German Thought Archives - Page 4 of 5

The Joy of Ideas – Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Whether or not we ultimately see the French Revolution as stemming from a disillusionment with the monarchy, bourgeois self-assertion, or hungry peasants, it is obvious enough that after the initial turmoil the leaders who came to share power and chop heads were motivated by ideas of what society should look like, and where it was heading. The Russian Revolution and the early Soviet Union too, for all their betrayals of pure Marxian and Marxist thought, nevertheless contained many actors who took their cues from ideology, and often added their own lines to the drama. Thinkers, both on the right and the left, have been driven by ideas, consciously or unconsciously. And passionately held belief is something that many of us admire and envy, whatever the belief’s content. It is one of the attractions of the fictions of Dostoevsky that his characters believe so passionately in ideas.

Isaiah Berlin is a historian of ideas, but to my mind his closest affinity is to the Russian novelists of the 19^th century, including his favourite Turgenev, and not to other historians. Berlin’s work is filled with a serious and excited engagement with ideas, good and bad, hopeful and hateful, so that we ourselves become aware of the sheer force which animates them as well as if we had seen someone slaughtering a pawnbroker with an axe over them or dissecting frogs. This is perhaps no surprise. Born in Riga in the Russian Empire in 1909, Berlin and his family moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) just in time to witness the Russian capital be torn apart, repeatedly, by revolutions coloured by ideological thought. He moved to the United Kingdom with his family shortly thereafter, studied at Oxford, and became one of the greatest thinkers of his time.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, subtitled “Chapters in the History of Ideas”, is a collection of Berlin’s essays in which his principle concerns are on full display – the Enlightenment and Romanticism and both of their troubled legacies, and his own idea of “value pluralism”. At the centre of the collection is a magnificent, awe-inspiring essay on the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre. Besides de Maistre, other recurring figures in this collection include Kant, Herder, Machiavelli, Vico, Rousseau and Voltaire. Many of these thinkers will be familiar to us, at least in passing, but Berlin’s great strength – and the reason I adore him so much – is his ability to make their concerns appear fresh and relevant to our own age. In short, he makes us understand ideas from the inside – their excitement and their pleasure.

Rather than explore each of the essays in turn, here I will explore thoughts he develops throughout them, and why it’s exciting.

The Enlightenment Vision of the World and its Problems

These days the Enlightenment, the period in the late 17^th and 18^th centuries when clever philosophers, predominantly from France, tried to solve all human problems using reason, now has something of a bad name. Firstly, these eminently reasonable men (and they were, pretty much, all men), were often hypocrites. Kant, as is well known now, failed to apply his philosophy to the savages of the world, and was rather racist; Hume was no better. To my mind this charge, which Berlin does not bother addressing, is far less important than the one that out of their thought came the totalitarian systems of the earth. This is the view which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Karl Popper, another influential mid-20^th thinker, called Plato, with the regimented society and clear social stratification of The Republic, one of the first totalitarian thinkers, and also had little love for the Enlightenment.

It is this view of the Enlightenment as a less-than-benign force that Berlin engages with. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity Berlin is keen to moderate criticism of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism which followed. He explores how a combination of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas created the groundwork for modern totalitarianism, but need not necessarily lead to it.

Lost Unities – The Decline of Universalism

The Enlightenment was the last period of the world where dreaming of a utopia was in some way possible. It was an old idea that all genuine questions – about our place and goals upon the earth – could have only one valid answer. These answers could be found if we looked hard enough and knew how to do so. Finally, people believed that all the answers were compatible. People answered questions differently, whether due to religious or political thoughts, but nevertheless they were mistaken and simply missing the one Truth which could be found and should be propagated by those who found it. Believing all this makes a utopia – a place of stasis and conformity, possible. It allows for Hegel’s idea of progress, Marx’s idea of communism. It also allows for the rationalism of the French philosophes whose ideas came to justify the terrors of revolutionary France.

Killing people is of course a shame, but when you are building a perfect state, sometimes murder is necessary.

Enlightenment Smashers – Vico, Machiavelli, Herder

Berlin credits different thinkers with destroying these ideas and making way of Romanticism. Machiavelli realised that Classical and modern Christian societies had incompatible ideals. He showed that the honour and violence of Ancient Greece and Rome could not be combined with Christian ideals of meekness and piety. Both places, in short, had different ideas of perfection. Vico, meanwhile, who is something of a hero in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, understood that every culture has its own vision of reality, with its own value systems. He saw that through imagination – fantasia – it is possible for us to enter into another society’s view of the world, without adopting it as our own. Finally, Herder showed that each culture has its own centre of gravity, and would only suffer from taking its inspiration from others. Together these thinkers broke down the idea of universal Truth that had driven the French philosophes.

