Category: German Literature

A Book Without a Soul – Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader

I read The Reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink, because – surprise, surprise – it was on my reading list. However, I’d been meaning to read it for a while. I actually bought myself a copy of the German while still at school – the book is short, and at the time I thought that I’d have plenty of time, energy, and desire to read German literature in the original language. I read the first few pages and gave up. But now my German’s better and I do, sometimes, read things in that language now, and even occasionally enjoy doing so. Still, I was in Russia, and my German copy is at home, so I read Der Vorleser in English on my Kindle to save myself time.

The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, a young man who falls in love with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. One day she suddenly disappears, and when he meets her again it is in a courtroom, where she is being tried for working in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This forces Michael to re-evaluate their relationship and confront a kind of complicity for having loved her. As you do. Anyway, the novel forms part of the German postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) that I’ve written about elsewhere. In particular, The Reader raises questions about guilt and responsibility. How far can we blame Hanna for her actions, and all of that.

Well, let’s find out.

The Relationship – First Love

Young Michael Berg, aged just 15, gets hepatitis. He collapses vomiting on the way home from school. Luckily, however, a woman is there to help him. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault”. This woman is Hanna Schmitz, an ideal German beauty and in her thirties. When Michael recovers, after a long time in bed at home, he finds Hanna to thank her for her trouble. Except instead of just thanking her, he falls in love with her. When he sees her changing her stockings he goes red and runs away. But he comes back, and this time helps her move some coal. He gets covered in black dust and she suggests he has a bath. After the bath she puts her hands on his erection and initiates their physical relationship.

Being a modern reader who tends to value consent, this struck me as an inauspicious start to a relationship. Of course, for Michael, it’s great. The two create a ritual of showering and making love, and when he goes back to school it is with newfound confidence, because he now feels comfortable around girls. He starts skipping lessons at school to go and see Hanna, and even plans a biking holiday for them both at Easter, which they both actually end up doing. Everything seems wonderful. Michael even has the cute habit of reading her stories, mostly significant Enlightenment works by stodgy German authors. Anyway, she laps it up.

The Relationship – Dating a (literal) Nazi

Of course, things aren’t as wonderful as they seem. Michael narrates The Reader from far in the future. He already knows what will happen to their relationship, and he struggles to fully enjoy even these recollections, knowing what he eventually does about her. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily”. But even beyond hindsight, there’s a lot going wrong. She “took possession of [him] as a matter of course” during sex (I’m not critiquing anybody’s sexual preferences, but it’s an important point), and seems to view everything as a “power game”. The relationship quickly becomes abusive. Michael starts apologising for things he never did, taking on blame, surrendering. During their bicycle holiday, one morning she even hits him with her belt.

In some way, their relationship plays out in miniature the experience of a nation under fascism. Hanna is controlling, violent, and demands devotion. Michael gives it to her, accepting horrible conditions in the name of love (for the state). She is “single-minded” – there’s a lack of internality to her, something Adorno describes as common to the authoritarian personality type. When Michael thinks about his love for her there are lots of images of submerging, which also connects to fascism’s demands for a loss of self and identification with the state.

Moving On

One day Hanna disappears. Michael sees her while he’s out with his friends, but he doesn’t approach her. The next time he goes to her flat, he finds it empty. The aftermath of the relationship is just as nasty as the thing itself. Michael ends up sleeping with people he doesn’t love; he refuses his dying grandfather’s blessing out of an obnoxious nihilism. Hanna has left him a mess. But he does get into university, and there he studies law. One day he takes part in a seminar which involves going to a local court to watch the trial of some concentration camp guards. And it is here where we, in the second part of The Reader, meet Hanna again.

A Sham of a Court

Hanna, while they were together, never really spoke much about herself. Whenever Michael asked something she’d dismiss him – “the things you ask, kid!” – or else answer with difficulty – “it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers”. Now, at the courtroom, he learns the truth. Hanna had worked at the camps. What was more, while transferring prisoners from one camp to another as the war ended, she and her colleagues through negligence ended up killing almost all of them, for a fire broke out in the church where they were locked up for the night and the guards never opened the doors to free them.

Schlink, a professor of law in real life, introduces the reader to the challenges of retroactive justice. At first, for the students, the idea is an intellectual one. Hanna broke the law of the time, but the law was not applied to her then as a guard – does that mean she should go without punishment in the present? But this theoretical, intellectual problem becomes a personal one when Michael sees her among the defendants. However, even in the court it’s hard to feel we’re dealing with a real trial. Among the lawyers are ex-Nazis, and at one point Hanna rightly asks the judge “so what would you have done?” He can only bluster an answer. The idea that everyone in Germany is complicit in the Nazi atrocities, directly or indirectly, is a one challenging component of some postwar German thought.   

