In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • W. G. Sebald’s Agenda: Picturing Ethics and Translating Authenticity
  • Christian Howard-Sukhil (bio)

German writer W. G. Sebald provides a rare opportunity to examine collective experience as a unifying factor of the nationless, for he is well known for his exploration of identity, history, and memory. Carol Bere describes Sebald’s narrator as “often displaced,” adding, “Sebald’s narrators are also wanderers, often unable to engage with life, and motivated or obsessed by personal memories or enigmas, questions they are unable to resolve” (184). These personal memories and enigmas are textually embodied in Sebald’s work through the inclusion of photographs and other images, which serve as remnants of the characters’ past lives and become relics that anchor the fictional world to the real.1 Even as his writing style is celebrated for incorporating material sources of the past, so has this technique led to ethical debates about Sebald’s right to use such images, and in one case, a person who identified himself in a photo reproduced in Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten insisted on the image’s removal.2 Sebald has defended his work through his authenticity and fidelity to the real, which is predicated on his very use of these relics and images. Todd Heidt explains this defense in relation to Sebald’s characters:

It is as though Sebald’s narrators, in attempting to justify the (hi)stories they are writing, document the process of writing it in images, letting the [End Page 72] photographs tell a parallel story of reconstruction in which the “exclusion of human bias” normally ascribed to the objectivity of photography lends itself to both the object of study and the manner in which it is carried out.

For Sebald (and his narrators), the material sources reproduced in the texts are objective, unbiased remnants of a past life that endow the stories with similar objectivity. But what does it mean for the reproduction of the image to be “unbiased” and “objective,” especially when that reproduction occurs within a fictional context? How do we determine the authenticity of these textual relics, including photographs and other images? How do Sebald’s fictional stories participate in an ethically justified fidelity to the real world?

I take up these questions in relation to a particular “objective” image: the diary of Ambros, one of the characters whose life Sebald’s narrator is trying to reconstruct in Sebald’s 1992 work, Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants).3 Sebald includes a photograph of the front of this diary, which prominently defines itself not as a diary per se but as an “agenda.” The narrator writes: “On the desk in front of me is the agenda book that belonged to Ambros. . . . It is a pocket diary for the year 1913, bound in soft burgundy leather and measuring about twelve centimeters by eight. Ambros must have bought it in Milan, because that is where his entries begin, on the 20th of August” (126). Sebald includes two more photographs displaying the contents of this diary: one of an entry dated September 23–24 and another dated November 2–3.4 As though verifying the narrator’s description of its origin, the diary in these photos lists the months and days of the week in Italian.5 [End Page 73]

There is a problem with these photos: the pictured agenda book and the pages of the diary are from different sources, a fact Sebald has painstakingly tried to conceal by using books that are approximately the same color and have similar features, including a ribbon bookmarker and a wrap-around button clasp. Nonetheless, the details of these features reveal their differences. While both books have ribbon bookmarkers that are unraveling at the ends, the length and shape of the ends are distinctly different. The closed agenda book features a clasp with a metal pin, which is absent in the open diary. In addition, the closed book has a button clasp that is rounded at the end, whereas the open diary’s button clasp has a squared-off end.

Sebald clearly took pains to find a diary and agenda book with similar features. But if the open diary has these two features, why not simply include...

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