The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W.G.

Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten

Author(s): Stefanie Harris
Source: The German Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 4, Sites of Memory (Autumn, 2001), pp. 379-391
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of
German
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3072632
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STEFANIEHARRIS
Northwestern University

The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in

W.G.Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten
W.G.Sebald's Die Ausgewandertenbegins at the end, with a photographof a cemetery in the shadow of an enormous tree.'
Encountering this image, the reader may
initially assume that the photographperhaps presentsthe locationin whichthe narrative will unfold, and this assumption appearsto be reinforcedwhen within the first
ten lines of the work,the narratorrefers to
"einemRasenfriedhof"(A8) and its trees.2
However,one soon findsthat the graveyard
is only peripheralin fixing the location of
the narrator's eventual destination. No
scene will be explicitlyset in the graveyard,
thus leaving us to wonder at its inclusion.
As we continue to read, we may conclude
retrospectively that the photograph had
provisionallyannounced the subject matter pursued thematically in the booknamely,the deaths of the four men whose
biographies will follow, and more broadly
those of all who perishedin the Holocaust.
The photographwould thus serve to prepare us for the text, to underscore pertinent themes, and to illustrate abstract
ideas. Examiningthe picture more closely,
we note the visual details: the tombstones
are askew and the grass is overgrown,presenting a scene of neglect, of a cemetery
that has been forgotten.This qualityof neglect certainly resonates throughout the
pages of the text, for example in the descriptions of the run-down English estate
in the first section or the accumulatingdebris and disintegration of the city of Manchester found in the fourth section. Further,the photographis later doubledin the
The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001)

images of an overgrownJewish cemetery

that the narratorvisits toward the end of
the work (A 334-36). In a work that includes so many photographic imagesseventy-eight in the German edition-we
must ask, however,do they merely serve to
illustrate the narrative?3Alternatively,is
their function only that of introducing a
mode of factuality into a narrative that
might otherwise be read as fiction? Or is
there somethingin the nature of photography, in the temporal and spatial frame of
the photographic image, that presents a
particularrelationshipto deathandto memory that exceeds the symbolicmode of the
linguistic text in which the images are embedded?Sebald will include visual images
not becausetheyunderscorethe writtennarrative but becausethey present the reader
with that whichthe text alone cannot.
In a recent interview,Sebald addresses
the question concerningthe difficult classificationof his booksby saying:"Factsare
troublesome.The idea is to make it seem
factual,though some of it might be invented" (Atlas282). Here, Sebald seems to acknowledgethe problematicposition of aesthetics in relationship to the representation of the Holocaust introduced at least
since Adorno.Seen in this light, one could
concludethat Sebaldemploysphotographs
in his worksnot fortheir pictorialvaluebut
only their referential character-in other
words, the photographsverify something
in the world, or to borrow from Roland
Barthes, they are the "certificateof presence" for the thing that has been there

379

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THEGERMAN
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(87).4The photos would thus serve as incontrovertibleevidence of the past (as do

the journal and diaryentries that are both
photographed and transcribed into the
book's pages), and would seem to add that
element of "factuality."However,the narrator also includes a photographthat is a
knownforgery,and questionsat times whether "dieseBilder nicht triigen" (A 72). In
contrast to what we have come to know as
"documentaryliterature,"Sebaldboth exploits and denies the documentarystatus
of the photograph,promptingus to lookbeyond the simple reading of these photographsas merelyenhancingthe non-fictional elements of the text and to ask how they
might function with and against the languageof the text itself in orderto communicate a particularrelationshipto the past.
This first photographis dominated by
the imposing central figure of a tree that
casts its dark shadow over the scene (A 7).
Its livid center cannot be read as we might
read a text. It resists intelligibility,
which is to say that it cannot be decoded in the prescribed ways which
culture provides. As a lacuna in the
work,the image presents "dieLagune
der Erinnerungslosigkeit"(A 259) or
"die von blinde Flecken durchsetzte
Vergangenheit"(A 80) that afflict not
only the narrator's subjects but also
the narrator's and our own relationship to the past. The first photograph
thus brings together the fundamental
issues of the novel-the imperativeof
memory and forgetfulness, the relationship to death and the past-that
the linguistic text alone is unable to
reconstitute.
Sebald's book, published in 1992,
is made up "vier lange Erzdhlungen"

of the lives of four men, told in a manner

that becomes increasingly detailed and
more complex with each account. In all
four cases, the narratorhas had a personal
encounter,if only briefly,with the primary
subject- the retireddoctorHenrySelwyn,

