… the ghostly novels of W.G. Sebald *

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W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His four novels — The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz — have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in an automobile accident in December 2001. In a 2007 interview the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, stated Sebald as one of three newly deceased writers who would have been worthy Nobel Prize laureates along with Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida.

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Sebald’s death was as unsettling and anomalous as his work. Here was a writer struck down at the height of his powers, at the age of fifty-seven, when he had just begun to achieve wide recognition. Each of these statements would typically be incompatible with at least one—often both—of the others. He was one of the most innovative and original contemporary writers in the world, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt as if it had been exhumed from the past, as if the spirit of ruined Europe were speaking through him. Perhaps this is why it was said, in Germany, that he wrote like a ghost. There was always something weirdly posthumous about his writing, but this only makes his physical death more shocking. — Geoff Dyer

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The loss feels unbearable. Premature death has brutally imposed a retroactive shape on Max Sebald’s life and work, turning early or middle things into last things. Perhaps in the future it may come to seem inevitable that the elegiac intensities inscribed by Sebald in literature do not result in a large body of work. That, instead, we have the imperishable gift of just a few books written once he found the voice in which to deliver his commanding, exquisite prose arias. But, for the moment, the loss simply feels…devastating. Unacceptable. Difficult to take in. He had an exemplary sense of vocation, full of scruples and self-doubts. The work is recklessly literary and inspired by a thrilling variety of models. These writers—from Adalbert Stifter and Jean Henri Fabre to Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard—illustrate Sebald’s connection to several kinds of moral seriousness, luminousness of description, and purity of motive. He was one who demonstrates that literature can be, literally, indispensable. He was one by whom literature continues to live. — Susan Sontag

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Sebald wanted to find a literary form responsive to the waves and echoes of human tragedy which spread out, across generations and nations, yet which began in his childhood. Silence and forgetting were conditions of his early life. Sebald doubted whether those who had never experienced Theresienstadt or Auschwitz could simply describe what occurred there. That would have been presumptuous, an appropriation of others’ sufferings. Like a Medusa’s head, he felt that the attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality. It was necessary, he found, to approach this subject obliquely, and to invent a new literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue, often involving the experiences of one “WG Sebald”, a German writer long settled in East Anglia. He was reluctant to call his books “novels”, because he had little interest in the way contemporary writers seemed to find all meaning in personal relationships, and out of a comic but heartfelt disdain for the “grinding noises” which heavily plotted novels demanded. — Peter Handke

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Excerpt: Austerlitz (2001)

If the mark of a great novel is that it creates its own world, drawing in the reader with its distinctive rhythms and reverberations, then W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz may be the first great novel of the new century. An unnamed narrator, resting in a waiting room of the Antwerp rail station in the late 1960s, strikes up a conversation with a student of architecture named Austerlitz, about whom he knows almost nothing. Over the next several years, the narrator often runs into his odd, engaging acquaintance by chance on his travels, until finally, after a gap of two decades, Austerlitz decides to tell the narrator the story of his life and of his search for his origins in wartime Europe.

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion. I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps as I walked all round the inner city, down Jeruzalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat, Pelikaanstraat, Paradijsstraat, Immerseelstraat, and many other streets and alleyways, until at last, plagued by a headache and my uneasy thoughts, I took refuge in the zoo by the Astridplein, next to the Centraal Station, waiting for the pain to subside. I sat there on a bench in dappled shade, beside an aviary full of brightly feathered finches and siskins fluttering about. As the afternoon drew to a close I walked through the park, and finally went to see the Nocturama, which had first been opened only a few months earlier. It was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial dusk and I could make out different animals leading their sombrous lives behind the glass by the light of a pale moon. I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.

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Unrecounted: Text and Image in W.G. Sebald
by Nikolai Preuschoff

Sebald, who would have celebrated his 70th birthday this year, didn’t publish any literary texts until he was 40. There was a novel he wrote when he was still in secondary school, but it was never published and neither were the small poems he wrote, often when travelling. Things changed in the mid-80s, when Sebald, by then professor of German at the University of East Anglia, wrote a long poem after a visit to the British Museum about the German botanist and explorer Georg Willem Steller. The poem was accepted by the Austrian magazine Manuskripte, and so were the two poems that followed, portraying the medieval painter Matthias Grünewald and the author’s own alter ego. In 1988, all three poems were published by the small Bavarian publishing house Greno under the title Nach der Natur (and as After Nature [2002] by Hamish Hamilton). The edition included six black and white photographs by the photographer Thomas Becker showing half-drowned black trees and trunks in flooded fields, beautifully printed on plates that separate the images from the text.

Becker’s skillfully composed, high-resolution photographs are in stark contrast to the images Sebald would include in his later prose fiction writings, published mostly throughout the ’90s: neither Vertigo (1990) nor The Emigrants (1992) use plates any more, and many of the reproduced photographs are now taken from newspapers, postcards or family albums found at flea markets. Other images the author took himself, many of them with a small point and shoot camera, a Canon Ixus L1, using colour negative film.

the manuscript of The Emigrants

Sebald’s literary work is exceptionally visual, and his writing from and with images demonstrates an approach to literature not in competition with (or afraid of) the visual, but in dialogue with it, knowing that for both description and photo or drawing there first needs to be careful observation and study. It is in this regard quite significant that Sebald wrote his first published literary text about a botanist who travelled with Vitus Bering’s second expedition to Kamchatka.

