Art is the preserver of memory, but it is also the destroyer of memory: this is the final tug-of-war in Sebald’s work and the most fundamental one. As he searches for patterns in the constellation of grief that his books record, he runs the risk that the patterns themselves, by virtue of their very beauty, will extinguish the grief that they seek to contain. Sebald’s peculiar alchemy of aestheticism and sorrow unwittingly underscores its own insubstantiality. Even as he investigates the roots of memory, Sebald, like the weavers whom he finds so emblematic, continually unravels his own creations.
II
For English readers, Sebald’s books have an extra layer of circularity, because they appeared in translation out of order. Vertigo, his first prose book, was published in the United States after The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz followed in 2001. Sebald’s first literary work to be published in German, After Nature, was his last to appear in English. This displacement is actually a boon to English readers, because After Nature benefits immensely from being read after Sebald’s other work. It is a panorama of many of his great themes, but they appear in embryonic form.
Like Sebald’s other books, After Nature confounds genre: it has been called a prose poem, but while the language in places has the feel of prose, technically it is free verse. Each of the three sections has its own title and can be read as a distinct poem, but Sebald seems to have thought of them as a single entity. (In German the book is subtitled Ein Elementargedicht, “an elemental poem.”) The volume’s title refers to the practice of creating a work of art from a living subject (the poem mentions painting “after nature”), and the subject who is patiently submitting is Sebald himself: each of the three characters presented is a self-portrait of the writer. The first section is a biographical meditation on Matthias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century painter known for altarpieces that depict the crucifixion and other torments of the flesh and the soul with harrowing fidelity. (Max Ferber, the painter of The Emigrants, seems to speak for Sebald when he says that “the extreme vision of that strange man, which was lodged in every detail, distorted every limb, and infected the colors like an illness, was one I had always felt in tune with.”) The second section follows eighteenth-century explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller (who shares Sebald’s initials) on an Arctic journey led by Vitus Bering. And in the third Sebald investigates his own family history and early memories, much of which will prove fertile ground for the later works as well.
The suggestion of self-portraiture is evident from the opening lines of After Nature, which depict a person closing one of Grünewald’s altar panels. As the panel folds in upon itself, the face of St. George becomes visible on the outside, “about to step over the frame’s / threshold.” George’s “silver / feminine features” are those of Grünewald himself, whose face “emerges again and again / in his work.” We are reminded of Sebald’s own face and voice appearing over and over in his characters; and it heightens the analogy that the shape of the closed altar panel is reminiscent of a book, with the face of St. George — that is, of Grünewald — in the spot where the author’s name should be.
Grünewald’s face, Sebald continues, displays “always the same / gentleness, the same burden of grief, / the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled / and sliding sideways down into loneliness.” Holbein the Younger, too, has depicted him in a painting of a female saint:
These were strangely disguised
instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger
whose books were burned by the fascists.
Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art
men had revered each other like brothers, and
often made monuments in each other’s
image where their paths had crossed.
One could hardly ask for a better description of Sebald’s own enterprise. Starting with this book, he would practice a somber cartography, mapping out in his own works of art the crossing paths, real or imagined, of Stendhal, Kafka, Nabokov, and the countless others whose suffering is stenciled on his work: “the marks of pain,” as he put it in Austerlitz, “which. . trace countless fine lines through history.”
As the glancing reference above to “the fascists” shows, even when the events of World War II are not front and center in Sebald’s book, they never recede far into the background. “We know there is a long tradition / of persecuting the Jews,” the poem declares a bit later in this section and goes on to describe the torments suffered by the Jews of Frankfurt in the Middle Ages: a fiery massacre, the wearing of yellow rings, their confinement to a ghetto in which they were locked each night, and “on Sundays at four in the / afternoon.” Grünewald would have witnessed this persecution, Sebald continues, because his future wife was reared in the ghetto, though she later converted to Christianity. But the persecution of the Jews is just a tile in the mosaic of human suffering, a mosaic that in this poem includes Grünewald’s personal torments — his marriage was unhappy, possibly because “he had more of an eye for men”—as well as those of the patients in the hospital at Isenheim, the site of Grünewald’s masterpiece, whose horrible disfigurements may have inspired some of the artist’s work; and the massacre of five thousand peasants in the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525, which Grünewald learns of after meeting two painters who are brothers, Barthel and (yes) Sebald Beham. In Sebald’s account Grünewald refused to leave his house after hearing of this, but
he could hear the gouging out
of eyes that long continued
between Lake Constance and
the Thuringian Forest.
For weeks at a time he wore
a dark bandage over his face.
But the dominant event is the solar eclipse of 1502, a “catastrophic incursion of darkness”:
on the first of October the moon’s shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann
Indagine,
will have travelled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold