W.G. Sebald : Fact and Fiction

 

The great German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, 13 years after he’d published his first work of literature and five short years after the English translation of a book of stories set in motion his rise to international renown. (Months before his death, he was rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.) Throughout his career and afterward, critics struggled to find words to describe the hallucinatory quality of his deceptively sober prose. Sebald tells tales, that much one can say—ghost stories of a sort, as dark and translucent as smoky glass. Displaced Jews haunt some of these narratives; the shades of literary figures—Kafka, Stendhal, Nabokov—materialize in others. And yet Sebald writes like a man typing up case histories, and he accompanies his narratives with something like documentation—photographs of people, facades, notes, newspaper articles, train tickets. These have no captions, and you don’t always see how they relate to the text. But because photographs testify to the onetime existence of things, they give the weight of the real to stories that may or may not be made up. Sebald’s refusal to respect the line between fact and fiction has become commonplace, especially among younger writers. But his adroitly artless synthesis of fable, history, photography, and artifact is still jarring.
 
The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte called Sebald’s method bricolage, which can mean both “collage” and “tinkering.” The critic James Wood speaks of “fictional truth,” and also offers this aptly mournful phrase: “cinders of the real world.” The poet Michael Hamburger came up with “essayistic semi-fiction which gives rope to both observation and imagination.” In her new biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, the first life of the writer, Carole Angier calls that “the neatest summary” of Sebald’s method that “anyone ever managed.” I like “periscopic,” which Sebald used, because it captures the subaqueous stillness of his worlds, and his disorienting angle of vision. Every great writer founds a new genre, Walter Benjamin decreed. “The twentieth-century writer who best passes that crazy test,” Angier writes, “is W. G. Sebald.”
 
In 1996, Angier was asked to review The Emigrants, the first book of Sebald’s to be translated into English, and read it in a single night. The book consists of four stories about men who die from the delayed effects of catastrophe. Three are Jewish. Two of them had their lives upended by the Nazis. The fourth man is the German valet, traveling companion, and lover of the scion of a Jewish banking family from New York. Sebald disavowed the term Holocaust writer, and indeed the Holocaust forms just one piece of his vision of modernity as an ongoing disaster and a march toward the total destruction of nature. Yet the Holocaust holds a privileged place in Sebald’s worldview. He told interviewers that it “cast a very long shadow over my life” because he grew up in an Alpine corner of Germany, blissfully unaware of the past (he was born in 1944, just before the end of World War II), and “I don’t really know how I deserved it.”
 
  
Angier agrees that Holocaust writer is inadequate, even as she anoints him “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust”—a “survivor’s guilt” that, as the daughter of Jewish parents who barely escaped from Nazi Vienna, she thinks “all Germans should feel.” Shortly after reading The Emigrants, she went to Sebald’s office at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where he had been teaching on and off for more than 20 years, to interview him for The Jewish Quarterly. She had questions. Was The Emigrants fact or fiction? Who was this German who wrote about the tragedy of Jews?
 
A quarter of a century later, Angier, the author of biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi, has produced a suitably unorthodox life of this singular writer. That was the only kind circumstances permitted. Sebald’s widow refused access to any material relating to his family. Without permission from his estate, Angier couldn’t quote directly from some privately held sources, even certain letters to which she had access, or cite his published works at any length. Angier’s solution is to cut back and forth among the usual portrayal of an artist’s ascent, in which she captures glimpses of the man; astute critical assessments of the work; and vivid accounts of her quest for the people and places that appear in his writing, many of them barely disguised. Her strategy pays off: This is an insightful, compulsively readable book.
 
However melancholy the artist, the man could be playful. Sebald’s colleagues remember him as companionable and witty. He had a laugh in his voice; he made up mordant aphorisms; he captivated his students. As a high-spirited college student himself, he was nicknamed “Cocky.” Yet Sebald also published crepuscular poems and prose in the student newspaper. He nursed his rage at his parents, particularly his father, who served as a transport officer during the Nazis’ invasions of Poland, Russia, and France—and refused to talk about it. Sebald had episodes of terrible depression. By the time Angier met him, though, he had resolved his contradictions into a persona at once “kind, gloomy, and funny.”
 
What interests Angier is how Sebald used his life, and that of others, in his art. Her curiosity has an edge. Back in 1996, when she asked whether he based his characters on real people, he said, “Essentially, yes, with some small changes”—an assertion repeated so often in articles about him that it attained the status of fact. Sebald told Angier about the man on whom he based Dr. Henry Selwyn, the protagonist of one of the four stories in The Emigrants. In the story, the narrator and his wife rent rooms in a British manor owned by Dr. Selwyn, a courtly and eccentric recluse, and his wife. Doctor and narrator become friends, and eventually Selwyn divulges his secret: He is actually a Jew from a village near Grodno, in what used to be the Russian empire (now Belarus), who came to England as a child in 1899. A short time after Selwyn makes this confession, the narrator and his wife learn of his grim death.
 
The main difference between Dr. Selwyn and the doctor who was in fact Sebald’s landlord, Sebald said, is that the real doctor told him about Grodno “sooner than I say in the story,” and “very cursorily.” Sebald already suspected something anyway, because at his landlord’s Christmas party he met “one very incongruous lady,” whom his landlord introduced as his sister from Tel Aviv.
 
In 2014, Angier arrived at the door of Abbotsford, the home of the model for Selwyn, the late Dr. Philip Rhoades Buckton. There she talked with members of his family and discovered that Sebald had flat-out lied. Buckton was not Jewish. He did not come from Grodno. He had no sister in Tel Aviv. He came from Cheshire and “didn’t have a Jewish bone in his body,” Angier writes.
 
Sebald had told Angier that he’d invented the minor details in The Emigrants, not the major ones. Instead, it is the story’s minor details—which are Gothic and implausible—that turn out to be true to life. The narrator first spots Selwyn facedown on the grounds of his decaying estate, counting blades of grass. Yes, Buckton lay on his lawn to examine insects, plants, sometimes even blades of grass. The narrator used a strange exterior bathroom that teetered on columns and was reachable only by a footbridge. Yes, the bathroom was there until it was torn down. Then there’s the maid in the story, who wears “her hair shorn high up the nape, as the inmates of asylums do,” and croons all night long. The daughter-in-law confirms that the maid looked like that and mumbled to herself, then adds, “But he didn’t have to say so.” Nor did he have to advertise the particulars of Buckton’s death, a move that enraged the family. What they do not mind, or so they say, is that Sebald turned their paterfamilias into a Jew. “We have many close Jewish friends,” says Esther, a daughter.
 
Angier minds, though, or is at least confused: “What was Sebald doing in his interviews?” Sebald can’t have just forgotten that Buckton wasn’t Jewish. Of course, improving on life is what novelists do, and authors often don’t want to come clean about their sources. But the context of Sebald’s borrowings raises troubling ethical questions. As the husband of Buckton’s granddaughter asked Angier: Couldn’t Sebald’s embellishment of the truth and his confusing use of photographs, when he wrote about the Holocaust, encourage its deniers?
 
Sebald told a less innocent lie too. When Angier asked how he dealt with his models’ possible objections, he said he showed them his manuscripts, and if they were unhappy, he didn’t publish. “This whole business of usurping someone else’s life bothers me,” he told Angier in the 1996 interview. “But—unless they’re dead—I ask them.”
 

Untrue again. Sebald usurped a lot of lives, and he didn’t always ask permission. One example among others involves his character Jacques Austerlitz in Austerlitz (2001), Sebald’s final work of fiction, and his best-known. Austerlitz, an architectural historian prone to nervous breakdowns, believes himself to be the child of a dour Welsh minister and his chilly wife. Only when he is well into his 50s does he learn that he is really a Jew from Prague brought to London at the age of 4 on a Kindertransport, a train that carried Eastern-European Jewish children out of reach of the Nazis. Sebald based Austerlitz, in part, on a Kindertransport child from a Munich orphanage, Susi Bechhofer, who was also raised by a Welsh couple and recovered her identity late in life. She’d published a memoir, and when Austerlitz appeared in Germany, her publisher told her that the main character in the novel sounded very similar to her. She wrote to Sebald. He confirmed that he had availed himself of her history in Austerlitz and later sent her a copy of the translation. She was shocked. “This was her story,” Angier writes. “Here was her home in Wales, her minister father, her years in boarding school, her parents’ silence. Worst of all, here were the most traumatic moments of her life” reproduced almost exactly—the moments when she learned “that she wasn’t who she thought she was.” Bechhofer published an angry article in the Sunday Times called “Stripped of My Tragic Past by a Bestselling Author.” She planned to ask Sebald to acknowledge his debt, but he died before she could. Her lawyer asked his publisher, but nothing came of that.
 
Is this a theft worth worrying about? It’s not technically plagiarism, and Sebald’s pirating of Bechhofer’s life is less injurious than, say, the revenge fiction Philip Roth wrote about his ex-wives. You could give Sebald a pass on the grounds that Bechhofer herself had made her life public. But Sebald expropriated more brazenly for another of the stories in The Emigrants, “Max Ferber.” Ferber, a painter of spectral portraits made by the repeated application and rubbing-off of charcoal, is another Jew who came to London as a child, in flight from the Nazis; he remembers his past only in fragments. As an artist, Ferber shared many traits with the painter Frank Auerbach, also a refugee from Nazi Germany and also furious about having his identity pilfered. But like Bechhofer, Auerbach was a public figure. Sebald’s other source for Ferber’s backstory, his good friend Peter Jordan, was a private citizen.
 
Ferber’s family and the details of his escape are faithful re-creations of Jordan’s. Both sets of parents were deported from Munich in 1941; the fathers of both were art dealers who were interned in Dachau. The boys fled Munich in the same way, by flying alone to London, and attended similar boarding schools. The resemblances aren’t the problem, though. In this case, Sebald did show Jordan a work in progress. Sebald even asked for corrections. But as Jordan shared his story with Sebald, he also loaned him family memoirs, including one by an aunt, Thea Gebhardt, about her childhood before the war. Sebald plundered many of Thea’s “best bits,” in Angier’s words, enhancing here, subtracting there, and adding two romantic interludes. He attributed the passages to Ferber’s mother.
 