Born in Bavaria, Sebald studied German literature in Freiburg im Breisgau and later in Switzerland. Soon afterwards, he moved to Manchester where he received a PhD for a study on Döblin and started to pursue an academic career that brought him to Norwich. As a writer, a bit like the Arctic-explorer Steller, Sebald was drawn to unknown regions and forgotten stories, although the landscapes of his writing proved not to be too far from his home: the world of recent German and European history newly revealed to his expatriate eyes. His prose fiction writings can be described as unique and, apart from their visual component, relatively conservative: all his writings are concerned with the past, particularly the German past and the Shoah, which has been described as a centre that his writings circle around. In particular they are concerned with the broader history of modernity in its multiple, but mostly destructive aspects – imperialism and colonialism, industrialisation and exploitation.

Sebald’s writing style, at once melodic and melancholic, is oriented to 19th and early 20th century literature: he praised the work of Austrian and Swiss writers such as Keller and Stifter, and his language, even in his interviews, has something old fashioned about it (most likely due to the fact that he left southern Germany, where he grew up and studied, in the 60s, and preserved his Bavarian German though all the years he lived in southeast England). What makes Sebald’s prose unique and sets it apart from both his 19th and early 20th century patron saints and other contemporary German writers is a technique of montage, of which the included images are only the most visible expression: the extensive use of quotations and references taken from all kinds of sources, sometimes marked and exposed in the text, sometimes hidden and included like little academic riddles for intertextual research. But because Sebald’s images are the most obvious among the various montaged elements, and because they not only illustrate but influence the narrative, it makes sense to talk about ‘intermedial’ rather than ‘intertextual’ texts. …

However, in Sebald’s work the text still dominates the images: the text would be changed by the omission of the images, but it would still be readable; the images on their own rarely serve the narrative function. Sebald was a long-time amateur photographer, but it would be an exaggeration to call his work exceptionally ambitious. Travelling with a small film camera, many of his pictures can safely be called snapshots. As a writer though, he takes images quite seriously. His habit of collecting photographs and postcards from flea markets and charity shops inspired Tacita Dean’s fourth artist’s book, FLOH, in 2001. And while it seems remarkable that Dean composes a book exclusively out of portraits, holiday snapshots and other documents of banal occurrences, Sebald, too, is not eager to exhibit his own photographic work, but prefers to use not only different sources (the lack of clarity regarding the pictures’ origins has drawn criticism) but also different media, combined, reflected upon and given a new existence in his narratives.

In post-war German literature there are surprisingly few writers who experimented with images. The almost-forgotten Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940-1975) combined text and image in his wildly collaged scrapbooks, and the renowned filmmaker and author Alexander Kluge (b.1932) has used text and image in his literary work since the ’90s to challenge discursive and narrative constructions.5 While Sebald knew of both authors and while his admiration for Kluge and his historical narratives is known, his interest in the combination of text and image or, more precisely, the principle of montage, can be traced back to his PhD thesis on Alfred Döblin. The crossing of different art forms, genres and media has always been the territory of avant- garde movements. Philippe Soupault’s La Fuite in La Révolution Surrealiste (1926) is often considered the first example of a narrative text with images included for more than just illustrative purposes. Breton’s Nadja was published in 1928, but the introduction of textual montage to the German literary tradition by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was so revolutionary that Walter Benjamin saw it in explosive terms, blowing up the framework and style of the bourgeois novel. Döblin assembles his montaged fragments so densely, Benjamin writes, that the author underneath ‘barely gets a word in edgeways’.6 This is a pretty accurate description of Sebald’s own style of montage and the multiple voices of different narrators in his texts – the only difference being that Sebald adopted the technique of montage so that images, too, are included in the narrative assemblage.

Benjamin not only wrote about montage in Döblin’s work, but adapted its technique for his own theoretical writings. Montage, with its play of distances, transitions and intersections, its perpetually shifting contexts and ironic juxtaposition, had already become a favorite device for him before Döblin wrote his novel. For the Arcades Project, the unfinished major philosophical work Benjamin began in the late 1920s, he planned ‘to carry over the principle of montage into history’.8 And, interestingly, he also planned to include images. While for Sebald images are a natural part of the writing process, they are essential for Benjamin’s concept of history. For him, history is not about textbooks and grand narratives, but about images: it is only in an image, in the brief flash of a moment, that we can recognize historical truth – the rest is the long thunder of the following text. When thinking about the past is determined by images, these images merge with our understanding of the present. In other words, there can’t be an image of the past independent from our present world views, and altogether it is hard to grasp an image of the past anyway: Benjamin describes what can be grasped as a brief flash of the past that amalgamates with the present. He calls this flash-like image, preserved or frozen as a still, the dialectical image: ‘it’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’9 ‘For while’, he goes on, ‘the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images […] and the place where one encounters them is language.”

By including images in his texts – paintings, photographs and reproduced receipts, diaries or diagrams – Sebald reminds his readers of this: first, that the narrative cannot be reduced to pure imagination. The included research and its documents (as well as quotations and even, though rarely, footnotes) bear witness to biographical events and therefore to historical truth. And second, that neither the text nor the images can be fully trusted, since they only create a fictional narrative ‘based on true stories’ and that the readers need to put on an ‘inquiring gaze […] to penetrate the darkness’. The inclusion of images thus not only adds visually to the text and its ‘authenticity’, but at the same time challenges the reader to question the authenticity or, more precisely, to seek further for it.

This modesty of the author is also expressed in one of Sebald’s last books, the posthumously published Unerzählt (Unrecounted): a collection of 33 Haiku-like poems combined with drawings of pairs of eyes, of renowned or less renowned people, made in a photorealistic style by Jan Peter Tripp. Both text and image here are reduced to a minimum of expression: a small section of the head, three lines, five lines of text, a few syllables per line. In a way, this can be regarded as Sebald’s approach to writing: the text begins with an image; realism is combined with invention; and in an attempt to gesture at an untold story they come together, piece by piece.

Walter Benjamin datebook

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