- Hi, welcome to the
closing keynote round table
of the Fictions of History conference.
We hope you've enjoyed
the conference so far,
we've had a really good two days.
We had a great keynote last
night with Steven Greenblatt.
We had 20 panels over the
course of this conference,
on a wide array of topics
from presenters from all over the world.
And we want to thank you all for coming,
and participating and making
this conference a possibility.
And now we're delighted to
introduce a keynote round table
with Mark Anderson, Daniel
Kehlmann, Judith Ryan
and moderated by Andre Aciman.
The title of the round table
is Art, Fiction and History:
The Work of W.G. Sebald.
I wanted to say thank
you to the many people
who made this conference possible.
My fellow co-organizers
Jin Chang and Sara Salman.
As well as our many co-sponsors,
Constance Old who is generously helping us
in memory of her brother Lloyd,
and the conference
volunteers who have been
helping throughout the
day, Michele Chinitz,
Iuri Moscardi, Anna
Chichi, Monica Selescra,
Maria-Cristina Necula, Joe
Goodale and Nara Viera.
Without further ado, I'd
like to turn this over
to Andre Aciman.
Thank you.
- [Andre] Thank you.
- Welcome everybody.
It's a pleasure to have you here,
and it's always a pleasure
to see so many people
interested in the work of Sebald.
When we initially thought of doing this,
we thought well maybe, you
know, five to 10 people
will show up.
So we're very happy to see
such a big number of people,
and I was...
I mean I have to say a few things,
I'm really happy that
I've got this particular
committee who is sitting
in front of you today.
I met Sebald a couple of times,
and I have to give you some background.
Cause when he first
published The Emigrants,
I read the book right away
through a series of
coincidences that are of
in fact Sebaldian in nature.
But it was a coincidence,
and I read the book
and I loved it.
I truly loved it.
And I immediately reviewed it,
and then there was a
silence of a few years,
and then he came up with another book,
and I received the galleys of that book,
and I said, oh yummy, you know, great;
and it was The Rings of Saturn.
And I read it once, and
then again the second time,
and I decided I hated it.
I hated it and I reviewed it for the
New York Review of Books in a long piece,
and I was mortified
because I said something
that I probably was right
but it felt very wrong.
I said that this is an
author who was extremely,
extremely talented, but who has
not discovered his form yet.
Well, wrong I was because
he was writing in his form.
In the form that has maken him so lovable,
and then Austerlitz came
out and he contacted me
and he said he wanted me to introduce him
at the 92nd Street Y.
I said does he realize that I am the one
who panned his book in
the New York Review.
And he says yes he knows that,
that's why or that's
regardless of the fact
that's he wants you to introduce him.
And so I met him the first time there,
and he was absolutely charming.
Totally charming.
I learned a big lesson at that time,
is that if somebody does a nasty to you
pretend it never happened.
(laughter)
He pretended so well
that I was almost fooled,
and I realize that the tactful thing
would be not to bring it up.
So we met a couple more
times and that was it,
because then he died.
I loved Austerlitz.
I think Austerlitz is a great novel.
It's an outgrowth of The
Emigrants, I thought,
but it has enough of The Rings of Saturn
and of the other books he wrote
that it makes him a full novel,
that is indeed the perfect form
of the novel as we know it.
I was thinking today of what to say
because I'm not going to
be saying much after this.
But I was thinking of
all those great books
that have been suddenly sort of
crossed our firmament recently.
European books, Elena Ferrante for one,
Knausgaard another one and now there's
a latest manifestation of a
gentleman called Edouard Louis
from France and we've all probably seen
The New Yorker this week.
They're all good writers, they're decent,
but they don't have this
thing that Sebald had
and that's what I wanted to say,
is that there is something about Sebald
that is fundamentally serious.
The tone is high, the style is perfect.
The fact is that when I was
asked by the New York Magazine
what are the great novels
of the 20th century
I said the one that will
remain in the next 50 years
as a classic is Austerlitz.
And I believe it, I think it's
one of the greatest novels
that we have produced, greater
than probably anything else
since what is it, the Memoirs of Hadrian.
But that is all my opinion,
and I am usually wrong,
as my wife says.
(audience laughs)
So without further ado,
I think we want to start
with Daniel Kehlmann to give us a sense of
what his experience of Sebald is.
- Yeah, thank you very
much I think I agree
with what you said about
the importance of Austerlitz
although I do like The
Rings of Saturn very much.
And I think, actually
although I think Austerlitz
might be his most important book,
if I had to pick a personal favorite
my favorite would be
Rings of Saturn I think
among his novels, his books ...
- [Andre] Well you and
my wife will get along.
(laughter)
- But it's very interesting
for me from the perspective
of someone who grew up in
Germany and in Austria then
and in the German-Austrian literary world
to look at Sebald and what he became
and his standing in the world.
Maybe we can talk about that
later, because it's really
strange that he never
reached a kind of recognition
in German literary world.
Until today he didn't actually,
but especially while he was still alive
he never got the recognition
that he got elsewhere,
especially in the United
States of America.
And it's a very funny and
at the same time sad episode
that he ...
There's a very famous and also
infamous literary competition
that's actually live on TV
in German literature called
(speaking in foreign language).
And in 1990 Sebald went to
(speaking in foreign language)
which is a prize for emerging
writers and read a chapter
from the Exiles.
- [Mark] From The Emigrants.
- The Emigrants, sorry.
I will sometimes confuse the
english titles of his books,
I apologize in advance.
And it was a disaster (laughs).
They give away four awards
and he got none of them.
And it's so strange to
look on that in retrospect,
Sebald, who is one of the
great writers of the century,
reading at a competition of
young and emerging writers
although he wasn't that
young anymore at this point,
and actually not getting any recognition.
Not too long after that the
(speaking in foreign language),
the house of literature
in Stuttgart was opened
and the head of that house, of that ...
How do you ...
Is there a way to translate
(speaking in foreign language)?
So he invited Sebald to
give the opening remarks
and Sebald gave an amazing speech,
which is a key part of his oeuvre
but the head of the (speaking
in foreign language)
he actually got into trouble
because people asked him
why can't you get a famous writer
for such an important occasion?
And it's strange how things developed ...
- If I can interrupt just for a second,
we've decided to be in
a conversation mode,
not in a formal presentation mode,
at the very time this was
not early in Sebald's career,
this was in 2001, shortly before he died.
To say that about Sebald, at
the same time in New York,
Richard Eder had written
in the New York Times
about Austerlitz that, with Primo Levi,
Sebald was the foremost
spokesman of the Holocaust.
