In the preface to her new biography of W. G. Sebald, Carole Angier declares that her job is to provide us with the truth. Why does she feel the need to say so? Angier is not boasting about her own reliability. Rather, her declaration of purpose introduces the key dichotomy of her book: the biographer’s commitment to “truth” against Sebald’s desire for others to believe his “stories.”
She structures her biography around this opposition: behind or beneath the story is the truth, which both undergirds the story and undermines it. Winfried Georg Sebald’s life becomes the standard by which his fiction is judged. Yet Sebald’s prose works are almost entirely composed of stories from the lives of other people, related to or by his narrators. Angier’s approach inevitably leads her to ask what right Sebald had to these stories, and whether it was wrong to transform the lives of real people—as he did—in service of his art. The stakes of these questions are heightened by the tension between the centrality of Jewish suffering to Sebald’s writing and his own Christian German heritage. Are Sebald’s books appropriative, in the pejorative sense? Is it ever defensible to make literature from someone else’s pain?
This question gains urgency when Sebald is accused of narrative theft by those whose stories became the materials for his work. Angier, herself an admirer of Sebald’s work, attempts to defend him against the charge of narrative theft, but her methodological division between truth and story limits her explanation to the facts of his life. She presents Sebald as a man who instinctively identified with suffering wherever he saw it. This involuntary identification gives rise to what she calls “the unique empathy of his work” (435) and “his unique empathy with the victims of the Holocaust” (428).
I believe that Sebald’s own work provides another approach to the suffering of others. He considers and rejects identification, coming to feel another’s pain as his own, and instead chooses recognition, being moved by another’s pain as theirs. The exploration and illustration of recognition are core to his literary project, but we can only see this dynamic if we move beyond Angier’s schema of story and truth.
Speak, Silence is informed by dozens of interviews conducted over the past decade with Sebald’s friends, classmates, colleagues, and students. Many, if not all, of Angier’s most engaging discoveries derive from these diverse impressions of Sebald. If the subject of a biography has died without leaving some first-person account, some memoirs or journals or letters, then one of the few navigable routes for the biographer is finding people whose own stories include the subject. In light of the questions Angier raises about narrative ownership and the right to tell another’s story, this common biographical method reveals the flaws of a worldview where lives are parceled out like personal property. Our existence as social animals seems resistant to such borders. This interdependence of lives is accented by the disclosure, at the start of the book, that Angier was hampered in her quest for truth by an obstacle which might have thwarted a lesser biographer. Ute Sebald, Winfried’s widow, declined Angier’s requests for interviews and for access to his literary estate, including his personal papers. Hers is, we must imagine, one of the lives in which Sebald figured most prominently. His story remains incomplete without hers. Angier compensates for this lack with a breadth-first approach; if we can’t have the story where he is a main character, we can at least have twenty stories where he played a memorable bit part.
This approach is most successful when applied to his early life. Sebald, whose literary fame only dawned in his late 40s, seemed to have appeared fully formed as a writer, armed with his walrus mustache, mordant wit, and melancholic air. It feels almost revelatory to imagine him as a rebellious teenager, wearing his jeans into the bath in his quest for an ever-tighter fit. Yet when Sebald marries Ute Rosenbauer, the picture we get of Sebald’s life suddenly flattens. With much of his personal life inaccessible, Angier instead describes his personality as a teacher and colleague. The unavoidable result is the gradual evacuation of the illuminative details described above, yet Angier does not shift her gaze elsewhere. The scope remains tightly confined to his personal life, despite the paucity of material available to her. As Ryan Ruby points out in his review for New Left Review[1], Angier provides an awfully sparse picture of Sebald’s intellectual and political environment. As the political content of Sebald’s work continues to spark academic debate, I had hoped to learn something, for instance, about his reaction to the Thatcherian neoliberalism he mentions in The Rings of Saturn. Even a record of silence and inaction would be valuable for those who charge Sebald with political quietism, yet Angier leaves the issue untouched. She instead turns to Sebald’s literary output to fill the gap left by Ute’s refusal. She approaches the books with her trusty methodological spade: under the stories lies the (personal) truth.
