Sebald by The Economist
By A.D. Miller
The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which “Austerlitz” and the four linked narratives of exile in “The Emigrants” are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of “Vertigo” gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”.
Sebald, born in Bavaria in 1944, spent most of his adult life as an academic in Britain. He died in Norfolk in 2001, after having a heart attack at the wheel of his car. He wrote in German, but worked closely with his English translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell. In either language, his voice is mesmeric.
Key decision
To invent his own hybrid form. Sebald’s main works blend travelogue and meditation, fiction with history and myth. They have a narrator who both is and is not Sebald himself: a spectral character who is sensitive, digressive and restless, compulsively peregrinating around Europe and its past.
Strong points
Finding a voice to fit his preoccupations. His sentences are looping, reflexive, moving forward yet endlessly turning back on themselves. By the time he wrote “Austerlitz”, the last book he published before his death, Sebald had more or less dispensed with paragraph breaks altogether. This fluidity creates a feeling, as the character Austerlitz says of his own sense of history, that “time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it”—clauses that are themselves part of a much longer, circular sentence. This is a style that tries to unbury the dead through syntax.
Golden rule
Obliqueness, or, as one critic put it, tact. Sebald’s prose is finely wrought yet unflashy. His punctuation is rarely more exotic than the comma; his vocabulary is unadorned. Similes are uncommon: he deals instead in a sort of luminous reality. As in style, so in content. Asked about his approach to the horrors of 20th-century history—his work circles the Nazi Holocaust as if it were a mountain—Sebald once said that his aim was to intimate “to the reader that these subjects are constant company; their presence shades every inflection of every sentence one writes”, without describing the camps and catastrophes directly. It is loss, rather than bloodshed, that his books lament.
Favourite trick
Putting pictures into the text that subtly reinforce these themes. They are black-and-white, uncaptioned and unexplained—pictures of people, but also train tickets, restaurant receipts, maps and other relics. They seem to advertise the veracity of the stories they appear in, yet they are artful and calculated. The images are often poignant, at once bringing back forgotten people and confirming that they are irrevocably lost. They point up a question that is at the heart of Sebald’s work: why do we cling on to some things from the past while the rest of it escapes us?
Role models
In the way it samples and fractures different subjects and stories, Sebald’s work is almost post-modern. Jorge Luis Borges is cited by some as a key influence on him. And yet his sentences are also plangently old-fashioned, sometimes reminiscent, for readers in English, of medieval periods. There are echoes of Thomas Malory and Thomas Browne and, in his dextrous weaving of complementary tales, of Ovid.
Typical sentence
Many of the finest are too long to cite, so this, from “The Emigrants”, will have to do: “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”
Vintage Classics reissue three of Sebald’s books this year: "The Emigrants", March; "Rings of Saturn", April; "Vertigo", June
ILLUSTRATION KATHRYN RATHKE
Culture | German literature
Mourning has broken
W.G. Sebald had just begun to be widely recognised as one of the most lyrical and imaginative prose writers of his generation when he died
KNOWN to his friends and colleagues as Max, W.G. Sebald lived for more than three decades in England. He had been born in Germany in May 1944. Too late to be involved in the second world war, he was nonetheless wholly shaped by it—“as if those horrors I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, from which I shall never entirely emerge.”
In 1966, after studying German literature at Freiburg University, he went to Britain, first to Manchester University and then as a lecturer to the University of East Anglia, where in 1987 he was appointed to the chair of German literature. Rural Suffolk became his home, a place he evokes again and again in “The Rings of Saturn”, his fourth novel, or, as he preferred to call it, his “prose fiction”. Suffolk was where Sebald could walk for hours without meeting a soul and where there was little to hinder his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past.
In a sense, England represented a double exile for Sebald. In his view, Germany was also in exile—from its own history. Sebald grew up in a working-class family in a village in the Bavarian Alps amidst a profound silence about the war and the Holocaust, a silence that was intensified rather than broken when, at the age of 17, he and his schoolfellows were shown, without explanation or discussion, film footage of Bergen-Belsen.
The whole subject of forgetting and memory became Sebald's ruling passion. His work is impossible to categorise: a mix of memoir, biography, travelogue, local history, topography and meditation. Running through it all is his search for a language and a way of looking at the past without sentimentality or mythologising.
Eccentric, possessed of an almost comic ear for gothic melodrama and a child's innocent sensibility, Sebald took years to find his voice—and then he created only a small body of work. Just 11 years after “Vertigo”, his first book, came out, Sebald had a heart attack at the wheel of his car and was killed. He was 57.
