed that he forgot it.

Sebald was destined to spend his life wandering from place to place asking similarly unanswerable questions in his own unique form of meditative monologue: dense, detailed, meticulously researched recitatives in an old-fashioned, elaborate, mellifluous periodic style (dubbed by German commentators, who never met an Anglicism they didn't like, the "Sebald-Sound.") Language was, in the end, the closest thing to a homeland he ever found. "When I began to write at forty," he once said, "at first it was only to carve out some free space for myself in the everyday world." Once he started carving, he couldn't stop.

Postwar Germany, absorbed in rebuilding and mesmerized by its prodigious Wirtschaftswunder, deliberately forgetful of both the horrors it had caused (Auschwitz, etc.) and those it had suffered (Dresden, etc.), was unthinkable as a homeland. England's memory of such things was keener (many RAF bombers raiding Germany had taken off from around Norwich, where Sebald wound up spending more than half his life), but even in the Victorian brick house he settled in, Sebald characterized himself as "chronically unsettled....I've lived here for thirty years, but I don't feel in the least at home."

What Sebald essentially did, both in his critical and quasi-novelistic work, was to retell stories, above all, episodes from the lives of troubled, rootless, haunted outsiders like himself: Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, Edward Fitzgerald, and Chateaubriand in The Rings of Saturn; Holocaust survivors Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, and Max Ferber in The Emigrants; Stendhal and Kafka in Vertigo; and the mysterious Jacques Austerlitz, a Czech Jew sent alone to England as a four-and-a-half-year-old child in 1939 and raised by a Welsh minister, in Sebald's final book). Though generally spared the worst kind of suffering themselves, these men have all been wounded by the cruelty and stupidity of the world, which they can only chronicle, not change. (Casement, who championed the downtrodden, whether in Ireland or the Belgian Congo, was, of course, executed by the British for high treason; Selwyn and Bereyter committed suicide long after the war, like Paul Celan or Primo Levi.)

Sebald dreamily accompanies his heroes on their wanderings through a desolate, tormented world, except in The Rings of Saturn, where he goes off on his own melancholic "English pilgrimage" all over Suffolk. The archetypal landscape for young Sebald was the bombed-out streets of postwar Munich; and in fact everywhere he ventures, he seems to find nothing but a postindustrial wasteland, littered with all sorts of ruins, from the merely depressing tumbled-down castle of Somerleyton to the utterly horrific (though still intact] Belgian fortress of Breen-dank, "a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence." Built just before World War I, it was occupied by the Nazis, who tortured the Austrian Jewish writer (and future suicide) Jean Amery, among others, within its walls.