When Hanna is asked why she didn’t let the prisoners go free, she says that it would have been impossible to restore order. Faced with her duty as a guard and her duty as a caring human being, she chose the former. The Reader does engage a little bit with German philosophy, old as well as new. Michael’s father is a professor of the subject, and has written on Kant and Hegel. I’m no expert on Hegel, but I know enough about Kant to say that he placed a huge amount of emphasis on doing one’s duty.

While the categorical imperative probably has an answer to the question of whether we should let prisoners die or fail at our jobs, I think there is a subtext about the inadequacy of philosophy in The Reader. Early on in the novel Michael notes that “behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided”. In reality, neither Hegel nor Kant could create a philosophical system capable of coming to terms with the questions of collective guilt and responsibility that the Holocaust raised. When Michael eventually asks his father for advice about the case, he does not get the answer he wants from him either.

The Reader and the Listener

The twist of The Reader, which is relatively obvious, is that Hanna can’t read. She ended up in court because she ignored court summonses, and she hit Michael on their bike tour because he left her a note she couldn’t understand. In the courtroom the other guards blame her for writing a report on the atrocities, and she accepts responsibility for it. It turns out she’ll do anything to avoid the shame of others learning that she can’t read. In fact, she ended up in the camps because she was avoiding the possibility of promotion at her old job, a promotion that would have exposed her illiteracy.

For Michael, this raises the question of whether her illiteracy could “be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp”. He knows that he could tell the judge, saving her from getting a huge prison sentence. But he hesitates. His father tells him that it’s more important to protect her dignity, her sense of self, than to save her from prison. In the end, Michael watches her get sentenced to a far longer sentence than she perhaps deserved.

After Court

Michael’s life after graduation is a failure. He hides from the world, becoming a professor of legal history. His wife separates from him. But one day he decides to write to Hanna, or rather to read to her. He sends her recordings from various books, so that she can listen and enjoy herself at prison. She eventually learns to read by following in the books his words. Michael’s attitude towards illiteracy in some way reflects the problem of Nazism itself, and the way it took hold over the German people. “Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation”. She has come to think for herself.

The final section of The Reader I shan’t spoil here. It is difficult and morally challenging. We are not asking ourselves “who is to blame”, because that’s a relatively straightforward question. The much harder question The Reader poses is “how much are they to blame?” This is an area of uncertainty, of gradations. I don’t have a clue myself what the answers might be. But Schlink orchestrates his novel carefully, and in doing so he makes sure we ask ourselves what we think. That’s commendable, in its way.

Conclusion

The Reader is on my university reading list for the same reasons it’s often read at German schools: it’s short, it’s morally complex, it’s historically relevant. It’s not unlike those pre-made meals you can buy at the supermarket – ready to eat (or analyse), but there’s something missing when you compare them with other meals (or books). You know, it might just be that it has no soul. I know that sounds ridiculous, especially when we’re talking about a relatively engaging love story with some guilt and redemption sprinkled on top. But what I mean is that I felt the book was too short – its themes, their weight, overwhelmed the human element it tried to explore.

That’s not to say you can’t write about people’s complicity in the German past in a short novel – Grass’s Cat and Mouse does it perfectly well. But the Holocaust is perhaps a little much. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I felt the book was written for its themes, rather than its characters, or the story. And when you have that impression, it’s hard to enjoy it. The characters lose their internal energy; they seem like automatons, just advancing the themes. The feeling is in no way as bad as reading Tolstoy’s later works, but it’s similar. The Reader just feels too simple, too formulaic, in spite of its great themes. It feels like a book you read at school. I enjoyed it at the time. I even went out and bought my girlfriend a copy as soon as I finished. But it’s hardly a book I’ll revisit.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.

Fragments of Pain – W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

The Emigrants is the second novel by W.G. Sebald, the late German academic who was based at the University of East Anglia, that I have read after Austerlitz. I read Austerlitz a few weeks ago and was not as affected by it as I felt I was supposed to be, and so I decided not to write a post about it. The Emigrants is concerned with many of the same themes as Austerlitz – memory, trauma, and the like – but it explores them in a way that was slightly more approachable and, as a result, more impactful. Sebald is a pretty unique phenomenon, and even if the horrors of central Europe’s twentieth century do not interest you, his way of writing about them is another reason to read him.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who discovers at the end of his schooldays that he is not the Welshman he thought he was, but a Jew from the Prague. This leads him to an odyssey of discovery as he tries to find out the truth of his origins, and whatever became of his parents. Austerlitz’s story comes to us mediated through a narrator who meets Austerlitz over the course of several years, often by complete chance. The Emigrants adopts a similar approach, but because it is made up of four short stories, ranging in length from under thirty pages to almost one hundred, the stories end up easier to follow, and their characters are a little easier to believe in.