German Romanticism and its Legacy

In doing so, they opened up a space for German Romanticism, which was far more intellectual and philosophical than its English equivalent (both made for good poetry, tho). The Romantics focused on a cult of self, rather than the universal. In doing so they made utopias impossible, by encouraging us to see that we each have our own utopia, rather than sharing a common one. Rather than feeling and emotion, what the later Romantics were interested in was the idea of will. We each have our own inner ideal within us, and rather than make peace with the world we must do whatever we can to bring that inner ideal out into the open. The idea of being true to yourself was essentially born at this time.

At first, being true to yourself just meant being a starving artist in an attic. But it left the possibility open of a kind of solipsism, wherein your own vision of the world could grow so powerful that it denied the significance of other people. At this point one was no longer an artist of the pen, but an artist of man, shaping others to create one’s own world. It is this idea – of the disregard for others, of the sense that objective truth is impossible and violence the inevitable consequence of clashing ideas – that Berlin considers the most terrible legacy of Romanticism. It allowed for madmen to take Enlightenment ideas and ignore all criticism, creating rationalist monsters in the early Soviet Union, and terror in fascist Germany.

Neither the Enlightenment nor Romanticism need necessarily lead to totalitarian violence. Berlin, whose whole life consisted of a passionate and earnest engagement with these ideas, naturally was not willing to dismiss them completely. Instead, he makes it clear how Romanticism in particular also leaves open the possibility of humanism: “The maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher.” Abstract ideas have no value in themselves, and the worst thing is to get in the way of another’s will – out of such thoughts grew existentialism, a much more positive set of thoughts than those of either Adolf or Joseph.

Value Pluralism vs Relativism

Berlin’s main contribution to thought – he did not consider himself a philosopher – was the idea of value pluralism, which he built out of the ideas of Vico and Herder about the differences between cultures. Pluralism Berlin describes as “the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other.” For example, those who value liberty above all else, and those who value equality above all else, will discover sooner or later that they cannot have a perfectly liberal and equal society – in other words, that their ultimate ideals are incompatible with each other, even though they are both recognisably good, and recognisably “rational”.

We can understand other cultures thanks to the imagination, or Vico’s fantasia, but we do not have to like them. As Berlin put it in one of the pieces included in the appendix to The Crooked Timber of Humanity, “I must be able to imagine myself in a situation in which I could myself pursue [their ideals], even though they may in fact repel me.” Literature, at its best, is in some way the proof of pluralism – we learn to see other ideals by their own internal light, even though we do not necessarily change our own views as a result.

How is this different to relativism? Berlin defines relativism as “a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood.” In other words, relativism means that other cultures are unquestionable – we have no choice about whether we accept them or not, because there is too much distance suggested between our own values and those of the other group. Another way of looking at this is to suggest that with relativism, we may understand the values of other societies, but we cannot understand why they would be held. There is an insurmountable barrier between us and others, one that ultimately makes deprives us of a feeling of common humanity.

The Bad Guy: Joseph De Maistre

The majority of the pieces in The Crooked Timber of Humanity explore the ways that value pluralism works and the legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism; but by far the longest piece, on the Savoyard reactionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, is much more focused. Berlin’s goal here is to revaluate this thinker, dismissed by earlier historians as a simple conservative. Instead, Berlin argues that de Maistre speaks decidedly to our own time, as a prophet whose ideas in many ways suggest those of fascism. In other words, “Maistre may have spoken the language of the past, but the content of what he had to say presaged the future.”

Joseph de Maistre, Savoyard arch-reactionary. Agree or disagree as we may with his views, he comes across as a quite extraordinarily visceral thinker.

De Maistre was for most of his life a diplomat for the Savoyard king, and his most productive years were while he was in Saint Petersburg during the age of Napoleon. He was popular in Russia, and Tolstoy even mentions him in War and Peace. His ideas were reactionary, rather than conservative. Where the likes of Burke tried to explain conservatism through appeals to sunlit uplands, peace and prosperity, Maistre’s approach was almost the opposite – he saw humanity as irredeemable, a creature that needed the violence of the executioner to keep it in check. Reaction, for de Maistre, was about saving humanity, rather than about protecting some historic ideal of playing cricket on the village green.

In practice, this meant doing everything he could against Reason and its followers. He protected irrationalism, kings and queens, by suggesting that only what is irrational can lie beyond question. Indeed, to begin questioning is already to fall foul of the Enlightenment – one must never question. He hated intellectuals, he hated the free traffic of ideas, he thought that suffering was the key to salvation, and that only a strong state and strong elites can keep our evil urges in check. De Maistre is quoted a few times by Berlin, and he comes across as the most extraordinary thinker – I feel a shiver go down my spine just reading even the shortest of excerpts. He is frightening, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is frightening, because he has beliefs that he believes with all his heart and yet which to most people are complete anathema.

