Redeeming Words

SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

—————
Rodolphe Gasché, editor
 Redeeming Words
Language and the Promise of Happiness
in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

David Kleinberg-Levin
Cover image: “Figure on Road” 1987–1988 by Josef Herman © The Estate of
Josef Herman, courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2013 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, 1939–

  Redeeming words : language and the promise of happiness in the stories of Döblin
and Sebald / David Kleinberg-Levin.
    pages cm. — (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-4781-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  1. Döblin, Alfred, 1878-1957—Criticism and interpretation.  2. Sebald,
Winfried Georg, 1944–2001—Criticism and interpretation.  3. Language and lan-
guages in literature.  I. Title.

  PT2607.O35Z7174 2013
 833'.912—dc23 2012045688

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 An Michael:

. . . trotz ihrer Vergänglichkeit, unvergessbar die Zeiten . . . 

Every epoch [. . .] bears its end within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel
already noticed—with cunning. [. . .] Each epoch not only dreams the
one to follow [Michelet], but [by remembering its past] in dreaming, it
precipitates an awakening [of the present].
—Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century,” The Arcades Project

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

—Novalis, Philosophical-Theoretical Work 1799–1800

What cannot be said must above all not be silenced, but written.
—Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

What has never been written—read!

—Walter Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty
 Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Prologue xiii

Part I
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Language as the Causality of Fate

1 Fatality: Character as Fate 3

2 Natural History 29
3 Döblin’s Conception of the Modern Novel 37
4 The Language of Fate 47
5 Language as the Causality of Freedom 69
6 Paradise in Words: The Promise of Happiness 77

Part II
Damals:
The Melancholy Science of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Stories

1 Telling Stories: A Question of Transmissibility 93

2 Natural History: Becoming in Dissolution 147
3 Of Humans and Other Animals 177
4 As Time Goes By: Words from the Embers of Remembering 183
5 Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness:
  Sebald’s Phenomenology of Spirit 189
 x/ CONT E NTS

6 Beauty: Symbol of Morality in a Phenomenology of Spirit 207

7 On a Journey through Disenchantment 223

Epilogue 241
Notes 249
Bibliography 305
Index 319
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Estate of Josef Herman and the Flowers Gallery of

London and New York for kind permission to use an image of Herman’s
“Figure on Road,” a painting the allegorical sense of which seems singularly
fitting for the cover of this book.
Many are the friends who, in one way or another, in the course of
a number of years, have contributed to the thinking and writing of this
book. But, hoping that my increasingly weak powers of memory have not
made me forget the contributions of a friend, I would like to name at least
those to whom I consider myself most indebted. I would like to recall,
with my thanks, Giorgio Agamben, Jay Bernstein, Daniel Brandes, Gerald
Bruns, Edward Casey, Mauro Carbone, Peter Fenves, Doris Gahler, Jürgen
Habermas, Samir Haddad, Gregg Horowitz, Glen Mazis, Eduardo Mendieta,
Guiseppina Moneta, Dennis Schmidt, Davide Stimilli, Carlos Thiebaut,
Bernard Waldenfels, and Samuel Weber. I am immensely grateful to Charles
Curtis, Thomas McCarthy, Michael McGillen, and David C. Wood; their
comments and suggestions on various parts and stages of this work have
been helpful beyond measure. And finally, I wish to acknowledge and thank
Peter Fritzsche and Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei for suggestions regarding the
penultimate draft of the work in its entirety. Of course, I alone am respon-
sible for the words that have been published here.

xi
 Prologue

I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle
of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in lan-
guage, is the very existence of language itself.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics”1

The imperfect is our paradise. / Note that, in this bitterness, delight, /

Since the imperfect is so hot in us, / Lies in flawed words and stubborn
sounds.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate”2

Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory3

In Parages, Jacques Derrida explains why he likes the figure of a distant

shore to signify the wholly, absolutely other: “Because,” he says, “the shore,
that is the other [la rive, entendons l’autre], appears [only] by disappearing
from view.”4
“Voyage of the Mayflower,” one of the essays that William Carlos Wil-
liams wrote for In the American Grain, is about the historical fate of such
a shore. In this essay, the poet laments the smallness, the weakness, of the
imagination that the Puritans brought with them to the “New World”—
to the shores of America. These people left England to escape political
persecution, political oppression; they journeyed with a collective utopian
dream of freedom—above all else, the freedom to live in the keeping of
their religion. And yet, when they landed on this continent, imagined from
across the Atlantic Ocean as a virtual paradise, they were frightened by its

xiii
 xiv / PRO L OGU E

immeasurable dimensions: not only the challenges in its mountains, forests,

and marshes but also its questions for the spirit. There was then, after all,
a certain metaphorical truth in the ancient cartography, which showed this
continent inhabited by monstrous dragons and other frightening creatures.
Would their spirit measure up to the greatness of the land—and the great-
ness it demanded? The place where they landed caused them great hardship;
but even its hospitality, its generosity, its openness, proved to be deeply
troubling: what they found here shocked their senses and overwhelmed
their comprehension. They shrank in abject fear before the possibilities
that this “New World” offered. Their powers of imagination, weakened by
repression, recoiled from the actuality of the sublime. Was there ever even
a brief moment of romanticism, a moment when they suddenly glimpsed
what they could create and become—and found themselves tempted? The
institutions that they quickly founded denied the providential promise in
this “promised land.” Terrified of the new, the different, everything that
for them must count as other, they betrayed the utopian promise for the
sake of the same. They settled for the old jurisdiction and a compromised
promise of happiness. They used words to indict words in a futile attempt
to repress the promise of happiness that their language itself, in its very
being, nevertheless persisted in representing. And they bequeathed memo-
ries darkly stained by imaginary guilt. So many missed opportunities, so
many lost possibilities—the very essence, it seems, of history, chronicle of
the ruins of hope.
A shore that appears only by, only in, disappearing! Is that not the
aporetic phenomenology of utopia as a promised land? The figure of an
earthly paradise of universal happiness appears again and again in world
history. But if what “happiness” signifies, namely, the bringing of human-
ity to itself, repeatedly withdraws from our approach, how can we avoid
skepticism or cynicism, concluding that it is nothing but a transcenden-
tal illusion, a haunting phantasm, the impossible possibility of the poetic
imagination?
Briefly, early in his life, it seems that Jacques Derrida, an Algerian
French philosopher coming to the shores of America, and approaching, no
doubt, with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America vividly in mind,
entertained the speculative thought that “America” might be a worthy
name for the utopian promise. He would call it the promise of a new
Enlightenment, a new democracy, still to come.5 However, as his familiarity,
discernment, and understanding increased, he gave up that name for his
faith, his hope; for in the reality that “America” named, he observed how
powerfully and effectively what that promise called for had been systemi-
cally suppressed and betrayed. Neither America, nor the elusive promise
 PRO L OGU E / xv

that name once seemed, somehow, to vouchsafe, could rescue, or redeem,

the moral promise that Europe in the twentieth century had so singularly
failed to realize. What now remains, if anything, of that promise? Where
now might its summons be found?

In this book, reading works of literature written with a keen sense of their
historical moment, we will explore the proposition that language bears a
utopian promise, a summons to responsibility. In part because of the con-
nection between language and community, the very existence of language,
language as such, seems to call for recognition as the bearer of this singular
message, summoning us to realize the utopian promise of universal happi-
ness: an enlightened world of freedom, justice, and peace, a world without
cruelty and meanness of spirit.
Commenting on Derrida’s speculative thought regarding the future,
David Wood notes that he “devotes much attention to proposing, imagin-
ing, hoping for a ‘future’ in which im-possible possibilities are being real-
ized.” However, Wood argues,

It is important to steer clear of the utopian black hole, the

thought (or shape of desire) that the future would need to bring
a future perfection or completion. The future may well exhibit a
universal structure of immanence. But what is equally disturbing
is not our inability to expect the unexpected, but the failure of
our institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable.6

If language is indeed a unique source of promise, how might literature, as

a medium of aesthetic semblance, draw on that source to respond to this
double failure? How might literature bear witness to the promise—and to
its betrayals? And how might literature illuminate the aporetic phenomenol-
ogy of this utopian, or messianic promise, when what that promise signifies
can be represented adequately neither by its infinite deferral nor by its
actualization in any real present?

In the readings of literature that follow this Prologue, we will be reflect-

ing on these questions, testing Theodor Adorno’s principal argument in
his aesthetic theory. In Martin Jay’s nicely condensed recapitulation, the
argument is that “genuine experience,” that is, “experience worth rescuing
 xvi / PRO L OGU E

from the damaged variety of modern life, is closely tied to the memory of
happiness, whose faint promise of return is what art is able to offer.”7
Intended as a philosophical contribution to our understanding of the
nature of language, this book will question and reflect on the operations of
language as they figure in the art of literature, searching those operations
for dialectical indications of a promise of universal happiness, an earthly
utopia, or say, with Derrida, a new Enlightenment still to come.
Pursuing and extending some intriguing arguments proposed by Wal-
ter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno regarding language and the promise of
happiness, we will venture an experience with language, drawing on the
conceptual and methodological resources in their versions of critical theory
to approach the heart of the matter, concentrating our reading on some
remarkable stories and novels by Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) and W. G.
Sebald (1944–2001), two very different German authors who committed
themselves to writing works of fiction that expressed, in distinctive but
equally compelling styles, their experience of historical life. Their writings
bear witness to two different times; but both periods were critical, truly fate-
ful moments in the history of the twentieth century. And their stories are
consequently entangled in a dialectical struggle between hope and despair,
faith and skepticism.
Döblin was writing essays and fiction in the troubled years between
the two world wars, Sebald writing after the Second World War and the
Holocaust, too young to be responsible for the Nazi genocide, yet neverthe-
less feeling somehow summoned to bear witness to the past for the sake
of a Germany, and in particular a German literary culture, that, he felt,
had still not undertaken any significant “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” any
appropriate attempt to come to grips with the nature of war and the moral
significance of the Holocaust. Moreover, deeply distressed over the uncanny
silence in German literary culture, not only regarding the immeasurable
devastation and horror in the course of the War and the Holocaust, for
which both Germany and the Allies were responsible, although indeed
in different ways and degrees, but also regarding the representation of this
devastation and horror in post-War German literature, Sebald attempted
in the 1980s and 1990s to set in motion a dialogue of memory and criti-
cal reflection.8
How might literature express the inexpressible? How might it rep-
resent horror that defies imagination and resists representation, how can
the writer avoid aestheticizing human suffering in the process of giving it
beautifully compelling literary form, and how can one remember devasta-
tions of war betrayed by the very words meant to bring them to memory
and thought?9 After the events in the first half of the twentieth century,
 PRO L OGU E / xvii

the literary conventions of the past—in particular, the conventions con-

stitutive of the German “Roman,” a genre exemplified by the novels of
Goethe—had become, for both Döblin and Sebald, manifestly unusable,
since the reality experienced in the two wars and the Holocaust made it
impossible not to discern the distortions of truth that the Enlightenment
presuppositions of the “Bürgerstand” frame of mind would inevitably impose
on the form and the content of the novel; and one also had to realize,
correspondingly, that those same assumptions made it impossible for the
traditional forms of literature to comprehend the haunted world in which
we must find a way to live.10
We know that Dickens wrote novels that depicted child abuse, the
exploitation of children, and the grim realities of urban life in a rapidly
industrializing England, and Baudelaire wrote poetry that registered the
torments and struggles of the individual in the modern metropolis. But
according to Sebald, around the beginning of the twentieth century, repre-
sentations of things which had hardly figured in the literature of the nine-
teenth century, and especially not in the literature that represented German
life, finally began to appear: “The horrible, the shocking and disturbing
[Das Grauenhafte, das Entsetzliche], things that previously haunted only the
darkest corners of the Romantics, now suddenly figured in a really central
way in German literature.”11 And, although earlier centuries unquestionably
experienced, and found ways to represent, the catastrophic events of nature
and the horrors of war, Sebald wants to suggest that this new sobriety and
truthfulness, or say new realism, represents the attempt in our time to
contrast and set against one another, in both style and content, the distinc-
tive significance for literature of the catastrophic events separating the last
two very different centuries. And for Sebald, as for Döblin, what is most
distinctive is that these events can no longer be rendered with credibility
in any mythological, theological, or metaphysical context: when regarded
simply as events in natural history, however, they are absolutely bereft
of any “deep” meaning—and indeed, despite the temptations inherent in
the art of storytelling, they resist all projections of sublime purpose and
meaning.12 In that sense, these events are truly “unerzählbar,” impossible
to retrieve in narrative form.

What defines all the arts of the twentieth century and the last several
decades of the nineteenth is that, increasingly, in one way or another,
whether eagerly or reluctantly, they could not avoid recognizing that their
inherited conventions of representation were no longer sustainable. And by
 xviii / PRO L OGU E

the beginning of the century we just left behind us, in fact even before the
shock of the two wars and the Holocaust, the arts could not fail to recognize
the vertiginous dimensions of this situation. European culture was in crisis.
In his 1901 Logical Investigations, and again, even more forcefully in
1911, in an essay bearing the title “Philosophy as Strict Science,” Edmund
Husserl called attention to what he took to be a crisis in the conceptual
framework and logical foundation of the natural sciences: a crisis he already,
at that time, understood to be a crisis not only challenging the dependence
of scientific theory on pre-theoretical language but unsettling some seem-
ingly fundamental assumptions in the history of European culture. And in
1935, with storm clouds gathering over Europe, he gave a lecture in Prague,
“Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man,” which was subsequently
expanded to include, gathered under the title The Crisis of European Science
and Transcendental Philosophy, some truly groundbreaking studies addressing
what, by that time, he recognized as much more than a crisis limited to
the conceptual language used in the natural sciences. He warned, indeed,
of a dangerous “spiritual crisis.”
In writing Being and Time, his first major work of thought, published in
1926, Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, continued his teacher’s research,
arguing that:

The real “movement” of the sciences takes place when their

basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is
transparent to itself. The level that a science has reached is deter-
mined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts.13

However, he was more radical than Husserl, asserting that, ultimately, the
crisis needs to be understood ontologically, namely as nihilism, reducing
the question of being to nothingness. And in the “Introduction” to that
work, he not only challenged the old foundations, but, digging deeper,
called foundationalism itself into question. In fact, giving Husserl’s sense
of a “spiritual crisis” a different object, he extended the questioning of
language to theology, observing that it has been compelled to seek “a more
primordial interpretation of mankind’s being towards God, prescribed by
the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it.”14 Thus, he argued
that, “conceptually,” the “foundation” that theology has posited for faith
“not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and
distorts it.” Moreover, he called for recognizing as a philosophical task the
existence of a crisis in the language of the historical sciences, noting the
need to find different ways to represent historical actuality; and acknowledg-
ing new movements in literature and new currents of thought in linguistic
 PRO L OGU E / xix

studies, he maintained that even “the history of literature is to become the

history of problems.”15 How far is literature capable of working through this
history and the crisis it defined?
For the literary arts, the crisis, overtaking representation, created a
unique challenge, calling into question the forms, styles, and techniques
of language that had been in use for many centuries. Both Döblin and
Sebald wrote their works of fiction and literary criticism with an acute
consciousness of this crisis. There is in their prose, therefore, despite all
their differences, a certain sobriety and scrupulous honesty—a commitment
to truth that they shared with many other writers of the twentieth century.
In the course of explaining why Hegel’s thought has been consid-
ered, mistakenly, to be no longer relevant for understanding the twentieth
century, Frederick Beiser usefully points to changes that register some of
the dimensions of the crisis that has challenged the arts of the twentieth
century:

We have lost the feeling for religion, “the taste for the absolute,”
which was the inspiration for Hegel’s metaphysics. After two
world wars, the gulags and the Holocaust, we have lost faith in
progress, though this faith is the cornerstone of Hegel’s philosophy
of history. We live in such a specialized and pluralistic age that
no one expects to see the restoration of wholeness, the recovery
of unity with ourselves, others and nature; but these were the
grand ideas behind Hegel’s philosophy.16

These were also the grand ideas behind the literature of the eighteenth
century, most of the nineteenth, and even the very early years of the twenti-
eth—until the First World War exposed the daemonic character of Western
“civilization,” including its “modernization,” in all its destructiveness. The
spirit of enthusiasm that had carried the Enlightenment was finally buried
in the trenches. Nothing would remain, it seemed, other than its ghost.
By the time that war ended, it was impossible to deny that the moral
foundations of the Western world—and the political institutions of state
supposed to serve great moral ideals—were weakening and crumbling in a
crisis that had already, in fact, been in effect for a long time. Moreover,
the paradigm of knowledge, truth, and reality that had held sway since
the dawn of the modern world was finally losing its compelling authority.
Poetry and prose fiction could no longer reflect, no longer represent, the
experience of the time according to the old conventions and models with-
out in some ways becoming, as in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901),
sentimental and elegiac, a work of belated mourning, unable or unwilling
 xx / PRO L OGU E

to relinquish the past, despite perceiving with considerable moral lucidity

the inner corruption, the decadence, the disease, of the old social order.
Mann’s later work, The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, although still
written in the old narrative style and form, takes the reader back to prewar
Europe and represents the crisis as a struggle not only for the health of the
individual soul, but ultimately for the future sanity of Western civilization.
Its characters are cast as allegorical figures embodying the various ideas,
ideals, and forces that were fighting one another for the soul of Europe.
“Modernism” now names the historical character of the arts created
in recognition of the dimensions of this crisis. The term first gained cur-
rency, it seems, soon after the First World War. It was a way of character-
izing that recognition and the consequent experimentation challenging the
various arts. The term is not easily defined, however, because, over time,
its use has greatly extended both its denotation and its connotation, and
in the writings of some critics and historians, the reach of the term has
even extended all the way back into the middle of the nineteenth century,
referring to experiments and movements in the arts that set the stage for
the distinctive innovations of the twentieth century. Thus the term has
been used, with little agreement regarding historical dates, to designate, in
“modern” art and literature, European movements as bewilderingly diverse
as mid-nineteenth century realism, naturalism, aestheticism, impression-
ism, symbolism, Jugendstil, “Die Brücke” (1905–1911), “Der blaue Reiter”
(1909–1914), cubism, expressionism, futurism, surrealism, dada, “Neue
Sachlichkeit,” neo-realism, and what I will here call “reflexive modern-
ism,” i.e., art the form and content of which is rigorously reduced to, and
deduced from, an examination of its historically essential conditions of
possibility.17 Despite belonging to a unique medium, the experiments and
innovations taking place in poetry and the other forms of literature were
at once significantly influenced by what was taking place in the other
arts—painting, theatre, cinema, music, ballet, and even architecture—and
also powerful influences on them.18
In his reliable Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, Pericles Lewis
suggests that, in regard to literature, twentieth-century “modernism” des-
ignates the tendency “to break away from traditional verse forms, narra-
tive techniques, and generic conventions in order to seek new methods
of representation appropriate to life in an urban, industrial, mass-oriented
age.” He goes on to opine that, in his words,

Modernism offered an artistic and literary response to a wide-

spread sense that the ways of knowing and representing the world
 PRO L OGU E / xxi

developed in the Renaissance, but going back in many ways to

the ancient Greeks, distorted the actual experience of reality.19

There was thus also a sense that the old ways of representing reality and
giving expression to experience could no longer claim authenticity. Events
had exposed the literary forms of the past to a reality the experience of
which they were unable to express or represent with any degree of cred-
ibility, validity, and legitimacy. Eventually, by the time the First World War
had ended, the recognition of this situation constituted for many artists
something like a compelling sense of existential urgency and crisis, and it
involved calling into question both the content and the form of represen-
tation; hence, for many writers, the problematic nature of language could
not be ignored, and new ways to express what people were experiencing
had to be invented. The crisis presented a challenge, of course—but also
an opportunity.
Indicative of the split sense of crisis is Robert Musil’s lament that
the character of modern life is so radically different from what it had been
in the past that it could not be narrated—it had become, he said, think-
ing in terms of the nineteenth-century novel, “unerzählbar.” But as we
know, he did in fact make the challenge in this situation an opportunity
to experiment with fictional narration, attempting to write a novel of and
for his time: a novel, however, that, with its alternative versions of reality,
ultimately escaped his authorial control and accordingly could never be
completed. Published nevertheless in its fragmentary condition, The Man
Without Qualities (1930) showed new possibilities for the fictional novel.
In “The Storyteller,” an essay fragment written sometime in 1935
or 1936, years still suffering the traumatic afterlife of the War, Benjamin,
a reader of Kafka and Musil, reflected on the fate of storytelling in the
modern world, and called attention to the disintegration and atrophy of
experience, experience understood as “Erfahrung,” as journey and venture,
increasingly forgotten in the shocking rush of experiences, “Erlebnisse,”
atomic, fragmented moments of reduced experience, bereft of memory, his-
tory, and meaningful venture:

With the [First] World War, a process began to become apparent

which has not ceased since then. Was it not noticeable at the
end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown
silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience
[Erfahrung]? What ten years later was poured out in a flood of
war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth
 xxii / PRO L OGU E

to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For

never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than
strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience
by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral
experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to
school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky
in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destruc-
tive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.20

The argument continues, introducing a thought that, as our readings will

show, illuminates the works of both Döblin and Sebald: “Death,” in this
analysis, “is the sanction of everything that the storyteller has to tell. He
has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to
which his stories refer back.”21 But the art of storytelling seemed to be finally
reaching its end, “because the epic side of truth, of wisdom, is dying out.”22
Death plays a dominant character in Döblin’s postwar novel, a project in
which he attempted to renew, specifically for our time, the epic genre; and
in the figure of “natural history,” death is a grey and ashen presence whose
metamorphic destructiveness haunts all of Sebald’s stories.23
There can be no doubt, I think, that, in the context of economic
stress and political failure, the traumatic experience of the First World
War brought renewed attention to the inflammatory writings of Fried-
rich Nietzsche, whose unprecedented critique of European culture, reli-
gion, social forms, and political institutions encouraged acknowledgment
of a grave crisis in reason—a crisis from which language, as a medium of
expression, experience, and truth, could not possibly escape. Language, the
language of truth, is, he claimed, nothing more than a “mobile army of
metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”:

In short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced,

transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and
which eventually, after long use, seem to be firm, canonical, and
obligatory: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten
that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and
without [creative] sensuous power; coins which have lost their
pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.24

After arguing, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), against our common habit
of projecting the contingent, ultimately groundless grammatical features of
our native language, whatever that tongue happens to be, onto the world
 PRO L OGU E / xxiii

we inhabit and taking our disavowed projections to represent ontological

or metaphysical truth, Nietzsche wrote: “I shall repeat a hundred times:
we really must free ourselves from the seduction of words!”25 Not only the
concept of “truth,” but also all our other philosophical concepts, such as
“cause” and “effect,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “reason,” are ultimately noth-
ing but mythologies, “conventional fictions for the purpose of designation
and communication.”26
This revolutionary critique of language that Nietzsche set in motion
did not fade into oblivion. At the turn of the century, various intellectual
circles in Vienna, hospitable city of residence at one time or another for,
among others, Karl Kraus, Fritz Mauthner, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Mori-
tz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and of course Sigmund
Freud, began to debate the question of a thoroughgoing critique; some even
ventured projects designed to reform or reconstruct the language. Kraus, a
fanatical grammarian whose passion for language was such that he would
agonize for days over the placement or misplacement of a comma, dedi-
cated his life to defending language against its corruption and abuse, firmly
believing that careless language is careless thought. In 1896, he and von
Hofmannsthal became acquainted with one another as members of a youth-
ful social-intellectual club called “Jung Wien,” where “Sprachkritik” was
the subject of much heated conversation. In 1901, the first of Mauthner’s
magisterial three-volume Contributions to a Critique of Language (Beiträge
zu einer Kritik der Sprache) appeared in print, received with much acclaim
and debate. The third volume came out in 1903. And, beginning in 1910,
the first parts of his Dictionary of Philosophy (1910–1911, 1923–1924) were
published, attempting to give philosophical terms a precision they had
never before enjoyed. Terms that could not be so favored were accordingly
to be rejected, cast out and forever banished from legitimate philosophical
thought. This rigorous operational positivism set the stage for ambitious
experiments to carry out that programme.27
Mauthner’s work was an important inspiration for Moritz Schlick,
who founded the “Vienna Circle” (“Wiener Kreis”) in 1926 and published,
among other works, a General Theory of Knowledge (1918–1925), in which
he argued, more radically than had Kant, against metaphysical speculation;
and, in keeping with the austere empiricism behind that argument, he
encouraged the view that, since the discourses of ethics and aesthetics are
capable neither of the kind of rigorous definition possible in mathematics
nor capable of the kind of objective verification possible in physics, they
must be considered meaningless. Carnap, intensely interested in working
through what he perceived to be a crisis in the sciences related to the
looseness of language, joined Schlick and his colleagues in the “Wiener
 xxiv / PRO L OGU E

Kreis,” and in 1928, he published The Logical Construction of the World

(Der logische Aufbau der Welt), in which he undertook to construct out
of a phenomenalist language, and according to the strict laws of logic, all
the terms required by the physical sciences. The publication of this work
followed by just a few years Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(1922), a wildly bold attempt, inspired by Mauthner’s project, to reconstruct
language, rendering it in the purity and transparency of logical form. Both
Wittgenstein and Carnap failed in their respective attempts; and whilst
Carnap simply abandoned the fantasy of a logically transparent language
to ground the terms needed in the discourse of physics, Wittgenstein soon
repudiated the very idea of such a language, celebrating instead the perfec-
tion of ordinary language. Language, he insisted, in an excess of conserva-
tive fervor, is perfect just as it is.
During these same years, we know, Sigmund Freud was also a resident
of Vienna; and during his student years at the University there, he under-
took studies in epistemology and metaphysics with the philosopher Franz
Brentano, an important figure for Edmund Husserl, whose Logical Investiga-
tions (1901), studies essentially concerned with the formation of concepts
in language, prepared for his subsequent contributions to phenomenology.28
Turning from philosophy, however, and pursuing a course of studies that
led him eventually into the practice of psychiatry, Freud found himself
increasingly fascinated by the nature of language. Approaching language
from a perspective totally different from the one that would emerge from
the logical positivism of the “Wiener Kreis,” he sought to reveal and inter-
pret the encrypted, unconscious undercurrents operating in language. His
Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899; and just two years later, in
1901, he published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, soon followed by
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).
Hugo von Hofmannsthal was another of Vienna’s illustrious intellec-
tuals, a poet and writer of novels, essays, and libretti for some of Richard
Strauss’s operas. And he too became obsessed with language. However,
he obsessed in ways quite different from Husserl, who never abandoned
his hopes for transcendental intuitionism, and from the philosophers com-
mitted to logical positivism, with its ideal of a standardized, referentially
perspicuous system of language; for, much closer in spirit to Mauthner and
Kraus, and decades before Joyce and Beckett, von Hofmannsthal was deeply
distressed by a crisis in language that he experienced as affecting the very
possibility for him to say and impart anything at all really meaningful. Thus,
in 1902, just one year after Mauthner’s Kritik der Sprache, in a formulation
of the crisis that has become a key to understanding “modernism,” he
expressed his despair in a fictional letter written by a certain Lord Chandos
 PRO L OGU E / xxv

to his friend, Francis Bacon. In this last of his letters, Philipp speaks of a
crisis he passed through, in which—

The abstract words that the tongue must enlist as a matter of

course in order to bring out an opinion disintegrated in my
mouth like rotten mushrooms.29

First, he lost his natural fluency; then he found that he could not use words—
he calls them the “grand words”—such as “spirit,” “soul,” or “body,” without
experiencing “an inexplicable uneasiness.” And this affliction, he averred,

Gradually broadened, like spreading rust. Even in simple, informal

conversation, all the opinions which are ordinarily offered casu-
ally and with the sureness of a sleepwalker become so fraught
with difficulties that I had to cease participating entirely in
these conversations.30

“I felt,” he said, undoubtedly mindful of the bitter irony in his allusion

to Paradise, “like someone locked in a garden full of eyeless statuary, and
I rushed to get out again.”31 So whilst he experienced some marvelous
moments enjoying the mere presence of ordinary things, moments indeed
of little Proustian “revelations,” his happiness was threatened, because what
he felt in such moments of illumination “had no name and is not namable.”
He found himself left to recall in melancholy languishment the transience
of “a sublime and deeply moving aura which words seem too weak to
describe.”32 This fictional “Letter,” exhibiting a radically new form of sub-
jectivism, was a powerful and influential expression of a self-consciousness
for which failure—the failing of words, the failing of meaning—had become
the principal experience that the writer felt compelled to convey.33
This failure is the theme of “The Word,” a poem by Stefan George
that first appeared in 1919. In 1928, it was published in a book of verse
bearing the title Das Neue Reich. The poem, just seven short strophes, ends
with these words:

So lernt ich traurig den verzicht:

Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht.
[So it was with sadness that I learned renunciation:
No thing may be where the word breaks off.]34

One should note that the final line lends itself to a double reading: accord-
ing to one reading, it expresses a crisis in ontology—Heidegger would say
 xxvi / PRO L OGU E

a crisis in the modern experience of being; in another reading, however, it

expresses a crisis in language, a crisis in its capacity to speak of that which
is—or speak of it without reiterating old, shop-worn words.35
We noted a few pages ago that, for Adorno, “genuine experience,
experience worth rescuing from the damaged variety of modern life, is
closely tied to the memory of happiness, whose faint promise to return is
what art is able to offer.”36 The Chandos “Letter” confirms that interpreta-
tion in the surprise of a dialectical oscillation that, pressured by despair and
melancholy, shows us words seemingly too weak to bring into the world
even a glimmer of redemption somehow able, nevertheless, to continue
bearing the eternity of the promise.

The principal question that I wish to pursue in this book is whether, because
of the connection between language and community, the very existence of
language, language as such, must be recognized, despite the crisis, as the
bearer, the carrier, the metaphor, of the utopian promise of happiness.37
What is this promise? For the moment, let me simply note that, in the
context of a conversation on Karl Kraus, Sebald emphasizes that writer’s
impassioned, life-long search for ways to give expression to the “divine
sense of justice,” the “Gerechtigkeitssinn” that is carried in language.38 The
promise of happiness is meaningless unless it bears something of this sense.
The argument at stake here, proposed in a spirit of speculation, accordingly
concerns a crucial experience with language, namely that, in literature—
Döblin’s and Sebald’s works, for example—this promise somehow appears,
somehow reveals itself, borne by language in an aesthetic semblance that
keeps alive, in cultural memory and hope, our longing for the actualization
and fulfillment of the promise in a future world order.
In Part I, in a reading of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz that will per-
haps call to mind the argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a work of col-
laboration by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, what I want to show
is the conflict that operates in that work of fiction within language itself:
the strife, namely, between language as the causality of freedom, hence the
carrier of the utopian promise of happiness, and the archaic, mythic rem-
nants of language operating as the causality of Fate. Despite Döblin’s hopes
and intentions, the narrative fails to give a decisive, convincing victory to
the language of freedom. Despite those hopes and intentions, the narrative
is unable to overcome the spellbinding power of mythic Fate, taking pos-
session of its words. The benighted, daemonic language persists, as when
it figures in uses of language—for example, as an instrument of prejudice,
 PRO L OGU E / xxvii

domination, and hate—that work against the project of enlightenment and

the actualization of the utopian ideal. The frequency, in Döblin’s prose, of
parataxis, brief sentences without subordinate clauses of an explanatory or
interpretive nature, is symptomatic of the persistence of Fate, operating
with an archaic language not yet fully rationalized. Can language that is
not free of fatalism nevertheless bear the promise of happiness? We must
read his novel with this question in mind.
My reading will venture the argument that, besides telling a story
about a criminal character struggling for redemption, Döblin’s novel has
another story to tell, a story calling attention to the condition of language
as many poets, storytellers, and philosophers experienced it in the late years
of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. This other
narrative dramatizes in metaphorical, allegorical terms an intense struggle
between language serving the daemonic causality of Fate and language
serving the redeeming causality of freedom. And although the language of
freedom is ultimately not sufficiently compelling to claim a victory repre-
senting the protagonist’s achievement of moral salvation, nevertheless the
very existence of language, making it possible for the author to impart the
story of this historically consequential struggle taking place within language
itself, constitutes the gift to the art of literature of a “weak messianic power,”
bearing a message of hope—bearing the promise of happiness, redeeming
a humanity coming to itself. This redeeming of humanity depends in part
on the redeeming of the power in language. The story we will be bringing
to light in Part I of this volume, the story, namely, of a struggle within
language for its own redemption, the renewal of its creative, revelatory, and
transformative power, its power, therefore, to impart the promise, is at least
as fascinating as the story of the protagonist’s struggle to break away from
his past and lead a decent life.
In Part II, in a reading of Sebald’s works of fiction, what I would
like to show is (1) how the qualities of his prose give expression to our
languishment, our mourning and melancholy, not only over the destruction
of nature and history for the sake of contemporary life, but over the fateful
inevitability of transience, everything passing away; (2) how the qualities
of his prose convey our corresponding longing for the utopian promise of
happiness, and (3) how the narrative content accordingly brings intima-
tions of this promise into the dialectics of historical presence, construct-
ing allegorical constellations and figures of astonishing beauty. For beauty
on the edge of the sublime stirs our recollection of the forever-deferred
promise of happiness and keeps utopian hope alive. Although language can
have only, as Benjamin avers, a “weak messianic power,” it somehow keeps
utopian hope alive, if only in the ephemeral forms of aesthetic semblance.
 xxviii / PRO L OGU E

Thus, in Sebald’s stories, the moments of beauty when that ideality is pres-
ent are infrequent and ephemeral, invariably fated to pass away. But in the
eternity of that passing away, beauty is transformed into the immeasurable
sublimity of hope.

