TLS: Will Self on Sebald

Will Self on Sebald

Sebald, the good German?

Will Self on W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust

"I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I did finally find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything as I had already made a down payment on some furniture. Once, towards the end of the war I did contemplate loosening the Führer’s neck napkin and allowing a few tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me."
Following Freud – himself driven into exile by the Nazis – there are some things too serious not to joke about, and this applies to Hitler, to the regime he initiated, and even to the murders – through war, mass shootings, extermination camps and forced marches – that that regime carried out: mass murders the true extent of which will never now be established with complete accuracy. Twenty million, thirty? What can such figures tell us about the reality of a single individual crushed beneath the Nazi juggernaut?
I should qualify the above: some things are too serious for some people not to joke about them. I cannot decide whether or not W. G. Sebald would permit himself even the wryest of smiles in response to Woody Allen’s parody of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, which I quote from above. After all, it isn’t the Holocaust that “The Schmeed Memoirs” seeks to extract humour from; rather, Allen is savagely mocking Speer’s claim that at the time it was taking place, he personally knew nothing of the murder of millions of Jews. By transforming Hitler’s erstwhile architect – who subsequently became his Minister for War Production – into a self-deluding barber, Allen performs the essential task of the satirist: to expose the lie of power for what it was, is, and always will be, and to strip away the protective clothing – of idealism, of denial, of retrospective justification – from the perpetrators of genocide.
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Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically, in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history, this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best, and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round “an immense domed rotunda”, and muses: “This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. To counter this synoptic view – which, again and again throughout his work, Sebald links to dangerous idealisms and utopian fantasies – the writer offered us subjective experience. This was not, however, reportage that relies for its authority on witness; Sebald, as he wrote with reference to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in his essay “Air War and Literature”, mistrusted seeming clarity in the retelling of events that had violently deranged the senses. Rather, his was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life.
Sebald, perhaps better than anyone, would understand the threshold we now stand upon. Last year Harry Patch, the final remaining British survivor of the trenches in the First World War, died, and with his death another stratum of history was sealed shut. In the next two or three decades the same will happen in respect of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Last November John Demjanjuk was wheeled into a Munich courtroom to stand trial on charges of being an accessory to 27,900 murders in the Sobibor extermination camp, and despite the statement by the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland that “All NS criminals still living should know that there won’t be mercy for them, regardless of their age”, it is generally understood that this will be the last Holocaust crimes trial of any significance. The previous month Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, in his guise as the leader of the BNP, appeared on BBC1’s Question Time, where he was subjected to carefully orchestrated liberal barracking. And on January 27 – the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz – we will have Holocaust Memorial Day, a national commemoration of the victims of German National Socialism inaugurated by Tony Blair in 2001.
W. G. Sebald died in December of that year, but had he lived I doubt he would have made any public comment about this. Nevertheless, the message I take from Sebald’s works and his scrupulous posture in relation to the remembrance of the Holocaust’s victims, is that such events, far from ensuring a “Legacy of Hope” (the theme of this year’s Day), shore up a conception of history, of humanity, and of civilization that depends on a view of the Holocaust as an exceptional and unprecedented mass murder. It is not just in terms of the Zionist eschatology that the Holocaust is deployed as a symbolic event; we also require it as a confirmation of our own righteousness in the democratic and industrialized West.
Albert Speer was, of course, the very personification of an industrialization run amok. The Nazis, for all the twisted atavism of their ideology, were nothing if not modernizers. So, Speer could be significant for Sebald for many reasons – the grotesque giganticism of his designs for the new capital of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich would seem the epitome of that distortion of Burke’s “objects great and terrible” which was the Nazis’ vision of art as the servant of social control. In Sebald’s Austerlitz, the eponymous protagonist, an architectural historian, circles the truth of his origins as he circles the terra incognita of Germany itself. Through his study of such buildings as factories, docks and fortifications hypertrophied by nineteenth-century industrialization, Austerlitz is unconsciously homing in on the most monstrous disjunction of human scale: the exterminatory assembly lines of the Holocaust.