Each of the stories focuses on a different émigré, emigrant, or exile, from the lands inhabited by the Jews and Germans, with a final emigrant – Sebald’s narrator himself – as the one who hears and transcribes the stories of others, either from notebooks or diaries or from conversations. One thing that Sebald does well is emphasise the subjectivity of experience. This was perhaps a necessity in Postwar German literature – after all, how could one possibly write objectively about the Holocaust? The Holocaust isn’t even mentioned in The Emigrants, but all but one of the emigrants are Jews, at least in part, and in the suicides and despairs that fill the book’s pages the Holocaust is always present in the background. The Emigrants is less the record of the lives of four emigrants so much as the record of trying to record the lives of four emigrants.

James Wood, the critic, writes of Sebald’s great skill at conveying “whole lives”. Rather than the false omniscience of the third person, or the boundedness of the first, Sebald’s approach is a hybrid form that lets us see from the outside the course of a life – from youth to death – as other people perceive it, even as we understand that those same people are flawed and limited in their perceptions, and never able to see the whole picture. But what we hear in these stories is not to be completely trusted not only because people can never know everything, but also because people will know things and conceal them. We arrive too late to hear the full picture, but we can try to build it out of the fragments the narrator picks up from others. The emigrants have all left their country, and one obvious question that we can never fully answer, is why?

Looking at the first two stories, which were probably my favourites, will make it clearer how Sebald operates in The Emigrants.

Dr Selwyn

Sebald’s narrator meets Dr Selwyn while looking for a place to rent. He lets Sebald and his wife rent part of his house in the English countryside and he reveals the story of his life to them over time. Selwyn is an old man, almost eighty, with a wife of his own, though she is rarely in the house. The house and grounds themselves are all in a state of decay. Selwyn’s great passion, tennis, is one he no longer indulges in. He has a servant who is mentally ill, and apparently no friends at all. But one day a guest does arrive, and the two men invite Sebald and his wife to dinner.

Selwyn describes how in his youth he felt a certain attraction for a mountaineering guide, Johannes Naegeli – “never in his life, neither before not later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man”. These are the words Sebald’s narrator gives to us, and they are not exactly definite in their meaning. Naegeli, we then learn, died in a mountaineering accident. A short while later Selwyn breaks off his narrative, saying it was probably not interesting. He starts showing slides from a trip he undertook with his guest ten years ago, and Sebald watches them, aware that they are sharing memories, but he remains on the outside.

At another time, Selwyn mentions being afflicted by homesickness more and more. He explains that his family originally came from near Grodno in the Russian Empire. We don’t learn why his family left, though the implication – and it is only an implication – is that antisemitism drove them out. Selwyn explains how he told his wife “the secret of my origins”, and perhaps that is to blame for the decline of their relationship – Selwyn’s name is an anglicised version of his original Seweryn. He also mentions perhaps having sold, “at one point, my soul.” A page later and Selwyn has shot himself.

At the end of each of the stories in The Emigrants I found it was useful to ask myself what the story was trying to say. With “Dr Selwyn” I ended up coming to the conclusion that what it was trying to say was precisely that it is impossible to say everything, and often impossible even to say enough. Like a shattered vase we only have the pieces of Selwyn’s dialogue with which to try to make sense of the shape of his life – his emigration, his possibly homosexual love, his cold marriage, his homesickness and death. We can perhaps put them all together, but the glue can only ever be our imaginations, and as a result, unreliable. In the face of the horror of suicide, we have nothing concrete to offer. We simply don’t know enough.

Paul Bereyter

Dr Selwyn was alive to tell his story, but Paul Bereyter is not so lucky. Instead, Sebald’s narrator learns of his old schoolteacher’s death through the papers: “Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher”. But immediately the narrator informs us that the article is, if not full of lies, at least dishonest. It does not say that Bereyter had killed himself as well, by laying himself down on the tracks before an oncoming train, or that Bereyter had been prevented during the Third Reich from teaching because he was a quarter Jewish. Newspapers, though we often hope to rely on them for facts, are just as unreliable as everything else in Sebald’s world when it comes to trying to piece together something approaching truth out of all its many fragments.

