Silent Catastrophes

Silent Catastrophes

‘Silent Catastrophes’ – An Introduction

The fascination of the particular narrative genre he developed lay in the absolutely innovative linguistic and imaginative precision with which [. . .] he relates and reflects upon the silent catastrophes continually occurring in the inner life of mankind.

W. G. Sebald, Strange Homeland
(on Peter Handke’s Repetition)

Reflecting on his own origins towards the end of the long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), his debut literary book publication, W. G. Sebald recalls how he ‘grew up / despite the dreadful course / of events elsewhere, on the northern / edge of the Alps, so it seems / to me now, without any / idea of destruction’; and how nevertheless, beneath this outwardly idyllic rural childhood, there lurked an all-pervasive sense of ‘a silent catastrophe that occurs / almost unperceived’ (‘die Vorstellung / von einer lautlosen Katastrophe, die sich / ohne ein Aufhebens vor dem Betrachter vollzieht’). This persistent theme, apostrophized as a ‘natural history of destruction’, runs through his literary and academic work alike, and seems particularly applicable to the essays translated here, in which, as in the later Logis in einem Landhaus (A Place in the Country), seemingly idyllic landscapes are juxtaposed with historical events and inward states which are anything but serene.

The present volume of ‘Essays on Austrian Literature’ ‘From Stifter to Handke’—to cite in reverse order the subtitles of the two collections translated here—comprises two books of collected essays, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland), published by W. G. Sebald in 1985 and 1991 respectively with the Austrian literary publishing house Residenz. The nineteen essays in these two companion volumes, arranged chronologically in each volume, have as their subjects seventeen writers—all but one (the poet Ernst Herbeck) writers of prose. Like the essays in A Place in the Country, they span almost two centuries, an era which saw Austria evolve ‘from the vastness of the Habsburg Empire to a diminutive Alpine republic’ (below p. 220). Beginning in an age of colonial expansion and emigration (Sealsfield), via Biedermeier quietism (Stifter), the upheavals of the Vormärz and 1848 and the age of industrialization and concomitant urbanization, they reflect and document an era of deracination and transition, demonstrated most acutely, though by no means exclusively, in the successive waves of westward migration of the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. In the twentieth century, the essays also reflect the crises of consciousness and identity, particularly bourgeois identity, in the age of Freud (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Altenberg, Kafka), crises of identity and assimilation which, with the two world wars of the twentieth century and their consequent diasporic migrations, again become particularly acute for the many writers of Jewish extraction discussed—as experienced and evoked, in very different ways, by Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth and Jean Améry. The Second World War and its aftermath also leave traumatic traces in later generations of non-Jewish writers, such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Gerhard Roth and indeed Sebald himself, fiercely critical of a social reality in which the spectre of the recent fascist past continues to lurk silently beneath the seemingly unruffled surface of the prosperous post-war present. Although the apparent idyllic Alpine setting, like that of Sebald’s own childhood, might at first appear far removed from such historic turbulence, its seismic effects, as Sebald writes in the penultimate essay of this volume, affect ‘even the remotest regions’, striking ‘just as much out of the blue as ever a lightning bolt did from the clearest of skies’. ‘Indeed,’ he continues, ‘in the end it makes little difference whether the catastrophe is caused by nature or by the workings of history, which consumes and engulfs everything in exactly the same way as fire or water’ (below p. 385).

Sebald of course was German, not Austrian; but, as the narrator of Vertigo demonstrates, the village of his childhood is situated within walking distance of the Austrian border, and this sense of being from the margins may go some way to explaining Sebald’s interest in a literature beyond the borders of West (and East) Germany, with which of course it shares a language. In a 2001 interview with Michael Silverblatt, Sebald explains that one reason for his affinity with ‘nineteenth-century prose writing’ (in German) is ‘not least’ that ‘the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from . . .’. Admiration for prose style aside, this sense of being from a ‘regional backwater’, as he puts it in another interview, ‘a peripheral zone in which a dialect was spoken which was nearly as extreme as Swiss German’, also suggests an identification with a contemporary generation of Austrian writers from modest backgrounds who ‘in a topographical, social and psychological sense hailed from the periphery’, as he writes in an article commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the ‘avant- garde’ (or ‘trans-garde’) literary movement, the ‘Grazer Gruppe’ (Graz Group) and ‘Forum Stadtpark’, as well as its prime vehicle, the journal manuskripte founded by Alfred Kolleritsch in 1960—a movement which, Sebald claims, inaugurated what amounted to a radical, and indeed polemical, ‘reinvigoration of Austrian (and beyond that German) literature which in the 1960s was in a parlous not to say desolate state’.

The Graz journal manuskripte, bringing together linguistically and formally innovative work by progressive (mostly) Austrian authors with re-evaluations of (mostly) Austrian literature, in fact plays a key role in W. G. Sebald’s emergence as a writer. Across nine issues, from 1981 to 1988, no fewer than ten pieces of Sebald’s are published there, including two essays later collected in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks and two in Unheimliche Heimat. The first of these, in 1981, is the essay ‘A Small Traverse’ on Ernst Herbeck (the only essay on a poet in the present volume), followed in 1983 by an (as yet untranslated) essay on the Bavarian writer Herbert Achternbusch, and in 1984 by the final essay in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, ‘Light Pictures and Dark’, bringing together the canonical nineteenth-century prose writer Adalbert Stifter with the later Nobel prizewinner from Graz, Sebald’s near contemporary Peter Handke. The following issue of manuskripte sees the publication of what would become the central section of Nach der Natur (After Nature), ‘And If I Remained by the Outermost Sea’—his first literary publication since the publication of early poems in the journal ZET in 1974 and 1975. In 1985 there follows a German version of Sebald’s second essay on Kafka, ‘The Law of Ignominy’, first published in English nine years earlier, and subsequently included in Unheimliche Heimat—Sebald’s original English version of this essay is reprinted in the present volume. In 1986 there appears ‘In an Unknown Region’, also later included in Unheimliche Heimat, on Gerhard Roth’s then recently published magnum opus Landläufiger Tod (1984), as well as—in the same issue of manuskripte—the long poem ‘As the Snow on the Alps’, which was to become the first part of Nach der Natur. This is followed the next year by ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’, the third and final part of that ‘Elementargedicht’. Sebald’s two final publications in manuskripte, in successive issues in 1988, would later become the respective first sections of Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo) and Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants). The story ‘Berge oder das . . .’ (‘Mountains or the . . .’), episodes from the life of Henri Beyle—better known under his pen name Stendhal—is published in Vertigo under the title ‘Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet’. Sebald’s final contribution to manuskripte, in the 100th issue with the theme ‘Über das Altern’ (‘On Ageing’), is the story ‘Verzehret das letzte, die Erinnerung, nicht’, which in The Emigrants becomes ‘Henry Selwyn’. The last two pieces stand out for their inclusion of a number of photographic images, though these differ considerably from those in the subsequent book publications.