The following text was originally published in the journal Shangri-La. Drifts and fiction apart included in the Case Report / s of Auschwitz. You can check the summary and download the entire journal this link.
Perhaps exile, with its variants of uprooting, flight, loss and recovery of memory, is the great issue of the literary work German WG Sebald. Died in car accident in 2001, when their success began to flourish internationally in the critical work of great French literature, Hispanic and, particularly, Anglo-Saxon, with Susan Sontag in the lead, we can say that yours is the great Holocaust book is not about the Holocaust. Or at least, that is not directly.
Exile and memory are two issues that are inevitably linked, probably due to the emotional needs that arise retrospective distance to the place of origin. The exile can occur through different pathways, having a spatial or temporal nature, physical or emotional however, they are all closely related, if its most a matter of short or long term personal sensitivity: an exile prolonged space ends up being temporary, just as a physical exile is leaving emotional scars over the months and years. Sebald, above all, is aware of its own history, you know where it comes from and what are their roots, and makes it all his great maxim, moral justice.
WG Sebald's father worked in the Wehrmacht, name given to the German armed forces during the Third Reich, and it is not unreasonable to think that this would inevitably influence the sensitivity of the writer, whose works abound in the characters of Jewish descent, with conditional lives more or less by the great catastrophe of the twentieth century West. But Sebald is not interested in showing the direct impact of the Holocaust. We will not see in his novels (or essays, or books of travel, or any designation to receive her creations are always so personal that cross genres) the manner in which the Jews were crowded into the wagons of a freight train headed for communal showers or walking to the gas chambers. Sebald let the story of the drama of that moment is undertaken by those who experienced it directly, either Primo Levi, or his friend Irene Némirovski Jean Amery, whose relationship would mark him deeply. What interests the German author, and is interested because, morally, is what he should have, which is able to count are the traces of this misfortune, the way the manifest anonymous lives around certain signs, how the large leaves theory and history is reflected in the margins of the intra, full of codes, signals and echoes of events which have a range much greater than that at first glance it may seem. The important thing Sebald's books, beyond its impressive erudition, his load of data, references and the thoroughness with which is very specific cases (without neglecting the science or technology in its more specific, quite interested in all) which in other hands would go unnoticed, is the global sense, bringing together the ethical and the aesthetic and the covers of life, real cool breeze along the road. The important thing Sebald's books is the ability to stimulate the reader, to make him see that the history textbooks is not merely a theoretical abstraction or a mere accumulation of statistics, history can be reflected in the neighbor down every day to buy bread in elder care for your garden every morning, or classmate of your child, without anyone knowing you have to learn every day to grow up without parents who gobbled history. History is silent, do not cry, never protest, and danger, Sebald seems to say, is that humans become infected by being complicit in this silence possible injustices.
On this particular issue is one of Sebald's books are still raising more dust, and that most directly addresses the issue of the Second World War: "On the natural history of destruction." In this short essay in which there is no doubt of its kind because, probably, the seriousness of the issue can not be addressed, with a profusion of names, dates, facts and statistics of all kinds, forgetting, for part of German literature, the absolute destruction of many cities by the Allies. Perhaps due to a feeling of guilt in a logical way for allowing the expansion and barbarism of the Nazi regime (is this feeling of guilt which leads to Sebald into exile and be so hard on their own country?), It seems that the writers denounce what cost them their own people had suffered in those times when the world pointed to Germany with his finger. Sebald, beyond resentment and feelings dark moth-eaten, is scandalized by this behavior, and it shows in his essay a ferocity never seen it, so cold and objective in their writing and their opinions. If anything characterizes all his work, regardless of the issues already mentioned, is the careful observation, which seeks to every detail and review, analyzing own and others' behavior, but never make a trial less a verdict. The author's interest in his characters is almost anthropological, and perhaps this is not to force too emotionally involved (yes, much in the intellectual), always showing respect and admiration for them almost reverential. So there must be a very deep-rooted within Sebald to come out of his pen "on the natural history of destruction." In his diatribe are present almost all major names of postwar German literature: among others, Max Frisch, Hermann Kasack, Arno Schmidt, and even authors such as Alexander Kluge, of great influence in his own work. The only author who saves, even making clear certain literary weaknesses, as a "tendency to exaggeration and false philosophical significance" 1, Hans Erich Nossack. As Guillermo Piro said in his review of the book in Pagina/12:
Similarly, as discussed in the same review, Sebald refuses to admit that sometimes it is necessary to forget to live on, probably blinded by a desire for moral justice that is too large even for someone like him . All this makes this a strange book belligerent trial, a rarity in his work, taken over by the tone than substance. And certainly we will always know what you thought of this masterpiece of American literature, Slaughterhouse-Five, in which Kurt Vonnegut, away from any pretense of rigor or documentary, provides the clearer picture and, in keeping with the events, paranoid about it. Because yes, the self who lived those bombing of Dresden.