Sebald’s narrator’s attempt to recover Bereyter is not easy. Much has been destroyed. Architecture, which in Austerlitz is a way holding on to memory, here does the opposite – Bereyter’s house has been taken down and replaced by a block of flats. In S, the village where Bereyter had taught, people after the war either kept quiet about their role in the gradual removal of Jewish, even slightly Jewish, people from public life, or even forgot it altogether – and we cannot know which. Instead, for the narrator, growing up in the postwar years, Bereyter has a reputation that obscures all that. He has perhaps not grown up properly, he is a bit strange, a bit of a free-thinker. A kind of collective refusal to accept responsibility for Bereyter’s dismissal from his post hangs over the town.

Of course, Bereyter gets his job back and teaches and eventually finds what appears to be companionship in life. His suicide, then, is more complicated than simply his temporary loss of work. The words of the woman he spent much of his later years with describes the way he began an attempt to recover a sense of the lost past, of the suffering of the Jews. He reads authors who suffered as a result of the Nazi era, or those who flirted with suicide – Wittgenstein, Trakl, Mann, Benjamin. The woman seems to suggest that the result of this reading, this research, was that Bereyter no longer felt he could belong in the village where he had once taught. The weight of the guilt that he had revealed to himself was too much. And that, perhaps, is why he ended his life.

The other two stories contain many of the same themes and ideas of the first two, expanding on them, and approaching them from different angles. One thing that is particularly interesting is to consider the role of Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants. We read about those whose obsession with the past and regrets eventually destroyed them. But our narrator too, is scouring the past, reconstructing lives. Where does all this place him? He too is a figure, trying to master a history that is too broad and too horrific for the human heart to bear. The question is, as always, why he does this. There is a moral value in trying to recover the past, but The Emigrants is not wholeheartedly in favour of archive-scouring either. It seems to suggest an approach to the past that acknowledges its own limitations: we cannot know everything, but we must know enough.

Style

The greatest influence on Sebald’s prose was probably the German writer, Adalbert Stifter, who is not read much in English these days. (Though NYRB released a new translation of Motley Stones just last week!). Stifter’s stories are slow, meandering, and don’t appear to be going anywhere. But at the same time, from the few I’ve read, there’s a certain magic in them all the same. Because they are so obviously stories, it is hard to feel pressure to get to the point. We wouldn’t hurry up someone telling a story by the fire – it’s the same feeling. The stories of The Emigrants, whatever their moral heftiness, are also broken up by long stretches of… nothing. Nature descriptions, pointless events, whatever.

“At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” Thus begins “Dr Selwyn”, not with a bang, but with a drive. This style is so unusual because we are everywhere taught to focus, to not waste time. Even in our reading, we want to be entertained. But I don’t think Sebald’s style here is merely the result of a desire to try my patience, though it does that. I think there is a kind of moral purpose here. Sebald is determined to notice things, to make a record, and this demands attention to the world around us. I also think that the style further adds to the contingency of the stories – Sebald’s narrator comes across them or their authors by chance. Things are found and saved from forgetting only by luck.

It’s worth mentioning the Sebald also uses black and white photographs in his works, another innovation. They generally depict things from the text, or at least seem to. Their low quality, and dubious authenticity, reflects back on the narrative. We often take the accuracy of a photo for granted, even though in reality they are just as unreliable a record as prose. Sebald’s use of photos at first suggests an additional investment in making his stories seem real, but in the end they only further contribute to the destruction of certainty, of wholeness, that takes place in whatever he writes.

Conclusion

In a way, I am not sure how to approach Sebald here. His fiction is unique among authors I’ve read. His stories juxtapose the quiet peace of nature and travel writing against the horrors of the earth, whether Holocaust of repression or whatever else. And yet at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the poet Michael Hofmann, who accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog – or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.” Hofmann’s description is apt. Sebald’s writing takes us into a fog, into a world of uncertainty and confusion. Like your blogger, Sebald cannot write a simple sentence. And if everything on the earth circles around scepticism about being able to know anything, because our memories and perceptions are hopelessly corrupt, what are we supposed to take away from this?

There are some fantastic descriptions, and I think that Sebald’s topics are valuable. This is not so much Germans berating themselves over their guilt, as one German looking at the way lives can be maimed by trauma. The despair of The Emigrants is unavoidable. But when one’s dealing with that part of the 20th century, I don’t know what else one has any right to say.

For more sad Germans, check out Adorno and Grass.