JC: Yes, I was feeling that today. I was typing up some of the notes here, and the computer program I was using was changing the letters. I would type a lowercase “a” because it was at the left margin of the poem, and the computer would change it to a capital. [Audience laughter.] I would go to the next line, and it would do the same thing.
WGS: Yes, my translator in the book that’s coming out in the autumn [Austerlitz] has some Czech bits in it, which I found quite hard to write. At any rate, I haven’t got a machine but the translator had a machine, and whenever she put those Czech bits in, the computer then put a one-and-a-half space for the next line, without explanation, without rhyme or reason. He’s not answerable. This is the strange thing, that there’s the same gap of incomprehension between us and these machines as there is between us and the animals we look at in the zoo. [Audience laughter.] There is a gap of incomprehension. We guess at what they might think about us, but we’re not entirely sure.
JC: The fault line in your work seems to be the conflict between nature and civilization, and for you the fear is that nature is going to be destroyed. .
WGS: Well, in one sense, organic nature is going to vanish. We see it vanishing by the yard. It’s not very difficult — I mean, you can hear the grass creak. Once you have an eye for it, if you go to the Mediterranean you can see that there used to be forests all along the Dalmatian coast. The whole of the Iberian Peninsula was wooded; you could walk from the Atlas Mountains to Cairo in the shade at the time of Scipio. It’s been going on for a long time, it’s not just now. There are pockets, Corsica, for instance, where you can see what these forests looked like. The trees were much taller. They were like the American trees, straight up, some sixty yards. But there are only pockets of it left. And you can see that it’s a process of attrition that’s gone on for a long time and that organic nature is being replaced through the agency of the psychozootic power, whatever one might call them, i.e., us — it’s being replaced by something else, by chemistry, dust, and stones, which function in some form or other. And we don’t know what it’s going to be. On the whole, the thing evolves under its own steam. There’s very little we can do to steer it.
JC: Of the four books which I know in English, The Emigrants seems to be the one that’s least like the others in structure. There are four sections about four individuals, all of whom are more or less drawn from life. You’ve used the term “documentary fiction” to describe The Emigrants. I was wondering if that same description fits the other three novels at all.
WGS: Not really. They’re all different. I think this one [Austerlitz] is much more in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy. The first one, Vertigo, has very strong autobiographical elements, i.e., it looks at a period of disturbance in the narrator’s life and tries to intimate how that might have come about. And it is also in the nature of crime fiction, in the sense that there are unresolved crimes. Which really happened — these gruesome murders in Italy which are described in that book — I mean, these are authentic elements.
JC: And the death of Schlag the hunter at the end of Vertigo?
WGS: That is also how it happened to me as I grew up in that village. But the image of the hunter is projected backward in the text in an illicit sort of way. So there are a few instances, certainly in the Stendhal and in the Kafka story, where some kind of legerdemain arranges things in a way suitable for the text.
JC: There is the effect in Vertigo when we read the last section — the narrator returning to his home town, W., which is also first the initial of your hometown — where we suddenly see what we’ve read before in a new light, and this turns around our perception of the earlier chapters. Was that something that came to you when you got to the last chapter?
WGS: No, that happens. For instance, as in psychoanalysis, when the narrative is finished, its beginnings show up in a new light. And in fact it happens with all forms of tales and stories, that the end really provides. . I mean, after the tock comes the tick again.
JC: Was The Emigrants, then, very different from the other books, in the writing of it?
WGS: Different in the sense that Vertigo was very much a thing I did by myself, but with The Emigrants I had interlocutors, i.e., people whom I had known and was talking to, as it were, after their death, remembering who they were. Or people who, as in the case of the last story, were still alive. The last story is based on two figures, on a well-known contemporary painter and on a landlord I had in Manchester who was an émigré and came to Manchester in 1933; all the details about the childhood of his mother are from his mother. And this was for me quite a momentous experience, this whole Manchester business, because growing up in Germany you do perhaps learn the odd thing or did at the time. . I mean, one didn’t really talk about the Holocaust, as it is called, in the 1960s in schools, nor did your parents ever mention it, God forbid, and they didn’t talk about it amongst themselves either. So this was a huge taboo zone. But then pressure eventually saw to it that in schools the subject would be raised. It was usually done in the form of documentary films which were shown to us without comment. So, you know, it was a sunny June afternoon, and you would see one of those liberation of Dachau or Belsen films, and then you would go and play football because you didn’t really know what you should do with it.
Then later on when I started at the university in 1964, ’65, for the first time these issues became public, in the sense that newspapers wrote about it a great deal. There was the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which went on for a long period of time, well over a year, and where there were daily full-page reports about these things. And I remember reading those reports every day and being absolutely astonished at the details that came out of them. Nevertheless, despite my interest, unavoidable interest in these questions, I couldn’t really imagine it at all; it was some form of abstraction; there were large numbers and you didn’t know who these people really were. Because it is inconceivable of course in this country somehow that there is in the heart of Europe a country where there aren’t any Jewish people. Or scarcely. There are some now, small growing communities again. In the 1960s you grew up there for twenty years and you never bumped into a Jewish person, so you didn’t know who they were. Just some kind of phantom image of them. And so I go to Manchester. I didn’t know anything about England nor about Manchester nor about its history or anything at all. And there they were all around me, because Manchester has a very large Jewish community, and very concentrated in certain suburbs, and the place where I lived was full of Jewish people. And my landlord was Jewish. I didn’t talk to him about that nor did he talk to me about it either. We all avoided the subject. Until his wife, who was a good Englishwoman, once told me, well, do you know, Peter is actually from Munich? And I didn’t know what I should do with this piece of information. But eventually, twenty years later, I went back and talked to him about it. And this is when all these things came out. And it turns out that as a small boy he was skiing in the same places where I went skiing. That somehow then sets you thinking. It’s the reality of it. That he left traces in the snow on the same hills. These are different kinds of history lessons. They’re not in the history books.
JC: When you were at university, I think you said somewhere that it was a very disturbing experience because most of the professors had gotten their jobs during the brown-shirt era, so there was a conspiracy of silence even there.