ESSAYThe glowing tributes to the late German writer WG Sebald by literary heavyweights such as George Szirtes, Will Self and Susan Sontag are testament to his invaluable insights, writes Susan McKay, ahead of a conference at the University of East Anglia in celebration of his work
IT IS SEVEN years since the writer WG Sebald died, aged 57, in a car crash. His friends and colleagues speak of him with tenderness and a still unmitigated sense of loss as they prepare to talk about his work at an international conference in Norwich in September. "He is a great writer. He understands the human situation. He seems to me to get more of the world in than almost any other writer," says the poet and translator George Szirtes, who will read at the conference, along with poets Matthew Hollis and Lavinia Greenlaw.
It is not easy to classify Sebald's work, but for those who take to him, reading one of his books for the first time has the force of revelation. He is one of those writers whose insight becomes indispensable, and his readers press his books upon their friends with a rare urgency.
"He was a great discovery for me," says Szirtes. "He writes melancholy histories and magical encyclopaedias. He has done something very interesting with genre. He is not a storyteller, or a poet, or a novelist or a travel writer or a writer of memoirs. He doesn't claim authority - his work has a lyrical feel rather than being journalistic or academic. What it does, in a way, is to question the nature of our knowledge about things. It is writing. It is a person's voice. It is a sensibility and no one else has it. He gives me a sense of what it is to be in the world."
Susan Sontag has praised Sebald's "commanding, exquisite, prose arias". Anita Brookner said his work was unlike anything else, and that the reader emerged from reading him "shaken, seduced and deeply impressed".
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 into a rural Catholic family. His father had joined the army in 1929 and remained as a soldier during the Nazi era. A prisoner of war, he was absent during Sebald's early childhood. Sebald recalled that, at secondary school, his class had been shown a newsreel from Belsen, but that there had been no discussion about it afterwards. As a university student he learned from the Auschwitz trials that those responsible for the atrocities of Nazism were apparently ordinary German people.
He deplored the deliberate amnesia that afflicted post-Holocaust Germany, and accused most of the writers of the new Federal Republic of "propagating the myth of the good German who had no choice but to let everything wash over him and bear it" and "the fiction of a difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration". What is lost in this sentimental reappraisal of the "incriminating past", he argued, is any acknowledgement of the millions of victims of fascism as fellow citizens. "I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position," he once remarked.
His last book, Austerlitz, brought his work to a wider readership partly because it was taken up, particularly in the US, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is that - one reviewer wrote that he had never read a book that provided "such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis". However, the book is as much about history as about specific events, and its approach is oblique. "You could not write directly about the horror of persecution in its ultimate forms, because no one could bear to look at these things without losing their sanity," he said in an interview.
What was necessary was to intimate to the reader "that these subjects are constant company". Austerlitz concerns a man who is tormented by what turns out to be the absence of his own history, and who is almost destroyed by the discovery of the violence and loss it contains. "The moral backbone of literature is about the whole question of memory," Sebald has said. "Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and shape your life."
SEBALD MOVED TO England in 1970 and became a lecturer in European literature at the new University of East Anglia four years later. He was appointed chair of German literature in 1987, and founded the British Centre for Literary Translation at the university in 1989. Latterly, he taught creative writing on the famous course that had been set up by Malcolm Bradbury, who died in 2000. He wrote in German, and worked closely with his translators, one of whom, Anthea Bell, will speak at the conference.
According to Prof Lyndsey Stonebridge, one of the conference organisers, Sebald's writing was, in a sense, about translation. "He wanted to know things like: what does Poland in the 1930s sound like in Wales in the 1950s?" she says.
Sebald hated commemorations, she says, so the event is to be a celebration of his work. "To have someone that smart in the university was very important," she says. "He had a rather fierce commitment to language and he paid attention to beauty. He was sublime and serious and mournful, and he was also incredibly funny, with that very generous sense of humour that comes from knowing the world."
She says his work appealed to an unusually wide range of readers. He had read and understood structuralist and post-structuralist theorists, but he didn't require this of his readers. "His books breach the false divide between criticism in the academic environment and literature. His genius was to write work which is very complex and scholarly but which isn't knowing and self-referential. There is always a narrator who is a bit like Max - a good listener and a gatherer of stories. They are sometimes stories we might not want to hear, but they are engaging as well as melancholy."
The conference will include a long walk through East Anglia. Sebald was a walker, which fascinates the writer Will Self, one of the conference speakers. Self says he distrusts fiction writers who are "too good at criticism" but doesn't include Sebald in that category. "He was a rebarbative and rather tendentious critic," he says. Sebald is, he says, an "undisputably great literary figure". Self is working on a book of essays that arose after he "undertook a journey on a Sebaldian premise".
"Our interests have been marching together," he says. "Sebald wrote a sort of fictionalised autobiography. All of his great works are predicated on journeys. I'm interested in the peripatetic and the picaresque. As a satirist, I'm interested in distortions in scale, like Swift with Gulliver's Travels. One of Self's walks took him along "the fastest eroding coast in Europe", in Yorkshire. "I saw great chunks of it falling off into the sea," he says. "It is a landscape that is disappearing, but people are totally unaware of it. It is like the disappearance of the disappearance."
ROBERT MCFARLANE, another admirer of Sebald's work, has also written about the disappearance of landscape, through pollution and overdevelopment, and about how people seek happiness in wild places. The adjective "Sebaldian" has been applied to the work of novelist Aleksandar Hemon, born in Bosnia and now living in the US. Like Sebald, Hemon is preoccupied with the experience of exile, and with journeys.
Like Sebald, too, Hemon also makes use of atmospheric black-and-white photographs, fleeting glimpses of something passing, or a past that somehow has a potent connection with the present or intimation for the future. Sebald collected photographs randomly. He described rummaging in a junk shop in the East End of London and finding a postcard of a yodelling group from his home town in Bavaria. It was, he said, "a staggering experience".
GEORGE SZIRTES WAS born in Hungary and came to England as a refugee as a child, in 1956. He now works at the University of East Anglia. "Sebald's take is essentially central European," he says. Szirtes recalls listening incredulously to a young theoretical scholar who spoke at a recent conference about Sebald's "central European miserabilism". When his own turn came, he said that if there was bleakness in Sebald's work, "perhaps the bombing of Dresden might have had something to do with it".
"Shortly after he died, I went out into the fields and met the ghost of Austerlitz, who is also Max Sebald," Szirtes says. The long poem he wrote about that encounter is called, Meeting Austerlitz. It includes the lines: "Though Austerlitz had died the tenderness/ of his precision was consoling. No-one/ could start at quite that angle to the homeless/ intellect . . . "
• Details of the conference, from Sept 5 to 7,are available from the University of East Anglia website, www1.uea.ac.uk