So, does the gift of language bear within it a utopian or messianic promise of
happiness? Is language, as such—the very existence of language—a promise
of happiness? The old gods are vanishing; but every day, powerful ancient
languages are disappearing, and, at an unprecedented rate now, entire spe-
cies of birds, insects, animals, and trees are dying, passing into extinction.
What redemption can words promise? What promise can words redeem?
I will argue for what might be called, in a “profane” sense that
will soon be further clarified, a “redemptive” schema, showing that this
promise can be detected in the literature we will be reading and inter-
rogating; but I cannot deny that, in much modern literature, especially
works of the twentieth century, including those by our two authors, this
claim about language can seem at times to be nothing but a consolatory
delusion.39 Skepticism must carry some weight because of the damaged and
weakened condition of language that, at least since the time of Baude-
laire, many poets, writers, and philosophers have, in lamentation, called
to our attention. The modern experience with language immediately raises
many unsettling questions. How is it possible even to think the redeeming
enlightenment of this world, if language, the very medium of thought, has
been severely damaged, reified, commodified, and reduced to an instru-
ment of domination? Even if language has in the past borne a promise of
happiness, has in the past been an uncanny power to redeem, after the
catastrophes of the twentieth century, and after so many other causes
for disillusionment and disenchantment, what of this ancient inheritance
could possibly remain within the heart of language, itself a site, it seems,
of untold devastation? How could we expect language to serve our hope
for the utopian perfection and redemption of the world, when language
itself is in need of redemption—in need, that is, of the renewal or resti-
tution of its old potency, its power to reveal, transfigure, and originate,
salvaging whatever it invokes from distracted and neglectful everydayness,
from atrophied imagination, reified perception, and all the other ways that
significance can be lost? To resolve these doubts and questions, we must
undertake to discern indications of the uncanny “presence,” in language,
of this promise. But ultimately it can be only a question of the respon-
sibility that we bear and acknowledge for the words we use and abuse.40
 PRO L OGU E / xxix

The existence of language as such cannot guarantee the actualization of

the universal happiness it offers; the promise remains conditional, is, we
might say, only an offering—the gift of an idea, which the very existence
of language grants, and which it is in our power to accept, actualize,
refuse, deny, or betray. So whatever the “redemption” of language might
be supposed to mean, in the context of the present work it will not be
something vouchsafed by any teleological or eschatological economy. Nor
will it be assured by any material determinism. Theodicy and all its avatars
in materialism can enjoy no credibility in the modern world. Its words
are exhausted. As Sebald remarks:

The theocratic props [Stützen] collapsed a long time ago; hence-

forth, we must take comfort in the recognition that, as mortal
individuals, we are part of a greater process, which in a very
reassuring way follows its course [in einer sehr beruhigenden Form
abläuft]. But the transcendence [offered by theology] no longer
provides a stable grounding.41

And yet, he says, as he watches the world fall ever more rapidly into a
catastrophic state, he finds himself feeling ever more keenly the need for a
responsible literature—and a language capable of redeeming the things that
ultimately matter. There is no God to save us. But there is, he believes, a
solemn calling for the writer. For the writer can watch and bear witness,
summoning the past in memory and calling attention to what is presently
happening—because the present is already our future.42
Is this “present” the utopian or messianic promise, a gift, not only
conveyed in language but also constitutive of it? In “Faith and Knowledge,”
Derrida remarks that “The promise promises itself, it is already promised,
that is the sworn faith, the given word [. . .]. Religio begins there.”43 And
he explains thus his invocation of the “religious” dimension of the prom-
ise: “No to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of
a messianicity older than religion, more originary than all messianism. No
discourse or address of the other without the possibility of an elementary
promise.”44 In a formulation plainly influenced by Benjamin, Derrida states
that the messianic names “the opening to the future or to the coming of
the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and
without prophetic prefiguration.”45 It is, he says, “a general structure of expe-
rience.”46 What is promised is the promise as such. Carried in memory by
language, messianicity is that structure which opens the possibility for every
singular actualizing messianic event; consequently, it exceeds all messian-
isms. As Michael Naas summarizes it:
 xxx / PRO L OGU E

It is the name of a time or of an awaiting where that which

is always beyond our horizon of expectations, where the radi-
cally unexpected and indeterminate, can come at any moment,
at any moment ‘in’ history but also, insofar as the unexpected
cannot be understood from within the horizon of history, as an
interruption of history.47

For Derrida, as for Benjamin, although what transformation the messianic

might bring is indeterminate, it “always takes the phenomenal form of peace
or of justice.”48 In our context here, what Derrida will call “the invincible
desire for justice,”49 for a “democracy still to come,”50 is represented by faith
in the promise of happiness. “This justice,” he argues, “inscribes itself in
advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that
inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.”51 Moreover,
this promise, as Naas notes, is “not for this or that conception of justice,
but is justice itself.”52 Such will be the modernist conception of the mes-
sianic that, in thinking about language and its promise of happiness, we
will engage.
How, then, in the context of this book, might we conceive what is
involved in seeking to reclaim for immanence, for worldly interpretation,
the “redemption” of the promise of happiness that language, as I believe,
inherently recalls? Following Derrida, John Caputo has proposed an auda-
ciously “modernist” way to think about language, literature, and our world
as the light of transcendence, figured, here, as the God of theology, fades
away:

The name of God is the name of a promise—and a promise

cannot be made safe from a threat without being turned into a
sure thing, a guarantee. [. . .] The promise that transpires under
the name of God is the promise of the world itself, so that to
invoke the name of God is in the end a way of calling upon
something embedded within the world, embedded within ourselves
[. . .]. What classical theology was searching for under the figure
of the ‘transcendence’ of God is here refigured as provocation
[. . .]. The figures of transcendence, which readily assume the
form of literature or mythology, of dreams or desires, are ways
of retracing the lines of immanence in imaginative form, ways
of reclaiming immanence in all its richness and intensity.

Therefore, the name of God is, he says, in words reminiscent of Benjamin,

“the name of an event that breaks open the present.”53
 PRO L OGU E / xxxi

Can reading works of literature, attentive to the operations of lan-

guage, reclaim the promise of happiness for a worldly redemption? Can we
find in the language of literature indications of the promise in its imma-
nence? Have the writings of Döblin and Sebald preserved their inheritance
of an expressive potential, a redemptive potential, greatly weakened but not
yet lost, that Benjamin thought of as “prophetic” and “messianic,” inclining
the world toward its political and spiritual ideal of perfection?

In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács proposed to define the novel
as “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a
problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”54 It is “the epic of a
world that has been abandoned by God.”55 A certain “daemonic” psychol-
ogy accordingly compels its characters, for they, reflecting their authors,
inhabit a world conscious to some extent not only that it is bereft of mean-
ing, bereft of hope, but also that, without meaning, without prospect, their
reality “disintegrates into nothingness.”56 I think that the stories and novels
about which we will be reflecting here confirm this diagnosis. However, the
present situation is actually worse than Lukács believed, because language is
suffering much more today than it was in the past: constantly threatened by
etymological forgetfulness, overcome by commodification, reduced to one-
dimensional tonality, and enduring other types of reification; consequently,
it has lost much of its power to express this devastation with compel-
ling conviction, using—unchanged—the inherited forms and conventions
of literature. And yet, there is also, in twentieth-century literature, fierce
resistance to this damage—a resistance in language by language that bears
witness to its weakness but struggles to find truth within that very weak-
ness: a new expressive power, redeeming something of its utopian promise.
So we will be interpreting, here, some works of literature that belong
very much to our time, works expressing and reflecting the character of
our time not only in their narrative content, but also, and perhaps even
more distinctively, in their use of language. Specifically, our questions will
be engaging works of literature by two German writers who were, because
of their historical circumstances, compelled to experience something of
that loss of meaning, whilst at the same time they desperately struggled
to maintain a certain faith in the possibility of redeeming our language
through new forms of literature, rescuing the redemptive promise, the
implicitly prophetic message of utopian hope, that words, even in their
corruption, even in their paralysis, even in their anger, even in their
 xxxii / PRO L OGU E

mourning, seemed still to bear. The works that we will question were
searching, I think, for ways to renew the genius, the promise, the redemp-
tive power of words, thereby giving the things those words invoked new
configurations of meaning, new dimensions, new affinities, new identities,
new pasts, new futures.
Although writing from out of two different historical moments, both
Döblin and Sebald drew, each in his own way, on the rich resources of their
native language to take us not only into moments of beauty and the warmth
of human feeling, but also deep into abysses of desperation, attempting by
the magic of their words to transform into singularly meaningful experi-
ence what, as we enter into the historically framed lives of their fictional
characters, we have undergone with them and through them. We shall
reflect on the stories they tell in order to learn whether, despite the damage
that language has endured, it still is possible for words to undertake their
redemptive alchemy, redeeming their promise by transforming with revela-
tory, and perhaps prophetic power, our experience of the world—and our
sense of what is possible, giving us reason to hope for a secular or “profane”
redemption of the promise of happiness.

About Part I

Döblin, living in Berlin, was a German Jew, son of a tailor, who left the
vocation of neighborhood physician and psychiatrist to write novels at a
time when, not many years after the end of the First World War, as disas-
trous for Germany’s economy as for its spirit, the Weimar Republic, last
hope for the rule of enlightened institutions of state, was slowly collapsing.
Only a few years of economic stress and political struggles for power would
pass before the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists. Döblin
wrote Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, in an atmosphere charged
with anxieties: mounting economic hardship, social unrest, and political
instability. He wrote it in a time when many Germans were still strug-
gling to come to terms with the enormous uncertainties, dislocations, and
contradictions that massive and rapid industrialization inevitably causes.
In a fast-paced, staccato prose, short, hard-cut sentences in a rough urban
vernacular, Döblin staged a gripping struggle, within the realm of language, for
the future of the promise of happiness: a struggle unto death between, on
the one side, language possessed—indeed driven—by the mythic causality
 PRO L OGU E / xxxiii

of Fate and, on the other side, language committed to a future created by

and for the causality of freedom.
In the prose of his novel, Döblin throws us onto the streets of the
metropolis to learn how words are bound to Fate, as the story takes us into
a criminal underworld through which, eventually, National Socialism would
be marching on its way to tragic triumph. Without explicitly saying so, he
worked with language in a way that makes us conscious of the devastation,
the incalculable loss of redemptive power that language has suffered; but
he attempts, nevertheless, to tell a story in which, somehow, if only in the
semblance of allegory, the spell over language is supposed vanquished, so
that language might finally begin to deliver a story about the keeping of its
longed-for promise of happiness. But the language in which the story is cast
is possessed by the mythic causality of Fate, manifest in counter-rhythmic
interruptions and in echoing drum beats and drum rolls that never cease
to haunt the resolution of the story. An atmosphere of alarm that cannot
be wished away prevails. It is difficult to see anything good emerging from
the rhymes and rhythms of prose that express this time of emergency.

About Part II

Sebald, whose writings will be engaged in the second part, emigrated at age
eighteen from a remote village in southern Germany and settled perma-
nently in England, eventually teaching literature in an English university
and writing post-Holocaust literary criticism and works of fiction in the
language of his origin. (I use the term “works of fiction” instead of the
term “novels” because, for compelling reasons that I shall not discuss here,
Sebald preferred not to identify his fiction with the traditional genre of the
German novel.) Although living and writing after the catastrophe of the
Holocaust, in a time immeasurably different, therefore, from Döblin’s, he
likewise confronted the devastation of language and struggled over many
years to find a way to make the language he used in his fictional writings
reflect this damage without losing ciphers of hope. He found a way to
express this dialectic, writing in the languishment of a style that perfectly
fits the exigencies of what he characterized as the “aesthetics of resistance.”
Melancholy and mournful, this resistance is dependent on a use of lan-
guage capable of bearing the languorous, weakly redemptive power of an
overwrought memory always too late. His sentences give rise to elusive
gray images, some faintly “auratic,” that seem nevertheless to fade and dis-
sipate before one’s very eyes, images enjoying transience as their only claim
 xxxiv / PRO L OGU E

to eternity. Sometimes, though, the images that are aroused and emerge
from the prose do not entirely dissolve, as when they bear witness, but
always belatedly, to an unspeakable horror, an event that persists to haunt
our memory long after the sentence has come to its end. With seemingly
infinite slowness, a rhythm of singular importance for Benjamin,57 we are
frequently carried backward by timeless rivers of prose, out of the present
and into the melancholy lagoons and backwaters of prophetic memory,
casting on the present the light of its unforgettable truth. But, as I will
show, it is where language, transfiguring the ordinary, makes something of
striking beauty appear, that we experience the promise of happiness most
intensely. But authentic beauty never appears, for Sebald, without remind-
ing of transience, loss, and suffering. It never appears without recalling the
ever-unfulfilled promise. Thus it is only in the sublime beauty of a prose
given over to remembrance and lamentation, in a prose that will persis-
tently remind us, even if beauty must be sacrificed, of cruelties, sufferings,
and absences we have failed to acknowledge, that he will vouchsafe the
transmissibility of the promise.58

Now, to understand the project that I have undertaken to unfold here,

one must, to begin with, hear the word “redeeming” that figures in the
title of this book to be a provocative representation of redeeming both as
a verb, with words the object of literary efforts to rescue them from the
destructiveness—the nihilism—of contemporary culture, and as an adjective,
qualifying the power of words to rescue the things they invest with mean-
ing. These two senses are inextricably intertwined, so that we must think
the redemption of language in both the subjective and objective senses of its
genitive grammar. In the one interpretation, words will undergo the redeem-
ing; in the other, words will undertake the redeeming. To the extent that
the literary works we shall read and interpret are able to redeem our words,
rescuing their power to be meaningful again, they should in turn serve to
redeem whatever it is that those words are wrought to signify. The struggle
for the promise of happiness is, I believe, inseparable from the struggle for
the redemption of language. This is what I think the greatest literature of
our time understands and attempts to communicate.
The second matter in the title that calls for some preliminary expla-
nation is introduced by the invocation of a “promise of happiness.” This
phrase, which has resounded for years in the discourse of critical social
theory, will, in this book, be given a new meaning—a new vocation. In
1857, Marie-Henri Beyle, Stendahl as he is more commonly known, wrote
 PRO L OGU E / xxxv

in his essay On Beauty that “beauty is only the promise of happiness.” “La
beauté,” he declared, “n’est que la promesse de bonheur.” A century later,
Theodor Adorno reformulated in a negative dialectic the skepticism inher-
ent in that dictum, making art the subject and arguing, accordingly, that
art is “the ever broken promise of happiness,” because its resistance to the
moral ugliness of prevailing reality can take place only in the realm of aes-
thetic semblance.59 In keeping with this conviction, he accused Surrealism
of frivolously “betraying” the promise of happiness, sacrificing “to the [mere]
appearance of happiness transmitted by any integral form, concern for its
truth.”60 But what is happiness? And what is at stake in the claim that,
in the realm of art, as in life, happiness can be no more than a (forever
broken) promise?
In a brief essay on Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin remarked, without
actually proposing any definitions of content, that “there is a dual will to
happiness, a dialectic of happiness: a hymnal form and an elegiac form.”
His interpretation, situating the question of happiness in the temporality
of the political realm, continues:

The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of

bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration
of the original, the first happiness.61

This dialectic is always at work in the very depths of language—most of all,

perhaps, in the realm of literature, aesthetic semblance, where the dream
of restitution, the dream of Paradise that language promises, according to
Benjamin’s account, to fulfill is shown to be possible only in the event
that, drawing on our powers of imagination, the very powers, namely, that
have always figured in the art of literature, we can find our way to radi-
cally new configurations of our creaturely life. Now if, with Benjamin, we
call the second form “elegiac,” noting its reactionary temptation, we might
call the first form “visionary” and “utopian,” or perhaps even “prophetic”
or “messianic.” But the essential point is that the two rhetorical forms are
inseparable, for the future at stake is the future of a still unrealized past, a
past that has never been present.
Now, there are, of course, many ways of differentiating the utopian
from the messianic transformation, and just as many arguments for doing so,
even when both are interpreted to denote a secular or profane redemption
of the earth-bound world in which we live. However, the framing of their
differences, important though it is, and though for me a real temptation,
must be reserved for another time. Suffice it for now simply to name the
most important features to take into account: (1) whether what is at stake
 xxxvi / PRO L OGU E

is a transformation, a redemption, of our way of dwelling right here in our

earth-bound world or whether it takes place by transporting us into an
absolutely other realm and condition of existence; (2) whether the end
of the transformation is teleologically predetermined or whether the end
(always) remains to be determined; (3) whether the transformation takes
place within the continuum of history as we know it or whether, instead,
it involves an absolute interruption that inaugurates a post-historical or dif-
ferently temporalized world; (4) whether the transformation is a gradual
evolution or whether it involves a sudden eruption, the intervention of
an external agency; and (5) to what extent the transformation is our own
responsibility and to what extent it is choreographed beyond our powers.
An adequate discussion of these questions would inevitably take us too far
from our project and from the literature we will be reading. The differences
are of the utmost importance; but the argument about language and the
promise of happiness proposed here does not depend on resolving the ques-
tions they raise. Whether utopian or messianic, the paradise of happiness
that the argument is supposing to be promised would effect a significant
transfiguration—a redemption—of the suffering world. And insofar as lan-
guage is able to bear this promise, bringing it into our remembrance and
our activities, it itself would be redeemed.
Working out the implications of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s arguments
in the context of this present book, I want to venture the claim that
what is at stake in the “happiness” engaged by our use here of the phrase
“promise of happiness” is the possibility of a radically different “profane”
world—a redeemed world of justice, freedom, and peace, an enlightened
world order in which the social, political, and cultural antagonisms and
diremptions that now still prevail would be reconciled and resolved in
mutual recognition and respect, a world, also, in which individuals would
have the opportunity to discover and pursue the kind of life that would
bring them, in their individuality, a substantial measure of fulfillment and
happiness.
But of course, like Stendahl, we must not permit our visionary hopes
to blind us to adversity in the prevailing reality. Even when formed by
the most inspiring language, literature is, as such, powerless to rescue the
world from the forces of evil. Hence, the stress on the unrealized, even
unapproachable presence of the “promise,” the skepticism in a negative
dialectic for which Adorno, in his dissertation on Kierkegaard, constructed
a compelling image:

No truer image of hope can be imagined than that of ciphers,

readable as traces, dissolving in history, disappearing in front of
 PRO L OGU E / xxxvii

overflowing eyes, indeed confirmed in lamentation. In these tears

of despair, the ciphers appear as incandescent figures, dialectically,
as compassion, comfort, and hope. Dialectical melancholy does
not mourn vanished happiness. It knows that it is unreachable.
But it knows also of the promise that conjoins the unreachable,
precisely in its origin, with the wish.62

Some years later, in Minima Moralia, Adorno would bluntly burden hap-
piness with the responsibility that must constitute its promise, asking us
to contemplate, “What would a happiness [Glück] be that was not mea-
sured by the immeasurable grief at what is?”63 For Adorno, in fact, not
even the manifest beauty of nature is without its almost unfathomable
misery—although it is precisely therein that symbolic traces of a promise
of happiness await the time of our recognition: “Natural beauty is the
trace of the non-identical in things under the spell [Bann] of universal
identity.”64

In the context of the present book, we shall explore an extension of

Adorno’s reflections that I wish to propose regarding how the promise of
happiness figures in works of art. Drawing on the representation for which
Friedrich Schelling argued, namely, that language is a “corporeal being”
composed of sounds and letters that are blessed with a “spiritual essence”
or “inner being,”65 and on Benjamin’s early essay “On Language as Such
and On the Language of Man,” I want to suggest that we experiment with
a provocative and no doubt difficult thought about the “spiritual essence”
of language, namely, that the promise of happiness is carried, is borne and
transmitted, in and by language. If we commence with this thought as our
experimental assumption, the question to put to the literary works we are
reading concerns, then, how words—both language as such, or the very
existence of language, and language as narrative in the art of literature—
bear this promise of happiness. Bear at least its promise.
To give our project the necessary concreteness and specificity, our
questions will concentrate on the language that figures in fictional works
and stories by Döblin and Sebald, the one writing a few years before, the
other a few years after the trauma of the Holocaust, in order to see how,
resisting the threat to meaning that, for both writers, was overwhelming
their experience of historical life and compelling them to invent new forms
of narrative expression, their ways of handling language might be thought
to bear the physiognomy of that promise.66
 xxxviii / PRO L OGU E

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” presenting critical

reflections on historiography in the discourse of Marxism and its bourgeois
antithesis, Benjamin asserted that:

Reflection shows us that our image of happiness [Glück] is thor-

oughly coloured by the time to which the course of our own
existence has assigned us.67

Moreover, he said, this image is “indissolubly bound up with the images of

redemption,” for the “past” that figures in Western historiography “carries
with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” I submit
that the fictional works by Döblin and Sebald are exemplary demonstra-
tions, despite all their differences, of the twofold truth, at once historical
and metaphysical, in Benjamin’s argument. The images of happiness that
take shape in their works—hints of redemption, ciphers of the world in its
utopian perfectionism—are crystallizations of the dialectic of despair and
hope engaging their respective situations in historical time.
Benjamin’s writings seem to suggest, or to imply, that he thought there
is a redemptive promise—metaphorically cast as vestiges of the Adamic
language from which God has withdrawn—encrypted in our language, and
that remembrance of this promise, as in, above all, the work of translation,
therefore constitutes a moral responsibility which must be undertaken by
those who still believe that they can hear, perhaps especially in innocent
recollections of childhood, echoes of the vanished words of Paradise, rever-
berating in the immanence of the world. With a phrase that is reminiscent
of a phrase that appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (§80), he argued that,

Like every generation that has preceded us, we have been endowed
with a weak Messianic power [eine schwache messianische Kraft],
a power to which the past has a claim.68

Taking up the argument Benjamin was, I think, on the verge of making,

regarding the “angelic message” that language bears, we shall be searching
in our readings for the traces and echoes—and the rhythms—that might
indicate in some way, even if only in an elegiac prose, the utopian or
messianic promise of happiness, a remembrance of the hidden prophetic
message repeating the announcement of a new world order, the possibility
of a time of utopian or messianic reconciliation and redemption: an abrupt
break in the uninterrupted jurisdiction of history, prefigured by a promise
that, according to my interpretation of Benjamin’s metaphysico-political
narrative, we must suppose to be preserved and carried by language as such.
 PRO L OGU E / xxxix

In his “Theologico-Political Fragment,” an early text on the same

theme, jotted down as commentary on Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, Ben-
jamin suggested that,

The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of hap-

piness. The relation of this order to the Messianic is one of the
essential teachings of the philosophy of history. [And] just as a
force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the
opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through
being profane, the coming of the Messianic reign [Reich]. The
profane, therefore, although not itself a category of this realm
[Reich], is a decisive category of its gentlest approach. For in
happiness, all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in
good fortune is its downfall destined [bestimmt] to find it. By
contrast, the immediate Messianic intensity of the heart, of the
inner man in isolation, passes through misfortune, in suffering.
To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immor-
tality, there corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the
eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient
worldly existence, transient in its totality, [. . .] the rhythm of
Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason
of its eternal and total passing away [Vergängnis].69

But in the meantime—that is, in the time between the first Paradise of cre-
ation from which we were expelled, and the second Paradise of redemption
that would institute the corrections of justice, and all the other conditions
of a truly universal rationality necessary for individuals to find their singular
ways to lives of happiness; in the meantime, a time that is nothing, after all,
but a matter of faith, or hope, “dissolving” theological myth into a critical
engagement with history and its other—what can literature, as the only
art of language, contribute to this untimely redemptive “rhythm”? In our
interpretation of works by Döblin and Sebald, we need to give considerable
attentiveness to the rhythms that figure in their prose.
An adequate and satisfying exposition of the phenomenology of “hap-
piness,” the promise of which, according to our speculative claim, is borne
in, by, and through the gift of language, cannot possibly be undertaken
within the limiting framework of this book. Nevertheless, without ventur-
ing too far off course, I would like to give the conception of happiness in
question here a little more substance. Distinguishing, first of all, between
pleasure and happiness, both Plato and Aristotle observed that not every
pleasure is something good, something rationally desirable. Pleasure, they
 xl / PRO L OGU E

argued, may be found in many different forms of activity. Happiness, how-

ever—which they thought of only in relation to individuals, hence not
as a concept for interpreting and appraising the conditions of a society as
such, is to be found only in the most virtuous activity. Thus, they argued,
it is only in contemplative activity, pursuing the philosophical love of
wisdom, that one will discover the greatest happiness—and the true mean-
ing of happiness. Happiness, for these ancient Greek philosophers, was an
enduring fulfillment of the human soul, unifying in rational harmony the
individual’s theoretical and practical activity. And it required a rational
harmony between the life of the individual and the conditions of social-
political existence. Thus, the happiness of the individual, which meant, for
the Greek philosophers, a life of virtue, would be inseparable from—depen-
dent on—the individual’s happiness as a member of the political life of the
community. This implies that happiness would be impossible without the
harmony in a just order of society.
The visionary world of the ancient Greek philosophers seems, today,
very strange and distant. Not many today would agree, I suppose, that hap-
piness is possible only in a life of pure theoretical contemplation. But in
any case, moreover, we cannot as confidently determine the true nature—if
there is any—of individual happiness. It is not very difficult to attain agree-
ment regarding the nature of pain and misery: the material and corporeal
conditions constitutive of unhappiness are readily acknowledged and under-
stood. We seem to know in what configurations unhappiness prevails; but
about the essence of happiness understood as the essence of “the good life,”
there is, today, no consensus. In part that is because, in contrast to the
terms of a moral life, what constitutes “the good life”—an individual’s life
of happiness—must, nowadays, to be left for each individual to determine.
Whereas the normative imperatives of a moral life must be universal, some-
thing necessary for the happiness of everyone in society as a whole, the
substance of a good life, an individual’s life of happiness, different for differ-
ent individuals, must not be imposed. But a world that leaves the question
of happiness for each individual to determine is a world in which the way
to such happiness is uncertain, confusing, and subject to trial and error.
“Happiness” in the good life is the provocation of a question for each of
us to answer, learning what brings us happiness in the course of living our
life. Today, moreover, whilst there are passionate debates about the happi-
ness constitutive of a good individual life, the utopian conditions necessary
for the happiness promised to an entire society have generated much more
inflamed disagreements. Utopian conditions raise moral-political questions
that must be determined on grounds different from those that figure in the
individual’s conception of the good life.
 PRO L OGU E / xli

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens, as we know, with the assertion that

“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.” However, whilst the story that the author tells illuminates
the nature of the unhappiness in Anna’s family, he leaves us in the dark
regarding the character of the happiness that he supposes to be the same
in all families. Struggling to make sense of Tolstoy’s opening words for the
unfolding tragic story of Anna Karenina, Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself an
exceedingly unhappy man, penned these words for his first published book:
“The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.”70
Without attempting to settle in a dogmatic way questions regarding
how the substance of happiness figures in the good life of an individual
and in the moral-political life of a society, our project needs only to work
with the experimental claim that the promise of happiness which language
silently bears is to be understood, as I have already indicated, as the utopian
or messianic promise of a “redeemed world.” It should almost be unnecessary
to assert that it would be a betrayal of the promise of happiness to spell it
out in terms of a utilitarian calculus, namely, as a question of the greatest
happiness for the greatest number of people. And since this “redeemed
world” must not be identified with any social order, whether actual or
imaginary, if it is to avoid fatal compromises and betrayals, the reign of such
happiness here on earth must be incessantly deferred, reckoned therefore as
an unapproachable, essentially impossible possibility. And yet, the promise
in language sustains a vital sense of hope: even among the ruins of hope,
we must continue to search for traces in the language of literature—traces
of its hospitality, traces of its justice—that might encourage our faith in
a future of universal happiness. In any case, however, the happiness at
stake here must be not only a question for individuals to determine by
themselves regarding the life they want to live; it must also be a matter
of justice, freedom, mutual respect, and peace, reconciling contradictions
that destroy society from within and actualizing in social, political, and
cultural institutions the utopian, or messianic potential, its transmissibility
kept activated as the gift of language carried through the tragic course of
our history. For this reason, one might argue that the essence, or say the
heart, of language is hospitality. If there is any promise, any redemption,
any hope for a new Enlightenment, perhaps its secret lies in the hospitality
of language—language as essentially, inherently, for-the-other.

But can language, as such, be a message of hope, a bene-diction, the bearer

of a great promise, despite all the damage—its reification, standardization,
 xlii / PRO L OGU E

and impoverishment, as well as its use in violence and its abuse in the
service of evil—that has befallen it since the beginning of history? How
could language, despite its fall into one catastrophe after another, still have
a promise to keep?
“The corruption of man,” Emerson observed, “is followed by the cor-
ruption of language.”71 What, today, can “Paradise” possibly mean? Have
we not lost the meaning of that word? Can it have any meaning in our
world? It is, said Wallace Stevens, evoking Hölderlin’s words, “As if the
paradise of meaning ceased \ To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.”72
In this, our time, it seems, the mindless damaging of language—destruc-
tion inseparable from its capacity for destructiveness and malevolence—has
been taking place with ever-diminishing resistance. Can language, subject
moreover to endless contingencies fatal to meaning and transmissibility,
show nevertheless that it bears a redemptive promise? Would bearing such a
promise require that, in the continuum of historical time, language actually
keep it? Would the keeping of the promise of happiness be unconditional, or
would it require of humankind conditions of preparation? And how might
the promise of happiness be kept when every word in the discourse of
the social project of moral enlightenment—freedom, justice, equality, peace,
friend, community, education, humanity, and even spirit, a seemingly innocent
word—suffers from reverberations that register an essential, hence intermi-
nable duplicity, an inherent complicity with the forces of oppression and
malevolence—or with the unscrupulous commercialism that exploits words
like “freedom” for their profit?73 Each of these evocative words can become
the name of something morally repugnant. Each of these words is riddled
with internal contradictions that reflect and perpetuate contradictions in
our social-political economy. Even when language in the literary works we
shall be considering seems, perhaps, to remember its promise, or to impart it
in the allegorical register of a narrative, it does so in a mood that will not
spare even its momentary evocations of happiness from the shadows of guilt
and inconsolable sadness. For, first of all, these moments of happiness are
invariably ephemeral. Second, as both Stendahl and Adorno understood,
they are taking place only in the realm of aesthetic semblance. Moreover,
the deferment of the promised fulfillment must be endless and its concrete
determinate form must be left open, if it is to avoid reduction to a com-
promised positivity; but every instant that defers the promise of happiness,
or leaves the structure of actualization open, as it must, to the contingency
of events, is an unjustifiable perpetuation of misery—and a skeptical, guilt-
ridden challenge to the redemptive assumption. The indeterminate con-
tent of the promise, the very openness that protects it from compromises
with prevailing reality, leaves it at the same time in an aporetic structure,
 PRO L OGU E / xliii

constantly vulnerable to betrayal. There is compelling reason to doubt the

promise of happiness—doubt the claim that language bears any gifts.
Today, it seems, the promise in language—the promise of language—
can be kept, maintained only in its interminable deferment and only in an
experience of despair. And we who care about the fate of language must
surely mourn its damaged condition as we, for whom religious faith and
the traditions of ritual that have sustained it seem no longer able to offer
the consolations of transcendence, mourn a world bereft of its horizon of
hope, a world in which the promise of happiness, perpetually deferred, risks
becoming a speculative and ideological fantasy—or nothing but entertain-
ment. We are, paradoxically, lamenting the loss of something we have
never actually received from the past—or received so far only in fragments.