What’s striking is that they constitute the thickest description of German Jewish life in Sebald’s oeuvre. His Jewish characters tend not to have recourse to the past; their memories are what history has suppressed. But Ferber’s mother, courtesy of Gebhardt’s memoir, evokes the daily life of a bourgeois family that is comfortably both German and Jewish. We see green-velvet armchairs, a china swan, a silver menorah, newspapers, the works of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine “ornately bound in red with golden tendrils of vine.” The children go to a Christian nursery school, though they skip the morning prayers. Ferber’s mother writes of a favorite long family walk on the Sabbath during the summer or, “if it is too hot,” of just sitting with other Jewish families. In the shade of a chestnut tree, the men drink beer, the children lemonade. There are “Sabbath loaves” (presumably challahs) and salted (most likely kosher) beef. After that, they go to synagogue.
 
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. “He is no longer here to make the decision. But his publishers could.”
 
I’m not sure such a decision is called for. The effect of Sebald’s stories has everything to do with the seamless weave of embroidery and fact. Disentangling the sources from the finished product is the job of a biographer, not a reader.
 
Did Sebald commit acts of what we now call cultural appropriation? Yes, but to condemn him for that would be to miss the layers of meaning that complicate moral judgment. Sebald, in writing about Jews, wasn’t writing only about Jews. He was also writing about their absence—both from postwar Germany and, for those Jews who survived the Holocaust, from their own former selves. Nazi Germany forced into exile or murdered half a million German Jews and millions more elsewhere; it stole or burned hundreds of years of European Jewish culture. And it cut survivors off from, well, everything.
 
Angier notes that the most important things in Sebald’s fiction “are almost invisible, almost inexistent.” Perhaps the most consequential “almost invisible, almost inexistent” feature of his work is the Jewishness that his notably de-Judaicized characters have lost. His accounts of Jewish amnesia, without betraying the unique Jewish ordeal, share a root system, as it were, with German amnesia. The condition of not-knowing-yet-knowing that he attributes to some Jewish characters is sufficiently evocative of the national fugue state blanketing his childhood that we should not ignore the parallel, whether Sebald was conscious of it or not.
 
Absence is not just Sebald’s theme; it’s the essence of his style. Absence makes itself felt in Sebald’s gorgeously hollowed prose, richer in literary references than in the things of this world. The emptiness and silence of his childhood reproduce themselves in the unpeopled landscapes through which his characters wander. The present is vacuous, a vessel for the past, and the dead are more real than the living. In The Rings of Saturn (1995), Jozef Korzeniowski (later Joseph Conrad) perceives the “bombastic buildings” of the Belgian capital as nothing more than “a hecatomb of black bodies”—that is, of the millions of Congolese who died under Belgian colonial rule. As for Austerlitz, one Sunday morning he follows a porter into the bowels of London’s Liverpool Street Station for no reason he can explain and comes upon an abandoned ladies’ waiting room, the very room in which, an eternity ago, he sat waiting to be adopted. In the dusty gray light of the disused room, he sees himself, a small child clutching a rucksack, and the grim, unhappy couple who came to get him and divorce him from his Jewish past. Now long dead, they are dressed in the style of the ’30s, “a woman in a light gabardine coat with a hat at an angle on her head, and a thin man beside her wearing a dark suit and a dog collar.” This is a time in his life, he has just finished saying, when “the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.”
 
Contributing to the otherworldliness of Sebald’s narratives is the way that his characters float outside time. They can’t quite grab hold of the defining ruptures of their life. “I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood,” Austerlitz says. That sense of timelessness can follow a trauma. Angier tells us that Sebald often talked about an event in his childhood that he hadn’t been able to register when it occurred—a trauma, in short. This was the moment he learned the fate of the Jews. Angier summarizes the incident, but it’s worth reading Sebald’s own words, because they are so oddly depersonalized. In a 2001 interview (not with Angier), Sebald described how German schools dealt with the Holocaust in the 1960s: High-school students watched a documentary comprising footage of the liberation of the camps. With no preparation beforehand or discussion after, the teenagers saw mounds of emaciated corpses being bulldozed into mass graves, and other unassimilable horrors. “So, you know, it was a sunny June afternoon,” Sebald recalled, and “you would go and play football because you didn’t really know what you should do with it.”
 
I have to add a footnote here. Angier concludes that the film was “almost certainly” Death Mills, but doesn’t bring up the most shocking fact about this documentary: It never once mentions the Jews. The voice-over refers vaguely to victims from “all the nations of Europe, of all religious faiths, all political beliefs condemned by Hitler because they were anti-Nazi.” Sebald may not have remembered that the movie amounted to a further erasure of the Jews. But “these experiences lay down a sediment in you that somehow moves on, pushes itself on, like the moraine in front of a glacier,” he told another interviewer. You have to wonder whether this silence wrapped around a silence made the unspeakable more potent, and even harder to speak of. Like the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who took the same approach in his documentary Shoah (1985), Sebald refrained from trying to portray the horror of life after deportation, with one exception. In Austerlitz, he recounts how the Nazis forced the inmates of Theresienstadt, a way station to the camps, to disguise it as a resort for prominent Jews in order to fool visitors from the Red Cross. I take his inclusion of this grotesque farce as a caustic attack on attempts to reenact the concentration-camp universe. The only way to represent the unimaginable was to respect its unimaginability, to limit the audience’s experience to the truth of non-experience. Anything else would be monstrous.
 
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.
 
I do sense an anxiety behind Sebald’s compulsion to be oblique in his fiction, an impression reinforced when I encountered its opposite in his essay “Air War and Literature,” included in a volume called On the Natural History of Destruction, published in English in 2003. Part investigation and part denunciation of the Allied firebombing of German cities, the essay—his most controversial piece of writing—lingers on scenes of human wreckage that are more explicitly gruesome than anything else Sebald ever wrote. We read of corpses “roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size”; “the remains of families” that “could be carried away in a single laundry basket”; mothers who lugged their dead children around in suitcases; the stench; the rats, maggots, and flies, “huge and iridescent green,” that fed on rotting flesh.
 
Perhaps Sebald could dwell on details like these because he felt a direct connection to this collective German tragedy, having experienced the inferno himself, albeit from a very peculiar position—that is, from the womb. While she was pregnant with him, his mother watched Nuremberg go up in flames from a nearby village, a scene whose uncanny and lasting effect on him he described in his poem “After Nature.” And he saw the aftermath firsthand—“houses between mountains of rubble,” he once wrote, describing a childhood trip through Munich. Though in the essay Sebald relied on the accounts of those who had been there, he wasn’t usurping. He didn’t need periscopic figures of speech, because he couldn’t be accused of capitalizing on the pain of others—of the most taboo Other in his universe. The firebombings were his disaster.
 
Shortly before he died, Sebald gave his last talk, “An Attempt at Restitution,” a typically Sebaldian ramble through places and historical events. Toward the end, he chronicles the wanderings of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was born in the late 18th century, a time “when the hope that mankind could improve and learn was inscribed in handsomely formed letters in our philosophical firmament.” Yet Hölderlin felt estranged from his native land, “as if he guessed at the coming dark turn” that history would take. Sebald notes that at one point the poet happened to pass through a French town where, a century after his death, a division of the SS rounded up the inhabitants, sent some of them to labor camps, and hung 99 men from balconies and lampposts.
 
“What is literature good for?” Sebald asks in his talk, and answers: “Perhaps only to help us to remember, and teach us to understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic.” He continues, “There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts.” In On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald recited the facts; in his novels, he set out to make the “strange connections” that transform them into something more memorable. If Sebald the man ransacked lives unscrupulously, Sebald the artist did so with superb literary tact. He saved both the living and the dead from the oblivion of a purely physical death, and gave them an afterlife that—one hopes—will haunt us forever.
 
W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions. By  Judith Shulevitch. The Atlantic. October 5, 2021. 

He told friends his first novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t; he said he was “at home” in Vienna before he’d ever gone there; he claimed, falsely, to have directed a play by Harold Pinter during his student days at Freiburg; he said he was a photojournalist for an American magazine, which wasn’t true; “he told Brigitte,” the wife of a friend, “that he had six first names (not just three, his usual claim later, which wasn’t true either), and that he had ridden to his final exams on a horse.” Less funny, more disconcerting: in his master’s thesis he quotes from two letters he received from Adorno, but in fact Adorno sent him only one. “The quotation from the ‘second’ letter comes, like the others, from the first and only one. The solemn footnote referencing the second letter is a fake.” “Even as a respected professor” he would, “after hunting in vain for a forgotten source, throw up his hands in despair and invent it.”
 
Then there is the problem of sources in Sebald’s fiction—I mean beyond the inevitable complaints about how he repurposed friends’ stories without their blessing. (He “was so charming that you told him everything…and then he went away and wrote it.”) The “whole of one page” of The Emigrants is taken from the journal of a woman named Thea Gebhardt, the aunt of Sebald’s friend Peter Jordan (one of the models for the fictional Max Ferber), who provided him with the journal but not with permission to use it without crediting Gebhardt as its source. The artist Frank Auerbach, the other model for Ferber, never forgave Sebald for taking details of his life from Robert Hughes’s biography, as well as reproducing, in the German edition of the book, a drawing of Auerbach’s without permission. In Austerlitz, Sebald repurposed Susi Bechhöfer’s experiences in the Kindertransport as she’d described them in a BBC documentary and in her book Rosa’s Child, which led her to publish an objection titled “Stripped of My Tragic Past by a Bestselling Author.”
 
