The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

Who Is W. G. Sebald? by Carole Angier

Who is W. G. Sebald? I had just read a book called The Emigrants, and that’s all I wanted to know. The Emigrants contains four stories of exile from Germany. Each is longer and fuller than the last but still as coldly, heart-stoppingly clear, like a lake that keeps getting deeper and darker, but you can still see right down to the bottom. The first and last of the emigrants — the narrator learns slowly and painfully over many years — are Jews; the second is one-quarter Jewish. The third doesn’t seem to be Jewish at all, yet his history is deeply interwoven with that of Jewish émigrés; in fact, in his story, the Jewish themes are strongest of all. The Emigrants is about many universal issues: time, memory, art, loss. But its main subject is the tragedy of the Jews and Germany.

It is one of the most hermetically sealed, yet one of the most open-ended works of art I have ever encountered. The four stories reflect each other like a hall of mirrors. Certain dates, like the summer of 1913, obsessively recur. There are beheadings in two stories and hermits in three. Most striking of all, Vladimir Nabokov appears in all four: sometimes as man, sometimes as boy, harbinger now of death and now of joy, but always carrying his butterfly net and evoking the great pursuit of his

Originally appeared in The Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1996-97.

autobiography, Speak, Memory. At the same time The Emigrants is fully, firmly grounded in reality. All four stories are illustrated with photographs from their subjects’ albums. And large parts of the last two stories are taken up with extracts from people’s diaries — which nonetheless contain some of the book’s most beautiful writing and one of Nabokov’s appearances.

What is going on? This is the opposite of a tricky, self-conscious, postmodern novel. It is exquisitely written; but it is modest and quiet and does not draw attention to itself at all. And yet this book raises the question of its own status more vividly, more directly, than any frivolous literary game. It doesn’t matter historically. Only crazy people doubt the Holocaust happened, and puzzles about two or three survivors’ stories cannot alter that. But if I have no historical questions about The Emigrants, I do have literary ones and personal ones. Is it fact or fiction? How did Vladimir Nabokov get into all the stories, even into Max Ferber’s mother’s diary? And who is W. G. Sebald?

It says on his door that he is professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. The man who opens it looks more English than German. He has also changed his name. It was Winfried Georg Maximilian; now it’s Max. When we start to talk, however, a German intellectual — even a Munich intellectual — of the 1960s emerges: liberal, anticlerical, defining himself against the past. He still has his soft south German accent, too. I start by asking him about his antifascism, and in particular about his identification with the Jewish tragedy. How did that start? Not at home or at school, he says, with an ironic smile. Like all Germans of his generation, he was shown a film about the concentration camps at school, but hurriedly, without explanation. “I didn’t know what to make of it at all.”

W. G. SEBALD: I could easily say now that even as a boy I felt uncomfortable in that country. But whilst I was at school I didn’t think about it. I had my mates, my girlfriends, I went swimming and riding in the summer. . it took the first separation from home to change anything. When I went to the University of Freiburg to read German literature, I couldn’t get anything out of the teachers there. It was totally impossible, because they all belonged to that generation. They’d all done their doctorates in the 1930s and 1940s. And of course they were all democrats. Except that it later emerged that they were all ardent supporters of the regime in one way or another. . There was something completely disingenuous about the whole setup of the humanities in the universities at that time, and I didn’t like it at all. When I’d graduated, I remembered that there were such things as language assistantships in universities abroad. So I blindly applied to various places in this country and got my job in Manchester.

IN MANCHESTER, Sebald ended up renting a room from D., a Jewish refugee from Munich. This was quite by accident—“I met his wife in a greengrocer’s.” Although she said, “You know, D. is actually from Munich,” the two exiles never talked about what had made them both, in their different ways, leave Germany.

WGS: People like Peter Weiss and Wolfgang Hildesheim were starting to write then, and I was beginning to think about these things. And yet, when I was confronted by them in reality, it was a different matter. There was a sort of shyness, a sort of paralysis on both sides. It has taken all these twenty or thirty years for the paralysis to fade. In one sense I regret it, because Withington and Didsbury were full of German and Austrian Jews, whom I could have talked to. But in another sense I don’t, because I would certainly have said all the wrong things then. I think I might even say all the wrong things now.