By that time, he was already well known among readers of high literature. Sebald's death was widely reported in Europe, but in America, where he had only been published for five years, the obituaries were few, respectful and short. It is only with the posthumous publication of another three volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and now a last book of prose memoir, that Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognised as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.
Sebald was always suspicious of rhetoric, of official days of commemoration and public mourning. He scorned the Holocaust industry and the feel-good sentiment of portrayals such as Thomas Keneally's “Schindler's Ark”. His vision lay in its essential privacy and obliqueness.
He could suggest the Nazi administrative machine without even mentioning it, simply by a deadpan description of Germany's minutely regulated silkworm industry a century before. Not that he avoided the thing itself. There is a searing prisoner-counting scene at Theresienstadt in “Austerlitz”, which came out in English just two months before his death. But truth, he believed, could best be ambushed at the peripheries—in the description, for example, of some tin soldiers, carefully set out on a windowsill, slowly heating up and melting as allied bombs fire the city.
This detail comes from the most recent and probably final collection of Sebald's essays, “Campo Santo”, in an appreciation of Alexander Kluge and other German writers of the 1950s—very few of whom, he says, could look clearly at their immediate past. There are a dozen works here, set in chronological order across 25 years, and placed after four fragments about Corsica, on which Sebald was working when he died. The essays are especially interesting in that they help to show a gradual loosening and release of Sebald's talent as a writer, a progression from strict footnoted argumentation to the almost recklessly fluid and digressive style that characterises his prose fiction.
These later pieces—on Nabokov, on Kafka and film, on Bruce Chatwin and others—all explore in their subjects the same uncanny sensibility that informs his own work: the sense of a silk-thin border between us and some “quasi- or extra-territorial” world, to use a favourite expression of his. There is an almost family-feeling in his understanding of Nabokov, for example—another émigré who was familiar with borders both real and metaphysical.
Sebald's writing can induce dizziness. Sentences, paragraphs, whole works drift and circle. The focus shifts; multiple narrators stretch the perspective. And yet, when you look up, something settles. Real vertigo, you realise, consists in the vanishing acts, the astounding erasures of history. There is a moment in “Austerlitz” when Sebald's narrator describes a paper mill he has heard of, where the water murmurs gently and the trees cast a perpetual twilight. There, he says, among the drying sheets of clean blank paper, “you wish for nothing more than eternal peace”. But this place of uninscribed paper is, of course, also a tabula rasa of the mind. This is the dream, the unreality, the siren's song that tempts the world to abandon history's, as well as Sebald's, strenuous injunction to remember.
KNOWN to his friends and colleagues as Max, W.G. Sebald lived for more than three decades in England. He had been born in Germany in May 1944. Too late to be involved in the second world war, he was nonetheless wholly shaped by it—“as if those horrors I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, from which I shall never entirely emerge.”
In 1966, after studying German literature at Freiburg University, he went to Britain, first to Manchester University and then as a lecturer to the University of East Anglia, where in 1987 he was appointed to the chair of German literature. Rural Suffolk became his home, a place he evokes again and again in “The Rings of Saturn”, his fourth novel, or, as he preferred to call it, his “prose fiction”. Suffolk was where Sebald could walk for hours without meeting a soul and where there was little to hinder his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past.
In a sense, England represented a double exile for Sebald. In his view, Germany was also in exile—from its own history. Sebald grew up in a working-class family in a village in the Bavarian Alps amidst a profound silence about the war and the Holocaust, a silence that was intensified rather than broken when, at the age of 17, he and his schoolfellows were shown, without explanation or discussion, film footage of Bergen-Belsen.
The whole subject of forgetting and memory became Sebald's ruling passion. His work is impossible to categorise: a mix of memoir, biography, travelogue, local history, topography and meditation. Running through it all is his search for a language and a way of looking at the past without sentimentality or mythologising.
Eccentric, possessed of an almost comic ear for gothic melodrama and a child's innocent sensibility, Sebald took years to find his voice—and then he created only a small body of work. Just 11 years after “Vertigo”, his first book, came out, Sebald had a heart attack at the wheel of his car and was killed. He was 57.
By that time, he was already well known among readers of high literature. Sebald's death was widely reported in Europe, but in America, where he had only been published for five years, the obituaries were few, respectful and short. It is only with the posthumous publication of another three volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and now a last book of prose memoir, that Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognised as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.
Sebald was always suspicious of rhetoric, of official days of commemoration and public mourning. He scorned the Holocaust industry and the feel-good sentiment of portrayals such as Thomas Keneally's “Schindler's Ark”. His vision lay in its essential privacy and obliqueness.
