Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

Memory and/or Construction: Family Images in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

 Over the last decade German writer W. G. Sebalds’s oeuvre has become a locus classicus for the interplay of photograph and text.When we take a closer look at the various visual media and genres he uses in his works—namely, photography , film, architecture, floor plans, and maps—they all turn out to be visualized metaphors of memory. This means that verbal images appear as real images around which Sebald constructs his narratives. Underlying the family histories presented in his writings, there is a collective event (the Holocaust) of incomprehensible and unthinkable dimensions, as well as the memory of this event. But how should we and how can we remember an event of incomprehensible and unthinkable dimensions that is sublime in the sense of being terrible? And how can we represent this act of remembering? This is the painful, burning central question in Sebald’s work. Because remembering is clearly an imperative here. The only question is how. How is a question especially when we speak of texts like Sebald’s novels, in which the photograph—in contrast to its traditional function of authenticating and giving evidence—only widens the gaps and cracks between document and fiction. Moreover, Sebald achieves this effect not by using the tools of manipulated digital photography, so fashionMemory and/or Construction Family Pictures in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Zsófia Bán 8 MEMORY AND/OR CONSTRUCTION able in our day, or by reflecting on its problems, but without doing anything to the photographs, without any direct intervention in their being as objects. Instead, Sebald uses series; he places the photographs in various sequences; in other words, he uses the method of contextualization. The photograph as a means of the representation of remembering and memory, and of forgetting and death, in its turn, has already become a commonplace. And resulting precisely from these qualities, namely, from the fact that it reveals and conceals at the same time, the photograph, as Roland Barthes says, is never what we see. We look at a photograph with a kind of penetrating blindness: the photograph becomes invisible, and what we imagine behind it appears before our mind’s eye. In Sebald’s novels, it is usually the story itself. Or it is what these stories leave unsaid. And in these stories, the revealing and concealing natures of the photographs alternate (we can find examples for the former in The Emigrants, while for the latter more in Austerlitz1 ). However, as opposed to Barthes’ theory, our dead return to us not only in the photographs, and it is not only that we bring them back to life with our gaze, and it is also not that, in their turn, they also bring us to life by looking back at us:2 in Sebald’s world the dead are always present, and sometimes they are even more alive than the living. The characters are not always aware of this, or if they are, if they become aware of it somehow, then they are not really able to live with this awareness (see the four suicides in The Emigrants). Nevertheless, the fact that they are not always aware of this does not mean that they are not aware of it at all. Rather, they suppress this awareness into their subconscious. And in the case of Sebald’s works, this problem has to be interpreted simultaneously on the levels of private and collective memory. Because if these dead are the victims of the greatest trauma of the twentieth century, then they are also the ones who represent this historical trauma—they are its ghostly embodiments. In his book, often quoted in the context of the Holocaust, photography, and trauma, Ulrich Baer argues that there is a structural similarity not only between the photograph and memory but also between the photograph and trauma, in that they represent the eternal recurrence of something that is no longer there, yet is frozen in time. The broken, non-linear temporality of Sebald’s novels, as has been pointed out, is a precise reconstruction of the similarly broken temporality of the trauma (or dream and memory) MEMORY AND/OR CONSTRUCTION 9 with its rhythm of alternating suppression and surfacing. These works also represent precisely the process of becoming conscious of the trauma, which is often delayed, and of dealing with it, which sometimes takes place only several generations later. Research on the psychological effects of...