Silent Catastrophe
In Memoriam W. G. (Max) Sebald 1944 - 2001

'Die Beschreibung des Unglücks schließt in sich die Möglichkeit zu seiner Überwindung ein' - 'In the description of disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it.' (Die Beschreibung des Unglücks)

Unlike many contemporary German writers, W. G. 'Max' Sebald probably needs little introduction to British and American readers. Lauded by Susan Sontag and The Observer's Robert McCrum, his achievements as a writer in the 'European' tradition found an international acclaim which is reflected in the spate of obituaries and tributes in the press following his untimely death shortly before Christmas, at the tragically early age of 57 and at the height of his literary career.

Born in Wertach im Allgäu in May 1944, too young to have experienced the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II at first hand but growing up in the invisible, unexplained sense of horror of their aftermath, he left Germany in the 1960s to study in Switzerland, subsequently moving to England to take up employment as a Lektor in Manchester before joining the University of East Anglia in 1970, where he became Professor of European Literature in 1987), and where he followed up his book - on Carl Sternheim - with a doctoral thesis on Alfred Döblin which appeared in German unter the title of Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins. This 'myth of destruction' turns out to be a programmatic title, evocative of the subject matter of much of his oeuvre, whether in academic publications or in the works of prose fiction for which he is best known. Unexpectedly lyrical titles like 'Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte' (Between History and Natural History) and 'Konstruktionen der Trauer' (Constructs of Grief), or the two collections of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (Description of Disaster) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland) point the way to a preoccupation with the sense of 'lautlose Katastrophe', or silent catastrophe, which pervades all of his fictional works.

This can take many forms, from the brutalities of history (particularly but not exclusively the twentieth century) and eternal displacement occasioned by a lost homeland, to the personal destinies of individual, melancholic characters (which thus acquire a kind of mythic status, reminiscent of the emblematic fate of Kafka's Jäger Gracchus who haunts the pages of Schwindel. Gefühle) or, conversely, an almost biblical sense of a creeping, universal yet random destruction, a product now of fate, now of the Industrial Revolution or the human perversions of which it is a symptom, which surfaces in the long three-part 'Elementargedicht' Nach der Natur, and is one of the underlying strands of Die Ringe des Saturn as 'das lähmende Grauen … angesichts der … bis weit in die Vergangenheit zurückgehenden Spuren der Zerstörung' ('the numbing sense of horror in the face of the traces of destruction stretching far back into the past'). Often, though, the actual catastrophe is less tangible than the pervasive sense of unease, Angst, or vertigo ('Schwindel') it occasions, a sense of loss and emptiness which memory, an imperfect tool, struggles to overcome by attempting to 'fix' it or pin it down. Small wonder, then, that writers and artists figure so prominently among the cast of sometimes ghost-like characters who come and go through the works, whether as protagonists or as minor figures, isolated at some remove from the main narrative in a sequence of reported anecdotes.

Nach der Natur (1988; After Nature) opens with a long meditation on the life of the Isenheimer Altar painter Mathias Grünewald, followed by meditations on the life of the 18th century Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, and closing with a thinly-veiled, but highly stylized autobiographical account of the first person narrator-persona. Its elegiac tone and subject matter may be seen as containing in nuce elements which are later teased out in the narrative fiction, for example in the melancholic musings of four parts of Schwindel. Gefühle (1990; Vertigo, 1999), a kind of Italienische Reise which takes up the biographical motif in the opening section on Stendhal before taking up the characteristic first person narration in the second and (seemingly more directly autobiographical) fourth sections. The third section, 'Dr. K's Badereise nach Riva' (Dr K. takes the waters at Riva) is threaded through with allusions to Kafka's biography and to his Jäger Gracchus story, so that 'Dr K.', becomes one of the characters of the story and at the same time an alter ego of the narrator whose journey echoes his, and who is haunted by recurring sinister/comic pairs of characters (culminating in a 'double vision' of the young Kafka in an episode on a provincial Italian bus journey) will strike a note of recognition in anyone who has read Kafka's novels. It is hard, with hindsight, not to be moved by the phrases, modulated from Kafka, on the randomness of fate: 'eine falsche Drehung des Steuers, ein(en) Augenblick der Unaufmerksamkeit des Führers, eine Ablenkung durch die wunderschöne dunkelgrüne Heimat' (a wrong turn of the wheel, a moment's inattention, distracted by the wonderful green of the (home) country…).