Fall 2001

the former schoolteacher Paul Bereyter,

the narrator's own great-uncle Ambrose
Adelwarth,and the painter Max Aurach.5
All exiled from their countries of birth
(whether physically,psychologicallyor in
combination),the four men share feelings
of intense isolation and despair,the result
of a tragic history that, if not the direct effect, is at least tangentially related to the
Holocaust. Having escaped death during
the war,they are haunted by intense melancholyand homesickness,loss, exile and,
eventually, suicide. All suffer, in other
words, a total severing of ties "in der
sogenanntenwirklichenWelt"(A 161). Biographiesof the four men emerge through
the narrator'svoice via the narrator'sown
memoriesof these meetings; by way of informationthe narratoris providedby others (notablythree female informants,one
foreach of the last three stories);the narrator's archivalresearchand travels;and not
least, by wayof photographsand other doc-

uments reproducedin the text. The workis

thus as mucha storyof the narratorandhis
attempt to write these stories as it is a telling of the stories themselves. That is, the
work is an interrogationof how these histories are to be representedand told. As a

381

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

result, the book is difficult to classify in

terms of traditional genre, but is rather
composed of heterogeneous elements, a hybrid of non-fiction and fiction, fact and
imagination, photographs and text, biography and autobiography. Indeed towards
the beginning of the section on Paul Bereyter, the narrator criticizes the potential for
flights of fancy and the faculty of the imagination in his reconstruction of the past:
Solche Versuche der Vergegenwartigung
brachten mich jedoch, wie ich mir eingestehen muBte, dem Paul nicht naher,
hochstens augenblicksweise,in gewissen
Ausuferungen des Gefiihls, wie sie mir
unzulissig erscheinen und zu deren Vermeidung ich jetzt aufgeschrieben habe,
was ich von Paul Bereyter weil3 und im
Verlaufmeiner Erkundungeniiber ihn in
Erfahrungbringen konnte. (A 45)

Fall 2001

guage in the representation of the past,

but rather he employs the two media in
tandem precisely in order to address questions of representability more generally.
In the growing critical literature on Sebald, surprisingly little attention is given to
a detailed examination of the photographs
that are interwoven with the text. The photographs are thus generally subordinated
to a reading that addresses only its linguistic cues. In these otherwise thoughtful
analyses, the photographs serve merely to
"illustrate" the stories narrated linguistically (Parry 418) or model the ambivalent
status of fact and fiction in the texts
(Schlank 225). Although Arthur Williams
briefly foregrounds the photograph in his
essay, it is only within the context of Sebald's "post-modern aesthetics" (85). Here
too, however, a discussion of the photographs
In a sense, Sebald's entire work is a self- inevitably serves to highlight Sebald's
conscious examination of this problem of prose through which the meaninglessness
the narrator's "wrongful trespass"-how
of the photographs is ultimately "transcendoes one tell the story of the past, an- ded" (Williams 87). In other words, meanother's past, without lapsing into senti- ing would not only be possible but fully atmentality, or worse, distorting any com- tainable in the prose alone. Sebald's comprehension of the past altogether?6 (We plex work resists the inherent duality of
note, for example, that at least one of the this reading, however. We might instead
stories is explicitly written in reaction borrow Andreas Huyssen's description of
against an obituary which had ignored this "twilight memories" to better formulate
same narrative demand). How does one, as the stakes motivating the mutual play of
the author regrets toward the end of the the two media in Die Ausgewanderten:
novel, adequately represent the subject of
The twilight of memory,then, is not just
the narrative after having recognized "die
the result of a somehow natural generatiFragwurdigkeit der Schriftstellerei iiberon of forgetting that could be counterachaupt" (A 345)? These are, of course, not
ted through some form of a more reliable
questions being raised for the first time in
representation. Rather, it is given in the
response to German literature that engavery structures of representation itself.
The obsessions with memory in contemges a re-examination of the past and more
porary culture must be read in terms of
specifically, German-Jewish relations bethis double problematic.Twilight memofore, during, and after the Holocaust. Howries
are both: generational memories on
ever, in Sebald's text we find a provocative
the
wane
due to the passing of time and
strategy whereby the language of the narthe
continuing
speed of technologicalmorative is complemented by and juxtaposed
and
memories that reflect
dernization,
with photographs-photographs
of cities,
the twilight status of memory itself. (3)
buildings, graveyards and people. What
follows will not be an argument that Se- Sebald will explicitly address the strucbald valorizes the photograph over lan- ture of representation, proposing an alter-

382

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

native to either image or text in isolation.

"So also kehren sie wieder, die Toten"
(A 36). Thus concludes the first of the four
stories of which DieAusgewanderten is composed. Although we may read this statement
in many different ways, that the dead return to us by way of our memory of them
and their continued presence in our emotional lives, or that they are made present
to us again in our minds by our recounting
of stories past, this statement is, not least
of all, to be read quite literally. For here the
statement refers to the cadaver of an old
friend of the protagonist of the first story, a
mountaineer who disappeared into an Alpine crevasse at the outbreak of WWI, and
whose body was "released" from the glacier some seventy-two years later, almost
to the day: "die Uberreste der Leiche [...]
vom Oberaargletscher wieder zutage gebracht worden waren" (A 36). As this
corpse, only provisionally buried, announces, the dead are never put to rest, never redeemed. The dead do not only return in the
form of bones discharged by glaciers, however, but also through photographs:
Einmal ums andere, vorwarts und riickwarts durchblatterteich dieses [Foto]Album an jenem Nachmittag und habe es
seither immer wieder von neuem durchblattert, weil es mir beim Betrachten der
darin enthaltenen Bilder tatsachlich
schien und nach wie vor scheint, als kehrten die Toten zuriickoder als stiinden wir
im Begriff, einzugehen zu ihnen. (A
68-69)
The narrator's insistence on this motifthe return of the dead and our relationship
to the dead, which can be read simultaneously as the relationship to the pastinforms the discussion that follows.

