WG Sebald: The last interview | Education | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumani...

The last word

WG Sebald's literary career was at its height when he died in a
car crash last week. In his last interview, he told Maya Jaggi about
growing up in Bavaria after the second world war, his oblique
approach to the Holocaust and why he still wrote in German 35
years after arriving in England

Maya Jaggi
The Guardian, Friday 21 December 2001

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I first interviewed Max Sebald in September, one of his reluctant concessions to

publicity that he discharged with kindliness and deadpan humour. In his cramped,
defiantly computerless room at the University of East Anglia, where he was professor of
European literature, he showed me a sepia photograph of a young boy from his mother's
Bavarian clan, who was destined to return mentally disturbed from the first world war.
"This is before he knew," Sebald marvelled at the innocent countenance. "I find that
frightful - the incapacity to know what's round the corner."

Those words struck me after I learned of his death last Friday, at the age of 57, in a car
accident in Norwich. In old photographs he had given me, the boy Max (his third name
was Maximilian) stands before the Bavarian Alps, clad in the lederhosen he detested,
unaware both of the late flowering of his literary talent (he began writing "prose fiction"
only in his mid-40s), and that his career would be shockingly cut short at the height of
his powers. He had just moved from the small publisher Harvill to a lucrative deal with
the Penguin group. His early prose poem After Nature and the non-fiction Air War and
Literature will be published in English by Hamish Hamilton next year.

This edited conversation, published here for the first time, was a rare public appearance
by Sebald - his last in Britain - and took place on September 24, in partnership with the
South Bank Centre, before a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. It formed the
annual St Jerome event of UEA's British Centre for Literary Translation, of which
Sebald was the founder and a passionate advocate. Although Sebald came to Britain in
the mid-60s, and lived with his wife Ute in an old rectory outside Norwich, he wrote
only in German. Yet he felt at home in neither country. "My ideal station," he told me
with his mock lugubriousness, "is possibly a hotel in Switzerland."

Maya Jaggi: You were born in Wertach im Allgäu, Bavaria, on May 18 1944, in the
waning years of the Third Reich. How would you describe your family background?

WG Sebald: Wertach was a village of about a thousand inhabitants, in a valley covered

in snow for five months a year. It was a silent place. I was brought up largely by my
grandfather, because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947, and
worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him. I lived in that place until I
was about eight. My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer
backgrounds, and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of
the army as a captain. For most of those years, I didn't know what class we belonged to.
Then the German "economic miracle" unfolded, so the family rose again; my father
occupied a "proper" place in lower-middle-class society.

It was that social stratum where the so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most
present. Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that
preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of
the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds
around it - which of course we didn't. It was in the afternoon, with a football match
afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-60s, I could not
conceive that these events had happened only a few years back.

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It preoccupied me all the more when I came to this country [in 1966], because in
Manchester, I realised for the first time that these historical events had happened to real
people. [One character in The Emigrants (1993) was based partly on Sebald's
Mancunian landlord, a Jewish refugee.] You could grow up in Germany in the postwar
years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt
or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany Jewish people didn't exist. The
subsequent realisation was that they had been in all those places, as doctors, cinema
ushers, owners of garages, but they had disappeared - or had been disappeared. So it
was a process of successive phases of realisation.

MJ: Your work combines genres - autobiography, travel, meditative essay - and blurs
boundaries between fact and fiction, art and documentary. You've said the big events are
true while the detail is invented. What inspired your latest novel, Austerlitz, and the
character of Jacques Austerlitz?

WGS: Behind Austerlitz hide two or three, or perhaps three-and-a-half, real persons.
One is a colleague of mine and another is a person about whom I happened to see a
Channel 4 documentary by sheer chance. I was captivated by the tale of an apparently
English woman [Susie Bechhofer] who, as it transpired, had come to this country with
her twin sister and been brought up in a Welsh Calvinist household. One of the twins
died and the surviving twin never really knew that her origins were in a Munich
orphanage. The story struck home; it cast my mind back to Munich, the nearest big city
to where I grew up, so I could relate to the horror and distress.

MJ: Jacques Austerlitz recovers memories in his 50s of having arrived in Britain from
Prague on the Kindertransport. Much of your work is about memory: its unreliability, its
shattering return after being repressed. Does literature have a special role to play in
remembrance?

WGS: The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my
mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to
lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological
make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if
you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there
wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to
the reader can only come from things remembered - not from yesterday but from a long
time ago.

MJ: Your work is very oblique and tentative in its approach to the Holocaust; you avoid
the sensational. What do you think the dilemmas are of fiction writers tackling the
subject.

WGS: In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people
avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic
extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then from 1965 this became a
preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form. So I knew that writing
about the subject, particularly for people of German origin, is fraught with dangers and
difficulties. Tactless lapses, moral and aesthetic, can easily be committed.

It was also clear you could not write directly about the horror of persecution in its
ultimate forms, because no one could bear to look at these things without losing their
sanity. So you would have to approach it from an angle, and by intimating to the reader
that these subjects are constant company; their presence shades every inflection of every
sentence one writes. If one can make that credible, then one can begin to defend writing
about these subjects at all.

MJ: Your books have a documentary feel, using captionless black-and-white

photographs, but their status is unclear, or whether portraits correspond to people in
the text. What's your interest in photography, and why do you strive for uncertainty in
the reader about what's true?

WGS: I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically
but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. Two years ago in a junk shop in the East
End of London, I found a postcard of the yodelling group from my home town. That is a

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WG Sebald: The last interview | Education | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumani...

pretty staggering experience. These old photographs always seem to have this appeal
written into them, that you should tell a story behind them. In The Emigrants there is a
group photograph of a large Jewish family, all wearing Bavarian costume. That one
image tells you more about the history of German-Jewish aspiration than a whole
monograph would do.

MJ: Why do you continue to write in German?

WGS: I have lived in this country far longer than in Bavaria, but reading in English I
become self-conscious about having a funny accent. Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't
have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.
But the time may come when my German resources begin to shrink. It is a sore point,
because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also
have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your
second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

· Austerlitz is published by Hamish Hamilton. For Years Now, a collection of poems by

WG Sebald, is published by Short Books.

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