Sebald Restitution

8/6/2019 Sebald Restitution

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Campo Santo

w. G. SEBALD

TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL

Th e Mode rn L ib r ar yNew York


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2006 Modern LibraryTrade Paperback EditionTranslationcopyright 200, by Anthea Bell

All rights reserved.Published in the United States byModern Library, an imprint

of The Random House Publishing Group, a division ofRandomHouse,Inc., NewYork.

MODERN LiBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Designareregistered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This edition was published inhardcoverin the United States byRandom House, an imprint ofThe Random House Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., in 200,.Published in the United Kingdom by HamishHamilton,a publishing

division of PenguinBooks Ltd.,in 200,.This workwas originally published in German by

Carl HanserVerlag, MOOchen, in 2003. Copyright 2003 byThe Estate of w: G. Sebald. Copyright 203 CarlHanser MOOchenWien.This Englishlanguage translation byAnthea Bell is publishedhere by arrangementwith Hamish Hamilton, a publishingdivision

of Penguin Books Ltd.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Sebald,Winfried Georg[Campo Santo. English]

CampoSanto/W. G. Sebald;translatedby Anthea BelL-1st ed.

p.cm.ISBN 0-8129-7232-,

I. Bel l,Anthea . II. T it le .PT268I.E,8C36200,

834'.914--


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it was midsummer. Now and then lightning flashed, brieflylighting up the Alpine garden that covered the whole slopebehind the hotel. I thad been laid ou t in long years of workby a man called josefHoflehner, with whom Ihad struckupa conversation on the afternoon when I saw him working inhis rockery. josefHoflehner, who must have been well overeighty, told me that during the lastwar he was a prisoner ina wood-cutting squad in Scotland, working in Inverness andall over the Highlands. He had been a schoolteacher by profession, he told me, f irst in upperAustria and then in Vorarlberg. I don't rememberwhat made me ask him where hehad trained, but I remember he told me it was in Kundmanngasse inVienna, in the same institution and at the sametime asWittgenstein. He calledWittgenstein a prickly character, bu t would say no more about him.

Before going to sleep that evening in Bregenz, I read thelast pages of a biography ofVerdi, and perhaps for that reason I dreamed of the way the people of Milan, when themaestro lay dying in January 190 I, pu t down straw i n thestreet outside his house to muffle the sound of the horses'hooves, so that he could pass away in peace. In my dream Isaw the street in Milan covered with straw, and the carriages and cabs driving soundlessly up and down it. At theend of the street , however, which went uphill at a curiouslysteep angle, there was a deep black sky with lightning flashing over i t , just like the skyWittgenstein saw as a boy of sixf rom the balcony of the family's summer house on theHochreith.

An Attempt at Restitution

I can st ill s ee us i n the days before Christmas 1949 in ourliving room above the Engelwirt inn inWertach. My sisterwas eight at the t ime, I myself was five, and neither of ushad yet really go t accustomed to our father, who since hisreturn from a French POW camp in February 1947 hadbeen employed in the local town of Sonthofen as a manager(as he pu t i t) , and was at home only from Saturday to midday on Sunday. In front of us, open on the table, lay the newQuelle mail-order catalog, the f irst I ever saw, containingwhat seemed to me a fairy-tale assortment of wares, fromwhich it was decided in the course of the evening and afterlong discussions, in which our father go t his sensible way, toorder a pair of camel's-hair slippers with metal buckles foreach of us children. I think zip fas tenings were still quiterare at the time.

But in addition to the camel's-hair slippers we ordered acard game called the CitiesQuartet based on pictures of thecities of Germany, and we often played it during the winter

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months either when ou r father was at home or when therewas another visitor to make a fourth. Have you got Oldenburg, we asked, have you got Wuppertal, have you gotWorms? I learned to read from these names , which I hadnever heard befor e. I remember that it was a long timebefore I could imagine anything about these cities, so different did they sound from the local place-names ofKranzegg, Jungholz, and Unter joch , excep t t he placesshown on the cards in the game: the giantRoland, the PortaNigra, Cologne Cathedral, the Crane Gate in Danzig, thefine houses around a large square in Breslau.

In fac t, in the Cit ies Quartet, as I reconstruct it frommemory, Germany was sti ll undivided-at th e t ime ofcourse I thought nothing of that-and no t only undividedbut intact, for the uniformly dark brown pictures of thecities, which gave me a t an early age the idea of a dark fatherland, showed the cities of Germany without exceptionas they had been before the war : the intricate gables belowthe citadel of the Nurnberger Burg, the half-timberedhouses of Brunswick, the Holsten Gate of the OldTown inLubeck, the Zwinger and the BruhlTerraces.