In Picture Theory, his study of the relationship of words and images, WJ.T. Mitchell works to replace the binary construction that typifies most theorizations of that

Fall 2001

relationship with a dialectical picture, or

what he calls "the figure of the 'imagetext"'
(9). By focusing on what he calls "textual
pictures" (109) and "pictorial texts" (209),
Mitchell provides an alternative to the traditional view of a division of labor between
images and texts which has generally involved a clear subordination of one medium to the other. Thus for example, in a text
with illustrations or photographs the images generally serve to illustrate, exemplify, clarify, ground, or otherwise document
the text (the initial assumption perhaps of
the reader of Sebald's work); and in a book
of captioned pictures, the texts serve to explain, narrate, describe, label, that is to
speak for the otherwise illegible images.
Mitchell turns his attention specifically to
the relationship of language and photography in a detailed analysis of four examples
of what he calls "photographic essays"
(281). As opposed to a division of labor, the
formal requirements for the "photographic
essay" are predominantly marked by the
interrelationship of the two media, thus
neither is merely illustrative of the other
but rather photographs and text are-as
James Agee already stated in the introductory text to his own photographic essay, Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939), produced in collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans- "coequal, mutually
independent and fully collaborative" (qtd.
in Mitchell 290). Mitchell's justification of
this compound term, as opposed to, say,
photographic narratives or, more broadly,
photographic texts, is pertinent to how one
might talk about the relationship of these
two media in Sebald's text. For the photograph and the essay are linked by some
common attributes, including their relationship to a common referential reality,
the emphasis on a private point of view and
their necessary incompleteness. If Mitchell's primary question is: What is the relation of photography and language? My
question is, more specifically: How is this
particular relation employed in the repre-

HARRIS:The Return of the Dead

sentation of memory, and particularly
traumatic memory or a memory of loss?
Through the juxtaposition of media, Sebald's hybrid novel raises questions about
the role of photographyin the mediationof
private and public memory.7However,beyond this, the photographssuggest an alternativemodelof culturalmemoryitself.
Myreflectionsof an author'suse of photography in a work that addresses traumatic memory is made within the context
of a tradition of photographic theory in
whichphotographyis explicitlylinkedboth
to a modern "loss of experience," as evidenced by Walter Benjamin's comparison
of the productionof the photographicimage, and more specifically its temporal
structure, with the disruptive and traumatic shockdescribedby Freud (Benjamin,
"Motive"),and to a reformulation of history that involves the evacuation of traditional conceptions of meaningfulness and
coherence,as in SiegfriedKracauer'swork.
Kracauer'sessay,"DiePhotographie"
(1927),
forexample,contraststhe photographicimage and what he terms the "Gedachtnisbild" on the order of their relationship to
the referent and to time (Kracauer25):
Die Photographie bewahrt nicht die
transparenten Ziige eines Gegenstandes,
sondernnimmt ihn von beliebigen Standorten als raumlichesKontinuumauf. Das
letzte Gedachtnisbild uberdauert seiner
UnvergeBlichkeitwegen die Zeit;die Photographie, die es nicht meint und faBt,
muBwesentlich dem Zeitpunktihrer Entstehung zugeordnet sein.(28-29)

If, for Kracauer,the memory image maintains its significance through its attachment to a transparent truth value-or
what he will ultimately call a person's "Geschichte"or "Monogramm"(Kracauer2526, Kracauer'sitalics)-the photographinterrupts this unifying force. As a result,
this lack of temporal or spatial context on
the part of the photograph leads to the
"Vorldufigkeitaller gegebenen Konfigura-

383

tionen" (Kracauer39). In this sense, the

caption that Sebald's character Paul Bereyterwrites on the backof a photographof
himself, shirtless and in sunglasses, basking in the light, would seem to pertain to
all photographs:"zirka2000 km Luftlinie
weit entfernt-aber von wo?" (A 83). In
Kracauer'sdescriptions, photographsare
ghostly, "unerl6st[e]"images (32) in their
presentation of a past which was at one
time present:
Nun geistert das Bild wie die SchloB3frau durch die Gegenwart.Nur an Orten,
an deneneine schlimmeTatbegangenworden ist, gehen Spukerscheinungen um.
Die Photographie wird zum Gespenst,
weil die Kostumpuppegelebt hat. [...] Die
schlimme Verbindung,die in der Photographie andauert, erweckt den Schauder.
(31-32)