He not only often failed to—or, on whatever grounds, decided not to—acknowledge his sources and models, but, in interviews, he misrepresented the real people and relationships behind his fictions. Carole Angier, the author of biographies of Primo Levi and Jean Rhys, interviewed Sebald in the mid-1990s about The Emigrants, the first of his remarkable books to appear in English, and which is divided into four chapters tracing the lives of four exiles: Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. “So the schoolteacher in the second story, Paul Bereyter, and all the others, too, were real people?” Angier asked. “And these are their real stories?” Sebald responded:
 
   “Essentially, yes, with some small changes…. [The models for] Dr. Selwyn and his wife lived a smart country life for years. Terribly well spoken, he was, terribly well spoken…he told me about Grodno, sooner than I say in the story, but very cursorily. The first time I thought, this is not a straight English gentleman, was at a Christmas party they gave. There was this huge living room and a blazing fire, and one very incongruous lady. Dr. Selwyn introduced her as his sister from Tel Aviv. And of course then I knew.”
 
Knew, that is, that the real Selwyn was Jewish. In The Emigrants (like Angier, I consider it his best book), Selwyn is a melancholy, charming, eccentric doctor and naturalist who reveals to the narrator that, while he seems thoroughly English, his family in fact emigrated from Lithuania when he was a young child. It is typical Sebaldian quiet that the word “Jewish” doesn’t appear in the chapter, but Selwyn mentions attending a cheder. “I changed my first name Hersch into Henry, and my surname Seweryn to Selwyn.” At the chapter’s end, Selwyn shoots himself, becoming the first of the many figures in Sebald’s writing who commit suicide when a repressed past surfaces later in life. “Certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware,” the narrator muses, “have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.”
 
Early in Speak, Silence, Angier identifies the sources for the Selwyns. The doctor, she tells us, was based on the late Philip Rhoades Buckton, whose family and estate she visits. Like Selwyn, “Sebald’s landlord and friend in Abbotsford was a doctor, a naturalist, and a reserved man of old-fashioned courtesy. He was also,” like Selwyn, “married to a Swiss wife who was more practical and socially ambitious than himself; he was tall and broad-shouldered but stooped,” as Sebald describes Selwyn, “and he often lay on the grass of his lawn to examine an insect, a plant, perhaps even a blade of grass,” which is how Sebald’s narrator first encounters the doctor in The Emigrants. “And he did,” Angier says,
 
  “a few years after the Sebalds left Abbotsford, take his own life with a hunting rifle. In other words, he was almost exactly like Dr. Henry Selwyn except in the most important respect. For he not only seemed English; he was English, through and through. He was born in Cheshire, not Lithuania, and he didn’t have a Jewish bone in his body.”
 
Sebald’s books suggest that we are powerless to remember adequately and powerless to forget. Memory invariably involves falsification (“And the last remnants memory destroys” is the epigraph to “Dr. Henry Selwyn”), and what we repress always comes back, often with deadly results. Repetition is both his technique and theme; his books are more patterned than plotted; the way phrases and figures and events recur at intervals enacts what he and his characters so often describe: a vertiginous sense that the past has erupted in the present, that the dead are with us (“And so they are always returning to us, the dead”), that we have doubles (“I felt as if an invisible twin brother were walking beside me, the reverse of a shadow,” says Austerlitz).
 
I have been rereading his books, but reading Sebald for the first time feels like rereading; we experience déjà lu in step with his narrator’s déjà vu. In part this is a function of Sebald’s use of allusion and collage. His phrases, sentences, even paragraphs are often lifted from or echo other writers; a critical cottage industry has been built around tracking down the sources he integrates so seamlessly into his own melancholic voice. This means that even his narrator’s most personal statements are ghostly and choral and anachronistic and often vaguely familiar in their very texture. And the length of his sentences can cause you to forget and recover their subject several times in a single syntactic unit; one sentence in Austerlitz is more than seven pages long.
 
The sense of having read this before is also an effect of the way he elaborates motifs within and across books. Some of these repetitions are unmistakable—the Nabokov figure with his butterfly net who recurs across The Emigrants, Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus” whose appearances structure Vertigo, the star-shaped architectural pattern that more subtly haunts Austerlitz, the “crystalized twigs” that figure in multiple books, and so on. And on. Some of these motifs grow a little loud. (Do we need quite so much of Gracchus—the hunter suspended between life and death, who can neither be buried nor restored to life, and so serves as Sebald’s supreme figure for the impossibility of integrating the past, of moving from melancholy to mourning?) And some motifs are so quiet they might not really be motifs at all, such as the multiple mentions of people firing guns into the air in The Emigrants. I start to wonder, as I make my little checks in the margins, if I’ve perceived a pattern where there is none. Sebald probably intended his readers to feel that doubt, given that his narrator’s supersensitivity to coincidence often shades into paranoia.
 
In one sense Sebald’s use and depiction of repetition are historically specific, a German gentile’s reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust. It is far from his only concern, but it’s never far from any of his concerns. It is the tragedy he can neither responsibly “remember” (both because he wasn’t there and because artifice risks simplifying, supplanting the reality it supposedly depicts) nor forget. Angier’s title—in addition to constituting another Nabokov allusion—refers first and foremost to Sebald’s commitment to breaking what he called “the conspiracy of silence” surrounding the Nazi past in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. He never forgets, but he never pretends to have arrived at a form of remembering equal to a horror that exceeds representation; his melancholic repetitions become a way of addressing, and acknowledging the complexity of addressing, the genocide of the European Jewry.
 
But Sebald’s obsessive repetitions can also threaten to undermine historical specificity. This ambiguity is built into repetition as method: it concretizes and abstracts, heightens and flattens, focuses attention and disperses it, marks an event as significant at the cost of its singularity. Even the lightest of Sebald’s motifs, Nabokov, “the man with the butterfly net” who appears impossibly across The Emigrants, necessarily works against the individuality of each life that is being elegized. (This is the point, or part of it; the figures serve to declare artifice, to acknowledge fictionality.) The repetition that is doubling also blurs as much as it differentiates: Paul Bereyter, the teacher, is based on a teacher of Sebald’s, but he’s also clearly based on Wittgenstein.
 
More generally, if history is one long catastrophe returning in new guises, the work of historical reckoning can pass into a transhistorical fatalism. This is why I can lose patience with Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see only ruins, which is a way of not seeing forms of life and meaning-making that have sprung and might spring up in their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing; it’s that it’s leveling. And this is why I’ve always found passages like the one that ends The Emigrants disconcerting, all the more so for being lovely.
 
The narrator describes a photograph of a workshop in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto:
 
“Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometrical patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home.”
 
Even the patterns in the carpets start to form a pattern.
 
   “The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were—Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Non, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.”
 
Sebald makes these three nameless young Jewish women the Three Fates; the gaze he can’t hold is Death’s, but then Sebald saw Death everywhere. He was no doubt aware of the tension between historical memory and mythologization; to an extent we could say that is his subject here, and “here” is a work of fiction. Still, what is on one level an encounter with the reality of the workshops of Litzmannstadt is on another level the erasure of its particularity through the return of the Moirai.
 
The mythical tendency in Sebald isn’t only doom and bad abstraction. It is also a source of wonder and beauty—and as close as he gets to hope. The books are laced with little synchronicities, hidden symmetries, hints of domains beyond the rational, beyond the merely human. (There is infinite hope in Sebald, one might say, but not for us.) “I’ve always thought it very regrettable and, in a sense, also foolish,” Sebald told the writer Joseph Cuomo,
 
   “that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn’t a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard, and reduced themselves to becoming logicians and statisticians. It seemed a very poor diet, somehow, to me.”
 
Sebald collects—like a man with a butterfly net?—the small traces of mysterious orders.
 
But the beauty is itself double-edged. The exquisite patterning, the archaic involutions of syntax, the lyricism: Does Sebald’s style reinscribe a sense of human possibility while keeping vigil with the dead? Or does it merely aestheticize catastrophe? “In his classes on Hans Erich Nossack and Alexander Kluge,” Angier tells us, Sebald “said that they were the only ones who wrote adequately of the bombing of the cities, and that their witness-messenger style was the only possible and decent one.” Kluge’s writing—still too little known in the US—largely disavows literariness and instead experiments with the flat affect and language of administration to explore modern systems of organized destruction. Kluge’s use of photographs almost certainly influenced Sebald’s, as did his mixing of fact and fiction and his open engagement with both the Third Reich and Allied firebombings. Many of the claims for Sebald’s novelty are exaggerated—but then those claims for novelty weren’t made, so far as I know, by Sebald himself.
 

“In his classes on Peter Weiss and Jean Améry,” Angier continues, “he said that ‘only from these Jewish writers can we get any real insight’ into the experience of the victims.” With these statements Sebald could be preparing to condemn his own work, which he often does within his work, where he (or at least his narrator) claims to be
 
  “continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing.”
 
There is a fine line between an illuminating sensitivity to historical correspondence and the loss of historical specificity; between a vigilant acknowledgment of the complexity of his confrontations with the Holocaust and stylized, general despair, which risks making all tragedies fungible; between being open to intimations of alternative orders and paranoia (Sebald’s narrator often feels pursued); and between empathic identification with victims and appropriation of their experience. Sebald’s work has been important to me not because it solves any of these problems but because it makes them felt. To take him seriously is to find his books unsettling.
 
“If you read him without questioning, and are moved—that is his main aim,” Angier writes in the preface to her biography:
 
   “I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. It’s why writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me. But I would say to him, You’re wrong. You always wanted people to believe your stories. But they will believe them more, not less, when they know the truth.”
 
I am confused by this statement in several ways. I can’t imagine that Sebald (or for that matter any serious writer) would want us to read him “without questioning,” whatever that means, especially when Sebald, as Angier so meticulously documents, constantly shifts between soliciting and frustrating our confidence in the historical veracity of his work. That his narrator so closely resembles him, that he uses images which, at least at first, seem to offer documentary evidence about the people and places in his “stories,” that his techniques and tonalities are more often associated with nonfictional genres (the essay, the travelogue, reportage), and so on—these tactics produce truth effects he then immediately undermines.

