Post-Katastrophische Poetik. Zu W.G. Sebald und Walter Benjamin by Luisa Banki (review)

The considerable influence of Walter Benjamin on W.G. Sebald’s literary project can be seen in the recently published J.B. Metzler Handbuch on the author (eds. Claudia Öhlschläger and Michael Niehaus, 2017), in which Benjamin features as one of just four entries on individuals (the others are dedicated to major literary figures of the twentieth century—Kafka, Nabokov, and Robert Walser). As Carolin Duttlinger, author of the entry, notes, the importance of Benjamin for Sebald is widely acknowledged, but the precise function of Benjamin’s thought in Sebald’s writing has largely escaped systematic and sustained scholarly treatment. Emerging Sebald scholarship is now turning to this question in more focused ways, and Benjamin features substantially in a number of recent book-length studies (e.g., Nikolai Jan Preuschoff, Mit Walter Benjamin. Melancholie, Geschichte und Erzählen bei W.G. Sebald, 2015; Eva Riedl, Raumbegehren. Zum Flaneur bei W.G. Sebald und Walter Benjamin, 2017). Luisa Banki’s monograph, for which she was awarded the Preis der Stadt Konstanz zur Förderung des Wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses an der Universität Konstanz, contributes significantly to the task of sounding out the particular role Benjamin’s thinking played for Sebald through the concept of “post-catastrophic poetics.”

Banki works in the footsteps of Eric Santner, whose 2006 monograph On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald focuses on ideas of materiality and natural history to provide one of the few close investigations of the connections between the two thinkers/writers. In her own study, Banki argues that Benjamin is such an important figure for Sebald because his conception of catastrophe as the given, persistent state of modern existence allows Sebald to dedicate his writing to both the singular catastrophe of the Shoah and its relation to a modern, ontological condition of catastrophe. By examining this “Idee der Katastrophe,” as expounded by Benjamin in the wake of the First World War and taken up again by Sebald after the Second, Banki aims to shed new light on Sebald’s writing (of catastrophe). Post-Katastrophische Poetik is clearly divided into three sections, “Lesbarkeit,” “Erzählbarkeit,” and “Schreibbarkeit,” which refer to various “abilities” developed by Sebald in and through his writing and modelled on Benjamin’s narrative and historical theories; these are, then, what Samuel Weber calls “Benjamin’s -abilities” [ed. note: see review of Weber’s Benjamin’s -abilities in Monatshefte 102.4, Winter 2010, 631–634], and in Sebald’s work they constitute the “three-dimensionality” of his post-catastrophic poetics. Banki draws on a number of Benjamin’s writings—on allegory, melancholy, and history, but also on narrative and language: she is interested in the way Sebald’s postcatastrophic poetics emerges from the confluence of Benjamin’s narrative theory and philosophy of history. She uses his essays on mimesis to show how Sebald’s narrator, the “Nachgeborener,” must try to read the remnants of disaster, not as material fragments, but as “Schrift,” that is, as the written word in its materiality. And she uses his “Storyteller” essay to show how, while for Benjamin catastrophe (WWI) spells the end of storytelling, for Sebald’s postwar narrator, it heralds the “Zeit des Erzählens,” albeit a time of narrative that dawns at the moment of its impossibility. In this way, Banki notes, Sebald diverges from Benjamin, but is most strongly influenced by him.

According to Banki, Sebald’s texts are marked by melancholy, and as such, offer a mode in which the (always already lost) meaning of the fragments that remain after catastrophe might be perceptible. However, the potential of the melancholy text to make fragments readable (“lesbar”) as the irreparable remnants of lost meaning is, Banki argues, resisted by Sebald’s narrator, who is rather driven by the need to make the fragments of catastrophe meaningful after all. His narrator, she argues, is a paranoid figure, whose “Beziehungswahn” leads him to connect disparate remnants into an...