Interpreting in the light of the Kabbalah, the biblical narrative imparting

the genesis of language, Benjamin posited three chapters in a history of
corruption that would leave language today not only bereft of its original
creative power, but also, as a consequence of that loss, without the power
to redeem.74 According to Benjamin’s story, in the first chapter of a long
history, only God possessed the creative power of language; and He used
this power to name, and simply by naming, to create the world and all
the creatures inhabiting it. According to this story, there was, at that time,
no duality between word and thing: the mere utterance of the word was
sufficient to create or conjure the thing to which it referred; thus language
not only agreed with, but perfectly coincided with what it designated, what
it signified. Signifier and signified were absolutely inseparable—were indeed
virtually identical. And truth was thus guaranteed.
In the second chapter, God shared with Adam and Eve some of the
linguistic power that He possessed, conferring the ability to communicate
in spoken language; and Adam used this ability to name the other animals.
Language and reality were no longer identical, however, because Adam did
not enjoy the divine power to create reality solely by invocation, solely
out of the substance of language. Nevertheless, a certain preestablished
harmony persisted, hence a wonderful transparency of meaning, between
words and what they named. Such was the original language: the language
of Paradise. In the third chapter, however, following the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from the Garden, this marvelous power of nomination was lost.
That singularly glorious language—truly a “garden of letters,” if I might
borrow a lovely phrase from Plato’s Phaedrus 276d—was irrevocably shat-
tered, eventually disintegrating into a babbling multiplicity of tongues. The
 xliv / PRO L OGU E

multiplicity no longer carried heavenly sounds; lost, too, were the rich ety-
mologies—and the memory of them. Moreover, the languages that formed
in exile were reduced to the pragmatism of communication, forfeiting all
but some faint echoes and traces of the mythopoetic spirit that once had
animated their source. And not only that! For, after the Fall and Exile, the
natural affinity and identity between word and thing was broken.75 Having
lost the guaranteed connectedness that its words, its signifiers, once enjoyed
in relation to the things they designated, language, in the centuries that
followed, suffered the further corruption of deceptiveness. Not only were
there infinite possibilities in the fallen world for unwitting error; there
were also, as Homer reminds us in his story about Odysseus tricking Poly-
phemos, just as many opportunities and temptations for deliberate forms of
deception. Language, already bound to the law of death, could now enter
into complicity with the profane powers of evil. Must we not accordingly
acknowledge now where this chapter in the story of language leaves us,
if, since the death of God, what the name of God names can only be, as
Derrida suggests, the “desertification of language,” hence a hollowed-out
language, empty of promise?76
However, I suggest that the narrative that Benjamin wanted to tell
does not actually conclude with exile, the babbling of innumerable tongues,
and corruption. For, although this experience with language has contin-
ued into the time of our own modernity, a time increasingly deprived, he
thinks, of the truth, goodness, and beauty that the signifiers in the Adamic
language once possessed, it seems that in later writings he undertook to
imagine the prospect of another chapter, a chapter of hope, reconnect-
ing us through translation to the language of Paradise, indicating how, in
the shock of translation, encountering the enigmatic treasures of a foreign
language, we might take advantage of possibilities inherent in the language
we have inherited from our linguistic community to restore, or recreate,
some of its lost mythopoetic and communicative perfections.77 However, not
surprisingly, as his speculations and experiments approached the limits of
language, the words on which he was compelled to depend in order to give
them expression became increasingly burdened with meanings perilously
disconnected from inner-worldly experience—disconnected, therefore, from
the very theatre of action where he knew redemptive preparations had
to take place. Like the novelists and poets who would intuitively under-
stand him, Benjamin constantly struggled to resolve this impasse, seeking
in the uncanny silence between worldly languages undergoing the process
of translation the echoes and traces that might take him nearer to the
language of Paradise, retrieving from those vestiges of the original deeply
felt sense at least something of its promised happiness, uncompromised by
 PRO L OGU E / xlv

what all the languages of human culture have undergone in the course of
their long, mythic exile.
None of our countless languages will ever be able to enjoy the onto-
logical originality, or creativity, that the narrative in Genesis attributes
to Adam’s language. That extraordinary power of origination is not pos-
sible for us. Only a much weaker power of transfiguration still remains.
But in today’s world, we have not only lost the happiness of the language
of Paradise; we are also in danger of losing contact with the promise of
happiness, happiness in life, still to come, borne by all the languages, all
the babbling tongues, of our disseminated creaturely life. Or perhaps this
contact has already been irretrievably lost. After all, the language in this
story of Paradise, satisfying the dream of unity and wholeness, including
the complete, final, stable, and conflict-free reconciliation and unity of
sensuous sense and intelligible sense, is nothing but mythic fantasy. And
yet, losing contact with the promise of happiness, a promise supposedly
still guarded—and still partly concealed—in all the languages of the world,
would be an immeasurable loss. It might even deny us the secret of our
survival. So it seems that we somehow need to keep the story of that lost
original language in our cultural memory and sustain as deeply as possible
a felt sense of what its absolute loss might mean for our lives. This is what
the two authors we are reading here have understood.

We must also not fail to recognize, however, that hidden within this ancient
utopian fantasy of a mystical affinity between signifier and signified, thus
within the fantasy of a world unified and made whole by language, there
is unspeakable, unforgivable violence and death. That unity, that whole-
ness, even if possible, is not necessarily the summum bonum. Despite the
intensity of their longing, the later German Romantics, forceful influences
on both Döblin and Sebald, reluctantly called this fantasy into question.
An important version of this defiant Romantic skepticism appeared
in “Judgment and Being,” a fragmentary text from Hölderlin’s early years
(1795). In this text, the poet condensed into the briefest of statements the
inescapable contradiction—Empedokles, the hero in his never-completed
mourning-play, would have called it “Strife”—tearing apart the innermost
nature of language and raising questions regarding its redemptive potential,
its power to bring the unity of reconciliation to a world that is tragically
discordant. Though in his heart the most ardent of Romantics, unwilling or
unable to forget the mythopoetic draw of the otherwise absolutely unnam-
able Absolute, Hölderlin nevertheless concurred with Kant’s devastating
 xlvi / PRO L OGU E

critique of the illusions and delusions of speculative metaphysics, even

venturing the next logical step by refusing to posit, behind the empiri-
cism of whatever appears, the necessity of an unknowable, unrepresentable,
unnamable “thing-in-itself.” He believed, however, that by recognizing and
accepting our limitations, our finitude, we actually might deepen our feel-
ings, our longing, for the Absolute, realizing the sublime significance of its
withdrawal from the conditions imposed by representability, the conceptual
grasp of empirical knowledge. It could only be by striving for the Uncon-
ditioned, he thought, that we might find ourselves compelled to recognize
our limitations, the conditions that rule over our existence. He accordingly
held on to the hope that, as we learned to accept the appropriate measure
for our mortal lives on earth, we might be blessed with a certain peace of
the spirit.
Today, a much deeper skepticism has taken hold regarding the assump-
tion that, through language, we can know and say our world as it really
is. But let us return to Hölderlin’s “Judgment and Being,” a text of the
utmost importance, despite its brevity and incompleteness. At the very
beginning of the nineteenth century, this great poet, witnessing the signs
and symptoms of our abandonment in a world from which the divine had
withdrawn, pointed out how the very structure of profane language bears
the effects of that abandonment, that destitution. Hearing in the etymol-
ogy of “Urtheil,” the old German word for judgment, an originary separa-
tion or originary parting, an ur-teilen, Hölderlin argued that the analytic
character of judgment logically precludes the possibility that it could ever
bring into words the originary, unconditioned unity or wholeness of being
that philosophers had always wanted to claim underlies the separations,
the diremptions, the contradictions we experience. The structure of our
language will not let us forget the splintering separation of subject and
predicate that it imposed on experienced reality. According to the very
logic of synthesis, the synthesizing operation of judgment inevitably must
first separate what its predication intends to join. Language can never get
around itself, never unsay the separation its synthesizing must first posit
on the way to overcoming it. It is as if we were to try catching our own
shadows. The double bind is fated to prevail:

Judgment, in the highest and strictest sense, is the original sepa-

ration of object and subject, which are most deeply united in
intellectual intuition, that separation through which alone object
and subject become possible, the arche-separation [Ur-theil]. In
the concept of separation, there lies already the concept of the
 PRO L OGU E / xlvii

reciprocity of object and subject and the necessary presupposi-

tion of a whole of which object and subject form the parts.78

Thus, although philosophers are tempted to think of being as a unity, as

an indivisible whole, the attempt to say this, to state and represent the
claim in words, is doomed to failure:

Being—expresses the connection between subject and object.

Where subject and object are united altogether and not only
in part, that is, united in such a manner that no separation can
be performed without violating the essence of what is to be
separated, there and nowhere else being proper can be spoken,
as is the case with intellectual intuition.

In the years of his youth, Hölderlin’s skepticism—he would also call it

“sobriety”—was severe; but our longing for the unconditioned, the Abso-
lute, seemed to be, for him, sufficient to sustain the invocation of its absent,
spectral presence. Nevertheless, as the poetry of his mature years shows, he
understood with uncompromising lucidity the implications of his diagnosis
for the promise borne by language. The redeeming powers of language,
even of poetic language, are limited—rendered almost impossible—by the
very conditions of their possibility. Necessarily expressed in the form of
judgment, language can never attain immediate access to being as such. No
earth-bound language, no language bound therefore to finitude and death,
will ever reproduce concretely, within the logic of its grammatical forms, the
mythic totality, or absolute wholeness of being that is posited abstractly by
speculative thought and sought in the lives and discourses of subjectivity.
Powerful is the force of Love dwelling in language; but Strife can nev-
er be vanquished from its signifying constructions. Hölderlin’s Empedokles
understood that; and in the poet’s drafts of “The Death of Empedokles,”
language displays the effects of that implacable force. The language upon
whose communicative resources we must depend for the realization of its
promise in a world redeemed by harmony, or consonance, turns out to bear
within it, indeed in the narrative of its origin, hence too in its originality,
the discordant seed-syllables of Strife.
Restricted to the immanence of a modern world bereft of any tran-
scendent, metaphysical source of consolation, storytelling is asked to bear
a responsibility it cannot fully meet, since, as an event taking place within
the parameters of this world, its language has been damaged, sentenced
endlessly to suffer, and moreover to reproduce, its perpetual disintegration.79
 xlviii / PRO L OGU E

What Hölderlin’s fragment on judgment and being implies is that

the rational reconciliation in universal justice of all socially constructed
antagonisms and grievances and the mending of all culturally constructed
diremptions cannot be represented in absolute terms by the utopian or
messianic idea of a world transformed by the gift of indivisible unity and
wholeness, because it will never be possible for language to deliver its
promise of reconciliation, its promise of happiness, without exposing that
promise to compromise—corruption and division. Our language cannot
twist free from a grammar, or logic, that delivers the promise in a sen-
tence that symbolically breaks apart the unity and wholeness it is still able
to remember. The moment of imparting cannot avoid being at the same
time a moment of tragic separation, departing from the promise by always
recalling what will already have been parted. It is thus in this grammar
or logic that the ontological crisis which the poet already knew to be
challenging the modern world—the tragic loss, namely, of transcendence,
faithfully registered—is to be discerned. As Benjamin remarked, “Language
is not simply the imparting of the impartable [Mittteilung des Mitteilbaren];
it is also symbolic of that which cannot be imparted.”80
However, whilst never abandoning the sobriety of the critical intellect,
the German Romantics never lost all hope, never irrevocably renounced
their faith in the promise of language. But the word is freighted with
immeasurable sorrow; even when it reaches into the sky, it falls back to
earth before touching the edge of eternity. Thus, for these Romantics,
especially Hölderlin and Novalis, there was a tragic conflict, never resolved,
never settled, between the dictates of lucid intellectual sobriety and the
longing and languishing of the heart. In no poets and philosophers of earlier
times can we discern such dialectical tension, the mood swinging back and
forth between resigned joy, the sublime serenity that comes from accept-
ing the way things are, and the melancholy of a tragic longing exquisitely
conscious of the flight of the gods and the seemingly irrevocable fate to
which a suffering world has been sentenced.
One can detect a similar cast of mind, an elective affinity, in Sebald’s
distinctive style of prose. And in Döblin’s novel, we are engaged by a prose
that has fallen under the spell of Fate. These two writers were the inheri-
tors of a world—and a language—in which the German Romantics had
already sensed an existential crisis.
Bringing Hölderlin’s argument up to date in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, Max Horkheimer argued that,

Surrender to the whole, to the “common good,” is an especially

welcome principle to a bad form of rule. As long as the whole
 PRO L OGU E / xlix

is not constantly judged against the standard of human happi-

ness, the notion of the “common good” is just as dogmatic as
that of self-interest.81

The idea of unity and wholeness is an idea that must always be examined
with suspicion: the absolute that, in its transcendence, once beckoned so
brightly has now withdrawn into the night of an impenetrable fog. And
within the immanence of the political, a dangerous absolute has taken its
place.
The possibility of some radical transfiguration of the world in which
we dwell, affecting even the smallest, most insignificant things, mythically
expressed in the language of now obsolete theologies, has always been
elusive, difficult to express, withdrawing from the word into its reserve,
its self-concealment. But it is only in our time that this ancient story has
been felt to conceal the nothingness into which our words, sent on their
way, soon fall.
Nevertheless, more conscious than earlier generations had cause to
be that we creatures are absolutely alone on this planet, dwelling here as if
orphaned, as if abandoned, compelled in any event to assume responsibility
for working out the terms of our own destiny, we turn—we continue to
turn—in a time of despair and mourning to the greatest of our storytellers,
hoping for words that might help us somehow to remember the promise of
happiness and keep it alive, sustaining its traces and echoes, its rhythmic
remnants.

In writing about the poetry of Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida imagines this
fidelity as undertaking the “resurrection of language.”82 If it be true that
language bears a promise of happiness, it is surely essential that literature
not forget its inheritance, this gift in its keeping. The works we will be
reading keep, I think, that investment, if only in the most elusive alle-
gorical ciphers and traces, remembering a past the meaning of which is in
question, since it is always still in the making, still, in a sense, to come.
For, as Adorno argued, reminding the philosophical cast of mind not to
take fiction for reality, “what is true in art is something nonexistent”—a
time, namely, of happiness.83 In this regard, Paul de Man, commenting on
recollection of the past in Proust’s great novel, observed that,

The power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect

a situation or a feeling that actually existed, but it is a consti-
 l/ PRO L OGU E

tutive act of the mind bound to its own present and oriented
toward the future of its own elaboration. The past intervenes
only as a purely formal element, as a reference-point or leverage
that can be used because it is different and distant rather than
because it is familiar and near.84

Thus, if memory keeps faith in its story alive, a great origin, such as the
redemptive promise that ancient narratives posited as inherent in language,
will continue to encourage origination, the inauguration of the new, and
will repeatedly bring forth its unforeseeable potential, each time differently,
in interaction with different contexts, different demands. The promise of
happiness is, thus, the promise of continuing originality—or at least the
promise of that possibility. If language can still bear it.
According to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin once said to him that
“The messianic kingdom is always present”; but he also adamantly believed
that the coming of this era depended on the actions we undertake in this
world we live in.85 The coming of that time, that world, in the consum-
mation of utopian dreams, is decisively our responsibility. It is up to us to
prepare for it—preparing, first of all, ourselves. The works of fiction that
Döblin and Sebald have bequeathed, drawing as they do on the promise
their language is intended to keep and redeem, are, in their own incompa-
rable ways, rigorous preparations for the impossible possibility of a redeemed
world.

In the Introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel averred that, “the

history of the world is not the theatre of happiness. “Periods of happiness,”
he said, “are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods
when the antithesis is in abeyance.”86 Today it would be even more difficult,
straining credibility, to make a claim for world happiness. We no longer
can enjoy Hegel’s faith in the operations of a dialectic represented by the
rational, providential interpretation of history. We are living in a time of
the most intense disenchantment. But Hegel’s philosophical narrative, its
confession of belatedness in the interpretation of history-making events
symbolically represented by the twilight flight of the owl of Minerva, was
already haunted by the ghosts of the buried past, already troubled by its
vision of the future, and already addressing a time of crisis and mourn-
ing. Threatening the teleological cheerfulness mistakenly read into Hegel’s
narrative of historical progress, a speculative interpretation that in fact
acknowledges the horror in a history he describes as a “slaughter bench,”
 PRO L OGU E / li

there is a melancholy spirit abroad, a figure conceived in mourning, not

only lamenting the questionability of a metaphysical dimension and under-
going an experience the meaning of which Nietzsche, some years later, will
boldly call “the death of God,” but also lamenting, with a despair Hegel’s
system of dialectical reason can in the end neither dispel nor conceal, all
the missed opportunities and lost possibilities that have, in the course of
history, betrayed the promise of happiness.
In §§7–8 of the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel gave
expression to the melancholy and the mourning he felt in 1807, as he
observed the Reign of Terror vanquish all his hopes for an enlightened
German version of the French Revolution. What had seemed so full of
promise revealed its monstrous historical truth: as far as he could see, that
astonishing event had left nothing in its wake but fields of empty husks—
and countless corpses. And today, the promise is still unfulfilled. We are
consequently mourning the loss of what we never possessed—but are sus-
taining nevertheless, in just that way, our sense at least of the prospect lost.
That distinctive melancholy, its disenchanted knowledge replacing faith,
is all that seems to remain, today, of the “enthusiasm” which, for such
a long time, as Kant and Hegel both recognized, kept the revolutionary
spirit, and its utopian promise, alive. In defiance of this tragic history, can
language—does language—nevertheless perpetuate the promise of happi-
ness, safeguarding its transcendence whilst thoroughly entangled in worldly
immanence, and available not only for good but for ill? This skeptical
question must keep returning in our thoughts.87

With language in its “profane” condition, its supposed original unity of

signifier and signified shattered, comes the ability—and the necessity—to
raise skeptical questions, e.g., about the truth claim of the signifier and the
existence or nature of the signified. But in Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel
Levinas asks us to consider a different dimension of skepticism, suggest-
ing that “language is already skepticism,” meaning, I take it, that in the
experience with language he is explaining, we are to understand our rela-
tionship to language as one in which there is always already at work not
merely a loss of conviction regarding the truth of what he calls “metaphys-
ics”—or the ability of language to bear that dimension of truth—but also
a skepticism that challenges the unacknowledged suppression of all that
might open us towards alterities—the new, the different, the strange, the
possible—however unsettling or consoling they be.88 It is, he thinks, in
the very nature of language as such to provoke questions that cause us, in
 lii / PRO L OGU E

an excess of disillusionment, to relinquish as mythology our immemorial

connection to transcendence—a connection broken or suspended in what
Maurice Blanchot calls the “writing of disaster,” a phrase that points to a
contrast between Kant’s experience of the stars, still possible in his time, as
symbolic of the sublimity of the moral law, and the very different experi-
ence of the stars in today’s metropolis, a difference that emphasizes the loss
of our connection in today’s world to the inspiration and guidance of the
heavenly stars, constellations of meaning which in times past summoned
us to recognize the infinite and the eternal as our measure, keeping us in
a more balanced cosmological economy.
If there is a danger, or risk, in skepticism, namely, that it might be
taken to authorize a denial of the redeeming power of words, turning away
from, or giving up on, their ability to bear a utopian or messianic promise
of happiness, it is essential to recognize that there is also a contrary danger,
or risk, perhaps a much greater one, in denying skepticism regarding the
consolations of the metaphysical its persistent voice, a critical voice that
returns after every attempt to refute it, for it compels us to interrupt and
interrogate the complacencies of ethical life that have been protecting
us from fully registering our knowledge of the devastations and horrors
we find it unbearable to think; and it keeps our words with one another
endlessly exposed to knowledge, hence open to the moral claim in further
words—the intractably aporetic, inescapably demanding “pas au-delà” that
Blanchot will invoke. Language is skepticism, we might then say, in the
sense that it is the promise to continue the struggle for happiness beyond
the limitations of the present—but without stepping beyond this world into
a realm of abstract speculation. In the skepticism that language maintains
we must find our openness to all that is other. Language is hospitality—
justice in this sense.

In thinking about the utopian promise of happiness, a promise, indeed,

of radical originality, its universality concretely borne in the depths of
language, we need to keep in mind the three ways in which this promise is
supposed to be intrinsically carried by language, namely: carried in poetry,
carried in prose fiction, and carried in our everyday forms of dialogue.

Poetry.

Poetry is the form of language that celebrates, and plays with, the emer-
gence of intelligible sense from the originality of the sensible sense. It thus
 PRO L OGU E / liii

exhibits, contrary to Platonism, Cartesianism, and empiricism, a sense of

“sense” in which the two types of sense, the intelligible and the sensible,
are not sundered and in irreducible opposition, but are operating wholly
together as one in the music of a creative movement. As poetry, therefore,
language expresses, and promises to satisfy, at least in aesthetic semblance,
the longing for the reconciliation of the two senses of “sense.” In other words,
in poetry, language shows that, whether in harmony or in dissonance and
tension, those two senses can work together to set in motion certain desired
aesthetic effects, indicating in that way the possibility of overcoming the
pathology in our cultural dissociations: the dualisms separating the sensuous
and the ideal, mind and body, flesh and spirit, feeling and reason, sensibility
and thought, nature and freedom, action and contemplation, dimensions
of our being as “rational animals” which, since ancient times, have been
separated by imaginary, culturally constructed, but nonetheless debilitating
dualisms, appreciating the one, repressing the other. In the reconciliation
of the conflict between the intelligible or cognitive sense and the sensuous
sense that takes place especially in the language of poetry, we are given the
chance to experience what the end of the dualisms—and the theodicies—
that have served a culture of renunciation and repression might mean: the
end, namely, of what I have characterized, in writing about Nietzsche, as
our “civilized cruelty.”89 So, in the beauty of poetry, and in the freedom of
its play with sound and sense, its language at once sensuous yet intensely
disciplined, rich in meaning yet no longer subordinated to, or completely
determined by, the presentation of a spiritual content, the cognitive sense,
we can get an inkling of a utopian possibility emerging from the determi-
nate negation of the ancient repression of human nature, sacrificed over
centuries for the sake of mastery, the will to power. And if, as Kant sug-
gests in his third Critique, the aesthetic experience of beauty can symboli-
cally reveal, or bring out, the promise, the prospect, of a sensus communis,
the experience of language in poetry, where the two senses of “sense” are
working creatively together, might bring out, or reveal, something that
the promise of an as yet unapproachable utopia of happiness is pledging.
Although poetry can speak only in the mode of aesthetic semblance, in the
reconciliation between sensible sense and intelligible sense, the language
of poetry becomes a mimetic anticipation of the longed-for social whole-
ness, essential condition for genuine happiness. However, besides being only
aesthetic semblance, even this reconciliation, limited as it is to poetry, can never
be complete, final, or perfectly stabilized. We are reminded that the happi-
ness language promises remains elusive, never entirely released from the
questioning of its possibility. Thus a certain melancholy inevitably affects
even the most genuinely joyous poetry, as we find ourselves compelled to
 liv / PRO L OGU E

acknowledge our distance from the possible in a perpetually compromised

happiness—a lost present. And, as Adorno says in an essay on Eichendorff,
“only mourning for the lost moment has preserved what the living moment
[in poetry] continues, even today, to miss.”90

Fiction.

As prose in the fiction of literature, language might be found to bear the

promise of happiness in that it is an aesthetic mimesis or repetition of
divine creation, the creatio ex nihilo, a spontaneous and productive power
of origination; it expresses, and promises to satisfy, the longing for the ful-
fillment of creativity in life; it is the desire to originate ex nihilo, using the
imagination to create alternative realities that dispute old assumptions; it
is the desire to reveal what things conceal about themselves from ordinary,
untutored apprehension. Thus, in literature, language figures in the desire
to retrieve and thereby redeem still unrecognized possibilities, making sur-
prising things happen in the fictional worlds of aesthetic semblance. Once
again, the very essence of language as a medium of transfiguration seems to
be manifest, revealing the extraordinary possibilities latent in the ordinary
and the familiar, and silently, implicitly sustaining in memory the utopian
or redemptive promise.

Dialogue.

The promise of happiness might be found also in everyday forms of com-

munication, carried by virtue of the fact that the very existence of language
promises, despite countless occasions for misunderstanding and failures of
intelligibility, something more than and other than the continuation of
human history, namely, the emergence of a form of sociability within which
communities respectful of differences—the pluralism of singularities—might
be built. As the primary medium for everyday forms of communication,
language is social-political “originality,” the poetically political power that
Hölderlin invoked with the word “stiften” (“founding”), and that Han-
nah Arendt called “natality,” the power to bring people together, to cre-
ate, without sacrifice to singularity and plurality, a certain commonality, a
gathering of understanding, if not also of action. These two allegorically
powerful words not only express the longing for an ideal form of commu-
nity; in an exemplary way, I think, they also show that, and how, language
bears the promise of happiness—because universal happiness depends on
enlightened processes of dialogue, gathering mortals into relationships that
adumbrate the founding of a world where ethical life might finally flour-
 PRO L OGU E / lv

ish. As Kant argued in his third Critique, when we members of the human
species received the gift of language, marking us as “creatures intended for
society,” we also received the transcendental idea of universal communi-
cability, the imperative beginning of civilization, bearing the prospect of
a society formed through its communal sense and sustained by the art of
a reciprocal communication of ideas.91 Insofar as language bears within
it the promise of happiness, language would bespeak, however obliquely,
however indistinctly, the empirical desire—what Kant wanted to call a
certain “enthusiasm”—for the creation of a more perfect world. Whatever
else communication communicates, it seems that, as Hegel likewise under-
stood, it always communicates the promise or possibility of a new, radically
enlightened form of community—hence, again, the promise of universal
happiness.92 The essence of language is its generosity of spirit.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas declared, proposing a characteristically
lapidary and cryptic formulation, that “language is justice.”93 It is justice, we
might suggest—and hospitality—insofar as it bears the utopian promise of
happiness. Despite acknowledgment of the claims of skepticism, Otherwise
than Being, a much later work, will enlarge the metaphysical dimensions
of this dense thought, venturing the thought, expressed even more crypti-
cally, that in the resonances of every language, the promise of happiness
comes as “inspiration or prophecy.”94 Benjamin, in his “Theologico-Political
Fragment,” referred his philosophical project to a longing for the “happi-
ness of a free humanity”: against all odds, “das Glücksuchen der freien
Menschheit.”95 Against all odds: for, as Adorno argued in his early essay
on “The Idea of Natural History,” reconciliation “is above all there where
the world most presents itself as semblance: that is where the promise of
reconciliation is most thoroughly given.” But, he added, reminding us of
the dialectical aporetics which virtually erases all traces of that promise,
that aesthetic semblance is also precisely “where at the same time the
world is most thickly walled off from all ‘meaning.’ ”96 What, in that case,
can literature promise? What would be its authority? What claim would it
be entitled, then, to make? Questions to ponder, addressed only obliquely,
however, in the reflections on literature that follow, for the promise that
we are supposing the language of literature bears, that it silently remem-
bers, takes place only in the realm of semblance: as such, it is powerless,
immediately or directly, to alter the world. Nevertheless, the promise of
happiness that language, even as fiction, seems to vouchsafe, to bear and
transmit by virtue simply of its being a form of communication, a medium
of connection, functions, I believe, somewhat like an anticipatory mimesis
of the possible redemption which language can serve; and the language
would, in serving that way, approach also its own redemption as a potent
 lvi / PRO L OGU E

medium of origination—creation and revelation—weakly reminiscent of

the mythic language of Paradise.
At stake is what Jürgen Habermas has described as “the reconciliation
of a modernity which has fallen apart,” namely:

the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that moder-

nity has made possible in the cultural, the social-political, and
the economic spheres, one can find forms of living together in
which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a peace-
ful [befriedetes] relation, [. . .] what Brecht would have termed
“friendly living together.” This kind of friendliness or sociability
does not exclude disagreement, even conflict; rather it implies
the establishment of those human forms through which a society
can survive conflicts.97

Indeed, we might add—not, I think, departing from his intention—

that such “sociability,” including Kant’s “unsocial sociability,” implies the
existence of forms of communication through which a society might not
merely survive the tragic vicissitudes of history but could even flourish, by
encouraging dialogical engagements among different positions and perspec-
tives and learning from them, creatively transforming situations of conflict
into situations that would strengthen the commitment of society to a more
promising form of life. Habermas has argued that the “weak and transitory
unity of reason, which does not fall under the idealistic spell of a universal-
ity that triumphs over the particular and the singular, asserts itself in the
medium of language.”98 I wholeheartedly concur, but insofar as this “unity
of reason in the diversity of its voices” requires forms of communication
representing the good will of all concerned parties, I am not so sanguine
about its prospects. Even today, that pluralism of voices is repressed in the
name of the unity of reason.99 Unfortunately, when pluralism is encouraged,
it falls too often into a babbling cacophony of intolerance and hatred—or
into the irrationality of extreme relativism.
In his early Jena writings, Hegel already anticipated the dialectical
nature of the problem, recognizing his time as one in which, as he put it,
“the power of unification [Vereinigung] is disappearing from human life, and
antitheses lose their lively relationship [lebendige Beziehung] and alternation
[Wechselwirkung], and gain independence.”100 What in this book I want to
reflect upon is the argument that, beyond, and always to some extent even
necessarily subverting, that form of reason which, according to Habermas,
is “asserting itself” in the medium of language, the very existence of lan-
guage means that there is nevertheless promised—but (only and ever) as to
 PRO L OGU E / lvii

come, as yet to come, for those with hope and nearly infinite patience—the
utopian or messianic realization of happiness, the gift whose promise has
been gestated and borne in and by that medium. In fine, the third claim we
are exploring is that, as everyday communication, the medium of language
promises, as if not impossibly possible, the founding of a truly universal
moral community—or at least sustains, when all is said and done, a certain
“enthusiasm” (if I may appropriate here a word from Kant) for the remote
prospect, the great possibility, of a seemingly impossible earthbound Para-
dise. This, I suppose, could be part of what Habermas might have meant
when he said, in a remarkable statement, that every discourse, as inher-
ently bearing a weak transcendental “demand,” is “equally close to God”—
“unmittelbar zu Gott.”101 At stake in language as everyday communication is
the possibility of a redeemed community—call it utopian or messianic—in
which the pluralism of singularities would finally be able to flourish.
As I read them, the stories that Döblin and Sebald entrusted to words
communicate something of that prospect. So, in the two studies that fol-
low this Prologue, we will see how they draw upon the textual operations
of language to reveal neglected dimensions of our reality, undertake to
reconcile ancient, culturally oppressive opposites, and evoke in allegorical
representations new, less barbaric forms of community for individuals to find
their way, each in his or her own way, to a life that is fulfilling.
Although arguing that all the arts of the twentieth century have been
compelled to recognize a crisis challenging their inherited conventions of
representation and that the literary arts have been correspondingly pres-
sured by a crisis specific to language, Adorno continued to believe that
what the language of great literature promises is the history-transforming
“fulfillment [Einlösung] of past hope.”102

But there have been so many missed opportunities, missed possibilities!