Seemingly ripped from the clutches of

death because of the mannerin whichtime
is immortalized in the photograph, "in
Wirklichkeitist sie ihm preisgegeben"(Kracauer 35).
This evocationof "Spukerscheinungen"
and "schlimmeTat[en]" and the "Schauder"they evoke is not only a response to a
past that can no longer be retrieved but
simultaneously the manner in which the
photographannounces the immolation of
the subject pictured.8To some extent, Sebald evokes this shudder with all the images reproducedin his book of those who
will, whether tangentially or directly, be
victims of the Holocaust. As Marianne
Hirsch states in Family Frames-a rich
and subtle investigationof the relationship
of photography,memoryand anamnesisthe power and silence of family photos of
Holocaust victims is particularlyacute in
that nothing on the surface of the pictures
themselves "reveals the complicated history of loss and destruction to which they
testify" (13). We note this, for example, in
the shy smile ofBereyter'sgirlfriendHelen
Hollaender (A 71) who along with her

384

THEGERMAN
QUARTERLY

Fall2001

mother was likely murderedat Theresien- words, the essential feature of photograstadt, or Aurach's parents murdered at phy complicates the very possibility that
Riga (A 325, 326). The traumatic effect of writing, or language more generally, can
the photograph is not limited to a function address its specificreferentiality.Further,
of the specificimage that it presents, how- the relationshipto the referentsuggests an
ever, but is an essential component of its inherent contrast between language and
temporal structure.
photography,in that language is fictional
The relationship of the photographto by nature due to its arbitraryrelation to
death and mourning is echoed in both the referent, whereby a photograph does
AndreBazin'sand Susan Sontag'scompar- not invent but is "authentication itself"
ison of the photograph to a death mask (Barthes 87). Thus there is always some(Bazin 14; Sontag 154). But it is perhaps thing of the photographthat is in excess of
most explicitlypursuedin RolandBarthes's narrative, something that elides the scrumeditationon the ontologyof photography tiny of the observer,for it is uncoded and
in his shortbook,CameraLucida[Lacham- thereforearrestsinterpretationor the abilbreclaire, 1980].Throughhis reflectionson ity to name it-Barthes's punctum. The
photography,stagedfirst througha general punctum, offeredby chance, is that which
examinationof the mediumand then more interrupts the gaze, breaks or punctuates
particularlyas an attempt to speak of his the studium (general field of interest).
mother's death through a photograph of
As distinct from memory or imaginaher,Barthes opens up the problemsboth of tion, the inimitablefeatureof photography
how to represent history and the peculiar is the that-has-been.However,as Barthes
relationship to death announced by the maintains, "by attesting that the object
photograph.Foras Barthes states (andSe- has been real, the photograph surreptibald's narratorechoes), there is a "terrible tiously inducesbeliefthat it is alive [... ] but
thing which is there in every photograph: by shifting this reality to the past, the phothe return of the dead" (Barthes 9). tograph suggests that it is already dead"
Barthes's initial question is: What essen- (79). In other words,the past is made prestial featuredistinguishesphotographyfrom ent as in Kracauer's ghosts. An equivathe community of images? To this he an- lence emergesbetween the absolutepast of
swers that because of its unique relation- the photographicpose and death in the fuship to the referent,a photographis the ab- ture. Photography's"certainty"results in
solute Particular, the sovereign Contin- an "arrestof interpretation"(107), theregency (and thereby, outside of meaning). fore one cannot "penetrate" the photoTherefore, although one may examine a graph (106), a quality of the photograph
photograph,one cannot speakofthe photo- that Barthes refers to as "flat death" (92)
graph, whereby his initial question con- and that, as Elissa Marderhas shown, is a
cerning a general theory of photography depiction of a death that can never be asappears to be invalidated. Two things similated,transcendedor put to work.Due
emerge from this conception of photogra- to the peculiar status of the photograph
phy: one, the manner in which the photo- with relation to its referent, the that-hasgraphserves to authenticate an existential been attached to all photographssuggests
singularity,or a non-repeatableevent; and an implicittraumabecause of its irretrievtwo, the manner in which this singularity, able "past-ness"and the mourningof that
or absolute particularity,resists our abili- loss. However, a photograph does not
ties to talk about a photographin an ab- merely cause us to mournthe loss of a past
stract way because each photographbears that can never again be recuperatedbut sia distinct and unique message. In other multaneously announces our own death,

HARRIS:The Return of the Dead

as Sebald's narrator also recognizes: "als
stunden wir im Begriff,einzugehen zu ihnen" (A 69).
As Kaja Silverman suggests in The
Thresholdof the VisibleWorld,this recognition, particularly as a function of the
unintelligibilityof thepunctum, may open
up the possibilityof an ethical relationship
between the viewer and the photograph.
The "prick"of Barthes'spunctum results
fromthe eye lookingfrom a position that is
not assigned or culturally validated in advance, whereby "an otherwise insignificant component of the screen comes into
contact with one's own mnemic reserve"
(Silverman 182). This is not to suggest,
however,that one recuperates the photograph for one's own ends but rather proposes that through this contact we might
"be given the psychic wherewithal to participate in the desires, struggles, and suffering of the other, and to do so in a way
whichredoundsto his or her,ratherthan to
our own, 'credit"' (Silverman 185). The
photographis thus neither capturedby the
viewer as voyeur,nor is it integrated into
the story of our own catharticredemption,
but confronts us and touches us with the
specificity of loss.

