anderson sebald kluge

Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family

Mark M. AndersonGermanic Languages, Columbia

Abstract The article examines two major German writers of documentary fic-tion, Alexander Kluge and W. G. Sebald, who incorporate photographs into their work as part of a complex strategy of realism. Both authors are strongly marked by the legacy of Nazi propaganda and its manipulation of photographic images; both authors reflect on the relationship between trauma, war, memory, and representa-tion, especially with regard to family histories. Kluge’s emotionally flat documen-tary account of the Allied bombing of his hometown reveals a problematic deaden-ing of personal and familial relations. Sebald’s semiautobiographical fictions, whose German narrators are riven by their disrupted family histories, can only be partially understood through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory.” Despite common political and stylistic traits, the writings of Kluge and Sebald ultimately forge quite different literary esthetics.

In the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, a new kind of visual realism began to assert itself in European and American literature. This turn toward the image—especially the photographic image—could be observed most closely in literary works that incorporated actual pictures into the typo-graphic text, not as illustrations but as constitutive, nonsupplementary parts of the whole. It could also be seen in works that gave verbal descrip-tions of photographs without actually showing them and yet made issues of vision and visuality central to the story itself; Cortázar’s 1959 story “Las

Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-020© 2008 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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Babas del Diablo” (“Blow Up”), where a photograph seems to hold the evidentiary key to a crime, is the paradigmatic example of these. But above all what W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) has termed the “pictorial turn” in postwar cultural practice could be registered in a heightened awareness of the visual character of the literary medium per se, from the “sculptural” graphics of concrete poetry to the made-for-cinema crime thriller or sentimental romance, organized as a series of camera “takes.” If Walter Pater, at the end of the nineteenth century, famously described the arts to be aspiring toward the “condition of music,” then in the age of the photograph and the cinema, the literary arts seem to aspire to a “visual condition.”� While participating in this general turn in postwar European and Ameri-can culture, German literature presents a special case because of the prob-lematic status of the image after the Hitler period. Few governments had mobilized visuality for such notorious ideological ends to such an extent as the Nazis. Propaganda images in journals like the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stürmer, party control of documentary and feature films, even the strategically visual organization (and subsequent media dissemination) of political gatherings, marches, the führer’s public arrivals and departures—all these images contributed to an enormous, genocidal, visual lie.� After the defeat of the Nazis, these mythic and mystifying images suddenly dis-appeared, provoking a rupture in the collective national narrative but also a combined fascination and uneasiness with this forbidden visual legacy. Young German artists and writers coming of age during the student move-ment of the late 1960s followed two distinct avenues of response: on the one hand, a dehistoricizing, “American” celebration of popular images (the “pop art” alternative) and, on the other hand, a fact-driven politiciza-tion of the image that sought to recover a problematic, partly invisible past (“documentarism”). In German practice, these strategies often overlapped, operating as they did in the charged context of student rebellion against Germany’s

1. W. J. T. Mitchell has been a powerful voice in the discussion of images and texts for twenty-five years, from The Language of Images (1980) to What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005). Clas Zilliacus (1979) provides an early but still useful overview of the international trend toward documentary fiction, starting in the 1960s with authors such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in the United States and Rolf Hochuth and Peter Weiss in Germany. Various terms were coined for the new genre, including “faction,” “literature of fact,” “factography,” “documentary literature,” and “documentarism” (ibid.: 97).2. For a concise general discussion of “the power of images” in Nazi Germany, see the online essay by David Crew (2006) on photography, the Holocaust, and the Nazi state as part of a general discussion of German History after the Visual Turn. Rolf Sachsse’s Die Erziehung zum Wegsehen (2003) argues that the Nazi state carefully fostered “happy images” of daily life under Hitler in order to encourage Germans to “look away” from its negative sides and to “overlook” its victims.

fascist legacy, the anti–Vietnam War protest, and artistic provocation. For instance, the young art student Anselm Kiefer caused an outrage by photo-graphing himself performing the (illegal) Hitler salute while standing on blocks in a bathtub filled with water or, in a later series entitled “Occu-pations” (1969), in public squares in various European cities. The small, black-and-white, amateur snapshots owed much to pop art strategies of instantaneity, seriality, and the transgression of high and low culture; they repeated the same rather banal and formally unimpressive image again and again, much like Andy Warhol’s serial images of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell soup cans. But, at the same time, they pushed the political and juridical limits of representation and nearly resulted in Kiefer’s expul-sion from the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. (Only the intervention of one of his teachers, a camp survivor, saved him.) On the literary front, the charismatic poet and novelist Rolf Dieter Brink-mann mixed provocative photographic images with unconventional liter-ary texts whose typographic layouts—as in the anthology Acid, coedited with Rainer Rygulla, which would quickly achieve cult status—signaled their allegiance to pop art, the Beat generation, and a general philosophy of rebellion. The text/image question infuses all his writing, most obvi-ously in his 1968 verse collection Godzilla, its twenty-two poems printed over photographic images of female models in bathing suits. The images could derive from the world of advertising or erotic magazines and are cropped to focus on pelvis or breasts; the poems are by turns erotic, vulgar, childlike, and sarcastic send-ups of the commercialization of sex. After his death in 1975 in a traffic accident at the age of thirty-five, Brinkmann’s widow published a facsimile edition of diaries and workbooks that made clear just how important the notion of visual and typographic interaction was for his creative impulse: “Starting in September 1971, Brinkmann cre-ated four volumes of material that he worked on simultaneously. He cre-ated collage texts with photos, press releases, advertisements, paper money, postcards and letters” (Brinkmann 1987: from the first [unnumbered] page of the editorial afterword). Elaborately titled “Investigations into the Defi-nition of a Feeling for Rebellion” (there are also numerous subtitles), it has secured Brinkmann’s posthumous fame as one of the most innovative and iconoclastic writers of his generation, an angry German pop author of the 1960s who prepared the way for postmodern prose writers of the 1980s and 1990s. But if everything in Germany in these years tended toward the politi-cal, basic differences in what one might term the speed of the image dis-tinguished various artistic practices. Pop art makes use of a “fast” image in order to produce immediate, powerful, clashing impressions; as with