He could suggest the Nazi administrative machine without even mentioning it, simply by a deadpan description of Germany's minutely regulated silkworm industry a century before. Not that he avoided the thing itself. There is a searing prisoner-counting scene at Theresienstadt in “Austerlitz”, which came out in English just two months before his death. But truth, he believed, could best be ambushed at the peripheries—in the description, for example, of some tin soldiers, carefully set out on a windowsill, slowly heating up and melting as allied bombs fire the city.
This detail comes from the most recent and probably final collection of Sebald's essays, “Campo Santo”, in an appreciation of Alexander Kluge and other German writers of the 1950s—very few of whom, he says, could look clearly at their immediate past. There are a dozen works here, set in chronological order across 25 years, and placed after four fragments about Corsica, on which Sebald was working when he died. The essays are especially interesting in that they help to show a gradual loosening and release of Sebald's talent as a writer, a progression from strict footnoted argumentation to the almost recklessly fluid and digressive style that characterises his prose fiction.
These later pieces—on Nabokov, on Kafka and film, on Bruce Chatwin and others—all explore in their subjects the same uncanny sensibility that informs his own work: the sense of a silk-thin border between us and some “quasi- or extra-territorial” world, to use a favourite expression of his. There is an almost family-feeling in his understanding of Nabokov, for example—another émigré who was familiar with borders both real and metaphysical.
Sebald's writing can induce dizziness. Sentences, paragraphs, whole works drift and circle. The focus shifts; multiple narrators stretch the perspective. And yet, when you look up, something settles. Real vertigo, you realise, consists in the vanishing acts, the astounding erasures of history. There is a moment in “Austerlitz” when Sebald's narrator describes a paper mill he has heard of, where the water murmurs gently and the trees cast a perpetual twilight. There, he says, among the drying sheets of clean blank paper, “you wish for nothing more than eternal peace”. But this place of uninscribed paper is, of course, also a tabula rasa of the mind. This is the dream, the unreality, the siren's song that tempts the world to abandon history's, as well as Sebald's, strenuous injunction to remember.
Culture | German literature
Mourning has broken
W.G. Sebald had just begun to be widely recognised as one of the most lyrical and imaginative prose writers of his generation when he died
KNOWN to his friends and colleagues as Max, W.G. Sebald lived for more than three decades in England. He had been born in Germany in May 1944. Too late to be involved in the second world war, he was nonetheless wholly shaped by it—“as if those horrors I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, from which I shall never entirely emerge.”
In 1966, after studying German literature at Freiburg University, he went to Britain, first to Manchester University and then as a lecturer to the University of East Anglia, where in 1987 he was appointed to the chair of German literature. Rural Suffolk became his home, a place he evokes again and again in “The Rings of Saturn”, his fourth novel, or, as he preferred to call it, his “prose fiction”. Suffolk was where Sebald could walk for hours without meeting a soul and where there was little to hinder his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past.
In a sense, England represented a double exile for Sebald. In his view, Germany was also in exile—from its own history. Sebald grew up in a working-class family in a village in the Bavarian Alps amidst a profound silence about the war and the Holocaust, a silence that was intensified rather than broken when, at the age of 17, he and his schoolfellows were shown, without explanation or discussion, film footage of Bergen-Belsen.
The whole subject of forgetting and memory became Sebald's ruling passion. His work is impossible to categorise: a mix of memoir, biography, travelogue, local history, topography and meditation. Running through it all is his search for a language and a way of looking at the past without sentimentality or mythologising.
Eccentric, possessed of an almost comic ear for gothic melodrama and a child's innocent sensibility, Sebald took years to find his voice—and then he created only a small body of work. Just 11 years after “Vertigo”, his first book, came out, Sebald had a heart attack at the wheel of his car and was killed. He was 57.
By that time, he was already well known among readers of high literature. Sebald's death was widely reported in Europe, but in America, where he had only been published for five years, the obituaries were few, respectful and short. It is only with the posthumous publication of another three volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and now a last book of prose memoir, that Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognised as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.
Sebald was always suspicious of rhetoric, of official days of commemoration and public mourning. He scorned the Holocaust industry and the feel-good sentiment of portrayals such as Thomas Keneally's “Schindler's Ark”. His vision lay in its essential privacy and obliqueness.
He could suggest the Nazi administrative machine without even mentioning it, simply by a deadpan description of Germany's minutely regulated silkworm industry a century before. Not that he avoided the thing itself. There is a searing prisoner-counting scene at Theresienstadt in “Austerlitz”, which came out in English just two months before his death. But truth, he believed, could best be ambushed at the peripheries—in the description, for example, of some tin soldiers, carefully set out on a windowsill, slowly heating up and melting as allied bombs fire the city.