Encrypted in Antwerp’s Central Station Austerlitz finds a programme of social control, and remarks to the novel’s narrator: “The clock is placed some twenty metres above the only baroque element in the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht”. In English “Union is strength”, but in Flemish that motto echoes “Arbeit macht frei”.
Then, there is Speer’s awkward status as not only the pre-eminent German denier of Holocaust knowledge, but also its foremost passive resister, who, charged with Hitler’s scorched earth policy, saved as much industrial infrastructure as he could. Just as Speer refused the evidence of his own senses when he visited the slave labourers at the notorious Mittelbau-Dora missile factory, so we can imagine that Sebald’s own father refused – at least in retrospect – to acknowledge the reality of what he witnessed as a career soldier in the Wehrmacht. Sebald said of his own parents that they were typical of German petit-bourgeois who “went into the war not just blindly, but with a degree of enthusiasm . . . they all felt they were going to be lords of the world”. Sebald’s father was in the Polish campaign, and in the family photo album there were pictures that initially had a “boy scout atmosphere”, but: “Then the order came and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead, razed to the ground and with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child . . . . I look at them now, and I think, ‘Good Lord, what is all this?’”. It’s easy to see this as Sebald’s paradigmatic experience of the power of photography both to document and to dissemble historical reality – power he himself would make great use of. In Vertigo Sebald’s alter ego says of an album that his father bought his mother in 1939 as a present for the first Kriegsweihnacht – or Nazi-sanctioned “War Christmas”:
"Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out smiling from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war."
And there, below the text, is the photograph in question, which was, Sebald said in an interview: “an indication that these things were accepted as part of the operation right from the beginning”.
Named “Winfried” from a Nazi list of approved names, and “Georg” after his father, Sebald preferred to be known as Max. He was born in the Bavarian Alps in May 1944 as the Reich was collapsing beneath the Allied onslaught, and his own literary achievement stands in almost diametric opposition to that of Speer. While Speer occupied himself exclusively with variations on the theme of what the psychoanalytic thinker Alexander Mitscherlich termed his Lebenslüge, or “Great Lie”, Sebald devoted his energies to exposing all the smaller lies of his parents’ generation. He remained steadfast in his excoriation, when asked in the course of an interview with the Jewish Quarterly after the publication of The Emigrants, whether he could talk to his parents about the so-called Hitler time, Sebald replied:
"Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five . . . . It’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds. I always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration – it’s the same thing. But they cannot understand this."
There is, as yet, no direct access to Georg Sebald’s war record, but sifting through the clues in Sebald’s texts and cross-referencing these with his statements in interviews, it seems likely to me that his father ended up serving with the 1st Gerbirgsjäger – or “mountain huntsmen” – who were indeed stationed in Slovakia before the invasion of Poland, and whose record includes a sorry tapestry of war crimes, including the rounding up and shooting of Jews in Lvov. Sebald, inevitably, was not close to his father, who had been taken prisoner by the Americans in 1945 and only returned home when the writer was three. But while it’s almost a cliché to say of a male writer’s books that they are acts of parricide, Sebald’s great achievement lay in not succumbing to Oedipal rage so as to forestall tragic sadness.
In his writings and interviews Sebald never pretended that his artistic development was entirely sui generis; it’s more that the lamentable insularity of the English-speaking world has made us generally impervious to foreign cultural influences. (This cannot have been far from Sebald’s own mind, not only when he rigorously collaborated on the translations of his own prose works from German into English, but also in his work as a pedagogue and as the founder, in 1989, of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.) The influence of Alexander Kluge – to name but one exemplar of the documentary literature of post-war Germany – on Sebald’s methodology and concerns is difficult to assess for a non- German speaker, since none of Kluge’s key texts is available in translation. We can identify, to some extent, Sebald’s affinities with Jean Améry, or with Alfred Döblin, the subject of his own doctoral thesis, but the point needs to be stressed that these are Jewish German writers, the former a Holocaust survivor, the latter a modernist whose sensibility was shaped during Weimar. What we cannot do is place Sebald within the German literary context where he might be said to belong. Rather, let us resurrect him as a disciple of Améry, of whom Sebald wrote, “\[His\] existentialist philosophical position . . . makes no concessions to history but exemplifies the necessity of continuing to protest, a dimension so strikingly lacking from German postwar literature”.
Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews. He said that he felt no guilt himself – and indeed why should he? He was not responsible – but that there was an irremediable “sense of shame”. Subjected at school, as all Germans of his generation were, to a film of the concentration camps without explanation or context, Sebald was jolted out of what had been an isolated bucolic childhood; it impinged on him from then on that, “While I was sitting in my pushchair and being wheeled through the flowering meadows by my mother, the Jews of Corfu were being deported on a four-week trek to Poland. It is the simultaneity of a blissful childhood and those horrific events that now strikes me as incomprehensible. I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life”. The shadow lengthened through his university career where, in Freiburg, Sebald found himself being taught German literature by academics he later described as “dissembling old fascists”. Only the returned exile Theodor Adorno offered any insight, and no doubt his remarks on the possibility of a post- Holocaust literature must have been something the young Sebald took to heart: “To write poetry after Auschwitz”, Adorno wrote, “is barbaric”. A statement he later amplified thus: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it”.
Such “action writing” and any possible voyeurism were modes that subsequently Sebald carefully avoided. For a counterexample to his own meticulousness you need look no further than Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a novel widely feted for its moving portrayal of the impact of the Holocaust – but on whom, exactly? Schlink’s novel may present a schema of evolving Holocaust consciousness in the successor generation of Germans, but its effects depend on exactly the kind of “action writing” Sebald rejected. (In Schlink’s case this consists in the portrayal of the protagonist’s underage sex with a beautiful concentration camp guard.) Just as Sebald himself never visited a concentration camp. This was a pilgrimage that he believed was “not the answer”, especially since such sites had become only way- stations on the profane tourist trail.
But he did assiduously follow newspaper reports of the Auschwitz-Birkenau trials of 1963–5, and said of the trials, “it was the first public acknowledgement that there was such a thing as an unresolved German past”. Further, “I realized there were things of much greater urgency than the writings of the German Romantics”. Sebald was struck both by the utter familiarity of the defendants – “the kind of people I’d known as neighbours” – but still more by how the Jewish witnesses, initially strange and foreign, were in the course of the proceedings revealed to have been residents of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. For Sebald, awakening to the realization that he had been living among tacit accomplices to the elimination of these people’s relatives made him feel himself to be a tacit accomplice as well, and so he “had to know what had happened in detail, and try to understand why it should have been so”.
In 1966, Sebald came to England, to Manchester University, as a teaching assistant. In 1966 – as today – Manchester had a thriving Jewish community. In post-war Germany it was, of course, only too possible never to encounter a Jew, but now Sebald had a German-Jewish landlord whose own parents had been deported to Riga where they were murdered. This man subsequently became one of the models for Max Ferber, the painter in Sebald’s The Emigrants, and the encounter hammered out the template for his subsequent modus operandi. “To my mind”, Sebald later said, “there is an acute difference between historiography and history as experienced history.” The experience of real, live Jews was definitely important – and possibly equally significant was that these were English Jews; after all, if, as the old Jewish saying has it, the Jews are like everyone else but more so, then it can be inferred that English Jews are like the English – but more so. The uncanny portrayal of Dr Henry Selwyn in The Emigrants is a function of his almost perfect assimilation to English diffidence, and since Sebald based him on a real-life model who the writer did not even realize was of Polish-Jewish extraction until told so, he stands as a sign pointing towards that earlier age when German Jews, with names such as Hamburger and Berlin – evidence, Sebald once remarked, of just how tragically close their identification with the Fatherland was – were quite as well camouflaged.