Even so, we must bear in mind this book Sebald, not only for knowledge of their content, sincerity or passion that sets out its ideas, but because it can operate as a hub on which to understand the rest of his bibliography, beyond its appearance of "work island." So good, you can understand this silence German as another consequence of the Holocaust, albeit in an opposite direction to that of his other books, aimed now at a counterproductive guilt, and this contributes to the creation of this great mosaic of the author which show traces of an event so decisive in the evolution of the twentieth century. The relationship between exile, memory and guilt is immediate, and everything is built through history. Sebald seems to say that only distance allows the survival analysis, but sometimes it is necessary to address a more acute critical to all that, little by little, is falling into complacency. It is indispensable to the struggle against forgetting.
precisely against this oversight is addressed much formal work of the German author's work. The evocation of the past is not a gimmicky gadget Sebald of nostalgia, quite the contrary, evocations arising from the elusive details of everyday life, detailed observation of reality and its intimate relationship with the past of the author or a global western culture. For this reason it is fair to place Sebald and Proust postmodern heir (so immediate reference to him as may be Bernhard Borges), making intimate evocation live teacher reference and pastiche. But, and this is important, Proust's aesthetic emotion is always subject to a rigorous ethical Sebald ("consequence of being a child of his homeland and the events experienced in the twentieth century?) That conditions at all times the narrative. Thus, fits German author in an artistic movement which renews the world of culture from multiple angles without having to blow up the past, but knowing that you have to break the established corporate cultural underworld. Authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas in Spain or the Portuguese filmmakers like Pedro Costa would be champions of this vision nonconformist art in the middle of a fight that was never terminated. If the first of these authors there is a clear relationship that extends from its vast cultural background to the disappearance of the frontier reality and fiction and its dissolution with the narrator / author as well as some stylistic similarities with the Portuguese, a priori, no such connection. However, it seems entirely comparable not only the risk of both artists, but its fundamental commitment to prevail above all ethical and aesthetic rigor, the transgression of the documentary from fiction (and vice versa) and the devotion of reference. If Pedro Costa speaks through his images of John Ford and Jacques Tourneur, Sebald seems to articulate the dead voices of teachers to whom literature owes everything it is today. In this dichotomy ethics, aesthetics, or to integrate into each other, are surely the most pleasing prospects of contemporary art.
This adherence to the forefront by Sebald is, at least, curious, since the author, in his books, seems to invoke the opposite. The appreciation of the quiet, the ride, the recovery of memory, learning and a taste for the classics, the absence of rhetoric and strict personal morality seem to hide anyone except modern. But at certain levels and do not need to prove anything, just read their works.
It was therefore necessary in the world of letters the presence of a new way of looking at history, so far in some things like the next in other academic texts or simple informative works. Sebald stands to see where one stops, and that's the greatness of his creation. It is also aware that the contemporary look and can not be a pure gaze, as the barrage of information and references that are currently working with is almost infinite, and this circumstance is used by the author without attempting to give a distorted impression of own subjectivity. Simply, it is openly exposing what is evoked, knowing that our way of looking at history lives in constant evolution. Precisely on the alleged defilement of the look in his comments Sebald Vertigo Stendhal's ideas about the persistence of memory and its relation to the representation:
What Stendhal states applied to art, or travel in general, you can also extrapolate the concept of historical memory / personal memory, which is directly related to one of the most visible features Sebald's books: the presence of black and white images of photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, manuscripts schemes, or anything that helps evoked memory relate to recovered memory, while aid to the aforementioned blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction.