That he put a non-Jewish
German into the category
with Primo Levi saying
these are the great writers
who have been able to
write about the Holocaust.
So really at the pinnacle
and at that time,
there was no more famous
author in Europe in America
than W. G. Sebald.
So a completely different reception,
and even today people dismiss Sebald as
an American fascination or
something that is not really
central for German literature.
- Which is incredible
and really outrageous.
So I'm not here to defend
that position, I just wanted
to bring that up, so
don't look at me (laughs).
And on a more serious note,
what I find so interesting
when you look at Sebald's oeuvre,
at the whole, in its development,
I think it was Nabokov
who said, maybe I'm wrong
about that but I think it was
Nabokov who said the only
biography of a writer
worth telling and writing
down is the history
and development of his style.
And I think in the case of
Sebald that's even more true
and more interesting than
with most other writers
because he didn't start
out as a literary writer.
He wrote a lot of things
in the position of
being something else and
not a literary writer
because he was a literary scholar.
And if you read his essays
or what is published today
as his essays in chronological order,
it's a very very unusual
development from a very
conventional style actually,
a very rather confined,
conventional, scholarly style
of writing about literature
and then gradually loosening
up and allowing himself
to insert elements of
fiction and fictional writing
and even his first literary
book, Vertigo, is kind of
a book of literary
fiction but in a disguise
of a book of nonfiction.
And so he starts out being
a writer of a very formal
and special kind of nonfiction,
literary scholarship,
who then inserts elements of fiction
and he ends up being quite the opposite.
He ends up being a great
great fiction writer
who just in a very playful way
pretends to write nonfiction
and I find that very fascinating.
- And if I could pick up on
Andre's remark that Sebald
hadn't found his form,
I think it is striking
that Sebald with almost
every book created a new form
even though in retrospect
we can hear the Sebald sound
or we can see the preoccupation
with certain themes
and unify the books,
but his very first book
when he finally gave up
the academic mantel of
the scholarly essay, which
by the way he was always
undermining in other ways
because he was not quite
the academic.
I think he was always playing
at being the academic.
But when his first real attempt
at literature as an adult,
because he had written
a novel as a young man,
was actually a long
narrative poem, After Nature,
it was one of the last
things to be published
in english translation, but
that was the very first book.
It was autobiographical,
it was in four parts,
but it was a poem.
Then he went to the biographical
essay, the writer essay
with an essay about Stendhal,
about Kafka, about Casanova,
but then fictionalizing them,
taking them slightly past
the mode of a scholarly
essay or just an essay.
- But in a somewhat uneasy
way, or would you disagree?
He's not completely at
ease with what he's doing
at this point.
I think at this point he is
really looking for his form.
- He's finding his way.
Then he writes The Emigrants,
where he takes again
the four stories and
instead of famous writers
he brings it into the
realm of family history
and photo albums and people
he's happened to know
and even his own family.
Then The Rings of Saturn, a
completely different book,
and then Austerlitz.
It was as if he was trying
to find a different form
with each book, which is
quite unusual I think.
I don't know, Judith, you
have thoughts about this.
- Yes, can everyone hear me? Is this on?
I just wanted to say though,
there is a sense of contingency
in the creation of these
books as well because
very often Sebald was
trying to figure out how
he could make a little bit more
money and establish himself
a little bit more as a writer.
And what he tended to do was
to send essays and articles
to various reputable
German language newspapers.
So in the (speaking in
foreign language) of those
we see several of the
stories, several of the parts
of The Rings of Saturn, and
some of the other things
he wrote.
He had loosely in mind the
idea, perhaps he might be able
to put them together, but
that wasn't absolutely clear
as he was writing them.
- Perhaps before we move on,
we might want to consider
the issue which was raised
in quite a few among
the panelists before what
you call the contingency,
which is the incidental and ...
- [Mark] Coincidental.
- Coincidental, yes.
The way in which he strings
or laces things together
as if there was a connection between them,
but I've always felt, and
maybe that's why I got fed up
with The Rings of Saturn is
that it seemed a bit forced
and adventitious to a fault.
To the point where he was
putting these things together
as if each one was a
separate entity that was now
belonging in a bigger work.
But then, all famous
writers have done that,
precisely that thing, of
putting together things
that had been published separately.
- One of the things we were
also talking about is ...
I don't know how much this
interests a general audience,
but it is for a scholar like
myself interesting to see
the scholarly Sebald
and the writer Sebald,
these two different persona.
The scholar Sebald is a polemicist,
he's an angry young man,
he's unfair, he criticizes
writers in a way that
the readers and scholars
of those writers feel is
completely unjustified,
it's really a break from
what we think of when
we think of Sebald as
this empathetic listener.
I think one of the really
characteristic marks
of his fiction is that
he creates this unnamed
German narrator who is there listening
to other people's stories,
and it's that willingness
to listen, that empathy,
which struck I think
a really deep chord in
that moment in the 90s
of a lot of Holocaust
memory, that here finally
was a non-Jewish German
who could hear the stories
of the survivors of that period.
And it's striking that,
and I don't know if Daniel
if you have a theory
about this, or Judith,
why he's such an angry
polemicist as a scholar,
constantly at war with people,
and then when he starts
writing literature has
this great understanding of all people.
- And then also, if I might add to that,
he doesn't just criticize
somebody for something,
he really focuses on something peculiar.
He made most of an impact
until today as a polemicist,
well there are three things of course,
one is famously his point that the German
post-war literature didn't
bring up the experience
of being bombed, of
experiencing the bombs,
and then there are two writers
he really attacked fiercely
in his scholarly essay.
One is Ulrich Becker, who was
maybe the most prestigious
Jewish Holocaust writer
of the late 80s and 90s
with his book (speaking
in foreign language),
which he thinks is hypocritical
and just bad literature.
And the other one is Alfred Andersch,
who was one of the leading
writers of Group 47
and was also a hero of the Left and of ...
You can say kind of anti-Nazi
literature after fact.
I as somebody who recently reread Andersch
I think that's where he's
most unfair actually,
but that might be ...
Somebody else might disagree with that.
- Well actually, I think you're
right to say he's really ...
Well both of you mentioned
that he was a product
of the 1968 student movement
and I experienced bits
and pieces of that when I was doing study
in Munster in Germany, and
there students were marching
against their professors
because professors were thought
to be starchy.
The professors were thought to be thinking
about aesthetic matters,
they were not thinking about
the world or about how the
world could be improved
by the right kind of literature.
And so for example, they
would be marching through
the streets and saying
such and such professor,
they would put his name
in, is saving Kafka
because at that point they thought Kafka
was far too aestheticist.
We would never say that today.