HE SMILES—not his ironic smile, but an open, very charming one, and suddenly his face changes completely. I think that he still has the shyness and reserve he had with D., and that he mostly keeps his face a blank in case it, too, might say the wrong thing.

He studied Carl Sternheim for his M.A., and Alfred Döblin for his Ph.D., both writers with troubled relationships to their Jewishness. Later he taught Austrian literature — which is practically a history of assimilation, with writers like Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus. Of course. I’m not surprised that this shy, clever man should make this most difficult journey in books.

But I can’t leave him there. Although I feel the same shyness, the same paralysis, come over me, I clear my throat and ask, “What about your family? They weren’t madly opposed to the whole thing?”

WGS: Oh no, they weren’t opposed. I come from a very conventional, Catholic, anti-Communist background. The kind of semi-working-class, petit bourgeois background typical of those who supported the fascist regime, who went into the war not just blindly, but with a degree of enthusiasm. They all fell up the ladder in no time at all, and until 1941 they all felt they were going to be lords of the world. Absolutely, there’s no doubt about it, though nobody ever says it now. My father was in the Polish campaign, and he must have seen a thing or two. . His unit was camped out in the woods behind the Polish border, perhaps eight weeks before it all started. It’s all in our family albums. The first photos have a boy-scout atmosphere — they’re all sitting outside their tents mending their shirts, and underneath there are jokey captions like “Who needs women?” Then the order came, and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead, razed to the ground, with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child. It was only later. . I only go home once a year, for two days, and I look at them now, and I think, “Good Lord, what is all this?”

CAROLE ANGIER: Can you talk to your parents about it?

WGS: Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five. . it’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds. I always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration — it’s the same thing. But they cannot understand that.

CA: How do you feel about Germany now?

WGS: I still suffer from homesickness, of course. I take the train from Munich, and it turns the corner southwards, near Kempten, and I feel. . and then as soon as I get out of the railway station I want to go back. I can’t stand the sight of it. Nothing much has changed. They still have some pretty strange attitudes. You stand in Munich Pasing S-Bahn station at night, for instance, and some tramp rummages around in a bin. And some other chap who’s just come from work goes up to him and says, “You don’t do that here, you know. You ought to get a proper job.” There’s a lot of that about. And then there’s all the rest of it.

I went to a Jewish cemetery not long ago, in a small town near Freiburg with a mill, straight out of the Brothers Grimm. There’s this German forest and amongst it the Jewish graves. There’s no one there, hardly anyone comes to visit. But at the bottom there’s a camping site, where people come in the summer to grill their sausages and drink their beer. And there’s a notice which says that visitors to the cemetery are not permitted to enter the camping site. Not the other way around.

WE LAUGH, as there doesn’t seem much else to do. Then he tells me about his previous book [Vertigo], in the last part of which the narrator returns to the village where he grew up “and remembers many things.”

WGS: I thought I’d done it as discreetly as possible. But my mother was mortified to read details about families in our village. And ever since then she’s never gone back. Wertach is here [he puts his cigarettes on the table], and here’s Sonthofen [his matches]. There’s a mountain between them [his coffee cup], and you have to travel around it. [He draws a semicircle around the mountain with his finger.] It takes forty-five minutes by bicycle.

Occasionally she meets someone from Wertach who’s come to shop in Sonthofen, and if they don’t mention anything she’s reassured. She’s like so many people in that country — the most important thing is that your neighbors mustn’t think badly of you. There’s nothing you could describe as civilian courage. It just isn’t there. My mother couldn’t say: “This is my son. He’s now fifty-two years old, and he can do what he likes.” That would be completely impossible for her.

HE CAN TELL ME THIS, I think, because his mother will never read The Jewish Quarterly. Or his father, or anyone else from Wertach or Sonthofen. The cemetery and the camping site are separate worlds in his life too; he alone moves between them.