The graveyardin the first photograph

of Sebald'swork is not the only necropolis
or city of the dead that we find picturedin
these pages. Manchester,the setting of the
fourth section, is describedas a city of singular desolation-isolated, empty,still, decaying-and in this way,reifiesthe descriptive modifiers found throughout the book
as a whole:deserted,overgrown,neglected,
decaying, empty, rundown, a wasteland,
hollow to the core, abandoned-"ein Gebiet von tausend Quadratkilometernuberziehende, aus unzahligen Ziegeln erbaute
und von Millionen von toten und lebendigen Seelen bewohnte Stadt" (A 221). Al-

385

most one quarterof the photographsin the

book are of the exteriors of buildings or
their interiors, in which no living person
appears.A large portion of these are massive structures such as hotels, that are
seemingly on the verge of collapse.Others
are markedby brokenwindowsor the overgrown vegetation obscuringtheir view.As
such, they present us not only with an image of decay but also prompt us to ask:
Whereare all of the souls who once inhabited these structures? One is reminded,
here, of the photographsof the early twentieth centuryFrenchphotographer,Eugene
Atget, of whose images Benjamin once
wrote: "Nicht umsonst hat man Aufnahmen vonAtget mit denen eines Tatortsverglichen" ("Kleine Geschichte" 385). Although we might pursue the "criminal"element to be traced in the photographic
images that Sebald includes, more interesting in this context is Atget's self-professed motivation behind the selection of
his images, namely to create a photographic archive of preciselythose elements of
the old Paristhat were disappearingunder
modernization.Indeedhe was occasionally
known to attach a note to his photographs
stating: "will disappear" (Eugene Atget,
Pantheon).As such, the photographsbear
witness to a past that is about to be erased
from the topographyof the city.9
Sebald uses photographs not only for
what can be shown but also to give evidence of that which can no longer be seen.
In other words,they providean image of a
past that has been clearedaway or covered
up. Two examples which highlight this
most strongly are found in the fourth section of the work. The first is an aerial view
of the city of Manchester(A 232) on which
can be seen the orderedgrid of streets and
row upon row of houses-that is except for
the gapingblank space in the center of the
image, the formerJewish quarterthat had
been a center for Manchester'slarge Jewish communityduring the inter-waryears
beforethose who livedthere later movedto

386

THE GERMANQUARTERLY

the suburbs. In this vacated zone-another

lacuna or "lagoon"-almost all traces of the
former houses which had occupied this
space are gone. Only the perpendicular
streets framing open space and a single row
of empty houses remain, as if to give witness to a past that has been swept away.
This space that is left unfilled is perhaps
less distressing to the narrator, however,
than his experience upon visiting the town
of Bad Kissingen, the home of Max Aurach's mother during her adolescent years.
Intending to visit the synagogue, he learns
that it was destroyed during the devastation of Kristallnacht and the rubble eventually removed. In its place now stands an
undistinguished municipal office building,
a photograph of which is reproduced (A 332).
The photograph cannot, however, be considered merely a photograph of this building
but is simultaneously a photograph of the
absence of the synagogue which can never
again be photographed. In other words, it
is a photograph of an irretrievable past
and an irrecoverable loss, a photograph of a
past consigned to oblivion. The narrator
concludes this section, remarking:
[Ich] spurte doch in zunehmenden MaB,
daB die rings mich umgebende Geistesverarmungund Erinnerungslosigkeitder
Deutschen, das Geschick, mit dem man
alles bereinigt hatte, mir Kopf und Nerven anzugreifenbegann. (A 338)
This cleaning up must be understood as a
loss of material specificity. Looming behind this statement, however, is the threat
that the narrator's text itself would "clean
up" the uncodable specificity of the event
that the photograph, by contrast, continually asserts.
Because of the high degree of structural, narrative and visual repetition built
into the four accounts, one could profitably
engage a reading of any of the four, or,
across all four of the sections. However, I
will focus the remainder of what follows on
the fourth section of Sebald's work, which