The narrator, say, claims to be reproducing passages from his uncle’s journal (there’s a photograph of the “agenda”), but nobody could mistake the dreamlike prose poem that follows, whether it draws on a real journal or not, for anybody but Sebald. (Nobody in Sebald sounds like anybody but Sebald; he isn’t interested in a mimesis of other voices.) In “Max Ferber,” he describes and then reproduces a faked photograph of a book-burning in Würzburg; the burning itself really happened, but “since it was already dark…they couldn’t take any decent photographs” (see illustration on page 18). This, on the simplest level, is one of myriad warnings to the reader not to be seduced by the supposed objectivity of archival photographs. I would feel silly multiplying examples here of Sebald demanding that we question text, image, him; that’s what reading Sebald is. And surely by “stories” Angier doesn’t mean his stories about his stories, his claims about his sources, since few will “believe them more, not less” when some of the main “truths” revealed by her biography are Sebald’s misrepresentations, starting with the way he misled her—Angier is clear that she considers it deliberate—about Philip Rhoades Buckton.

 

Maybe Angier means the “truth” about Sebald’s life—that if we understand the man, despite his preference for privacy, we will then believe in the work, “believe” in the sense of better grasp its importance? Or does she mean that we’ll believe more in the goodness of his intentions? It does seem by the end of Speak, Silence that Angier feels she is in possession of the fundamental “truth” of Sebald. Here I need to quote two paragraphs from late in the book:
 
   “Scholars like Mark Anderson and Uwe Schütte, friends like Richard Sheppard, all look back to childhood trauma as the source of Sebald’s troubles. Their candidates are, as we know, the death of his grandfather and his clashes with his father. But what is more common than the death of grandparents, and—especially in his generation—clashes with one’s father? Gertrud [Sebald’s sister] is sure that Georg [Sebald’s father] never seriously maltreated her brother, as we also know. But now we have, I think, an explanation: normal experience was a trauma to the child Winfried, as to the man Max [Sebald]. His father cutting his hair and scrubbing him, his mother dressing and watching him, anyone photographing him—all were ordinary experiences, but to him traumatic and intolerable. So was the death of his grandfather a trauma beyond normal loss, and so too, therefore, was the experience of the film about the concentration camps, and the dawning knowledge of what had happened. That was not an ordinary experience for anyone. Nonetheless, Gertrud and Beate could survive it, Ursula and Jürgen and the other friends could survive it. But not Walter Kalhammer, and not Max.
 
So much falls into place now. His hyperbole, for instance, so surprisingly common in his subtle work, and the basis of his melancholy humour—it wasn’t really hyperbole at all. He wasn’t exaggerating about his awful train journeys, or his encounters with awful people, though he played to his audience’s belief that he was: it was his experience that was extreme, not its expression. Or his feeling, from his schooldays on, of being overwhelmed by work and longing for peace. He did vast amounts of work, always. But the feeling of being overwhelmed came from far more than that. It came from his universal penetrability, his artist’s disease.”
 
What can “trauma” mean when it means anything, means everything? A struggle over a haircut, the loss of a loved one, a train trip, having your photo taken, your first encounter with the shocking footage of the genocide in which your family was complicit? This is leveling in the extreme, everything rendered interchangeable by a supersensitivity that—if it means the collapse of all distinctions—becomes a species of insensibility. I lose sight of any actual person altogether in this description; it is an intense version of the trope (and tropes aren’t people) of the Romantic artist whose troubles—“how sensitive he was, how hard life was for him, how he grew more depressive with age”—signify the depth of his genius. In this account Sebald becomes a Whitmanic or even Christlike figure. “Why was he the one to suffer for Germany,” Angier asks, “and beyond Germany for the whole world?”
 
I have trouble reconciling this “truth” about Sebald with Angier’s belief that he is “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust.” The diagnosis of this “artist’s disease” erases both Sebald’s particularity and his capacity to reckon with particulars; it is the image of a person who, as Angier puts it, “makes no distinction between the herrings and the victims of Bergen-Belsen.” I want to be clear that I’m in no way suggesting that Angier—a thorough researcher and the daughter, as she says, of Viennese Jews who fled the Nazis—is suggesting that all catastrophe is interchangeable. But if this is somehow Sebald’s truth, it strikes me as a startling indictment, not a defense of the writer. The vertigo I feel reading Speak, Silence is that precisely where it approaches hagiography I find it damning.
 
Others “could survive it”—“it” being the knowledge of the Nazi past—but not Walter Kalhammer, Sebald’s friend who killed himself, and not “Max.” But Sebald’s death in a car accident in 2001—his daughter was with him and thankfully survived—was not a suicide. Angier reports that the inquest revealed that Sebald most likely had a heart attack, but her account of his life seems to require that his death be, if not deliberate, fated; his death must help things “fall into place.”
 
Early in the book, Angier recalls how Sebald, flipping through an album during an interview with the journalist Arthur Lubow, pointed out a photograph from 1933 that his father had taken of a fellow soldier who had died in a car accident. Sebald told Lubow that he first saw the photograph when he was five and said that he had “a hunch that this is where it all began—a great disaster that had occurred, which I knew nothing about.” Lubow considers this the primal scene of Sebald’s obsessive interest in both photography and death, but Angier asks, “Was this the silent catastrophe he felt around him, hidden not in the past, but the future?” Was it, that is, a premonition that he was meant to die in a car crash? Later she writes, “In some mysterious way, Max Sebald and car accidents were connected,” but, beyond the fact that a crash is important in his first (unpublished) novel, the main connection seems to be that he was a horrendous driver, clumsy and easily distracted, and that he’d already experienced some harrowing near misses before his fatal accident.
 
Since Angier accepts that the car crash wasn’t suicide, the only way I can understand her claim that Sebald “couldn’t survive it” is if we view his heart attack (assuming that’s what happened) to have been directly caused by his “universal penetrability”—that his heart literally broke or burst from accumulated sorrow as he drove with his daughter on that summer day. But that is not what an inquest shows when it shows that your arteries are “80 percent occluded,” arterial disease is not artist’s disease, and while of course Sebald’s early death felt painfully resonant with the darkness of his work, Angier seems to me to be imposing an aesthetic pattern on the complexity and contingency of a real life. “He didn’t choose that death,” Angier concludes her book, “with his daughter beside him. But when it came to him that way, it was what he’d always thought coincidence was: destiny.” This sentence seems to me disfigured by a contradictory desire to acknowledge contingency even while abstracting it into mythology.
 
Ifind all this distressing because of what I consider the (subtler) risks of patterning and mythologization within Sebald’s work—that tension between illumination and obfuscation, between exploring the burdens of historical memory and aestheticizing history, of making real people Fates or fated, which denies both agency (that we might change, individually and collectively) and accident (that you might get struck by lightning without its meaning anything). Sebald, however, was writing—for all his blurring of genres—fiction, what he once called “semi-documentary fiction,” not biography, and despite his obsession with historical echoes, his books refuse closure, refuse the sense that everything must, ultimately, “fall into place.”
 
 
I also find that Angier’s descriptions of Sebald’s “truth”—that everything was trauma, that he suffered for all of us and died for or from his suffering—jar with the revelations and collocations of her patient research, those misrepresentations I began by cataloging. Angier has many terms for Sebald’s untruths—“Sebaldian games,” “fairy tales,” “whoppers,” and sometimes “lies.” Who cares about his fibs about his name or exams or student theater days? They are inconsequential and sometimes a little charming. I’m not interested in lies he might have told in his private life, but what about claiming, in your graduate thesis, to possess a second letter from a major Jewish intellectual? Angier reports that “Richard Sheppard, who uncovered this Sebaldian joke, says that it ‘is not a case of academic dishonesty,’ but of ‘Max the Schelm [trickster] having a…laugh at his examiners’ expense.’”
 
Assuming we’re not overinterpreting an innocent mistake, is the joke funny? If you are a young German scholar attacking, as Sebald was, Carl Sternheim (who was half Jewish, banned by the Nazis, and died in Belgium in 1942) for his aesthetic and moral failings, to lie about receiving a letter from Adorno (among other things, a Jewish refugee) seems to me a pretty bad joke. (Sternheim was “hopelessly trapped in the process of assimilation,” Sebald writes in the English-language abstract to his German thesis; “not only was Sternheim unable to create an ethically and aesthetically valuable and independent work, but, further [he] was forced to reproduce the fallacies, idiosyncrasies and prejudices of the Wilhelminian ideology.”) I won’t go on about why I find the “fake footnote” perplexing, even if Sebald thought he was just travestying the academy in a thesis nobody would read, but I was startled by Angier’s interpretation:
 
   “But there is a last surprise, which sheds a very different light on this strange fake footnote. Adorno was a Jewish refugee from Nazism. Max dated the fictional second letter from him to 17 May, which is the date both of Ferber’s escape from Germany and of his murdered mother’s birthday. And, of course, the day before Max’s own birthday. That is, in his dissertation of 1968 he was already making a magical connection between himself and victims of the Holocaust. Thus, what he hid in his fake footnote was not only a lie and laugh, but beneath them the opposite, the catastrophe for which he would spend the rest of his life trying to atone.”
 
The “fictional second letter” shares a date with Max Ferber’s escape—except Max Ferber isn’t a real person, but a character (albeit based on at least two real people) in a work of fiction. And since that date is the day before Sebald’s birthday, this lie about Adorno is recuperated as a sign of Sebald’s “magical connection” to those who perished in the Holocaust. I’m unable to view Sebald’s misrepresenting his correspondence with Adorno in order to demote Sternheim as part of his atoning for the Nazi past. I don’t know what Sebald thought he was doing, but if Angier is right and he felt authorized to lie in his dissertation because of his “magical connection” to Holocaust victims, I again see her ostensibly sympathetic account as an indictment.
 
The questions about his right to repurpose the experiences (e.g., Susi Bechhöfer, Frank Auerbach) and even the writing of others (e.g., Thea Gebhardt) without permission or crediting them are murkier. How do you acknowledge—not just in an acknowledgments page but in the structure of the work itself—that you have models and that you’ve departed from them? Here Sebald’s purposeful destabilization of fact and fiction, and his dramatic alteration of the facts in question, within his four great books of prose fiction is a moral and aesthetic necessity, not some sort of failing: it foregrounds artifice, constructedness; it proclaims that Sebald is experimenting with making sense, making pattern, that he is weaving out of disparate materials an artwork that will not live or die according to fact-checkers.
 