It is with Die Ausgewanderten (1993; The Emigrants, 1996) however, that what German critics refer to as the 'Sebald sound'reputation as a writer really comes into its own. Praised by Susan Sontag as 'an astonishing masterpiece', the English translation by Michael Hulse was followed by translations into French, Dutch, Danish, Italian and Spanish. The moving, tragic but never sentimental life-stories of four casualities of the 'lautlose Katastrophe' of history, who - like the poet Paul Celan - are marked for ever by the loss this implies, and whose strangely innocent and dislocated lives end in some form of exile, whether suicide or in institutionalized isolation, are woven together by the first person narrator, one 'W.G. Sebald', whose life and circumstances (e.g. the recurring anniversary of 18 May, the narrator's birthday) are disarmingly similar to the author's own. In this way the book, in common with Sebald's other works of fiction, plays an elaborate game with the reader, blurring the boundaries between fiction and essay, biography and autobiography, travelogue and journal. This is even more true of Die Ringe des Saturn (1996; Rings of Saturn, 1998), subtitled 'Eine englische Wallfahrt' and ostensibly an account of a walking tour in Suffolk. The 'myths of destruction' have taken their toll in the supposedly idyllic English rural landscape too though whether haunted by the launching of the bomber squadrons taking the 'Air War' to Germany, the inexorable erosion of the coastline by the sea in the lost city of Dunwich (a kind of East Anglian Vineta), or the havoc wreaked, in an eerie silence, by the hurricane of 1987 on the narrator's very doorstep. The personages, moreover, whether historical or living, encountered on this 'English pilgrimage' have their own tales to tell of loss, emigration, and idiosyncratic isolation, which the understated narrator is peculiarly gifted at eliciting.

The sense of a literary pilgrimage, but also of a kind of exile, is continued in Logis in einem Landhaus (1998; Rural Retreat), comprising six biographical meditations on Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Eduard Mörike, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser and the painter Jan Peter Tripp, while the controversial Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature), based on a set of three lectures held at the University of Zurich, posits the theory (already discussed in some of the earlier critical essays and adumbrated in Die Ringe des Saturn) that the wholesale destruction wreaked by World War II in Germany is a topic largely ignored - or suppressed - in post-war German literature, a belated challenge to the literary establishement taken up by Günter Grass in his latest novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwise).

The most recent work of fiction, and the only work to be classified as a novel, the prize-winning Austerlitz (2001; English translation by Anthea Bell) once again interweaves a narrative of loss and displacement with the peregrinations, actual and fictional, of the first-person narrator as the life of the eponymous protagonist, another 'emigrant' washed up on British shores by the Kindertransport, is related in his own words but at one remove during a series of meandering walks which determine the pace of the narrative. Here the elegiac Sebaldian sentence, inspired by the prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century German, or rather Austrian, writers featured in the critical essays (not least in the biographical meditations of Logis in einem Landhaus (1998; Rural Retreat) but also by seventeenth-century English writers like Sir Thomas Browne (a key figure in Die Ringe des Saturn), is taken to new heights, or perhaps new lengths, in its explorations of the key themes of memory, exile, and loss.

