Tag: German Literature

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Reading well, at least as it’s taught at university, is not much different from detective work. From incomplete information, we make deductions and classifications, and test hypotheses against textual evidence. What does this word really mean, what was this character’s real motivation? Often, the “best” works seem to be those revealing the least, having us fumbling the most. Obscurantism occasionally lies very close to greatness.

The German author Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is different because it’s a detective story that we wish were not one. Like many of the great German novellas, into whose tradition it neatly falls, Böll’s work is dominated by an interrogation of what it means to narrate. Katharina Blum meets and falls in love with a criminal, then shoots a journalist. But whose story is this to tell?

This plot, which we learn almost on the first page, is not what keeps us reading. Rather, it is the determination of Katharina’s motive or, more broadly, what’s in her heart. As we read, we encounter different ways of presenting / understanding her that seem to have a claim to be the truth.

Narrative coldness.

What we notice first is this strikingly cold narrative. The narrative voice seems obsessed with distancing itself from any kind of bias or emotional contribution to our experience. “And so, those are the facts”, it declares after an early chapter. At another point, it names all the sources for the novel. Generally, it uses the passive voice and the German indirekte Rede, or reported speech, which in formal use is its own grammatical construction and gives the narrative a kind of serious “report” feel to it. All of this effort to be honest about the work’s narrative, which stretches as far as a sly apology by the narrator every time the strict chronological telling is interrupted, makes us wonder what such approaches conceal.

Yet we can also take the narrator at face value, and trust that they were trying their best to tell the truth. We can do this because we have two actors who are manifestly not doing this – the police, and the journalists. But first, there’s Katharina herself.

Katharina

In his afterword, written ten years later, Heinrich Böll calls Katharina the “embodiment of the economic miracle” that took place in West Germany after the Second World War. She has her own flat, drives a car, and does her own budgeting – sending money to her poorly mother and her incarcerated brother. We read of interest rates and savings accounts. A generation earlier, a novel about a young woman from the countryside going to the city would end up with the woman being exploited, but here, Katharina manages more or less to hold her own life together…

…At least until the novel’s events begin. The novel is set in 1974, just as the economic miracle ended due to the oil price chaos in 1973. And this change of fortunes is mirrored in Katharina’s own life. Things taken for granted turn out to be less stable. The police is one such topic – when Katharina begins to get bullied by the press, her pleading is “can’t the state do something?” Her employment situation, once her name starts going through the gutter, also wobbles. She receives threatening phone calls. All the signs of her freedom start to turn on her.

Katharina lives in a world of change, and while it has benefited her, her focus on her “honour” is precisely an attempt to find something solid that she can keep safe. She is under constant threat throughout her life from men who are trying to proposition her, and so she tries hard to protect herself from this. When we first hear her voice in the narrative, in the context of questioning at the police station, it is in a mode of pedantry: she is insisting that the police use the right language for her experience. “Zärtlichkeit” and “Zudringlichkeit” are both to do with sexual attention, but Katharina insists that she is experiencing the latter word, which is unidirectional, while the police keep mistakenly writing the former and suggesting thereby that Katharina herself reciprocated or encouraged when she did not.

Yet pedantry is one way of creating an oasis of personal agency in a world where you have very little. Like the cold narrative style, it is an attempt to control a message.

The Police

After Katharina Blum takes Ludwig Götten home following a party, she is pounced upon by the police, who have been trailing him. Somehow, however, Ludwig has escaped – and Katharina must know how, even perhaps be an accomplice. The narration puts us in the place of the police, who are trying to get to the bottom of things. Normally, as I noted at the beginning, readers slip quite willingly into the interrogator’s shoes – crime novels are popular for a reason. Here, however, this becomes quite uncomfortable both for the overwhelming power of the police relative to Katharina, and our own complicity in the invasion of her privacy.

Besides comparing ways of telling Katharina’s story, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is, in a more earthy manner, concerned with privacy and our right to it. When the police first raid her flat, they insist on collecting everything with writing on it. Rather than finding a smoking gun, we are forced to see Katharina’s life broken down into components and painstakingly analysed. We go through notebooks, through family photos, through her finances, and even through her car’s odometer reading. We certainly learn, or think we learn, something about her life. But the cost is, naturally, that we begin the process of destroying that life.

The Tabloid

More so than the police, the greatest damage done to Katharina’s honour comes from the tabloid, “NEWSPAPER”. A German reader would recognise Bild, their popular if sensationalist and unreliable tabloid, akin to something like the UK’s Daily Mail. If the police are able to throw her in a cold room and interrogate her, the newspaper’s treatment of her is somehow more deadly and poisonous. No sooner than Katharina is released from her first questioning, we learn that she is being written about in a way that has, at best, only limited intersections with the truth. It is a pattern that’s repeated throughout the articles quoted in the novella.

Her friends, the upper-middle-class Blornas, are misquoted in a way that makes Katharina look bad. At other points, the reporter “improves” quotes out of an apparent duty to “provide simple people with help articulating their thoughts.” The only person who is convinced that the paper got him right is the priest from Katharina’s hometown, who has an obvious agenda (he calls her a communist). When he’s later confronted by Blorna, his source for this association proves to be “his nose.” It turns out he can smell communists. We would sigh, or maybe laugh, if it weren’t part of Katharina’s life being turned upside down by the paper that reports him.