Still, I agree with Angier that his not seeking permission from Peter Jordan to use language from Gebhardt’s journal or his failure to credit Bechhöfer were “wrongs”—especially because of his position and subject matter. “Both were wrongs,” Angier says, “against just those people with whom he felt more imaginative sympathy than any other German writer.” The question, of course, is when “imaginative sympathy” passes into exploitative appropriation. Certainly he could have been frank in interviews.
 
Which brings us back to the “whopper” with which Angier’s book began—the lie Sebald told her about Rhoades Buckton when she interviewed him. “He had spun me a tale.” It was a tale that traveled; Angier notes that it has “been repeated ever since.” Will Self repeated it when he gave the annual W.G. Sebald Lecture in 2010. Rhoades Buckton’s granddaughter, Tessa, attended that lecture and approached Self, who referred her to Angier’s interview. Angier writes:
 
   ”I can see only one answer: that he wanted readers to believe his story, and used me to confirm it. He wanted us to believe that he had known a mysteriously suffering Englishman who turned out to be a Jew. If he wasn’t a Jew, it would be a quite different story.”
 
But would it have been a different story—assuming that “story” here means “Dr. Henry Selwyn” in The Emigrants—if Sebald had told the truth about the model for his character? Most fictional characters are composites of people the author knows (or thinks she knows) and whatever alterations the larger pattern of the work requires. The closer the fictional character is to an identifiable historical person, the higher the risk of giving offense—Angier tells us that Rhoades Buckton’s family wasn’t upset about Sebald claiming he was Jewish, but about his suicide being “used”—or leading readers to believe you’re just calling your writing fiction to avoid getting sued.
 
Yet it’s not obvious to me that The Emigrants, that deftly patterned work, would be a different book if we knew more about its basis in fact. Again, we might debate whether any blurring of fact and fiction in a book that even obliquely touches the Holocaust is morally hazardous, or whether it’s a species of appropriation for a German writer to turn gentiles into Jews, and so on. But even these moral debates will usually feed back into aesthetic ones, return us to the books, not the stories behind them, because our sense of whether these costs were in some sense worth it will depend on how valuable we ultimately find the artworks.
 
To me, it’s the lie that risks making it quite a different story. It troubles my sense that the books are powerful in part because they willfully but elegantly undercut their own authority, their claims to objectivity. It might support Angier’s assertion, in her discussion of the Adorno footnote, that Sebald “lived more in his imagination than in the real world,” but if that renders him unable or unwilling to tell the difference between fact and fiction, history and myth, how can she consider him to be the German writer who most took on the “burden of responsibility” for German history? Or maybe it’s not that Sebald “wanted us to believe”; maybe he wanted to get caught, outed, made to do public penance for his canonization as the good German, given his aforementioned “scruples”? But look at how I’m now also transforming trespass into atonement.
 
One last lie, this one better known: Sebald told many interviewers, including James Wood, that the image of the boy dressed as a page that appears on the cover of Austerlitz was a photograph of a real-life architect who was the model for Joseph Austerlitz. When Wood examined the Sebald archive in Marbach am Neckar in 2011, he turned it over and saw that someone had written the name of the English town where it was purchased and a price: “Stockport: 30p.” Wood interprets all this as Sebald’s slyly introducing “a note of the unreliable”—not an attempt to make us “believe his story,” as Angier has it, but the opposite:
 
  “To register that he himself, who was not Jewish and had only an indirect connection to the Shoah, was merely a survivor of the survivors—and even then only in a figurative sense. And also perhaps to register that the novelist who writes, of all outrageous things, fiction about the Holocaust cannot have a comfortable and straightforward relation to the real.”
 
It would be reassuring if Sebald’s purpose—however much I think the lie he told Angier is different from the one he told Wood, and callous in its instrumentalization of Rhoades Buckton and his family—had been to undermine his own authority as opposed to bolstering it, a time-release acknowledgment of fictionality his readers must first swallow as fact. This seems more consistent with the spirit of the work, but I don’t pretend to know. If something like that is the case, a softer version of the self-sabotage I imagined above, then the irony of Angier’s defenses of Sebald—he couldn’t tell imagination from reality, he desperately needed us to believe him, and so on—is that they make his misrepresentations seem much worse than they were.
 
Toward the end of her book, Angier enumerates some of the common criticisms of Sebald’s work, noting that many share the “objection,” which she describes as “worthless,” that
 
“Sebald’s portrayal of Germany’s victims, and of all the victims, human and animal, of the manifold cruelties of nature and history is exploitative, an appropriation of suffering that is not his in order to lend his work a spurious seriousness. This is not a textual point, but a personal one, about his motivation and sincerity. It is, in other words, a biographical point, made by people who know nothing about Sebald’s biography. It would have been better for him if they’d been right. But they’re wrong. The unique empathy of his work was genuine.”
 
I’ve already written at length about how I worry her defenses of Sebald’s “unique empathy” threaten to hollow out the claim for the “genuine.” I also disagree that the question of whether or not his “portrayal of…victims” is “exploitative” is ultimately a “biographical point” and not a textual one. I’m not saying that Sebald’s motivations are wholly irrelevant to our sense of his books (clearly I’ve been speculating about his intentions myself), but a sincere belief that you can understand or share the feelings and experiences of others is hardly proof against appropriation; that’s often how it starts.
 
“The difficulty and slipperiness of empathy,” as Saidiya Hartman, who has spoken admiringly of Sebald, puts it, “lies in its capacity to lend to appropriation. In making the other’s suffering one’s own this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration.” Sebald is a significant writer not because he meant well or had, as Angier describes it, “mirror-touch-synaesthesia-like penetrability.” It’s because his formally innovative fictions enable us to feel the past in the present while also acknowledging the instability of memory. The work poses but does not answer the questions of when empathy shades into appropriation or history into myth or a moral reckoning into the aestheticization of tragedy. Writing is a questionable business.
 
 
The Storyteller. By Ben Lerner. The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2021

W.G. Sebald is the modern master of the uncanny — or perhaps that should be ‘was’, as he died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001 at the age of 57. Deciding which tense to use depends on whether you mean ‘W.G. Sebald’ as a shorthand for his body of work, which outlives him, or to refer to the man who wrote it, known to his acquaintances as Max. The question poses its own Sebaldian conundrum, reflecting his strange crepuscular writings with their meditations on the dead and the living, past and present, culture and identity. His ghost lives on in the flickering half-light, the most enigmatic, perhaps, of his characters.
 
Born in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, Sebald belonged to the generation of Germans whose inordinate moral task was to absorb the Nazi guilt of their parents, a guilt so submerged by shame that it was never mentioned as he was growing up, though it subsequently became the leitmotif of his work. His given name, Winfried, has such a ring of the Third Reich that it is not surprising he abandoned it, as he did his native country. He spent most of his career at the University of East Anglia as a professor of German, but his literary renown is based on the English translations of the extraordinary non-academic writings he began publishing in his forties, especially The Emigrants (1992), which established his international reputation, The Rings of Saturn (1995) and his masterpiece Austerlitz (2001).
 
In these uncategorizable, liminal books, he slipped the net of genre, blurring the boundaries between fiction, history, essay and travel writing, to explore issues of memory and buried trauma, most notably that of the Holocaust, through the Jewish refugee characters who people his work. The voice is startlingly original: exquisitely focused yet relentlessly oblique. There’s nothing obviously experimental in his style, which is closer to that of the 19th century than to modernism or postmodernism. And yet paragraphs, and even some sentences, can slide on for pages with an eerie surface calm that disconcerts, as if something is being endlessly avoided.
 
Most famously, his books incorporate haunting, often slightly blurry, black-and-white photographs from which the real-life dead look out at us, figures from the world of documentary fact who nevertheless give off a paradoxically dreamlike aura, as if they are beseeching us to connect with them but remain just out of reach. A photo of the eponymous Jacques Austerlitz, for example, features on the cover of that book: a serious-faced child in Vandyke fancy dress, a spectral reminder of prewar Prague, where the protagonist’s mother was an opera singer before her son was sent off on the Kindertransport and she herself was deported to a concentration camp.
 
Jacques is adopted by a sinister Welsh couple, who give him a new name and make him forget who he really is. The novel —though you can’t really call it that, as it features so many nonfiction digressions, including into architectural history — narrates his quest to recover his past and his true identity, but at a tangent. Sebald himself, rather like Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, is the primary yet recessive ‘I’ of the story, to whom Austerlitz recounts his tale.
 
I have to confess that I’m one of those readers who has always found Sebald’s books obscurely unsettling in their hypnotic magnetism, though I would be the first to pay homage to the astonishing genius of their literary craft. So it came as a jolting anagnorisis to discover from Carole Angier’s biography — the first — that the photo in question is not in fact of a middle-European Jewish child but of a random little English boy called Jackie Grindrod in a prewar country pageant somewhere near Rochdale. It is taken from a vintage picture postcard which Sebald bought in a junk shop for 30 pence — the price is written on the back.
 
That would not matter but for the fact that Sebald stated clearly several times in interviews that the photograph was of the real-life model for Austerlitz, someone he knew. First discovered by the critic James Wood, this is not the only example of Sebald’s dishonesty about his historical sources, which is now revealed in more detail by Angier.
 
We learn, for example, that Dr Henry Selwyn in The Emigrants — a Jewish refugee who remakes himself as an Englishman but ends up committing suicide — is based on a real person, a Dr Buckton, in whose Norfolk house Sebald and his wife once briefly lodged. Angier visits the house (which is accurately described in The Emigrants) and meets Dr Buckton’s daughter Tessa — who reveals that, though her father indeed shot himself, he came from Cheshire, not Lithuania, and ‘didn’t have a Jewish bone in his body’.
 
Again, that would not matter prima facie. Fiction writers are more than at liberty to draw inspiration from life and transform it anew in whatever way they choose. The problem is the barefaced lies Sebald told interviewers, including Angier herself, who profiled him for the Jewish Quarterly in the 1990s. He explicitly told her that the real-life model for Dr Selwyn was a Jewish émigré from Grodno, confiding that he always had a sense that the doctor whom he met was ‘not a straight English gentleman’, and that this was confirmed when, at a Christmas party chez Buckton, he met an ‘incongruous’ lady, the doctor’s ‘sister from Tel Aviv’.
 