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advertising, emphasis is placed on the readily consumable message, on the “now” of aesthetic, sensual response or, at times, of political and social anger. The same is true of some documentary literature that seeks immedi-ate ideological effects and makes use of a readily identifiable political mes-sage. But a modernist-inspired form of documentary literature, going back to the Weimar experiments of Brecht, Döblin, Piscator, and others, prefers instead a “slow” image, which delays and problematizes viewer response; the image should lead to reflection, abstraction, critical examination of the past and the ideological character of its representation. Thus, in the early stages of German documentarism, whose political and moral anger was fanned by the so-called “Auschwitz trials” of former camp guards and SS officers in Frankfurt in 1963–65, documents often took on the role of legal evidence, exposing the cover-up and obfuscation of the Nazi past during the first two decades following the war. Peter Weiss’s 1965 play The Inves-tigation drew on legal transcripts, newspaper accounts, and the author’s own attendance of the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards and SS officers in order to put the criminal facts (including the defendants’ actual names) into visual form on the stage. Despite the play’s clear political orienta-tion, its rigorously unemotional, highly formalized musical language (it was subtitled “An Oratorio in Eleven Chants”) required audiences to do a double take, reconciling monstrous crimes with mundane personal details, historical atrocities with epic form. It premiered simultaneously in some twenty German and European cities, seeking thereby to concentrate and accelerate the play’s political and aesthetic impact. Film director, media theorist, television producer, and author Alexan-der Kluge made his literary debut in 1962 with his pathbreaking series of documentary-like “biographies” (Lebensläufe) of Nazi perpetrators, victims, and other war participants. The cosigner of the Manifesto of Oberhausen (1962), proclaiming the “collapse of the conventional German film,” Kluge occupied the fertile zone between film and literature where photographic images provided a common realistic element that would disrupt conven-tional storytelling and filmmaking. But Kluge’s use of the documentary mode was never simple, nor simply ideological. As Andreas Huyssen (1988: 122) has noted, Kluge’s strongest documentary writing has more to offer than most of the 1960s documentarism because it goes beyond simple fac-tual reportage and political enlightenment to embrace “the experiments of the Weimar avant-garde, especially Brecht and the montage tradition.” Typical of this technique is the mixture of image and text, in which fac-tual historical information is indistinguishable from invented (if seemingly realistic) narrative elements, which he used to superb effect in the par-tially autobiographical, pseudo-documentary montage texts published in

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1977 under the ambiguous title Neue Geschichten (a title that can mean “new stories” but also “new histories”). A good example is his “The Aerial Attack of Halberstadt on April 8, 1945,” which describes the bombing of his hometown that he experienced as a thirteen-year-old boy at the end of the war. Using photographs, tech-nical drawings, newspaper interviews, and verbal narrations, it seems to offer a series of discrete, individual perceptions of the bombing “from the ground,” that is, as it was experienced by the participants: a movie-house employee just after a bomb has partially destroyed the theater; a mother attempting to flee her home with her children; two women in an antiair-craft tower who are injured or killed; a high-ranking English officer who participated in the bombing and who reflects on the event in a postwar interview. The text pursues a primary documentary, political aim: to focus attention on a historical event that was partially suppressed after the war by the occupying Allied forces, who did not want to be reminded of the “capitalist logic” of the bombing at this late stage in combat. Yet much of the material is simulated, and as Kluge himself noted, the most “realistic” parts, including a postwar interview by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung with one of the raid’s English commanders, stem from his own very active imagination, not the archive. His love of paradox and self-contradiction is constant. “I invent almost nothing, but not everything that stands in quotes is actually a citation,” he noted in a recent interview. “I always proceed realistically, but because I consider reality to be the greatest liar of all, our errors are often for me a more precise record than the so-called facts” (Hage 2003: 207). That the images in this text are not simple factual representations of reality, to be seen (and seen through) at a single glance, is clear from the opening picture of a poster for the popular movie Heimkehr (Homecoming) (figure 1). In one sense, the advertisement serves as an appropriate contem-porary document, since this film was playing, or is said by Kluge to have been playing, in the Capitol cinema in Halberstadt when the first bombs fell. But its use is highly ironic. Directed in 1941 by Gustav Ucicky and star-ring Paula Wessely, the film is set in 1939 on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Its tale of the courageous but persecuted ethnic German minority in Poland thus served as a perfect foil for Propaganda Minister Josef Goeb-bels’s claim that the invasion represented Poland’s “return home” into the greater Reich (Heim ins Reich); Ucicky himself claimed the film should make manifest the racial difference between Germans and Slavs.� But the photo-

3. The film Heimkehr (Homecoming), described by Nazi censors as “politically valuable to the State,” opened in 1941 at the Ufa Palast am Zoo in Berlin and received a number of prizes, including that of the Venice film festival. After the war, Ucicky was banned from work-ing as a director by the Allies. Nobel Prize–winning author Elfriede Jelinek has described