This detail comes from the most recent and probably final collection of Sebald's essays, “Campo Santo”, in an appreciation of Alexander Kluge and other German writers of the 1950s—very few of whom, he says, could look clearly at their immediate past. There are a dozen works here, set in chronological order across 25 years, and placed after four fragments about Corsica, on which Sebald was working when he died. The essays are especially interesting in that they help to show a gradual loosening and release of Sebald's talent as a writer, a progression from strict footnoted argumentation to the almost recklessly fluid and digressive style that characterises his prose fiction.
These later pieces—on Nabokov, on Kafka and film, on Bruce Chatwin and others—all explore in their subjects the same uncanny sensibility that informs his own work: the sense of a silk-thin border between us and some “quasi- or extra-territorial” world, to use a favourite expression of his. There is an almost family-feeling in his understanding of Nabokov, for example—another émigré who was familiar with borders both real and metaphysical.
Sebald's writing can induce dizziness. Sentences, paragraphs, whole works drift and circle. The focus shifts; multiple narrators stretch the perspective. And yet, when you look up, something settles. Real vertigo, you realise, consists in the vanishing acts, the astounding erasures of history. There is a moment in “Austerlitz” when Sebald's narrator describes a paper mill he has heard of, where the water murmurs gently and the trees cast a perpetual twilight. There, he says, among the drying sheets of clean blank paper, “you wish for nothing more than eternal peace”. But this place of uninscribed paper is, of course, also a tabula rasa of the mind. This is the dream, the unreality, the siren's song that tempts the world to abandon history's, as well as Sebald's, strenuous injunction to remember.
KNOWN to his friends and colleagues as Max, W.G. Sebald lived for more than three decades in England. He had been born in Germany in May 1944. Too late to be involved in the second world war, he was nonetheless wholly shaped by it—“as if those horrors I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, from which I shall never entirely emerge.”
In 1966, after studying German literature at Freiburg University, he went to Britain, first to Manchester University and then as a lecturer to the University of East Anglia, where in 1987 he was appointed to the chair of German literature. Rural Suffolk became his home, a place he evokes again and again in “The Rings of Saturn”, his fourth novel, or, as he preferred to call it, his “prose fiction”. Suffolk was where Sebald could walk for hours without meeting a soul and where there was little to hinder his strange capacity for merging and dissolving the present into the past.
In a sense, England represented a double exile for Sebald. In his view, Germany was also in exile—from its own history. Sebald grew up in a working-class family in a village in the Bavarian Alps amidst a profound silence about the war and the Holocaust, a silence that was intensified rather than broken when, at the age of 17, he and his schoolfellows were shown, without explanation or discussion, film footage of Bergen-Belsen.
The whole subject of forgetting and memory became Sebald's ruling passion. His work is impossible to categorise: a mix of memoir, biography, travelogue, local history, topography and meditation. Running through it all is his search for a language and a way of looking at the past without sentimentality or mythologising.
Eccentric, possessed of an almost comic ear for gothic melodrama and a child's innocent sensibility, Sebald took years to find his voice—and then he created only a small body of work. Just 11 years after “Vertigo”, his first book, came out, Sebald had a heart attack at the wheel of his car and was killed. He was 57.
By that time, he was already well known among readers of high literature. Sebald's death was widely reported in Europe, but in America, where he had only been published for five years, the obituaries were few, respectful and short. It is only with the posthumous publication of another three volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and now a last book of prose memoir, that Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognised as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.
Sebald was always suspicious of rhetoric, of official days of commemoration and public mourning. He scorned the Holocaust industry and the feel-good sentiment of portrayals such as Thomas Keneally's “Schindler's Ark”. His vision lay in its essential privacy and obliqueness.
He could suggest the Nazi administrative machine without even mentioning it, simply by a deadpan description of Germany's minutely regulated silkworm industry a century before. Not that he avoided the thing itself. There is a searing prisoner-counting scene at Theresienstadt in “Austerlitz”, which came out in English just two months before his death. But truth, he believed, could best be ambushed at the peripheries—in the description, for example, of some tin soldiers, carefully set out on a windowsill, slowly heating up and melting as allied bombs fire the city.
