In her introduction to the published interviews with and profiles on the Bavarian-born expatriate writer W. G. Sebald, Lynne Sharon Schwartz remarks on Sebald’s fascination, present in some form or fashion in all of his published writings, with “the swift blossoming of every human endeavor and its long slow death, either though natural or [human]-made disaster, leaving a wealth of remains to be pored over, not to mention vast human suffering.”[1] In each of the four novels that he completed before his untimely death in an auto accident in December of 2001, Sebald’s narrators navigate history and memory toward the creation and articulation of an image, an understanding, of some specific person or event as a whole. At times the subjects of Sebald’s narrator’s ruminations are real, and at other times they are fictional; or, to be more accurate, the subject is almost always some conflation of the real and the fictional, ultimately placing the subject somewhere in the liminal space between reality and imagination, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and myth. Yet whether real, imagined, or some hybrid chimera made from their combination, the subject of Sebald’s narrators is always more than just the individual—it is also the time and the place, the historical and cultural context occupied by the subject. And in each case, all of these things—the individuals and their contexts—are obscured behind veils of fog and layers of dust which Sebald’s narrators must carefully parse, as if uncovering a priceless archeological artifact. Often, this uncovering is done at a remove, across expanses of time, through second- and third-hand accounts of things remembered, in found objects and photographs of indeterminate origin—in short, through memories and recollections that are neither Sebald’s nor the narrator’s own. This objective remove, however, the distance that separates first the narrator, then Sebald, then the reader from the experiences and memories of the object does nothing to undermine the urgency with which the uncovering is pursued.
The first of Sebald’s novels to be translated into English, The Emigrants, tells the stories of four individuals living in exile and the ways in which their own individual reckonings with memory shape, and ultimately seal, their respective fates. Although not explicitly stated, it is implied throughout the novel that the four individuals share, to some degree, a common trauma as the incubator and curator of their memories: the horrors perpetrated by the German Nazi regime. Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz, is more explicit; here Sebald’s narrator recounts, and eventually becomes himself engaged in, Jacques Austerlitz’s ongoing search for memories of his childhood and thus his identity, having no recollection of anything that preceded his placement, at the age of five, on a kindertransporte train from Prague to be raised, in relative safety from persecution and extermination, in Wales.[2]In each novel, the focus is on memory; memory as truth, memory as identity, memory as trauma itself.
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Joanne Crozier, in a thoughtful 2021 essay titled “Reflections on the Value of a Penny,” notes the following: “The objects that we imbue with meaning—the things that evoke special memories—are anchors that hold us in place as the currents of modern living swirl around our roots, threatening to erode our identities. These material traces of the past tell our stories and define who we are.” In Sebaldian fashion, Crozier’s essay contains various images, many of objects, which ground the memories and recollections presented in the essay; we are shown the author’s collection of thimbles, old coins, even tattered pages of an old book—objects that elicit memories and in which the memories reside. This essay resonated deeply with me, and not just for its evocation of the style and manner of Sebald. Roughly ten years ago, I began collecting pins—the kind you can affix to a hat or a walking stick—from various places that I would visit. Some of the pins represent cities or countries; others represent specific sites: national parks, scenic highways, museums, random roadside attractions that struck me as particularly interesting. Some of the pins represent places I visited with my family, and some represent places that I visited alone. Each one, no matter the place, or time, or reason for my being there, is a memory to which I am determined to cling. Each pin is a response to the trauma that is the simple passage of time, the temporary duration of experiences of joy, the childhoods that don’t last, the ends of relationships that should have lasted. They stand in a unique relationship to time—an intentional attempt to arrest, or at least defy, its flow, while at the same time the constituent parts of a larger, unifying story that can only unfold over time. They are (somewhat) neatly housed in a book that I made for just this purpose and which, more often than not, is present with me wherever I am. At any given moment, these little metal memories are patiently awaiting their chance to fulfill the twofold, contradictory purpose of memory—to ease and to exacerbate the trauma of loss.