Figure 1 Poster for the popular movie Heimkehr (Homecoming). From Kluge 2000: 27


graph in Kluge’s text goes beyond the irony of historical content. Because it is a reproduction of a publicity image which refers in turn to a cinematic (and propagandistic) representation of the war, it serves as a mise en abîme of photographic truth in general, suggesting the constructed nature of the cinematic war image and even of Kluge’s own narrative. Where is the line separating historical fact from propaganda and visual representation? In no case is the understanding of this opening image immediate; its mean-ing, or variety of possible meanings, emerges slowly over time as the prod-uct of reading, rereading, research, and reflection. The poster functions in this sense not as a document of reality but as a set of questions about reality and its representation. The subsequent images in Kluge’s text also present serious formal obstacles to quick consumption: their grainy, dark, unfocused quality; the black-and-white format, emphasizing their remoteness as historical artifacts; the unfamiliarity of illustrations taken from technical manuals; in some cases, the lack of captions or, contrarily, the lengthy theoretical captions; and finally, the fragmented, discontinuous nature of the images, which offer only snippets of the whole event. One should note, however, that these formal “difficulties” are part of the rhetorical means by which the images are put forward as “authentic” documents: since the images resist catering to the viewer’s aesthetic enjoyment, since they are hard to read (or simply dull or insignificant), they seem not to be aesthetic constructs. This verisimilitude, what Barthes might have termed their “reality effect,” is strengthened by a brief narrative of the “unknown photographer,” who is said to have taken pictures of the city during the raid. Ironically, he is arrested by local authorities for suspicious activity and narrowly escapes execution; but his story explains the origin, survival, and authenticity of the images documenting the bombing. Like the editor of an eighteenth-century novel introducing the manuscript he has supposedly found in a trunk in the attic, Kluge pretends to be offering a piece of reality itself, although characteristically neither he nor a first-person narrator ever appears in the story itself. In his introduction to the Neue Geschichten, Kluge (1988: 103) explicitly if somewhat cryptically links the formal discontinuities of text and images to his own experience of the bombing: “A few of the stories appear to have been cut short. . . . The form of a bomb blast makes an impression. Such a form is constituted by being cut short. On April 8, 1945, I was ten meters away from such a blast.” This formal quality of being “cut short,” the

Heimkehr as “the worst propaganda film the Nazis ever made” (ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/elfriede/wessely.HTM).


emphasis on interruptions and gaps as the crucial components of historical experience, is also embodied by the matter-of-fact, illustrative photographs documenting the destroyed city. The very neutral, mechanical quality of these images is part of the text’s documentary self-presentation, according to which the “objective” eye of the camera simply records what happened (“Geschichte” as history, not personal story). At the same time, this very neutrality—emphasized by captions identifying particular street names and neighborhoods—seems grotesquely inappropriate for the presenta-tion of what is after all the brutal destruction of the author’s hometown, the killing and horrific suffering of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children. Kluge’s images are not just “slow,” they are “cold”; justifiable as documents, they irritate or perplex the reader as elements of a personal story that refuses to be personal. This “coldness” of the documentary image expresses itself in both the style and the content of the verbal text, which foregrounds the extreme neutrality or even absence of the narrating self. Where is the child who experienced the bombing “at ten meters”? Where is the adult reflecting on the destruction of his home, the deaths of neighbors, friends, per-haps close family members? The documentary, even “bureaucratic” or “lawyerly” style is maintained even in descriptions of horrifying events. Indeed, at times the story seems to mock the victims and their automaton-like responses. After the bombing of the movie house, for instance, the female manager thinks only of getting ready for the next show, since (we are told) no “catastrophe” could disrupt her “attachment” to the cinema’s daily schedule of six screenings. Confronted by the dismembered bodies of the dead soldiers, she feels she should “put things in order at least here” and then mindlessly places body parts “which no longer belong together” in a laundry kettle (Kluge 2000: 29). In another sequence, Kluge presents an elementary schoolteacher named Gerda Baethe, who attempts to save herself and her three children. Here too the rigorously factual account of the woman’s terrorized response is unsettling because she thinks like a practically minded soldier following a “strategy from the ground,” not like a mother or teacher. She refers to the children as “property” or “troops,” pokes one of them in the side to see if “the little ones were still function-ing,” and coolly reflects that she would save the boy and sacrifice the “less valuable girls, who she believed could be replaced later” (ibid.: 43–44). Formally, one can argue that Kluge is drawing here on what Helmut Lethen (2002) has described as the “cold” tradition of the Weimar avant-garde, the “new objectivity” of Brecht and Döblin that breaks with per-sonalized, sentimental narratives and sees in photography and cinematic montage a mechanical ideal of artistic representation. One might also


argue that, in highlighting the mechanized, “inhuman” behavior of the vic-tims, Kluge is realistically depicting the symptoms of trauma; the bombing has produced an emotional short circuit that blocks the normal expression of horror, mourning, and empathy. He himself has claimed that at the time of the story’s composition, which coincided with the left-wing terror-ist actions of 1976–77, he was interested in discovering a “patriotic core” for his community by showing Germans in a state of complete powerless-ness (Hage 2003: 208–9). And of course a “neutral” or “cold” manner of presentation can heighten the reader’s sense of outrage at the bombings, which took place when the war was almost over and served little military purpose. But at least part of the explanation is to be found in Kluge’s ambiva-lent relation to the victims: their “inhumane” response stems not so much from the trauma of the air raid as from their deeper identity (in his view) as “typically” German subjects, who have been depersonalized, before the bombing, by the interrelated forces of capitalism and fascism. The state of traumatized powerlessness merely brings into sharper focus this “defa-miliarization” (in the dual sense of an alienating inhumanity and lack of family identity). The cinema employee’s first thoughts are not what might be happening to her family members or relatives in another part of town but how she can save her employers’ property; Gerda Baethe attempts to save her children not out of an elementary maternal urge but as a military “strategy” where civilians take part in the war effort. Both exist as puppets who are pulled by the strings of warmongering capitalist and fascist logic, not as private individuals or family members. (To gauge the ideological character of Kluge’s depiction, one should contrast these responses with media representations of the victims of the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center, which highlighted their last desperate attempts to communicate with families, heroically save lives, etc., not their trauma-tized, automaton-like responses.) If Kluge’s “cold” text, with its unempathic narrative style and photo-graphic documentation of the destruction, serves as the index of deficient human subjectivity, it also marks his own unresolved, hostile relation to the German victims, whom he can never quite stop thinking of as Nazi and capitalist perpetrators. Although the section depicting Gerda Baethe is introduced by the rather dreamy close-up image of a woman, we are also told that she spent “fourteen glorious days” on a vacation before the bombing, driving in a convertible with a Nazi who claims that “everything is a question of organization” (Kluge 2000: 47). Kluge’s absence from the text is a sign that his own affective, familial, and communal relationships have been “cut short,” that a “homecoming” is no longer possible, indeed,