Here’s a taste:

“Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”

“Don’t you hear the earth shouting its demand for blood? The blood of animals is not enough, nor even the blood of guilty men spilt by the sword of the laws.”

“In this way, from mite to man, the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures is ceaselessly fulfilled. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar on which all living things must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

All this makes one giddy. It is so violent, so horrible, and yet it fills one with a kind of awe. For Berlin, de Maistre is one of the history of ideas’ great villains, but he is a player in the drama. And we can all learn something from him. He believed that we do not know what we truly want, that ideas are often disappointing, and that the urge for self-sacrifice, for self-immolation, is just as strong as the desire for shelter or food or warmth. This is not the man of the French philosophes, but then again, as de Maistre says, “as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”

However much we may wish for ourselves, on the whole, to be rational beings, de Maistre offers a necessary dose of reality, and even if his suggestions of our terrible fallenness and the need for God and authority go far beyond what most of us like or want, still he has value. Otherwise we may end up just as foolish, just as idealistic, and just as dangerous as the Enlightenment, for all its light, turned out to be.

Conclusion

Berlin is exciting because he makes ideas feel real. He can transform a little Savoyard reactionary into a frightening, exhilarating, monster of a thinker, and he can do this with every thinker in the book. This is not because he tells us little titbits from their lives, but because he builds their ideas into something that we must engage with and evaluate for ourselves. Where do we stand on matters of the Enlightenment or Romanticism? However much we may think that they are ancient history, Berlin shows in The Crooked Timber of Humanity that their debates continue to be played out in our own era.

More importantly, in his idea of value pluralism, he advocates for a way of looking at the world which is moderate without losing the ability to judge. We can see what is good and bad in our opponents, without establishing such a distance between us and them as to make dialogue impossible. In our own age, when dialogue feels increasingly pointless, and actors increasingly hidden within the shroud of their own bad faith, Berlin provides a message of cautious hope, a guide to how to approach politics, and one that is hard not to like.

I have also read Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, available as Penguin Classic, and that is another work that I would recommend heartily. Berlin turns various thinkers, most of whom we would never have heard of otherwise, into living, breathing, arguing human beings. For anyone interested in 19^th century Russian literature or history, the book is a must-read. As for this one, it’s pretty good too. Read it, think on it.

Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

What is attractive about Ludwig Wittgenstein is that he was a real genius. I did not gallop through Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius because I wanted to know about Wittgenstein’s philosophy – I did it because I wanted to know about the man. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language are worth knowing about, sure, but certainly not near the top of the pile of philosophies I want to have a grasp of. Though Monk’s biography gave me some sense of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, the focus here was more on his life. This approach works because, for me at least, the parts of Wittgenstein’s thought that are most interesting are precisely those that came from his life – such as the way the mystical sections of the Tractatus came from Wittgenstein’s experience in the First World War.

Rather than summarise a summary of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, I thought I’d note here the parts of his life that struck me as particularly entertaining, saddening, or interesting. Being such a unique personality, Wittgenstein provides plenty of all three.

The Briefest of Biographical Summaries

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna to one of the richest of all Austrian families and had an extremely privileged upbringing. But the Vienna he was born into, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s life, was not a happy place producing happy people. I counted at least five suicides in the first chapter of Monk’s book alone – three of them Wittgenstein’s brothers. Our hero moves to England for his studies, meets a number of philosophers including Bertrand Russell who all eventually come to consider him a genius. He spends time in Norway and as a soldier, works as a teacher and gardener, goes back to Cambridge to teach, helps out in the Second World War behind the scenes, and finally dies. Given that the lives of most philosophers are little more interesting than that of Immanuel Kant, who never left his province, Wittgenstein’s life of action is rather exciting.

Genius and its Duty

One thing making Wittgenstein interesting is that he was not a scientist and did not see philosophy as scientific. Instead, he approached philosophy creatively. At one point he shocked the boring old gits of the Vienna Circle of philosophers by recommending they read Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He also lectured primarily using the power of inspiration, standing in the lecture hall or else pacing until a thought came to him, and then announcing it to enraptured onlookers. Most importantly, Wittgenstein’s whole character was artistic. Monk quotes Russell here:

“His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair.”

At another point Russell had Wittgenstein pace up and down his room for three hours in silence before Russell finally asked: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” “Both,” Wittgenstein replies, and continues his pacing.

The language of sins is surprising to people who like me think of Wittgenstein as a boring logician. In reality, Wittgenstein was of a decidedly religious sensibility. His major influences appear to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – Hadji Murat and The Brothers Karamazov are just two of several books by the authors that Wittgenstein adored and passed out among his friends. Acquaintances compared him to Levin from Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin from The Idiot. Though he was raised a Catholic, Wittgenstein did not believe in the Church’s dogmas, even as he believed in a kind of God and definitely believed in his own sinfulness.