There is, perhaps, a temptation to trust that, when given tangible form, memories can attain a degree of permanence; this object, although a memento of a particular place and moment in time, by virtue of its continued presence in my possession, in this little book, lends the remembered experience a semblance of the eternal. Likewise, and wholly independently of the existence of these little objects themselves, there is a parallel attainment of the eternal that is achieved simply by virtue of knowing that they exist, as documents, of a (my) past. The possibility of remembering, to know that one is ever in possession of these aids to memory, is itself a comfort; it is a small victory against the tides of change and destruction that compel every moment and every experience toward its end. In his sad and beautiful account of his search for his lost home Alexandria within his new home New York, André Aciman explained, of Straus Park, that “[h]ere I would come to remember not so much the beauty of the past as the beauty of remembering.”[3] While we hope that the memories themselves are beautiful, and warm, and happy, to be able to remember is itself a wonder and a joy. This is perhaps why so much of living is spent in the transcription of the world to memory[4]; this is why we write, or take photographs, or collect coins or stones or spoons or travel pins—we are ever focused, whether we know it or not, on the endless but ultimately futile task of constructing a permanent record. Yet as we construct this record, which we hope will save us and remind us of all that is happy and good and meaningful, we are simultaneously erecting an edifice that will equally ensnare and punish us.
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Memory, so often clung to for its capacity to ease and uplift, can also be an enormous weight. In a 1997 interview, when asked specifically about the fact that his emigrants were at an advanced age when they ultimately succumbed to their despair, Sebald elaborated on the “density” of the weight of memory:
It’s a question of specific weight, I think. The older you get, in a sense, the more you forget. That is certainly true. Vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight. And of course once you are weighed down with these kinds of weight, it’s not unlikely that they will sink you. Memories of that sort do have a tendency to encumber you emotionally.[5]
André Aciman is more succinct in his claim that the enduring quality of memory is not joy but pain: “In the end, the work of memory is the work of loneliness. … All we have in the end is our self, our loneliness—not even our memories but how they’ve lied to us.”[6]
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There is an undeniable irony in the contention that memory, as a means to preserve and lend permanence to elements of the past, is perhaps precisely what condemns us to the suffering that is an attendant part of living temporally. But there is also something profoundly unsatisfying about a kind of eternity which would render memory unnecessary. To be unmoored from the past would be to live like the angels Damiel and Cassiel in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin—without pain or loss, but equally without wonder, connection, or meaning. The first lesson that Damiel learns upon forsaking his angelic existence to become human is pain—the first color he sees when he awakes in a West Berlin alley is the deep red of his own blood. But this is what it is to be human, and our memories, in both the joy and the pain that they evoke, remind us equally of our own particular human experiences but also of the greater meanings of humanness in itself.
Notes
[1] Lynne Sharon Schwartz, “Introduction,” in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 13.
[2] It is worth noting here the profound parallel between Jacques Austerlitz’s experience and Sebald’s own. Raised in a small alpine town in Bavaria, and only one year of age at the conclusion of the war, Sebald himself had no recollections of the war, its preludes, or its immediate aftermath. Further, he would often speak of the “conspiracy of silence” which he encountered throughout his childhood and up through his university time in Freiburg, during which no one ever spoke of war. Yet despite knowing almost nothing specific of its horrors, Sebald was fundamentally shaped by this trauma; it is no wonder, then, that his narrator would become so engaged in Jacques Austerlitz’s search for his own ‘history.’
[3] Andre Aciman, “Shadow Cities,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 44.
[4] Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterize this as a translation of the world to memory. Try as we may, we are incapable of constructing an objective record; every entry is an interpretation, a choice to focus on this at the expense of that, a desire to prize this and to bury that.
[5] Ibid, 53.
[6] Andre Aciman, “Beckett’s Winter,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 102, 106.