Utopia seems as unapproachable today as it was in the darkest years of the
mediaeval world. But must it not remain unapproachable, if it is to avoid
fatal compromises with prevailing reality? In any event, invocations of the
messianic call for a faith that few can feel. What memory must nevertheless
struggle to retrieve, against all odds, is a past that has been forsaken, not
only in the past but also—always already—in the betrayal of every present.
For the sake of its enduring transmissibility, its futurity, however, the
promise of happiness must withhold the fullness of its presence in the order
of time, imparting only traces, nothing more—what Adorno will describe
as “fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of what exists,”103
 lviii / PRO L OGU E

traces that can never exclude skepticism, despair, and even nihilism regard-
ing their meaning, above all their very reference to the transcendent, some
superior originating reality. In the readings of literature proposed in this
book, it is these traces, these hints, which need to be sought out and
remarked.
I should like the studies offered here to show that, and how, even
in literary works struggling against nihilism, against the ravages of natural
history and the loss of cultural memory, or against the cruel justice in a
causality of Fate, and always against the very structure of language itself,
something of the promise of happiness seems nevertheless to have been
kept by language, its intimations shimmering shyly through every syllable.
In summation, then, the essence of my argument is that, despite its
damaged condition (standardization, commodification, staleness), language
is, as such, by virtue of its very existence, the bearer of a utopian or mes-
sianic promise of happiness. But moreover, by showing the sheer power
of words to create fictional worlds and redeeming the revelatory power of
words—above all, their power to turn the familiar into something no longer
familiar, something astonishing in beauty or moral resolve, and their meta-
phorical power to take us to places where we have never been before—the
two authors in this study write to encourage reflection on our hope, a hope
that can never be other than vexed and weakened by justified doubt, for
a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, struggling to evoke,
frequently against the grain of the very language they must use, and even
when the forces of destruction are strong and prevail, the physiognomy
of a different world—but still our world here, this very world, not some
infinitely distant heavenly world—in which the promise of happiness might
perhaps be fulfilled and redeemed.
In the experience with language ventured in this book, it will be
those intimations, sustained by traces and echoes, these partly hidden hints,
sometimes rendered present only in the rhythms and cadences of the prose,
and emerging from “force fields of potential intelligibility,” that we will
engage.104
Might we not conclude, after completing our readings of Döblin and
Sebald, that inherent within the communicative structure of language, as
what alone remains indestructible, there is a promise recalling both a lost
and a future Paradise? Is there not, in and by their uses, their art of lan-
guage, evidence of a promise of happiness kept and repeatedly imparted,
even though inimical forces operating in the world ceaselessly work to
interrupt its actualization and corrupt its message? And would not the keep-
ing and imparting of the promise, safeguarding the eternal enigma of that
 PRO L OGU E / lix

gift—and its transmissibility—for all generations to come, be the “justice”

of language that Levinas was intent on reclaiming?
Gershom Scholem, close friend of both Benjamin and Adorno, once
declared that, “To restore language to youth, that is the task.”105 If its youth
dwells in its promise, we should give thought to how, in different ways,
the words of two extraordinary writers—Döblin and Sebald—have kept and
tried to redeem that consequential promise.
 Part I

Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

Language as the Causality of Fate

Opening Conversation

Character for man is destiny.

—Herakleitos of Ephesos1

Fate and character are commonly regarded as causally connected, char-

acter being the cause of fate. [. . .] If a concept of fate is to be attained,
it must be clearly distinguished from that of character, which in turn
cannot be achieved until the latter has been more exactly defined.
On the basis of this definition, the two concepts will become wholly
divergent: where there is character there will, with certainty, not be
fate, and in the realm of fate, character will not be found. Moreover,
care must be taken to assign both concepts to spheres on which they
do not, as happens in common speech, usurp the rank of higher spheres
and concepts. For character is usually placed in an ethical, fate in a
religious context. We must banish them from both regions by revealing
the error by which they were placed there.
—Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character”2

The less a man is imprisoned by the bonds of fate, the less he is

determined by what lies nearest at hand. Whether it be people or
circumstances.
—Benjamin, “On Morality and Anthropology”3

1
 2/ REDEEMING WO RDS

Fate is the entelechy of events within the field of guilt [. . .], here
everything intentional or accidental is so intensified that the complexi-
ties [. . .] betray, by their paradoxical vehemence, that the action has
been inspired by fate.
—Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play4

Fate is not a purely natural occurrence—any more than it is purely

historical. Fate, whatever guise it may wear in pagan or mythological
contexts, is meaningful only as a category of natural history [where] it is
the elemental force of nature in historical events, which are not them-
selves entirely nature, because the light of grace is still reflected from
the state of creation. But it is mirrored in the swamp of Adam’s guilt.
—Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play5

Happiness is what releases the fortunate one [den Glücklichen herauslöst]

out of the enchainment of the fates [Verkettung der Schicksale] and out
of the net of his own fate.
—Benjamin, “Fate and Character”6
 1

Fatality
Character as Fate

§1

The Tragic Struggle for Freedom

Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin’s novel relating the story of Franz Bib-
erkopf, is a philosophically thought-provoking narrative about character
and fate.1 It was published in 1929 in Berlin as the Weimar Republic was
crumbling. This was a time of great social, political and economic turmoil,
agitation and unrest, and it was during this time that National Social-
ism, proclaiming its commitment to biological and cultural racism, and
already encouraging intimidating brutality, began its rise to power. And it
was around the same time that, in the south-German university town of
Freiburg, nestled in the romanticism of the Schwarzwald, Martin Heidegger
was arguing in a lecture course that there is an abyssal metaphysical dif-
ference between the human and the lower animal.2 Döblin’s great novel,
composed in the coldly observant style of “Neue Sachlichkeit” realism, but
with features drawn from surrealism, German expressionism, and modern-
ism, is a montage of scenes drawn from the brutal, quotidian life of Berlin’s
criminal underworld, where it is difficult to discern that metaphysical dif-
ference.3 Also at that same time, the painter Georg Grosz was showing us
the Berlin of a crude, corrupt, and degenerate bourgeoisie: a different social
class, but the same underlying malaise.
In this chapter, we will reflect on how, in the unfolding of Döblin’s
story, character and fate get involved with one another, as if there were
some tragic inner necessity at work. What makes the present study different
from other studies on this novel is that fate will be interpreted as an expres-
sion and effect of the causality of language, a language that has been dam-
aged from without and corrupted from within. In Döblin’s narrative twist,

3
 4/ REDEEMING WO RDS

language finds itself possessed by the force of causality—a causality named

Fate. In effect, his novel stages a struggle unto death—a struggle taking
place within language—between language serving the causality of freedom,
with its promise of happiness, and language serving the causality of Fate,
with its pitiless sentences of judgment. In an unnerving, uncanny proso-
popoeia, language has itself been turned into a character in the unfolding
of the story—turned into the character whose name and causality is Fate.
The claim for which I will argue, then, is that the story of Franz Biberkopf
is illuminated in a singularly significant way when read as taking its readers
into the course of his daily struggle for survival against the overwhelming
forces of destruction and death ruled over by Fate—a demonic Fate that,
invested in the very form of language, in the language it has taken violent
possession of, manipulates him at every turn. Having overcome language,
Fate takes possession of the promise of happiness, deciding its future.
Our attention to language warrants the marking, here, of a differ-
ence in meaning between “Fate” and “Destiny,” words that I propose to
take as translations of the corresponding German words “Schicksal” and
“Geschick.” I want to say that the triumph of Fate (“Schicksal”) is the
negation of freedom, the impossibility of freedom. But in its struggle against
Fate, freedom shows its sublime moral quality. Thus, in contrast to Fate,
Destiny (“Geschick”) requires freedom—is actually impossible without it.
One might accordingly read Döblin’s novel as representing Biberkopf’s
struggle to overcome the power of Fate and give the character of his life
the meaning of Destiny.
In his groundbreaking work on The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács
argued that, in modernity, the totality of human life succumbs to forces that
appear as forces of nature, “from whose omnipotence only the innermost
part of the soul is withheld.”4 In Franz’s repeated expressions of a desire to
cease a life of crime and lead a good life, one can hear, I think, a damaged
longing for redemption. That desire, that longing, is in a terrible struggle
against the archaic forces of nature. More specifically, however, if what is at
stake is Franz’s attempt to overcome the criminal character of his past and
begin to lead an upright, respectable citizen’s life, what the novel—or rather
its language—never ceases to show is that he must constantly, desperately
struggle—since he is nothing, after all, but a fictional character created
by the writer’s use of language—against the virtually overwhelming power
of the causality of Fate that is expressed in, and by, this use of language.
More lucidly than is conventional, more stripped of disguise, and with
stronger, more insistent compulsion, words show themselves here as a force
of moral significance—the persistently propelling, rhythmically compelling
force of judgment or pronounced resolution that they always already are.
 FATALITY /5

(In this regard, I think it could be argued that the strange causality which
Döblin bestows on language in his novel has a certain precedent in the
inevitability of Emma Bovary’s death, which one might read as an effect
of the “fatality” in Flaubert’s style.)
Of course, language is not the only moral force operating in this epic
story: character is another, and so are the circumstances, two pressures pull-
ing in opposing moral directions. And although it is, I think, illuminating
to describe the language in this novel as a moral force, it might be even
more provocatively illuminating to think of it here as a hyperbolic meta-
physical force, for even whilst it warns, admonishes, and even announces
prophecies, it nevertheless operates duplicitously, without moral scruples of
its own, neither urging virtue nor tempting to errancy, but rather acting,
instead, like a wind in the sails, an overwhelmingly powerful one, that
freely exaggerates and italicizes what Fate has in store for the contingent
conjunction of character and circumstance, propelling the protagonist, a
non-hero whose pathetic passivity, weakness, and inertia constantly prevail
over good intentions, toward the resolution of his life in the story.
The claim I am making for my reading of the novel, therefore, is that
Döblin has staged a conflict between an expressive language that seems
actually to propel Franz toward self-destruction and a language of freedom
and redemption that, at the very last moment, supposedly salvages him
from this fate. The happy ending of the story will always be, I think, a
surprise, because the character seems to be moved by the causality of Fate
expressing itself in and as language, toward a wretched death. Ultimately,
though, neither the words that press Franz toward the worst nor the words
that are supposed to rescue him at the end constitute reality: they are all
merely words in a fictional story. It is the author’s words, coming as his
character nears the fateful sentence we assume is reserved for him, that
save him at last from the fate toward which language—nothing, really, but
the author’s words—seemed to be bearing him.
Döblin’s numerous evocations of ancient Greek epics and tragedies
in Berlin Alexanderplatz are not incidental, neither mere ornaments of his
narrative nor desperate attempts to justify the operations of his language. In
Greek tragedy, the spoken word—a curse, an insult—can be fatal, actually
causing death. With this causality of the word before him as he under-
took the translation of Sophocles, Hölderlin limned a distinction, in his
supplementary “Remarks on Antigone,” between language that is “facti-
cally deadly,” “tödlichfaktisch,” and language that is “factically deadening,”
slowly mortifying, “tödtendfaktisch.”5 There will be fatal consequences—for
both the speaker and the object of the speech—when one is tempted into
“nefas,” uttering the unspeakable, that against the utterance of which divine
 6/ REDEEMING WO RDS

law rules. When language becomes causality; it becomes not merely an

expression or representation of Fate, but Fate itself, slowly and inexorably
leading toward death.
Drawing on Kant’s distinction between the mechanical causality of
nature and the causality of freedom, causality through freedom (“Kausalität
aus Freiheit”), and on Hegel’s profound discussion of a “causality of Fate”
(“Kausalität des Schicksals”), I will argue that Döblin throws his main
character into the force field of a demonic causality of Fate, doing so by
his uncanny use of language: principally repetitions, rhymes, and rhythms.
The story that unfolds thus concerns an epic struggle within Biberkopf’s
character to overcome this causality of Fate by virtue of his actions in a
transformed life. According to Kant, such a life would manifest the causality
of freedom that all human beings, as such, should in principle be able to
actualize, gifted as they are by nature supposed to be, with the transcen-
dental capacity to determine their causality in the world solely by reference
to the moral law—indeed, not only in obedience to the moral law, but
out of a truly disinterested respect for it.6 Stated using terms from Kant’s
conceptual architectonic, I suggest that Döblin has cast his epic hero into
a lifeworld in which the deck of cards is stacked against him; because, as
partaking of traits distinctive of both the empirical causality of nature and
the transcendental causality of freedom, without being reducible to either
one, the epic figure’s adversary, the prevailing social reality, masquerading
as the causality of Fate, becomes an intangible, almost invincible linguis-
tic force, an archaic linguistic survivor from the time of Greek tragedy, a
haunting prosopopoeia manipulating Biberkopf’s world from a dimension
that appears to be outside it, subjecting him ceaselessly and mercilessly to
prophecies, warnings, and challenges that probe his moral character. In
truth, though, this causality of Fate, operating through language and becom-
ing language, is not a mythic power but the cruel social reality that, having
hammered Biberkopf into the shape of a criminal life, is now relentless in
its determination to punish and thwart him.
If Döblin’s narrative use of this archaic trope, this vestige of Greek
tragedy seems far-fetched, one should recall the opening sentence of Marx’s
“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” sentencing the old Europe to a glo-
rious fate that will defeat it: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter
of Communism.”7 Marx’s prophetic use of that word is neither whimsical
nor ironic; as his critical diagnoses of capitalism show, there is a spectral
logic, a kind of illusionism, at work in its organization of the economy. Of
course, in Döblin’s modernized epic, the fate that is haunting Biberkopf’s
Berlin is the rise to power of National Socialism, its demonic promise
defeating Communism for the loyalty of the German worker. What is it
that haunts Biberkopf?
 FATALITY /7

§2

Outline of the Story

The plot of this story draws us into the struggle of a group of unfortunates
to survive in the indifference of the modern city during the Weimar Repub-
lic.8 For the main character, it is a tale somehow binding guilt, misfortune,
and atonement, according to an inner necessity that leaves the reader
questioning the claimed redemption. Franz Biberkopf, having served time
in prison for causing the death of his girlfriend, returns, as the novel opens,
to Alexanderplatz, his familiar neighborhood. (He was sent to prison for
striking her in a moment of uncontrollable jealousy and, without intention,
causing her death.) Once out of prison, Franz, vows to become “anständig,”
honest, upright, and respectable. In his terms, however, this means that he
must avoid his friends of old, pimps and thieves and thugs, and somehow
survive peddling whatever he can: “hanging out” on the street, he is selling
not only small necessities—shoelaces, for example, but also pornography
and even Nazi newspapers. At first, he succeeds in his intent to stay out of
trouble. Soon however, this unceasingly harsh life takes its inevitable toll.
Feeling disillusioned, desperate, and betrayed by a society that had failed in
its promise, he falls back into his old habits, rejoining a gang of criminals,
the denizens of the city’s darker realms, living outside the law. Despite his
attempts to begin a new life, Fate sends him blow after blow: first, he is
betrayed by a friend after causing the death of his girlfriend, Ida, next he
is pushed out of a moving motorcar and badly injured as he and his gang
are escaping from a failed robbery and finally, a jealous thug he befriended
and trusted murders Mieze, his new girlfriend. Franz is arrested and sent,
because of his mental state, to a psychiatric hospital where he is almost
defeated in a struggle with death. But in this fight for his life, he is reported
to have gained a measure of wisdom, confessing his violent ways, acknowl-
edging his guilt, and realizing that he must shoulder some responsibilities
for the good of the community he lives in. Eventually, having undergone
a miraculous apocalyptic resurrection and rebirth, he is released from the
ward and returns to the streets. This time, however, he supposedly returns
to Alexanderplatz as a genuinely new man, having found the moral strength
that was given him through all the adversity in his life-experiences. Having
failed in his search for a happiness he could not define, he finally finds its
portion, accepting the simple necessities of life, harming no one, earning
his living as an assistant caretaker in a small, local factory.
In reading this surprising end to the story, we are meant to become
witnesses to the rebirth of the human spirit: a transformed Franz Biberkopf
is said to have found meaningful redemption in belonging productively
 8/ REDEEMING WO RDS

to the community, and the causality of Fate against which he struggled

is declared to be finally defeated: in a story made of words, the language
of salvation has triumphed; words favoring redemption and freedom have
vanquished the language that, by its terror, served to express the causality
of Fate. I, however, will dispute this triumph, this vanquishing of Fate, and
will explain, in due course, why the author’s claims cannot be sustained.
For the time being, though, it may be observed that, to some extent,
the problem is a consequence of the miserable social conditions of the pro-
letariat. Doubts about the triumph, consummating the epic story, of the cau-
sality of freedom cannot attribute all the blame to Biberkopf’s deficiencies
of character. The society into which Biberkopf finally settles after prison
is already shadowed by the rising power of National Socialism, its cynical
politics offering false hopes for an end to poverty, unemployment, and all
the shameful conditions of a nation defeated in war. Soon the precarious
Weimar experiment in democracy would be abruptly arrested; the freedom
that had erupted in Expressionism and the rigorous art of critique and uto-
pian vision that had found moral lucidity in a style of “Neue Sachlichkeit,”
would be brutally suppressed; and a strange, new language, a sinister lan-
guage drawing power from distortions, euphemisms, and degrading epithets,
that of the Nazis, would attempt to ignite ancient hatreds, glorify war, and
ennoble sacrifices for the good of the nation. The language of free aesthetic
expression that briefly flourished, the liberating language of uncompromised
truth, would soon be forced into exile—or into an underground survival.
Addressing other writers in 1921, in the wake of Germany’s defeat
in the First World War, about the moral and political task of the writer in
relation to the state, Döblin wrote:

In this time of incipient freedom movements [. . .] writers must

maintain the strictest reliance upon themselves, knowing what
a fine and dangerous instrument they possess in language. Even
in peaceful times, writers have observed that there is something
rather awkwardly self-willed contained in words: one believes
oneself to be writing and is being written instead; writers must
constantly be on guard to assert themselves in relation to lan-
guage [. . .]. It is dangerous for writers to lose composure, to
fail to master their instrument, and to subordinate themselves
to suggestive images that are at home with bad, unclear words.
And this defeat of the writer, this failure in the face of his own
words, is now apparent a hundred times over. This defeat puts
the writer on a level with the little man inspired to excess by
speeches bellowed in the streets.9
 FATALITY /9

Although he had great sympathy for the plight of the proletariat class,
understanding the urgent need to reform Germany’s political institutions,
Döblin feared mob psychology and worried about the dangers in the politi-
cization of the discontented masses.10 But as an artist, a writer, one who
understood that the creative, self-expressive freedom of the individual
must be secured, Döblin opposed the false individualism of bourgeois capi-
talism, the fragmentation and anomie destroying individual autonomy, as
much as he opposed the tyranny of the masses. And without compromising
the autonomy of his aesthetic principles, he created a language, a style
of writing, which could, he felt, address the consciousness of his time,
its “petrifakte Geistigkeit,” in an enlightening way.11 Although one can
discern in this style, spare, austere, hard-edged, a physiognomy that is
reminiscent of Kleist and Kafka and Musil, can recognize its resemblance
to Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and can even read the story in relation
to the traditional “Bildungsroman” in German literary history, noting of
course its conscious departure from the assumptions and conventions of
that genre, it is essential to recognize that Döblin forged a truly original
style and form: an experiment that, drawing inspiration not only from
recent innovations in surrealism, modernism, and German expressionism,
but also from psychoanalysis and the sociology of his day, attempted to
invent a new narrative form and forge a new, historically effective experi-
ence with language.12

§3

Döblin’s Prologue

There is a brief prologue for Biberkopf’s story, framing its allegorical signifi-
cance, condensed enough to permit its complete reproduction, introducing
the dimensions of the story and, at the same time, conveying something,
despite its being a translation, of Döblin’s deliberately plain, emotionally
flat style, rigorously denied all expressive adornment:

This book reports the story of Franz Biberkopf, an erstwhile

cement- and transport-worker in Berlin. He has just been dis-
charged from prison, where he has been doing time because of
former incidents, and is now back in Berlin determined to lead
a decent life.
And, at first, he succeeds. But then, though things go eco-
nomically well with him, he gets involved in a regular combat
 10 / REDEEMING WO RDS

with something that comes from the outside, with something

unaccountable, that looks like fate.
Three times this thing crashes against our man, disturbing
his scheme of life. It rushes at him with cheating and fraud. The
man is able to scramble up again; he is still firm on his feet.
It drives and beats him with foul play. He finds it a bit
hard to get up; they almost count him out.
Finally, it torpedoes him with huge and monstrous savagery.
Thus our good man, who has held his own till the end, is
laid low. He gives the game up for lost; he does not know how
to go on and appears to be done for.
But before he puts a definite end to himself, his eyes are
forcibly opened in a way that I do not describe here. He is most
distinctly given to understand how it all came about. Through
himself, that’s obvious, through his scheme of life, which looked
like nothing on earth but now suddenly looks entirely differ-
ent, not simple, almost self-evident, but prideful and impudent,
cowardly withal, and full of weakness.
This awful thing that was his life acquires a meaning.
Franz Biberkopf has been given a radical cure. At last we see
our man back in Alexanderplatz, greatly changed and battered,
but, nevertheless, bent straight again. [BA 11/1–2]

This summary, though embodied in an expressionless, flat, matter-of-fact

prose, nevertheless has evoked, countering the metaphysical causality of
Fate, a sequence of enigmatic events that are anything but ordinary: revela-
tion, conversion, and redemption. The final sentence, however, assuming a
moralist’s tone, suddenly returns us to the struggles of everyday existence,
life in the metropolis, compelling us, the readers, to hear a powerful plea
for social justice, an argument, as it were, formulated in the starkest pos-
sible language of materialism:

To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to

many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like
this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and
butter. [BA 11–12/1–2]

I believe that there is, in this seemingly cold-hearted account of Biberkopf’s

life, an account that permits itself no affection, no pity, no expressiveness,
something I want to acknowledge as real sympathy: perhaps, in truth, the
finest and most authentic, because of its uncompromising moral lucidity.
 FATALITY / 11

This lucidity is what will give Döblin’s use of language its frightening alle-
gorical force, appearing with the greatest compulsion in its rhymes and
repetitions, its rhythmic drum beats, and the persistent, inescapable rever-
berations of its prophecies and warnings.13

§4

Biberkopf’s Character: Its Nature and Social Construction

In his essay, “Looking Back on Surrealism,” Adorno reflects on the expres-

sion and representation of freedom in works of art, observing that,

[t]he subject, freely controlling himself, free of all concern for

the empirical world and having become absolute, exposes himself
as lacking animation, virtually as dead in the face of a total
reification that throws him back on himself and his protest.
The dialectical images of surrealism are those of the dialectic
of subjective freedom in a state of objective unfreedom. [. . .] It
has been said that in Hegel’s thesis the Enlightenment abolished
itself by realizing itself; the cost of comprehending Surrealism
is equally high—it must be understood not as a language of
immediacy but as witness to abstract freedom’s reversion to the
supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature. The montages of
Surrealism are the true still lives. In making compositions out
of what is out of date, they create nature morte. [. . .] If today,
however, surrealism seems itself to be obsolete, it is because
people already deny themselves that consciousness of denial that
is sustained in the negativity of surrealism.14

Although Döblin’s novel is a work of montage, it is not a work belonging

to surrealism; nor can its principal character, Franz Biberkopf, be credited
with the heroic, if futile gestures of freedom which surrealism prizes. How-
ever, the novel does “expose” Biberkopf to a hostile world of reification
that throws him back on himself and reveals itself dialectically, through
the “blows” that repeatedly defeat his gestures of subjective freedom, in
all its objective unfreedom. Moreover, as I shall argue, the language of
the novel does show Biberkopf in a way that effectively makes us help-
less witnesses to the “reversion of abstract freedom to the supremacy of
objects and thus to mere nature.” As Döblin’s “prologue” to the fourth
chapter says, Biberkopf’s gestures are futile; instead of manifesting his
 12 / REDEEMING WO RDS

freedom, they only imprison him more securely in the Fate that language
is already preparing for him:

Here you are going to see our man boozing, almost giving him-
self up for lost. But it wasn’t so bad after all [noch nicht so hart].
Franz Biberkopf is being spared for a harder fall [für schlimmere
Dinge aufbewahrt]. [BA 121/92]

He is compelled, here, not only by what is said but also, in an uncanny way,
by the very rhyming of the language. And it is in this chapter that Biberkopf’s
walking is described, as we noted earlier, with word-iterations assigning it a
mechanical rhythm: “Right foot, left foot. . . .” In the “prologue” to the fifth
chapter, Döblin sets in motion a contradiction: the very same words that
ascribe a certain “freedom” to Biberkopf immediately take it away from him
with their rhythm and their rhyming, enacting the causality of Fate:

A quick recovery, our man stands again where he stood before,

he has not understood anything nor learned anything more.
Now the first heavy blow falls on him. He is dragged into a
criminal case, it’s against his will, he defends himself, but the
issue he must face.
Fiercely and bravely, with hand and foot, he tries to win
the race, but it’s no use, he’s beaten, the issue he must face.
[Er wehrt sich tapfer und wild mit Händen und Füßen, aber es hilft
nichts, es geht über ihn, er muß müssen.] [BA 163/128]

The language we read here enacts and accomplishes exactly what it

describes or predicts.
In a perceptive study of Döblin’s novel, Gabriele Sander summa-
rizes and then comments on the author’s characterization of Biberkopf as
“anständig” and “gutwillig,” “von Natur aus gut”:

The protagonist is cast as a man who is good-natured and naïve,

but also compulsive and susceptible to excesses of violence
and alcohol, a man who, because of his psychic as well as his
political and ideological instability, cannot manage to realize his
good intentions and establish a middle-class existence. He now
experiences the urban reality from which he has been cut off
for four years as an alarming pandemonium, as a chaotic, hostile
place, which he believes he must counter with the attitude of a
warring conqueror. He refuses the assistance offered from vari-
 FATALITY / 13

ous sides, believing only in his own strength. [. . .] Biberkopf’s

lack of human insight prevents the development of friendships
and leads to repeated disappointment. [. . .] After Biberkopf
has tried several occupations and, lacking perseverance, suf-
fered several setbacks, he becomes an alcoholic and ends up in
criminal circles.15

Since even his intentions, however admirable their goal, are so weak that
they fail to overcome contrary impulses and inclinations, it is difficult for
me to accept the benevolence and generosity of the author’s characteriza-
tion: considering the life that Biberkopf lives, these favorable descriptions
are perplexing, if not to be taken as ironic. To be sure, I do not want to
ontologize the nature of character, reducing Biberkopf to a criminal essence;
nor do I want to legitimate an abyssal difference between the criminal
world and the world of the bourgeoisie, for there is an uncomfortable truth
in Adorno’s claim that these two worlds are like mirrors of one another.16
Nevertheless, one cannot, and must not, overlook or excuse his brutality,
the violence of his jealousy, and his weakness of will, his always being will-
ing to take the easiest course, regardless of its ethical merit. Even though
Döblin has characterized Biberkopf as “good-willed,” he has also described
him as a “rough, uncouth man of repulsive aspect” [BA 45/29].17
In this novel, possibly the boldest, most innovative, most thought-
provoking literary work published in Germany during the tenure of the
Weimar Republic, the life of its main character gives Döblin the opportu-
nity to explore the ways in which, as Peter Jelavich phrases it, “thought
and action are shaped but also confused by a variety of competing and often
contradictory messages, [. . .] relayed to the individual through the mass
media—newspapers, journals, posters, the phonograph, radio and cinema.”18
Biberkopf returns to the life of a city in which he finds himself overwhelmed
and confused, buffeted by all these messages, tossed around in the same way
that, in the winds of a hurricane, the loose pages of newspapers are tossed
around. He is captivated by fantasies of bourgeois respectability, seduced by
easy criminality, and responsive equally and almost simultaneously to the
revolutionary language of communism and the violently arousing language
of fascism. Michael Baum justly describes him as like a marionette.19 He
might also be characterized, borrowing Robert Musil’s definite description,
as exemplifying “der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”: a man without reflectively
formed judgments of his own, a man whose qualities are nothing but the
reflections of others, hence a man without his own character.
In his book on Döblin’s novel, Michael Baum concentrates on Döb-
lin’s narrative constructions and “semiotic structures,” his ways of using
 14 / REDEEMING WO RDS

language to reveal Biberkopf’s character. He calls attention, for example, to

a passage in which the repeated use of “es” brings out Biberkopf’s passivity.
The following passage appears in a section bearing the ironic title, “Franz
ist ein Mann von Format, er weiß, was er sich schuldig ist,” translated
by Eugene Jolas as “Franz is a Man of Form, he knows what he owes to
himself”:

[. . .] Plötzlich brüllt er auch, was ist in ihm aufgegangen, und sprudelt
nur so, es hat ihn losgelassen, ein Blutstrom flinkert durch seine
Augen: “Verbrecher ihr, Kerle, ihr wißt ja nicht, was ihr tut, euch
muß man die Raupen aus dem Kopf hauen, ihr ruiniert die ganze
Welt, paßt auf, daß ihr nicht was erlebt, Blutvergießer, Schufte.”
Es sprudelt in ihm, er hat in Tegel gesessen, das Leben ist
schrecklich, was ist das für ein Leben, der im Lied weiß es, wie ist
es mir gegangen, Ida, nicht dran denken.20

The English translation, though in many instances admirable, indeed some-

times incomparable, does not convey in the same way here, that is, by way
of grammar, the passivity that is suggested by the German words:

[. . .] Suddenly he begins to shout, what’s come over him, some-

thing bubbles up in him, something’s being released, his eyes
become bloodshot: “You criminals, you, you lousy fools, why,
you don’t know what you’re doing, somebody has got to beat
the hell out of you, you ruin the whole world, just watch out
you don’t get into trouble, you blood-spillers, you crooks, you.”
He is bubbling over, he’s done time in Tegel, life is awful,
what kind of a life is this, the fellow who wrote that song is
right, I mustn’t think about what happened to me, Ida.

One should notice that the cause, signified twice by the word “something,”
is thereby indicated in the most vague terms, so that, as Baum argues, what
is moving Biberkopf is represented as an unfathomable external force, a
powerful natural or supernatural causality, and not an inner, reflectively
developed motive cause.21 Döblin’s grammar here denies Biberkopf subjec-
tivity and individuality: it turns him into a puppet of Fate.
Biberkopf’s character, his way of experiencing the world, and his rela-
tions with others are revealed not only in the language used to describe
him but also in his own use of language. His own use likewise reveals his
passivity. But when he says, referring to his time in prison, “They knocked
hell out of me,” his words in German betray more than mere passivity;
 FATALITY / 15

they show that he experiences himself as an object manipulated by Fate.

