W.G. Sebald. History—Memory—Trauma (review)

This much-anticipated publication of papers presented at the first international symposium dedicated to German author W.G. Sebald (held at Davidson College in March of 2003) offers new insights and supports much of the current research on thematic and poetic concerns central to Sebald’s works: intertextuality and influence; narrative form, style, and tone; the Holocaust, the Allied air raids, and the trauma and memory of these historical atrocities and history in general. Twenty-one of the twenty-five presentations given at the Davidson Symposium are gathered here under three sections: “Contexts and Influences,” “Narrative and Style,” and “History and Trauma.” The absence of contributions by two notable scholars in the field of Sebald studies, Anne Fuchs and Jonathan Long, is unfortunate; however, their work is available in two recent monographs as well as in a collection of essays they co-edited (W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History, Würzburg 2007).

The two introductory contributions by the editors Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh contextualize Sebald’s works, his influences, and both German and Anglo-American reception. All the contributions in this volume are in English, and both German original and English translation are given when quoting Sebald. While this is an attempt to make Sebald’s works transparent to non-German speakers, it also highlights the differences, often significant, between the translation and the original. McCulloh’s introduction pointedly emphasizes the importance of language and translation not only in terms of Sebald’s reception in the Anglophone world, but also for the texts themselves, going so far as to claim for Sebald “two distinctive œuvres” (7). The opening section of the volume also includes a transcript made by Gordon Turner of the interview Michaël Seeman conducted with Sebald in 1998. In this interview, Sebald succinctly and seriously, though not completely without humor, describes many of the central thematic concerns of his texts and illuminates aspects of his aesthetic strategies. With the proliferation of secondary literature on Sebald’s works, it is a pleasure to read his own thoughts on his literary production.

The essays in the first section of the volume contextualize Sebald in not only a German but a broader European literary tradition and emphasize the importance of intertextuality and influence that has come to be seen as characteristic of Sebald’s œuvre. Lilian Furst meticulously shows how Sebald draws on the tradition of realism in literature but simultaneously subverts this tradition through his use of photographs (221). One of the few contributions to consider the text-image relationship, Maya Barzilai’s essay on the relationship between photography and memory starts from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and then details the specificity of “uncanny” and traumatic memory in Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Patrick Lennon, and Karin Bauer offer intertextual and comparative investigations of a more conceptual nature. Friedrichsmeyer emphasizes the connections between Sebald and the literary tradition in which he is writing, primarily through the example of Goethe’s concept of “elective affinities.” Lennon focuses on the connections between Sebald and Laurence Sterne, but he also considers Sebald in relation to Michael Hamburger and Friedrich Hölderlin on both biographical and textual levels. Bauer’s comparative reading of Austerlitz (2001) draws on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche and invokes ideas of the “flâneur” and the “cosmopolitan good European.” Bauer’s characterization of Austerlitz as “an inversed Bildungsroman” (235), reveals the interwoven connections of past and present in the text as defying any hopes of redemption or resolution.

R.J.A. Kilbourn’s detailed discussion of Sebald, Kafka, and Nabokov investigates in particular the fictional status of death (34) and the “redemptive power of memory” (60f.). Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus fragment has been established as a central intertext to “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” the third story in Se-bald’s Schwindel.Gefühle/Vertigo (1990/2000). In addition, both Kilbourn and Brad Prager discuss the significant intertextual role...