W.G. Sebald - What Was He Up To?

I read about W.G. Sebald long before I read his Austerlitz. I hunted him down through the prison's inter-library loan program because I thought he would have something to teach me about the novel. His use of photographs has stuck with me - even if I am not yet sure how I will use this idea. His prose struck me as very low-key, as having a matter-of-factness,and me with my prose style as ploding as Theodore Dreiser found some reassurance Sebald's style. However, it was rooting his fictions in history attracted me as I am trying to root my Indiana stories in its history.

Carole Angier having now written a biography of  Sebald writes of the history that affected the novelist:

He grew up, he wrote, with the feeling that there was “some sort of emptiness somewhere.” Already as a child he thought, There’s something wrong here. It was connected to his name, Winfried: even as a small boy he felt it wasn’t right. (And surely all this makes us think of Austerlitz.) Often he imagined “a silent catastrophe.” But what was it? No one would tell him.

In fact, there were two silent catastrophes, both of which had happened around the time of his birth: the genocide of the Jews and the bombing of the German cities. These were the silences that demanded to be filled, the secrets he would be driven to explore.

“You Only Write if You Have To.“ On W.G. Sebald’s Life and Work. 

Seems he was doing a bit more than mixing. As described by Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic Monthly's W. G. SEBALD RANSACKED JEWISH LIVES FOR HIS FICTIONS: Why did he lie about his sources?

Where would Sebald have found such rich material, if not in the recollections of Jordan’s aunt? He grew up in a world without Jews. No one spoke of them “at home or at school,” Angier writes. “I never even knew what a Jew was,” his sister Gertrud tells Angier. During Sebald’s childhood, Germans remained closemouthed about two of the great horrors of the war: the genocide of the Jews and the wholesale destruction of German cities. The silence was “so complete that for the first eight years of his life, in the village of Wertach, and for several more in the small town of Sonthofen, he had no conscious knowledge” of these calamities. And yet, Sebald wrote, even as a small child he sensed “some sort of emptiness somewhere.” Angier says that Jordan, whom he met when he was 22, was the first Jewish refugee he came to know, and that the friendship was a turning point for Sebald, “the moment he saw that historical events had happened not to numbers or even names, but to real people who had lived across the landing.”

Jordan didn’t foresee that Sebald would pass Gebhardt’s memoir off as his own writing without attribution. That upset him. Sebald “should not have used it so closely without crediting it,” he tells Angier. Weighing the evidence, Angier decides that most of Sebald’s purloined histories amount to run-of-the-mill authorial borrowing, but in extreme cases like Bechhofer’s, she wonders: “Can there be any defense of Sebald here, with his special empathy for Jewish victims, and his special awareness of the moral dangers of a German writing about them?” Her answer is no. She thinks he should have attached a short note at the beginning or end. “It wouldn’t destroy the effect of his story to let us know that it is a fiction, and that real people stand behind it,” she writes....

***

And yet this scrupulous author went ahead and stole the life histories of actual Jews. Why? Angier never quite explains Sebald’s need to be underhanded, perhaps because it’s inexplicable. But to the degree that Sebald culturally appropriated (if that’s what you want to call it), I believe that, for him, understanding the Jewish quest for an obliterated past was inextricable from the work of excavation required to recover a usable German present. Literature is parasitical, sometimes in disturbing ways, and that is a source of its power.

 Native Americans would be the comparable group for an Indiana writer. After all, Indiana lacks Indians - we have no Indian reservations, we do not even have Indian casinos because they were removed from the state. Blacks have suffered discrimination here; only the Native Americans were subjected to genocide. Indiana writing needs to take into consideration our treatment of all minorities.

However, I could not in good conscience adapt Sebald's methods.

The Guardian has two reviews of this biography as well as more material lon Seblad here.

sch