that the very notion of “family” or “home” has been shattered—even and perhaps especially for German Marxists caught in the ideological cross fire of the Red Army Faction in the mid-1970s.�

The compelling mix of image and verbal narrative in W. G. Sebald’s prose works both compares and contrasts with the politicized, documentary phase of West German literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Sebald followed the Auschwitz trials on a daily basis as a student and has acknowledged his admiration for the work of Peter Weiss, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Thewe-leit, and others who combined verbal narratives, documents, and images to contest Nazi-inspired accounts of the past. Like Kluge, Sebald uses “slow” images; they are the opposite of the unabashedly trivial, hedonistic, immediacy-seeking images of pop culture. Uncaptioned, often poorly lit or focused, they too assert their documentary nature through the very lack of any overtly pleasing or merely interesting aesthetic quality. A restau-rant bill, a calling card, an old postcard—they offer themselves as innocu-ous fragments of the real. But as with Kluge, the reality effect of Sebald’s images compounds the difficulty of deciphering the verbal narrative, to which they stand in an oblique but contiguous relation. For Sebald con-ceived of the pictures as a form of writing. Just as the literary text aspires to a condition of visuality, his photographs “call out” to be told as stories. “One doesn’t know [the photographic subjects],” he noted in an interview about the old photographs he collected and used as inspiration for his own texts. “And so you have to start thinking hypothetically. Along this route, you inevitably slip into fiction, the telling of stories. While writing, you see ways of departing from the images or entering into them to tell your story, to use them instead of a textual passage, etc.” (Scholz 2000: 51). Like Kluge, Sebald has also banished color from his images. But unlike earlier documentary German literature, where the black-and-white format served primarily to reinforce the realist impression, his use of the format also recalls the black ink and white page of the surrounding verbal text: one medium merges into the other. The format also invests the subjects and the passage of time with a dated quality that is basic to their stories. In these photographs, the contemporary world is “always already” past; even snapshots taken recently look old and so hark back to an earlier era. Many of the images are in fact old photos or postcards—not “ready-mades” that can circulate as consumable signs of contemporary culture but “ghosts”

4. Interesting in this regard is Kluge’s autobiographical comment that his parents divorced six months before the bombing took place: “In a sense I became a lawyer in the middle of the war. I would have done everything to bring the two of them back together. Everything I think today takes nourishment from this time” (Hage 2003: 209).


that have come back from a previous time, their mere existence a challenge to the reality and permanence of the here and now. “I believe that black-and-white photography, or rather the gray areas [in it] precisely indicate this territory between life and death. In the archaic imagination, there was generally a vast no-man’s land where people continually wandered about” (ibid.: 52). Far from representing a rejection of present reality, this concep-tion of history coincides with Benjamin’s messianic notion of a “Jetztzeit” in which past catastrophes, suffering, and death are part of the reader’s (or viewer’s) charged apprehension of the present. The text’s documen-tary gaze simply takes in a much broader range of human and political history. Sebald’s critics have consistently overlooked the political aspect in his literary writing, focusing instead on questions of memory, identity, trauma, and the “postmodern” epistemological uncertainties of his fictions.� But political polemic was instrumental in his literary breakthrough and emerged from a sustained critical reflection on what might be called an “ethics” of documentary realism that began in the early 1980s. In an article of 1982 that provided the basis for his book Luftkrieg und Literatur (translated into English as The Natural History of Destruction), he laments the general failure of German writers to provide objective, factual accounts of the destruction of German cities by Allied bombing. The few works that tried to repre-sent its cataclysmic nature reach for pathos-laden, apocalyptic, mythical, and overly literary formulations that cannot do justice to the event—stylistic failures that, for Sebald, amount to moral failures. A notable exception is Hans Erich Nossack’s “report” of the Hamburg firebombing in July 1943, entitled The End (Der Untergang), which is based on firsthand observation. As Sebald points out, Nossack developed his reportorial style from Stendhal (also a witness to military devastation in Napoleon’s Italian campaigns), whose diaries had taught him to “express himself as plainly as possible, without the usual literary adjectives, without flowery images, more like a writer of letters and almost in everyday language.” Nossack’s style in the “report” (Bericht) of the destruction of Hamburg maintains the documentary style that would become a “model” for the West German documentary litera-ture of the 1960s and 1970s, especially that of Kluge. “In direct contrast to

5. During his lifetime, much of the critical response to Sebald’s writing was limited to news-paper and magazine reviews. Since his death in 2001, academic studies have proliferated so quickly that it is now difficult to give an overview. Excellent starting points are the recent anthologies W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Long and Whitehead 2004) and Sebald. Lek-türen (Atze and Loquai 2005). Anne Fuchs’s (2004) perceptive and broad treatment of mem-ory and trauma, which, however, consistently underplays the political dimension of Sebald’s writing, is representative of the tenor of current academic studies.


