PETER HARRISON ON WG SEBALD

In the night of the mind

In December 2009 I travelled to Stepney Green in London. Breathing the cold air, standing in a quiet street, I studied a house. Three stories tall, the first of five or six similar houses, it stood at the end of a long, high brick wall. The cemetery hidden behind the wall is the oldest Ashkenazi Jewish cemetery in Britain, dating back to 1697, and is described in precise detail by W.G. Sebald in his monumental final book, Austerlitz. At the very end of the book, Austerlitz is in Paris preparing to travel to the last known sighting, 60 years before, of his father. Austerlitz says goodbye to the unnamed narrator, gives him the keys to the house, invites him to stay whenever he wishes and tells him to ring the bell on the door set into the brick wall. Discovering the cemetery by chance a few days before leaving London, having lived next door to it for years, Austerlitz had seen:

‘Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like woman of perhaps seventy years old – the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out – was walking along the paths between the graves in her slippers. Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now grey with age …’ (p.409)

With me outside the house – described in the book as being on Alderney Street (p.166) though in reality it’s in Alderney Road – stood Stephen W., a friend of Sebald’s. Stephen W. visited the cemetery with Sebald, whom he referred to as ‘Max’, 10 years before and looked on as Sebald took 20 or 30 photographs, one of which, showing a cluster of graves, appears in the book (p.409). The description of the elderly caretaker and her grey dog are accurate. Later, at dusk, we walked around the large Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, finding the sites where photographs were taken of a recently abandoned asylum, St. Clement’s Hospital (p.324), monuments to the dead (p.320) and a stone angel, arms missing, standing atop a tomb bearing the words, ‘Until the day break, and the shadows flee away’ (p.321). Sebald places Austerlitz in St Clement’s, wandering the halls in a drug-induced confusion and later talking to a fellow inmate who remembers with perfect clarity the moment when:

‘something which had been stretched too taut inside him snapped at a particular spot behind his forehead…’ (p.325)

Austerlitz contains many hauntings of the mind. The overarching narrative concerns Jacques Austerlitz, sent to England aged five on the Kindertransport, struggling with the buried memories of his family history. One key aspect of genius is the ability to make meaningful connections between disparate facts and ideas. At their first meeting the narrator is:

‘astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked, forming perfectly balanced sentences out of whatever occurred to him, so to speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysics, bringing remembered events back to life.’

Though we subsequently learn that Austerlitz’s knowledge ends at the late nineteenth century, and he had established a series of sophisticated filters to protect him from the terrors of the twentieth century.

Building on Sebald’s previous works, Austerlitz is partly structured around seventy or so black and white photographs, all of them presumably taken by the author, though none of them are credited or acknowledged in any way. Although occasionally Sebald changes a minor detail to part-fictionalize London – the River Walbrook is changed to the Wellbrook (p.186) – he seems insistent on factually recording historic events. The severe regulations imposed upon Prague’s Jewish community by the Nazis are fastidiously detailed (p.242-255). Sebald’s genius dwells in his meticulous weaving of notes, photographs, interviews, reading and travelling. He suggests, however, that facts alone will not lead us to the truth. Austerlitz, an architectural historian, has the logical accompaniments (the timetables, the building plans) to discover his past, but he is overwhelmingly unable to do so. Perhaps this helps explain Sebald’s subtle continuous play with reality and fiction¹, and his attuning, as expressed by Austerlitz’s history teacher, to the perils in recording the past:

‘Our concern with history is a concern with pre-formed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.’ (p.101)

Sebald houses Austerlitz next to the final resting place of London’s first-buried Jews, and he is unaware of this while he battles for years with his own slowly emerging traumas. The notion of the truth being at the periphery, while we stare transfixed at an idea of history, advances an understanding that history is a subjective concept. In the summer of 2005, working as the researcher for an upcoming book, The Desk Killer, I found a list of over 100 companies based at the enormous Buna works slave labour site at Monowitz, known as Auschwitz III. I.G. Farben was the largest of these companies. After the war I.G Farben was split up into its pre-1925 constituents, becoming AGFA, Beyer, BASF and Hoechst. Of the 24 executives that stood trial at Nuremberg, only 13 men were imprisoned. They were all out by the late 1950s, most of them installed as executives in the new companies. The Allies reconfigured in the post-war years, the iron curtain fell and a strong West German economy was seeded by the Marshall plan. Western economic structural support for the post-Farben companies, through governmental and industrial collaborations, secured their futures. This history is less known than the familiar narratives of the post-war years. It has been obscured, and in its place we are presented with other versions of history, of good versus evil, a history of clean lines and simple motives. The truth is often more human. It is messy, complex and inconsistent.

