IN MANCHESTER, Sebald ended up renting a room from D., a Jewish refugee from Munich. This was quite by accident—“I met his wife in a greengrocer’s.” Although she said, “You know, D. is actually from Munich,” the two exiles never talked about what had made them both, in their different ways, leave Germany.
WGS: People like Peter Weiss and Wolfgang Hildesheim were starting to write then, and I was beginning to think about these things. And yet, when I was confronted by them in reality, it was a different matter. There was a sort of shyness, a sort of paralysis on both sides. It has taken all these twenty or thirty years for the paralysis to fade. In one sense I regret it, because Withington and Didsbury were full of German and Austrian Jews, whom I could have talked to. But in another sense I don’t, because I would certainly have said all the wrong things then. I think I might even say all the wrong things now.
HE SMILES—not his ironic smile, but an open, very charming one, and suddenly his face changes completely. I think that he still has the shyness and reserve he had with D., and that he mostly keeps his face a blank in case it, too, might say the wrong thing.
He studied Carl Sternheim for his M.A., and Alfred Döblin for his Ph.D., both writers with troubled relationships to their Jewishness. Later he taught Austrian literature — which is practically a history of assimilation, with writers like Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus. Of course. I’m not surprised that this shy, clever man should make this most difficult journey in books.
But I can’t leave him there. Although I feel the same shyness, the same paralysis, come over me, I clear my throat and ask, “What about your family? They weren’t madly opposed to the whole thing?”
WGS: Oh no, they weren’t opposed. I come from a very conventional, Catholic, anti-Communist background. The kind of semi-working-class, petit bourgeois background typical of those who supported the fascist regime, who went into the war not just blindly, but with a degree of enthusiasm. They all fell up the ladder in no time at all, and until 1941 they all felt they were going to be lords of the world. Absolutely, there’s no doubt about it, though nobody ever says it now. My father was in the Polish campaign, and he must have seen a thing or two. . His unit was camped out in the woods behind the Polish border, perhaps eight weeks before it all started. It’s all in our family albums. The first photos have a boy-scout atmosphere — they’re all sitting outside their tents mending their shirts, and underneath there are jokey captions like “Who needs women?” Then the order came, and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead, razed to the ground, with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child. It was only later. . I only go home once a year, for two days, and I look at them now, and I think, “Good Lord, what is all this?”
CAROLE ANGIER: Can you talk to your parents about it?
WGS: Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five. . it’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds. I always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration — it’s the same thing. But they cannot understand that.
CA: How do you feel about Germany now?
WGS: I still suffer from homesickness, of course. I take the train from Munich, and it turns the corner southwards, near Kempten, and I feel. . and then as soon as I get out of the railway station I want to go back. I can’t stand the sight of it. Nothing much has changed. They still have some pretty strange attitudes. You stand in Munich Pasing S-Bahn station at night, for instance, and some tramp rummages around in a bin. And some other chap who’s just come from work goes up to him and says, “You don’t do that here, you know. You ought to get a proper job.” There’s a lot of that about. And then there’s all the rest of it.
I went to a Jewish cemetery not long ago, in a small town near Freiburg with a mill, straight out of the Brothers Grimm. There’s this German forest and amongst it the Jewish graves. There’s no one there, hardly anyone comes to visit. But at the bottom there’s a camping site, where people come in the summer to grill their sausages and drink their beer. And there’s a notice which says that visitors to the cemetery are not permitted to enter the camping site. Not the other way around.
WE LAUGH, as there doesn’t seem much else to do. Then he tells me about his previous book [Vertigo], in the last part of which the narrator returns to the village where he grew up “and remembers many things.”
WGS: I thought I’d done it as discreetly as possible. But my mother was mortified to read details about families in our village. And ever since then she’s never gone back. Wertach is here [he puts his cigarettes on the table], and here’s Sonthofen [his matches]. There’s a mountain between them [his coffee cup], and you have to travel around it. [He draws a semicircle around the mountain with his finger.] It takes forty-five minutes by bicycle.
Occasionally she meets someone from Wertach who’s come to shop in Sonthofen, and if they don’t mention anything she’s reassured. She’s like so many people in that country — the most important thing is that your neighbors mustn’t think badly of you. There’s nothing you could describe as civilian courage. It just isn’t there. My mother couldn’t say: “This is my son. He’s now fifty-two years old, and he can do what he likes.” That would be completely impossible for her.
HE CAN TELL ME THIS, I think, because his mother will never read The Jewish Quarterly. Or his father, or anyone else from Wertach or Sonthofen. The cemetery and the camping site are separate worlds in his life too; he alone moves between them.
CA: And yet, though you’ve lived in England for thirty years, you still write in German.
WGS: I hardly knew any English at all when I came to Britain, and I am not a very talented linguist. I still have quite bad days even now, when I feel that I am a barbaric stutterer. But that’s not the main reason. I am attached to that language. And there’s a further dimension, I think. If you have grown up in the kind of environment I grew up in, you can’t put it aside just like that. In theory I could have had a British passport years ago. But I was born into a particular historical context, and I don’t really have an option.
THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN Wertach and Sonthofen has no coffee left in it, and outside, the gray Norfolk clouds have thinned. So we decide to talk about The Emigrants under the trees. The book is full of plants and trees. Nature is a second victim it celebrates, after the Jews.
WGS: The Emigrants started from a phone call I got from my mother, telling me that my schoolteacher in Sonthofen had committed suicide. This wasn’t very long after Jean Améry’s suicide, and I had been working on Améry. A sort of constellation emerged about this business of surviving and about the great time lag between the infliction of injustice and when it finally overwhelms you. I began to understand vaguely what this was all about, in the case of my schoolteacher. And that triggered all the other memories I had.
CA: So the schoolteacher in the second story, Paul Bereyter, and all the others, too, were real people? And these are their real stories?