Cosmologists talk of the “anthropic principle”, which extrapolates from the coincidence of the physical laws of the universe and our ability to observe those laws, to the proposition that this is no coincidence but a necessity: the universe has evolved precisely to produce beings of our kind, QED, God. I suspect in our view of Sebald as the pre-eminent – or at least most widely and obviously revered – Germanlanguage writer in the English-speaking world, we are falling victim to a strong anthropic argument, when a weaker one will suffice. Undoubtedly, it was precisely Sebald’s own exile from Germany and his exposure to living Jewish communities that made it possible for him to transform the inchoate mistrust of his “passive collaborator” background into an active literature of atonement.
I suspect there is a degree of wishful thinking in the critiques of post-war German literature published in English, and the title of the most comprehensive of these – Ernestine Schlant’s worthy if over-determined The Language of Silence – says it all. The literature of Holocaust survivors can tell us how it was, but it can do little to explain why it was. For that we have impotently required a fully self-actualized literature of the perpetrators; in other words: an impossibility. Hannah Arendt’s much quoted subtitle to her study of the Eichmann trial, “the banality of evil”, has become a shibboleth to be lisped in the nightmarish face of the Holocaust. In fact, Arendt avoided the term in the text, while stressing, in her private letters from Jerusalem during the trial, that after ploughing through the 3,000-page transcript of Eichmann’s interrogation by the Israeli police, what impressed her most was his “brainlessness”.
We cannot interrogate the brainless for their or our own self-actualization, we cannot look to those who have capitulated to a regime which made evil a civil norm for a moral re-evaluation. Instead, we have their sons and daughters, and we have Sebald; whose elegant, elegiac and haunting prose narratives reinstate the prelapsarian German-speaking world. His careful use of documentary sources places before the contemporary reader the actualité of a culture in which Jews were an integral part, while his style is at once discursive – looping in historic anecdote and literary reference – and incisive: cutting away at the surface of reality to expose the mysterious interconnections of things-in-themselves. To read Sebald is to be confronted with European history not as an ideologically determined diachronic phenomenon – as proposed by Hegelians and Spenglerians alike – nor as a synchronic one to be subjected to Baudrillard’s postmodern analysis. Rather, for Sebald, history is a palimpsest, the meaning of which can only be divined by rubbing away a little bit here, adding on some over there, and then – most importantly – stepping back to allow for a synoptic view that remains inherently suspect.
I think it’s this beguiling overview – which Sebald calls our attention to again and again in his writings by describing the works of Dutch landscape painters and English watercolourists – that explains in part our willingness to ascribe to him some specifically moral ascendancy, and by implication a historiography he explicitly denies. For the English-speaking world – and the English in particular – Sebald is the longed-for “Good German”; he is everything Speer wanted to become but never could.
Sebald has recognized the taint and moved to erase it by a systematic bearing of witness. But if he had remained behind in Germany, might he not have succumbed to the same pressures as many of his generation, and been carried along on the tide of Marxist posturing to an equivalence between the Federal Republic and the Third Reich? It is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction, just as it is difficult to see him falling for the victimology of many German writers of the successor generation, who, in their tortuous investigations of Oedipal hatred, revealed only that it was all about them. But then, recall that Sebald was no great believer in free will. “This notion”, he said, “of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn’t really subscribe to.” Nor, presumably, could he have subscribed to any view of his literary work as originating from a desire to do the right thing – that was then done. Indeed, he never did: he disavowed any particular philo-Semitism, explaining his resurrection of German Jewry as a form of social history as much as anything else – which does indeed make Sebald sound more English than the English. But the urge to project pious motives onto writers in a godless age is quite as strong as our desire to damn them to a hell no one believes in either.
In England, Sebald’s one-time presence among us – even if we would never be so crass as to think this, let alone articulate it – is registered as further confirmation that we won, and won because of our righteousness, our liberality, our inclusiveness and our tolerance. Where else could the Good German have sprouted so readily? If he had remained at home might he not have become – at the very least – a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald’s writing is anecdotal in feel, and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana – Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and model-making enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing.