Beyond the undoubted artistic achievements, Sebald is a writer who exemplifies the scope of one blast from the trauma of the Holocaust in the twentieth century, both in the way it affects you personally and in the perception of dark tracks transferred to the cultural world or the public and private lives of those who suffered directly or indirectly. If Godard said that cinema's great failure was not giving the world an image of the Holocaust, we can not deny that all art forms of the twentieth century made us rethink, from these horrendous crimes, a new way of looking at history and warily addressed the fervor of events. In the world that remained after the Holocaust, which inevitably are all children, regardless of nationalities and borders, it becomes essential to search for identity, searching for an innocence and roots that probably have no home, just so that the hero of Austerlitz, the latest novel (and the more clearly be defined as a novel) of Sebald. Here, Jacques Austerlitz is a character interchangeable with the narrator, do not know if the real Sebald. The son of a Prague Jewish actress, comes to England in a wagon train full of children rescued from Nazi extermination, and grows oblivious to what happened in the place they came to that, at some point, it forces you to know their origins and overcome the trauma that deprived him of old Europe the education of their parents in central European city. And so comes the prowl in Europe, the ride, as always in Sebald, which reflects much more than refracted, and feeling free of tears and anger, there is always something beyond what we know about ourselves . The story of Jacques Austerlitz is the history of Europe, and the search for identity is the search for the transnational identity as well as authors have defined Claudio Magris and Sebald himself. Austerlitz, the novel, condensing probably best of the author and is a superb testament, which not only returns to familiar locations, such European capitals as defined by its architecture or the Theresienstadt concentration camp to which he returns after The incursion into emigrant, it takes a final tour de force theme that acts as a sounding board for all his work and placing it as the great twentieth-century author of the report and the (intra) European history.
One of the signs indicating that a current author who died recently, has become a classic is to refer to him in this. In this article, unconsciously, I said in mind the thoughts that I have suggested reading Sebald's work, not realizing until the end. Sebald is not present, the vortex has passed and the fever has passed, at which point the classical avant-garde and shake hands.
Exile and memory are two issues that are inevitably linked, probably due to the emotional needs that arise retrospective distance to the place of origin. The exile can occur through different pathways, having a spatial or temporal nature, physical or emotional however, they are all closely related, if its most a matter of short or long term personal sensitivity: an exile prolonged space ends up being temporary, just as a physical exile is leaving emotional scars over the months and years. Sebald, above all, is aware of its own history, you know where it comes from and what are their roots, and makes it all his great maxim, moral justice.
WG Sebald's father worked in the Wehrmacht, name given to the German armed forces during the Third Reich, and it is not unreasonable to think that this would inevitably influence the sensitivity of the writer, whose works abound in the characters of Jewish descent, with conditional lives more or less by the great catastrophe of the twentieth century West. But Sebald is not interested in showing the direct impact of the Holocaust. We will not see in his novels (or essays, or books of travel, or any designation to receive her creations are always so personal that cross genres) the manner in which the Jews were crowded into the wagons of a freight train headed for communal showers or walking to the gas chambers. Sebald let the story of the drama of that moment is undertaken by those who experienced it directly, either Primo Levi, or his friend Irene Némirovski Jean Amery, whose relationship would mark him deeply. What interests the German author, and is interested because, morally, is what he should have, which is able to count are the traces of this misfortune, the way the manifest anonymous lives around certain signs, how the large leaves theory and history is reflected in the margins of the intra, full of codes, signals and echoes of events which have a range much greater than that at first glance it may seem. The important thing Sebald's books, beyond its impressive erudition, his load of data, references and the thoroughness with which is very specific cases (without neglecting the science or technology in its more specific, quite interested in all) which in other hands would go unnoticed, is the global sense, bringing together the ethical and the aesthetic and the covers of life, real cool breeze along the road. The important thing Sebald's books is the ability to stimulate the reader, to make him see that the history textbooks is not merely a theoretical abstraction or a mere accumulation of statistics, history can be reflected in the neighbor down every day to buy bread in elder care for your garden every morning, or classmate of your child, without anyone knowing you have to learn every day to grow up without parents who gobbled history. History is silent, do not cry, never protest, and danger, Sebald seems to say, is that humans become infected by being complicit in this silence possible injustices.
