EW: You include many photographs with your text — of the people, the places, cityscapes or landscapes, and they’re very evocative, they’re haunting. In the narrative they seem to trigger a search. You see a photograph or you look at an album or someone shows you something, and then that takes you somewhere.
WGS: Well, the pictures have a number of different sources of origin and also a number of different purposes. But the majority of the photographs do come from the albums that certainly middle-class people kept in the thirties and forties. And they are from the authentic source. Ninety percent of the images inserted into the text could be said to be authentic, i.e., they are not from other sources used for the purpose of telling the tale.
I think they have possibly two purposes in the text. The first and obvious notion is that of verification — we all tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters. Once you bring up a photograph in proof of something, then people generally tend to accept that, well, this must have been so. And certainly even the most implausible pictures in The Emigrants would seem to support that, the more implausible they are. For instance, the photograph of the narrator’s great-uncle in Arab costume in Jerusalem in 1913 is an authentic photograph. It’s not invented, it’s not an accident, not one that was found and later inserted. So the photographs allow the narrator, as it were, to legitimize the story that he tells. I think this has always been a concern in realist fiction, and this is a form of realist fiction. In the nineteenth century, certainly in the German tradition, the author is always at pains to say, well, this is where I got it from, I found this manuscript on top of a cupboard in this or that town in such and such a house and so on and so forth, in order to give his whole approach an air of legitimacy.
The other function that I see is possibly that of arresting time. Fiction is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient, and it is very, very difficult in that particular form in the narrative to arrest the passage of time. And as we all know, this is what we like so much about certain forms of visual art — you stand in a museum and you look at one of those wonderful pictures somebody did in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this — they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. I think that is something that is positive, slowing down the speed of reading, as it were.
EW: One critic describes you as a ghost hunter. Do you see yourself that way?
WGS: Yes, I do. I think that’s pretty precise. It’s nothing ghoulish at all, just an odd sense that in some way the lives of people who are perhaps no longer here — and these can be relatives or people I vaguely knew, or writer colleagues from the past, or painters who worked in the sixteenth century — have an odd presence for me, simply through the fact that I may get interested in them. And when you get interested in someone, you invest a considerable amount of emotional energy and you begin to occupy this person’s territory, after a fashion. You establish a presence in another life through emotional identification. And it doesn’t matter how far back that is in time. This seems to be quite immaterial somehow. And if you only have a few scraps of information about a certain sixteenth-century painter, if you are sufficiently interested, it nevertheless allows you to be present in that life or to retrieve it into the present present, as it were.
One of the first things I wrote was a long prose poem [After Nature] about the early sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald, about whom we know hardly anything at all apart from his pictures. And it’s these lacunae of ignorance and the very few facts that we have that were sufficient somehow for me to move into this territory and to look around there and to feel, after a while, quite at home. It interests me considerably more than present day. . I mean, going to Rio de Janeiro or to Sydney is something that I find entirely alien. You couldn’t entice me there. The fact that I’m now in America seems extremely strange to me.
EW: One of your subjects in The Emigrants is a former schoolteacher of yours named Paul Bereyter. What made you want to get beyond your own, as you put it, very fond memories and discover the story that you didn’t know?
WGS: In the town in which I grew up — we moved when I was seven or eight years old from a village to the nearest small town — this is where I went to the primary school where I was taught by this particular teacher. And in this town throughout the postwar years when I grew up, between the ages of eight and eighteen, no one ever mentioned that this man had gone through years of persecution, had been ousted from his teaching post in 1935, and then had come back after 1945 to pick up the loose threads again. Everybody knew about it. A small town that had, I don’t know, eight thousand inhabitants — everybody knew everybody else’s business. The teacher himself of course — and that is the most perplexing aspect of that whole tale — never mentioned it either. And so clearly, as I was very attached to him as a boy — I admired this man greatly — I did want to find out the truth about it. And at that level you might describe it almost in the first instance as a piece of investigative journalism. Once you get hold of a thread you want to pull it out and you want to see, you know, what the colors of the pattern are. And the more difficult it gets — as it did in this case, because nobody in the town was prepared to talk to me about that life — the more intrigued you become, the more you know that there is something buried there. And the less you want to give up on it.
EW: Why wouldn’t they to talk to you? This is forty, fifty years later.
WGS: Yes. Well, you know, the conspiracy of silence still lasts. It is something which people in other countries can scarcely imagine. It continues to puzzle me that when I grew up there, even when I was beginning to be capable of rational thought, as it were, at the age of sixteen or seventeen or so, this was scarcely fifteen years after the war. If I think back from the present moment in time, from 1997, sixteen or seventeen years back to 1980, it seems to me like yesterday. And so for my parents, for my teachers in 1960 or thereabouts, these calamitous years from 1941 to 1946, 1947, or so must have seemed like yesterday. And if you imagine that you have gone through such a dreadful phase of history, implicated in it in the most horrendous way, you might think that there might be an urge to talk about it. But I think that conspiracy of silence. . it just came about, as it were. And it held, I think, even between married partners. I cannot imagine my parents, for instance, ever talking about these matters between themselves. It was just a taboo zone which you didn’t enter. I think these self-generated taboo zones are always the most powerful ones.
EW: Because Bereyter was one-quarter Jewish he was not allowed to teach, he was rejected by the townspeople, he went to live abroad. But then he came back to Germany in 1939. Why?