The Cities Quartet marked no t only the beginning ofmy career as a reader but the s tart ofmy passion for geography, which emerged soon after I began school: a delight intopography that became increasingly compulsive as my lifewent on and to which I have devoted endless hours bendingover atlases and brochures of every kind. Inspired by theCities Quartet, I soon found Stuttgart o n th e map. I sawthat compared with the other German cities it was no t too

far from us. Bu t I cou ld no t imagine a journey to i t, anymore than I could thinkwhat the city itselfmight look like,for whenever I thought of Stuttgart all I could see was thepicture of Stuttgart Central Station on one of the cards inthe game, a bastion of natural stone deSigned by the architect Paul Bonatz befor e the F irs t World War, as I laterlearned, and completed soon after i t , a building that in i tsangular brutalist architecture already to some extent anticipated what was to come, perhaps even, if I may be permitted so fanciful a men ta l leap, an tici pated t he few lineswritten by an English schoolgirl of about fifteen (judgingby the clumsy handwriting) on holiday i n S tu tt gart t o aMrs. J. Winn in Saltburn in the county of Yorkshire on theback of a picture postcard, which came into my hands at theend of the 196os in a SalvationArmy junk shop in Manchester , and which shows three other tall buildings in Stuttgartand Bonatz's railway station, curiously enough from exactlythe same viewpoint as in ou r long-lost German CitiesQuartet game.

Betty, for such was the name of the gir l spending thesummer in Stuttgart, wri tes on August 10 , 1939, barelythree weeks before the outbreak of the Second WorldWar-when my father was already approaching the Polishborder in Slovakia with his convoy of trucks-Betty writesthat the people in Stuttgart are very friendly, and she has"been ou t tramping, sunbathing and sightseeing, to a Ger man birthday party, to the pictures and to a festival of theHitlerYouth."

I acquired this card, with the picture of the railway sta-[99


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t ion and the message on the back, on one of my long walksthrough the city of Manchester, before I had ever been toStuttgart myself. When I was growing up in the Allgau inthe postwar period you did no t travel much, and if you didgo for an outing now and then as the "economicmiracle" se tin , it was by bus to theTyrol, to Vorarlberg, or at most intoSwitzerland. There was no call for excursions to Stuttgartor any of the other cities that still looked so badly damaged,and so until I left my native land at the age of twenty-one itwas still largely unknown territory to me, remote and withsomething not quite right about it.

It was May 1976 when I f irst got ou t of a t rain at Bonatz's station, for someone had told me that the painter JanPeterTripp , with whom I had been to school in Oberstdorf,was living in Reinsburgstrasse in Stuttgart. I remember thatvisit to him as a remarkable occasion, because with the admiration I immediately felt forTripp's work it also occurredt ome that I too would like to do something one day besidesgiving lectures andholding seminars. Atthe t imeTripp gaveme a present of one of his engravings, showing the mentallyill judge Daniel Paul Schreber with a spider in his skul l -what can there be more terrible than the ideas always scurrying around ou r minds?-and much of what I have writtenlater derives from this engraving, even in my method ofprocedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, inpatiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.

I have kept asking myself since then wha t the invisible

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connections that determine our l ives are, and how thethreads run. What , for ins tance, links my v is it to Reinsburgstrasse with the fact that in the years immediately aftert he war i t contained a camp for so-called displaced persons,a place which was raided on March 20 , 1946, by about ahundred and eighty Stuttgart police officers, in the courseof which, although the raid discovered nothing bu t a blackmarket t rade in a few hen 's eggs, several shots were firedand one of the camp inmates, who had only just been re united with his wife and two children, lost his life.

Why can I no t ge t such episodes ou t of my mind?Why,when I t ake the S-Bahn toward Stuttgart city center, do Ithink every t ime we reach Feuersee Station that the fires arestill blazing above us, and since the terrors of the last waryears, even though we have rebuilt our surroundings sowonderfully well, we have been liVing in a kind of underground zone? Why did it seem to t he traveler on a winternight, coming from Mohringen and get t ing his f irst s ightfrom the back of a taxi of the new administrative complexof the fi rm of Daimler, that the network of lights glitteringin the darkness was like a constellation of stars spreading allover the world, so that these Stuttgart stars are visible no tonly in the cities of Europe, the boulevards of Beverly Hillsand Buenos Aires, bu t wherever columns of t rucks withtheir cargos of refugees move along the dusty roads, obviously never stopping, in the zones of devastation that are always spreading somewhere, in the Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea,or Afghanistan?