The paper does damage – there’s a reason why Katharina ultimately shoots the man responsible for the stories. Yet part of that damage is buried under plausible deniability. After the story of Katharina first emerges, she starts receiving threatening phone calls, for example from men propositioning her, in yet another invasion of her privacy. Can we blame the newspaper for that? Certainly, but not in a way where the dots could be connected in a court, and by then the damage would be done anyway. That’s the power of institutions when they are not on our side.

But Böll does not leave the matter there – he also wants to connect the paper more directly to death. He does this through Katharina’s ailing mother, who is already in hospital. Here the journalist is denied an interview by the hospital workers, who state that her condition is very fragile, but the journalist is undeterred. Making use of a disguise, he sneaks in and gets his scoop. The cost is Katharina’s mother’s life – she expires soon afterwards. To rub salt into her wounds, in the newspaper report the author claims that it was the shock of Katharina’s misdeeds that prompted her mother’s death!

And so, Katharina is progressively dehumanised, in the sense that she is replaced as a human in the public eye by another – false – human according to the paper’s editorial decisions – a communist, a bad person. Is it not surprising, then, that she turns to violence?

“how violence develops and where it can lead”

The full title of the novel is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead, and it was the second part that was most interesting to me before I had any idea what the book was actually about. One thing we might notice is that the second title reflects the coldness of the general narration – we have a report’s title more than a story. How Katharina becomes dehumanised and miserable enough to shoot a reporter is presented with a focus on the causes rather than on either Katharina’s mental state (which remains mostly hidden) or on any moral judgment of the murder. Murder remains bad, but readers are expected to want to understand how it might come about.

Simply put, it seems to come about from a decline in social trust. We hear a lot about it today in the context of our own political situations and nations’ changing demographic profiles, but Böll depicts the problem long before our own time. Katharina moves to a big city, which is, of course, a good thing and an achievement, and successfully makes a few friends there. Still, at the same time, she’s aware of how the social and technological progress she’s reliant upon for this success can have its negative sides: “I know so many women who are alone, who spend their evenings alone in front of the TV,” she says. Just as her world became bigger, for many people it can become smaller as they close themselves off from the world. (For example, by reading the gutter press without ever having the experiences that might conceivably balance it).

As soon as the paper starts printing rubbish, the trust Katharina feels in society collapses – recall her cry for help to the police to do something about the libel being printed. (The police are leaking information anyway). The institutions she had expected to help her have not complied with her reasonable idea of justice, while the people she had expected to treat her kindly – strangers – are instead contacting her in a way that is threatening. With her name and honour dragged through the mud she is essentially locked out of society, which is a position where violence becomes a plausible-seeming answer to her problems. So that’s one way that violence comes about. Herr Blorna experiences something similar, as his association with Katharina leads to his own career and world collapsing – though in his case it only ends in fisticuffs.  

There’s another instance of violence, too, as we’ve seen – the death of Katharina’s mother. Here, there’s a kind of trust issue at stake. The reporter both ignores the advice of the doctors to leave her alone and adopts a disguise to achieve his goal. In other words, he completely ignores the social rules whose obedience confirms our status as good citizens. The result, Böll chooses to emphasise, is yet more violence.

Conclusion

In theory, newspapers are supposed to tell the truth, just as the police in their investigations are supposed to discover it. In The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, we see a paper that fails to tell the truth and an investigation that mostly probes a private life with little success at its stated goal. Only the novel’s chosen narrative approach, of a bloodless directness that names its sources and tries to be clear about sources of bias, seems to stand against this by telling us what really happened. However, in reality, this only complicates things further. We might notice, for example, how little Katharina herself speaks, even if she gets the last word. Too often she is only being quoted by others or described.

And should we even trust her own words? Aren’t humans often inarticulate about what’s within their hearts? The narrator might try to be neutral, but neutrality is itself a mask that allows biases safe passage. Really, shouldn’t we know who he or she is, so that we can make our own judgements? Or alternatively, shouldn’t we be given sources without mediation or introduction, so that we can assemble the story ourselves? (This is still not neutrality, because the ordering and choice of sources is itself an influence on our perception of them, but it’s closer to neutrality). Ultimately, we might say that if the narrative makes us distrust bad newspaper reporting, its wider message is not consoling about our capacity to locate objectivity.

Someone I went to school with now works at one of those newspapers, and when I asked him at a chance meeting whether that made him complicit in their occasional hateful and socially destructive messaging, his unencouraging answer was that the paper wasn’t left or right-wing, and that if people wanted to read populist rubbish that was their choice and equally their choice as a paper to write in a way that catered to it. He was quite confrontational in manner, obviously in part a response to my tactless question, but also in a way that to me seemed to indicate that even though he presented himself as being above what he wrote, it was beginning to affect his soul. I can’t say I was too happy for his success.

With that said, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum definitely feels like it has no answers to the existence of papers like Bild. It might have been motivated by its author’s rage at the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof group of terrorists in the papers at the time, but the work has very little to say about the people who actually read the papers and how such papers’ influence might be diminished. Instead, it focuses on their effect on an individual. In that, it’s an emotional appeal clad in cold language, rather than a rational argument. Böll himself calls the text a “pamphlet” in the afterword and that’s really what it is –  a short, effective story, told interestingly. But not one with any answers.

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.