I might be doing the mittel-English readership of Sebald – if indeed such people exist at all – a disservice, were it not that I’m prepared to take the rap myself: I find Sebald’s path into the charnel house of the twentieth century quite reassuring, especially when it takes the form of a hearty English walk. To read exclusively German post-war German literature is to find oneself in the position of the unnamed narrator of Walter Abish’s How German Is It?, who, on returning to his home town after the war, becomes transfixed by the way Germanness inheres in everything he sets his eyes on – even the rivets that secure the map of the town to the station wall. In too-German Germany Sebald is, of course, not quite German enough. In the eight years since his death, his stature in England – already high – has grown considerably, while in Germany there has been some upgrading of his reputation, but Sebald would have needed to be alive in order to have benefited from the revelation of Günter Grass’s membership of the SS. As for Martin Walser, paradoxically it is his insistence that Germans have done enough atoning which – or so German friends of mine assure me – people find “boring”.
Sebald did enter the lists of the great controversies surrounding the history of the Hitler-time when in 1997 he delivered a series of lectures, posthumously published in English in an edited form, under the title On the Natural History of Destruction. When these writings appeared in Germany, Sebald’s contention that the Allied bombing of German cities, which resulted in 600,000 civilian deaths and 5 million homeless, was singularly under-represented in post-war German literature, became a stick in the hands of both Right and Left, intent on beating each other. Sebald’s reputation predictably suffered collateral damage. I suspect Sebald was not so much ingenuous as out of touch with contemporary opinion: to him the continuing and plangent shame Germans should feel for the murder of the Jews remained a given; it did not need to be restated in a thesis concerning a different mass killing. Besides, he did state explicitly in the text that it ill behoved Germans to castigate the Allies for prosecuting the war in this fashion.
You do not have to be an exile to be perceived as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) in the German-speaking world – but it helps; while it is exactly those Bakelite touches English critics find reassuring – even as they shade in the utter blackness – that German ones are dismissive of. Reviewing Austerlitz for Die Zeit, Iris Radisch described its lapidary style as “Holocaust and staghorn buttons” while averring that “Something’s wrong here . . . . Is it really possible to use the same model of archives to describe the search for your deported parents as the search for shells . . . in a school friend’s house? . . . Is it persuasive to plaster the journey back to the places of expulsion, death and destruction with antique curiosities?”. Then again, given that if you hail a cab outside Frankfurt’s railway station its driver is very likely to be writing a doctoral thesis on the Frankfurt School, Sebald’s metaphysical bent – so worrying to English empiricists – is viewed straightforwardly by this compatriot:
"Sebald is the same as those philosophers, of whom Kierkegaard said, all that they write about reality is just as confusing as reading a sign at a flea market stall that says “Washing done here”. You come back with your things, hoping to have them washed, but instead you stand there like an idiot because the sign is merely there to be sold."
None of which is to suggest that you cannot also find plenty of praise for Sebald’s works among German critics, it’s just that what’s missing is the peculiar reverence which attaches to writings that – so long as they are not read too closely – seem to confirm us English in some of our most comforting prejudices.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald cryptically alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius”, which plays with the idea of an idealist world created by eighteenth-century encyclopedists to bedevil their empiricist heirs. The passage Sebald had in mind was this: “Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre”. In the preamble to this same strange tale Borges’s narrator recalls a dinner with a friend at which “we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality”. This is of course Sebald’s own fictional methodology, and I believe only a very few readers have grasped the atrocious and banal reality that he wishes us to perceive, despite the myriad clues that are scattered throughout his texts.
Consider this, from Austerlitz, where the eponymous survivor of the Kindertransport remarks,
"It does not seem to me . . . that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead."