“Mir haben sie verplempert” expresses his fatalism both in the words and
in the very grammar of his phrasing. Although he cannot imagine another
way of interpreting his experience, he nevertheless senses with audible
pain that this fatalism denies him his humanity: “I ain’t a human being
any more” [BA 36/22]. But to a considerable extent, he capitulates instead
of resisting the adversity of his circumstances. Those circumstances are,
to be sure, overwhelming in their hostility. Moreover, as Otto Keller has
pointed out, in the Berlin underworld to which he returns, there is no
authentic communication with others that would encourage his struggle
for self-knowledge and moral lucidity.22 His frequently incorrect grammar,
his parataxis and explosive, staccato-like speech, sentences either disjointed
or connected without logical or grammatical order, are telling expressions
of his disorientation, his confusion, and the turbulence and fragmentation
of his experience. They bespeak a man not in control of his life, not in
control of his words. But, as some scholars have noted, the way he talks,
both to others and to himself, tells us not only about him, about his char-
acter and state of mind; it also reflects the violence, the shocks, and all
the unresolved contradictions that prevailed in his urban, working class
lifeworld: a world that was out of joint.23
Taking a break from peddling racist, pro-Nordic newspapers on the
street, the only way he could think of to make a little money, Biberkopf
goes to a café, the “Kneipe” in the Elsasser Straße, with “his [Nazi] arm-band
discreetly tucked in his pocket” [BA 83/59]. Very soon, however, knowing
the Communist sympathies of some of the other customers, he is shouting
wildly, and his agitated state is creating a disturbing atmosphere in the bar:

And he goes on shouting with a feeling of horror, what’s going

to happen there, he wards it off, he steps on it, he must bellow,
bellow it down. The café roars, Henschke [the proprietor] stands
before him at the table, dares not come near him, standing
there like that with that roaring coming out of his throat all
topsy-turvy and foaming: “And none of you’s got anything to
say to me, not one of you can tell me anything, not a single
one of you, we all know better than that, we didn’t go to the
front and lie in the trenches [Graben] for this, so you could
bait me, you agitators, we’ve gotta have order, order, I’m telling
you, order—and put that in your pipes and smoke it, order and
nothing else” (yes, that’s it, here we are, that’s just it), “and if
anybody comes and starts a revolution now and don’t give us
order, they ought to be strung up all along the street” (black
 16 / REDEEMING WO RDS

poles, telegraph poles, a whole row on the Tegel Road, I know

all about that) “then they’ll get theirs [dann werden die dran
glauben], when they swing, yes, sir. You might remember [Dann
könnt ihr es euch merken] that whatever you do, you criminals.”
(Yes, then we’ll have order, then they’ll be quiet, that’s the only
thing to do, we’ll find that out.) [BA 94/70]

This passage shows the extent of Franz’s confusion, the disorder of his
mind in the shifts from “mir” to “wir,” “ihr” to “sie”: shifts, that is, from
“I” and “me” to “we” and “us,” and from “you” to “they.” Is it any wonder
that he fell for the Nazi program, promising a new society, a new nation,
of law and order?
As we know from the Book of Genesis, to bestow a name on something
is to assert power over it—creative power or possessive power. But Franz
Biberkopf—“Ziberkopf, Niberkopf, Zieberkopf”—has got no real name, no
authentically individuated identity [BA 335/275]. Even “Biberkopf,” the
surname that Döblin assigns him, reduces him, denying him an individual
biography, casting him into an externally imposed relation to the world.
Thus, as we come to the very end of the story, we find our man in the
detention ward of Buch Insane Asylum. Here, Biberkopf’s name is turned
for a second time into a mocking, menacing question about his identity,
his character or nature; and the hostile name-calling is preceded by words
that not only name violent, threatening sounds, but themselves actually
produce those sounds, rhyming and resounding with a threatening violence:

Boom, crash, zoom, crash, boom, a battering ram, zoom, a ham-

mering at the door. Bashing and crashing, crackling and smashing.
[Wumm Schlag, wumm Schlag, wumm Sturmbock, wumm Torschlag.
Wuchten und Rammen, Krachen und Schwingen.] Who is this lying
fool, Franz Biberkopf, this crying mule [ein Wiedehopf], this sigh-
ing ghoul [ein Gliedertropf], he’d like to wait here till it snows,
then, he thinks, we’re gone and won’t come back again. Wonder
what he’s thinking about, a feller like that can’t be thinking a
great deal, he’s got water on the brain, he wants to lie around
here and act like a mule. But never mind, we’ll make things
hot for him, we have bones made of iron, crash door, look out,
no door, just an empty hole, a gaping hole, boom, zoom, watch
out, boom, zoom. [BA 423/350]

Relentlessly stalking him, Death has finally come to Biberkopf’s door; beat-
ing its drums and making frightful noises, it strikes with persistent insis-
 FATALITY / 17

tence. Death is even attacking his name, his very identity. What should
we think about the word-sounds—and the words that play unkindly on
the sounding of his name? Surely, these words are not only descriptive, a
way for the narrator to indicate the gravity of Biberkopf’s medical condi-
tion. Nor could they be merely a way for the narrator to dramatize the
threatening presence of the staff at the door to Biberkopf’s room. Do not
the word-sounds themselves constitute the threat? My claim is that there
is in operation here a force of language not merely telling us that Fate is
knocking on the door, but actually embodying and enacting it, doing its
work. This uncanny efficacy of words is what we need to question.
In a section of the sixth chapter, a section of the novel bearing the
English title “Third Conquest of Berlin,” there is another provocation relat-
ed to Biberkopf’s name, likewise raising a question about his very integrity
as an individual, an autonomous man. After a little searching, Biberkopf
has found a place to live and, to settle the entitlement, the landlady puts
the police registration papers in front of him. Normal procedure in those
days. But that requirement makes him begin to brood:

If I write my name’s Biberkopf, they’ll look me up in their files

right away, they’ll phone headquarters and they’ll say, this way,
old boy, and why don’t you show up once in a while, and what’s
the matter with that arm, what hospital did you stay in, who
paid for it, and it’s none of it true.

So he broods and inwardly rages, “grübelt und wütet”; but eventually he

signs his name. In this next textual passage, the narrator’s third-person
description abruptly shifts into Biberkopf’s first-person ruminations, a
stream of uncensored consciousness:

And as if writing with a stick, he chisels thick letters into the

paper: I’ve never been a coward, and my name, I won’t let any
of ’em steal it from me, that’s my name, that’s what I was born,
and that’s what I’ll remain: Franz Biberkopf. One thick letter
after another, Tegel Prison, the street bordered with black trees,
the convicts sitting there, at their gluing, carpentry, repairing.
Dip it in again, I’ll put a dot over the I. I’m not afraid of the
coppers nor of the bulls with their brass badges. Either I’m a
free man or I’m not. [BA 240–41/194–95]

What concerns him is his freedom: not only, though, his bodily freedom—
not being locked up again, but also his identity as an individual. For in the
 18 / REDEEMING WO RDS

crowded metropolis, individuals can lose their individuality, can become a

mere statistic, melting into the masses, lost in the crowd. Anomie ­threatens.
And death, of the body and of the spirit, also threatens. For what immedi-
ately follows Biberkopf’s attempt at self-affirmation is a mysterious warning,
uttered by Death itself: “Es ist ein Schnitter, der heißt Tod.” The transla-
tion, in archaic English evoking the mediaeval dread, reads: “There is a
mower, death yclept.” These same words, the voice of an impersonal power,
occur many times, insistently interrupting the narrative with their haunting
reminder. Thus, throughout the novel, from its beginning to its ending, the
reader gets the impression that Biberkopf’s every thought is being registered
by an unknown mind reader, and that his every movement, every gesture,
is being watched by some unseen presence: somehow, he is totally visible,
and even his innermost thoughts are no secret, somehow registered in the
memory of another presence. But it is not always the narrator—and not
always Döblin, the author, who seems to be watching him, penetrating his
consciousness, keeping a record, remembering every detail, even the details
that seem quite insignificant. More often, it seems that it is Fate, wresting
control even from the author, who is haunting the narrative, keeping an
eye on Biberkopf’s every gesture, every move, stalking him and marking
him for death.24 In the brief introductory summaries that appear at the
beginning of every chapter and that, in an unsettling way, are both inside
and outside the frame of the fictional world, a spectral Fate often seems
to be hovering, minatory and prophetic. Not even the separateness of the
parergon that precedes each of the chapters can restrain Fate from breaking
through the invisible spacing of difference to enact what is being described.
But, at the end of the novel, Biberkopf eludes the death of his body
when he instead surrenders his nature, his character, to Death and—at
least according to the narrator—is somehow reborn, a redeemed soul. The
narrator’s claim is not, however, confirmed: since the story ends with the
claim, readers are not actually shown a man whose behavior demonstrates
a transformed character—a second nature, a second chance. In light of
this abrupt ending, one can only wonder how convinced Döblin himself
was regarding this second nature. We might recall that, reflecting, in his
Theory of the Novel, on the question of “first nature” and “second nature,”
Georg Lukács asserts that what the bourgeois novel shows us is always a
socially constructed “second nature” that is nothing but—

a complex of meanings that are petrified and estranged, and

that are no longer able to awaken [a sense of] inwardness; it is a
charnelhouse of rotted interiorities [ein erstarrter, fremdgewordener,
die Innerlichkeit nicht mehr erweckender Sinneskomplex; sie ist eine
Schädelstätte vermoderter Innerlichkeiten].25
 FATALITY / 19

Even if we accept the claim and dismiss the hypothesis that Biberkopf’s
author has merely permitted himself the freedom to imagine the fulfillment
of his hopes for the character, we must still consider whether, in his sup-
posed transformation, Biberkopf merely exchanges one rotten nature for
another. In the brief account of his new life, he certainly seems not to
have formed a more admirable interiority. He may have received a second
nature, hence a second chance in life; but whether what he has learned,
if anything, from his experiences has developed his moral capacities and
connected him in solidarity with others to the struggle for justice and peace
is a question that remains stubbornly unresolved. One suspects, however,
that he has merely adopted the “respectability” of the lower bourgeoisie.
In bed, delirious, sleeping off a night of drinking, Franz’s chosen way of
life is called into question. What are his deepest moral commitments? What
does he really care about? Who is questioning him is not clear. Perhaps his
conscience, perhaps the narrator, with whom, paradoxically, Döblin might
have made him able, in his delirium, to communicate:

—Did you lose your heart in nature? That’s not where I lost my
heart. To be sure, it seemed to me as if the essence of the primal
spirit was about to carry me away while I was standing opposite
the alpine giants or lying on the beach by the roaring sea. Yes,
something also bubbled and boiled in my bones. My heart was
shaken, but I did not lose it, neither where the eagle nests, nor
where the miner digs for the hidden ore-veins of the deeps.—
—Then where?
Did you lose your heart in sport? In the roaring stream
of the youth movement? In the turmoil of political struggle?—
—I did not lose it there.—
—Didn’t you lose it somewhere?
Do you belong to those who lose their heart nowhere, but
keep it for themselves, to conserve it nicely and mummify it?—
The road to the supernatural world, public lectures. All
Souls Day: Does Death really end everything? November 21, 8
p.m.: Can we still believe today? Tuesday, November 22: Can
man change? Wednesday, November 23: Who is just before
God? We call your special attention to the development of the
Declamatorium, “St. Paul.” [BA 128/97]

These are not so much questions for Franz, who obviously has more imme-
diate questions to cope with, as they are questions for us. Who are we, the
author seems to be asking, that we may pass judgment on the character of
others? And what are our answers to these questions? I have not, in this
 20 / REDEEMING WO RDS

chapter, hesitated to judge what Döblin characterizes, perhaps with some

irony, as Biberkopf’s “good nature”; nor have I been reluctant to express my
doubts about Franz’s eventual “redemption.” However, I will not undertake,
here, to argue in defense of the moral judgments, inasmuch as that defense,
although important in its own right, would ultimately require a lengthy
theoretical excursus into moral philosophy.

§5

Human Nature and Fate

In “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” an extremely important early

writing by Hegel, in which he begins to formulate thoughts on character,
human nature, and fate that will be more fully developed in his Phenom-
enology of Spirit, there is a discussion of law, transgression, punishment,
and Fate that sheds light on Franz Biberkopf’s character and his struggle,
against the causality of Fate, to lead an upright life. Hegel’s reflections on
the causality of fate and related themes, an inspiration and provocation for
both Benjamin and Adorno, bring out all the dialectical contradictions,
all the tensions that we find in Biberkopf’s life-world and in the character
formed and acting within it:

Punishment is the effect of a transgressed law from which the

trespasser has torn himself free but on which he still depends; he
cannot escape from the law or from punishment or from what
he has done. Since the characteristic of the law is universal-
ity, the trespasser has smashed the matter of the law, but its
form—universality—remains. The law, whose master he believed
he had become, remains, but in its content it now appears in
opposition to him because it has the shape of the deed which
contradicts what previously was the law, while the content of
the deed now has the shape of universality and is law. This
perversion of the law, the fact that it becomes the contrary of
what it was before, is punishment. Even though the man has
cut himself loose from the law, he still remains in subjection to
it. And since the law, as a universal, remains, so too does the
deed, since it is the particular.

Hegel continues his analysis:

 FATALITY / 21

Punishment represented as fate is of a different kind. In fate,

punishment is a hostile power, an individual thing, in which
universal and particular are united in the sense that in it there
is no cleavage between command and its execution; there is
such a cleavage, however, when law is in question, because the
law is only a rule, something thought, and needs an opposite, a
reality, from which it acquires its force. In the hostile power of
fate, universal is not severed from particular in the way in which
the law, as universal, is opposed to man or his inclinations as the
particular. Fate is indeed an enemy, and man stands over against it
as a power fighting against it. Law, on the contrary, as universal, is
lord of the particular and has subdued this man to obedience. The
trespass of the man regarded as in the toils of fate is therefore not
a rebellion of the subject against his sovereign, the slave’s flight
from his master, liberation from subservience, not a revivification
emerging out of a dead situation, for the man is alive, and before
he acts there is no cleavage, no opposition, much less a mastery.
Only through a departure from that united life that is neither
regulated by law nor at variance with law, only through the killing
of life, is something alien produced. Destruction of life is not the
nullification of life but its diremption, and its destruction consists
in its transformation into an enemy. It is immortal, and, if slain,
it appears as its terrifying ghost which vindicates every branch of
life and lets loose its Eumenides [i.e., the Furies].26

Franz Biberkopf is pursued by a ghostly, demonic force, which Döblin incar-

nates in the words that tell Biberkopf’s story, his struggle for redemption.
Adopting the revolutionary teaching of Jesus, Hegel declares that only the
redemptive power of love, operative within each individual and within
society as a whole, can bring about a true reconciliation with the forces
of Fate. Consequently: “A reconciliation with fate seems more difficult
to conceive than one with the penal law, since a reconciliation with fate
seems to require a cancellation of annihilation.”27 But the aesthetic nature
of the language that Döblin uses to tell the story of Biberkopf’s life makes
us understand that such love, ultimately requiring a revolutionary transfor-
mation of society, is absent from the life-world depicted in Döblin’s epic.
And, in particular, there are no traces of love, no expressions of love, in
Biberkopf’s supposedly “reformed” life.
As every reader of Döblin’s epic novel knows, it is impossible to read
it in a thoughtful way without encountering the figure, the prosopopoeia, in
 22 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the language of Fate, and coming to terms with its haunting, spine-chilling
omnipresence.28 The first encounter takes place early in the second chapter.
In the back of a small café on Rosenthaler Platz, two men sit drinking tea
and talking. Georg, the younger of the two, has just lost his job and is
not receiving the sympathy he needs from his friend. Contemplating his
own misfortunes and the measure of happiness he now considers himself
lucky to receive from the world, the friend offers only the consolation of
stoic resignation:

A wife, a child, it looks as if that were the whole world. I have

no regrets. I don’t feel any guilt about it, we have to take facts,
like ourselves, the way they come. We shouldn’t brag about our
fate [Man soll sich nicht dicke tun mit seinem Schicksal]. I’m an
enemy of Destiny [Ich bin Gegner des Fatums], I’m not a Greek,
I’m a Berliner. [. . .] At any rate, don’t get yourself all muddled
up. That’s the beginning of the end.

Shamelessly smug about how he has handled the difficulties in his life,
despite having just asserted that we should not be boastful about what good
fortune fate has bestowed on us, the friend, a schoolteacher, concludes his
lecture, advising Georg to drink some rum and go play a game of billiards,
probably too wrapped up in his own life to be aware of his words’ unspeak-
able coldness and “Schadenfreude,” saying, as he departs:

I enjoy the Rosenthaler Platz, I enjoy the cop on the Elsasser

corner, I like my game of billiards, I’d like anyone to come and
tell me that his life is better than mine [. . .]. [BA 56–57/36–37]

What does the author think of Fate? “Where there is an absence of knowl-
edge, an absence of will [Erkenntnislosigkeit, Willenlosigkeit], there is Fate.
Where knowledge and will exist, there is a way around Fate.”29 But this
way around Fate is hypothetical; it is neither universal nor guaranteed. Be
this as it may, Döblin turns to the writing of stories as a way of gaining a
deeper insight into the roots of evil in the world. As if anticipating Hannah
Arendt’s courageous study of Adolf Eichmann, Döblin declares his convic-
tion, in one of his essays, that these roots are to be found in the little
things of everyday life which, being all too familiar, are easily overlooked;
and he suggests that “it would be worthwhile [löhnend] [for writers] to shine
some light on these [presumed] banalities [Banalitäten].”30 Although it is
clear that Döblin thinks “human nature” predisposed to selfishness, jealousy,
cruelty and violence, it is equally clear that he believes we are not only
 FATALITY / 23

capable of overcoming these ways, but capable also of sympathy, kindness,

tenderness, and love. Not surprisingly, considering Döblin’s first vocation
as a physician, his narrative thus implicitly subverts a certain inheritance
of biological essentialism—precisely that constellation of concepts that the
Nazis embraced as the ideological lynchpin of their extermination program.
The old Jews that gave Franz the warmth of their hearth and table soon
after his release from prison are figures that represent these virtues.
Döblin’s stories, Berlin Alexanderplatz in particular, are studies of char-
acter, of human nature, in situations of adversity. They are studies of char-
acter, of human nature, tested by, and struggling against, the overwhelming
force of Fate. What is called “Fate” seems like a mysterious force that hovers
over our lives; but in truth, it is simply the facticity of a constant moral
challenge to our sensibility, our intelligence, our will, and our capacity to
acknowledge the Other. Thus Döblin repudiates the tragic conception of
Fate that we have inherited from ancient mythologies, intent on subject-
ing its metaphysical interventions to “scientific” explanation. What this
intention would seem to imply is that “Fate” will appear in his stories in
strictly concrete terms, in words bringing out the material conditions of
temptation and compulsion, words sometimes enacting the causality of Fate,
as if actualizing their prophecies. And this is indeed what the reader finds.
But it is questionable whether, considering the decisive narrative role that
Döblin assigns to Fate, the story of Franz Biberkopf’s life can be understood
in a dimension strictly limited to dialectical materialism. And if that is true,
then to that extent, contrary to his claim, his story continues to depend,
despite its sharp attention to the material conditions of Biberkopf’s life-
world, on the mythopoetic spirit that lives on in the tragedies of ancient
Greece. Are Döblin’s invocations of the characters in Greek tragedy ways,
therefore, of acknowledging this inheritance? And might they not also
serve to stress, perhaps with a measure of irony, the conflict of interpreta-
tions that confronts the modern storyteller? I mean the conflict between
mythology and science as ways of understanding our lives and our world.
Döblin prized the advances of his day in the fields of biology and
psychology; grounded in the empirical knowledge of his first vocation, he
sought in his fictional works to represent their enlightenment and display
their newly achieved explanatory power. But there are nevertheless, in Berlin
Alexanderplatz, powerful vestiges of the archaic, mythic phenomenon of Fate,
uncanny returns and repetitions of this ancient force, terrifying in its warn-
ings, curses, and punishments. This novel is therefore a sobering reminder
of the disquieting truth for which Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, that the world of myth and the world of
the Enlightenment are dialectically, inextricably intertwined: the spirit of
 24 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the Enlightenment, the curiosity of science, was already present in ancient

times, present even in the myths; but consciousness, spellbound by myth,
never entirely broke the spell, and there are, in consequence, vestiges of this
consciousness even in the most contemporary, most scientific cast of mind.
I shall argue in chapters to follow that, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, it is
principally through the expressive uses of language that Döblin has set in
motion the optical traces and audible reverberations of mythic Fate, still
hovering over modern life, haunting its ways, calling it to account. Bib-
erkopf’s life shows that the implacable forces of mythic Fate can survive as
character: since its remaining forces, inextricably bound up in nature, hence
also in human nature, still move unstoppably in modern disguise throughout
the infrastructures of social and cultural life formed by capitalism, mythic
Fate can survive, as character, in historical time, dictating even now the
gestures and actions of the individuals upon whom it lays its claim, and
making them submit to its own inscrutable judgment.
The modern novel is a reflection of all the unreconciled contradic-
tions that persist in contemporary society. These contradictions are in evi-
dence throughout Döblin’s novel; in fact, he leaves them, or makes them,
much too striking, too glaring for readers to ignore. Even the authority
of the law suffers these contradictions: “Legality,” he declared, echoing a
thesis for which Benjamin argued in his “Critique of Violence” (1921),
“is the brute force of the ruling class.” Mythic Fate survives through these
contradictions. In the second chapter, Biberkopf’s situation is compared
to that of Orestes, one of the heroes of Greek tragedy. Might he also be
regarded as a hero? If an affirmative answer to this question were possible,
how would the nature of his heroism be described? A voice addresses these
questions. Is it the author’s? Is it the narrator’s? Might it be Biberkopf’s?
Or all three, intertwined?

Is he hounded by things in his past, [. . .], by conscientious

scruples, nightmares, restless sleep, tortures, Furies from the days
of our great-grandmothers? Nothing doing. Just consider the
change in his situation. A criminal, an erstwhile God-accursed
man [. . .], Orestes, killed Clytemnestra at the altar [. . .]. I say,
times are changed, up and at him, hey, terrible brutes, trollops
with snakes, then dogs without muzzles, they snap at him, but
don’t get near him, because he stands at the altar, that’s a Hel-
lenic conception, and the whole pack of them dancing angrily
around him, the dogs amongst them. Without harps, as the song
says, the Furies dance, they wind themselves about the victim
 FATALITY / 25

in a mad frenzy, a delusion of the senses, a preparation for the

booby-hatch.
But they don’t hound Franz Biberkopf. Let’s admit it, here’s
how, with his [swastika] arm-band in his pocket he drinks one
mug after another at Henschke’s or somewhere else, and in
between at Doornkaat, and his heart grows warm. Thus our
furniture mover, newsvendor, etc., Franz Biberkopf, of Berlin N.
E., differs from the famous old Orestes in the end of 1927. Who
would not rather be in whose skin? [BA 98/73]

What soon follows this is an extremely detailed medical account, an

account such as one would find in the coroner’s report and in the records
of the police, making us witnesses to Franz’s gruesome murder of Ida, his
girlfriend, and showing us the gravity of the fatal blows and wounds that,
with a vengeance and brutality that is unspeakably horrifying, he inflicted
on her helpless body. This medical description, physiological and anatomi-
cal, is abruptly brought to an end, to be followed by an elaborate, eerily
detached explanation in terms of the laws of physics. The murder is said
to be “incomprehensible without a knowledge of those laws” [BA 99/74].
The narrative translates the words that have described this savage murder
into mathematical formulae coldly expressing the physical force of Franz’s
blows. Nothing, it would seem, could possibly shatter more effectively the
archaic, mythical narrative. And indeed, after these depersonalized formu-
lae, the narrative continues:

Thanks to such timely considerations, we can dispense entirely

with Furies. We can follow, step by step, what Franz did and
Ida suffered. There is no unknown quantity in the equation.
[BA 100/75]

Whether or not the Furies still exist, surviving the ruin of the Greek
civilization and the age of Enlightenment, they are not haunting Franz
Biberkopf, a man living without a conscience:

Is he hounded by things in his past, [. . .] by conscientious

scruples, nightmares, restless sleep, tortures, Furies from the day
of our great-grandmothers? Nothing doing. [. . .] Times have
changed. [BA 98/73]

But somehow, the Furies are still present, living on in this evocation:
 26 / REDEEMING WO RDS

“Up and at him, whoa,” shriek the old Furies. Horror, oh, hor-
ror, to see a God-accursed man at the altar, his hands dripping
with blood! How they snort: Dost thou sleep? Thrust slumber
away. Up, up. Agamemnon, his father, had started many years
ago from Troy. Troy had fallen, and thence shone the signal fires,
from Ida over Athos, oil-torches constantly blazing towards the
Cytherean forest. [BA 100/75]

After an unforgettable evocation of the madness of that historical moment,

with the Greek soldiers celebrating and the people of Troy in shock and
mourning, the narrative comments: “We can’t compare ourselves with this
way of doing things. Here again we’re inferior” [BA 101/75]. Inferior? In
what way, we can only conjecture, only imagine. Inferior, perhaps, in that
our historical events and our family tragedies, however intense their impres-
sion, are nevertheless bereft—if that is the appropriate word—of the dra-
matic, metaphysical power, the mythical aura, that made the events of the
ancient world into timelessly sublime epic stories. Döblin’s narrative gives
us a literary glimpse into the events of the ancient world—the Trojan War,
the murder of Agamemnon, the rage of the Furies—to compare with his
literary description of the murder in Berlin, a crime scene that he describes
using the languages of the exact sciences. But, whatever we make of the
comparison, and however much we might wish to substitute the modern
conception of agency, responsibility, and punishment for the tragic concep-
tion of Fate, it seems that the mythic dimension of our existence on earth
can never be entirely forgotten. Wilhelm Dilthey maintained that a person’s
life is “a mysterious combination of chance, destiny, and character.”31 And,
as the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment argued, the historical processes
of disenchantment at work in the rationalism of the Enlightenment never
totally obliterated, never vanquished altogether the demonic enchantments
of mythic, archaic life.
As if demonstrating the dialectical intricacies of this point, Döblin’s
narrative will occasionally insert narrative fragments that evoke legendary,
mythical, or fairy-tale images, only to subvert in their very construction
the illusion he supposes we are tempted to cling to:

A star-clear sky looked down upon the dark realms of mankind.

The castle of Kerkauen lay in deep nocturnal quiet. But a fair-
haired woman buried her head in the pillows and found no sleep.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, her love, the dear love of her heart, would
leave her. A whisper went (ran) through the sable, impenetrable
(dark) night: Gisa, stay with me, stay with me (don’t go away,
 FATALITY / 27

don’t go off on a voyage, don’t fall down, take a seat please).

Forsake me not. But the cheerless silence had neither ear nor
heart (nor foot nor nose). And yonder, separated only by a few
walls, there lay a pale slender woman with wide-open eyes. Her
dark, heavy hair lay in confusion on the silk of the bed (Castle
Kerkauen is famous for its silk beds). A shiver of cold shook
her. Her teeth chattered, as though she were deeply chilled,
full stop [Punkt]. But she did not move, comma [Komma], she
did not pull the coverlet closer over herself, full stop [Punkt].
Motionless her slender, ice-cold hands lay (as if deeply chilled,
cold-shuddering, a slender woman with wide open eyes, famous
silk bed) on it, full stop [Punkt]. Her luminous eyes roamed blaz-
ing through the darkness, and her lips trembled, colon, quotation
marks, Eleanore, dash, Eleanore, dash, quotation marks, quotation
francs, quotation dollars—going, going, gone! [Ihre glänzenden
Augen irrten flackernd im Dunkeln umher, und ihre Lippen bebten,
Doppelpunkt, Gänsefußchen, Lore, Gedankenstrich, Gedankenstrich,
Lore, Gedankenstrich, Gänsefußchen, Gänsebeinchen, Gänseleber
mit Zwiebel.] [BA 76/54]

This is an extraordinary passage, nicely translated except for the very

ending, where Döblin has indulged in some playful, untranslatable puns.
Unfortunately, these are lost in the English, which, besides losing them,
introduces, with the references to francs and dollars, a more serious, if
equally disjointed motif. Here is a textual fragment, seemingly connected
neither to what precedes nor to what follows it, except perhaps by way of
some extravagant hermeneutical construction of secret meaning. Although
the fragment begins ominously, just as some familiar childhood fairy tales
begin, the grammatical instructions soon give it a different character, rob-
bing it of any spell of enchantment that might possibly have been forming.
As the illusion disappears, the instructions assume greater significance, but
without clarifying how the text they interrupt and seemingly dominate is
to be understood—and without clarifying, for that matter, how they them-
selves are to be understood. However we interpret this fragment, the effect
of the various interruptions (beginning with the alternative or supplemen-
tary words that introduce a mischief which cannot be controlled by the
parentheses that enclose them) is, I think, to break the spell, the trance,
of mythic Fate that elsewhere his use of words—his investment in rhymes,
rhythms, and repetitions—induces. At least for the time being. Good and
evil forces are struggling, within language itself, for control over events,
control over the story.
 28 / REDEEMING WO RDS

The eruption of these grammatical indicators also reminds us that we

are reading a fictional story—and that the story is in fact a composition
of language, grammatically organized words. It is therefore not only the
ancient world of mythic Fate and tragedy that is subverted here; the illusion
created by the telling of a story is also deconstructed, as the author calls
our attention to the composition as a composition, emphasizing the words
that compose its material substance. The passage we have just read displays
one of Döblin’s most radical, most innovative literary experiments—an
experiment that might even leave us wondering just how “natural” Fate
really is and just how “fateful” human nature is.
 2

Natural History

In the course of thinking about the phenomenon of criminality within

contemporary bourgeois society—a subject that his readings of Karl Kraus
provoked him to ponder, Adorno observes that,

For all the talk to the contrary, nothing has changed in the
fundamental stratum of bourgeois society. It has walled itself
off malevolently as though it were indeed eternal and existed
by natural law the way its ideology used to assert that it did. It
will not be talked out of its hardening of the heart—without
which the National Socialists could not have murdered millions
of people undisturbed—any more than it will be talked out of
the domination of human beings by the exchange principle,
which is the basis for that subjective hardening.1

“Natural law,” which Adorno justifiably rejects, has played a major role
not only in jurisprudence, but also in natural history. Döblin does not tell
us what he thinks about natural law; but having begun his adult life as a
dedicated physician, a physician often treating the poor, he found that he
had much to say about human nature. Drawing on his years of experience
and knowledge in the practice of medicine, he accordingly wrote at length
about natural history, natural science, and human experience—especially
our experience of ourselves—in relation to nature. Indeed, it would not
be hyperbole to suggest that, by the time he began writing Berlin Alex-
anderplatz, he already had formulated a distinctive philosophy of nature,
including of course a philosophical anthropology, registering his reflections
on human nature. In 1927, two years before the publication of that novel, a
collection of essays, Das Ich über die Natur, was published, setting out many
of his philosophical reflections.2 In this work, he posits a conceptually and
historically decisive contrast between the “I” that is “in” nature, suffering
its conditions, and the “I” that is “above” nature, subduing and controlling

29
 30 / REDEEMING WO RDS

it. He does not posit, even as a possibility, the reconciliation of their con-
flict, but instead supports domination as the necessary objective of science.
In one of his earlier essays, “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalt-
ers” (“The Spirit of the Age of Naturalism”), published in 1924, Döblin
argues, not surprisingly, considering his physician’s vocation, for an empiri-
cal understanding of the world completely free of metaphysical and theo-
logical interference.3 And in “Die Natur und ihre Seelen” (“Nature and her
Souls”), another essay from that same period, he declares that

[i]t is obvious we are animals and plants. But soon I will dem-
onstrate that we are also water, salt, sand and stone.4

This certainly sounds like a manifesto in support of some version of natural-

ism or materialism. However, even if we make allowances for the cultural
tradition within which—and for which—Döblin would have had to think
and write, it is nonetheless noteworthy that words laden with theological
meaning, such as “Geist” and “Seelen,” appear not only in his titles, but
also in more substantive ways within his texts. Is this indicative of a certain
ambiguity or ambivalence? On the one hand, he wants to interpret every-
thing—including technological progress, economic imperialism, national-
ism, racism, and even wars—in terms of natural history, natural processes.
And he wants us to think of human life as composed of, or inseparable from
natural substances, water, salt, sand, and stone: these materials, in cycles of
beginnings and endings, constitute—and are—the essence of the human as
nature. On the other hand, he is disturbed not only by the suffering and
slaughter of human beings at the hands of other human beings, but also
by the suffering we human beings cause in animals, and by our indiffer-
ence to their slaughter: sentiments that a ruthlessly consistent naturalism
or materialism might be compelled to banish.5 Moreover, although Döblin
claims to represent our creaturely condition, cause of suffering, decline, and
death, in terms of natural history, the stories in which that condition is
depicted somehow make it seem, paradoxically, less like a merely natural
phenomenon and more like the objective monstration of a metaphysical
judgment of Fate: a history of inevitable creaturely suffering without any
salvation, any redemptive breakthrough.6
Despite Döblin’s claims, the “naturalism” in his novel, Berlin Alexan-
derplatz, is a strange weave of contemporary science and vestiges of archaic
thought. It is not merely that Fate in the guise of natural history is not
overcome, not defeated; on the contrary, it is continuously operative, act-
ing through human beings—especially the weak-willed, creating its own
configurations of life and death. In “Mein Buch, ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz,’ ”
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 31

written in 1932, Döblin reflects on the conception of natural history figured

in this work, emphatically asserting that:

This world is a world of two gods. It is simultaneously a world

of construction and a world of disintegration. This conjunction
happens in temporality, and we take part in it. [. . .] There is
order and dissolution there.7

Why does he refer to these processes as “gods”? To be sure, he intends a

metaphoric sense; but he is a writer who chooses his words with great care,
attentive to all their dimensions of sense and all their reverberations, all
their implications. He is a writer who passionately believes in the impor-
tance of exactitude. But if, with one breath, he insists on the rigors of
empiricism or naturalism, a memorable example of which is his clinical
description, sparing no details, of the physiology of sexual potency, with
another breath, he repudiates the “soulless materialism” of a crude Marxism:
“I know of no soulless material.” [“Mir ist keine seellose Materie bekannt.”]8
Everything, he thinks, expressing a view shared by Benjamin, has—and can
communicate, each thing in its own distinctive way—its “spiritual nature.”
Even metals, crystals, and stars.9
In the fourth chapter of Berlin Alexanderplatz, bearing, as title, “For
it happens alike with Man and Beast: as the Beast dies, so Man dies, too,”
Döblin, writing with the most biting irony, paints a vivid picture of crea-
turely life, sparing no gruesome and gory details, and none of the cruelty
and brutality of the slaughter house in Berlin [BA 136–43/103–109]. Soon
thereafter, in the section “And they all have the same Breath, and Men
have no more than Beasts,” we are taken through more animal slaugh-
ter [146–48/113–14]. And once again, there is an unsettling dissonance
between the two moods of the slaughterhouse butchers: in their equanimity,
their gay mood, their calmness, their peace of mind, they are completely
dissociated from the violence in their hands.

