EW: One of the painter Max Ferber’s techniques to achieve his goal of creating dust is to put on layers of paint and then scrape it off and then rub it out and put it on and scrape it off. And there’s a point when you describe your own writing of this book where you seem to be adopting, almost, or finding yourself in the same position of writing and erasing and even questioning the whole, as you say, questionable business of writing.
WGS: Yes, it is a questionable business because it’s intrusive. You do intrude into other people’s lives, as I had to when I was trying to find out about these stories, and you don’t know whether you’re doing a good or a bad thing. It’s a received wisdom that it’s good to talk about traumas, but it’s not always true. Especially if you are the instigator of making people remember, talk about their pasts and so on, you are not certain whether your intrusion into someone’s life may not cause a degree of collateral damage which that person might otherwise have been spared. So there’s an ethical problem there. And then the whole business of writing of course — you make things up, you smooth certain contradictory elements that you come across. The whole thing is fraught with vanity, with motives that you really don’t understand yourself.
This form of creative writing, as it were, doesn’t date back very far with me, but I have always been scribbling in one way or another. So it’s a habitual thing. It’s very closely linked, as far as I can tell, to neurotic disorders, that you have to do it for certain periods of time and then you don’t do it for other periods of time, and then you have to do it again and you do it in an obsessive manner. It is a behavioral problem in one way. Of course it has other more positive aspects, but those are well known. What is less well known are these darker sides of it.
EW: I think at one point that someone says, referring to another text, that the book was heartbreaking but necessary work. It felt to me like that’s what you were doing here, that this was heartbreaking but necessary work.
WGS: Well, I’m glad to hear that some people think that. I find that reassuring up to a point, but it’s not going to allay all the misgivings that I have about it. And one of the most acute problems after a while is, of course, contending with the culture business that invariably then surrounds you, and you have to deal with it. Because when you do begin to write seriously, then it is very much like an escape route — you find yourself in some kind of compound, your professional life, and you start doing something about which nobody knows. You go into your potting shed. . For me, when I wrote my first texts, it was a very, very private affair. I didn’t read them to anybody, I have no writer friends and so on. So the privacy which that ensured for me was something that I treasured a great deal, and it isn’t so now. So my instinct is now to abandon it all again until people have forgotten about it, and then perhaps I can regain that position where I can work again in my potting shed, undisturbed.
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.