On this particular issue is one of Sebald's books are still raising more dust, and that most directly addresses the issue of the Second World War: "On the natural history of destruction." In this short essay in which there is no doubt of its kind because, probably, the seriousness of the issue can not be addressed, with a profusion of names, dates, facts and statistics of all kinds, forgetting, for part of German literature, the absolute destruction of many cities by the Allies. Perhaps due to a feeling of guilt in a logical way for allowing the expansion and barbarism of the Nazi regime (is this feeling of guilt which leads to Sebald into exile and be so hard on their own country?), It seems that the writers denounce what cost them their own people had suffered in those times when the world pointed to Germany with his finger. Sebald, beyond resentment and feelings dark moth-eaten, is scandalized by this behavior, and it shows in his essay a ferocity never seen it, so cold and objective in their writing and their opinions. If anything characterizes all his work, regardless of the issues already mentioned, is the careful observation, which seeks to every detail and review, analyzing own and others' behavior, but never make a trial less a verdict. The author's interest in his characters is almost anthropological, and perhaps this is not to force too emotionally involved (yes, much in the intellectual), always showing respect and admiration for them almost reverential. So there must be a very deep-rooted within Sebald to come out of his pen "on the natural history of destruction." In his diatribe are present almost all major names of postwar German literature: among others, Max Frisch, Hermann Kasack, Arno Schmidt, and even authors such as Alexander Kluge, of great influence in his own work. The only author who saves, even making clear certain literary weaknesses, as a "tendency to exaggeration and false philosophical significance" 1, Hans Erich Nossack. As Guillermo Piro said in his review of the book in Pagina/12:
For Sebald, a writer has a moral imperative to write what happened, denying any kind of artifice, appeals to the "accuracy and accountability "" The ideal of truth is, before total destruction, as the only legitimate reason to continue the literary work. "
Similarly, as discussed in the same review, Sebald refuses to admit that sometimes it is necessary to forget to live on, probably blinded by a desire for moral justice that is too large even for someone like him . All this makes this a strange book belligerent trial, a rarity in his work, taken over by the tone than substance. And certainly we will always know what you thought of this masterpiece of American literature, Slaughterhouse-Five, in which Kurt Vonnegut, away from any pretense of rigor or documentary, provides the clearer picture and, in keeping with the events, paranoid about it. Because yes, the self who lived those bombing of Dresden.
Even so, we must bear in mind this book Sebald, not only for knowledge of their content, sincerity or passion that sets out its ideas, but because it can operate as a hub on which to understand the rest of his bibliography, beyond its appearance of "work island." So good, you can understand this silence German as another consequence of the Holocaust, albeit in an opposite direction to that of his other books, aimed now at a counterproductive guilt, and this contributes to the creation of this great mosaic of the author which show traces of an event so decisive in the evolution of the twentieth century. The relationship between exile, memory and guilt is immediate, and everything is built through history. Sebald seems to say that only distance allows the survival analysis, but sometimes it is necessary to address a more acute critical to all that, little by little, is falling into complacency. It is indispensable to the struggle against forgetting.
precisely against this oversight is addressed much formal work of the German author's work. The evocation of the past is not a gimmicky gadget Sebald of nostalgia, quite the contrary, evocations arising from the elusive details of everyday life, detailed observation of reality and its intimate relationship with the past of the author or a global western culture. For this reason it is fair to place Sebald and Proust postmodern heir (so immediate reference to him as may be Bernhard Borges), making intimate evocation live teacher reference and pastiche. But, and this is important, Proust's aesthetic emotion is always subject to a rigorous ethical Sebald ("consequence of being a child of his homeland and the events experienced in the twentieth century?) That conditions at all times the narrative. Thus, fits German author in an artistic movement which renews the world of culture from multiple angles without having to blow up the past, but knowing that you have to break the established corporate cultural underworld. Authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas in Spain or the Portuguese filmmakers like Pedro Costa would be champions of this vision nonconformist art in the middle of a fight that was never terminated. If the first of these authors there is a clear relationship that extends from its vast cultural background to the disappearance of the frontier reality and fiction and its dissolution with the narrator / author as well as some stylistic similarities with the Portuguese, a priori, no such connection. However, it seems entirely comparable not only the risk of both artists, but its fundamental commitment to prevail above all ethical and aesthetic rigor, the transgression of the documentary from fiction (and vice versa) and the devotion of reference. If Pedro Costa speaks through his images of John Ford and Jacques Tourneur, Sebald seems to articulate the dead voices of teachers to whom literature owes everything it is today. In this dichotomy ethics, aesthetics, or to integrate into each other, are surely the most pleasing prospects of contemporary art.