All over the hall there is gay noise, people are working, dragging
things around, calling to each other. [. . .] But what is this man
doing with the cute little calf? He leads it in alone by a rope;
this is a huge hall in which the bulls roar; now he takes the
little animal to a bench. [The animal, lying patiently, is about
to receive a blow on the head.] That will be its last encounter
with this world. And sure enough, the man, the simple old
man, who stands there all alone, a gentle old man with a soft
voice—he talks to the animal—takes the butt-end [. . .] and
 32 / REDEEMING WO RDS

gives the gentle animal a blow in the neck. Quite calmly, in the
same way in which he had brought the animal here and said;
“Now lie still,” he gives it a blow in the neck, without anger,
without great excitement, but also without melancholy, “no,
that’s the way it is, you’re a good animal, you know, of course,
that’s the way it has to be.” [. . .] The peaceful old man stands
by a pillar with his little black notebook, looks across the bench,
and writes down figures. Living’s expensive these days, difficult
to calculate, hard to keep going, what with all the competition.

In a prose that attains a terrifying, captivating beauty, Döblin provokes

uncomfortable thoughts. Who is acting beastly—“like an animal”? Are the
beasts, submitting with mute resignation to their fate? Or are their butchers?
And yet, even here, despite the abyss that, we suppose, separates the human
species from the other animals, there is a fate in common: an inevitable
sentence of death, a sentence that cannot be contradicted. Even the butch-
ers know this on a visceral level, for the most part, of course, unconsciously.
Hence, the occasional uncanny moments when an irrepressible “irrational”
sympathy takes over their gestures.
Franz is overtaken, overcome, by just such an uncanny moment of
natural sympathy when, arguing with an anarchist he meets in a bar, the
shadow of Death passes over him and he suddenly remembers the suffering
of nature:

Franz draws himself up in his chair and grabs his beer-mug and
looks steadily at the anarchist. There is a mower, death yclept.
In the mountains will I take up a weeping and a wailing, and
for the habitation of the wilderness a lamentation, because they
are burned up so that none can pass through them, both the
fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the earth are fled, they
are gone. [BA 270/220]

This is what, in the name of natural history, Death has wrought. Perhaps
even Death is saddened by what he has seen.
It will be recalled that, after a spell of heavy drinking, Biberkopf, lying
in bed, deeply sunk in a stupor, is asked, by whom we do not know: “Did
you lose your heart in nature?” And he, or perhaps rather his unconscious,
replies: “That’s not where I lost my heart. To be sure, it seemed to me as
if the essence of the primal spirit was about to carry me away while I was
standing opposite the alpine giants or lying on the beach by the roaring
sea. Yes, something also bubbled and boiled in my bones. My heart was
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 33

shaken, but I did not lose it, neither where the eagle nests, nor where the
miner digs for the hidden ore-veins of the deeps” [BA 128/97]. He feels the
intense connection and knows himself to be a vulnerable part of nature;
but he will not submit to the powers of natural history. Later, however, he
seems to have undergone a change of heart, recognizing the true extent
of his identity with the other creatures here on earth. Instead of being an
ego ruling over nature, he becomes one of the many creatures inhabiting
nature and suffering with them the natural history that settles their fate.
Does Fate reign in natural history? On this question, as on many others
that arise in our reading of Döblin’s novel, the author leaves me unsure
of his firm position.
When, near the end of the novel, Biberkopf is lying, delirious, mostly
unconscious, perilously close to death, in the detention ward of the hospi-
tal, he strongly identifies himself with the lives of the mice living in the
storeroom:

Franz’s soul has reached a deep stratum, and consciousness is

present only at intervals. The gray mice who live up in the
store-room understand him, so do the little squirrels and the field
rabbits leaping outside. The mice sit in their holes, between the
detention ward and the big central Buch building. Something
flutters from out of Franz’s soul, it roams and searches, sputtering
and questioning, it is blind and returns to its tenement, which
lies still breathing on the bed behind the wall.
The mice invite Franz to join them at their meals and
not to be sad. What is it makes him sad, they ask. Then it
develops that it is not easy for him to talk. They urge him on,
why not make a complete end of it all? Man is a hideous beast:
the enemy of enemies, the most loathsome creature on earth,
far worse even than the cats.
He says: It is not good to be living in a human body. I’d
rather cower under the earth or run across the fields and eat
whatever I can find, and the wind blows and rain falls and the
cold days come and go, that’s better than living in a human body.
The mice scamper about, and now Franz is a field-mouse
and digs along with them. [. . .] All that was animal in him is
wandering in the fields. Now there slips away from him something
that gropes and searches and makes itself free, something that
he has felt within himself before, although rarely and dimly. It
swims away across the mouse-holes, delving into the grass, grop-
ing in the earth, where the plants hide their roots and seeds.
 34 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Something is talking with them, they are able to understand it,

there is a blowing back and forth, a patter, as if the seeds were
falling on the ground. Franz’s soul is giving its seed-germs back
to the earth. But it is a bad season, cold and frost-bound, who
knows how many will be fruitful, although there is much space in
the fields, and Franz has many seeds in him, each day he blows
out of the house and scatters more seed-germs. [428–29/354–55]

Here, it is not only with animals, but also with plant life, and the earth
itself, that Franz identifies himself. In this brief moment of sympathetic
identification, suddenly expressed in dithyrambic prose, Döblin’s narrator
seems to find something of the promise of happiness. To be sure, this takes
place in a world of delirium; but for Döblin, this experience is emblematic
of a spirit in relationships and affinities that is shared by all of nature.
But human nature, endowed with consciousness, resists that identification,
asserting its egological difference, even making it metaphysical. Neverthe-
less, our humble origin spells a fate that, without exception, awaits all the
beings in nature. Even the hardest stone. We human beings, blessed with a
measure of freedom, can to some limited extent resist the course of natural
history. Ultimately, however, even freedom succumbs.
But Döblin thinks that, precisely because of the connection between
the human and the rest of nature, the same destructive forces operating
in the realm of nature are operating also in society. Underlying the social,
political, and economic causes of the world that his novels depict, the
immutable laws of nature, challenging us with all their contingencies, vio-
lence, and indifference to our hopes and fears, are ruling with absolute
power.10 Fate, or its agent, natural history, can even make use of freedom
to subvert and destroy the conditions that make freedom possible. It is
this rendering of historical life in all its facticity that transforms it into
the allegorical dimension of “Naturgeschichte,” “natural history.” The pre-
dominant facticity of the narrative—what Döblin thinks of as its strong
commitment to materialism—is repeatedly challenged by the interruption
of textual splinters that remind us, with their symbolic references, of the
metaphorical, allegorical dimension in which the presence of the inscru-
table operations of Fate is to be felt. Thus, for example, immediately fol-
lowing a brief textual passage in which Jeremiah has spoken of the blessed
and the accursed—those who trust in God and those who do not, we come
to a passage evoking an apocalyptic image of nature. Nature, appearing
allegorically as natural history and bearing an ominous message for the
godless human species, is addressed here in rhythms of striking intensity
that are even more audible, I think, in Döblin’s German:
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 35

Water in the dense black forest, black and terrible waters, you
lie so dumb. In terrible repose you lie. Your surface does not
move, when there is a storm in the forest and the firs begin to
bend, and the spider-webs are torn between the branches and
there is a sound of splitting. Then you, black waters, lie there
below in the hollow place; and the branches fall.
The wind tears at the forest; to you the storm does not
come. You have no dragons in your domain, the age of mam-
moths is gone, nothing is there to frighten anyone; the plants
decay in you; in you move fish and snails. Nothing more. Yet,
though this is so, although you are but water, awesome [unheimlich]
you are, black waters, and terrible in your repose. [BA 198/158]

The allegorical vengeance of “Naturgeschichte”—its terrifying judgment,

punishment and death—is evoked with even greater foreboding in a
description of life around Alexanderplatz in the bitterly cold winter of 1929:

A dump-heap lies before us. Dust thou art, to dust returnest. We

have built a splendid house, nobody comes in or goes out any
longer. Thus Rome, Babylon, Nineveh [. . .], all were crushed
[. . .]. [BA 166/130]

Biblical dust, prophetic dust, recalling all creaturely life to an inevitable

death, falls more than once on the characters in this novel [BA 119/89–90].
All the greatest cities of our civilization have vanished, ending in melan-
choly ruins. Is ours now already crumbling? The Weimar Republic certainly
was, as Döblin sat writing his novel. “You cannot cheat Nature!” [Ibid.].
What this brings out is the fact that Döblin, like Sebald, is disposed to
think of the historical not as such, but rather as an allegorical “Naturge-
schichte.” But for Döblin, as Roland Dollinger notes: “The wish for his-
torical fulfillment [Erfüllung] is constantly shattered by the conditions that
keep human beings confined within the realm of nature [Naturhaftigkeit des
Menschen].”11 The self struggles to rise above nature, but again and again
falls down, returned to its thralldom. Such is the story, at once inspiring and
melancholy, of our creaturely life—our “Kreatürlichkeit.” Döblin’s “natural-
ism” is saturated with symbolism and allegory, without, however, sacrificing
its concrete materialism. But haunting the experience of the world in the
novel’s metaphorical system of natural history is—the omnipresent voice
of Fate. In Döblin’s novels, it is Fate who represents and enacts natural
history, interrupting the unnamable narrator in a voice that reverberates
with the grim laughter of Death:
 36 / REDEEMING WO RDS

There is a mower death yclept. Has power, which the Lord hath
kept. Soon will he slash. [Es ist ein Schnitter, der heißt Tod, hat
Gewalt vom großen Gott. Bald wird er drein schneiden.] [BA 185/146]

There is a mower death yclept. Has power, which the Lord

hath kept. When he ’gins his scythe to whet, keener it grows
and keener yet. [Es ist ein Schnitter, der heißt Tod, hat Gewalt
vom großen Gott. Heut wetzt er das Messer, es schneidt schon viel
besser.] [BA 228/183]

Death “marches o’er the land blowing on a little flute, he wrenches his
jaws apart, and takes a trumpet, to blare upon his trumpet, and beats the
kettledrum and now it looms, a doom, gloom-black, battering ram, drooms,
and softly droooooms . . .” [BA 383/317]. Death, the true figure of Fate,
breaks into the narrative again and again; its menacing shadow, reverberat-
ing rhymes and echoes, and grim, booming laughter are never absent. And
in an uncanny way, its words are more than expressive: having taken pos-
session of language, they are actually, within the context of the narrative,
like causally efficacious “judgments”—Fate’s verdicts, or sentences. And it
is this weird effect, I suggest, that makes Döblin’s novel so distinctively
enthralling. It is a modern work committed to the cause of enlightenment,
longing for compelling empirical evidence for the promise of happiness;
and yet, its narrative is dialectically intertwined with the epic realm of the
mythic. We will again encounter Death and its terrible scythe when we
are reading Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: natural history in its literal and
allegorical dimensions.
 3

Döblin’s Conception of the Modern Novel

§1

Words and Stories

In “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” Theodor

Adorno asserted that,

[i]f the [contemporary] novel wants to remain true to its real-

istic heritage and tell how things really are, it must abandon a
realism that only serves the façade in its [ideological] work of
camouflage by reproducing it.1

What is reflected in the form of narrative montage—the form that Döblin

employs in Berlin Alexanderplatz to disrupt or suspend nineteenth-century
realism, is the experience of the disintegration and disenchantment of the
world.
Experiencing Berlin as a metropolis reflected not in its glitter and
glamour but instead in its “damaged life,” its doom, Döblin wanted to
illuminate the profound changes he perceived both in individual lives and
society as a whole. The novel must be made into a form of storytelling that
would bear witness to what has befallen the individual and society under
the rule of unrestrained capitalism. But such an undertaking, he realized,
would require a correspondingly new form and style of literature.2 Because
of changes in the character, the subjectivity, of the modern individual and
in the material and social conditions of life, especially the life of the urban
working class, the psychological novel, the classical “Bildungsroman” of
the nineteenth century, a genre that Goethe perfected, with its groundless
assumptions about progress, enlightenment, and the natural order, had to
be left behind. In fact, for Döblin, the very concept of “fiction,” of “lit-
erature,” must submit to changes that would reflect more truthfully, more

37
 38 / REDEEMING WO RDS

tellingly, the conditions of the time. For when the death and destruction
of World War I came to an end, it was manifest that the old Europe had
indeed been changed forever.
In his essay on the contemporary situation of the narrator, Adorno
reflects on a distressing fact that today’s writers of fiction must somehow
confront:

The identity of experience in the form of a life that is articulated

and possesses internal continuity—and that life was the only
thing that made the narrator’s stance possible—has disintegrated.

Consequently,

Apart from any message with ideological content, the narrator’s

implicit claim that the course of the world is still essentially one
of individuation, that the individual with his impulses and his
feelings is still the equal of fate [Verhängnis], that the inner person
is still directly capable of something, is in itself ideological [.  .  .].3

Developing in this essay the argument that Benjamin made in his essay
on “The Storyteller,” Adorno accordingly delineates what he regards as a
paradox in the narrator’s position: Even though “it is no longer possible to
tell a story, the form of the novel still requires narration.”4 Döblin’s novel
shows he clearly understood that the novel, at its origin the experience of a
disenchanted world, was the literary form specific to the bourgeois age: form
turned toward a subjectivism that removes it from, in Adorno’s words, “das
epische Gebot der Gegenstandlichkeit,” “the epic precept of objectivity.”5
Authentic storytelling is actually, however, still possible today; but the his-
torical analyses of Benjamin and Adorno are only partially in error, because
it is true that the contemporary narrative form has undergone profound
alterations—as storytelling in Döblin’s novel, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses,
demonstrates. But in Döblin’s novel, we see with moral lucidity the principal
character, Franz Biberkopf, an outcast struggling to become “the equal of
fate,”—and irredeemably failing. We see an epic struggle for subjectivity in
historically new conditions of objectivity. If Biberkopf’s Sisyphean struggle
to lead a “decent” and “respectable” life is acknowledged as heroism, it
certainly is radically different from the earlier exemplars in literary history.
With Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin sought to write an epic of and
for his time. In the modern epic, he wrote, reflecting on his own efforts,
“one finds worked out powerful basic situations, the elementary situations
of human existence.”6 Like the epics of ancient times, the contemporary
demands “exemplary actions and figures”—not “exemplary” in moral vir-
 DÖBLIN’S CONCEPTION OF THE MODERN NOVEL / 39

tue, but rather “exemplary” in characterizing something essential about the

historical moment, its “Geistesgegenwart.” (I should like to translate the
intricate temporal sense of this word as spirit’s vigilant waiting, “erwarten,”
to encounter the future of a past that is to come, but coming as a disruption
or opposition, “gegen,” to the spirit of the present.) Döblin unquestionably
intended the principal character in his novel to represent the cruelty, reckless
violence, and spiritual destitution of the “common man” living in the early
years of the twentieth century. But he also wanted to show the possibility of
a way out of this mean and brutish existence. And so it is not surprising that
some readers have read in his story a “heilsgeschichtliches Jedermannspiel”: a
morality play concerned with the redemption of this “typical” human being,
hence also with the historical possibility of a redeemed society.7 Perhaps.
But in any case, the challenge, for Döblin, would require representing with
moral lucidity the universality that is present, though not manifest, even
in the peculiar “heroism” of an individual without self-reflective subjectiv-
ity, struggling to live an ethical life in a society without authentic sociality,
without the material conditions that would make such a life possible, and
without the inheritance of an enlightened language.8 The challenge would
also involve making it possible for his readers to hear, despite ideological
distortions, the voice of humankind claiming our attention through the nar-
rative of the life of such an individual—and correlatively, through, to use
Adorno’s words here, “the protest [represented by this subjective life] against
an objective social situation that every reflective individual experiences as
hostile, cold, and oppressive.”9
According to Döblin’s conception, this contemporary epic would thus
be radically different from its ancestor: “The epic work is not a rigid form.
It must be constantly developed like drama, and specifically in constant
opposition to tradition and its representations.”10 The form must permit
narrative freedom: no predetermined plot and only a partially formed con-
ception. The author must work his way toward the theme by engaging
readers in the activity of writing. In this way, readers would also experi-
ence the process of production.11 Moreover, unlike the ancient epic, Döb-
lin’s version, consciously faithful to his materialism or naturalism, but also
resembling what Kant called “reflective judgement,” refrains from assuming
universal meaning, universal truth, instead attempting to discover, to learn
that meaning, that normative ideal, beginning with a knowledge of the
concrete particulars: since there is no longer a unified, coherent world,
he is compelled to construct a meaning, a universal, out of the otherwise
poorly understood fragments of urban reality. This is his “Wortkunst,” his
art of words, his artifice.12 But can the promise of happiness—thus, the ideal
of the universality of justice—be shown to shine through the relentless,
uncompromising negativity of the narrative and its prose style?
 40 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Döblin articulates one of the dimensions of the cultural crisis when

he argues without the reservations one might expect that books are “the
death of real, actual speech,” “der Tod der wirklichen Sprachen.”13 It feeds
on the voices that it has taken part in destroying:

And how can we speak? Who is regulating our voice? [Wer

reguliert unsere Stimme?] We suddenly have no voice; our voices
are taken away from us [man nimmt uns die Stimme] and we are
given in exchange sorry print fonts [traurige Drucktypen]. How
can fonts influence the rhythm of our language, since it is actual
speech, the inhaling and exhaling, the cadence of the voice [die
Kadenze des Tonfalls], according to the meaning that constructs
the sentence and puts the sentences in order.14

The traditional form of literary language is not only responsible for the
death of the voice; it is even responsible for the death of language. So
Döblin attempts to write works of literature in which, he hopes, voices—
the voices of the street, of everyday life—can really be heard, heard and
reclaimed: novels in which language recovers the power it once enjoyed
in the age of storytelling.15 Influenced by the experiments in Expressionism
that took Germany by storm in the early years of the twentieth century,
Döblin’s prose creates narrative images that are as sharply chiseled, as boldly
delineated, and as intensely expressive as the stark, eye-riveting Expres-
sionist images reproduced in the woodblock novels of Frans Masereel, the
Belgian graphic artist whose works emboldened German writers to con-
struct new, more immediately evocative styles of prose. These attempts to
intensify expressive power in the language of storytelling draw on Romantic
revolutionary idealism, but could not be more at odds with Romantic nos-
talgia and pathos. Indeed, in Döblin’s hands the vocation of writing calls for
experiments in recovering the critical power of language, probing the limits
of its conventional power to arouse and enlighten the reluctant conscience
of the people; accordingly, writing must involve experiments in mobiliz-
ing the motivational power of language—its power to transform discursive
abstractions into emotionally and morally compelling stories. Deliberately
subverting this undertaking, however, Döblin has permitted the voices of
everyday life, the voices of “real, actual speech,” to be overpowered by a
tyrannical metaphysics of language—a metaphysics in which a brutal society
has invested its consciousness and its capital. In due time, I shall explain
why I think he has done this.
In his journals, Emerson argued for the language of everyday life: “The
language of the street,” he declared, “is always strong.” And after noting
 DÖBLIN’S CONCEPTION OF THE MODERN NOVEL / 41

some examples, he said: “Cut these words & they would bleed; they are
vascular & alive; they walk & run.”16 Döblin tells the story of Biberkopf’s
damnation and redemption in the voices of the people, using their words,
patterns of speech, and grammatical forms. But are the resources of this
idiom, though strongly expressive of suffering and equally strong in calling
attention to the oppressive conditions, also sufficient for thinking and com-
municating the new utopian form of sociability that needs to be created?
In the course of writing stories, Döblin realized that, “In every style
of language there dwells a productive power and a compulsive character”:
“In jedem Sprachstil wohnt eine Produktivkraft und ein Zwangscharakter
inne.”17 As a writer, Döblin realized that he must abandon the assumption
“that there is a single German language and that one can think whatever
one wants within it. The master knows that there are many linguistic
levels on which everything must move.”18 Accordingly, the task for the
writer is to find within the material resources of language that power, that
compelling form, and retrieve language as “a concrete, blossoming phe-
nomenon,” “ein blühendes, konkretes Phänomen.”19 Despite his literary
rebellion and his innovations, however, he never wavered in his belief that
“the handed down and inherited materials of literature [das übergegebene,
überlieferte Material der Literatur] already provide the authentic means of
production [Produktionsmittel] for the forming of the contents of conscious-
ness.”20 “Tägliches Wortmaterial.”
Approaching the writing of fiction with this conception of language
and style in his thoughts, Döblin created a dense, immeasurably rich narra-
tive texture, a “Kinostil” montage of texts communicating with one another
in subtly intricate ways, registering the sounds and voices of the city and
engaging ready-made material taken from folksongs, old ballads, popular
lyrics, advertisements, slogans, newspaper clippings, literary works, street
jargon, local dialect, worn-out clichés, doggerel, shop signs, street signs,
government documents, weather forecasts, and, bearing messages not to be
ignored, the Old Testament. In one of his essays, he remarks, “I am not
I, but rather the street, the streetlights, this or that occurrence [Ereignis],
nothing more. That is what I am calling the style of stone [den steinernen
Stil nennen].”21 Ulrich Dronske is therefore right to observe that Döblin’s
writing is very much a process in which things, “Gegenstände,” become
speech, acquire, together with their names, unique communicative voices.22
Although Biberkopf’s life is presented in a coherent narrative, this
narrative is frequently broken up, interrupted by sometimes clashing,
sometimes cryptic textual fragments, warning, admonishing, commanding,
judging, predicting, interpreting. Döblin experiments, in his novel, with
different methods of textual integration, different “functional possibilities
 42 / REDEEMING WO RDS

of meaning,” different ways of engaging and disengaging the reader.23 Thus,

for example, he will compellingly draw us, his readers, into a narrative
scene, making us feel as if we were in the grip of a reality, only to cast us
suddenly out of the scene, annulling the illusion of witnessing, of “Verge-
genwärtigung,” with an alienating montage effect—a Brechtian “Verfrem-
dungseffekt.”24 But there are also moments in the text where the opposite
effect is intended: textual passages that draw readers into the immediacy
of the story, compelling them to undergo empathically the experience of
the character.
Döblin’s way of writing produces strong dynamic tensions, juxtaposing
different literary styles and tonalities: a moment of parody or satire next to
a moment of biblical solemnity; a light, comedic moment, silly or grotesque,
next to a sublime moment of epic tragedy; the expression of a banality next
to the expression of a remarkable insight; an episode represented first in a
refined, elevated style of language, abruptly followed by its characterization
in the crude idiom of the street. He borrows phrases and lines from the
revered classics of literature, recasting them in a satirical or ironic mode. On
one-and-the-same page, sometimes even in one sentence, he will create an
inseparable mix of narration, stream-of-consciousness, narrator comment,
and a ready-made phrase or colloquialism. Consider, for example, this:

The man pushed a bunch of old papers under Franz’s arm, Franz
sighed, looked at the package under his arm: all right, he’ll prob-
ably be there. What’ll I do there anyway, shall I go, wonder if
it’s worth while handling magazines like that? The pansies; he
just gives me this stuff and expects me to carry it home and read
it. A fellow might feel sorry for those boys, but they’re none o’
my business. [BA 73–74/51]

And also this, which ends with a rhyme that calls attention to the language
and its artifice:

“You’re sweet, come on, I’ll pour you a glass of Mampe brandy,
thirty pfennigs.” He lies there, stretched out at full length. “What
do I care for Mampe? They knocked hell out of me. I did my
time in Tegel, I did, what for, I’d really like to know. First with
the Prussians in the trenches, and then in Tegel. I ain’t a human
being any more.” “Well, but you’re not going to cry here. Come
on, open your li’l beakie, big man’s gotta drink. We’re a jolly lot,
we are, we’re as happy as can be, we laugh and sing with delight
from morning until night.” And the dump heap for that. Why,
 DÖBLIN’S CONCEPTION OF THE MODERN NOVEL / 43

they might have chopped off the fellow’s head at once, and be
done with it, the lousy dogs. Could have dumped me on the
garbage heap, why not. “Come on, big man, take another glass.
I’d walk a mile for Mampe’s brandy, it makes you feel so hale
and dandy. [“Tomm, droßer Mann, noch ein Mampe. Sinds die
Augen, geh zu Mampe, gieß dir ein auf die Lampe.”] [BA 36/22]

And finally, this, with its compelling martial rhythms and strong rhymes,
again drawing attention to language as the material out of which the story
is constructed:

Right foot, left foot, right foot left foot [Rechtes Bein, linkes Bein,
rechtes Bein, linkes Bein], marching slowly in step, don’t crowd,
Miss [Fraulein]. Careful! Cop and a crowd! What’s that? Make
haste and you get laced. [Eile mit Keile.] Hoohoohoo, hoohoohoo,
the roosters crow. Franz was happy, the faces all looked nicer.
[BA 132/100]

Passages like this abound.

There is no omniscient narrator; instead, as in this third textual
extract, the narrator, sometimes difficult to distinguish from the author
and sometimes from the principal character, is thrown into situations that
make it impossible to report with omniscient detachment what is happen-
ing. Sometimes the author, enjoying a freedom that neither narrator nor
characters can have, is the one who is speaking, offering comments on
events, interpreting, judging, addressing the character, or addressing us,
the readers. And at other times, there is a mysterious and chilling voice,
source or origin unknown, which seems to be the voice of Fate or the
voice of Death.
I will have more to say about the narrative style of Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz in Chapter 4, where I will complete my argument for the
connection between his language and the overpowering force of Fate.

§2

Montage: Freedom or Fate?

For the Surrealists, there is meaning in chance constellations of events and

objects; but this meaning cannot be fully grasped. However, if the meaning
were to be totally beyond understanding, how could it serve to illuminate
 44 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the cause of freedom? Would it not in the end serve the politics of mysti-
cism or fatalism? It was with these questions that Benjamin, disappointed
in its revolutionary prospects, reluctantly turned away from Surrealism.
In his dissertation on The Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin
contends that,

In the field of allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune

[. . .]. The false appearance [Schein] of totality is extinguished.25

The same must be said, as he knew, about modernist montage, since it is a

construction composed of fragments. Thus, one reason why Döblin turned
to montage in the writing of Berlin Alexanderplatz was that it would consti-
tute, if only in the realm of fiction, of semblance, a rejection of systems and
totalities, hence also a decisive repudiation of totalitarian politics. At the
same time, however, it is inherent in the logic of montage that it creates,
and leaves, manifold gaps, openings in the texture of the narrative. This
would seem to be inimical to determinism. However, in Döblin’s novel,
what often enters these gaps, these openings, is Fate. But there is an ambi-
guity in what is called “Fate,” for it can mean either determinism, negating
the very possibility of freedom, or it can mean chance, the unexpected,
thus giving freedom at least a chance to engage. My claim in this regard
is that in Döblin’s great novel, montage is correspondingly ambiguous. It
opens the narrative to Fate; but it leaves unresolved the question whether
it favors the course of freedom. Treating individual life and social life in
terms of natural history risks making these forms of creaturely life seem
not only enigmatic but powerless by casting them beyond the possibility
of comprehension entirely in terms of human agency.
In the gaps or openings that montage creates, however, questions arise
about the meaning of the textual juxtapositions. And these questions solicit
the reader’s participation in the production of that meaning. Likewise, the
language of Döblin’s narrative is frequently composed in a way that gives
the curious reader, and perhaps also Biberkopf himself, considerable inter-
pretive freedom. In fact, using words that leave much to be guessed or
imagined in a section of the sixth chapter, bearing the heading, “Arise,
weak Spirit, and get on your Feet,” Döblin challenges this weak spirit to
arise and exercise its freedom:

Something [Einiges] has become clearer to the old boy, who drags
himself through the streets now, in order not to croak in his
room, something [einiges] has become clearer than it was to this
old boy who is now running away, away from death. [BA 237/191]
 DÖBLIN’S CONCEPTION OF THE MODERN NOVEL / 45

But before the scene ends, Döblin, or his narrator, or perhaps Biberkopf
talking to himself, will indicate what that “something” is:

Life is a hellish thing, isn’t it? You knew it once before, that time
in Henschke’s saloon when they wanted to kick you out with
your armband, and that fellow attacked you, and you hadn’t done
anything to him. And I thought that the world was peaceful,
that there was law and order, but there’s something out of order
[es ist etwas nicht in Ordnung], there they are and how terrible
they seem now! That was in a moment of clairvoyance. [Ibid.]

Does Biberkopf now know something we readers still do not? Has he really
achieved moral lucidity? Should we trust the claim? The scene ends here,
a fragment leaving us with more questions than answers, leaving us still
feeling in the dark. But there is something infinitely more important than
that knowledge: leaving us to interpret on our own what there is to be
learned from Biberkopf’s experience of the urban life-world, the author, or
his narrator, has given our freedom as readers the acknowledgment and
recognition that all freedom demands. The montage structure, only briefly
opening the curtain on a scene, is a form that obliges its readers to exer-
cise their freedom—a freedom of more consequence than the semblance of
freedom that has perhaps been bestowed upon the fictional character. If his
montage is an opening within the narrative structure to interventions by
chance, Fate, or divine compassion, interventions that alter the direction or
momentum of the story itself, it is also an opening to different interpreta-
tions of the story’s meaning: it is an invitation that disputes the power of
Fate and affirms the freedom of language and the freedom of the reader.26
In Politics of Friendship, describing the law of the double bind, which
holds us responsible for what it is beyond our freedom to determine, Der-
rida takes us to a place that is recognizable, I think, as like the place to
which Döblin’s narrative takes us, ultimately leaving us, as its readers, to
settle its unsettling moral claims:

We are caught, the one and the other, in a sort of heteronomic

and dissymmetrical curving of social space—more precisely, a
curving of the relation to the other: prior to all organized socius,
all politeia, all determined “government,” before all “law.” Prior
to and in front of all law, in Kafka’s [multiple] sense[s] of being
“before the law.”
But let there be no mistake: before all determinate law,
as natural or as positive law, but not before the law in general.
 46 / REDEEMING WO RDS

For the heteronomical and dissymmetrical warping of a law

of originary sociality is also a law, perhaps the very essence of
law. What is unfolding at this moment—and we are finding it
a disturbing experience—is perhaps only the silent deployment
of that strange violence that has forever insinuated itself into
the origin of the most innocent experiences of friendship or of
justice. We have begun to respond.

