Abstract
The fourteenth of December 2011 was the tenth anniversary of the death of W. G. Sebald, and the year leading up to that date was marked by a plethora of memorial events and publications, of which the above three books are among the most significant because of the new material they contain. Torsten Hoffmann has edited a collection of 20 conversations and interviews, all of which were originally conducted in German. Twelve of them were published at the time, but eight were not and are printed here in German for the first time: the conversations with Reiner Kunze (1975) (pp. 37−43), Franz Reichert (1977) (pp. 44−9), Andreas Isenschmid (1990) (pp. 50−70), Piet de Moor (May 1992) (pp. 71−8), Ralph Schock (July 1993) (pp. 96−104), Sven Boedecker (1995) (pp. 111−21), Walther Krause (December 1996) (pp. 126−53) and Doris Stoisser (April 2001) (pp. 224−51). Sebald critics have been slow to seek out and use the 60 interviews that Sebald gave during his lifetime: German-speaking Sebald critics will now have no excuse for ignoring them. Although the eight new items, especially the conversation with Schock, overlap with other interviews with Sebald, seven of them broach new subjects or contain substantial passages in which Sebald dilates on subjects on which he had dwelt more briefly elsewhere. In the conversations with Kunze and Reichert, the young Sebald is the questioner and uses the opportunities to persuade an established poet to dwell on the therapeutic value of poetry − something that would become one of his own aesthetic concerns − and to discuss the work and humour of Karl Kraus, a writer whom he admired but about whom he never published anything. In his long and humorously relaxed conversation with Isenschmid, Sebald speaks at greater length on Schwindel. Gefühle. than he does in any other interview and with particular reference to the function of chance there. In his conversation with De Moor, where his interlocutor is Dutch, not German, Sebald speaks frankly and at length about such central subjects as his pessimistic views on human history, theology, sociology, the violation of Nature, impending apocalypse, his literary predilections and Schwindel. Gefühle. During his (second) interview with Boedecker, Sebald has much to say about the significance of melancholy, his project of writing a book on ‘the story of my parents and the early phase of fascism’ (p. 119) (which he gave up in early 2001 in favour of a book on the Great War), and, most importantly, the origins and text of Die Ringe des Saturn. While he concedes that the book involves a ‘thousand hidden parallels’, he identifies Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrende Gesellen (p. 111) as one of them − a piece of music which, coincidentally, had made a deep impression on both Sebald and myself when we were about 17. Sebald’s conversation with Krause, probably his longest on record, was originally broadcast using interspersed readings from his work, and it is now of considerable importance because it is almost the only interview known to me where he identifies some of his favourite musical compositions − Bellini’s I Puritani, the work of Bach and Schubert, and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. But he also has significant things to say about his professional life, the difficulties involved in translation, the ‘transcendent’ significance of the colour white, Swiss materialism, and his fascination with significant details and hidden quotations. Finally, Sebald’s conversation with Doris Stoisser is, like his other conversations with women interlocutors, particularly revealing. Here, he expatiates more fully than elsewhere about the Belsen film he had had to watch at school, his special relationship with Austrian literature, his encounter with Martin Esslin in Vienna on 11 December 2000, his affinity with the writing of Améry, Bernhard and Wittgenstein, his admiration for the narrative structure of Mann’s Doktor Faustus, his move away from Literaturwissenschaft, the realism of his writing, the origins of his interest in Napoleon, metro journeys beneath Paris, literary responses to modern war, the moral issues involved in the writing of fiction, his meeting with Raoul Schrott (whom he encouraged to study at UEA in the 1980s), and the differences between melancholy and depression. These seven conversations alone, together with a useful index (pp. 287−8), would make Professor Hoffmann’s collection a necessary purchase for anyone who can read German and has a scholarly concern with Sebald’s work, though its finish is slightly marred by a few, puzzling mistranscriptions.
Whereas essays on Sebald’s prose fiction continue to proliferate, essays on his poetry are still a rarity, despite Nach der Natur (1988) and the publication in 2008 of 62 of his poems in Sven Meyer’s ground-breaking anthology Über das Land und das Wasser. Iain Galbraith’s new collection of English translations is set to alter this situation, for it will enhance Sebald’s reputation as a poet because, paradoxically, the translations make the German originals more transparent and accessible. Although the volume has the same title as its German counterpart and although Meyer was, like Galbraith, familiar with the manuscripts of Sebald’s poems that are held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (pp. 105−9), the new publication is, as Galbraith has explained at some length, more than just a translation of Meyer’s anthology (see http://sebald.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/published-in-english-with-additional-material). First, it contains 88 poems and omits two of Meyer’s poems – ‘Analytische Sommerfrische’ and ‘Physikalisches Wunder’ (pp. 35−6) – because they are already collaged almost verbatim into the second section of the third part of Nach der Natur. Second, whereas Meyer’s volume consists mainly of poems that were published in journals during Sebald’s lifetime plus 21 unpublished poems from Sebald’s papers, Galbraith’s anthology adds a further 33 unpublished poems. Third, whilst Meyer’s anthology divided Sebald’s poetry into three chronologically arranged sections by merging the more loosely arranged bundle of poems entitled ‘Poemtrees’ (1964−8) with ‘Schullatein’ (‘School Latin’) (c. 1967−80), one of the two groups of poems that Sebald fashioned into a single typescript roll but never managed to have published, Galbraith’s volume divides it into four distinct sections. Fourth, Galbraith provides a great deal of fascinating information about the way in which Sebald’s poems from between 1964 and c. 1984 ‘cascade’ into Nach der Natur, especially its final part ‘Die dunckle Nacht fahrt aus’, whose title, incidentally, comes from a poem by Paul Fleming − the seventeenth-century German poet, not the professional boxer from Queensland.