This adherence to the forefront by Sebald is, at least, curious, since the author, in his books, seems to invoke the opposite. The appreciation of the quiet, the ride, the recovery of memory, learning and a taste for the classics, the absence of rhetoric and strict personal morality seem to hide anyone except modern. But at certain levels and do not need to prove anything, just read their works.
It was therefore necessary in the world of letters the presence of a new way of looking at history, so far in some things like the next in other academic texts or simple informative works. Sebald stands to see where one stops, and that's the greatness of his creation. It is also aware that the contemporary look and can not be a pure gaze, as the barrage of information and references that are currently working with is almost infinite, and this circumstance is used by the author without attempting to give a distorted impression of own subjectivity. Simply, it is openly exposing what is evoked, knowing that our way of looking at history lives in constant evolution. Precisely on the alleged defilement of the look in his comments Sebald Vertigo Stendhal's ideas about the persistence of memory and its relation to the representation:
In his writings, confesses to having experienced Beyle great disappointment when, a few years, revising old papers, suddenly encountered an engraving entitled prospettiva d'Iver and had to admit that the picture was held in memory of the city by the evening light was but a copy of this engraving. So advises Beyle, you should not buy prints of beautiful and scenic panoramas that you see when you are traveling, because suddenly everything takes a print from a memory space, could even be argued that kills him. Despite your best efforts made, for example, could not remember the Madonna of San Sisto wonderful he saw in Dresden, as had been covered by the recorded Muller had made it, in contrast, obnoxious pastel paintings by Mengs who were in the same gallery, of never and nowhere had lodged a copy, as if I had remembered before the eyes.
What Stendhal states applied to art, or travel in general, you can also extrapolate the concept of historical memory / personal memory, which is directly related to one of the most visible features Sebald's books: the presence of black and white images of photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, manuscripts schemes, or anything that helps evoked memory relate to recovered memory, while aid to the aforementioned blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction.
Beyond the undoubted artistic achievements, Sebald is a writer who exemplifies the scope of one blast from the trauma of the Holocaust in the twentieth century, both in the way it affects you personally and in the perception of dark tracks transferred to the cultural world or the public and private lives of those who suffered directly or indirectly. If Godard said that cinema's great failure was not giving the world an image of the Holocaust, we can not deny that all art forms of the twentieth century made us rethink, from these horrendous crimes, a new way of looking at history and warily addressed the fervor of events. In the world that remained after the Holocaust, which inevitably are all children, regardless of nationalities and borders, it becomes essential to search for identity, searching for an innocence and roots that probably have no home, just so that the hero of Austerlitz, the latest novel (and the more clearly be defined as a novel) of Sebald. Here, Jacques Austerlitz is a character interchangeable with the narrator, do not know if the real Sebald. The son of a Prague Jewish actress, comes to England in a wagon train full of children rescued from Nazi extermination, and grows oblivious to what happened in the place they came to that, at some point, it forces you to know their origins and overcome the trauma that deprived him of old Europe the education of their parents in central European city. And so comes the prowl in Europe, the ride, as always in Sebald, which reflects much more than refracted, and feeling free of tears and anger, there is always something beyond what we know about ourselves . The story of Jacques Austerlitz is the history of Europe, and the search for identity is the search for the transnational identity as well as authors have defined Claudio Magris and Sebald himself. Austerlitz, the novel, condensing probably best of the author and is a superb testament, which not only returns to familiar locations, such European capitals as defined by its architecture or the Theresienstadt concentration camp to which he returns after The incursion into emigrant, it takes a final tour de force theme that acts as a sounding board for all his work and placing it as the great twentieth-century author of the report and the (intra) European history.
One of the signs indicating that a current author who died recently, has become a classic is to refer to him in this. In this article, unconsciously, I said in mind the thoughts that I have suggested reading Sebald's work, not realizing until the end. Sebald is not present, the vortex has passed and the fever has passed, at which point the classical avant-garde and shake hands.
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