However: “We are already caught up, already caught out, in a certain
responsibility, and the most ineluctable responsibility—as if it were pos-
sible to think a responsibility without freedom.” In fact, he says, “We are
invested with an undeniable responsibility at the moment we begin to
signify something.” Moreover: “This responsibility assigns freedom to us
without leaving it with us, as it were—we see it coming from the other. It
is assigned to us by the other, from the place of the other, well before any
hope of reappropriation allows us the assumption of this responsibility.”27
For Franz, who has vowed finally to take responsibility for his life, it seems
as if there is a monstrous, inhuman Other simultaneously requiring an
ethical life but also restricting his freedom. In creating this character and
casting him into a situation of such adversity, Döblin is, somewhat like
Kafka, thrusting us, his readers, before the law. What is our answer, our
response, to the pressures of the Other? After all, are we not, in a certain
sense, accomplices in Franz’s crime? Having succumbed to the illusions in
reading a work of fiction, we believed we could escape moral judgment.
Döblin will not let us get away so easily.
Occasional remarks directly addressing the reader, such as “”Now let’s
get on with our story,” “Nu mal weiter im Text” [BA 317/259], break open
the narrative, dispelling the illusion and giving recognition thereby to the
reader’s burden of freedom, confining the forces of Fate, at least temporarily,
within the context of the narrative. [See also BA 217–18/173–74.]
 4

The Language of Fate

§1

Metaphysical Force-Fields: The Archaic Lives On

Words bear the stamp of the metaphysics that imposed itself through,
precisely, this language. [.  .  .] Deconstructive writing always attacks the
body of this language [. . .].
—Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other1

Banished from rational thought, mimetic forms of behaviour exact a

terrible revenge.”
—James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood:
Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg”2

My argument here, briefly stated, is that, in Döblin’s narrative, the poten-

tiality of authentic human speech and the potentiality of authentic human
action—speech and action in Hannah Arendt’s political sense—have been
usurped, taken over by the metaphysics of language, a dangerous aestheti-
cization of language expressing and enacting a causality of Fate.3 Language
struggles to maintain its freedom; but Fate, often taking the form of a dread-
ful syncopation, a counterrhythmic eruption into the narrative, frequently
prevails, casting a spell over language, abducting it, and using it for its
own causality. If, as Benjamin claims, “the rhythm of Messianic nature [is]
happiness,” then what Döblin’s prose introduces into the narrative might
be described, borrowing Hölderlin’s term for a different narrative operation,
as a “counterrhythmic” warning.

47
 48 / REDEEMING WO RDS

As the narrative moves with compelling logic toward its ending, Bib-
erkopf is in hospital facing imminent death: “Franz,” we read, “has Death’s
word in his mouth and nobody is going to tear it away from him; he turns
it around in his mouth; it is a stone made of stone, and no nourishment
comes out of it” [BA 435/361]. He is finally fighting no longer against
Death, who has been stalking him relentlessly throughout the unfolding
of his story. Now, surrendering, he wants to be fully conscious until the
very last moment, as he is taken by Death into the realm of its reign. His
time, however, has not yet come. He is for the time being to be saved:
not only from Death, but also from the life of crime and violence that had
been his fate. The voice of Death, however, will not cease to reverberate
in his ears, teaching him humility, the distinctive virtue of creaturely life
[BA 441/366].
Important though a certain engagement with “naturalism” in nar-
rative representation is for Döblin, his use of montage works against it,
weakening narrative coherence, disrupting the temporal order, and turning
objects and scenes into citations detached from their contexts. The effect
of this denaturalizing is, I think, to call attention to the operations of
language: frequent narrative interruptions, bursts of syncopation, conflict-
ing discursive fragments, and sudden shifts in perspective enable Döblin
to concentrate our attention on objects and scenes as events of language.4
And his prose style, with its repetition, alliteration, pounding rhythms
and counterrhythms, intensely reverberating energy, and seemingly unstop-
pable word flows, constantly reminds us that the novel is a composition
of linguistic events. Drawing inspiration from the “Sturm” aesthetic, and
from German Expressionism, as well as from Marxism, his use of language
emphasizes at once the sensuous materiality of language in a praxis of
writing and the power of language to create out of nothing but its own
materials a convincing world of fiction and, imposing its will, cause things
to happen within that world.5 As Neil Donahue has argued, in Döblin’s use
of language, language is “neither purely autonomous, a construction unto
itself, nor is it purely referential, merely a window onto a narrated world;
rather, language is calling attention at once to itself and to its objects of
referentiality. The two impulses interfere with one another constructively to
sharpen the readers’ critical experience of both the fictional world and the
real words.”6 In their discrepancy lies the challenge to ethical life, raising
questions about the promise of happiness. As we already noted, however
immersed readers may be in the unfolding of the story that Döblin wants
to tell, they are never permitted to forget the dependence of that story on
the syntactic, semantic, rhythmic, and tonal possibilities inherent in the
linguistic materials This is Döblin’s materialism.
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 49

The master key to Döblin’s style, his way of writing, was expressed
with exact insight when he reported, in “The Construction of the Epic
Work,” that,

You think that you are speaking, but in fact you are being
spoken, or you think that you are writing, but in fact you are
being written.7

This thought is a repetition of what he said in “The Writer and the State,”
an earlier essay:

Already in a peaceful time writers observed that something

fatally self-willed [etwas fatal Eigenwilliges] lies in their words:
they believe they are writing, but instead they are being written.
Writers must constantly be on guard in order to assert themselves
against language, must get around it like a wild beast tamer [wie
ein Tierbändiger umgehen].8

This language that somehow “writes itself” is not “automatic writing,” but
writing that is forced to submit to language, exposing itself to what language
demands; it is writing that does not originate within the writer’s subjectiv-
ity; nor is it authorized by the writer’s interiority. But this submission to
imposed language, this “being written,” happens in at least three different
ways in Döblin’s novel. Sometimes, it expresses his positive commitment
to let the objective social reality speak for itself, presenting that reality as
much as possible without the intervention of his “subjective” interpretation.
In this way, language comes to him compellingly, giving the impression of
a certain truthful immediacy, communicating the actualities of the life-
world, imparting voices and sounds of people and things. This is writing as
working with a historically inherited language, writing as a material praxis,
engaged in a struggle to break free of the historical weight of words. But
sometimes, his language exhibits a moment of despair and resignation, as
when he succumbs to the overwhelming authority of words no longer able
to represent objective social reality honestly and accurately, ending a defi-
ant struggle against the sedimented history of language. And sometimes,
as in the story of Franz Biberkopf, it seems to be a question of the writer
and his character overcome by words that, having become an absolutely
independent power, forcefully enact the causality of Fate, mocking the
assertiveness and defiance of both author and character.
Thus, if we heed Döblin’s experience, it is perhaps not altogether
surprising that Berlin Alexanderplatz ends without any sequel to the story
 50 / REDEEMING WO RDS

of language as the causality of Fate. Despite his exertions, the continuation

of the novel in a story the utopian substance of which would be language
as the causality of freedom still eluded him, its impossibility undoubtedly
a condition of that historical moment.
Influenced by a renewed encounter with Martin Heidegger’s bold
overturning of subjectivism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty jotted down in his
late “Working Notes” thoughts about our experience with language that are
strikingly similar to Döblin’s, except that they do not serve metaphysical
powers, as happens in the novel:

1. It is not we who are speaking, it is the truth that speaks

itself in the depths of speech.9

2. That language has us and that it is not we who have language.

That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak
of being.10

Of course, I recognize that Döblin likewise wanted to take the experience of

language in the novel out of the subjectivism that had, in the early years of
the novel, captured it. However one might reasonably wonder whether the
self-effacement that Döblin claims as author—his disappearance as such by
merging his identity with things and reversing the relationship between the
writer and his language, making himself the recipient of its gifts rather than
its source, its author—does not sacrifice too much, namely, the experience
of freedom. Might there be a way in which Biberkopf’s life as a puppet
of Fate is a reflection of his author’s sense of helplessness, of diminished
freedom, living in a nation defeated in the First World War and suffering
through the last years of the Weimar Republic? Could the oppressiveness of
the social, political, and economic conditions of Germany in the formative
years of Döblin’s writing find as their expression in his work the sense that
language is out of our control, is, as it were, mysteriously dictated by social
forces in possession of its signs and meanings? Might the peculiar causal
efficacy of the language of Fate be the true reflection of the sentiment pre-
vailing at that time among the German people, a reflection of their sense
of powerlessness to determine the course and meaning of events in their
time? This truth content, at any rate, is what I want to claim.
In any case, this experience with language clearly was decisive for his
process of writing. But what I also want to show is that this experience is
crucial for my interpretation of Fate as taking over the function and the
effect of the language he deploys in telling the story of Biberkopf’s life.
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 51

In an essay written in 1916, Benjamin distinguishes between the

expressive character of language in tragedy and the expressive character
of language in the German mourning play: “Whereas in tragedy the eternal
inflexibility of the spoken word is exalted, the mourning play concentrates
in itself the infinite resonance of its sound.”11 In Döblin’s epic, language
draws, in effect, on the expressive qualities of both genres: it speaks in a
commanding voice, with the clarity of knowledge; but it also concentrates
in itself the infinite resonance of its sound, letting us hear, in hammer-like
rhythms and repetitions, the struggle it undergoes as the agent, in the novel,
of the causality of Fate, an inflexible and implacable force.
Referring to Döblin’s evocation of stone in the characterization of his
style, Neil Donahue remarks that,

[Döblin] uses the pen as a chisel to break words out of their

traditional usages as polished literary convention in order to open
instead a quarry of verbal raw material from historical reality,
with all its hard edges and precipices. The novel as a quarry of
language challenges the reader to move along its hard edges while
looking ahead at the daunting aggregation and new formations.12

Donahue also observes there that, in a uniquely innovative way, Döblin’s

prose makes words function as a form of action, operating not only within
the narrative structure but also outside that narrative context—an interven-
tion in the real world, appealing to the readers’ sense of responsibility. I
concur with this observation, but want to give it more concreteness, so that
it illuminates the connection between language and Fate that is crucial for
the actual unfolding plot of Döblin’s novel and therefore, correspondingly,
for our understanding of its peculiar symbolic and allegorical dynamics.
That, in any case, is the intention at work in this present chapter. And
the argument that I wish to make is that, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, language
is not only used so as to be expressive of Fate; it is also used in a way that
fills it with the force of Fate. Language in this novel somehow becomes Fate
itself, a voice that is neither the author’s nor the narrator’s, but a voice
without a name, without an origin—a voice sometimes directly address-
ing Biberkopf, assaulting him with admonishments, warnings, maledictions,
imprecations, counsel, and prophecies.
In Döblin’s prefatory headings, preceding each of the nine chapters,
language demonstrates in an uncanny way this minatory power, this impla-
cable force of Fate. These headings may seem at first to be merely descrip-
tive, telling us in abbreviated form what is going to take place in the
 52 / REDEEMING WO RDS

section we are on the verge of reading. But in a strange and disconcerting

way, the words carry the causal force of Fate. It is as if, exceeding even
the power of prediction or prophecy, they are actually going to make what
they describe come about. Here, again, is what precedes the first section
of the fifth chapter:

A quick recovery, our man stands again where he stood before,

he has not understood anything, nor learned anything more. Now
the first heavy blow falls on him. He is dragged into a criminal
case, it’s against his will, he defends himself, but the issue he
must face [Er wird in ein Verbrechen hineingerissen, er will nicht,
er wehrt sich, aber er muß müssen].
Fiercely and bravely, with hand and foot, he tries to win
the race, but it’s no use, he’s beaten, the issue he must face [Er
wehrt sich tapfer und wild mit Händen und Füßen, aber es hilft
nichts, es geht über ihn, er muß müssen]. [BA 163/128]

The emphatic repetition, and of course the rhyming, even when it is weak,
decisively reinforce the impression I am suggesting. The heading for the
sixth chapter creates a similar impression:

Now you see Franz Biberkopf neither boozing nor hiding away.
You see him laughing now: we must make the best of things each
day. He’s in a rage because they had coerced him, they’ll never
coerce him again, not even the strongest of men. He clenches
his fist in the face of this sinister power of woe, something’s
against him without a doubt, tho’ he can’t quite make it out,
but it’s bound to come about, he must suffer the hammer’s blow.
[Er hebt gegen die dunkle Macht die Faust, er fühlt etwas gegen sich
stehen, aber er kann es nicht sehen, es muß noch geschehen, daß der
Hammer gegen ihn saust]. [BA 215/173]

The English translation catches some of the rhyming, but in the course of
achieving that effect, its force has been weakened, sacrificing the rhythmic
impact, striking relentlessly like a hammer, that can be felt in the German.
Once again, I think, language is not merely expressive of Fate, but also
causally enacting it. The heading for the final ninth chapter strikes me as
perhaps the strongest instance of this mythic power:

Now Franz Biberkopf’s earthly journey is ended. It is now time

for him to be crushed outright. He falls into the hands of the
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 53

dark power called death, and that, it seems to him, is a fitting

place to stay. But he learns what this power thinks of him, in a
way he did not expect, which surpasses everything he has met
with up till now.
They settle accounts. He is enlightened concerning his
ignorance, his pride, his every blunder. And then our old Franz
Biberkopf breaks down, his whole life goes asunder. [BA 411/341]

The impression that these headings make is continually reinforced through-

out the book.
Another way in which Döblin makes the unfolding of his narrative
seem driven, compelled, by the force of Fate is through the use of sounds.
Pursued relentlessly by the counterbeats of Fate, Biberkopf is now in the
Buch Asylum, losing his battle against Death:

Boom, zoom, the wind stretches his chest, draws in his breath,
then he inhales as if he were a barrel, each breath heavy as a
mountain, the mountain approaches, and crash—it rolls against
the house. Rumbling of basses. Boom, zoom, the trees sway, they
can’t keep time, they’re swaying right, they’re swaying left, and
now he knocks them down. Falling weights, hammering air, a
rattle and a roar, and a crash, boom, zoom. I’m yourn, come on,
we’ll soon be there, boom, night, night.
Franz hears the calls. Boom, zoom, they do not stop, can’t
they be quiet for a while? . . . [BA 420/347]

The German text is stronger and more intense, both in its sound effects—
long, reverberating syllables, sharp, percussive syllables—and in its rapid
succession of pounding rhythms:

Wumm wumm, der Wind macht seine Brust weit, er zieht den
Atem ein, dann haucht er aus wie ein Faß, jeder Atem schwer wie
ein Berg, der Berg kommt an, krach, rollt er gegen das Haus; rollt
der Baß. Wumm wumm, die Bäume schwingen, können nicht Takt
halten, es geht nach rechts, sie stehen noch links, nun knacht er sie
über. Stürzende Gewichte, hämmernde Luft, Knackern, Knisten,
Krache, wumm wumm, ich bin deine, komm doch, wir sind bald
da, wumm, Nacht, Nacht.
Franz hört das Rufen. Wumm wumm, hört nicht auf, kann
schon aufhören.
 54 / REDEEMING WO RDS

The force, now Death personified, gains momentum, gains in its compul-
sion; and it mocks his helplessness. Language has become metaphysical
dictation, no longer human speech:

Boom, crash, zoom, crash, boom, a battering ram, zoom, a ham-

mering at the door. Bashing and crashing, crackling and smash-
ing. Who is this lying fool, Franz Biberkopf, this crying mule,
this sighing ghoul, he’d like to wait here till it snows, then, he
thinks, we’re gone and won’t come back again. [. . .] But never
mind, we’ll make things hot for him, we have bones made of
iron, crash door, look out, smash door, hole in the door, crack in
the door, look out, no door, just an empty hole, a gaping hole,
boom, zoom, watch out, boom, zoom. [BA 423/350]

Whereas Death “the mower,” as we have seen abundantly, stalked Franz

throughout the earlier chapters in the narrative, interrupting the narrative
again and again, merely warning, admonishing, counseling, and reminding
him of its presence, its omnipotence, here in the final chapter it addresses
Biberkopf, its defenseless victim, more directly. With Franz laid low, the
prosopopoeia is emboldened; the force in its voice turns thunderous; it is
invincible. With victory—the sentence of Fate, assured, Death assumes a
different tone:

The Powers of Storm [Die Sturmgewaltigen] are silent now, another

song has started, they all know the song and him who sings it.
When he lifts up his voice, they are always silent, even those
who on earth happen to be among the most impetuous.
Death has begun his slow, slow song, and he sings it like a
stammerer, repeating each word; when he has finished singing a
verse, he repeats the first before he starts anew. His song is like
the hiss of a saw. Quite slowly, the saw ascends and then plunges
down into the flesh, shrilling louder, clearer and higher, till it
comes to the end of a note, and rests. Then it withdraws, slowly,
slowly, hissing, higher and clearer grows the note, it shrills, and
then it plunges into the flesh once more. [BA 429/356]

Fate gets its victory: Franz surrenders to Death. But after he is said to
acknowledge his guilt, overcome by remorse, and to demonstrate his
anguish, Döblin, practicing his literary art, quickly resurrects him in lan-
guage, claiming him to be released somehow from the causality of Fate,
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 55

giving him new life. Or should it be said, instead, that this is what Döblin
claims and wants us to believe?

§2

The Problematic Ending: Unfulfilled Historical Time

[Art] embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom. The

fact that through its very existence it stands outside the evil spell that
prevails allies it to a promise of happiness [Glücksversprechen], a promise
it itself somehow expresses in its expression of despair.
—Theodor Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?”13

To have acquired a language is not, in truth, to possess its words but

only to have gotten a shimmering indication [of their coming], a hint
from which to release and receive the words that are longed for.
—Karl Kraus, “Sprüche und Widersprüche”14

The more profoundly society fails to deliver the reconciliation that

the bourgeois spirit promised as the enlightenment of myth, the more
irresistibly humour is pulled down into the netherworld, and laughter,
once the image of humanness, becomes a regression to inhumanity.
—Theodor Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?”15

In an early draft of Goethe’s Faust, Part One, the play ends with Mephistoph-
eles confirming the conventional attitudes of the time regarding Gretchen’s
drowning of her love-child: “She is condemned,” he proclaims. “Sie ist geri-
chtet!” However, in the published version that appeared in 1806, some thirty-
one years later, the fateful judgment that Mephistopheles announces is now
refuted by “a voice from above,” asserting “Ist gerettet!”: “She is saved.”16
With that bold revision, Goethe proclaimed his sympathies for a revolution
in sexual mores. But astute contemporaries did not fail to recognize that he
could save her from that ending only by a “deus ex machina.”
 56 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Virtually every critic commenting on Döblin’s novel has complained

that the ending is problematic: what the author gives us seems, at best,
ambiguous or inconclusive, and in any case not at all compelling.
In the final chapter, we read about Reinhold’s trial for the murder of
Biberkopf’s girlfriend, Mieze, and about Biberkopf in hospital, confronting
a seemingly inevitable death and at last acknowledging his guilt, feeling
remorse, and assuming responsibility for all his crimes and misdeeds. “Imme-
diately after the trial,” Döblin reports, “Biberkopf is offered a job as assistant
doorman in a medium-sized factory.” But after informing us that his “hero”
accepts the offer, he tells us: “I have nothing further to report about his
life.” “We have,” he says, “come to the end of our story. It has proven a
long one, but it had to unfold itself, on and on, till it reached its climax,
that culminating point which at last illuminates the whole thing” [BA
452–53/376]. The novel, however, does not actually come to an end with
these words. There are more words to come [BA 453–54/377]: Biberkopf is
declared to be “no longer alone on Alexanderplatz,” feeling himself more
connected, more integrated into society. He has supposedly learned that
“much unhappiness comes from walking alone.” Moreover, he is reported
to realize that, “A ship cannot lie in safety without a big anchor, and a
man cannot exist without many other men. The true and the false I will
know better now.” But he has also realized that, in the midst of a crowd,
or in moving with the masses, it is difficult to maintain one’s individuality,
difficult to resist following the crowd, and difficult to resist Fate—indeed,
a causality of Fate that is expressly identified with words: “The words come
rolling up to us, and we must be careful not to get run over.” Hence my
principal claim regarding language, namely, that in this novel, it is not
merely expressing, but actually becoming a causal force—the force of Fate.
Soon enough, Biberkopf is put to the test, measuring the character
of his autonomy, his strength to resist Fate: “Often, they march past his
window with flags and music and singing” [BA 454/377]. Who are these
marchers? They could be striking workers; they could be revolutionaries
marching for the victory of Communism. But in the context of this novel,
it is more likely that they are marching for National Socialism. However,
“Biberkopf watches coolly from his door, he’ll not join the parade any
more.” An old inner voice, all too familiar, speaks out: “Shut your trap,
in step, old cuss, march along with the rest of us.” But this time, although
still for reasons that are essentially a question of self-interest, he resists the
urging: “But if I march along, I shall have to pay later on with my head, pay
for the schemes of others. That’s why I first figure out everything, and only
if everything’s quite O.K., and suits me, I’ll take action.” “Reason,” he tells
himself, “is the gift of man, jackasses replace it with a clan.” “Dem Mensch
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 57

ist gegeben die Vernunft, die Ochsen bilden statt dessen eine Zunft.” Who
is speaking this last sentence? Whose voice is it, really? The rhyme makes
the counsel easy to remember; but it also tends to diminish the gravity of
its truth, reducing it to the style of a nursery lesson or the fragment of a
limerick. And as an expression of old conventional wisdom, that sentence
belies Biberkopf’s claim to have achieved genuine independence of thought.
At this point, an inner voice gives him a prophetic warning:

Keep awake, keep awake, for there is something happening in

the world. The world is not made of sugar. If they drop gas-
bombs, I’ll have to choke to death; nobody knows why they
are dropped, but that’s neither here nor there, we had the time
to prepare for it.

Biberkopf considers the worst:

If war comes along and they conscript me, and I don’t know
why, and the war’s started without me, well, then it’s my fault,
it serves me right. [. . .] Let it hail and storm, there’s no way of
guarding against it, but we can defend ourselves against many
other things. So I will not go on shouting as once I did: Fate,
Fate! [BA 454/377–78]

“It’s no use,” he thinks, “revering it merely as Fate, we must look at it,

grasp it, down it, and not hesitate.” Again the rhyming, sometimes strong,
sometimes weaker, but always with a forceful, pounding rhythm, which
ironically reinforces our sense that the causality of Fate is at work, contra-
dicting the resolve to defy it: “Das muß man nicht als Schicksal verehren,
man muß es ansehen, anfassen und zerstören.” Despite that resolve, though,
it is obvious that he still, in effect, is turning his life over to Fate—Fate
and its servant language.
And Fate is still threatening to induce him to abandon his precari-
ous struggle for courage and join the masses, the people of the metropolis.
Here, again, is its language:

The drums roll behind him. Marching, marching. We tramp to

war with iron tread, a hundred minstrels march ahead, red of
night and red of day, deathward leads the way. [BA 454/378]

Following this image of foreboding, in a different font of diminished size,

and separated by some spacing, we come, finally, to the real end of the
 58 / REDEEMING WO RDS

novel, with words that echo Fidelio’s battle cry of revolution, “Zur Freiheit!
Zur Freiheit! Zur ewige Freiheit!,” but leave us, the readers of this tale,
with haunting uncertainties. Who are the men whom Biberkopf witnesses
marching here on their way to war? And when and where, and in solidar-
ity with whom, will Franz Biberkopf take a decisive stand? And why does
Döblin leave the identity of the marchers ambiguous? Are they Nazis?
Communists? Liberals? What does this indeterminacy say, not only about
Franz, but also about his author? And about that historical moment? The
promise of happiness hangs in the balance:

The way leads to freedom, to freedom it goes. The old world

must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn! And get in step, and right
and left and right and left, marching: marching on, we tramp
to war, a hundred minstrels march before, with fife and drum,
drrum, brrum, for one the road goes straight, for another it goes
to the side, one stands fast, another’s killed, one rushes past,
another’s voice is stilled, drrum, brrumm, drrumm!

The Weimar Republic is crumbling; the National Socialists, gaining

in power, are every day becoming bolder, and storm clouds, as of imminent
war, are beginning to accumulate over the metropolis. (We know that, as
early as 1926, after Goebbels took over the leadership of the Nazi Party in
Berlin, the local members, emboldened in their ambitions, became increas-
ingly more active.) Nevertheless, according to the narrative, as Death
danced around him, Biberkopf is said to have experienced a redemptive
revelation, making him change his ways. When Germany goes to war, what
will Biberkopf do? Where will his sympathies lie? Will he fall in step with
any of the political parties, marching with the Right or marching with the
Left, each side offering a different totalitarian actualization for its promise
of worker solidarity? Or will he shun their dogmatism, their summons to
violence, and side with the cause of freedom, finding a different solidarity in
living the life of a good citizen, a good neighbor? Is his withdrawing from
participation in the marching of the masses a declaration of freedom? Is it
wisdom or cowardice? Is it moral lucidity or moral confusion? The masses
are marching, mobilized by the Right and the Left, each side attempting
to win the people for a cause proclaimed to be both inevitable, a mat-
ter of Fate, and yet also the only way to real freedom.17 Franz might not
“fall in step” with the marchers; but he longs for, craves, security, law and
order—precisely what, before long, the Nazis were promising. Will he suc-
cumb? He might not join the masses in their marches; but will he then be a
disengaged bystander, an accomplice, silent and indifferent, to their seizure
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 59

of history? The language that expresses Fate, and that indeed embodies its
causality, still seems to be dangerously powerful. Is there any real hope, in
this novel, for the language that would instead express and embody the
causality of freedom, the causality of enlightened action? Where is the
language—the language of freedom, the language that, for Döblin, would
be a form of action capable of changing the world, reinforcing its more
enlightened tendencies? It is not certain that we can hear it. “The way
leads to freedom”: so “get in step”! We know now to what other steps
these steps can lead.
I suggest that Döblin’s language is simply too weak to carry the weight
of the utopian promise; despite its “Sachlichkeit,” its lucidity and sem-
blance of facticity, its lack of expressive energy fails at the crucial moments
to confirm its final release from the daemonic power of Fate. The sober,
inexpressive, plainspoken tone that one associates with statements of fact
cannot overcome the reader’s sense that the causality of Fate—archaic,
mythic powers hostile to the spirit of a new enlightenment—has not yet
been vanquished. Although Döblin asserts that Franz, near death, has finally
recognized his guilt, felt remorse, wants desperately to begin a new life, and
has been redeemed, he is not able actually to show it, to unfold a narra-
tive in words that would make that transfiguration convincing: Biberkopf
still seems small-minded, is still looking out only for his own welfare; and
he is still willing to hawk Nazi newspapers and wear the Nazi armband,
displaying the swastika for all the world to see. Likewise, Döblin can, in
ending the novel, only assert that “the way leads to freedom,” but he is not
able to show that way, not able to represent it in compelling words—words
more powerful than those controlled by Fate. Presumably, these failures are
symptomatic of the prevailing social-political conditions; and presumably,
it is also because of these conditions that the language that would express
what Kant called the “causality of freedom” was not available to him. (Kant
asserts the transcendental necessity of this “causality,” positing it as a neces-
sary presupposition of practical reason in the most absolute contrast to the
mechanistic, deterministic causality that he thought pervasively operative
in the realm of nature, and that he accordingly thought characterized the
behavior of human beings insofar as they are regarded as merely corporeal,
merely physical entities. Needless to say, the “causality of freedom” is also
to be contrasted with the “causality of Fate,” a notion that Kant introduces
briefly and without much elaboration, but that receives a more sustained
and more substantive treatment in Hegel’s early theological writings, espe-
cially The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate).18 My argument here follows
what Adorno argues, namely, that in a damaged society, a society unable
to achieve the reconciliation of its contradictions, the artworks produced
 60 / REDEEMING WO RDS

within it cannot escape being themselves damaged quantities. Thus, in

bringing his story to an ending, Döblin finds himself forced to intervene
in the epic plot, resorting to something like a “deus ex machina” in order
to rescue his troubled hero and adumbrate the “novus ordo seclorum,” a
world no longer ruled by Fate. Döblin can accomplish this, however, only
by undertaking his own struggle against the prevailing culture, a culture
protected and perpetuated by its predominant forms of literature, which
affirm the status quo instead of questioning it and provoking imaginative
thought.
In “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” originally published in
1937, Herbert Marcuse’s description of the individual in a society structured
by late capitalism sharply illuminates Biberkopf’s character and the condi-
tions within which he struggles:

The individual has the character of an [apparently] independent,

self-sufficient monad. His relation to the (human and non-human)
world is either abstractly immediate (the individual constitutes
the world immemorially in itself as knowing, feeling, and will-
ing ego) or abstractly mediated (i.e., determined by the blind
laws of the production of commodities and of the market). In
neither case is the monadic isolation of the individual overcome.
To do so would mean the establishment of real solidarity and
presupposes the replacement of individualist society by a higher
form of social existence.19

The blind laws to which Biberkopf is subject are behind the causality of
Fate, its words constantly stalking him, always ready to strike him down.
And as the ending of the novel shows very clearly, placing him at a door,
watching a parade of marchers—probably young Nazis—pass him by, all
marching in step, waving banners and singing patriotic songs: his monadic
isolation cannot be overcome, because real solidarity, the solidarity of a
society without the antagonisms and contradictions of capitalism, is out
of the question.20 Only a false, mindless, authoritarian solidarity seems
to beckon the disaffected, the destitute, all those who are hopelessly lost
among the dizzying changes taking place in their once familiar metropolis.21
Quite a comment on the historical assumption of an enlightened “march
of progress”!
Even after his alleged revelation and redemption, his “death” and
“resurrection” as a new man [BA 264/215], Biberkopf was still living within
an “affirmative culture” that had, at best, according to Marcuse, “canceled
social antagonisms [only in the form of] an abstract internal community.”
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 61

The false, deceptive solidarity of patriotic war was every day gaining public
enthusiasm:

In their spiritual freedom and dignity all men, as persons,

were considered of equal value. High above factual antitheses
shone the realm of cultural solidarity. During the most recent
period of affirmative culture, this abstract internal community
(abstract because it left the real antagonisms untouched) has
turned into an equally abstract external community. The indi-
vidual is inserted into a false collectivity (race, folk, blood, and
soil). But this externalization has the same function as internal-
ization: renunciation [of freedom] and subjection to the status
quo [. . .].