I mean, of course you've written
the most fascinating book
though on Kafka's holy
aestheticism, but that's a result
of another phase.
And the anger that
everybody had about that.
The anger at their professors and at
traditional german studies.
And I think that Sebald
just got to the point where
he thought things have
to have the right view,
and the right view is my
view, and if they don't have
that view, then I'm gonna
give them a really hard time.
And that's what he did.
- But it's still strange,
I mean how do we put them
in the right relation?
The Sebald, the very very calm, quiet,
empathetic Sebald persona
of the famous books,
and the very very angry scholar
who basically hates everyone.
They are obviously the same
person but, it is very ...
I don't have a good theory
here, I just find it
very puzzling.
- And it's even stranger
when one thinks that some of
the people he attacks, the
writers, are Jewish writers.
I mean Ulrich Becker is the ...
With Jacob the Liar but
also Bronstein's Children
had written these great
books about Jewish identity
as a german speaking
and german writing Jew.
But also Hermann Broch,
he accused Hermann Broch,
this great writer, The Death
of Virgil, the Sleepwalkers,
who was in exile in America
working in this library,
he accused him of having
written a Nazi novel,
of glorifying the Nazi
movement implicitly with
his Mountain novel.
He did the same thing when
he wrote his dissertation.
A writer not that well
known here named Stanheim,
who was a Jewish writer of Kafka's period,
who had been hounded
into exile in the 30s,
had suffered terribly, and
Sebald accused him also
of being anti-Semitic.
And he sent his manuscript to
Adorno and Adorno wrote back
to him and said you're being really tough
on this poor Stanheim.
So it's really quite a puzzle.
I don't know what quite to make of it.
Later we'll have a Q and A
period, if people have ideas
about this I'd be curious.
- Well the only thing I
can say is that he was
very insecure as an academician.
In the academy he was not
secure and I saw some letters
and he's always complaining about ...
Even this is when he's in East Anglia,
they're giving him all
kinds of honorific titles,
they're giving him free time,
and he's always complaining
they're not giving me enough,
there's not enough money,
I should be doing this,
I should be given that
but I'm not getting it
because of such and such.
The man was very insecure in
the profession as a professor.
- Well I think he was also
angry because he felt that
his family and the place
in South Germany right on
the border where he was
living was not actually
talking about the Holocaust,
and that they had kept it
from him.
He felt that they were
withholding information
and that was a result of
their guilt or something,
but he was just angry because
he felt that that should
have been an open
discussion in the family.
Of course, other people at
the same time were saying
we're talking about this too much.
- Well later on, I think
that you're absolutely right,
that is the anger that links
Sebald to his generation
of young Germans, Germans
born during the war,
right after the war, who grew up in this
what Sebald calls the conspiracy
of silence of the 1950s
where the teachers, the
parents, the politicians
all knew what had taken place
but didn't talk about it,
and then the students
came of age in the 60s,
the Auschwitz trials took place,
there were long descriptions
in the daily newspapers
about exactly what happened,
and for the first time
Sebald and many of his
peers read these accounts
and that of course is
then the great anger that
in the German situation '68
isn't just the rebellion
against authority that
we know from this country
or that the French had
in many other places,
but in Germany it's fueled
by that conspiracy of silence
of having been lied to
by the authority figures
and I think that that's something
that Sebald is really ...
His generation, that
generational experience of being
a second-generation German is
really central to his work.
And that includes leaving
Germany, going somewhere else,
feeling like you need
to be a good European
because nobody knows what it means
to be a good German anymore.
And at that time it seemed
a contradiction in terms,
and so Sebald's obscure life as a
(speaking in foreign
language), as a scholar
of German literature in East Anglia,
not even in Cambridge or Oxford or London,
but in a provincial English
university was somehow
characteristic of so many
Germans who felt that,
the best Germans often, that
they had to leave Germany
in order to be true to another identity.
- He makes that connection quite
explicit in one of his last
published texts, a speech he
gave when he was introduced
into the (speaking in foreign language).
And I think this is one of
the most important texts
where he talks about himself,
which he doesn't do a lot.
It's very short, it's only one
and a half, maybe two pages
and there he says explicitly
that he grew up in this
unbearable silence, and especially
he makes that connection
that then he had to leave
because that silence
was unbearable.
This is extremely interesting
in different ways,
I think it is one of his
most important experiences
and formative experiences
as a writer to really feel
the unbearableness of that
silence at school, in the family,
everywhere, about what just
had happened when he was young.
But then also he explicitly
makes that connection
that the silence of the things
that drove people into exile
actually drove him into exile.
So he ...
And that's the most
peculiar thing about him,
that he becomes one of the
exiles in his own mind,
whose fate is so
interesting and so important
and so moving to him.
So he feels like he is
one of them I think.
- Although of course he
was criticized by some
who said he shouldn't be
identifying with these exiles,
he didn't have to leave,
he was never persecuted,
and so forth.
There's a discussion,
although I think it's one of
the reasons he chose for
his book not The Exiles,
but The Emigrants, because
he does include his own
family history in that book.
But he doesn't take that
category of the Jewish exile,
refugee from ...
- In the German title
(speaking in foreign language),
it has even more restraint
because (speaking in foreign
language) really just means
those who move away, it
doesn't mean refugees.
- No it doesn't except
that it is an illusion
to Goethe's story about people who have
left for elsewhere ...
- [Mark] After the French Revolution.
- After the French Revolution
and they're telling
each other stories.
And all of this also has to
do with weaving and weavers
and so forth, but one of
the other things I wanted
to say was, when we contrast the Sebald,
the calm, cool, not
really calm, calm warm,
but steady slow voice of the
narrator in his prose fictions,
we don't have to just contrast
that with the early Sebald
who was an angry young man.
We can also contrast that
with the transgressive writer
that Sebald was.
And one of the things I
wanna do if we get a moment
is to show how very different
Sebald as an author is
from his narrators, and
that was one thing I would
like to just point out to us
because over and over again
in his own notes, he's
very conscious of this,
and he writes narrator narrates,
does this, and goes there
and so on.
So he, even though many people
talk about the pseudo Sebald
just as we talk about the
pseudo Marcel in Proust,
there is perhaps a more precise difference
at certain moments, and I don't
know if I could show that?
- [Moderator] Yeah, you can show that.
- Yeah, why don't I see if I can do that.
I have a number of slides here.
So I'm not even going
to show my first page
and I'm only going to pick
out a couple of these images.
These are of course not history paintings,
they're views by Ruisdael of
Haarlem from the 17th century.
He did about seven of
these different paintings,
and here we have one on the
right with the warm pallet
and the very sunny bleaching
fields reflecting the sun
upward, the warm yellow color,
and then a much bleaker one
where everything looks much more
blue and gray.