Fall 2001

details the narrator's encounter with Max

Aurach. The Aurach account is perhaps
the most illustrative in terms of questions
of representation and representability in
both image and text since these issues are
explicitly addressed here, not only by way
of a description of the painter's method,
but also the narrator's own perceived failure at portraying his subject adequately.
Aurach, whose character is largely based on
the painter Frank Auerbach, is a solitary
artist whom the narrator befriends when
he first moves to the city of Manchester as a
young man. Through a series of meetings
over two decades, Aurach's story emerges
as a kind of reverse chronology of fragments: from his adult life in Manchester, to
the story of his emigration from Germany
as a child, his mother's memoirs before the
birth of her son, and the narrator's own
visits to the towns of his mother's youth. As
a child, Aurach was sent away from Munich by his parents to the care of an uncle in
London, and is later orphaned, his parents
victims of the Holocaust. Aurach's recognition of their death is a belated one, however, and in this belatedness takes on the
structure of a trauma that is never satisfactorily incorporated into his psychological
life. Initially able to correspond with his
parents from the English boarding school
to which he is sent, he tells the narrator:
Als die immer muhseliger werdendeKorrespondenzim November1941 abriB,war
ich zunachst, auf eine mir selbst straflich
erscheinendeArt, erleichtert.DaBich den
Briefwechselnie mehr wiirde aufnehmen
konnen, das ist mir erst allmahlich klargeworden,ja, um die Wahrheitzu sagen,
ich weiBimmer noch nicht, ob ich es ganz
schon begriffenhabe. Es erscheint mirjedochheute, als sei mein Lebenbis in seine
auBersten Verzweigungen hinein bestimmt gewesen von der Verschleppung
meiner Eltern nicht nur, sondern auch
von der Verspdtung und Verzogerung, mit

der die zunachst unglaubhafte Todesnachricht bei mir eintraf und in ihrer
nicht zu fassenden Bedeutung nach und

HARRIS:The Return of the Dead

nach erst in mir aufgegangenist. (A 285,
my emphasis)

This description, particularly in terms of

its relationshipto temporality,is similarto
the model of traumatic experience which
Freud delineates in Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Here, Freud defines trauma as a
breachbetween mind and memory,wherein "dasBewuBtseinentstehe an Stelle der
Erinnerungsspur"(25)- a phrase,we will
recall, that Benjaminemployedin his own
discussion of the paradigmaticmedium of
modernity, namely photography ("Motive" 612f., 629f.).10The traumatic experience is that which overwhelms memory,
that which can never be effectively and
fully integrated or inscribedin memory.As
such, trauma acts as an interruption of
meaningfulness in that the event is never
given psychicmeaning through incorporation into narrative memory.This, then, is
the breach that arises because the traumatic event is present in the mind as a
present time of the present (that is, free
floating or uncathected) without being
present in memoryas a present time of the
past. Aurach's description of his own
thoughts confirmsthis temporalproblem:
die Zeit [...] ist ein unzuverlassiger

Mal3stab,
ja, sie ist nichtsals das Rumoren derSeele.Es gibtwedereineVergangenheit noch eine Zukunft.Jedenfalls
nichtfurmich.Diebruchstiickhaften
Ervon denen ich heimgeinnerungsbilder,
sucht werde,haben den Charaktervon
(A270)
Zwangsvorstellungen.
However, as already suggested, this
breach or rupture, or discontinuous temporal structure, is also consistent with the
structure of the photograph.As John Berger describes in his collaborationwith the
photographerJean Mohr,"Allphotographs
are of the past, yet in them an instant of
the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived
past, it can never lead to the present. Every photographpresents us with two mes-

387

sages: a message concerning the event

photographed and another concerning a
shock of discontinuity"(Bergerand Mohr
86). Thus Berger asserts that the narrative time of a photographis not identicalto
that of cinema, nor I wouldargue is it identical to that of the linguistic text, because
the narrativetime of the photographis not
"anticipatory"or "movinginexorablyforward," but is rather "discontinuous"
(Berger and Mohr 280). Tellingly,Aurach
is not able to integrate this event into his
life's narrative,not least of all because of a
linguistic loss. "[Es] hangt [...] mit dieser

EinbuBe oder Verschuttung der Sprache

zusammen" (A 271)- having stopped
speakinghis mother tongue, the language
is buried alive, much like the lost mountaineer of the first narrative.
The photograph with which the book
opens returns in slightly different guise in
the midst of the Aurach section, when the
narrator revisits the artist's studio after
many years and finds him studying a reproduction of Courbet's "Die Eiche des
Vercingetorix"(A 268). Weas readerscannot help but view the photographnot only
as the reproductionof this nineteenth century masterpiecebut also as a visual echo
of the first photographthe text presents.
As if through a kind of double-exposure,
Courbet's oak is now growing out of this
overgrown, country graveyard. And Aurach seems to confirm this when he reveals:
dasUngluckmeinesjugendlichen
Noviziats hatteso tiefWurzelgefaBtin mir,daB
es spaterdochwiederaufschieBen,b6se

Bliiten treiben und das giftige Blatterdachuber mir aufwolbenkonnte, das mei-

ne letztenJahreso sehriiberschattetund

verdunkelt hat (A 285-86)

-a statement that could have come from

any of the subjects found in the book.

