The year I spent in Munich and thereabouts I was working for a German cultural institute, the quite well-known Goethe-Institut. This was after I had taken my doctorate in England and I was looking for a career, and I thought I might do that. But as it turned out, I found it too officious, representing, however obliquely, Germany in a public sort of way abroad. I felt, when I saw it from closer up, that it wasn’t me and that I’d rather go back and live in hiding, as it were.
EW: In hiding?
WGS: Well, where I am now is very much out in the sticks. It’s in a small village near Norwich in the east of England. And I do feel that I’m better there than I am elsewhere in the center of things. I do like to be on the margins if possible.
EW: What attachment do you feel to Germany now?
WGS: Well, I know it’s my country. Even after all those years. I’ve been out of it now for. . it must be well over thirty years by now. Longer out of it than in it. Although of course I come from the edges, as it were, the southern edges of Germany — my granddad’s house was on the Austrian border almost directly. I hardly knew Germany. When I left it I knew the territory where I had grown up and I knew Freiburg and I had been to Munich once or twice. But one didn’t really travel terribly much in the midsixties or early sixties. And so I hardly knew it. I didn’t know Frankfurt, I didn’t know Hamburg, I didn’t know anything in the north or the middle — Hanover, Berlin were all totally alien to me. So in a sense it’s not my country. But because of its peculiar history and the bad dive that history took in this century or, to be more precise, from about 1870 onwards because of that, I feel you can’t simply abdicate and say, well, it’s nothing to do with me. I have inherited that backpack and I have to carry it whether I like it or not.
EW: And you still write in German.
WGS: And I still write in German, yes. There are very few writers who write in two languages, even people as accomplished as Nabokov in more than one language. Once Nabokov had moved across from Russian to English, he stayed in English. He still used Russian for translation purposes. But he didn’t, as far as I know, write in that language after he had made the transition. Making the transition as Nabokov does, say, is a very, very risky and harrowing business. And so far I have tried to avoid making that decision. There aren’t many other writers that I can think of who had to contend with that particular problem. There is Elias Canetti, who lived for many decades in London before he returned to Zurich, who spoke English perfectly well but never wrote a line in English, to the best of my knowledge. I think it is quite difficult to reach a level of sophisticated competence in a language. Even if you can babble on, it doesn’t mean that you can write it well. That’s quite a different proposal.
EW: Since you mention Vladimir Nabokov, there are references in The Emigrants to a man with a butterfly net, the boy with the butterfly net, Nabokov himself. Why does he hover over this book?
WGS: I think the idea came to me when I was thinking of writing the story of that painter. This particular story, as you know, contains among other things, as a secondary narrative, as it were, the childhood memoirs of the painter’s mother. These are to quite a substantial extent authentic, based on authentic materials. I had the disjointed notes which that lady had written in the years between her son’s emigration to England and her own deportation; she had about eighteen months to write these notes. As you know from the text, this family had lived in a small village in northern Bavaria, upper Franconia, called Steinach, then around 1900 moved to the nearest town, the spa town of Bad Kissingen. And if you read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, his autobiography, which to my mind is a wonderful book, there is an episode in it where he says that his family went to Bad Kissingen several times in exactly those years. So the temptation was very great to let these two exiles meet unbeknownst to each other in the story. And I also knew — and this is based on fact, it’s not something that I artificially adjusted later on — that my great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth had interned himself in an asylum in Ithaca, which is where Nabokov taught for many years. And where, as one knows from his writings, he was always in his spare time going out with his butterfly net. So it seemed a very, very strange coincidence that two locations in the stories that I would have to write about were also Nabokov locations. Of course I also knew extremely well, from my time in the French part of Switzerland, the area around Lac Le Mans and Montreux and Vevey and Basel-Stadt and Lausanne. I knew all these places quite intimately. I didn’t know of Nabokov, of course, when I was a student there; I hadn’t got quite that far. I didn’t know he lived there, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have dared to call on him, as you can imagine. But I knew the whole territory and I knew these lifts going up into the mountains that he talks about. And so it seemed an obvious thing to do and, again, an opportunity to create something which has a kind of haunting, spectral quality to it, something that appears, forms of apparitions of virtual presence that have, vanishing though they are, a certain intensity which can otherwise be not very easily achieved.
EW: I think one critic sees it as a sign of joy and another as foretelling death.
WGS: It’s both, of course. People always want what seem to them to be symbolic elements in a text to have single meanings. But of course that isn’t how symbols work. If they are any good at all they are usually multivalent. They are simply there to give you a sense that there must be something of significance here at that point, but what it is and what the significance is, is entirely a different matter.
I think that it was a question of trying to find, in a text of this kind, ways of expressing heightened sensations, as it were, in the form of symbols which are perhaps not obvious. But certainly the railway business, for instance. The railway played a very, very prominent part, as one knows, in the whole process of deportation. If you look at Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah film, which to my mind is one of the most impressive documents of this whole fraught business, there are trains all the time, between each episode. They run along the tracks, you see the wagons, and you see the signals and you see railway lines in Poland and in the Czech Republic and in Austria and in Italy and in Belgium. The whole logistics of deportation was based on the logistics of the railway system. And I do pick that up at one point when I talk about my primary schoolteacher’s obsession with the railways. So it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. It always depends of course on how you put this into practice. The more obvious you make a symbol in a text, the less genuine, as it were, it becomes, so you have to try and do it very obliquely, so that the reader might read over it without really noticing it. You just try and set up certain reverberations in a text and the whole acquires significance that it might not otherwise have. And that is the same with other images in the text: the track, certainly, the smoke, and certainly the dust.
EW: Memory seems harder to escape the older that your subjects get. And most of them succumb, in a sense, through withdrawal or suicide. Why is memory so ineluctable and so destructive?
WGS: It’s a question of specific weight, I think. The older you get, in a sense, the more you forget. That is certainly true. Vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight. And of course once you are weighed down with these kinds of weight, it’s not unlikely that they will sink you. Memories of that sort do have a tendency to encumber you emotionally.