Angier takes it as a given that Sebald composed each character from the “sources” of one or two people that he had known or read about. We learn that Max Ferber (the subject of the fourth section in Vertigo) is a composite of the painter Frank Auerbach and Sebald’s landlord Peter Jordan, while Ambros Adelwarth in The Emigrants is revealed to be William Schindele, who Sebald called an uncle. Angier argues not just that these real people influenced or informed Sebald’s characters, but rather that those characters simply are pseudonymous versions of their counterparts. Angier can breezily claim that “Paul Bereyter’s real name was Armin Müller” (97), despite the clear resemblance between his story and the life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Once Angier decides on a “true” counterpart, Sebald’s deviations from that counterpart’s life are presented as fabrications: Dr. Henry Selwyn and Cosmo Solomon weren’t actually Jewish, the real Paul Bereyter didn’t have so many of Wittgenstein’s features, and Max Ferber wasn’t as suicidal as Sebald wanted him to be.
All these alterations might be seen as unremarkable for another writer. What else is literature, besides making things up? One difficulty here is the peculiar resistance of Sebald’s work to genre classification—not quite novel, not quite memoir, not quite essay. Even “fiction” and “nonfiction” can get tricky at times: the narrators often speak as though relaying historical fact, and the images included in each of his books lend a documentary authority to the events they accompany, even as one realizes that not all the pictures can be what they seem. This paradoxical effect certainly interested Sebald. The photographs form the center of the narrator’s authority; they are the trump card that shows how things really were. At the same time, however, his books are littered with photographs that cannot possibly show what they claim, or even photographs which the text tells us are doctored or fabricated. The opposed effects work together: Sebald needs his readers to feel the power of the photographs, the concrete reality which they suggest, so that we are then disoriented and thrown off-guard when that reality becomes uncertain. Angier seems puzzled by this self-contradictory method, noting that in his interviews (including his interview with her) he often lied about the provenance of his pictures, suggesting that a photo found in a flea market was in fact sourced from the family albums of a fictional character. “How could he both want to shock us with the reality of his photos,” Angier asks, “and at the same time remind us that they could be fakes?” (283). She sees this as “an insoluble question,” yet the question is only insoluble if one opposes “story” and “truth.” If we understand Sebald instead as trying to show something about what gets accepted as truth, about the stories that form our understanding of “what really happened,” then there is little problem with Sebald’s apparent self-undermining. The puzzlement which Angier expresses is the goal. Sebald forces us to examine the trust and openness required for us to accept a photo in the newspaper or an eyewitness account.
However, Angier rightly questions whether transgressing these boundaries between fact and fiction is acceptable, in light of his material. Sebald, it turns out, made a habit of basing Jewish characters on non-Jewish sources, often adding some relation to the Holocaust in the process. One of Angier’s interviewees suggests that this is dangerous: if the Jewishness of a supposed Holocaust survivor could be fake, couldn’t everything else be? Angier agrees that “he had almost provided a foothold for Holocaust deniers” (26). While the thought of David Irving waving around a copy of Austerlitz seems rather far-fetched, the core point is less about material consequences than whether Sebald—German, gentile—had the right to use the Holocaust in his fictions.
Sometimes, Sebald did rely on Jewish sources. Sections of a diary written by his landlord’s aunt, Thea Gebhardt, appear in The Emigrants as the memoir of Max Ferber’s mother. The story of Austerlitz’s childhood as a Kindertransport refugee, placed with a Welsh family, who discovers his true origins later in life is taken from Susi Bechhöfer’s memoir Rosa’s Child. Yet we might find these cases even more troubling than the invented Jewishness above: neither Bechhöfer nor Gebhardt were so much as informed, let alone consulted. Granted, these two cases are not identical: Bechhöfer’s memoir was published, while Gebhardt’s was given to Sebald by Peter Jordan; Gebhardt was dead, while Bechhöfer was alive; large portions of Gebhardt’s text are used almost verbatim, while only the general narrative was taken from Bechhöfer’s memoir. Nevertheless, the similarities are undeniable. As the headline of a review of Angier’s book in The Atlantic puts it, “W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions.”[2]
How can we be moved by Sebald’s depiction of exilic suffering (taken from Bechhöfer) or his evocation of the social world shattered by the Holocaust (taken from Gebhardt) if we know they were made by a German appropriating Jewish pain? Bechhöfer lived to see the product herself and was outraged enough to write an article about it in the Sunday Times. Why would Sebald, known for his sorrow over the horrors of the Nazi regime, seem to disregard the pain he could cause his unwilling Jewish sources? The most devastating answer would be a cynical desire to make his stories more moving. Instant pathos, just add genocide. For anyone who is convinced, as I still am, that there is immense value in Sebald’s project, an alternative explanation is vital.