These hauntings in his memories are presented to us in the photographs found in

the text, in his descriptionsof his adoptive

388

THEGERMAN
QUARTERLY

city- the necropolis, Manchester-and in

his own drawings.
The small room with its "seltsamen
Lichtverhaltnisse"(A 236) in which Aurach works is layered with the material remains of the artist's media-paint and
charcoal-and decades of dust. His particular method consists of sketching live models rapidly and heavily with charcoal sticks,
only to rub out the image with a rag and
start again in subsequent sittings, until the
canvas becomes worn through and has to
be patched.
EntschloBsich Aurach, nachdem er vielleicht vierzig Variantenverworfenbeziehungsweise in das Papierzuruckgerieben
und durch weitere Entwiirfe iiberdeckt
hatte, das Bild, weniger in der Uberzeugung, es fertiggestellt zu haben, als aus einem Gefiihl der Ermattung, endlich aus
der Hand zu geben, so hatte es fiir den Betrachter den Anschein, als sei es hervorgegangen aus einer langen Ahnenreihe
grauer,eingeascherter,in dem zerschundenen Papier nach wie vor herumgeisternder Gesichter.(A 239-40)1
Aurach's portraits as palimpsests would
seem to present an extreme contrast with
the instantaneous process of photography
-but are perhaps more in keeping with
the long exposure time of the daguerreotype, and not least of all because of the suspicion of occult practices that surrounded
the early medium. In Robert Hughes's
monograph of the artist Frank Auerbach,
this sketching method is portrayed in forty
photographs of the progression of the drawing (200-01). As opposed to time-lapse photography which preserves discrete moments of continuous movement, this series
of images presents the gradual capturing
of the still model. The image thus presents
the fortuitous elements of its lengthy exposure. In his "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie," Walter Benjamin described the
effect of looking at a daguerreotype as follows:

Fall 2001

Aller Kunstfertigkeit des Photographen

und aller Planmafiigkeit in der Haltung
seines Modells zum Trotz fiihlt der Beschauer unwiderstehlich den Zwang, in
solchem Bild das winzige Fiinkchen Zufall, HierundJetzt, zu suchen,mit demdie
Wirklichkeitden Bildcharaktergleichsam
durchgesengthat, die unscheinbareStelle
zu finden, in welcher, im Sosein jener
langstvergangenenMinute das Kunftige
noch heut und so beredt nistet, da3 wir,
riickblickend,es entdeckenkonnen. (371)
And so it is perhaps not surprising that
Aurach is likened to the earliest photographers when, sitting together in a caf6 one
day, the narrator notices that Aurach is
covered with a metallic sheen as a result of
the massive amounts of charcoal dust
floating around his studio-and his being
covered in dust reminds Aurach of a newspaper article he once read, describing a
photographer's assistant, whose body after so many years in the trade had absorbed enough of the silver compounds,
daB3er zu einer Art fotografischerPlatte
geworden war, was sich [...] daran zeigte,

daBdas Gesicht und die Hande dieses Laboranten bei starkem Lichteinfall blau
anliefen, sich also sozusagen entwickelten. (A 244)

The narrator's perceived failure at his

ability to portray Aurach adequately in
words takes on the characteristics of the visual artist's own method:
Dieser Skrupulantismus bezog sich sowohl auf den Gegenstand meiner Erzahlung, dem ich, wie ich es auch anstellte,
nicht gerecht zu werden glaubte, als auch
auf die Fragwiirdigkeitder Schriftstellerei iiberhaupt.Hundertevon Seiten hatte
ich bedecktmit meinem Bleistift- und Kugelschreibergekritzel.Weitausdas meiste
davon war durchgestrichen, verworfen
oder bis zu Unleserlichkeit mit Zusatzen
uberschmiert.Selbst das, was ich schlieB3lich fur die "endgiiltige"Fassung retten
konnte, erschien mir als ein mil3ratenes
Stuckwerk. (A 344-45)

HARRIS: The Return of the Dead

The narratorstops writing, not because he

has successfully captured the essence of
his subject,but rather out of sheer exhaustion. In other words,he questions the very
possibility of representing the essential
quality of his subject-or what used to be
called the soul-at least in the medium of
print alone. Layered with scribbles and
crossings-out, the material accumulation
of the text renders it illegible. Moreover,
the passage is not unique, but only highlights or calls attention to the tortured nature of the writing process found throughout the text. It is this conflict that is
accentuated in one of the few photographic close-ups found in Die Ausgewanderten. The image is of a young boy leaning
over his desk in a painful position while he
writes (A 255). The photographbrings together the dual impulses of the work concerning the paradox and, for Sebald, the
struggle of representationsof the past. For
how can the specificity of the photograph
communicate any intelligible meaning without recourse to cultural
codes that elide its specificity?And
how would the abstract mode of the
linguistic symbol communicate the
specificity of an event without the
imaginative element which always
rendersthat representationa distortion?
The narrator is haunted by the
ghosts that demanda mode of representation that might exceedthese dichotomies. Sitting alone in an enormous virtually empty hotel on the
verge of ruin, the narrator hallucinates the sounds of a ghost orchestra :,4-i
reaching him, and imagines that in
the theater wings of this phantom hall are
hung the photographshe once saw of the
Litzmannstadt ghetto in Lodz, an industrial center once known as polski
Manczester.Likehis own stories of the past,
the photographs had only been rediscovered in the mid-1980s in a small antique
dealer'sshop and were exhibitedin Frank-

389

furt. Like so many of the photographs of

Manchester reproducedin his own book,
the photographsof the ghetto streets are
disquietingly empty of the vast populace
who had populated it. The final, long descriptive passage of Sebald's work is an
ekphrasis of one ghostly image that is described in detail but never reproducedfor
us-something which perhaps calls to
mindthe WinterGardenphotographat the
heart of Roland Barthes's own book, a
photo that, as Barthes said, is the center of
the Labyrinthformedby all photographs,a
photographthat could function as the essence of the Photograph,but as such can
not be pictured for the casual viewer
(Barthes 73). The end of Sebald's text describes three young women as they sit at a
loom, and althoughtheir eyes are veiled to
the viewer by the lighting in the room, the
narrator senses that they gaze directly at
the viewer,who now takes the place of the
photographer.

