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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sebald seems to want to say, on the one hand, that the past exists and
is superior to any imagining, that its authenticity is so powerful that it can
never be denied; it is no mere
story.
His is that survivor's conviction of the
importance of memory, above all the memory of the War and the
Holocaust, which are almost never mentioned directly. But how does a
postwar German-Jewish child like Sebald "remember" this past time?
The narrator describes his family's move in 1952 to "S--," and his
childish pleasure in the bustle of a big city:
"It
was, I thought, particularly
auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by
patches of was te land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had
once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to
the word
city
as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and
the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air." If one
denies the superiority of that memory to any fiction one resembles
Ferber's Uncle Leo, who saw a photograph of the book burning in
Wiirzburg (this too is included by Sebald in the book) but insisted that it
was a fake; the burning had taken place at night so how could the picture
have been taken? But to recover the past through the memories of others
is like the recovery of the body of Selwyn's friend from the grip of a glac–
ier: "And so they are returning to us, the dead. At times they come back
from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of
the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots."
And yet, of course, we are permitted, if we wish, to regard all the pho–
tos in this album-like book as fakes.
The Emigrants
is a novel. Its adroitly
managed incorporation of fact also allows for fantasy and art. The narrator
returns to Deauville in 1991 to look for Uncle Ambros and Cosmo and
dreams that he sees them there together, in 1913, "taking tea out in the
courtyard, or in the hall leafing through the latest papers, which were
brought early every morning at breakneck speed from Paris to Deauville by
Gabriel the chauffeur," or at the races at La Tougue Hippodrome. All the
eiegantes
of the era are there, the ladies "wearing lace dresses through which
their silken undergarments gleamed in Nile green, crevette, or absinth
blue." There is an incomparable glimpse of the two young men dining at
the Normandy together, eating a lobster out of a single silver platter:
"Ambros was steadily taking the lobster apart, with great skill, placing lit–
tle morsels before Cosmo, who ate them like a well brought up child."
Sebald may have some inclination to be an illusionist who mixes memory
and dream-like Vladimir Nabokov who appears several times in the book,
is the subject of one of Ferber's faceless portraits, "Man with a Butterfly
Net," and is shown also, with the net, in a well-known photograph.
Sebald has admitted, I understand, that Ferber is not one real man but
a combination of his Manchester landlord and an artist he knows. Ferber