Like Hoffmann’s edition, Galbraith’s anthology will be indispensable for Sebald scholars, including native German speakers. First and foremost, his masterly translations involve an acute sensitivity to Sebald’s carefully pitched German which is well known for being both ‘guarded and diligent’, precise and elusive. Consequently, they have the power to unsettle the reader into a better understanding of the German original. Galbraith’s translations also carefully track the shift that took place in Sebald’s poetry between the terse, elliptic impersonality of his early poems and the more relaxed, spatially more recognizable narratives of his later ones. The recognition of this shift almost inevitably persuades the reader to consider the poems in the context of Sebald’s works of prose fiction and make recherché as well as obvious links between the two genres. Thus, for instance, the early ‘Il ritorno d’Ulisse’ (pp. 38−9) not only prefigures the third section of Schwindel. Gefühle., it also suggests that its narrator, too, ‘had strayed to a country / not his place of origin’ − which could mean either 1960s England, or 1980s Wertach, or both. And ‘On the Eve of’ (pp. 157−9) inverts the angelic vision of the waiting travellers at Schipol Airport that Sebald’s narrator experiences in Part IV of Die Ringe des Saturn (pp. 114−15), by turning those travellers into sad beings who, being lost in a limbo between life and death, cause the indestructible sparrows to chatter ‘raucously among / themselves as if something / were not quite right’. The suggestive power of Galbraith’s translations is, however, due in no small part to the impressively thorough and wide-ranging scholarship which has generated the encyclopaedic footnotes (pp. 171−213), and which far outstrips that of many a soi-disant Sebald specialist. How, for instance, did Galbraith manage to locate such obscure quotations as those from Jean Paul Richter’s novel Titan (1800−3) (p. 184), Antoine de Pluvinel’s manual on horsemanship of 1625 (pp. 185−6), Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlaβ eines jungen Physikers of 1810 (p. 197) or Hans Moleman’s report on the ‘Bende van Venlo’ in the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant of 23 February 1995 (p. 205)? But the footnotes are not just intrinsically fascinating. They, like Sebald’s more explicatory prose fiction, persuade the reader to develop the sense of existing in a historical landscape where pain, loss, catastrophe and atrocity – Sebald’s ‘truth in things’ – are not only serendipitously present in apparently innocent, everyday locations, but also connect with other, superficially unrelated locations – see, for instance, Galbraith’s subtle decoding of ‘Somewhere’ (p. 135) in his Introduction (pp. xx−xxii).
The third volume, a memorial issue of Akzente, contains the German texts of the 33 poems that are absent from Meyer’s anthology of 2008 but have now been translated by Galbraith (pp. 494−518), an essay by Galbraith entitled ‘Im Archiv’ (pp. 519−22), an essay by Verena Lenzen entitled ‘Eine Spinne im Schädel: W.G. Sebalds Wort-Bild-Welten’ (pp. 523−45), and an essay by Uwe Schütte, Sebald’s last PhD student, entitled ‘Anmerkungen zu W.G. Sebalds Eigensinn’ (pp. 546−66). Galbraith’s piece usefully and succinctly complements his Introduction to his translations (pp. xi−xxiii). Professor Lenzen’s essay discusses the visual aspects of Sebald’s oeuvre and makes unusually perceptive use of interviews and unpublished material from the Marbach papers. It also concludes that Sebald’s photographs function in much the same way as Galbraith’s footnotes: oscillating between language and silence, they point simultaneously into a limbo that is occupied by the dead and a complex, interconnected history of violence and extermination (p. 534). And, in a more striking and complex way than any other writer to date (even Thomas von Steinäcker, ‘Zwischen schwarzem Tod und weisser Ewigkeit: Zum Grau auf den Abbildungen W. G. Sebalds’, in Sigurd Martin and Ingo Wintermeyer (eds), Verschiebebahnhöfe der Erinnerung: Zum Werk W.G. Sebalds (2007), pp. 119−35), Professor Lenzen sees just how many shades of grey occur in Sebald’s work, how the German word for grey (‘grau’) is closely linked with the German word for terror (‘Grauen’), and how, in the end, this ‘Grau-Programmatik’ is of central import for a much larger post-Auschwitz aesthetics (p. 537). Finally, Uwe Schütte’s eminently readable essay, in which the ‘Eigensinn’ of his master’s provocative voice is clearly audible, resembles nothing so much as a fast-moving performance by a Kung Fu adept. For here, Schütte vigorously and wittily uses his pugilistic skills against a multitude of opponents on behalf of a writer who was an unforgiving polemicist, an unorthodox academic critic, an aesthetic moralist, a prize-winning dissident, a uncompromising pessimist, a wandering gentile who dared tell the stories of Jewish victim/protagonists, an anti-German German whose concerns were rooted in German history, a Humanist with a preference for animals, a latter-day Nature mystic who was only too familiar with Nature’s blind destructiveness, and a Holocaust author who could see the atrocities of the Shoah re-enacted in dreadful historical events that have no obvious connection with anti-Semitism. Schütte’s narrative voice may be less sombre than Sebald’s, but he, in common with his late Doktorvater, believes that the point of great literature is to confront complacency, raise unanswerable questions, test the limitations and validity of accepted taboos, and provoke discussion and argument about the things that affect us most deeply. He thereby provides us with an uncomfortable but entirely appropriate ten-year memorial to a remarkable author and person whose message, one hopes, will still be audible and comprehensible in ten years’ time, despite the current attempts by authority to eliminate the Humanities and their alternative voice.