Die Weberin [...] auf der rechten Seite

[sieht mich] so unverwandtund unerbittlich [an], daBich es nicht lange aushalten
vermag. Ich iiberlege, wie die drei wohl
geheiBen haben-Roza, Luisa und Lea
oder Nona, Decumaund Morta,die Tochter der Nacht, mit Spindelund Fadenund
Schere. (A 355)

390

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

They present a loss that cannot be transcended and thus put to rest, will not stay
buried, but will remain a haunting that
gazes relentlessly into the future, that returns again and again, that can not be
cleaned up or swept away. A past that must
be passed on or else be consigned to oblivion, but that is threatened in the very act of
its communication. In their own collaborative work in image and text, John Berger
and Jean Mohr suggest that the two media
function as supplements:
The photograph, irrefutable as evidence
but weak in meaning, is given a meaning
by the words. And the words, which by
themselves remain at the level of generalisation, are given specificauthenticity by
the irrefutabilityof the photographs.Together the two them become very powerful; an open questionappearsto have been
fully answered.(Bergerand Mohr92)
That the question would be fully answered
is, I think, an impossible claim, but that
provisional answers must be attempted is,
as Sebald demonstrates, a necessity, lest
the past become forever consigned to the
lagoons of oblivion.
Notes

I am gratefulto the participantsof the MLA

2000 panel on "Sites of Memory,"especially
Susanne Baackmann, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this work.
2
Page numbersreferringto the photographs
from Sebald's text described in the essay are
cited parenthetically (A) throughout.
3 There are
only 76 photographsreproduced
in the English translation, The Emigrants
(1996).
4 The combinationof
photographand text is
a componentof all of Sebald'sprose fiction, includingSchwindel, Gefiihle;Die Ringe des Saturn and his most recent Austerlitz, as well as
non-fictionworkssuch as the publicationof his
Zurichlectures, Luftkriegund Literatur.
5In the English translation, Max Aurach is
Max Ferber.

Fall 2001

6In his lecture celebrating "The Centenary

of Photography,"Paul Valeryalso refers to the
distinction between photography and literature, and more specifically,a split that has certain consequences for a conceptionof history:
Since History can apprehendonly sensible things, being based on verbaltestimony relayed through words, everything on
which it grounds its affirmations can be
broken down into things witnessed, into
moments that were caught in "quicktakes" or could have been caught had a cameraman, some star news photographer
been on hand.All the rest is literature.All
that is left consists of those components
of the narrativeor of the thesis that originate in the mind and are consequently
imaginary,mere constructions, interpretations, bodiless things by nature invisible to the photographiceye, inaudible to
the photographicear so that they could
not have been observed and transmitted
intact. (Valery196; Valery'sitalics).
As I will argue, Sebald's work will intentionallycomplicatethis dichotomoustransmission of the past, suggestingthat history and literature more thoroughlypermeate each other
than the accountfrom Valerywould suggest.
7 See also, Hirsch and Silvermanfor a formulation of this relationship through different
contexts.
8As Pierre Bourdieu similarly notes in his
analysisof amateurphotography:"[P]hotography [...] is a matter of capturing the ephemeral

and the accidental,as it cannot save the fleeting view from completedisappearancewithout
constituting it as such" (191, n.8).
9See especially, the two letters Atget wrote
to Paul Leon, Directeurdes Beaux-Arts,in November1920,in whichAtget urges Leonto purchase the photographiccollectionfor its archival value (EugeneAtget,Aperture7). For if the
photos themselves are not preserved,the individual geographicalsites of Paris will not only
have been lost fromthe physicalmapof the city
but also its public memory. In other words,
these corners of Paris will be consigned to oblivion.
10Foran investigationof
Benjamin'srecourse
to the language of photographyin his analysis
of Modernity,see especially, Cadava.
"As both reviewers and critics of Sebald's

HARRIS:The Return of the Dead

text have noted, the Aurach character is substantially basedon the British artist, FrankAuerbach.In the Germanedition of the work, one
of Auerbach's charcoal drawings, "Head of
Catherine Lampert VI" (1980), is even reproduced (A 240; Hughes 186). Further, the similarity between the passages describing
Aurach'sstudio and method are strikinglysimilar to the descriptions the art critic Robert
Hughes provides in his monograph on Auerbach. Indeed the degree of textual borrowing
here suggests that Sebaldcollects not only photographs for use in his novels, but also textual
fragments.

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