Angier, for her part, clearly feels the force of these questions. In her view, Sebald was “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust,” (viii) and she resolves to defend him. Unfortunately, her answer undermines her protective intent. Angier concludes that Sebald had a unique sensitivity to the suffering of others that left him unable to do anything but identify with experiences that were not his own. As one of his close friends put it, his skin was “metaphorically missing” (436). Although she stops just short of diagnosing Sebald with “mirror-touch synesthesia”, her stance is unmistakably medical (437). In this picture, Sebald had empathy and concern for the oppressed in the same way that someone with alopecia has no hair. Pain is all around us. “We can forget and ignore it, but he couldn’t” (437).
To mark out Sebald’s attitude toward the past as a unique ailment gravely misunderstands his project and runs the risk of reducing his work to a mere curiosity. Before his career as a literary writer, his academic work consisted of scathing criticism of the German literary establishment for its willful blindness and bourgeois complacency. His assault was so uncompromising precisely because he believed that his perspective was not unique. Sebald thought that his fellow Germans had the ability to recognize and empathize with the suffering of others; therefore, he maintained that their failure to do so must be held against them. Angier sees his caustic and polemical critical output as irreconcilable with the subdued melancholy and considered empathy of his literary work, concluding that the two halves of his oeuvre must represent warring halves of his personality. Yet his prose fictions also express, albeit through different methods, this same conviction that others can and should attempt to see the world differently.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald gives us two contrasting models for recognizing and responding to the experiences of others. Together, these stories outline an alternative to Angier’s theory of compulsive identification. The first is the narrator’s recounting of the life of Roger Casement, who fought tirelessly and across diverse arenas against “the side of the powerful,” becoming famous for exposing the terror inflicted by the Belgian colonial authorities in the Congo.[3] Sebald suggests that “it was precisely Casement’s homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression…of those who were furthest from the centres of power.”[4] Casement’s sexuality did not lead him to see himself as one of the Congolese workers mutilated by the Belgian imperialists, nor as one of the Putumayo enslaved by rubber barons. He fully recognized their struggle and their suffering without forgetting that it was theirs, rather than his.
The Casement passage stands in contrast to the narrator’s account, later in the book, of a visit to the house of his friend Michael Hamburger. Hamburger describes his own fascination with Hölderlin, which tempts him to the point of imitation, prompting the narrator’s own bout of uncanny identification with Hamburger himself. It seems to him “as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched in the soft north light had once been my spectacles cases, my letters and my writing materials.”[5] The narrator’s ability to distinguish himself from Hamburger seems at risk, much like Hamburger’s ability to distinguish his own life from Hölderlin’s. Yet both the narrator and Hamburger reject their respective identifications as untenable: Hamburger does not, in fact, “cast reason aside like an old coat,”[6] and the narrator puts his thoughts to rest, “perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one’s sanity.”[7] Sebald knew the temptation to abandon reason and let oneself drift into madness. Many of his characters, including his narrators, are drawn to the possibility, and several succumb. Yet for Sebald himself, this kind of total identification would have felt like an abdication of the responsibility to understand and to remember. There is an uncomfortably thin line between the melancholic poet who embraces madness and the guilt-stained citizen of the GDR who embraces amnesia.
Angier has a rather different reading of the Hamburger episode. For her, the total identification which tempts the narrator is the “absence of division,” which is the “aim of the entirety of his work” (430). She understands Sebald’s attention to suffering as the result of dissolving the boundary between subject and object, coming to quite literally feel the pain of others as his own. The most prominent example in Angier’s book is, of course, his “imaginative identification with the victims of the Holocaust” (433), but she also has Sebald identifying with a whole host of authors and fictional characters: Hamlet, Herzog, Holden Caulfield, Anatol Stiller, Hölderlin, Camus, Kafka. This is the Michael Hamburger model of encountering the experiences of others, and I believe she is mistaken to read Sebald as endorsing it.