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And how far is it from the pointwhere we find ourselvestoday back to the late eighteenth century, when the hopethat mankind could improve and learn was inscribed inhandsomely formed letters in our philosophical firmament?At the time Stuttgar t, nes tl ing amid vineyards and overgrown s lopes, was a l it tle place of some twenty thousandsouls, some of whom, as I once read, lived on the top floorsof the towers of the collegiate church. One of the sons ofthe country, Friedrich Holderl in, proudly addresses thissmall, still sleepy little Stuttgart where cattle were driveninto the marketplace early inthe morning to drink from theblack marble fountains, as the princess of his native land,and asks her , as i f he already guessed at the coming darkturn tha t h is to ry and his own li fe would take: receive mekindly, stranger that I am. Gradually an epoch of violence thenunfolds, and with it comes personal misfortune. The giantstrides of the Revolution, writes Holderlin, present amon-strous spectacle. The French forces invade Germany. TheSambre-Maas army moves toward Frankfurt, where afterheavy bombardment the utmost confusion reigns.With theGontard household, Holderlin has fled that city for Kasselby way of Fulda.*On his return he is increaSingly torn be-tween his wishful imaginings and the real impossibility of

*The famous poet Friedrich Holderlin (1770--1843) grew up in N6rtingennearStuttgart. He hadan unhappy love affair withthe wife of his employer, the bankerJ. F. Gontard, inwhose house he was a tutor. Around 1802 he showed the firstsigns of psychological distrubance, and spent most of the rest of his life sufferingfrom mental illness. Much of his poetry celebrates the ideals of ancient Greece.

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his love, which transgresses against the class system.Yes, hesits for days on end with Susette in the garden cabinet or thearbor, but he feels the humiliating aspect of his position allthe more oppressive. So he must leave again. He has goneon so manywalking tours in his life of barely thirty years, inthe Rhone mountains, the Harz, to the Knochenberg, toHalle and Leipzig, and now, after the Frankfurt fiasco, backto Niirtingen and Stuttgart.

Soon afterward he sets offagain to Hauptwil in Switzerland, accompanied by friends through the wintry Schonbuch to Tiibingen, then alone up the rugged mountain anddown the other side, on the lonely road to Sigmaringen. Itis twelve hours' walk from there to the lake. A quiet jour-ney across the water. The next year, after a brief stay withhis family, he is on the road again through Colmar, Isenheim, Belfort, Besans;on, and Lyon, going west and southwest, passing through the lowlands of the upper Loire inmid-January, crossing the dreaded heights of the Auvergnedeep as they are in snow, going through storms and wilderness until he finally reaches Bordeaux. You will be happyhere, Consul Meyer tells him on his arrival, bu t six monthslater , exhausted, dis tressed, eyes f licker ing, and dressedlike a beggarhe is back in Stuttgart. Receive me kindly, strangerthat I am. What exactly happened to him? Was it that hemissed his love, could he no t overcome his social disadvantage, had he after all s een too far ahead in his misfortune?Did he know that the fatherland would turn away from hisvision of peace and beauty, that soon those l ike him would


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be watched and locked up, and there would be no place forhim bu t the tower? A quai bon la litterature?Perhaps only to help us to remember, and teach us to

understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic , for ins tance the connection between the former princely residence of Stuttgart, later anindustrial city, and the French town ofTulle, which is builton seven hills-Elle a des prhentians, cette ville, a lady livingthere wrote to me some time ago, That town has Brand ideasif itse!f-between Stuttgart, then, and Tulle in the Correzeregion through which Holderlin passed on his way to Bordeaux, and where on June 9, 1944, exactly three weeksafter I first saw the light of day in the Seefeld house inWert ach, and a lmost exactly a hundred and one years afterHolderlin's death, the entire male population of the townwas driven together in the grounds of an armaments factory by the SS Das Reich division, intent on retribution.Ninety-nine of them,men of all ages, were hanged from thelampposts and balconies of the Souilhac quarter in thecourse of that dark day, which still overshadows the memo-ries of the town ofTulle.The rest were deported to forcedlab or camps and extermination camps, to Natzweiler,Flossenbiirg, and Mauthausen, where many were worked todeath in the stone quarries.So what is l i terature good for? Am I, Holder lin asked

himself, to fare like the thousands who in their springtimedays lived in both foreboding and love, bu t were seized bythe avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently

betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all t oo soberrealm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherouslight, where they count slow t ime in frost and drought, andman still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synopticview across the barrier of death presented by the poet inthese lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however,by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice wasdone. There are many forms of writing; only in literature,however, can t here be an attempt at res ti tut ion over andabove the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship. A place that is at the service of such a task is thereforevery appropriate in Stuttgart, and I wish it and the city thatharbors it well for the future.

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