And the set of six or seven
paintings is distributed
among these two.
The one here on the right
is the one that the narrator
goes to see in The
Hague at the Mauritshuis
and he arrives there,
he's made a special trip,
and he gets there, he
hasn't made a trip to see
this painting, he's made a trip to see
Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson of 1632,
and he's so angry about that painting,
ubelieveably angry,
everything's just a mishmash,
things put together, the
faces of the other doctors
are all looking in different directions,
and in any case it's a
really revolting subject.
So we have a narrator here who is grumpy.
He's so grumpy he can
hardly contain himself.
And after a while he says
I'm going to just look
at another painting.
And he knows where he's going
and he's going to the one
on the right hand side and
I'm showing that because
this is called the birds-eye view.
Both of these paintings
are in the birds-eye view.
Of course in film the birds-eye
view today also includes
the aerial shot, but in
these earlier centuries
it's pretty much literally a
bird, and no bird has a sort of
eye in it's underbelly as
it's flying over something,
so it's always seen from an angle.
These things here are
actually the rows of houses,
these are the bleaching
fields and the people
working in them.
So the point I'm making
is a grumpy narrator
with a very particular
set of characteristics.
He goes to see the Battle
of Waterloo, which I think
John Knight mentioned
in his talk, and this is
an important experience
for this grumpy narrator.
So off he goes, he hates
Belgium, obviously,
he hates Brussels, he hates
Waterloo, and so forth.
He goes to look at this
monument, the monument is a mound
and the viewer as visitors
to the battle sight
go and look, they climb up
the stairs, you can see them
climbing up and they walk
around a sort of balcony
and of course they then
have a birds-eye view
of the battlefield.
Apocryphally I hear, Victor
Hugo in Les Miserables
actually quotes Wellington
who went two years after
the battle of Waterloo and
he said they've changed
my battlefield, cuz this
mound wasn't there at all,
and actually that image is
a construction of the mound
made out of debris, the debris of history,
debris of battle, and a
small farmhouse as well.
But let me go back.
So here we are Beneath the
Lion's Paws, it's even more
intimidating as it were
than if you were a bird
up there looking down.
So when you're up high you
can have a peaceful, calm
overview of everything,
from an angle however.
The Waterloo-Panorama, and
I think it was Jonathan who
mentioned that one today,
this viewing platform ...
Well look at that, look at
these people on the platform,
where are they?
They're up off the ground
on a viewing platform,
so they in fact have the
privilege of a birds-eye view,
and what they're viewing
is a huge surround picture,
it's a panorama that goes all around them,
but what they're viewing
is from a birds-eye view.
They mainly look down,
slantwise, and they can also see
the upper parts.
But, everybody says oh it's
in the center of things,
but if you were in the
center of things you would be
a dead body on the ground here.
This is the actual painting
by Dumontin in 1912,
and here we see very clearly
what we see of dead soldiers,
dying horses, we also see
smoke coming up from the fire,
and the top of the picture,
the horizon and the sky,
is one of those birds-eye view images,
just as we saw in the Ruisdael.
Sebald was a trickster and
he took a colored brochure
and he cut part of that
painting out into an oval shape,
I think he probably xeroxed
it on his department
xerox machine before then
making it into an oval.
What point of view is that?
It's not even a camera's eye.
It's just kind of quaint
oldey fashionedy perspective.
I'm going to come quickly
to a real history painting,
Willem van de Velde the Younger,
The Burning of the Royal
James: Battle of Sole Bay.
And you can see that here
the painter also is standing
at an imaginary point
somewhat above the horizon.
You see there is a very low horizon here,
but actually that wasn't the case because
van de Velde the Younger
and the Older were both
in little boats on the
periphery of the scene
and looking slantwise upward.
But it's always peripheral
and looking at an angle.
I'm very partial to this
because this is an image
that Sebald doesn't reproduce
but his grumpy narrator
tells us it's so horrible
he's been looking
at these paintings in the Greenwich Museum
at the Observatory in Greenwich.
Greenwich meantime you
know it's all very steady
and all very central
and it's an observatory.
But he says, what's wrong
with all these paintings
is that they don't show
what it's like for a sailor,
for a fighting sailor to
be standing on the deck
and experiencing the boat
collapsing around him
as a result of fire from
cannonballs from the other side.
Both of the van de Veldes
first worked for Holland
and then they worked for England.
Here's something that
Sebald didn't see and it is
an autoboss proto film, we see two ...
We see these frigates,
these are not small boats,
they only look small here because
he's making a quick sketch
from his little boat at
an angle on the side.
But you can see the boat
the masts are coming down.
So the reproach that the
grumpy narrator makes is not
really a fear reproach at
all, it's just him expressing
his own irritation at all this.
This is a more composed,
it's designed for tapestry,
and the little boat in the ...
Where are we? There.
In the left hand foreground
is supposed to be
a representation of the
boat that the artists used
but isn't that bizarre too?
Because you can't draw yourself on a boat.
They did, they have several
pictures of themselves,
but you see the peripheral position.
Now what I'm talking about,
and I think we can just
turn all this off.
So basically the point
of this is to show how
the peripheral position
is so important for him.
And we're talking about
the advantages of it,
he's away in England where
he can be nice and grumpy
about his parents in Germany
and his teachers in Germany.
He's off to the side, but
then he's at the University
of East Anglia, he's not
at Oxford or Cambridge,
so he's off to the side.
How is he going to establish
his scholarly credentials?
Well, he makes a book of
essays, and that counts
as the second big long book
that you have to present.
So that was basically ...
The question is, his skepticism
about whether we can even
find out the truth is reflected here.
His narrator has a chance
to think about first of all
the slantwise view from above
and secondly the peripheral
slantwise view up, the more
subjectivized and perhaps
more traumatic view, but
he doesn't really learn
any clear lesson.
So that's just a visual interlude.
(muffled comment from moderator)
(audience laughs)
- Actually, I thought that
you were going to address
his use of images in his literature.
I think it's easy to forget
how new Sebald's books
felt at the time.
Now we're used to people writing fiction
but using these documentary images.
That seamless kind of
mixing of image and text
has become a real cliche.
- And everyone got it from him ...
- Well the Sole Bay image
is actually from Greenwich
and that's what he saw there.
One thing we have is we
don't have his photos anymore
quite in the shape that they were.
And that's for archival reasons.
But when I first looked at those photos
he had cut out lots lots lots
more black and white images
of paintings from an
art book or a catalog.