The life of Roger Casement, which she does not discuss, seems much closer to Sebald’s idea of how one should recognize the pain and struggle of others. Yet the Casement example is oblique and brief. It leaves us with the same troubling questions of appropriation, ownership, and the right to speak. If our selves stay separate, if I recognize that I lack the experiences of others, how can I possibly know their pain? Sebald’s writing could be read as one long attempt to work out this question. Austerlitz, his final book, might be his most sustained answer. The titular main character is a man tortured by his inability to make his pain communicable, to articulate—even to himself—the sorrow and unrest that runs through his life. Austerlitz is based, in part, on a philosopher who was himself exercised by the seeming difficulty in communicating one’s experience to another, the supposed impossibility of really knowing that someone else is in pain: Sebald’s old influence and literary model, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Angier doesn’t tell us much about Sebald’s experience with Wittgenstein, who she mentions infrequently in the body of Speak, Silence. She does tell us that, in 1966, Sebald cared enough about Wittgenstein that the latter’s time in Manchester provided consolation for Sebald’s own miserable move there. His interest seems to have been retained over twenty years later, when Wittgenstein became one of the models for Paul Bereyter. Both incidents look minor when compared to the pervasive impact of Wittgenstein on Austerlitz. One of the first things a reader of Austerlitz will see is a cropped photo of Wittgenstein’s instantly recognizable eyes. Wittgenstein soon gets explicit mention when the narrator comments on his uncanny resemblance to the title character.[8] Both Wittgenstein and Austerlitz are would-be architects with a difficult relationship to their Jewish heritage; their shared features range from a suspicion of orderly clock time to a beloved and reliable leather rucksack. Unlike “Paul Bereyter,” Austerlitz is strewn with direct quotation and paraphrase of Wittgenstein’s late work, the fragmentary remarks and suggestions of the Philosophical Investigations. Austerlitz is the closest Sebald ever comes to a happy ending, to the possibility of reconciling with the past and arriving at real connection with others. That he does so in the book undergirded by Wittgenstein is, I believe, no coincidence.
Almost every character in Austerlitz struggles with the problem of knowing the experience of others. The history teacher André Hilary almost pulls out his hair imagining how much it would require to adequately describe one moment in a single battle without recourse to the storehouse of cliches and “preformed images” that make up our picture of history.[9] The narrator and Marie de Verneuil try for decades to understand the nameless absence haunting Austerlitz, while Austerlitz himself compulsively scours archives and assembles data to try and understand what it must have been like for his mother when she was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the end, their approaches are all confused. In Austerlitz, the pain of another is not something you can study by accumulating the right set of evidence or the most complete archive. That path leads Sebald’s characters in circles, like the raccoon the narrator sees in the Antwerp Nocturama: “washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.”[10]
Wittgenstein doesn’t exactly provide an answer to the problem. His discussion of pain begins midway through the Philosophical Investigations, as he imagines a philosopher who claims that, although he knows his own pains with complete certainty, he can never really know those of another person. Their pains are locked away, inaccessible, within their minds. The best he can do, the imaginary philosopher claims, is believe that someone else is in pain. Wittgenstein punctures all these theoretical considerations in typical fashion, with a simple request: “Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.”[11] If I see you cry out and grab your arm, I don’t need to gather evidence and draw the best conclusion. I just see that you’re in pain! Wittgenstein wants us to see that the question itself is confused, and that the supposed problem rests on this confusion. What leads us astray, he thinks, is a picture of individuals as self-contained and isolated, possessed of their own private storehouse of thoughts and experiences that are, by definition, inaccessible to others. This, he believes, is the understanding of the mind that dominates modern thought. Once you accept this fatal picture, the idea that you might ever know the suffering of another seems fantastic. Wittgenstein is trying to dispel the atomistic picture of society by drawing our attention back to the ordinary experience of seeing someone in pain. I am not separated from the suffering of others by a gulf that requires bridging by means of evidence; I can see the pain as pain because we share a language, a world, all the activities and connections that Wittgenstein sums up as a “form of life.”
The atomistic picture, in which everyone’s experiences are private property hidden away “inside,” creates the confusion that the characters in Austerlitz have fallen into, trapping them in their quixotic research programs and evidence hoarding. A similar confusion forces Angier into her diagnosis of Sebald as the emotionally flayed man, someone who cannot help but identify with others without reservation. From inside the atomistic picture of experience, a semi-delusional identification—feeling your pain completely as if it were my own—seems like the only way that Sebald could truly recognize the experiences of his subjects. Angier is not the first to suggest that his work “dissolves the boundary between victims and perpetrators, Germans and Jews” (422). To many, this would be an unacceptable result; from his rejection of total identification in The Rings of Saturn, I would venture that Sebald felt similarly. He attempts at every turn to approach his subjects with empathy and care, while at the same time maintaining and respecting the irreducible difference that marks them as individuals, separate from himself or his narrators. Once we’ve worked through the confusion that this picture engenders, we can see that Sebald’s goal was not identification, but recognition.