CA: And yet, though you’ve lived in England for thirty years, you still write in German.

WGS: I hardly knew any English at all when I came to Britain, and I am not a very talented linguist. I still have quite bad days even now, when I feel that I am a barbaric stutterer. But that’s not the main reason. I am attached to that language. And there’s a further dimension, I think. If you have grown up in the kind of environment I grew up in, you can’t put it aside just like that. In theory I could have had a British passport years ago. But I was born into a particular historical context, and I don’t really have an option.

THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN Wertach and Sonthofen has no coffee left in it, and outside, the gray Norfolk clouds have thinned. So we decide to talk about The Emigrants under the trees. The book is full of plants and trees. Nature is a second victim it celebrates, after the Jews.

WGS: The Emigrants started from a phone call I got from my mother, telling me that my schoolteacher in Sonthofen had committed suicide. This wasn’t very long after Jean Améry’s suicide, and I had been working on Améry. A sort of constellation emerged about this business of surviving and about the great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you. I began to understand vaguely what this was all about, in the case of my schoolteacher. And that triggered all the other memories I had.

CA: So the schoolteacher in the second story, Paul Bereyter, and all the others, too, were real people? And these are their real stories?

WGS: Essentially, yes, with some small changes. . Dr. Henry Selwyn, for instance, lived in that house, not in Hingham, but in another village in Norfolk. His wife was just like that, Swiss and very shrewd. She’s still alive, I think, and so is Elaine, their most peculiar maid. Dr. Selwyn and his wife lived a smart county life for years. Terribly well spoken, he was, terribly well spoken. . he told me about Grodno, sooner than I say in the story, but very cursorily. The first time I thought, this is not a straight English gentleman, was at a Christmas party they gave. There was this huge living room and a blazing fire, and one very incongruous lady. Dr. Selwyn introduced her as his sister from Tel Aviv. And of course then I knew.

CA: What about Dr. Selwyn’s friend, the mountain guide Johannes Naegeli, and the extraordinary coincidence of your finding that article on a train, about the glacier releasing his body seventy-two years later? It’s such a perfect image of the whole book—“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”

WGS: Dr. Selwyn told me about his time in Switzerland before the First World War, about his friendship with a Swiss mountain guide, and how much it had meant to him. Later I couldn’t recall the name he’d mentioned, or if he’d mentioned any name at all. Nor did he say that his friend had disappeared. But I did find that article on a train, just when I was starting to write the story. A mountain guide, in the same year, in the same place. . It just needed a tiny little rapprochement to make it fit.

CA: Was Ambros Adelwarth, the subject of the third story, really your great-uncle?

WGS: Yes, absolutely. That wasn’t his name, of course.

CA: What was behind Adelwarth’s despair? Was it his homosexuality?

WGS: His story began with a photograph. When I was in the United States in 1981 I went to see my aunt, and we sat and looked at her photograph albums. You know how it is with family photos — usually you’ve seen them all before. But there’s always one you haven’t. And the photograph of Uncle Adelwarth in his Arab costume was one of those. I had known about this uncle, I’d met him as a boy, but he had never made any sense to me. Now, as soon as I saw that picture, I knew the whole story. . In a Catholic family that all gets repressed. It isn’t even ignored — it’s not seen, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t fit in anywhere at all.

CA: There’s also a diary in “Ambros Adelwarth,” which is itself photographed. Did your great-uncle really keep a diary?

WGS: Yes, in several languages.

CA: I know. You can just make out one of the entries, and it’s in English.

WGS: Ah. That, however, is falsification. I wrote it. What matters is all true. The big events — the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance — you might think those were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l’effet du réel.

CA: Or to provide a linking image, like the one of Nabokov?

WGS: I don’t know that Ambros saw Nabokov in Ithaca, but it’s entirely plausible. He lived there for ten or fifteen years. Everyone in Ithaca saw him at one time or another, with his butterfly net.

CA: But what about Max Ferber’s mother meeting him in Bad Kissingen in 1910? Did you actually find that in her diary?