- But I mean I think that
the question for Sebald,
he said that the way he wrote his books
was to take images that
he had been collecting
and put them out on the table
and start rearranging them
and then through those
seeing lines of connection
between those images then start to imagine
the stories that could be told.
And you know, we take it for granted now,
but it really felt revolutionary,
even though of course images
and text have been used
together in many ways and
by many people before him,
but somehow there was something
new about how he did it
that really struck a
nerve and I'd be curious,
Daniel, if you had thoughts
about what it was, how he did it
that made it seem so new.
- Well, one thing ...
But I have a question
that just came to my mind
all those years of reading
Sebald, I never asked myself
the question I'm gonna
ask you now, because ...
Well I think what's really
interesting and kind of new
and innovative about his use of pictures
is that they're not good pictures.
The quality's terrible, you
don't really see what's on them,
you don't really know
why they're in there.
And of course, when you're
the first one who does that
it's really confusing and it's
like there is some mystery
hidden there that you need to solve.
But from today's perspective,
looking back on those books
as the classics they are
now, I'm asking myself
would we read them different
if he hadn't put in
those pictures?
I think we wouldn't
really miss them so much,
but maybe half the room
will hate me for this.
- But we do also have to
know that these seemingly
deteriorating and deteriorated pictures
are very largely made to be that.
And there have been some very
interesting studies on this
and you can see that sometimes
the truly hopeless, old,
departmental photocopier
can have its benefits
because it is so grainy that
you look he makes perfectly
clean, modern postcards
look like something gritty
though I think he also strew
some stuff on the glass.
He's fabricating these things.
- [Daniel] But from today's
perspective, apart from the
fact, what they have become now
is they have become a Sebald signifier.
We look at that and we see
that this is a Sebald book
or this is a book of somebody
who was influenced by Sebald.
But would the books be a lot
different without those images.
I'm asking, I don't have an answer.
- Absolutely, I mean for me I can't ...
Sebald without the images is not Sebald.
I mean, they're really
central and it's ...
I mean, one of the things that's
striking about the quality
of the images is poor,
he uses black and white,
he gets rid of the color,
that's very important of
taking it out of this modern realm of
contemporary photography
and making it seem
like an older period even
if it's contemporary.
The photos were never simply illustrations
of what he was saying,
there were no captions
and most oddly there was
no attribution at the end
of the book, there were
no rights given for images
that he had taken off from somebody else.
- [Judith] Some people sued for those.
- Oh he does give the ... ?
- [Judith] Yes, but he got
sued by a man (voice drown out)
- But the first editions
of Sebald's books in German
had absolutely no
attributions for these images.
So they seemed to come out of nowhere,
and I think that was part of the mystery.
- You were not actually
meant to make an association
between the text and the photograph,
and no matter how much you
tried there was always a gap.
You weren't sure if you were ...
Plus we also read somewhere
that whenever there's
handwriting, and I might
say a little episode
about his handwriting, I mean
he faked the handwriting.
In other words it was just
(speaking in foreign language)
and it was not supposed to be read
because you couldn't read it.
But I have to say this story
because, I should have brought
it with me but I didn't.
After I had reviewed his Emigrants,
he sent me a card to
thank me, which is nice.
But he sent me an antique
image of Alexandria, Egypt,
where I'm from, and it
was dated back to 1904.
And so I get this in an
envelope, it's a 1904 image
of Alexandria and in the
back there's an old lady
sort of writing to her
niece saying we are having
a terrific time in Egypt,
and it's dated 1904.
Except that on top of that handwriting,
I mean you wanna use that
horrible word palimpsest
go ahead, Sebald says "Dear
Andre, thank you very much
for the review" but he's
writing in black ink.
And so the other thing is
written in this kind of ...
- Sepia?
- Sepia ink. So it is a
typical thing that he does.
It was meant to thank me and
to confuse me and to gratify me
and to say now you can
never throw that card out
because it's from me.
But there was always a sense of the images
were sometimes forced.
And we have another story to tell you,
if you look at the image
that we have for the event.
This is the one, yes, we
took this from the cover
of the book.
And ironically I had read
somewhere, and if one of you knows
or if anybody in this panel
knows, he said somewhere,
because I read it somewhere,
that he found this image
by pure chance and simply
decided that this was going
to be the boy.
Except there was
absolutely no way that ...
I could not find that quote again.
And so in order to use
this image we had to
get in touch with ...
What is it, who published it?
Random House published the
book, Random House had no idea
who owned the rights to the
pictures so we went to the agent
and the agent had of course
said go to the publisher.
We went to the publisher in
England, then in Germany,
and they had no idea who owned it.
Eventually the agent just simply said,
look just give us 60 bucks.
(everyone laughs)
Which is what we did.
- You know this is also
true though a vast amount
of the prose in these books,
vast vast amounts of it.
He's a master at every
form of intertextuality,
including of course intermediality,
but intertextuality.
Alluding to works,
quoting snippets of works,
this is the thing where he
comes out of the operation
and he feels as if he's
in a hot air baloon,
up above with a birds-eye perspective,
and he uses phrases and
words from Schtifter.
There are long long
passages that he translates
into german from other languages,
he's a very fluent translator.
He founded and became the
head of a translation center.
But we see here in his
manuscripts sort of testing
these things out.
He translates quite
accurately very quickly
and then he goes faster and
faster to get the sentence
written right.
But there are a lot of
things where he has not made
any change whatsoever, but
he's very transgressive
about all that and there
are some things where
basically you have to ask a question:
is it still a literary borrowing
if it's being translated
into another language?
In other words, where does plagiarism stop
or where does plagiarism start?
So take a long english
text, which I just worked
on recently, and publish
an article about it,
an old guidebook, and he just
translates it into german.
And nobody knows what it is
but I discovered what it is.
And I think that's why he
broke with his first translator
wasn't it?
Because that translator
could find the passages
that were directly lifted from Conrad
and he could put those back in English.
But the passages from
obscure books, which often go
over many pages, he
didn't know where to find.
So that is another ...
When I say Sebald was a
very transgressive writer
and very prone to appropriate
things in a very creative way.
He's asking question after question about
what we do when we think
about writing and literature
and the use of material from (muffled).
So it's very fascinating.
- [Mark] Should we open
it up to questions?
- Yes, we should, thank you.
We should open up this
to questions and answers.
Questions from you and answers from us.
(audience laughs)
And you can ask any question you want,
provided it's not a disquisition.
Yes?
- [Mark] We should give
people microphones.
- You wanted the mic, yes.
Thank you, thank you.
- [Claire] Here, what I
can do is maybe take one
from each table and then we
can call somebody to stand.
Okay. Questions?
It's alright.