Near the end of Austerlitz, the title character tells the narrator that he is going to look for Marie de Verneuil, a friend whose affection he had rejected years earlier.[12] Sebald does not tell us what Austerlitz might find, but this is the note of hope I suggested earlier: the break from the sometimes-overwhelming melancholy of Sebald’s books. The relationship between Austerlitz and Marie, taking place even before the narrator and Austerlitz first meet, had failed because she found him “unapproachable,” like “a machine working by some unknown mechanism.”[13] Austerlitz could not articulate his pain, and Marie’s attempts to uncover the truth fell flat. Over the course of the book, Austerlitz gives an account of himself to the narrator, discovering the truth about his own past and coming to terms with the symptoms that the erasure of this past produced. It is only after this collaborative work of self-narration that it becomes possible to reconnect with Marie. The narrator is not incidental; Sebald is showing us what might be possible for the suffering subject if given someone willing to listen and to recognize the experience being communicated for what it is. This stands in contrast to an approach that would treat people (and their experiences) as puzzles to be solved, containers of an “inner life” only accessible through subtle deduction. That is the atomistic picture, and Sebald believed its consequences could be devastating to the psychological and emotional health of those who hold it. Once you start to see cryptic surfaces instead of minds, behaviors instead of people, you likewise become trapped in yourself, incapable of expression or release. In the most extreme case, this combination of alienation from others and inarticulable pain opens the door for the perilous dehumanization of those inaccessible others. Wittgenstein puts this another way: viewing another person as an automaton is “analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example.”[14]
This atomistic picture stands in polar opposition to the picture of mutual openness that Sebald and Wittgenstein each attempt to present. Truly seeing the suffering of another goes alongside attunement to their needs and receptiveness to their narratives. For Sebald, really listening to someone’s story is impossible if you are only interested in the truth hiding underneath it. As he constantly reminds us, “truth” is yet another narrative we are asked to accept. This moral dichotomy—between seeing others in their humanity and turning away—sheds light on Sebald’s anger at the excuse for silence on the Holocaust, all too common among Germans of his generation, that Jewish suffering was not their story to tell. Sebald understood that narratives, like experiences, are not held in private boxes, and that therefore no German could properly tell the story of their own past without incorporating the stories of those murdered by their fathers and uncles. Attempting to disentangle the two would be narrative cleansing, a gruesome parody of the original violence. Sebald’s books give us models of an alternative, narratives which present and recognize the suffering of others without attempting to claim it as his own.
In this capacity, I believe his books succeed. His life, however, is another question. What about Susi Bechhöfer, who saw her story repurposed in Austerlitz then had her attempts to contact Sebald dodged and rebuffed? What about Peter Jordan, whose aunt Thea had her memoir plundered without permission or acknowledgement? What about the villagers of Wertach, whose dirty laundry was aired in international literature by a man who visited them only when forced? What about his mother, who lost many close friends forever when they appeared as characters in Vertigo? None of these people were treated with the compassion and empathy that Sebald advocated in his fiction. They were instrumentalized, used for a story, and then tossed aside like so much industrial byproduct. The explanation I’ve tried to give of Sebald’s project is no defense. If anything, his callousness now seems more damning than it does when seen through Angier’s pop psychology. A man whose identity overflows into others is a curiosity, but a man who preaches respect for the pain of others in his books and disregards that pain in his actions is a hypocrite. Sebald, of course, would hardly be the first writer whose life failed to meet the standards of his art. Yet in his case, the failure is particularly jarring, because his books seem to present the very standards for responsible and compassionate receptivity that were violated in their creation. I am unwilling to accept this as the proverbial cost of doing business. There were things Sebald could have done. He could have consulted Bechhöfer. He could have, as Angier suggests, credited Thea Gebhardt somewhere in The Emigrants. These ideas are all a bit moot, since Sebald is long since dead, but the questions raised are broader than his work alone. Angier’s discoveries force us to ask what we are willing to forgive as the side effects of literary production, and what responsibility a writer has to those on whom their fiction depends. Speak, Silence may not be the definitive biography, but it makes these questions impossible to ignore.
Notes:
[1] Ryan Ruby, “Privatized Grand Narratives,” New Left Review 131 (2021): 131–44.
[2] Judith Shulevitz, “W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for His Fictions,” The Atlantic. October 5, 2021.
[3] W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 129.
[4] Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 134.
[5] Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 183.
[6] Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 182.
[7] Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 185.
[8] W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 40.
[9] Sebald, Austerlitz, 72.
[10] Sebald, Austerlitz, 4.
[11] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010), 241.
[12] Sebald, Austerlitz, 292.
[13] Sebald, Austerlitz, 215.
[14] Sebald, Austerlitz, 291.