Lost histories, forgotten lives

Between 1990 and his untimely death in 2001, W. G. Sebald published four major prose works: Schwindel. Gefühle (1990; Vertigo, 1999), Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants, 1996), Die Ringe des Saturn (1995; The Rings of Saturn, 1998), and Austerlitz (2001). With the aid of outstanding translations and endorsements from the likes of Susan Sontag and Will Self, these works established Sebald as one of Europe’s most significant literary figures. Through a genre-defying mix of biography, fiction, history, travelogue and essay, his books explore the condition of western modernity, the legacies of colonialism and the Holocaust, and the appropriate narrative form for conveying traumatic histories.

Among the many fascinations of Sebald’s work is the presence of embedded photographs and other images within his narrative texts. The images, often grainily reproduced and of questionable aesthetic value, exist in highly diverse relationships with the text that frames them. At times they appear to illustrate the written discourse, but this can be illusory, as, for example, when a passage on the East Anglian herring trade in The Rings of Saturn is accompanied by an image of a cod. At other times the photographs are adduced as proof of an unlikely coincidence or uncanny occurrence, as happens repeatedly in Vertigo. Sometimes the relationship between text and image is entirely indeterminate: The Emigrants starts with a photograph of a large tree in a cemetery, to which no direct reference is made in the text at all. But this photograph inaugurates a series of images of trees and cemeteries that create patterns of correspondence across the book and tie together its disparate narratives. Sebald’s use of photographs oscillates between referentiality, non-referentiality and self-referentiality in ways that both stabilize and destabilize the narrative discourse.

At the heart of his project, especially in The Emigrants and Austerlitz, lies a strong ethical commitment to recovering lost histories and forgotten lives. Photography is central to this enterprise, for two reasons. First, it is a powerful metaphor for the unbidden emergence of buried memories. Echoing Walter Benjamin, one of Sebald’s salient influences, Jacques Austerlitz speaks of “the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night”. Second, both The Emigrants and Austerlitz involve acts of transmission or bequest in which the narrator becomes the recipient of other people’s textual and photographic archives.

Shadows of Reality, edited by Clive Scott and Nicholas Warr, focuses on photography and what it meant for the author’s creative process, output and legacy. The essays that preface the image section of the catalogue are diverse in style and content: general reflections on photography in Sebald’s work by Warr and Scott; an interpretation of the “iconographic programme” of The Rings of Saturn by Angela Breidbach; Gordon Turner’s compilation of quotations from interviews with Sebald in which he discusses his interest in and use of photographs; a conversation between Warr and Michael Brandon-Jones, the photographer who collaborated with Sebald in producing the visual materials for his books; Glenn Jamieson’s short text about the prominence of the reflected flashbulb in Sebald’s photographs; and a surprisingly successful Sebald-inspired travelogue by Francisco Cantú.

The main interest of this volume, though, lies in the lengthy picture section, which brings together a generous selection of photographs drawn from the collections of the University of East Anglia, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (German Literature Archive) in Marbach am Neckar, and the Sebald Estate. The result is a comprehensive – though not, as the editors make clear, exhaustive – catalogue of images that are relevant to Sebald’s literary works.

In their essays Warr and Scott insist on the autonomous value of images, on the fact that they operate in a different discursive realm to the text that surrounds them and facilitate a kind of thinking that is not reducible to words. The picture section is designed with this understanding in mind, and to a large extent it works. Separated into “poetry” and “prose” sections, and organized chronologically, the book incorporates a wide variety of photographic material, including Sebald’s own photographs, images from his and other people’s family albums, pages from illustrated books, film stills, newspaper clippings and postcards. Colour originals and Brandon-Jones’s monochrome rephotographed versions sit side by side, the latter mainly in the form of contact sheets, but with some frame enlargements. In a prefatory note the editors use geological metaphors to describe these photographic materials. But such metaphors do not quite capture the sense of dynamism conveyed by the book. The presentation of multiple versions of the same image made at different exposures, the ways in which images are selected, cropped, converted from colour to black-and-white, and sometimes photocopied after printing, are indicative of a kind of image-thinking in the darkroom, on the page, with a magnifying glass. In interviews Sebald frequently described his method as a kind of bricolage, a principle of improvisatory combination that eventually yields a satisfying structure. Shadows of Realityoffers insight into how this might have played out in practice, in an age before JPEGs and Photoshop, when publications such as Sebald’s were made possible by the technical skills of unsung photographic specialists.

There are some surprises, too. The degree to which Sebald’s poetry converses in various ways with identifiable photographic images has been little understood until now. A studio wedding photograph of Sebald’s maternal grandparents, Theresia and Josef Egelhofer, taken in 1905, forms the basis of the brief account of the occasion in After Nature. While having intrinsic informational and nostalgia value, the image also takes on a melancholy cast in light of the subsequent closeness of Sebald and Egelhofer, whose death he claimed never to have fully got over. In a completely different vein, the poem “On the Eve of” is shown to be based partly on photographs of sleeping air passengers at Schiphol airport. Wrapped up and stretched out on the airport seating, they are at once haunting and laughable. The ludic aspects of Sebald’s work – the intertextual games of hide-and-seek he plays with the reader, the deliberate blurring of reality and fiction – are emphasized by the masquerade and role-play in which he indulges when posing as the character Henry Selwyn in Jan Peter Tripp’s garden.

Even when photographs did not find their way into Sebald’s published texts, they often functioned as an aide-mémoire or formed the basis of descriptions and reflections. A frequently cited passage from Austerlitz, for example, recounts the narrator’s alighting from the train at Pilsen station and photographing a cast-iron column. He is struck by “the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself”. While nowhere to be found in Austerlitz, a full-colour photograph of the column turns up in Shadows of Reality. This sets up a complex mnemonic relay between (fictional) character and (real) author, between things, images and thought, in which boundaries – between object-world, photograph and psyche, between world and text, and between past and present – begin to dissolve. This in turn corroborates and complicates points made by Warr and Scott concerning the sense of suspended temporality that photographs produce in the context of Sebald’s narratives.

There is a distinct hagiographic strain in critical writing on Sebald, and the editors are aware that their project could all too easily have become a collection of relics to fuel the “cult of Sebald”. This danger, happily, is averted. Shadows of Reality opens up new perspectives on its subject’s working methods, which themselves have implications for the way we read his books. It is a testament to the long creative collaboration with Brandon-Jones, the extent of which can now be fully appreciated. It is also, incidentally, a repository of social history and the history of amateur photography: anyone who took photographs in the 1980s and 1990s will recognize the distinctive hues of the era’s film stock and the look of its urban fabric. In this, as in many other ways, Shadows of Reality has much to offer the casual reader as well as the specialist.

J. J. Long is Professor of German and Visual Culture at Durham University. He has published widely on twentieth-century literature and photography, including an acclaimed monograph on W. G. Sebald

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