the traditional approach to writing fiction, Nossack experiments with the prosaic genre of the report, the documentary account, the investigation, to make room for the historical contingency that breaks the mould of [tradi-tional] novels” (Sebald 2005: 80–81; translation slightly altered). Documentary realism is here the ethically valid stylistic response to catastrophe. Quoting Canetti’s claim that the “precision” and “responsi-bility” in the diary of a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima provide the “essen-tial” literary form for “a thinking, seeing human being today,” Sebald (ibid.: 86) makes a sweeping pronouncement about Nossack’s text that sounds like his own literary manifesto: “The ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreducible foundation of all literary effort. It crystallizes resistance to the human ten-dency to repress any memory that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life.” Precisely because the traumatized survivor of the Hamburg bombing cannot remember—he “dare not look back, since there was nothing behind him but fire”—the memory and transmission of this event are delegated to those individuals who are “ready to live with the risk of remembering” (ibid.: 86–87). The writer, and especially the German writer, has the moral obligation to preserve those painful memories that normal life tends to efface. Two years later, Sebald extended this reflection to the representation of Jewish suffering. In an analysis of Günter Grass’s Diary of a Snail, he praises those parts of the novel based on actual documentation, such as the author’s own observation of an election campaign or “the impressively real details” of the Danzig Jews’ exile furnished by a Jewish historian living in Tel Aviv; Grass himself, he notes, could not provide these documentary passages since, like other German writers, he “still know[s] little of the real fate of the persecuted Jews” (ibid.: 113). The weakest parts of the novel are his essayistic digressions, which are “pure invention” (ibid.: 114). The sar-casm in these last words is programmatic: “mere” fiction detracts from the authenticity—moral and esthetic—of Grass’s text.

Unlike Kluge, Weiss, Grass, and many other German documentarists, how-ever, and despite what seems like an emotionally neutral, report-like tone of voice, Sebald’s texts are neither objective nor cold. Throughout works such as The Emigrants and Austerlitz, one senses the narrator’s subdued but unmistakable empathy for his subjects’ tales of emigration and loss; access to history is always through an individual’s personal story. In this regard, he departs from Kluge’s textual practice, which repeatedly focuses on the anonymous, collective, bureaucratized aspects of modernity, on its human disfiguration and “defamiliarization.” Sebald seeks out instead the


personal and the eccentric in his subjects, seemingly intent on salvaging what he can of an individual identity that has been damaged or closed off. In a very literal sense, his stories are “familiar”—not just because of their casual presentation of his subjects’ quotidian activities but because they explicitly focus on family relations. And although the narrator keeps himself quietly out of the spotlight, his own family narrative is subtly inter-twined with that of his protagonists. Family photograph albums, memoirs, and diaries play a fundamental role in the telling of these stories, both formally and affectively. An essay by J. J. Long (2003) on Sebald’s use of photography in The Emi-grants helps clarify the importance of these family images. Like most critics, Long argues against a realist, “indexical” understanding of the images as objective history or memory; rather, they emerge from the intersubjective, emotionally freighted link between narrator and protagonist and can best be understood as “postmemories.” Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s discus-sion of postmemory and the family photo albums of Holocaust survivors, he notes that many of the photographs in The Emigrants serve the needs of the second generation to discover, remember, and mourn a past that is just beyond their actual experience and memory but nonetheless haunts them. One of the most surprising claims in Long’s analysis is that these family images counteract the omnipresent forces of melancholy, historical catas-trophe and metaphysical pessimism in Sebald’s writings. The “affiliative gaze” of this second-generation German narrator allows him “to suture himself into the stories of others and construct a sense of narrative and biographical continuity as a compensation for exile and loss. . . . The com-bination of narrative and photography in [The Emigrants] can thus be seen as an attempt, at the level of form, to counteract the dispersal, dissipation, and rupture inherent in the historical process” (ibid.: 137). Long’s reading is consistent with the restorative and inclusive role that Hirsch (1997) attributes to the family photos of Jewish life in a Polish village before its destruction during the Second World War, which have been col-lected in the Tower of Memory in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Their very conventionality, she writes, “provides a space of identification for any viewer participating in the conventions of familial representation; thus the photos can bridge the gap between view-ers who are personally connected to the event and those who are not. They can expand the postmemorial circle.” More than a mere list of the vic-tims’ names or even than a narrative of destruction, these photographs of the Jewish world “lost to genocide and exile” can contain “the particular mixture of mourning and re-creation that characterizes the work of post-memory” (ibid.: 251).


This notion of postmemory has an obvious persuasive force for Sebald’s historical position, which differs from that of documentarists like Kluge and Weiss who experienced the war as adolescents or young adults. “Born in a village in the Allgäu Alps in May 1944,” he noted in an interview, “I was one of those who remained almost untouched by the catastrophe then unfolding in the German Reich [but which] nonetheless left traces in my memory” (Sebald 2003: vii–viii; translation slightly altered). However, one might ask whether Hirsch’s (and by extension Long’s) description of post-memory is not too generous a category, which all but erases the historical subjectivity of different viewers. By “expanding” the postmemory circle to “viewers who are personally connected to the event and those who are not,” Hirsch effaces not only the difference between direct witnesses and would-be witnesses but also the continuing ideological force of the original event for present viewers. Despite his manifest empathy for the non-German victims, Sebald’s German narrator cannot be brought unproblematically into the same identificatory model of commiseration and “familial look-ing” that his Jewish protagonists engage in. Despite consensus about the Holocaust, second-generation Germans and Jews do not have the same “postmemories.” Consider what happens when Sebald’s narrator confronts the pictures in his family album in the autobiographical story at the end of his first prose collection Vertigo (see figure 2). In “Il Ritorno in Patria,” his return to the Bavarian village of his birth summons his memory of the gypsies who camped at the outskirts of town in the summer months after the war. Whenever he walked past them, his mother would pick him up and carry him in her arms. “Across her shoulder I saw the gypsies look up briefly from what they were about, and then lower their eyes again as if in revul-sion” (2000: 183). Who these gypsies were, how they managed to survive the war, or why they had chosen that particular spot for their summer camp are historical questions that occur to the narrator only as an adult, years later:

