Before Sebald Was Great | The Nation

Sebald often returns to the word pathography—the study of a life through the lens of a particular ailment—and perhaps the urge to be a writer is one such malady, an idea that he would return to in his later essay collection A Place in the Country. Sebald is weighing for himself the idea of choosing art: What lies behind the urge to become a writer? What are the spiritual costs? Clearly Sebald hoped to jump the boundary between critic and artist: not to simply be a commentator, but to join the fraternity of the afflicted. 

The most polemical moment of Misfortune comes in its preface, in which Sebald suggests that the idea of melancholy, perhaps the central emotional state of all of Sebald’s work, is not a cloistered writer’s defect but instead a positive force:

Melancholy, the contemplation of disaster in progress, has, however, nothing in common with a desire for death. It is a form of resistance. And on the level of art, in particular, its function is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with a fixed stare, Melancholy considers once more how things could have come to this, it becomes clear that the mechanics of hopelessness are identical to those which drive our knowledge and insight. The description of misfortune contains within it the possibility of its own overcoming.

This is an intriguing assertion, though Sebald never really demonstrates it. Perhaps the evidence was conjured in Sebald’s own fiction. But does the melancholy in Sebald really contain a seed of “resistance”? 

Considering the psychological bent of the collection, one turns to Freud’s classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” In it, Freud distinguishes between two forms of grief: In mourning, there is a struggle to release our attachment from what we’ve lost, but what was lost is certain—for instance, a loved one who has died. In melancholy, by contrast, the object of grief remains repressed; we’re not sure what we’ve lost, or even if we’ve really let go. The ambivalence of the latter is fitting in thinking about Sebald, but what, exactly, is being resisted? Freud suggests that melancholy is ultimately a retreat into narcissism—a problem to be fixed for a clinician, but not necessarily for a writer. More negatively (and more politically), one might turn to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in which Benjamin writes that a defeated left, finding itself in retreat, indulges itself by taking stock of its feelings. The sufferer of left-wing melancholy looks inward only to find that “what is left is the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absent-mindedly caressed.” Benjamin’s phrase has become a shorthand for the malaise of left intellectuals who, having lost their belief in the revolutionary project, are left to linger. An uncharitable view of Sebald might see exactly these “velvet trays” as the building blocks of his art. 

Sebald makes no claim to be a revolutionary artist, and even his thoughts on melancholy seem to shift by the time of Strange Homeland, as he praises Handke’s ability to “withstand the temptations” of melancholy, but here we catch him struggling to justify his attraction to his darker humor. Sebald was undoubtedly aware of Freud’s and Benjamin’s misgivings. But what can anyone do but write their own temperament truly? Even a writer who began by speaking through a screen of intellectual heft still had reasons to pursue stronger feelings than a cold intellectualism. Writing at a time when victory for the left seemed as distant as it had ever been, Sebald took his investigations into smaller spaces, just like the 19th-century writers such as Stifter, whom Sebald admired for their patient tracing of the details. Sebald repurposed his melancholy, and perhaps began working outward into the world again. It is no accident that his final novel, Austerlitz, is his closest look at the horrors of the Holocaust.

In an essay written later in his career about German literary responses to World War II, Sebald asserts that “literature today, left solely to its own devices, is no longer able to discover the truth.” Of course, Sebald’s skepticism toward the powers of traditional literature could be attributed to melancholy, a sense that the old methods have been defeated. At the same time, this modesty is part of taking literature’s powers seriously. Pretending at power when you have none is to set off in error. “To its own devices” is a typically double-edged idea itself, one not to be taken entirely at face value. A feeling of literature left powerless is also a call to intervene, to find new devices, new methods to shake readers from their complacency. 

If The Description of Misfortune is dedicated to the peculiar mental state of being a writer, the second volume, Strange Homeland, or Unheimliche Heimat, turns outward toward social life. “Unheimliche” is translated here as “strange,” but it can also mean “uncanny,” another Freudian grace note. If the earlier volume asks the question of what it’s like to be a writer, Strange Homeland is written with a new confidence that its author has, to some degree, proven himself, and so takes on a wider set of political and social concerns, particularly the question of belonging and Heimat, or homeland (which, pointedly, Catling retains in the German throughout the text). Heimat is a deep source of ambivalence: On one hand, it must be viewed critically in the wake of Nazi crimes and the pitfalls of nationalistic revanchism everywhere. On the other, it is the backdrop for the wanderer—that figure so central to Sebald’s fiction—who must go on a journey without ever being sure he can come home again. The Heimat is a shadowy place for Sebald, both an illusion and our last chance of finding footing in a hostile world. As he writes with pathos about Améry, who gave up Austria and even his old name after surviving the Holocaust, “For what can we call our own, if not our home country?”

In writing about Austria, Sebald sharpens his focus as a writer of imperial decline. In his essay about Joseph Roth, the Jewish journalist and novelist best known for The Radetzky March, Sebald invokes the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a lost homeland, one with no precise relationship to experience today, but which still extends a ghostly memory into European consciousness. For Sebald, there is dignity in Roth’s humanism and fatalism, his dedication “to the symbolic salvation of a world he already knew to be doomed.” For Sebald, Jewish life is the highest form of estrangement from the Heimat; Roth, having lost the empire, is an exile twice over. Typically evasive, Sebald never quite makes a conclusive statement about the meaning of homeland, choosing instead to defer to contradictions that don’t entirely satisfy: “For the wandering Jews, however, among whose number Roth counts himself, and whose graves, as he writes, are everywhere, Heimat is nowhere–and thus the epitome of utopia.” 