That was rubbish. There was no such Israeli sister. It was Sebald who was not ‘straight’ — as is evident retrospectively from his digressive, enigmatic literary style. As Dr Buckton’s commonsensical son-in-law puts it to Angier: the real problem is the photographs. They’re all fakes, aren’t they? They can’t be of the people he says they are. That’s the last thing that anyone should say about the Holocaust, isn’t it — that anything about it could be fake?
 
Added to that moral conundrum is the intense anger and pain that Sebald provoked in those he never met, whose stories he borrowed for his books. The Holocaust refugee Susi Bechhofer, whose memoir was in fact a key inspiration for Austerlitz, felt cheated. The painter Frank Auerbach, who was reworked as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, found that book ‘repellent’.

 

Angier — whose self-imposed brief is to disentangle the life from the work, the fact from the fiction, W.G. Sebald from Max — is well aware that she has chosen the most elusive of subjects. Her title, Speak, Silence, is aptly chosen (with its nod to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory).
 
Sebald grew up in a world of the unspoken, with an obscure feeling, as he put it, that there was ‘some sort of emptiness somewhere’, some ‘silent catastrophe’. His authoritarian father, an army corporal with whom he was always in conflict, answered all questions about the war with ‘I don’t remember’. His Uncle Hans, who lived near Dachau, denied all knowledge of the camp there, asserted that the Germans were not responsible for what happened to the Jews, yet kept a copy of Mein Kampf in his spare bedroom.
 
Only in his teens did Sebald first begin to apprehend the conspiracy of silence, when his school was shown a film on Bergen-Belsen, which was received in silence, without comment. When, around the same age, he took a Swiss friend to stay with Uncle Hans he affected not to notice the book on the bedside table and said nothing.
 
As a biographer, Angier has had to contend with so many silences that she describes her biographer’s work, the product of years of sleuthing, as ‘a matter of joining holes together like a net’. The most resounding personal silence is that of Sebald’s wife, Ute, to whom he was married for 30 years but who ‘did not want to speak’ or indeed be included in the biography at all, with the result that she does not even merit an entry in the index. Sebald’s day-to-day intimate life thus remains a blank. The one fact about Ute we discover is that she was, perhaps surprisingly, working in a beauty salon at the time the hyperintellectual Sebald met her. We hear nothing about their daughter Anna, who was in the car with Sebald when he died but survived the accident.
 
In life, Sebald rarely spoke openly about himself — an inhibited, morose presence to most who met him. As one of his colleagues at the University of East Anglia recalled, he always seemed ‘not quite in himself’. Angier’s openness about the difficulties she has encountered in trying to untangle his enigma if anything adds to her portrait.
 
Moreover, despite the gaps, she has doggedly succeeded in interviewing a host of people who knew him, including his sister, friends from his early years, co-workers, pupils and the mysterious ‘Marie’ (no surname given) who first knew him in childhood and then briefly became close to him in later life. The details Angier heroically marshals at times verge on the distracting, but the portrait which ultimately emerges convinces: of a tormented man, an isolated misfit, riven by self-doubt, who wrote to stave off depressive breakdowns and even madness and suicidal impulses.
 
Another weird lacuna is that, though she chronicles them, Angier cannot make sense of the strange, unnecessary, repeated lies to interviewers which Sebald must have known would have put him at risk of exposure as a fraud. Why did he tell them? He could have said nothing at all, or explained that he had to use, say, an evocative junk-shop photo as a surrogate for ‘Austerlitz’ to demonstrate how many people were actually lost to history, their faces unrecorded.
 
A further bizarre detail is that in 1991 he penned an excoriating attack on a Jewish writer, Jurek Becker, a Holocaust survivor, dismissing his books as a failure — inauthentic, fake — because, in Sebald’s view, the author could not allow himself real memory. This seems more than odd, given the imagined memories Sebald later invented for his Jewish characters. Luckily for Sebald, that essay was rejected.
 
 For a German writer to accuse a Holocaust survivor of inauthenticity looks like a bid for reputational suicide. My hunch is that such weird, potentially self-canceling behaviors, including the untruths he told about the factual background of his works, are linked at some deep level with Sebald’s legacy of self-hatred, lies and silence, his role as a vector for German guilt. Does recognizing this problematic moral hinterland mean we have to reject his work and its seeming empathy with Jewish characters? Certainly not. Its extraordinary literary qualities are ambiguously enhanced by our knowledge of his tortured relationship both with truth and with himself.
 
W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies. By Lucasta Miller. The Spectator September 13,

 2021.

The four great prose works of W.G. Sebald were published around the turn of the millennium, a period once perceived by some as the end of history. Vertigo was quietly released in Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn followed in the 1990s, as Europe was completing a utopian project to bind its warring polities into a single, peaceful union. And Austerlitz, his masterpiece, was published in early 2001, mere months before the terrorist attack that, among its many world-upending consequences, reminded Western democracies that the events of the past cannot be left behind. Rather, as Sebald once wrote of the dead, they are ever returning to us.
 
Sebald died later that year at the age of 57, likely of a heart attack as he was driving near Norwich, England, where he had made his home since leaving West Germany in the 1960s. He did not live to see the resurgence of ethno-nationalist forces across Europe, part of a broader backlash to a postwar liberal democratic order that has never seemed shakier. But he probably would not have been surprised by these developments, since his books do not carry a trace of the triumphant tenor that marked the era in which they were produced. To the contrary, they are more like the tombstones that often appear in the grainy photographs interspersed throughout his work: mournful monuments to all that has been lost and destroyed over the course of European civilization; glimpses of the vast necropolis just beneath the surface of things.
 
Sebald wrote in this pessimistic vein partly because he was, by nature, given to brooding. “Wittgenstein was right,” says Carole Angier in Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald, the first major biography of the writer. “It is not just that a happy man is different from an unhappy one. It is that the world of the happy man is different from the world of the unhappy one.” Sebald also wrote this way because he was German, and, like many others of his generation, would always be ashamed of what his parents, particularly his father, had done during the war. Indeed, he is best remembered as a writer of the Holocaust, which for him remained both the ultimate symbol of humanity’s destructive urge and the black apotheosis of European history, whatever attempts the continent made in the subsequent decades to forge for itself a new fate.
 
Yet despite the pervasive gloom of his books, Sebald was, and still is, an intensely beloved writer. And despite the reserve he showed in his life (one close associate said he resembled a “block of ice”), he could be warm and playful and bitingly funny, and was adored by his sisters, his friends and colleagues, and his students at the University of East Anglia, where he taught German literature for the bulk of his career.
 
“People lose the faculty of remembering,” he once told his students. “This is the function of literature.” His compulsion to remember and resurrect is central to the appeal of his work, which, in addition to the somber business of saving the forgotten souls of the Holocaust, is full of curiosities and wonders. His method is now widely imitated: a bricolage of history and fabrication, images and narrative, memoir and borrowed text—“a most satisfactory form of essayistic semi-fiction,” as his friend, the writer Michael Hamburger, told him. The lost world Sebald stitches together feels alien and deeply familiar at the same time, which is another way of describing that foreign country we call the past.
 
Another friend told Sebald that when he read Vertigo for the first time, it felt like “real literature”—as if literature was also one of the lights going out of the world. This, too, is part of Sebald’s appeal, or was at least for influential champions like Susan Sontag: the discovery that there are still Kafkas in our midst. And just as Kafka seemed to prophesy the totalitarian state in his depictions of helpless individuals terrorized by bureaucratic forces, so Seb­ald may have seen what lies in store for us in his recurring vision of an abandoned Earth cast in perpetual twilight—a “secret sickening away of the world,” as he wrote in his narrative poem After Nature. He came to this vision not by looking forward but by looking back. As he once wrote to a friend, “The future is in the past.”
 
Winfried Georg Sebald was born in 1944 in Wertach, in the Bavarian Alps. His mother was a homemaker, “the perfect Hausfrau,” Angier writes. His father was a prisoner of war. He returned from France when little Winfried was three years old; as the son would later recall of the reunion, one day a stranger showed up at their door and claimed to be his father. Sebald père had entered the army in the late 1920s because, like other working-class men of that depressed era, he needed the job, eventually serving in the Wehrmacht as a technical support officer in charge of vehicles. At his wedding in 1936, he wore a Nazi uniform.
 
Sebald hated his father from the beginning, a feeling that only hardened as he became aware of his Nazi past. (The idealized father figure in Sebald’s life was his mother’s father, a kindly village policeman who died when Sebald was 12.) Nazism was the cataclysmic event whose repercussions defined his youth, even if hardly anyone spoke of it. Wertach and nearby Sonthofen, where the family moved when Sebald was eight, were remote enough that they were largely untouched by the war. There were not many Jews in these towns either, and the few who were there were stripped of their livelihoods and often compelled to emigrate. (“I never even knew what a Jew was,” Sebald’s sister Gertrud tells Angier.) There was, in other words, scant trace here of the Nazi past, so that the past ended up being both nowhere and everywhere—an abomination that was deeply felt but not properly remembered; a silence that rang out across the majestic mountains of Germany’s southern edge.
 
This was where Sebald grew up: an almost premodern idyll of breathtaking beauty, the atmosphere of which was nevertheless laden with trauma and terror. If that sounds like a fair description of Sebald’s work, it’s because he plumbed his childhood home for material in stories like “Il ritorno in patria” in Vertigo, in which a Sebald-like narrator returns to his hometown of “W.” after a long absence, and “Paul Bereyter” in The Emigrants, in which a different Sebald-like narrator recounts the story of a primary school teacher who lost his job during the Nazi years because he was part-Jewish (based on the travails of a real person, Sebald’s former instructor Armin Müller). These stories are marked by the “private silence of German families,” as Angier writes, belying Germany’s postwar reputation for publicly flagellating itself for its past atrocities. The profound disconnect between surface reality and its hidden currents would haunt Sebald his entire life. “It is the simultaneity of a blissful childhood and these horrific events that now strikes me as quite incomprehensible,” he once said.
 