for example, when I leaf through the photo album which my father bought as a present for my mother for the first so-called Kriegsweihnacht. In it are pictures of the Polish campaign, all neatly captioned in white ink. Some of these photo-graphs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out, smiling, from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of the Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war. (Ibid.: 184–85)

Sandwiched into this verbal narrative and, significantly enough, right after the word “Bilder” (“pictures”) in the German text is the image of a


Figure 2 Image from “Il Ritorno in Patria” in Sebald’s Vertigo (2000: 184), where returning to the Bavarian village of his birth evokes memories of the gypsies who camped at the outskirts of town during the summer months after the war.


smiling gypsy mother and child; pasted onto a black page and captioned in white ink with the word “Zigeuner” (“gypsies”), it clearly comes from the narrator’s family album. In an interview, Sebald called attention to the autobiographical origin of the photo, noting that the picture meant nothing to him when he leafed through the album as a child but set off a series of uncomfortable histori-cal speculations when he came across it in the mid-1980s. “It seems to me quite eye-opening, however, that as early as late-summer 1939 there was a German NCO [i.e., Sebald’s father] who took pictures of gypsies behind barbed wire somewhere in Slovakia. It shows that before the war actually started gypsies were being rounded up and interned in open-air camps in this puppet-state.” Note also that it was not just the photo that produced a feeling of alienation but also the belated, accidental, slightly uncanny manner of its rediscovery. “Only much later did it strike me that there was a whole tale in that one image” (Bigsby 2001: 145). Sebald’s use of this image recalls Roland Barthes’s discussion of the nineteenth-century photograph of a criminal condemned to death in order to suggest that all photographic subjects bear within them the sign of their future death and thus of their “pastness” in relation to the present viewer. As I have written in another context, the picture of the gypsy mother and child behind barbed wire, on the eve of a war in which their people were systematically persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, inevitably brings to mind their “pastness” as historical subjects—with the important dif-ference that the German narrator’s familial identity is caught up in the history of their disappearance (Anderson 2003: 109). Because this image comes from his family album, what was originally offered by the father as a Christmas present to enrich the family narrative becomes, decades after the war is over, the basis for the son’s increasingly estranged memory of his own childhood. Unlike the affective relations that Sebald’s narrator has chosen to have with the Jewish characters in The Emigrants, his actual family history is now marked by discord and shame. Even the memory of his mother in her “protective” maternal role brings back the image of the gypsies, “who look up briefly . . . and then lower their eyes again as if in revulsion.” Such photos in Sebald’s writings—and there are many of them—thus serve a referential, autobiographical function, without which his ideo-logical critique of German history, and of his own German family his-tory, would lose much of its bite. For the overriding problem for second-generation Germans like the author of Vertigo was not just the Holocaust itself but the parents’ postwar silence, selective forgetting, or deliberate falsifications. “The first line of defence was always, ‘I can’t really remem-


ber exactly what happened,’” Sebald recalled about his father’s refusal to talk about his wartime activities. “If you pressed harder then the atmo-sphere would become increasingly uncomfortable and arguments would set in” (Bigsby 2001: 143). The inclusion of the family photo in this story documents what the father would not tell his son—a gap in narration that has a collective dimension, since it also exists for the millions of German children in his generation who had a father who served “somewhere in the East.” “I still don’t know to this day, exactly what my father did or did not do,” he admitted in the same interview. What he did know—in part by looking at the kind of photographs that Hirsch (1997: 257) describes as the “building blocks” of postmemory—is that “the horrendous occurrences and atrocities [happened] as soon as the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939” (Bigsby 2001: 143).� The same “defamiliarization” of German family memories can also be provoked by images of Jews. A revealing example from The Emigrants is the photo album that the narrator discovers while researching the life of his elementary schoolteacher in the story “Paul Bereyter.” As a child, he had no knowledge that his teacher was different from any of the other German residents in their town, but after this man’s suicide in December 1983, he learns that, as a “quarter Jew,” the character referred to in the story as Bereyter was denied the right to teach German children and forced to take a tutor position with a French family. One series of photographs from the album shows him smiling with his Jewish fiancée in an idyllic Bavarian setting before his exile; another shows him with the French family, having swung within a month “from happiness to misfortune” and become so thin that “he seems almost to have reached a physical vanishing point” (Sebald 1996: 49). Here again the photographs serve as documentary evidence of persecution that was covered up after the war and that causes in the narra-tor a belated sense of responsibility and shame vis-à-vis his own childhood. Every image of and by children in “Paul Bereyter,” from the narrator’s own classroom drawings to the group pictures of smiling pupils, takes on a different meaning and affective value in light of this belated discovery. Only now can he understand why his teacher might have felt oppressed by teaching German children or why he would sometimes take off his glasses and polish them with such assiduity “that it seemed he was glad not to have to see us for a while” (ibid.: 35). Sebald explicitly stresses the importance of documentation and refer-entiality in this story, which not coincidentally begins with a picture of

6. It goes without saying that such remarks about Sebald’s difficult relation with his father are not meant to equate the suffering of second-generation Jews and Germans but to under-score their differences.