Much of Sebald's work, indeed, can be seen in terms of Trauerarbeit (grief-work, to use the term of another Austrian writer, Sigmund Freud), being both an in memoriam to individuals (as with Die Ausgewanderten, and the opening pages of Die Ringe des Saturn) and as a kind of moral imperative, a way of addressing and perhaps redressing the 'Unfähigkeit zu trauern' (Mitscherlich: inability to mourn) so notable in postwar Europe. The uniquely intimate interweaving of scholarship and subjectivity which give these works their fascination can be seen, as the author himself suggests in an interview (published posthumously) in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, in Adorno's terms of a re-subjectivizing of historical discourse, which is also a way of showing respect to its victims. After Auschwitz, Adorno suggests, 'there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better'. This 'description of disaster' is what Sebald's prose attempts and is also, perhaps, what gives it its characteristic form, a search for an appropriate language in which 'the numbing sense of horror', the nameless grief, can be expressed without succumbing to the paralysis which in some ways seems to be the only possible response. Like the silkworm spinning the cocoon, which both imprisons and protects it, or like the butterfly net with which a Nabokovian figure flits through Die Ausgewanderten, the sentences draw the reader into a web, albeit one in which the narrator himself sometimes fears becoming entrapped like the characters he portrays on the verge of madness; absorbed to the point of no return in the obsessions of their life's work which was, perhaps, intended as a bulwark against the horrors, the numbing paralysis of the past, they become transfixed, preserved in a state of suspended animation like the moths trapped and displayed in Austerlitz and elsewhere. The melancholic dwelling on the disasters of the past however need not mean succumbing to it - it can also be a form of resistance, as the preface to Die Beschreibung des Unglücks suggests. The exactness of the syntax, held together over great distances by its own tension like the span of a bridge in a way reminiscent of Kleist or Stifter, can thus be seen as representing an elaborate balancing act, its cumulative effect a gravity-defying antidote to the 'Schwindel.Gefühle' which generate it. A passage in Die Ringe des Saturn, describing the ornate prose of Sir Thomas Browne, may serve to characterize these qualities. Describing the effect of 'sentences which spread over one, two whole pages, resembling ceremonial or funeral processions in their elaborate difficulty', it is suggested that 'wenn er, mitsamt seiner Fracht, auf dem Kreisen seiner Prosa höher und höher getragen wird wie ein Segler auf dem warmen Strömungen der Lust, da ergreift selbst den heutigen Leser noch ein Gefühl der Levitation. … Es ist, als schaute man zugeleich durch ein umgekehrtes Fernrohr und durch ein Mikroskop'. 'But when, despite this enormous weight, he rises higher and higher like a glider on the thermals of his prose, even a contemporary reader is carried away with a feeling of levitation...The effect is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope and through a microscope at the same time'. Yet despite its evident 'literariness', there is a strong visual quality to the work, and it is often interspersed - sometimes in mid-sentence - with photographs, lending the prose a duplictious authenticity (as these apparently 'authentic sources' may be nothing of the sort) but also suggesting that there are limits to these flights of language, bringing the reader back down to the 'real' or visual world.

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Max's - or rather W.G. - Sebald's literary debut was with extremely short poems - spare unrhymed verses of three by three lines in German, which are echoed in the rather longer (but short-lined) poems published in the April 2001 edition of Akzente (a kind of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen) and more especially in the haiku-like English poems in his last publication, For Years Now (published only a short time before his death), accompanying or accompanied by images by Tess Jaray, and a counterpoint to her exhibition last May in the Purdy Hicks Gallery with texts taken from The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. In an interview he is recorded as saying 'I've been here thirty years and don't feel in the least at home', and this existence between the two languages, accompanied by a sense of pessimism at British insularity vis à vis 'foreign' literature, is perhaps what led him to found the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 1989. The most exacting of writers, he always worked in close collaboration with his translators, and it is fitting that last September he agreed to give, in tandem with Anthea Bell, the latest in the series of St Jerome Lectures on translation which he was instrumental in founding.

The intimacy of the semi-fictional narrator of the books belies the modesty and reserve of an author who never spoke about his work before it was complete, and then only self-deprecatingly, referring to some aspect of the photo-mechanical reproduction which did not meet his exacting standards. This melancholy narrator also only rarely offers glimpses of the warmth and humour appreciated by those who knew him. He was the most generous and compassionate of colleagues, adored and revered in equal measure by generations of students, and it is typical of the seeming lightness with which he bore his growing literary reputation that he had foreborne to mention to his colleagues that he had been awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis which was presented posthumously on 28 January. This was the culmination of a distinguished series of literary awards and prizes which included the Bobrowski medal, the Mörike-Preis, the Heinrich Böll and Josef Breitbach Prizes as well as, in 2000, the Heinrich Heine Prize - not forgetting the NESTA award, tragically cut short, which was to enable him to spend half of each year writing. He would, no doubt, have referred to the Bremen ceremony afterwards in one of the witty anecdotes he told so well, leaning in the doorway of the next-door office with his wry smile, unlit cigarette in hand, ready to put the most absurd piece of everyday politics into perspective with his characteristic dry humour. It seems almost impossible to believe that he will never do so now.

Jo Catling joined the University of East Anglia as a Lecturer in German Literature and Language in 1993, as a result of Max Sebald's sick leave (see opening of The Rings of Saturn). In 1999, following the reorganisation of the School of Modern Languages and European Studies she transferred, along with Max Sebald and other colleagues in European Literature, to the School of English and American Studies where she teaches German and Comparative Literature. She is editor of A History of Women's Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Thanks to Florian Radvan for additional material.