The writing here is more focused and crafted than in Misfortune—the reader gets a few glimpses of the Sebald to come. Catling, in her introduction, writes that Sebald’s more biographical approach was a departure from the standard German literary criticism of the time, which had remained resolutely focused on close reading. The narrowness of this textual criticism was seen by Sebald as a dodge by the keepers of German culture as they turned away from the dark historical truths of Germany’s 20th century. But this turn toward lived life was also the beginning of an artistic blooming. His essay on Améry ends with a strange—uncanny, even—anecdote of Améry meeting Thomas Bernhard “mid-tirade” in a bar by chance shortly before committing suicide. The autobiographical creeps in around the edges, too, as when Sebald, thinking about our feeling for nature, remembers how he saw “his grandfather raise his hat to an elder bush.”

In the collection’s final essay, on Handke’s Repetition, Sebald praises the novel’s literary powers, particularly its lightness and striking imagery, and wonders if “our natural Heimat might yet be saved after all.” Considering Handke’s future embroilment as a controversial spokesperson for Serbia in the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, there is some irony here. The redemption of the Heimat is a comforting thought, but perhaps it is more helpful to think of this statement, along with the others, as a provisional stage of Sebald’s thought process that continued to evolve in his fiction. Could the homeland be redeemed? Reading Sebald’s later works, like The Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, one is hardly sure of a positive outcome, though the question hangs in the air, still unanswered. 

In his essay on Adalbert Stifter, Sebald shows a profound sympathy for the Biedermeier writer, another melancholic sketching nature from the periphery. Stifter might seem at first like a kind of literary naïf: His stories highlight the beauty of flowers, forests, and snowdrifts more than he directly tackles any great theme. In appraising him, Sebald begins with a capsule biography (dwelling on his gluttony, his family and career misfortunes, his suicide), but he also praises Stifter’s work for its style—its patience for small-scale beauty, its lack of fidelity to plot. Sebald insists that something contradictory is at work under this pretty surface: “The scrupulous registering of the most minute details, the endless enumeration of what–strangely enough–is actually there: all bear signs of a lack of belief, and mark the point at which even the bourgeois doctrine of salvation could no longer be sustained.” The nature that Stifter inventories so carefully, as if to preserve it, is already well on the way toward annihilation. (Throughout all the essays in Silent Catastrophes, the idea of man’s destruction of the environment runs like a drumbeat through the background.) Stifter, then, is a kind of unconscious registrar of catastrophe: He may not even know that his world is lost, but his receptivity allows him to sense the truth and express it implicitly. His secret subject is “a release from the uncanny nature of time itself.”  

Might we think of Sebald as a writer whose work, like Stifter’s, sees the future out of the corner of its eye, even as it looks back? The Freudian sense of melancholy is fitting here—as an artist, Sebald radiates care and attachment to the small things as well, but his work also cannot speak the name of what it has lost. After all, do any of us know what we are losing? The world is always undergoing a process of reshaping itself, slipping through our fingers as we try to hold on; reality itself is in flux, and a new reality effect must be devised. Sebald was in the business of looking for new techniques. 

In Carol Angier’s (generally maligned) biography of Sebald, it came to light, perhaps unsurprisingly, that many of Sebald’s sources were manipulated—perhaps most controversially his conversion of non-Jewish sources into Jewish characters in his novel The Emigrants. Similarly, images in his work were often not what the narrator or author claimed them to be. Fictional license is expected, and the manipulation of images hardly new, but again Sebald seems predictive of a time when images are even less reliable than we thought. We are entering an era of mass image production in which perhaps the majority of images will be “false,” synthesized by AI. Sebald’s later focus on images (there are none in Silent Catastrophes) can be seen now less as “evidence” than a polemic for the coming reality, where we experience the destruction of our steady sense of visual truth, even as we continue to rely on its inputs. As Sebald said in his interview with Michael Silverblatt (his last interview before his death), reflecting on the obligation or the ability to write about the Holocaust:

We’ve all seen images [of the concentration camps], but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things in my view is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.

Sebald’s images, rather than supplying an artificial fidelity, encourage us to think harder about how we know what we know and why we believe what we believe. The closer we look, the less certain we become.

Sebald’s most enduring connection in Silent Catastrophes, the writer who he returns to again and again, is Kafka. Sebald is particularly focused on Kafka’s final masterwork, the enigmatic, unfinished novel The Castle. Although it may not be obvious at first, similarities between the novel and Sebald’s literary output are evident. A thinly disguised alter ego (Kafka originally began drafting his novel in the first person before changing the “I” pronouns to the now-famous “K.”) arrives at a strange, unnamed village with an ostensible task—he seems to be a land surveyor—only to be overwhelmed by detours and uncertainties, unsure if he will ever make any progress. Moreover, Kafka gives us a sense that while the objective remains the same (to reach the castle), the rules are always subject to change, both in the novel and in his style. This flexibility, the idea that at any moment a new invention might be unearthed, even unconsciously, seems at the heart of Sebald’s affinity. 

Tantalizingly, Sebald reads K. as a kind of revolutionary who is incapable of seizing the moment when it arrives: “Kafka’s way of representing the dilemma seems to imply that a revolution is nevertheless necessary and that it is all the more imperative the more impossible it becomes to translate its idea into practice.” This reading is some ways away from the typical idea of “the Kafkaesque,” which so quickly clouds a reader’s vision, confirming Kafka’s status while diluting his work’s vitality. In Sebald’s work, there are also patterns with which we are overfamiliar. But by seeing Sebald as a writer inventing the rules as he went along, we go with him deeper into his mystery and melancholy—his search for a method, however oblique, that might begin to dislodge the impossible. For literature, there still might be infinity in a grain of sand on a Suffolk beach.