[close] Obituary

German writer shaped by the 'forgetfulness' of his fellow countrymen after the second world war

Eric Homberger
The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2001

"I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position," remarked the German writer WG Sebald, who has died, aged 57, in a car crash in East Anglia. That scruple put him at odds with much of contemporary writing.

Scorning the Holocaust "industry", and what he referred to as an official culture of mourning and remembering, Sebald disliked feel-good sentimental portrayals of terrible events - such as Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark. He claimed no false intimacy with the dead.

He wanted to find a literary form responsive to the waves and echoes of human tragedy which spread out, across generations and nations, yet which began in his childhood. In the ruined cities and towns of post-war Germany the causes of the destruction of an entire society were never discussed. His father, who came home a stranger to his three-year-old son in 1947, after being released from a PoW camp in France, said nothing about the war. Silence and forgetting were conditions of his early life.

In his father's photo albums he found pictures taken during the Polish campaign in 1939, and he sensed that something in the grinning German soldiers and boy scout atmosphere of the campaign, ending with the torching of villages not unlike his own Bavarian home in Wertach Am Allgäu, hinted at the meaning of the destroyed buildings, silences and absence of memory around him.

Sebald doubted whether those who had never experienced Theresienstadt or Auschwitz could simply describe what occurred there. That would have been presumptuous, an appropriation of others' sufferings. Like a Medusa's head, he felt that the attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality.

It was necessary, he found, to approach this subject obliquely, and to invent a new literary form, part hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue, often involving the experiences of one "WG Sebald", a German writer long settled in East Anglia. He was reluctant to call his books "novels", because he had little interest in the way contemporary writers seemed to find all meaning in personal relationships, and out of a comic but heartfelt disdain for the "grinding noises" which heavily plotted novels demanded. "As he rose from the table, frowning ..." was precisely the type of clumsy machinery, moving a character from here to there, which Sebald mocked.

In four books published in translations since 1996 (The Emigrants, The Rings Of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz), Sebald was compared to Borges, Calvino, Thomas Bernhard, Nabokov and Kafka. (Sebald worked extremely closely with his English translators Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell.)

The narrative voice in his books is an inventive one, richly delineated. Reviewers grasped for the right comparison. Was it a gloomy Proustian. Or was it Jamesian? The persona or mask in his prose fictions, subtle and persuasive, was admirably serviceable for a writer devoted to an intense privacy. Paradoxically, for this most private of persons, Sebald delighted in using the "real" world as a springboard for meditations upon writing, history and the inner life.

Readers sometimes wrote to him, pointing out mistakes of one kind or another (the clock at an Italian train station was in the wrong location), but the deliberate "mistakes" were, for writerly purposes, adjustments to the historical truth. But only small things, and never the big issues, were to be changed.

Sebald, who was a devoted photographer, used images in his novels. Sometimes they were found objects, postcards, or something from an old newspaper. He was an exacting customer at the University of East Anglia copy shop, discussing what might be done with his images, adjusting the size and contrast. The photographs appear [close]