Like his fictional counterpart Paul Bereyter, Armin Müller would take his young charges on rambles through the countryside to study the flowers and trees. He would also show them the quaint hallmarks of the town’s industry: the wickerwork factory, the brewery, the cheesemaker, the mill, the gunsmith. (In “Paul Bereyter,” Sebald’s narrator recounts how the gunsmith, upon fixing the complicated lock on an old firearm, would take the gun out into the garden “and fire a few rounds into the air for sheer pleasure, to mark the end of the job.”) Sebald was an active boy, swimming in the lakes in the summer, skiing in winter. He romped about the fields with his friends, once falling into a river when they tried to cross a bridge on its handrails like a balance beam. When the outside world intruded, it came as a shock. During a family holiday in 1947, he got his first glimpse of a city: Munich, still ravaged by the war, a wasteland of blasted ruins. As his narrator recalls in “Paul Bereyter,” “ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air.”
 
The other great intrusion was the reality of the Holocaust, epitomized by the showing in school one day of Billy Wilder’s Death Mills, a film sponsored by the U.S. Department of War to educate Germans about the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Sebald was 17 years old, but was still unprepared for what he saw. “It was a lovely spring day, he always said, and they were expecting some light entertainment as usual,” Angier writes. “Instead emaciated corpses were piled on their desks. Afterwards nothing was said. No one knew how to react, so they just went off to a football match.”

 
It was in adolescence that Sebald raged even more against his father, demanding to know what he had done during the war, only for the elder Sebald to stubbornly respond, “I don’t remember.” He rebelled, too, against his family’s Roman Catholicism, its hollow bourgeois affectations, its fetishistic obsession with order and cleanliness. He insisted on wearing jeans even on Sunday, much to his mother’s chagrin, and shrank them so tightly (by soaking them in the bathtub) that he had trouble peeling them off.
 
His emerging politics—“anti-bourgeois, anti-military, anti-clerical, anti-establishment,” in Angier’s summation—were part of a broader flourishing. Contrary to the morose figure he cut as a famous author, his friends at the time thought he was “heiter, lustig, ganz normal—cheerful, funny, completely normal,” Angier reports. Literature became a passion, a rare ember of truth amid the dark cone of silence that surrounded him, and he read everything from Hemingway to Bernhard. His friends, an eclectic group who shared his politics and artistic interests, meant the world to him—not just companions, but fellow conspirators in the campaign against their parents’ morally repugnant generation. He was handsome, charismatic, and intensely serious about life, the kind of boy girls fall in love with. One of these girls was Marie, a French exchange student who spent two magical summers in Sonthofen with Sebald and his crew and never forgot it. But even at that tender age, Sebald was already showing the reserve that would characterize his later years. “He was alone,” says another girl who had loved him. “I’m sure of that.”
 
He was also struggling with psychological difficulties, undergoing his first breakdown toward the end of high school. He hid it from his friends and family, and the specifics are elusive, but Angier speculates that he fell into a deep depression laced with panic and anxiety. These breakdowns would dog him throughout his life, and inflict the various Sebaldian personae who proliferate in his books. “I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility,” the narrator declares on the first page of The Rings of Saturn. “I went through a difficult period which dulled my sense of other people’s existence,” says the narrator in Austerlitz.
 
 
When Sebald enrolled at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg in 1963, his occasional lapses into a distant silence were interpreted as evidence of a poet’s romantic soul, as if he were “a young Hölderlin,” according to a fellow student. Otherwise, he was the charming figure of his high school days, surrounded by artists and rebels in the dormitory known as Maximilianstrasse Studentenheim, “an island of freedom and openness in what was still a reactionary and authoritarian world,” Angier writes. The faculty was home to former Nazis (as was the case at other German schools; the university at Göttingen even required applicants to prove they were not Jewish up until the early 1960s), and they were detested by Sebald and the other members of the Maximilianheim. It was in Freiburg where Sebald developed an abiding enmity toward German academia and began to think of leaving the country for good. “He was always searching for his way and his place,” says Sebald’s college friend and rival Albert Rasche, “not just geographically, but in himself.” It was also at this time that he adopted the name that he would use for the rest of his life: Max.
 
By the time Max Sebald had settled into the University of East Anglia in 1970, he had married a woman from his Sonthofen days named Ute (who refused to speak to Angier, a significant lacuna in her biography). He had spent some years in Manchester, the gloomy setting of one of his most famous stories, “Max Ferber” from The Emigrants, about a Jewish émigré painter haunted by loss. He had written a novel based on his university days that was never published, as well as a slashing attack on a dead author, Carl Sternheim, who he thought had been improperly elevated by a German scholarly establishment bent on whitewashing the country’s racist militarism. He spent the next decade on this sort of barn-burning academic work, which won points for originality but was full of inaccuracies, sloppy citation, and tendentious arguments, all fueled by a towering anger toward his rivals in Germany.
 
He turned to literature in the 1980s, after what he described as a “midlife crisis.” “The illusion that I had some control over my life goes up to about my 35th birthday and then it stopped,” he told an interviewer the year he died. This crisis was brought on not by the perception that he was a failure—quite the opposite. He was by then established in his career; he was married to a woman his friends described as beautiful and sophisticated; he had a daughter to whom he remained devoted until the end of his life; he lived in a grand country house in Norwich, known as the Old Rectory, that he had lovingly refurbished himself. His sister Gertrud thinks it was his ostensible success that left him wanting. “Until his house was built, she says, Max was just an angry young man,” Angier writes. “Once he had realized his dream, his real suffering began.”
 
He began with poetry and plays. He even made a misguided foray into television screenwriting, trying for years to sell a script titled, in what now reads like a parody of Sebaldian self-seriousness, Now the Night Descends: Scenes From the Life and Death of Immanuel Kant. His first book, the poem After Nature, was published in 1988. But it was during the year before that he struck on his true calling, filing a grant application for a “prose work with pictures.” This work was the seed for two books, Vertigo and The Emigrants.
 
His vision and his voice are already fully formed in these books. The prose is precise, pristine, moving always at the same lugubrious pace, but nevertheless the reader feels swept up, carried along, in a slow, mighty current. It is clearly not the writing of a young man, but one who is already well into middle age, for whom history is not an abstraction, not the area of darkness before he was born, but actual experience, the past overlapping constantly with the present. His books can feel like a metaphor for getting old: If youth is a belief in autonomy, in the notion that you can be free of your origins and your family, then age is the growing conviction that the secret of yourself lies waiting to be discovered in the darkening mists of the past. For Sebald, this search can result in moments of perfect clarity, of light parting the clouds, but also leads to cul-de-sacs of absurdity and awfulness that offer no meaning at all, let alone redemption.
 
The black-and-white photographs—some taken by Sebald himself, others found in thrift stores or purloined from friends and family—function exactly in this ambiguous manner. Their purpose is expressed most explicitly in Austerlitz, which is about a Jewish orphan who, late in life, tries to discover what happened to his parents during the war. As the eponymous hero says of developing prints in a darkroom: “I was always especially entranced … by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night.” Yet the meaning of these blurry photos of rucksacks and landscapes and dead moths and long forgotten people remains difficult to pin down, as if Sebald has returned the past to us in a way that makes it only more mysterious, even sinister. The photos are the great formal innovations of his work, marking him as both a postmodernist and a post-Holocaust artist—his human subjects in particular, in their pronounced muteness, are evocative of the silences of Celan and Beckett, of ghosts.
 
In a more basic sense, the photos also make the books feel “real,” as if they are closer to newsmagazines than novels. When I first read The Emigrants, not knowing anything about Sebald, I assumed it was nonfiction (my copy is categorized by the publisher, nonsensically, as “HISTORY/FICTION”). And indeed significant swaths of his work are real, the events either taken from his own life or stolen from others. Sometimes the stories are taken from famous authors—Stendahl, Kafka, Chateaubriand—whose identities are obscured. Others are pilfered from less exalted figures: the inhabitants of his hometown of Wertach; his former landlord in a place near Norwich called Abbotsford; a Jewish friend who escaped the Nazis,* providing material that Sebald used in both “Max Ferber” and Austerlitz.
 
 
Almost to a person, the real-life inspirations for Sebald’s fictions hated what he had done to them. The main source for the scenes of village life in “Il ritorno in patria” became a reviled outcast in Wertach because he talked to Sebald—“No one ever forgave him,” one villager tells Angier—and he blamed Sebald for his woes. The family of Philip Rhoades Buckton, the inspiration for the main character in “Dr. Henry Selwyn” in The Emigrants, was miffed that Sebald turned Buckton, a gentile, into an exiled Jew in Abbotsford suffering from a loss of identity. Worse, Sebald lied to Angier and other interviewers about the genesis of that story, claiming he could discern that his former landlord was “not a straight English gentleman” but secretly a Jew. This tall tale was so widespread that the novelist Will Self once gave a lecture in which he claimed that Dr. Henry Selwyn was based on a “real Jewish émigré.”
 
Sebald’s most egregious appropriation involved his friend Peter Jordan, an actual Jewish émigré who met Sebald in Manchester, and who later became a distinguished figure in the world of European opera. Sebald not only used Jordan’s experience escaping Nazi Germany* to create the central backstory for his character Jacques Austerlitz, but also lifted passages verbatim from a memoir by Jordan’s aunt, a Jew who grew up in Germany before the war, to fill out the fictional diary of Max Ferber’s lost Jewish mother. Jordan is one of the rare subjects who feel honored to be included in Sebald’s books, even in quasi-fictional form, though he believes his aunt should have been credited as a primary source. Angier agrees.
 
Furthermore, Ferber himself is partly based on the Jewish artist Frank Auer­bach, who condemned Sebald’s story, which originally contained images of Auer­bach’s paintings (these were removed in later editions), as a “presumptuous” misuse of other people’s lives to bolster what was otherwise a “narcissistic enterprise.” Angier sides against Sebald on this score as well, saying he had callously treated Auerbach as if “he were already dead.”
 
