Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

Part II: Damals: The Melancholy Science of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Stories

Part II Damals The Melancholy Science of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Stories Opening Conversation How little moral the world would look without this forgetfulness! A poet might say that God had placed forgetfulness as door-keeper in the temple of human dignity. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human1 [T]he true measure of life is memory [Erinnerung]. Retrospectively, it traverses life with the speed of lightning. —Walter Benjamin, “Notizen”2 Originally, ‘memory’ means as much as devotion [An-dacht]: a constant concentrated abiding with something [das unablässige, gesammelte Blei­ ben bei]—not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may come. What is past, present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being. Inasmuch as memory—the concentration of our disposition, devotion —does not let go of that on which it concentrates, memory is imbued not just with the quality of essential recall, but equally with the quality of an unrelinquishing and unrelenting retention. . . . The gathering of thinking [Andenkens] into what must be thought is what 89 90 / REDEEMING WORDS we call memory. . . . Memory, as the human recalling of what must be thought about, consists in the ‘keeping’ of what is most thoughtprovoking . Keeping and protecting the truth [Verwahrnis] is the fundamental nature and essence of memory. —Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?3 The life of Man in pure language-mind was blissful. Nature, however, was mute. True, it can be clearly felt in the second chapter of Genesis how this muteness, named by Man, itself became bliss, only of lower degree. [After he names the animals, Adam sees them leap away from him with joy.] But after the Fall, when God’s word curses the ground, the appearance of nature is deeply changed. Now begins its other muteness, by which we mean the deep sadness of nature. It is a metaphysical truth that all of nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language. [. . .] This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first: she would lament language itself. Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and language of Man—not only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in nature). This proposition means, secondly: she would lament. Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; [. . .] and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns. Yet the inversion of this proposition leads even further into the essence of nature: the sadness of nature makes her mute. —Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”4 History is written across the countenance of nature in the sign language of transience. [. . .] In nature, the allegorical poets [of the German Baroque] saw eternal transience, and here alone the saturnine vision of these generations recognized history. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama5 Whereas in the symbol, with the glorification of death and destruction , the transfigured face of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of redemption, in allegory, the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified, primordial landscape. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama6 DAMALS / 91 [Art] embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom. The fact that through its very existence it stands outside the evil spell that prevails allies it to a promise of happiness, a promise it itself somehow expresses in its expression of despair. [. . .] It is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable. [. . .] In fact, this impossibility [i.e., lighthearted art after Auschwitz] was already sensed [gespürt] by great literature, first of all by Baudelaire, almost a century before the European catastrophe. —Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?”7 ...