WGS: That’s an episode from Speak, Memory. When I came across it I’d already read the memoir on which the diary is based, and in which there’s a Sunday-afternoon excursion in the country. What you need is just a tiny little shift to make it match up. I think that’s allowed. There are always elements that stray in from elsewhere. I take this to be a good sign. If you are traveling along a road and things come in from the sides to offer themselves, then you’re going in the right direction. If nothing comes, you are barking up the wrong tree.

In the Paul Bereyter story, for example, there are echoes of Wittgenstein in his period as a schoolteacher in Austria: the whistling, for instance, or, on the one hand, sacrificing himself to these peasant children and, on the other hand, feeling abhorrence for them. My schoolteacher did remind me of Wittgenstein; he had the same moral radicalism. But these details in the story come from Wittgenstein.

CA: And Ferber?

WGS: Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber’s escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D.’s. The second model is a well-known artist.

HE SPEAKS AS QUIETLY as ever, but I suddenly feel slightly dizzy. “Which of the two, then,” I ask, “is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?” He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, “Neither.”

“Ninety percent of the photographs are genuine,” he adds quickly, like someone throwing a life belt to a drowning man. But that leaves 10 percent which aren’t. . And what about the other “documents?” The message on Adelwarth’s visiting card, for example—“Have gone to Ithaca”? He went to Ithaca, all right; but Sebald wrote that too. And Ambros’s travel diary? Sebald wrote about half of it.

This is the answer to my question, then: The Emigrants is fiction. And the photographs and documents are part of the fiction. It’s a sophisticated undertaking, and perhaps a dangerous one, given its subject. But I agree with Sebald that novelizing the Holocaust (“a quick chapter about Auschwitz, then back to the love interest again”) is much worse. If literature can be made of this subject, it must be like this, solidly grounded in the real world. Besides, he himself has more doubts than anyone, which he expresses in Max Ferber. (“These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing.”)

So the reader does not need defending. He may feel a bit dizzy, like me, but that is a small price to pay for the elation of reading an extraordinary book. But I do have one doubt left: what about its models?

WGS: Yes, this whole business of usurping someone else’s life bothers me. And of course I’m never certain I haven’t committed errors of tact, of judgment, of style. . But — unless they’re dead — I ask them. I show them what I’ve written before I publish it; and if anyone objects, I don’t do it. In this way, for example, D. endorsed my use of his story and also of his aunt’s autobiography, which he had given me, and which I used for Max Ferber’s mother. In the case of the lady at Yverdon [who tells the narrator about the later years of Paul Bereyter], it was more complicated. It took me a long time to convince her that what I was up to was actually all right.

CA: Has anyone ever objected?

WGS: Yes, the artist who was the other model for Max Ferber did.

CA: But you still used him?

WGS: I changed his name from the German version, where it was quite close to the original, to something completely different. He doesn’t want any publicity whatsoever, and I respect that. On the other hand, he is a public figure, and I got all my information about him from published sources, mostly from a huge tome about him by an American. If one is describing a creative process, one must be able to use material of this sort.

CA: It’s the combining of the two stories that’s the problem. I can just see people recognizing the artist and then believing that this is his life story forever after.

WGS: Exactly. So one has to be very careful.

I TRY TO PRESS HIM on this. But all he says is: “I think the vast majority of factual and personal detail that I use is very viable.” At first I wonder if “viable” isn’t a fudge word, used (perhaps unconsciously) to evade. But then I realize that he means it quite precisely. He simply isn’t thinking any longer of the effect of his book on his models, no matter how hard I try to make him do so. He’s just thinking of his book.

As we stroll back across the grass, I reflect that it could hardly be otherwise. If he didn’t put his writing first, The Emigrants wouldn’t be the great work of art it is. Curiously, the final proof of this for me is not a photograph, but the absence of one. The book ends with a description of three young women sitting at a carpet loom in the Lodz ghetto in 1940, weaving literally (but as we know, in vain) to save their lives. I am convinced that I have seen their photograph on the last page; I remember the loom, their hands, their faces. But it isn’t there.