One of Jorg Friedrich's greatest admirers was the writer W. G. Sebald, whose death in a motor accident just over a year ago was a grievous loss not only to Germany but to Europe. He was German to the core and his books belong to German literature; but he chose to spend more than half his life in England, teaching at the Universities of Manchester and East Anglia. It was only in England, and quite late in life, that he began to write in the narrative form that he made his own, and by means of which he broke down the barrier between fact and fiction. A Sebald text draws on reportage, travelogue and a highly literary form of antiquarianism, copiously illustrated by a unique collection of photographs, picture postcards and other ephemera. His "novels" (if that is the word) are a peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German perfectionism, written in a prose that often dispenses with paragraphs, extends sentences for pages and may strike the uninitiated as hermetic. Even so, Sebald draws his readers into his world, a world where the past has a more powerful presence than the present. The elegiac atmosphere he creates with the utmost economy of means is instantly recognizable yet eludes definition. It is, quite simply, Sebaldesque.
More than that of any other German writer of recent years, Sebald's softly insistent voice has resonated across the Channel and the Atlantic. The publication here of The Emigrants in 1996, soon followed by The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz, transformed Sebald from a marginal, somewhat eccentric figure on the international literary scene into a reluctant celebrity. By the time he died, aged fifty-seven, his stature had been recognized in Germany, too, though he would have liked fewer literary prizes and more ordinary readers there. As the most significant European writer to have emerged in the past decade, Sebald would, if he had lived, hardly have been able to avoid the attentions of the Swedish academicians.
As it is, we are left with the surviving fragments of a career that had just got into its stride. The Natural History of Destruction, the first opus by Sebald to appear in English posthumously, is based on lectures given in Zurich in the autumn of 1997 and published two years later, almost entirely recast, under the less portentous title of Luftkrieg und Literatur ("Air War and Literature"), in which he responded to the correspondence provoked by the lectures and explained why he felt it necessary to castigate his fellow countrymen for turning a blind eye to his subject. The original German volume was supplemented by a similarly polemical essay on "The Writer Alfred Andersch", and for the English edition the publishers have now added fugitive articles on two more post-war writers, Peter Weiss and Jean Amery. The latter in particular was well worth reprinting, if only to be reminded of Amery's exceptional moral courage in forcing himself to write about his traumatic experiences at the hands of the Nazis at a time when so many of his contemporaries preferred to put the past behind them.
Why did Sebald's Zurich lectures, unlike his other works, arouse such an agitated response in Germany? In his foreword, Sebald comes straight to the point:
In spite of strenuous attempts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilisation, of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.
Post-war German literature was marked, he says, by a "false consciousness designed to consolidate the extremely precarious position of these writers in a society that was morally almost entirely discredited". Andersch is representative of that self-deceiving generation.
The severity with which Sebald judges his novels applies also to the West German society that mistook Andersch and other "internal emigrants" for examples of intellectual integrity, when in reality they had merely conformed.
The attempt to rehabilitate German literature had foundered on account of the fraudulence and moral cowardice of its leading figures. Sebald was casting doubt, not only on the authenticity of a generation of writers, but on the entire post-war German project of "coming to terms with the past" (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung).