the site where the teacher’s suicide took place and an explicit quotation from the Allgäu newspaper that originally reported the news. The news-paper is identified by its actual name (Anzeigeblatt), and the correct date of the obituary is given. Significantly, the narrator initially attempts to imag-ine his former teacher in various everyday scenes prior to his suicide. But these attempts, he claims, do not bring him any closer to the man, “except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptu-ous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter” (ibid.: 29; my emphasis). What follows, consistent with Sebald’s remarks on the obligation of German writers to preserve Jewish memories with actual documentation rather than invented stories, is the result of the author’s own research, interviews, and analysis; the photographs of “Bereyter” (whose actual name was Armin Müller) all stem from a family album that Sebald was given access to, probably by Müller’s second wife, who apparently gave him permission to use them for his story.� The fact that Sebald added fictional elements to this actual historical account, changing Müller’s name and interpolating aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s biography into the narrative, does not diminish its documentary, denunciatory character. “The story of the schoolteacher in The Emigrants is completely authentic, including the ghastly way in which this man ended his own life,” Sebald insisted in an interview. “The photo-graphs are photographs from his album” (Bigsby 2001: 155). It is worth remembering the political and aesthetic context of the period in which this story took shape, which stretches from Sebald’s discovery of Müller’s suicide in January 1984 to the story’s first publication in 1990. These are the very years in which Bavaria and Austria were roiled by reve-lations of the local Nazi past—the years in which a high school student in Passau became the “Nasty Girl” by publishing incriminating details from the biographies of prominent citizens or in which Austrian president Kurt Waldheim was forced to admit his selective memory of his activities during the war. In 1988 conceptual artist Hans Hacke provoked outrage simply by redecorating the town square of Graz as it had looked after the Anschluss with Germany in March 1938, complete with swastikas and Nazi banners. Another scandal-provoking “commemoration” of the Anschluss in the same year was Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, which con-fronted spectators with their own auditory self-image by playing tapes of the enthusiastic chants with which they (or their parents) welcomed Hitler to Vienna fifty years earlier on the square just outside the theater. Debate

7. Much of the biographical information presented here has not been published before: it stems from my own research and discussions with Sebald’s family members, Sonthofen resi-dents, and former colleagues of Armin Müller.


raged for weeks after the premiere, graffiti pro and contra was scribbled on public walls, and one irate woman apparently attacked Bernhard on the street with an umbrella. Of course this kind of resistance to historical memory was not limited to Austria or rural Bavaria: Sebald can hardly have missed the heated academic debates in France and England in this period about Holocaust revisionists such as Robert Faurisson and David Irving, who sought to use the very tools of historians to deny the fact of the Jewish genocide. This was the historical context for the emergence of The Emigrants, whose implementation of documentary “evidence” cannot simply be ascribed to a strategy of postmodernist narrative irony.

On the other hand, it is also clear that, in his actual writing practice, Sebald did not employ the photographs in his texts as mere records of the past. While holding to political and moral ideals about literary documen-tarism put forward in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, as we have attempted to show, he also insisted that fact and fiction are both “hybrids,” that our most personal and vivid memories are often false, that histori-ography rests on faulty sources, and therefore that photographs are com-prised of a similarly “irritating” mix of truth and falsification.� The first story in his first prose collection seems, in this regard, a manifesto on real-ism and the vagaries of memory. Based partly on Stendhal’s half-fictional autobiography La vie d’Henry Brûlard (itself a hybrid text with many draw-ings that appears to have given Sebald the idea for his own use of images), it quotes one of the major nineteenth-century French realist novelists in order to point out how fragile and self-interested human memory actually is, especially for someone traumatized by scenes of war: “[Stendhal] writes that he was so affected by the large number of dead horses lying by the wayside, and the other detritus of war . . . that he now has no clear idea whatsoever of the things he found so horrifying then. It seemed to him that his impressions had been erased by the very violence of their impact” (Sebald 2000: 6). Similarly, in an essay on Auschwitz survivors Jean Améry and Primo Levi, Sebald emphasized that even direct witnesses of Nazi crimes, that is, “the people who knew what went on” in the death camps, cannot give us a “true understanding” (“keinen wahren Begriff ”) of their experience, since the original memory trace is too disturbed. Writing “translates” this chaotic, pre-linguistic trace within the mind’s recording faculty (“Gedächt-nis”) into an ordered, discursive “recollection” (“Erinnerung”) that distorts

8. “Fact and fiction . . . are not alternatives. They are both hybrids with the constituent parts in different measure” (Bigsby 2001: 153). Compare Kluge’s account of “realism” quoted above, in which he defines reality as “the greatest liar of all” (Hage 2003: 207).