- [Female Audience
Member] Can you hear me?
I have two quick questions.
One is about translation and
why he had his books translated
since he was such a
good translator himself?
Also whether their
translations are what account
for his popularity abroad,
and you know we've been
talking about him as an
author but the way many of us
have familiarized
ourselves with his work is
through the translation not
directly, and so what impact
the translation has.
And also, how much Google
has changed the way we read
his books because when
you're reading them now you,
at least I, immediately
Google the place that he is
writing about.
So when he's talking about
the train station in Brussels
you can Google that and see
what it really looks like
compared to his, and all of the
places that he writes about,
you can actually see now on your computer,
you don't need to rely on his description
and whether that changes
the way you read him,
that you can just look
up the place and see
what it really looks like.
- Well when I refer to
translation I'm referring to
the texts that Sebald read
in a different language
other than german.
All of these big prose books
were written originally
and published originally in german.
But in order to follow Chateaubriand,
in order to follow Henri Beyle, Stedhal,
he just simply takes the
french and he writes it out
into german and he stops here and there
and interpolates comments and so forth
and he makes changes.
So that's what I mean by that translation.
Then we have the german books
and they were then translated
into english.
And when it's clear that Sebald
was looking simultaneously
at, let us say, Conrad's
Heart of Darkness,
then the person who
translated this prose fiction
of Sebald into english,
that was Michael Hulse,
and he could just take
out his edition of Conrad
and find the english and
plug the english straight in,
because essentially
what Sebald had done was
take the english and put it in german,
plug it into his german text.
But then there were these
obscure things like the
walking tour logbook
that nobody knew about,
and so Hulse could not find
where those things were.
And that is not necessarily
continuous pages of translation
but it comes very thick and
fast in fairly large doses
and so that was why then
Anthea Bell was the person
who was asked to do the
translation of Austerlitz
for example, because ...
Sebald really, and you came
to Harvard too and looked
at those incredible
typescripts that Hulse did
and Sebald's handwriting
in pen at the top of it,
I mean it would take you a
lot of work to go through
every word of that.
- Except that Michael Hulse,
to justify him, is a poet
in his own right and a very ...
- He's a what?
- He's a poet and he's a very good poet,
actually very talented.
- Yes of course.
- Anthea Bell is a woman
who's now translating all
the works of Stefan Zweig
and she's not a poet.
- Oh, I'm not criticizing Hulse.
- No no no, I'm just saying
that basically Hulse had,
I think it is ...
To answer your question, I
think, and I may be wrong,
that there is something about the english,
the very quality of the
english prose that we have
come to know as Sebald's prose
that is absolutely sublime.
And I think that it
started with Michael Hulse
because as soon as you read Michael Hulse
you can sense there's
a cadence to this prose
that is unlike anything we've
seen in english in years.
And I think that Anthea
Bell does the same thing,
she maintains, I'm sure she
maintains Hulse's rhythm
and Sebald because Sebald also
was a very intrusive author
when it came to translation, am I right?
- No you're absolutely right.
I mean the first english
translations of The Emigrants,
for instance, was very
much a collaboration
between Hulse and Sebald
because he knew english so well.
Of course, with other languages
he couldn't always do that
but with his english translations
he absolutely went ...
And it was such a painful
work for the translator
to see months of labor coming back to you
with all of these markings,
and you have to redo everything
to make the author happy.
It was a fraught collaboration,
but a very successful one,
but somewhat tragically I
think it foundered at a certain
point and they couldn't go on.
- But tell us about the actual quality,
because the english quality is perfect,
and I'm just wondering if the german is,
because I don't read german.
- I think the german is
sublime, but I'll let Daniel
answer this.
- The German is sublime,
but it is very different.
It's not very different,
but it is different.
He is a different writer in
german than he reads in english
and the thing that's most
different is that in german
he has a real love for a
certain kind of local phrases
or local words.
Therefore southern german
words, which he doesn't ...
So he sounds local in
a strange way in german
that he doesn't sound in english.
In english I think he reads like Borges,
like this very very worldly,
extremely international
writer with this beautiful
flow of language,
and in german there is
always this strange aspect
that kind of ties him to
a certain part, his prose
to a certain part of
Germany where he is from.
For example he loves this word
(speaking in foreign language), and good,
(speaking in foreign language).
It comes up all the time and it is a ...
I wouldn't say it's not quite
dialect, but it's something
that you would never find in Thomas Mann
or Josef Freund or Zweig.
It is ...
So there is something,
I wouldn't go so far
to call it parochial, not at
all, but there is something
decisively un-urban in his ...
And of course he's aware
of that, it's not something
that happens to him, he really knows that.
But there is something
different to this very very
international worldly urban
writer that he is in english.
- Also the 19th century style.
In german you can hear
the 19th century style
much more clearly and
you can almost imagine
somebody narrating that way.
- Yeah I think Sebald himself
said that he took deliberately
the sound of the 19th century
to narrate the horrors
of the 20th century and
that discrepancy for him
was very important.
But the question about Google
I think is an interesting one
because I think it takes a lot
of the mystery out of Sebald.
I mean, you can instantly,
you have these epigraphs
for instance to his works.
You can Google them now
and you suddenly see
oh this is from a poem by Holderlin,
but he doesn't tell you that.
He doesn't say where these things are from
and now it's all very
easy, too easy I think,
to figure out the puzzle.
Other questions?
- [Female Audience Member]
Could you please tell
what other countries he's popular
to and other translations,
how popular these translations
in other countries?
- I don't know if there's a ...
I don't off the top of my head
know into how many languages
he's been translated, but
I would say that he is
better loved in the
english speaking world,
by which I mean America,
England, Australia, New Zealand,
they're very dedicated readers,
but also in Italy, France,
and in Spain he's probably
I think it's fair to say
taken more seriously than he
is still today in Germany.
But he's probably been translated into 20
different languages I would say.
At least.
- The experience I have is that whenever
I have a conversation with French critics
or Italian critics, they will
name a whole slew of writers
that I consider either
nugatory and worthless
or that I have never heard of, which I say
the same thing about them too.
But eventually at some point
when I want to put a stop
to this kind of idiotic game
is to say what about Sebald?
And at that moment every French
critic, every French person
and every Italian will say
oh well, that's serious.
And so suddenly it means
that in their language
Sebald is translated in such
a way that automatically
he is canonical in
their tradition as well.
- [Female Audience Member] Yeah, hi,
you had raised a question
of reception in Germany
in the beginning and I
wonder since Judith Ryan
called Sebald a trickster
because he could have written
in english and it was
apparently to the irritation
of the people over in
Britain that he did not write
in english because then they
couldn't call him a British
writer, and being the trickster
he might have deliberately
also fudged his own reception
because I'm wondering
if Germans were also
seeing him as ex-patriot
and British writer.