I’m not sure I agree with Angier on either of these points. While I find it hard to square Sebald’s mendacity in real life with the painful honesty of his work—not to mention his scrupulous tact, evident in his steadfast refusal to theatricalize any aspect of the Holocaust—the obfuscation of his sources and the blurring of fact and fiction are crucial to maintaining the integrity of his project. It is the disorienting nature of his books—is this real or not?—that changes our understanding of the past and hence makes it strange and new. There is a related point, too, about a non-Jew using the Jewish experience of the Holocaust to make broader claims about humanity. Sebald’s suggestion is that its specific themes of exile and trauma and genocidal destruction say something important about us all, that the plight of European Jews is a source of tragic empathy precisely because European civilization at its height was composed of industrial empires built on mass death from the Congo to the Americas—and, forebodingly, the poisoning of the planet. Some, like Auerbach, might call Sebald’s identification with the Jews exploitation. Others would call it art.
 
It was the English-language publication of The Emigrants in 1996, originally published in German in 1992, that made Sebald famous. He was feted at literary events across Europe and the United States. He became a client of the superagent Andrew Wylie. Even the slighted denizens of Wertach ultimately came around, creating a “Sebald Way” that shows pilgrims the path Sebald’s narrator takes in “Il ritorno in patria.” But he was not in a good way during this time. His heart and his eyesight were deteriorating. His writing took an immense toll on him—he emerged from marathon sessions “totally beaten up,” as he once put it—which was exacerbated by bitter disputes with his English translator, Michael Hulse, over the books he had already written. He was in a hole, struggling to finish Austerlitz.
 
Then a miracle happened: He fell in love. Although he remained married to Ute, the person who saved him, and who became the most important figure in his life, was none other than Marie, the girl who had first fallen in love with him back in their Sonthofen days. In the intervening years, she had become a doctor. She had married and divorced and had three children. In 1999, she read about this world-renowned author who grandly called himself W.G. Sebald, and deduced that this person was her Winfried. She wrote him a letter, and they reconnected during his book tour later that year in Paris.
 
One of the remarkable aspects of Seb­ald’s books is that there are almost no women. The narrators show flashes of desire and longing, but these little fires are quickly extinguished in the ash of their dark obsessions. For such an autobiographical writer, it suggests that Sebald had difficulty loving people. The exception was Marie, and indeed a character named Marie de Verneuil in Austerlitz is one of the few romantic interests to appear in Sebald’s books. She was able to bring him back to himself. “When he thought of happiness, he told her, he thought of return,” An­gier writes, “and he had always half hoped his books might make someone like her reappear.” They traveled across Europe together in those final years, but, because of his marriage, they were also kept apart for long stretches of time, during which he would write her copious letters. Half their relationship was in writing. He thought of her so often, he wrote, that when he walked down the street he leaned toward France.
 
There are no coincidences in Sebald’s work—only connections in a subterranean network of meaning. It is no coincidence either that a person who invoked his youth, and all the hopes he might have harbored then, rescued him in those dark days, helping him finish Austerlitz. The book was his crowning achievement, released just as Europe was entering a brave new world that, in hindsight, also resembled a forgetful senescence. The cover featured one of Sebald’s enigmatic images: a boy in a brilliant white costume with a gossamer cape, playing the page to the fabled Rose Queen. In the book, the boy represents the young Austerlitz. “I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page who had come to demand his dues,” Austerlitz says, “who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.” In reality, Sebald discovered the photo in a junk shop, paying 30 pence for it (and later lying about its origin).
 
None of that makes his gaze any less demanding. Sebald died before he could see the upheavals wrought by terrorism, then economic collapse, then right-wing nationalism, then climate disaster. He had more foresight than most because he did not let his backward gaze waver. The boy he once was, like the boy peering at Jacques Austerlitz, expected something of him. So all the dead expect something of us, too.
 
 
The Lost World of W.G. Sebald. By Ryu Spaeth. The New Republic, August 19, 2021

WG Sebald’s mother Rosa once said that her son had been born without a skin, so that he was unable to protect himself from being overwhelmed by the suffering of others, and even normal experience was traumatic for him. For Carole Angier, author of this unauthorised biography, something about this acute sensitivity made Sebald “the most exquisite writer”, a man oppressed by experience and the burden of his mind, who believed that the remembering of great injustices was an attempt, however small, at what he called “restitution”.

 
In Janet Malcolm’s memorable dictum, biographers are burglars, robbing the lives of their subjects. But what Angier realised, as she embarked on her own pattern of theft, was that she was dealing with the most light-footed of all burglars. For Sebald’s books, a mixture of history, fiction, memoir and biography, are also heavily stolen from friends, family and acquaintances, leaving many of them furious and aggrieved. As Peter Jonas, former director of the English National Opera and a close friend of Sebald’s, put it: “He wasn’t just a listener. He was a recording machine.”
 
Angier’s task was not an easy one. The fact that Sebald’s wife and daughter wanted his life to remain private, which meant that she could quote only very little of his letters or even his published work, was clearly a huge drawback. The intimate life is inevitably sketchy. To compensate, she has done a meticulous job of research, both in Germany, where Sebald was born, and in England, where he lived for much of his adult life, interviewing hundreds of friends and colleagues, scrutinising every scrap of his voluminous writings, and unearthing the identity of many of the characters whose stories he used. She visited every place he ever lived or spent any time in and delved into the backgrounds of his many friends. She quotes another dictum of Malcolm’s: “We do not own the facts of our lives ... this ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.” The result, if somewhat overlong, is fascinating. As she says, biography is a question of joining holes together, and her skills as a joiner are formidable.
 
 
Sebald was born on the southern edge of Bavaria in May 1944. He had two sisters, Gertrud and Beate, both of whom talked at length to Angier. His father returned from the war when he was three, and their relationship was never good; as he grew up, Sebald saw in him everything he hated about the generation who had accepted the Nazis. By contrast, he loved and was largely brought up by his grandfather, who taught him to read, to love stories and to look closely at nature.
 
Until he was 40, Sebald’s work lay in academia, first as a schoolteacher, later as a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where he founded a prestigious centre for literary translation, and where students found his seminars more like conversations than lessons – challenging, subversive and humorous. He told them that they should steal all they could from the world around them. His papers, most of them on German writers and intellectuals, infuriated the academic establishment with their provocative assertions and cavalier attitude towards orthodox critical methods.
 
But then, in the early 1990s, came The Emigrants, the first of his books to be translated into English, greeted by Susan Sontag in the TLS as “an astonishing masterpiece”. A collection of stories, based closely on real people, it introduced readers to what would be Sebald’s unique style: characters that are a composite of many people, drawing on conversations, readings, memories and plundered secrets, mixed up, embroidered, illustrated by grainy black and white photographs that might be relevant, but seldom are. He credited no one, because that, he said, would reduce what he was trying to do, which was to write fiction, behind which stood real people. It was, he told Angier in the one interview she had with him, an act of homage, “tipping his hat to artists with whom he felt affinity”. These included Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir Nabokov, whose Speak, Memory was one of his favourite books.
 
In the beautiful but despairing books that followed – The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz – these gestures of homage continued and with them the themes that define his books: the memory of the genocide of the Jews in a Germany torn between denial of the past and determination to come to terms with it, and the wartime bombing of German cities. It made Sebald’s books unlike any others, in their fascination with coincidences, the way things hang together in forms we don’t expect or understand, their mixture of genres and use of language, and his conviction that literature has to be an ethical activity, inseparable from questions of moral value. They deal with oppression, persecution, war, loss, but never overtly with politics, and his characters are people who have been cast adrift, who feel they have taken wrong paths and misspent their lives. Angier further suggests that the books all reflect Sebald’s deep interest in that which lies beyond our grasp, somewhere between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, reality and dream. As the central character in Austerlitz puts it: “I have always felt I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all.” People who read his books never forget them.
 
And if in the process not everyone was happy to see themselves and their intimate lives and secrets portrayed and transmogrified into composites, well, Angier argues, “every great writer who has ever lived is ruthless”.
 
As part of her exhaustive research, Angier examined the voluminous working papers that Sebald left. They revealed a man of obsessive, agonising concentration over every detail, a writer who revised, rewrote, revised again. The drafts for The Rings of Saturn ran to 2,000 pages, from which he distilled 400. Going through them allowed her to follow the workings of Sebald’s mind, as he cut, expanded, borrowed and transposed, reimagined scenes and set biographical puzzles. This same minute concern carried over into the translations of his books, which also ran to many drafts, and in which he restored and rewrote passages. He spent 350 hours with the translator of The Rings of Saturn. Not surprisingly, relations with his translators were not always smooth.
 
Sebald’s nature, as it emerges from Angier’s book, was, even as a boy, anxious, gloomy, passionate and clever, and he was desperate to control the world around him. He was, and remained all his life, very alone. Photographs show his long face brooding. He was much loved by his friends, but could be sharp and cutting. He was a depressive, with spells when he feared that he was crossing “the line from melancholy to madness”. One of the few bright spells in his life seems to have been a late friendship – an affair? – with a woman he had known as a boy and who he met again towards the end of his life. The Sebald glimpsed in their encounters is playful, capable of private jokes and light-hearted pleasure. During her one meeting with him, Angier found him “kind, gloomy and funny”, honest about himself and his parents, but “about his work he ... spun me a tale”.
 
Though only in his late 50s when he died, Sebald had long been unwell with bad migraines and back pain. Friends noted that he was breathless and suspected heart trouble, but he refused to see a doctor. Always easily distracted, over the years he had had many minor car accidents. On 14 December 2001, driving his daughter near Norwich, he turned into the path of a lorry. His daughter was largely unhurt. Sebald died instantly, probably, the coroner concluded, of a heart attack.
 
In her long and scholarly book, a testament to the powers of research and detailed dissection, Angier has presented a remarkable portrait of a writer consumed by work, a man who fashioned, out of his own considerable erudition and culture, his imagination and his empathy, a kind of writing that was entirely his own. Speak, Silence will certainly turn readers back to the four great books that made him one of the most famous German writers of modern times. Sebald’s genius, she writes, was to “see the fiction in facts”.
 
Speak, Silence by Carole Angier review – a remarkable biography. By Caroline Moorehaed, The Guardian, August 14, 2021.