Sin, for Wittgenstein (as it was for Tolstoy), was determined by his own conscience: “The God who in my bosom dwells”. What Wittgenstein feared most of all was judgement – “God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”” He was never happy with himself. He expected nothing less than perfection from himself, that beautiful but impossible congruence between one’s thoughts and one’s actions. At one point he made a confession to all of his friends in an attempt to rid himself of his pride. Instead, he just annoyed them. Few were interested in listening to all of his minor failings.

But Wittgenstein believed that he had a duty to be perfect – the duty of genius that Monk uses as his biography’s title. By perfect I do not mean in conduct so much as in the sense of squeezing out of himself as much philosophy as possible, by any means possible. At one point Wittgenstein was struggling from overwork, but rather than take a break as his friends suggested, he decided to try hypnotherapy to help him concentrate even more successfully. At another point he decides to abandon the world to live in a hut in Norway and write philosophy.

Russell, ever sensible, warns him against it:

“I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”

Wittgenstein does not listen. He does not listen to anybody at all. In many ways he reminded me of Tolstoy, who like him was sceptical of doctors and medicine, and had an all-consuming desire to be perfect: “How can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

And Wittgenstein is miserable as a result: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.”

As he gets older Wittgenstein mellows in some ways, thanks in part to his loves, male and female. The sheer obstinacy of his youth is less visible, and there is less of the humorous, if sad, determination to ignore everyone else’s opinions or suggestions.

A photo of Ludwig Wittgenstein — Rather than reading this piece one should really just stare at this face for five minutes or so. I cannot be alone in thinking that Wittgenstein’s gaze pierces into the soul.

The Dark Side of Genius

Wittgenstein’s perfectionist demands upon himself were ones that affected everyone around him, and rarely positively. He shows a remarkable lack of concern for others’ feelings and emotions, especially those of his partners. Even though when asked how to improve the world he declared that all we could do was improve ourselves, his attempts at self-improvement rarely seem to improve either him or the world. He loses friends at every turn – including Russell himself. His vaguely Tolstoyan ideal of a good life – working with one’s hands while developing spiritually – is not one he himself follows, stuck in Cambridge, but is one he forces on others, including Francis Skinner, one of his partners.

When Wittgenstein actually encounters “the common man”, said man rarely proves the best of us. Wittgenstein dislikes his soldierly comrades in the Austro-Hungarian army, and during his years of teaching in the mountains of rural Austria he ends up being a dreadful teacher for anyone lacking ability. Wittgenstein preferred to use fists to ensure mathematics got into his pupils’ heads, rather than patient and repeated explanations. At one point he even knocks a poor child unconscious, for which he is taken to court.

As for the intelligent people in his life, they are rarely treated by Wittgenstein to any greater kindness or concern. Of one friend he said: “he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.” When another writes to him, wishing him well in his work and social endeavours, Wittgenstein responds especially pleasantly: “It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid. How could you imagine I would ever have “lots of friends”?” And indeed, after reading such a letter, how could we doubt his social abilities?

Wittgenstein’s determination to destroy himself in the name of perfection ruined any chance at happiness, even though he thought that perfection would be what would finally provide him with it. In this Wittgenstein is no different from many other depressed people, your blogger included, who set themselves impossible tasks and achieve nothing but their own misery thereby. I found one moment particularly amusing in connection with this. Wittgenstein finally sees a doctor for some exhaustion and pain he was suffering from and gets given some vitamins. Once he takes them, he immediately recovers and returns to work. Rather than lying in his moral failings, perhaps his inability to work could have just lain in his poor health. However, in his determination to see everything through the lens of his own sinfulness, Wittgenstein obviously never considered the possibility that he might just need to live a little more healthily, eat well and sleep.

Conclusion

Wittgenstein wrote that “the way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear”. It’s a good idea, but Wittgenstein clearly chose the wrong way to live. Clearly? Wittgenstein achieved a great deal, his work revolutionised philosophy, and on his deathbed he was able to request that his friends be told he’d “had a wonderful life”. Alas, his life rather epitomises that dreadful, unbridgeable divide between happiness and achievement. The best happiness demands limited goals, while the greatest goals demand the sacrifice of (at least) part of our happiness. We may read Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and say that Wittgenstein really just needed some good meds and some CBT for his OCD and other problems, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Would he have been able to work so well if he did not have this way of life, this drive? Wittgenstein was a genius – he had a self-appointed duty to destroy himself in the quest for a better way of philosophising. What is important is that Wittgenstein could squeeze more philosophy out of himself. Can we, depressed perfectionists, really hope to achieve that much more by destroying ourselves, or should we just cut our losses and be sensible, care about ourselves and the world, and eventually find that thing that others talk so lovingly about – happiness?

I don’t know.

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 20^th century, I don’t know what else one has any right to say.

For more sad Germans, check out Adorno and Grass.