This detail comes from the most recent and probably final collection of Sebald's essays, “Campo Santo”, in an appreciation of Alexander Kluge and other German writers of the 1950s—very few of whom, he says, could look clearly at their immediate past. There are a dozen works here, set in chronological order across 25 years, and placed after four fragments about Corsica, on which Sebald was working when he died. The essays are especially interesting in that they help to show a gradual loosening and release of Sebald's talent as a writer, a progression from strict footnoted argumentation to the almost recklessly fluid and digressive style that characterises his prose fiction.
These later pieces—on Nabokov, on Kafka and film, on Bruce Chatwin and others—all explore in their subjects the same uncanny sensibility that informs his own work: the sense of a silk-thin border between us and some “quasi- or extra-territorial” world, to use a favourite expression of his. There is an almost family-feeling in his understanding of Nabokov, for example—another émigré who was familiar with borders both real and metaphysical.
Sebald's writing can induce dizziness. Sentences, paragraphs, whole works drift and circle. The focus shifts; multiple narrators stretch the perspective. And yet, when you look up, something settles. Real vertigo, you realise, consists in the vanishing acts, the astounding erasures of history. There is a moment in “Austerlitz” when Sebald's narrator describes a paper mill he has heard of, where the water murmurs gently and the trees cast a perpetual twilight. There, he says, among the drying sheets of clean blank paper, “you wish for nothing more than eternal peace”. But this place of uninscribed paper is, of course, also a tabula rasa of the mind. This is the dream, the unreality, the siren's song that tempts the world to abandon history's, as well as Sebald's, strenuous injunction to remember.
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Placing words
Few know that the Britain-based German prose master was also a poet
Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. By W.G. Sebald, translated by Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton; 240 pages; £14.99. To be published in America in April by Random House; $25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
SINCE W.G. Sebald's sudden death in 2001, the cult of the Britain-based German writer has spread fast. Known for his exquisite prose works that, in their combination of the real with the fictional, push at the limits of what novels can be, he is considered one of the foremost German writers of his generation. He was also a poet.
“Across the Land and the Water” brings together a selection of the poems he never published in book form, if at all. Translated by Iain Galbraith, the volume sketches out a life on the move. Stretching over 37 years, the volume includes poems that Mr Galbraith found jotted down in Sebald's archives on scraps of paper, others written on menus, theatre programmes or headed paper from hotels. They emerge on trains or at the “unmanned/station in Wolfenbüttel”, Sebald covertly observing fellow commuters as he evokes the differing landscapes shuttling past.
Unlike his epic, vertiginous prose, these poems are often condensed and sparse. And yet they contain many of the themes that would obsess Sebald throughout his writing life. The poet spent his later years in Britain, working at the Universities of Manchester and East Anglia. Preoccupied with memory, desire and the ghostliness of objects, Sebald can evoke in one poem the faded glamour of “a forgotten era/of fountains and chandeliers” or a “turn-of-the-century/frock-coat and taffeta bow” while in another he will speak of an “ugly/tower block” or “moribund supermarkets”. This shift between differing eras could seem forced or artificial. And yet Sebald manages such movement with a lightness of touch. Indeed, the driving force behind his work is a search for the past, for the forgotten or overlooked: “I wish to inquire/Into the whereabouts of the dead.”
As in “Austerlitz”, his 2001 work of prose fiction, this search for the dead circles around the occurrence that haunts Sebald's writing, and which often prompts him to write in the first place—the Holocaust. In one short poem, “Somewhere”, for example, the opening line “behind Türkenfeld” becomes, with the help of Mr Galbraith's introduction, a far more specific and terrifying location than Sebald's title suggests. Along with being a town the then eight-year-old Sebald would frequently pass on his way to Munich in 1952, Türkenfeld was one of the 94 sub-camps of Dachau, and a train station on the notorious “Blutbahn” (blood track). Even in a seemingly simple six-line poem, the sudden weight of historical events can be felt.
This broad collection also shows Sebald's writing in a less melancholy light. He may speak of “the pain my happy/memories bring” but can also, in one of the two poems originally written in English, write playfully of a young woman in New York describing how much she loves the air-conditioning in her office as opposed to the summer heat: “There,/she said, I am/happy like an/opened up oyster/on a bed of ice.” His poetry can refer to such heavyweights as Goethe or Freud, but it also takes inspiration from the Brothers Grimm or the films of Alain Resnais.
Mr Galbraith does a good job translating these shifting tones and influences. However, it is a shame that this volume does not include Sebald's original poems in the German. Concerned with the transitory or the ghostly, it is easy to suspect that no one translation could pin Sebald down. Sebald himself seemed aware of this: “If you knew every cranny/of my heart/you would yet be ignorant.” And yet as these poems show, his talent lay in making the experience of such ignorance delightful.
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