This reality is challenged in many ways. Books themselves, the objects we hold in our hands, have been funnelled into an easy to recognize category. On the back cover of my Penguin edition of Austerlitz there is a single word, Fiction. This seems arbitrary and false. No information on the publisher’s page attests to the meld of fact and fiction within. The publisher’s page at the very front of novels, detailing the publisher’s address, permissions, author’s rights and printing information, has for years intrigued me as an anchor into the real, for no-matter how fantastical the story within may become, that page reminds us that books are objects of commercial exchange between writers and publishers.

From the very first page, Sebald locates us in territories of bewilderment. The narrator is by turns unknowing, curious, ill and uncertain. He wanders Antwerp before visiting the zoo and finding the Nocturama, in which he spies a raccoon repeatedly washing a piece of apple:

‘over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.’ (p.3)

The theme is established: an immigrant maintaining their existence in a small controlled space, shielded from any associations with their own history. When at last Austerlitz learns of his early childhood, he has a breakdown in which he loses his ability to speak:

‘The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence – the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility – now seemed to be nothing but an entirely arbitrary and eluded enterprise. I could see no connections any more, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-grey trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.’ (p.175-6)

Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s masterful 1985 documentary, consists of interviews with survivors, bystanders and persecutors of the Holocaust. On all but one occasion, Lanzmann interviews, on film, survivors that had never before spoken of those life-defining events. Lanzmann insisted that to do otherwise would be to capture not the raw memory of the events, brought up to the surface and uttered for the first time, but a story of the events, whittled and shaped by repeated telling.

Who speaks, and who remains silent? In a world of corporately-owned news outlets and an unverifiable cyberspace, this political question is as relevant now as it was in the years after the Second World War, when Holocaust survivors found themselves liberated to a populace often unable to believe the horrors they had lived through. Historian Martin Gilbert, in The Holocaust writes:

‘Each survivor faces the past, and confronts the future, with a burden which those who did not go though the torment cannot measure.’ (p.824)

After a long silence Jean Améry published essays in the mid sixties, attempting to find articulation for experiences that included exile, resistance, torture and genocide. After the war, there was silence. West Germany began to listen to survivors at the beginning of the sixties. Sebald details Améry’s writings, and responses from the Federal Republic’s literary establishment, in his essay Against the Irreversible, published in English in On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald argues that Améry newly approached language, finding the essay a suitable form of communication. Essays discount narrative styles that ‘might encourage a sense of complicity between the writer and his readers.’ (p.153) In At the Mind’s Limits Améry writes about his days of torture in July 1943. He ends one shocking passage with:

‘Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology!’ (p.156)

Sebald notes how ‘Améry resorts to irony where otherwise his voice would be bound to falter. He knows that he is operating on the borders of what language can convey.’ (p. 156) Sebald’s unique interlacings of travelogue, memoir, documentary and fiction displays his own reflections on the possibility of language. This, combined with the double spaced text and the interspersed black and white photographs, emits a mesmeric quality. A quality bolstered by his writings on time. Throughout Austerlitz, everything is permeable to other times; the past is forever there, coming through in glimpsed hauntings. Austerlitz interrogates our measuring of time:

‘Even in London, said Austerlitz, it is possible to be outside time…The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.’ (p. 143)

Nurturing memory is a key demand for all of us wanting to understand, as best we can, the past. Sebald is distinctive precisely because he refuses to swerve when confronted by the past. He knew that the years of silence criminally neglected the needs of those most violently entangled in the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Each of us, right now, could make a list of past crimes we have not begun to address as a society. There is not enough paper in England to chronicle the institutional blindness towards crimes that continue to this day, in the name of national security. Sebald places himself in the sky, looking over all of this, seemingly aware of the interconnectedness that allows the executives of Beyer to be reinstated after a few years in jail. One challenge for future writers and researchers is to prise out these deliberately concealed obfuscations and to thrust them into society’s narrow view. We are still so young, so easily distracted. We have a few geniuses to guide our way. Through his camera, perpetually creeping down the train track and slowly approaching the woods, and in interviews that defy us to blink, Lanzmann permanently transformed the documentary. Sebald’s writings continue as we do, inhabiting a place within us as we conduct our daily lives. With Austerlitz Sebald permanently transformed the novel.

Works referred to

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Penguin, 2002, London

W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, Hamish Hamilton, 2003, London

Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, Eureka Entertainment Ltd, 1985

Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Fontana/Collins, Glasgow, 1987