And the second part of the
question would be Ann Fox,
I don't know how, but she
furnished quite a bit of evidence
that actually it's a myth
that he was not received
all that well in Germany.
He won apparently a number
of prizes, so I wonder
if you could elaborate on
that question of reception?
Did he deliberately create
that, is he German or British,
did that affect the reception?
And is it really true that
he was received so poorly
in Germany as everybody
would like to think?
Maybe the British created
that, I don't know (laughs).
That was a joke but ...
- No I think it's true. I think it's true.
I was there, I remember the
conversation in the German
literary world in the mid and late 90s
and that was the time when
Sebald had already become
pretty much canonical over here.
I remember when Austerlitz was published
and it was really not seen as a big event.
Of course it was reviewed,
but it was not seen
as a big event in the
German literary world
and I remember how
outrageous I found it when
I mentioned Sebald and
people who were part
of the literary world had
either not even heard the name
or it wasn't considered an
important writer for them at all.
So it is true that he got a few awards.
There was one award he got
(speaking in foreign language)
which is a weird story in itself because
it's not a major award, and
to think it really happened,
a writer who was there told me.
They had a couple of writers reading their
(speaking in foreign
language), reading their work
to each other, and then there
was a vote and the writers
voted who among them who
should get the award,
the (speaking in foreign language).
That must have been mid
90s, maybe '95, '96.
What happened was every single
writer, including Sebald
voted for themselves.
(audience laughs)
And then in the second
round of voting one writer,
Norbert Stein, voted for Sebald.
Everyone else, including
Sebald, voted for themselves
a second time and so Sebald
got to have that award.
(audience laughs)
(Daniel laughs)
So yeah.
I think unfortunately it is
true that he wasn't really
regarded as well as he should
have been at that point.
But of course, it would have evened out.
So that the big ...
The way his reputation grew
over here, it would have then
reflected back on how
people read him in Germany,
and it has of course,
but he died before that
really had an effect.
- [Andre] I think there's
a question over there,
somebody has the microphone.
- [Female Audience Member]
Yes, I was wondering
about Sebald's identification as a German
and to what extent he
actually felt Bavarian
vis-a-vis any other of the German states,
because what struck me
was when he, for example,
recalled being shown
Holocaust photos in school
and no one explained to
him in school that couldn't
really be discussed even
though they had to look
at those pictures.
And my experience in
Germany was very different,
like many decades later, or
a few decades at least later,
but it seems to me maybe
there is something specific
about his German identity,
which is Bavarian,
and maybe that also
has to do with silence.
- Well I would say, I've
done quite a bit of work
on Sebald's origins and
I think that he wouldn't
consider himself so much
Bavarian as from the Allgau,
which is a portion of
Bavaria but it's tucked away
in the corner and it's on
the border with Austria
and on the border with Switzerland.
He went to a high school that
you could walk to Austria,
it was that close.
So he felt this affinity with
Austria and with Switzerland,
not at all with the (speaking
in foreign language),
with the Federal Republic of Germany.
But he really came out of
this rural, non-urban culture.
He was born in a tiny
village that didn't even have
a train station, and he spoke the dialect.
I've read letters that he
wrote with a friend of his
who went to school with,
he was living in England
at the time, and they're
written completely in dialect
and he has these hilarious
letters about sauerkraut
and written completely in dialect that ...
It was a part of him that
you can't see in translation,
there's no way that that will come out.
But a sharp German ear will
hear, even in the high german
that he wrote, these little
inflections and he had
a very deep connection
with this Allgau region.
Of course, he spent most of
his life away from the Allgau
and people ask him well
don't you feel homesick
for the Allgau and these places?
He said yes all the time, until I go back.
(audience laughs)
- I just want to add,
those inflections you hear,
he wanted that.
It's not something that
you can't switch off
if you have the abilities
of working with language
someone like Sebald had.
He wanted his German prose
to have those inflections
and to sound slightly local
for a number of reasons
but it's ...
And the same thing is ...
Maybe you know more about
that, when you hear him
speak english, he had
quite a heavy accent.
And I was told by friends of
his, or by people who knew him,
that he wanted it that way.
He didn't work on tuning down his accent,
so he kind of liked the idea
of in a way being a foreigner
or sounding like a foreigner.
Maybe that's wrong, maybe
that's just hearsay,
but that's what I heard.
- Let me ask you a question
then, and maybe I can answer
you with the same question.
If he was so sort of
faithful to that aspect
of his background that he
wanted to maintain in German,
what did he do to the
translators to encourage them
or to discourage from
them from maintaining
that little inflection that
would have appeared in English?
Which wouldn't have been that
difficult to do in English
with a good translator.
- [Judith] You mean to
create an inflection
by translating ...
- Yes, yes.
- I think it would be hard
for the English language
reader to perceive it.
But I suppose you could do it,
I just think it would sound
very weird.
- Well there are ways for a
translator to replicate some ...
And we do it all the time
in cinema and television
where you have these very
famous English actors
speaking with a german
accent when they have to.
And we all take it in stride
and we don't complain.
I'm just concerned that
if he was so committed
to maintaining this little
inflection in German,
why did he not labor to
have something like it?
Let's say that theoretically
it must have crossed his mind.
- Well I mean the question
is global english.
If an english translator
starts doing a welsh accent
to give this regional quality,
then what is the American
or Australian reader
going to do with that?
If I translate Sebald and put
a little bit of Bronx sound
into the ...
You know a New York accent.
It'll seem ridiculous.
But I think that one of the
questions that one has is
why do certain writers who
are so local nonetheless
translate so well into other languages?
I mean, Rilke, you would
say impossible to translate,
but there's so many good
translations of Rilke
and Rilke's so popular
in so many languages.
There's something about the writing ...
Kafka one can say the same thing about.
Certain writers write in such
a way that, even though they
in their original language
sound untranslatable.
A close friend of Kafka's,
Varful, said Kafka
can't be translated, he sounds
just like a suburb of Prague,
how can you do that?
And yet we know the history
of Kafka translations.
So there's some writers who can ...
Where it doesn't matter, and
I think that's one of genius,
the really tremendous
aspects of Sebald's writing
is that he has that local, that
nonetheless seems universal.
- Right, right.
- You can hear him on CD reading from ...
- (murmuring)
- Yes, the (speaking in foreign language).
And in that we hear of his
rival in England and so forth,
and he uses some english
words, and one can hear this
particular inflection.
There's an attempt to imitate
english more englishly
than the English themselves.