and betrays its truth content in the very act of mediation (Sebald 1989). But this insight became the basis for his portrait of emigrants and exiles who are not victims of the Holocaust but of some less definable experi-ence of human loss. Extrapolating from this area of traumatized and mel-ancholic memory, the author of The Emigrants gradually came to see the entire psychic apparatus of “normal” memory, knowledge, and perception as informed by the same subjective need for stable, reassuring representa-tions: “I do think that we largely delude ourselves with the knowledge that we think we possess, that we make it up as we go along, that we make it fit our desires and anxieties and that we invent a straight line of a trail in order to calm ourselves down” (Wood 1998: 25–26). In the last story of The Emigrants we can see both the merit and the prob-lematic nature of this conception of history for a second-generation Ger-man author. In “Max Ferber,” we see a photograph of the square before the Wuerzburg castle (residenzplatz) showing a large crowd of people and a cloud of smoke billowing up into the sky (figure 3). The image was first published in the official Nazi daily newspaper in order to document the book burning that took place there in May 1933. But as Ferber’s uncle claimed at the time, the Nazis had clearly doctored the image to make it look this way—a falsification of politics and history, he maintains, that exposes the mendacity of the Nazi regime “from the very start” (Sebald 1996: 184). Others in the family disagree, and the uncertainty about the authenticity of the image is left in the air until the narrator visits a Ger-man archive and proves there can be “no doubt” that the uncle’s suspi-cions were justified. However, in the very process of unraveling this mix of reality and propaganda by the Nazis, the narrator inevitably calls to mind his own manipulation of photographs in his literary texts and the inherent epistemological instability of the medium itself. For if photographs are the most convincing form of documentation of the real, they are also the easi-est to manipulate; indeed, their manipulability has been part of their iden-tity since their invention in the nineteenth century and a source of con-troversy ever since. As Alain Jaubert (1989) showed in his study of Stalin’s “erasure” of Trotsky from official Soviet photographs, the images used to persuade viewers of a certain empirical reality were in fact instruments of historical falsification. A similar paradox bedeviled the recent attempt to document war crimes perpetrated by the German army through photo-graphs from Soviet archives. Though well intentioned, the organizers of the exhibition misread some of the images, presenting them as “proof ” of Wehrmacht atrocities, whereas closer analysis appeared to reveal a differ-ent set of victims and perpetrators (Musial 1999). Again, visual material requires interpretation and can resist definitive explanation just as surely


Figure 3 This photographic image from “Max Ferber,” the last story of The Emi-grants, shows a cloud of smoke billowing above a large crowd of people assembled in the square before the Wuerzburg castle (residenzplatz). From Sebald 1996: 184.


as any written document or, for that matter, a realistic passage in a work of fiction. The difficulty of ascertaining the truth of a documentary image is not, however, an argument in favor of historical indeterminacy or “undecid-ability”—at least not in Sebald’s or Kluge’s case. As the above discussion should have made clear, their self-conscious, “difficult” use of images in fic-tional texts should spur the reader to closer and more attentive engagement with the nature of historical reality and the documents used to describe it. Sebald’s narrator in “Max Ferber” himself goes to the archive to investi-gate the authenticity of a questionable photo. But their images also serve to complicate the reader’s epistemological understanding of the documen-tary text by posing a series of textual riddles or games that call attention to the fictional process itself. For instance, though Kluge’s text goes to great lengths to certify the origin of certain photographs documenting the bombing of Halberstadt, it never explains its access to the dialogue and inner thoughts of the numerous protagonists; the origin of the narrative voice remains a paradox. Similarly, in explicit reference to the doctored image of the residenzplatz, Sebald noted that it “pulls the rug from under the narrator’s business altogether, so that as a reader you might well ask, What is he on about? Why is he trying to make us believe that pictures are real?” This overt narrative destabilization—the strategy “of making things seem uncertain in the minds of the readers” (Wood 1998: 27)—exposes the cracks in the documentary surface, acknowledges the gaps in the narra-tive, and calls attention to its own textual unreliability, all in classic mod-ernist fashion. In this respect, their “slow,” self-conscious documentarism is the reverse of, say, Steven Spielberg’s simulated documentary style in Schindler’s List, filmed with a handheld camera and in black and white, which encourages viewers to believe that the images on the screen are real, that they are seeing “history” unfold before their very eyes. Challenging the reader to believe in and simultaneously doubt the authenticity of their images, Kluge and Sebald ultimately question the notion that the world and its representations can be divided into entirely separate categories of truth and fiction, into factual “documents” and aesthetic constructs. There is no “pure” historical document. Personal differences of sensibility and talent aside, Sebald’s use of photographs, intertextual citations, and historical sources differs from Kluge’s because of their specific historical positions. Kluge experienced the war firsthand and began writing about it at a time when large sectors of West German society had a vested interest in forgetting or denying its recent Nazi past. Like Weiss and other documentarists of the 1960s and 1970s, he saw literary fiction as a means of disseminating information and


raising political consciousness, not despite but because of his modernist use of documentary material. For Sebald, writing some twenty years later, this political dimension of literature had by no means disappeared; the ongoing historical amnesia in the Bavarian society of his youth, as well as contemporary debates about Holocaust revisionists, kept it very much in the forefront. Unsurprisingly, the polemical tone of his documentarism is sharpest when dealing with German perpetrators in World War II in which his own family narrative is implicated—a legacy of Sebald’s politicization during the 1960s and a generational rift with his parents he never com-pletely overcame. Without any direct experience of this war, however, Sebald has only second-generation “postmemories” with which to bridge the gap and con-nect himself imaginatively to its participants. Whereas Kluge’s “cold” texts are characterized by authorial distance, impassivity, and sarcasm, which confirm the alienation of his subjects, Sebald’s empathic narratives “famil-iarize” and personalize them, representing suffering from within and seek-ing to reestablish family connections—though his texts also repeatedly insist on the difference between German and Jewish memories. Kluge’s documentarism limits itself to registering the immediate physical mani-festations of destruction; the absence of interiority and affect signals the ongoing effect of trauma and what I have called “defamiliarization,” which works in formal as well as affective registers. Arising at a later historical juncture, Sebald’s fiction deals instead with individuals whose trauma lies deep in their past; documents in his texts are part of the fragile, epistemo-logically uncertain, but morally urgent task to salvage meaning from the ruins of their personal histories. The incorporation of photographs thus serves to “refamiliarize” victims whose lives have been torn apart by war, exile, and emigration—an accomplishment that is all the more poignant given the contrary effect of such images on his own German family. Melan-cholic but also strangely restorative, these ghostlike pictures attempt noth-ing less than to bring the dead to life—even as they question the reality of the living.


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