W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions
Illustrations by Marisa Maestre
The great German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, 13 years after he’d published his first work of literature and five short years after the English translation of a book of stories set in motion his rise to international renown. (Months before his death, he was rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.) Throughout his career and afterward, critics struggled to find words to describe the hallucinatory quality of his deceptively sober prose. Sebald tells tales, that much one can say—ghost stories of a sort, as dark and translucent as smoky glass. Displaced Jews haunt some of these narratives; the shades of literary figures—Kafka, Stendhal, Nabokov—materialize in others. And yet Sebald writes like a man typing up case histories, and he accompanies his narratives with something like documentation—photographs of people, facades, notes, newspaper articles, train tickets. These have no captions, and you don’t always see how they relate to the text. But because photographs testify to the onetime existence of things, they give the weight of the real to stories that may or may not be made up. Sebald’s refusal to respect the line between fact and fiction has become commonplace, especially among younger writers. But his adroitly artless synthesis of fable, history, photography, and artifact is still jarring.
The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte called Sebald’s method bricolage, which can mean both “collage” and “tinkering.” The critic James Wood speaks of “fictional truth,” and also offers this aptly mournful phrase: “cinders of the real world.” The poet Michael Hamburger came up with “essayistic semi-fiction which gives rope to both observation and imagination.” In her new biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, the first life of the writer, Carole Angier calls that “the neatest summary” of Sebald’s method that “anyone ever managed.” I like “periscopic,” which Sebald used, because it captures the subaqueous stillness of his worlds, and his disorienting angle of vision. Every great writer founds a new genre, Walter Benjamin decreed. “The twentieth-century writer who best passes that crazy test,” Angier writes, “is W. G. Sebald.”
[From the November 2012 issue: “Memo,” a poem by W. G. Sebald]
In 1996, Angier was asked to review , the first book of Sebald’s to be translated into English, and read it in a single night. The book consists of four stories about men who die from the delayed effects of catastrophe. Three are Jewish. Two, and indeed of modernity as an ongoing disaster and a march toward the total destruction of nature. Yet the Holocaust holds a privileged place in Sebald’s worldview. He told interviewers that it “cast a very long shadow over my life” because he grew up in an Alpine corner of Germany, blissfully unaware of the past (he was born in 1944, just before the end of World War II), and “I don’t really know how I deserved it.”
