heavy blues of the clouds
a fiery red arose, and colors
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter’s memory.
These colors unfold as the reverse of
the spectrum in a different consistency
of the air, whose deoxygenated void
in the gasping breath of the figures
on the central Isenheim panel is enough
to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which
comes the mountain landscape of weeping
in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze
into the future has prefigured
a planet utterly strange, chalk-colored
behind the blackish-blue river.
Despite what the medievals may have thought, it is impossible now to see an eclipse as “catastrophic”: the event simply does not merit the implication of horror. Sebald understands the eclipse, however, not as a single dreadful incident, but as part of a plumb line that descends through history, linking all the horrors that would take place in the same physical location, up to and including the Holocaust.
Later in the poem, similarly, Sebald discusses Altdorfer’s painting of Lot and his daughters fleeing Sodom, in reference to the sight of Nuremberg in flames under the Allied bombs, and the epigraph to this section, from Virgil’s Eclogues, draws the reader back even further: “and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops / and from high mountains the greater shadows fall.” Though the conflagrations are distant from one another in every way — temporally, geographically — they are aesthetically part of a greater universal pattern of fiery massacre, a pattern that circles around infinitely, changed slightly upon each recurrence but not fundamentally altered. In later works Sebald has accomplished this kind of pattern tracing more effectively — here the layers can feel a bit slapped together — but the fundamental idea is the same: that when great suffering takes place somewhere, generation after generation, the sorrows are trodden in the soil.
But there is a crucial difference between the self-portrait and the artist: by witnessing one of the horrors that took place in this locale (the eclipse), Grünewald becomes a witness to them all. Sebald, on the other hand, witnessed none of World War II; and he feels this gap in his experience as painfully as most people feel the experience of trauma.
I grew up,
despite the dreadful course
of events elsewhere, on the northern
edge of the Alps, so it seems
to me now, without any
idea of destruction,
he writes in the poem’s final, autobiographical section. Born in the penultimate year of the war in a remote German village, he was shielded from the destruction by virtue of his youth; but still as a child he imagined within him “a silent catastrophe that occurs / almost unperceived /. . this / I have never got over.”
Like Jacques Austerlitz and Max Ferber, Sebald sees himself as a child brought up unaware of his own identity, a Kaspar Hauser-like figure. The poem never fully reveals the source of the “silent catastrophe,” the absent memory, but each part of this last autobiographical section sifts through a different time period in Sebald’s life in search of clues. “For it is hard to discover / the winged vertebrates of prehistory / embedded in tablets of slate,” the section begins, as if continuing a conversation, which in a way it is.
But if I see before me
the nervature of past life
in one image, I always think
that this has something to do
with truth.
“How far, in any case, must one go back / to find the beginning?” Sebald asks. And the “beginning” for which he searches is that of his own prehistory. After passing over the day his grandparents were married and a few other potential “beginnings,” he settles on the day before his father left to serve in Dresden, “of whose beauty his memory, as he / remarks when I question him, / retains no trace.” The next night Nuremberg was attacked, and his mother, on her way back to the Allgäu, was stuck at a friend’s house in the town of Windsheim, where she discovered that she was pregnant. The narrator’s life, then, is indelibly intertwined with the last days of the war. And yet he can retain no memory of it; he was too young.
“I nearly went out of my mind,” Sebald says of his reaction to seeing Altdorfer’s painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Austerlitz will use exactly the same words to describe revisiting sites in Prague that he had not seen since childhood. Mourning the loss of a memory that he never had, Sebald turns to Altdorfer as a surrogate. When memory is lacking, art will suffice; but art is a shorthand, not a substitute. Sebald aestheticizes history, but he never mistakes history for art.
III
After Nature, the first of Sebald’s literary works, inaugurates the search for “the nervature of past life” that would form the sub-text of all his books. The character obsessively driven by a quest for knowledge — a quest rooted in his or her personal life — is a constantly recurring figure. Janine, a French professor in The Rings of Saturn, studies Flaubert’s novels with “an intense personal interest” that is never explained. Jacques Austerlitz, a retired art history professor, has spent much of his life working on an investigation into the “family likeness” between various monuments of Europe, a topic that he feels compelled to pursue by an “impulse which he himself. . did not really understand.” Sebald’s narrator can also be included in this category: though we encounter him at various points along his wanderings through Europe and America, we are never told why he makes his journeys.
But Sebald did write a book in which he explained what it was that possessed him so; and in doing so he ignited a controversy in Germany that one critic compared to the storm about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Invited in 1997 to give a series of lectures at the University of Zurich, Sebald boldly put forth the thesis that postwar German literature had failed to represent adequately the devastating effects of the Allied bombing campaign for the German nation. The lectures were extensively covered in the Swiss and German media, and Sebald published them in book form in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur.
The scale of the destruction caused by the bombings, Sebald argues, is difficult “to even halfway comprehend,” but they “appear to have left hardly a trace of pain in the collective consciousness.” 1 Not only did few German novelists concern themselves with the air war against Germany, Sebald says, but there exist almost no testimonies of the war written by Germans; the majority of the information about the destruction comes from foreign journalists reporting from the bombed-out nation. Trummerliteratur, the “rubble literature” movement that emerged in the years immediately following World War II, is most notable for what Sebald calls its “collective amnesia.” Even now that historians have begun to document the destruction of the German cities, “the images of this harrowing chapter of our history have not truly crossed the threshold of the national consciousness.” Sebald describes a “tacit but universally valid agreement” among writers not to record the “true state of material and moral annihilation” in which the nation found itself — in other words, a conspiracy in German culture, the effects of which have lasted to this day.