Again and again Sebald makes statements of a transcendental idealism, again and again he points to coincidence and déjà vu as evidence of the unheimlich quality of subjectivity. This is Sebald’s alter ego in The Rings of Saturn: “my rational mind is . . . unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrase and gestures”. If instead of conventional linear narratives Sebald’s prose fictions are word-filigrees spun out of such atemporal coincidences, then they are also haunted by the congruence of the things-in-themselves that constitute the material world. In The Emigrants, Max Ferber returns to smoky industrial Manchester, understanding intuitively that while he may have escaped the Holocaust, it remains his destiny to “serve under the chimney”.
The echo of the Buna at Auschwitz is certainly intentional, and just as willed by Sebald are the references throughout his books to Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp established by Reinhard Heydrich in the Bohemian hinterland. I speak not just of the extended passages concerning the camp in Austerlitz, but of tens and scores of other references to it – far more than to any of the other, more notorious nodes of the Holocaust. I believe that in Theresienstadt, where tens of thousands of “privileged” Jews were crammed into an eighteenth-century fortified town of one square kilometre, Sebald saw the very synecdoche of the Holocaust.
With its theatre company and orchestra, its workshops and its newspaper, Theresienstadt was given a grotesque makeover by the Germans so that it could serve as a Potemkin village for a Red Cross inspection in 1944 designed to allay international suspicions. At the same time a film was made depicting the idyllic existence of those who shortly after the filming stopped were transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, or else forced east on the death marches that claimed 1.5 million more Jewish lives. Theresienstadt is for Sebald only an extreme and specialized form of a Holocaust he sees being perpetrated everywhere and at all times as civilization marches on. If there is any exceptional character to the German Holocaust it is only that it is German, just as Belgian genocides are Belgian, Rwandan ones Rwandan, Serbian ones Serbian and Croatian ones – albeit under German tutelage – Croatian. Describing Joseph Conrad’s arrival in Brussels to take up the commission that would gain him the material for Heart of Darkness, Sebald wrote: “\[Conrad\] now saw the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies, and all the passers-by in the streets seemed to him to bear that dark Congolese secret within them”.
While historians such as Daniel Goldhagen might wish to arrogate a unique exterminatory impulse to the Germans, Sebald resists this facile view at every juncture. In his doctoral thesis on Alfred Döblin, he was inclined to see aspects of Berlin Alexanderplatz as a shadow cast forwards, a kind of reverse memory. Commenting on Döblin’s description of an abattoir, Sebald avers that “Far more horrifying than the chaotic destruction of the Apocalypse is the well-ordered destruction contrived by man himself”. Implicit in Sebald’s work is the idea that human mass murder is only an internecine form of the holocaust we are perpetrating on the natural world. It is there in The Rings of Saturn where the description of the destruction of the European fisheries is juxtaposed with a double-page photograph of the naked bodies of the Nazis’ victims lying among trees. It is there in The Emigrants where Manchester is described as a “necropolis or mausoleum”; in Vertigo also, when the vehicles crawling along the gleaming black roads out of Innsbruck are imagined as “the last of an amphibian species close to extinction”. Encrypted in almost every line of After Nature we find the same message: “Cities phosphorescent / on the riverbank, industry’s / glowing piles waiting / beneath the smoke trails / like ocean giants for the siren’s / blare, the twitching lights / of rail- and motorways, the murmur / of the millionfold proliferating molluscs, / woodlice and leeches, the cold putrefaction”.
In conclusion then, Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day – and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response – if not an atonement – for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even – casting the shadow forward – an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one. “More and more”, the narrator of The Emigrants tells us concerning Dr Selwyn, “he sensed that Nature itself was collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it.” And as Gerhard Richter’s fusion of slow oils and photographic quicksilver so perfectly expresses, on that denuded foreground, Onkel Rudi is always posing for the camera, smiling, in front of the slave labourers’ hecatomb.

This is an edited text of the 2010 Sebald Lecture, which was delivered in London earlier this month.

Will Self’s most recent non-fiction books include Psychogeography, 2007, and Psycho Too, 2009. Liver: A fictional organ with a surface anatomy of four lobes, The Butt and The Undivided Self: Selected short stories, appeared in 2008.