(audience laughs)
- [Mark] There's a question.
- [Female Audience Member]
I wanted to circle back
to the question that you
raised at the beginning.
Your puzzlement over
the difference between
Sebald the polemical academic writer
and the hypnotic literary Sebald.
And I have both a theory and a question.
The theory is that he's
just an effective writer,
and that it's very effective
within academic discourse
to be polemical, there's
a high payoff for that.
In the psychological realm
though, we can just theorize
that he was a frustrated wannabe writer,
which is every other academic,
unless you are Andre,
who has actually managed to write novels.
So maybe you might be
able to map his criticisms
of literature and see is
there a project there,
a negative project, that he's
then trying to carry out.
But my question about
that is, is there anywhere
where he has spoken or
written about his transition
from an academic to a novelist,
his becoming as an artist?
Or is it something that we
have to guess and deduce about
from that loosening of his prose?
Any clues that anyone has
about that transformation?
I'm really curious.
- Well to my knowledge he said
one or two things explicitly,
but I don't think they're the real reason.
But the reason he gave was
Thatcher, that the Thatcher
reforms of the university
were so disheartening that
he became very disgruntled
with university life.
You know University of East
Anglia was actually ...
It was provincial and it's out of the way,
it wasn't Cambridge and
Oxford, but it was quite
a wonderful place.
It was one of these new
universities created
on a golf course, and
after '68 in the early 70s,
and he was one of the
first instructors there,
and he had quite a wonderful
time with a bunch of
like-minded, very talented,
peer or colleagues.
But in the 80s that
changed and he said himself
that Thatcher made them
all into pencil pushers.
They had to number the ...
They had to account for their work ...
He was very disgruntled
and that's what he gave.
I don't think that's the real reason,
but it's the one he gave.
- [Female Audience
Member] What do you think
the real reason is?
- I think he went through a
crisis in his personal life,
and I'll leave it at that.
It was a very difficult
period and if you read Vertigo
you see the origins, the narrator
is wandering around Vienna
in a daze and goes for days
without speaking with anybody
and at a certain point
looks down at his shoes
and realizes he's like a homeless person
who's been wandering the
street and he's reflecting
I think on ...
His writing really begins
with a kind of crisis
in a personal life that the
writing became another world
for him.
- I mean just to pick up
where you asked the question,
it is strange because there's
a scholar and then there's
a novelist, and you used the
term which was used before,
the loosening of his style.
You use that intentionally I suppose.
What if we ...
But then you said he
was an affected writer,
which tells us that there's
maybe a problem in both terms
because in a sense I think
he's a very urbane writer
and wishfully, it's a willfully urbane.
In other words he studied
to write that way,
which makes it maybe not
a loosened style at all,
but a very composed one, very constructed.
And I think that in many ways,
we can say the same thing ...
I mean I hate to do this, but
his identity might have been
a bit constructed, since this
is what we were talking about.
In fact, we're not even sure.
I've never quite understood
what this emigration
was all about.
Was it that he just got a
job in England and couldn't
find one in Germany?
Was he so dissatisfied with
Germany that he was going
to find something better
in England, really?
I mean I don't understand
what that move was all about
and why he stayed in
East Anglia, which is not
the best place to be, even in the 60s.
Though he must have been ...
So we don't ...
There's something about him
that sort of always baffles us
a tiny bit, for which I
don't have any explanation,
and I'm not an expert in the field so ...
- But it seems as if
once he finally started
teaching writing he was very gratified,
found that very satisfying.
And we actually met ...
Do you remember the name
of that person, Larry?
- [Larry] I've forgotten.
- A wonderful young man
who had been a student
at Sebald's writing courses,
and he really appreciated
how Sebald worked with him on his writing.
This young man by the
way had totally different
style of writing, writing
about very violent things,
but clearly he had found
an ideal teacher in Sebald,
and Sebald really enjoyed the work.
- [Moderator] Okay I think
maybe there's one more question.
- [Female Audience Member]
I started to read Sebald
after he passed away and I'm
wondering if you can speak
to whether that changed
scholarship on Sebald,
your relationship to his work,
how your reading practice
maybe changed?
Or maybe it didn't.
Yeah, I'm just wondering
how his passing changed
your relationship to
his work and how maybe
you see the field having
changed or not changed
because of it.
- Well I can say that there
was almost no academic work
on Sebald during his lifetime.
There were reviews of his work,
but there was virtually no
academic criticism.
Now Sebald studies have
become a cottage industry,
it's an enormous field of
work, but that all came up
after his death, and very quickly.
I don't know exactly why, but I think ...
I dunno I think critics
feel more comfortable
when somebody's dead, right?
We like dead ...
- We like dead writers better.
- Dead writers better you
know, they can't talk back,
they can't answer.
Daniel, do you have ... ?
- Well that's a big philosophical question
because the moment a writer dies,
his oeuvre changes in a profound way,
the way we read it of course.
I mean now Austerlitz is
obviously the crowning endpoint
of that oeuvre.
Whereas when it came out, it
was just Sebald's new book
and it could've been a transitional novel
while he was moving elsewhere.
And when it's new and when
the writer is still alive,
that's always what you assume.
You don't look at it like this
is the crowning achievement.
Well it might be, but
if you like the writer
and if you believe in the
writer, you will not say
this is the crowning
achievement, you will say this is
his new book and there will be others
and I'm curious to see where he will go.
And the moment he dies
then of course everything
is kind of fixed into
place, and you have kind of
a narrative arc of that
writer's development
that didn't quite exist before.
So ...
But you have that with every writer,
but of course even more
so with the writers who
die at a moment when they
might still be able to produce
their best pieces of
work, their best work.
There's a ...
And it's all the construction in a way.
I mean the Austrian historian
and scholar, a wonderfully
witty person, Egon Friedell,
in (speaking in foreign
language), he writes about
Goethe taking part at the
German military campaign
into France.
And Goethe has a wonderful
description of being shot at,
what it is to come into fire
(speaking in foreign language),
and he describes the sound of the bullets.
It's a great piece of
writing that actually reads
like (speaking in foreign
language) in a strange way.
But anyway, Friedell
takes that and he says
if Goethe had died (speaking
in foreign language)
at this point, we would
regard it as a real tragedy,
but we would also say
what could he have done
after (speaking in foreign language)?
So the moment somebody
dies everything changes
the way we read him, and of
course that happened to Sebald.
- Well maybe we should conclude here,
and I should point out
that Daniel has completed
in the New York Public
Library his latest novel,
so that will not be the
last word from him we hope.
Thank you very much,
thank you for attending.
(audience applauds)