Marcuse concludes this thought with an observation especially pertinent for

our interpretation of the ambiguities in the final scene in Döblin’s novel:

That individuals freed for over four hundred years march with
so little trouble in the communal columns of the authoritarian
state is due in no small measure to affirmative culture.22

To be sure, the “new” Biberkopf does not, so far as we know, actually join
the marchers; and we can only conjecture what his emotions are. But his
passivity, whether from indifference or the paralysis of fear, is obvious and
troubling; at the very least, it casts a shadow of doubt on the transformative
redemption that Döblin claims for him. In terms of Marcuse’s distinction
between “mind” and “soul,” it seems that Döblin has perhaps given Bib-
erkopf a desperate soul, but not a mind, not a critical faculty. “The mind,”
says Marcuse, “cannot escape reality without denying itself; the soul, how-
ever, can, and is supposed to do so. It is precisely because the soul dwells
beyond the economy that it can manage to escape so easily.” Whatever
one thinks of Marcuse’s distinction, one cannot deny that it illuminates
Biberkopf’s character, the way he thinks, and the actions he chooses:

An individual full of soul is more compliant, acquiesces more

humbly to fate, and is better at obeying authority. For he gets
to keep for himself the entire wealth of his soul and can exalt
himself tragically and heroically. [. . .] The festivals and celebra-
tions of the authoritarian state, its parades, its physiognomy, and
the speeches of its leaders are all addressed to the soul. They go
to the heart, even when their intent is power.23
 62 / REDEEMING WO RDS

This, it seems to me, is an accurate picture, both of Biberkopf and of

the state that, only four years later, will have arisen triumphantly in the
Berlin of Franz Biberkopf and his author, challenging both author and
character to find the right words for resisting the implacable currents of
history and evoking a radically different image of community life and the
responsibilities it enjoins. One might accordingly argue, in this regard, that
Berlin Alexanderplatz was written, in part, as a kind of thought-experiment,
exploring in an approximation to epic form, through the story of an out-
law, the conditions of possibility—and the demonic social forces resisting
that possibility—for a non-repressive social totality in which the spiritual
dimension of individual lives could flourish.
In concluding Totalität und Totalitarismus im Exilwerk Döblins, his study
of Döblin’s three-volume novel, Amazonas, written many years after Berlin
Alexanderplatz, Roland Dollinger offers his astute assessment of the histori-
cal bearing of Döblin’s larger literary project:

According to Döblin’s understanding of history, two fundamen-

tal tendencies are always shaping it: the isolation [Isolation] of
human beings from a natural (biological) and social whole and
equally the unquenchable urge to overcome this isolation. [. . .]
Just as, on one side, he laments in elegiac tones the atomiza-
tion [Vereinzelung] of the modern subject, so, on the other side,
he problematizes the craving [Begehren] for a new totality, the
violent manifestations of which he unceasingly depicts in his
Amazon-trilogy. He thereby posits a concrete connection between
individual and collective longings for a totality and the totali-
tarianism of the twentieth century, which emerges as a kind of
perverted realization of those movements towards some kind of
unity and wholeness. [. . .] In the Amazon-trilogy, Nature has
resolved to its advantage the struggle for historical humanity
between nature and God. Nevertheless, Döblin did not forsake
his hope in the resources of religion for the transformation of
human individuation. Indeed, religious discourse determines with
growing vehemence the works that follow the trilogy.24

But in a world of unnecessary cruelty, violence and suffering, a world shat-

tered by ancient hatreds, can our modern religions offer more than consola-
tion for what God, their substitute for Fate, has decreed? In his review of
Döblin’s novel, Benjamin argues that, exhibiting the last, most extreme,
and truly “fraudulent” development of the bourgeois “Bildungsroman,” what
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 63

it demonstrates is the necessity, or even the obligation, for a new form of

fiction.25 Biberkopf is punished for wanting from life more than his daily
bread, and his creator is unable to imagine, in appropriate words, the world
in which the forces he calls “Fate” would be overcome.
At the same time that Döblin expresses his contempt for the persis-
tence of fatalism in the modern world, he also encourages it, even sacrific-
ing credibility for the sake of an invocation that will create suspense and
heighten in that way the reader’s sense that Fate is very much at work. I have
in mind Franz’s evocations of Fate as Reinhold, who will eventually murder
Mieze, is on his way to visit Franz; the same Reinhold who will introduce
Franz to his girlfriend, Mieze. Although Franz cannot possibly know what
Reinhold is going to do to her, he repeatedly speaks of her fate—as if he
somehow already knew what only the author already knows. As Reinhold
mounts the stairs to his flat, Franz says to Mieze: “Just look, you feel nothing,
know nothing, suspect nothing of your fate.” “Kuck an, du fühlst gar nichts,
weißt gar nichts, ahnst nicht dein Geschick” [BA 326/267]. Three times, in
fact, Franz repeats the word “Geschick.” Here he does not say “Schicksal,”
the customary word for Fate, but rather a word less frequently used: a word
that, perhaps for that reason alone, emphasizes the coming or happening
of something sent. The word stresses the powerlessness of human agents:
instead of making their history, they passively receive it.
Two years after the publication of his novel, Döblin, writing a let-
ter to his friend Julius Petersen, acknowledged that the published ending
is unsatisfactory; and he said that “circumstances” made it impossible for
him to write, as originally intended, a second volume, a sequel, in which,
among other things, his claims regarding Biberkopf’s transformation would
be confirmed and readers would see a man of noble actions struggling in
solidarity with others to make the world a better, more humane place.
Moreover, in this projected second volume, he had intended to give his
readers an exemplary experience of the language of action—what I am call-
ing, after Kant, language functioning as the causality of freedom. Döblin
recognized, in his novel, that “a more passive-receptive element with tragic
overtones is opposed to an active element that is more hopeful.” “Against
my will,” he conceded,

simply from the logic of the action, the book ended this way; it
was not salvageable. [. . .] The ending should have been played
out in heaven: one more soul saved—well, that was not possible,
but nevertheless, I could not resist letting trumpets blast fanfares
at the end, whether they made psychological sense or not.26
 64 / REDEEMING WO RDS

The utopian ending, he declared, invoking even in the context of his own
life the inimical powers of Fate, “was beyond hope—the dice were loaded
against me.” Benjamin had always argued, though, that every authentic
work of art inevitably ruins itself for the sake of its truth. But can this
explain and authenticate Döblin’s failure? And if, as Adorno asserts in his
unfinished study on Beethoven, “a work of art is great when it registers a
failed attempt to reconcile objective antinomies,” one must at least ques-
tion whether Döblin’s novel “registers” that failure—“registers” it, I mean,
in any perspicuously reflexive way as social critique.27
W. G. Sebald was even more critical of the novel than was Benjamin.
In Der Mythos der Zerstörung, he assails Döblin’s “naturalism,” tantamount
to glorifying powerlessness in the confrontation with mythic and historical
forces and justifying brutality and violence as the inevitable work of Fate:

What in Döblin’s works is rhetorically conjured up in apocalyp-

tic images and other images of the destruction of life belongs
to the same teleology as the longing of the fascists, who were
headed, despite their dream of the thousand-year Reich, for an
early end; this affinity shows up in formulations such as “end
goal,” “ultimate victory,” “conclusive goal” and “final solution”
[“Endziel,” “Endsieg,” “Schlußziel” und “Endlösung”].28

Sebald is disturbed by the entirety of Döblin’s worldview: (i) apocalyptic

images of the end, (ii) a fatalistic interpretation of naturalism and natu-
ral history, (iii) a conception of politics treacherously intertwined with
mythology, (iv) the dramatic role he gives to the figure of Death, and (v)
support for our domination of nature, instead of our reconciliation with
it.29 Roland Dollinger, however, defends Döblin against some of his crit-
ics, arguing that what may appear to be a morbid obsession with death,
cruelty, and violence is actually his “Trauerarbeit,” the working through
of an immeasurable sadness over the inhumanity of human nature.30 For
some reason, Sebald’s reading of Döblin misses this sadness. There is some
merit in his argument.
However, Franz’s supposed salvation, or redemption, his release from a
life of destructiveness, violence, and death remains, I think, highly question-
able. Biberkopf, supposedly victorious over Death, appears to have ceased
living a life of rage, violence, and destruction. And, to be sure, “Franz weeps
and weeps,” insisting on his guilt: “I’m guilty, I’m not a human being, I’m
just a beast, a monster [ein Untier]” [BA 442/367]. “Thus died, in that eve-
ning hour, Franz Biberkopf, erstwhile transport worker, burglar, pimp, and
murderer” [Ibid.]. Nevertheless, the language claiming redemption sounds
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 65

hollow. The assertion by the author or the narrator is simply not at all com-
pelling: it remains a mere assertion, a claim by the author that the narrative
itself fails to demonstrate with words of sufficient vitality and power. More-
over, insofar as Biberkopf’s proclaimed “rebirth” is to be read as a metaphor
for what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” namely, the capacity of individual
citizens and political communities to inaugurate new beginnings, it is not
at all convincing. We are never actually shown Biberkopf’s transformation
of character; nor can we see how his newly acquired self-knowledge affects
his judgment and translates into constructive community action.31 The
author’s intervention, merely making the claim, does not release language
from the spell of Fate. And to the extent that Döblin’s use of language
cannot convince the reader that language—the language of the narrative
and Franz’s own use of language—is free of that spell, hence capable of
bearing the promise of happiness, Franz appears bound to that causality.
Perhaps, reflecting Döblin’s own sense of impotence as he witnessed the
disintegration of the democratic experiment, Biberkopf remains detached
and unmoved, seemingly unable to act, as history-shaking events pass him
by. And, whilst the montage construction creates openings between frag-
ments for the intervention of chance events, the narrative that Döblin
has written acquiesces to the pressures of Fate, which repeatedly forces its
way into those openings, defeating any revolutionary chance from seizing
the moment and, except for a few ephemeral glimpses of transcendence,
of Paradise, preventing the representation of a more enlightened world.
In his montage composition, there is nothing more than an occasional
image, ignited and extinguished with the speed of lightening, to present a
convincing aesthetic semblance of a society in which the contradictions
that are buffeting Franz Biberkopf have been reconciled.
But how could matters be otherwise? Far from taking Döblin’s manifest
failure to present the utopian vision of a more humane world in compelling
word-images to indicate his failure as a writer, Dollinger thinks it testifies
to his capacity for moral lucidity and moral integrity. There might be some
truth here. Nevertheless, this defense cannot entirely exonerate Döblin
with regard to Sebald’s severe criticisms.
In his essay on “The Construction of the Epic Work,” Döblin reflects
on his experience as a writer:

We are presented with the fact of the marvelous, unbound, free

invention. What do we mean by invention—the audacious,
unrestrained reporting of non-facts, of notorious non-facts? It is
the play with reality—in Nietzsche’s words, a superior laughter
over the facts, yes, over reality as such.
 66 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Writers enjoy creative freedom—but this freedom takes place only in the
realm of art, the realm of semblance. That is the writer’s only intervention
in the real world. It cannot, as such, resolve the contradictions that afflict
the world. To this extent, writers can only give expression, only put into
words, their own contradictory condition: being, despite their acute con-
sciousness, at a loss for the empowering words. Döblin’s reflections continue:

[The writer] competes with this stony, firm, and solid reality, and
conjures it away, blowing soap-bubbles from that same substance
with which the Creator once made the whole of this heavy earth,
the heavens, and all animals and their destinies.

In this “free fantasy,” he says, “everything that may be thought becomes

possible.” All writing is thus poetry: “Poetry is more than a dream. The
dream plays with reality, but for our emotions, it is still fatally bound up
with reality.”32 In this lapidary formulation, Döblin succinctly states the
contradiction from which not even the most fantastic, most powerful poetry
can ever escape. No word will be intelligible, or legible, unless it remains
bound to reality. But, if the word is bound, as it must be, to reality, its
imaginative and critical potential is limited. Commenting on the writings
of Karl Kraus in “The Position of the Writer,” Adorno remarks:

[This critic] once formulated the idea that everything that spoke
morally out of his works in the form of physical, non-aesthetic
reality had been imparted to him solely under the law of lan-
guage [. . .].

“It is a tendency inherent in form,” he says, “that demands the abolition of

aesthetic distance in the contemporary novel and its capitulation thereby
to the superior power of reality—a reality that cannot be transfigured in
an image but only altered concretely, [i.e., by actions taken] in reality.”33
Adorno’s comments can shed much-needed light, I suggest, on both the
possibilities and the limitations that were confronting Döblin whilst he was
engaged in the writing of his Berlin novel. These very same possibilities
and limitations appear in his epic novel, confronting his character, Franz
Biberkopf, with different ways to use his freedom. How will he earn a living?
How will he relate to women? Will he give constructive expression to his
experiences of degradation, alienation, and injustice? Will he resist the appeal
of the National Socialists or silently acquiesce in their violence? These are
the existential questions that, implicitly, Döblin gives to Franz, appealing to
the very freedom in which his character wants desperately to believe.
 THE LANGUAGE OF FATE / 67

Dollinger argues, astutely, I think, that the twentieth-century novel

reflects the freedom that has been won by contemporary society by extend-
ing that freedom to its readers, encouraging readers to become active par-
ticipants in the production of its meaning.34 And following the drift of his
own reflections on the contemporary novel, Michael Baum comes to the
conclusion that, in Döblin’s novel, what matters most are the questions
that his readers are left to struggle with: “The end of the Biberkopf story
is,” as he says, “the beginning of the story by the reader.”35 We are left, as
it happens, to contemplate the many possible endings. But all of them will
remain suspended in the air.
 5

Language as the Causality of Freedom

In “One-Way Street,” Benjamin declares, that “These are days when no

one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisa-
tion. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”1 My conjecture is that,
when he wrote that, he had some of Döblin’s early left-leaning, politi-
cally charged writings very much in mind: first of all, the fable conveying
Döblin’s observations and reflections on the failure of socialist democracy
to take place in Germany after the First World War, published using the
pseudonym, “Linke Poot,” referring his identity to the human hand but
meaning, in the idiom of Berlin culture, “Left Paw,” and second, Döblin’s
later epic tale about Franz Biberkopf, who eventually finds strength—so
it might be argued—in a life of “improvisation.”2 One more philological
curiosity is perhaps worth noting here. In one of his letters to Gershom
Scholem, Benjamin remarks that Kafka’s stories do not lie at the feet of
doctrine as Haggadah (the oral tradition, representing truth in its narra-
tive transmissibility) lies beneath Halakhah (the law in its inscription,
detached from the oral narration of lives), but instead, they “unexpectedly
raise a mighty paw against it.”3 These allusions to the political might of
the left hand and the “mighty paw” in Benjamin’s writings could perhaps
serve as a retroactively illuminating gloss on Döblin’s intention in assum-
ing, as the identity for his early political polemics, the pseudonym “Linke
Poot.” Interpreted in this light, his assumption of such an identity would
have been his distinctive way of registering, as a physician serving a poor
community, the animal-like intensity, bodily felt, of his resistance to the
inequalities and injustices prevailing in his time.
In this modern-day epic, Berlin Alexanderplatz, the “Gestus des Schlag-
es,” the violent gesture that in fury strikes out and pummels, knowing no
other way to take part in social life, the gesture that prevails throughout the
story, expressing itself through language, is supposedly repudiated, abjured
by the principal character; but it is by no measure certain what gesture will
take its place thereafter in the lives of the people. However, the pen can

69
 70 / REDEEMING WO RDS

be a mighty weapon, as both Döblin and Benjamin know. And if for the
sake of a more just and more benevolent world order the pen is taken up
for the task of writing by a hand that embodies sympathies committed to
the politics of the left, what that hand has written could perhaps adumbrate
the alternative for the fist. Franz Biberkopf, however, is unable—even in
the final chapters, even after his metaphorical “death” and “rebirth”—to see
past expressions of violence. But it seems that, as he observed the crumbling
of the Weimar Republic and the growing political strength of the National
Socialist Party, Döblin was not able to find within the language of his time
the resources necessary to imagine his character exemplifying the causality
of freedom, since he himself could not at that historical moment see the
way to a just society in which freedom and its corollary, social-political
responsibility, might flourish. He proclaimed the end of the causality of
Fate, a causality that requires the actual or symbolic death of the subject;
but the causality of freedom was still without its narrative, without its voice,
without its convincing language.
In Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the moral law, voice of freedom,
paradoxically given as “an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure
reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious, even though it be granted
that no example could be found in which it has been followed exactly,” is
said to engage “an inscrutable faculty that no experience can prove, but
that speculative reason has to assume as at least possible (in order not to
contradict itself in finding among its cosmological ideas something uncon-
ditional in its causality)”:

This is the faculty of freedom, which the moral law, itself needing
no justifying grounds, shows to be not only possible but actual
in beings which acknowledge the law as binding upon them.
The moral law is, in fact, a law of causality through freedom and
thus a law of the possibility of a supersensuous nature, just as
the metaphysical law of events in the world of sense is a law
of the causality of sensuous nature; the moral law thus defines
that which speculative philosophy had to leave undefined. That
is, it defines the law for a causality the concept of which was
only negative in speculative philosophy, and for the first time
it gives objective reality to this concept.

“This kind of credential for the moral law,” he says,

namely, that it is itself demonstrated to be the principle of the

deduction of freedom as a causality of pure reason, is a sufficient
 language as the causality of freedom / 71

substitute for any a priori justification, since theoretical reason

has to assume at least the possibility of freedom in order to fill
one of its own needs.4

The moral life is therefore a life that puts into practice—that is, in the
conduct of daily life—the causality of freedom. And in a corrupt world
needing reconciliation, needing redemption, the moral law becomes a sum-
mons to freedom, exemplary moral action. Franz, however, is never shown
to be capable of initiating that causality. Both his own language and the
language that narrates his story, keep him passive, denying him the causal
agency that, according to Kant, would dignify him with its potentiality.
What Adorno argued concerning Hegel in his essay “On Lyric Poetry
and Society” is equally relevant, mutatis mutandis, in regard to Döblin’s way
of redeeming Franz Biberkopf, handing him over to Death in order to give
him a second chance at life:

Hegel tried to overcome the contradictions of men’s real lives by

reconciling them in spirit, in the idea. The continued existence
of these contradictions in reality, however, had compromised the
spiritual solution: in the face of a life not grounded in meaning,
a life lived painstakingly amid the bustle of competing interests,
a prosaic life, as artistic experience sees it; in the face of a world
in which the fate individual human beings works itself out in
accordance with blind laws, art, whose form gives the impres-
sion of speaking from the point of view of a realized humanity,
becomes an empty word.5

Since the language that would express and enact Franz’s real, objective
freedom seems not at that historical moment to be possible, Döblin’s claim,
his assertion of Biberkopf’s new life, fails to convince us; nevertheless,
the claim certainly testifies—if I may appropriate some fitting words from
Adorno—to “language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible.”6
It is, I think, significant in this regard that, after reporting how Rein-
hold attacked and beat one of his girlfriends, Döblin says: “Another story-
teller would probably have thought now of inflicting some punishment on
Reinhold, but I can’t help it, it didn’t happen” [BA 218/174]. Whilst on
the one hand, this remark reminds us that we are reading a fictional story
that he has created, on the other hand, the remark perpetuates the illusion
of events beyond human control: as if the author were not merely telling
us that he decided for narrative reasons against punishing Reinhold, but
were confessing that he was somehow compelled not to do that. In remarks
 72 / REDEEMING WO RDS

such as this, Döblin seems to be encouraging and empowering the causality

of Fate and the language it has captured—precisely those archaic forces,
those ancient Furies, whom he presumably wants our civilization to leave
behind forever. But why would he want to grant Fate causal power in an
epic taking place in the twentieth century? Why would he, as a writer com-
mitted to advancing the ideals of enlightened, modern consciousness, give
archaic forces such recognition? Is there not a contradiction here between
his demonstration of archaic, mythic forces and his utopian support for
the critical project of social enlightenment? Is there a not tension within
the epic story that he wants to tell between regressive and progressive
social forces operative even in, even through, the language in which the
epic story is told? In 1918, Gershom Scholem wrote in his journals: “The
goal of prose is to make history operate from within language.”7 This inner
relation to the historical present, a lucid reflection on his time that might
also be a consciousness-raising intervention resisting its fateful course, illu-
minates, it seems to me, exactly what Döblin’s use of a demonic prose,
words demonstrably enacting the causality of Fate, sought to accomplish.
But in the end, he was not able to find the prose that would break the
spell of the demonic forces and confirm, shining through words that invoke
a reconciled society, the unequivocal triumph of the causality of freedom.
At the very end of the story, a supposedly redeemed Biberkopf says to
himself: “Once I got myself into trouble for a single word and had to pay
bitterly for it. This shan’t happen to Biberkopf again.” He finally recognizes
the causal power of words, and above all, the force of words enacting the
causality of Fate: “The words come rolling up to us; we must be careful
not to get run over.” The word he regrets invoking is “Fate.” Thus, as the
drums and trumpets of war are resounding in the distance and the march
of patriots is approaching, he resolves not to be swayed by the causal force
of that word: “So I will not go on shouting, as once I did: Fate. Fate.” He
understands, now, that, “It’s no use revering it merely as Fate; we must look
at it, grasp it, down it, and not hesitate” [BA 454/377–78]. But denying Fate
its mythic causal force, its power over language, is not sufficient to create
a society committed to the causality of freedom. And whilst the semantic
content of these words expresses the repudiation of Fate, the rhyming of
the words, suggestive of words falling into line and marching in step, raises
doubts about breaking the fatality of the historical continuum.
When will the miraculous happen? In a letter written in 1904 to Else
Lasker-Schuler, hence a decade before the beginning of the First World War
and long before the writing of his epic, Döblin was brooding on a ques-
tion he expressed with the utmost gravity: “Why shouldn’t a spirit come
knocking here right now?” “The miraculous happens,” he declared, “all the
 language as the causality of freedom / 73

time; whenever you really try to think about things, everything familiar
becomes unfamiliar; incredibly, the mystery is standing right by the door.”8
Telling stories might be one of the ways for the miraculous to happen.
(I suspect Kafka and Sebald thought so.) Early in the novel, something
of this nature is perhaps suggested: Biberkopf has just returned to Berlin
after his time in prison and is finding the city frightening. Without money,
lodgings, and employment, confused and anxious, he wanders around, try-
ing to get his bearings. Very soon, wandering into the Scheunenviertel,
he encounters some old Jews, one of whom, despite his burden of poverty,
invites him into his home and offers him something to eat. Some days
later, he tells the strangers he meets in a bar: “Once, gentlemen, when I
felt very low, two Jews helped me by telling me stories” [BA 63/42]. But
in the life he lives in the days and months thereafter, he loses touch with
what this experience was showing him. This kind of solidarity—a small
miracle—is a possibility in which Döblin, as himself a storyteller, passion-
ately wagered his faith.
In Wissen und Verändern, published in 1931 in the city of Berlin, Döb-
lin expressed his hope for an “ethical and utopian socialism” that would be
founded on freedom, justice, tolerance, solidarity, and social responsibility.9
Although under no illusions about what knowledge alone can accomplish,
he did believe, as the title of this work implies, that what knowledge enables
us to understand is essential to motivating necessary social-political changes
and bringing them about.
Continuing the story by telling of Franz’s new life in a language that
expresses the causality of freedom eludes Döblin. Until the moment when
Franz, coming to his senses in the psychiatric ward of the prison, suppos-
edly begins a new, redeemed life, we see language repeatedly taking the
side of Fate, not merely giving it forceful expression, but actually becom-
ing its causality, its very incarnation, its optical-acoustic flesh. But even in
the writing that comes after the abrupt announcement of Franz’s supposed
“rebirth,” language still fails to express the causality of freedom—the kind
of community action—to which Döblin suggests this metamorphosis should
lead. Freedom and the language of freedom, dialogue grounded in rational
principles and institutions of justice, are inseparable. And each depends on
the other. Döblin’s task, his project as a writer, was to bring the causality
of freedom to expression in language. He succeeded in giving the most
compelling imaginable expression to the causality of Fate; but the language
that could exhibit the causality of freedom and give concrete, compelling
expression to the promise of happiness it is presumed to bear, would remain,
for him, a tragically unfulfilled dream. A fatal metaphysics of language has
overpowered and suppressed the potentiality for authentic speech and the
 74 / REDEEMING WO RDS

potentiality for authentic political action. Only a continuation of the story,

in which we observe Biberkopf realizing in the conduct of his personal life
and in socially constructive action the self-knowledge, wisdom, and virtue
he needed to learn—only that would satisfactorily exhibit and demonstrate
this causality of freedom.
But what kind of solidarity, what kind of community might be at
stake in this dream? Between communism and fascism, there can be no
real choice. How might Döblin’s character work for solidarity and com-
munity whilst avoiding sameness and obedience to the One, some form
of servitude? The very concept of community as a utopian ideal, an ideal,
namely, that preserves and protects singularity within its rule of universal-
ity, is profoundly aporetic, an impossible possibility. But how can Döblin
give Franz new life without signifying the community to come? And if the
eschatologies and theodicies of the prophetic tradition, a tradition that
Marxism inherited and ironically continued, cannot avoid the imposition
of a final unity, must not the words for this community somehow create an
opening into a time of justice and peace beyond what theology can offer?
Perhaps the place where Döblin has positioned Franz as the mass of march-
ers passes him by registers a significant truth, which seems to have escaped
the author. For Franz has been placed in the position of the outsider, the
stranger, the bystander, hence, in fact, in the position that uniquely rep-
resents a permanent, aporetic contestation of the “transcendental illusion”
that lies behind the politics of solidarity and community.10
One error consists in looking away from the conditions of the exist-
ing world. Another consists in seeking unity in a universal not instituted
through the justice that forms in dialogue, which is the language of freedom.
Döblin certainly does not look away. And yet, he is at a loss for words
when it becomes necessary to show Biberkopf’s “vita activa” in the light of
the causality of freedom and thus to situate this worldly action in relation
to the redemptive potential—what Benjamin would call the “messianic
world of complete and integral actuality.” The prose of freedom eludes
him. Reflecting precisely on the question of such prose, Benjamin wrote:

History is not written; it is celebrated as a festival. As a purified

festival, however, it does not have the character of a ceremony
and knows no hymns. Its language is a freed prose, a prose that
has broken the chains of writing.11

In the festive life envisioned here, the dualism opposing the sacred and
the profane is no longer operative: the people are no longer waiting for
some transcendental consecration or metaphysical culmination, and every
 language as the causality of freedom / 75

moment of every day can become a festive celebration of the transformed

present. It is in such a new world that language would fully realize its
innermost potential, becoming at last a “freed prose,” a prose which has
“broken the chains of writing.” Döblin’s narrative prose makes us confront
the existence of those chains for the sake of sustaining our memory of that
potential—that “freed prose,” and liberated destinies, he longed to be able,
some day, to celebrate.
 6

Paradise in Words
The Promise of Happiness

The Messiah will be the last—and first—philosopher of language.

—Gershom Scholem, Diaries1

Biberkopf seeks happiness; he seeks it in a decent, “anständig” life, renounc-

ing his old ways—violence, brutality, crime. For him, the promise of hap-
piness is not the promise of a world of universal justice, peace, and human
dignity, but simply the promise of material satisfactions, the rewards he
believes are due him for avoiding his old, brutal dispositions.
In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant discusses the promise of hap-
piness in relation to the moral life:

Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world, in

whose whole existence everything goes according to wish and
will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire
end and with the essential determining ground of his will. But
the moral law commands as a law of freedom through motives
wholly independent of nature and of its harmony with our fac-
ulty of desires (as incentives). Still, the acting rational being
in the world is not at the same time the cause of the world
and of nature itself. Hence there is not the slightest ground in
the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality
and the proportionate happiness of a being which belongs to
the world [. . .]. Not being nature’s cause, his will cannot by
its own strength bring nature, as it touches on his happiness,
into complete harmony with his practical principles. Neverthe-
less, in the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary

77
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endeavour after the highest good, such a connection is postulated

as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good, which
must therefore be at least possible.2

To live a life of virtue, one must neither make one’s happiness as such
the end of one’s actions nor expect that a lifetime of virtuous actions will
necessarily be rewarded with material happiness. But, says Kant, we need
to believe that, in a life of virtue, happiness is at least possible. The moral
law, he argues,

commands us to make the highest possible good in the world

the final object of all our conduct. This I cannot hope to effect
except through the agreement of my will with that of a holy
and beneficent Author of the world. And although my own
happiness is included in the concept of the highest good as a
whole wherein the greatest happiness is thought of as connected
in exact proportion to the greatest degree of moral perfection
possible to creatures, still it is not happiness but the moral law
(which, in fact, sternly places restricting conditions upon my
boundless longing for happiness) which is proved to be the
ground determining the will to further the highest good.3

Therefore, morality is not about “how to make ourselves happy, but [about]
how we are to become worthy of happiness.” But this analysis implies, for
Kant, that—

Only if religion is added to it [the doctrine of morality] can the

hope arise of someday participating in happiness in proportion
as we endeavoured not to be unworthy of it.4

A virtuous life must be its own reward, since there can be no guarantee, no
promise of happiness. However, happiness in the conduct of an ethical life
must at least be a possibility. Even so, the restoration of Paradise here on
earth could only be an extremely doubtful postulate. In any case, though,
Paradise on earth, a new humanity, is not the symbol of happiness on Franz’s
mind. His thoughts never venture beyond his own needs; others exist for
him only in relation to those needs. Does he think himself “worthy” of
happiness? The measure by which he judges that is a questionable sense
of worthiness and justice.
The second chapter of Berlin Alexanderplatz is prefaced by an evoca-
tion of the biblical Paradise, promise of happiness still to come:
 PARADISE IN WO RDS / 79

Once upon a time there lived in Paradise [Es lebten einmal im

Paradies] two human beings, Adam and Eve. They had been
settled there by the Lord, who had also created the beasts and
plants and heaven and earth. And Paradise was the wonderful
Garden of Eden. Flowers and trees were growing there, animals
were playing about, and none oppressed the other. The sun rose
and set, the moon did the same, there was abiding joy the whole
day long in Paradise. [BA 49/30]

This passage, positioned where it is, seems at first to frame, or enclose the
Biberkopf story within a remembrance of Paradise and its utopian promise of
emancipation, justice, and happiness. But this impression is soon dispelled.5
The dialectic it sets in motion between enchantment and disenchantment
requires further analysis.6 The opening phrase, “once upon a time,” invok-
ing Paradise in the preterit tense, not only is unequivocal in assigning this
enchanting scene to a past that is absolutely past, a past that is irretrievable;
it also at the same time fictionalizes it, casting it in the language of fairy
tales. But this passage is immediately followed by words that return us to
the present, a present in which, in some uncanny way, “we” find ourselves
in Paradise—a children’s Paradise, filled with parodied echoes of “Hänsel
und Gretel”:

Thus let us start off merrily. We want to sing and move about:
with our little hands going clap, clap, clap, our little feet going
tap, tap, tap, moving to, moving fro, roundabout, and away we
go. [49/30]

This seems to bring Paradise, the promise of happiness, into “our” present
time. But is it still nothing but a fairy tale, a wish-fulfilling fantasy? Is it a
story only for children—and pathetically naïve utopian thinkers? Has Para-
dise been invoked only to make it the object of ridicule? (In his essay on
“Nature,” whilst reflecting on life and death, Emerson invoked a dimension
of his transcendentalism in a thought that illuminates the significance of
Döblin’s turn to a nursery story for children, and to “Hänsel and Gretel”
in particular, observing that “Infancy is the perpetual Messiah.” With this
astonishing thought, one that Benjamin and Adorno would surely have
appreciated, he was pointing out the unrecognized significance of nursery
rhymes and stories, keeping alive our memories of innocent happiness and
childhood dreams, with all their latent social critique and fantasies of para-
dise.)7 Three sentences from Döblin’s invocation of Paradise are repeated,
word for word, later on, seemingly resounding in Biberkopf’s own head as he
 80 / REDEEMING WO RDS

struggles mightily, overcome by anxiety and rage, to get control of himself

[BA 95/70]. Some days later, the same nursery rhyme, with children clap-
ping and tapping their feet, again resounds, echoing, perhaps confirming, a
happy moment for Franz; and Paradise, here, is also again signified: “With
our little hands we go clap, clap clap, with our little feet we go tap, fish,
fowl, all day long, paradise” [BA 97/72]. The nursery rhyme breaks into
the story one more time, this time in a fragment, interrupting, hence also
interpreting, a scene in which Biberkopf flies into a rage when a man he
knows comes to visit him in his temporary lodging [BA 119/90].
The significance of this nursery rhyme fragment is, however irremedi-
ably ambiguous. The rhyme is in its own way, to be sure, a remembrance
of Paradise; but its contextual positioning makes it seem more like an
ironic comment on utopian prospects. Is the hope for a better world illu-
sory? Is hope nothing but the fantasy of fairy tales? Could only the naive
believe in enlightenment, in possibilities for progressive social action? In
any case, the story that unfolds is hardly a “merry” one. We need to recall
that the historical source material for the Grimm brothers’ fable, which
Engelbert Humperdinck later, for the entertainment of the bourgeoisie,
turned into a discreetly charming opera first performed in Weimar in 1893,
is the unspeakable crime recorded in mediaeval stories of abandonment
and danger: children taken into the forest and left by their families to die
there or fend for themselves, because in times of famine, war, and plague,
these families were too impoverished, too destitute to take care of them.
The brother and sister in Döblin’s brief evocation of this tale are, as in the
opera, happily playing, of course; but despite this transformation, making
the story a happy one, echoes of the historical reality persist, haunting what
the children are singing. The children “start off merrily.” But in Döblin’s
narrative, their song is interrupted, quickly halted, abandoned as a frag-
ment. Are we perhaps to understand by this that the promise of happiness,
the social bond necessary for the restoration of Paradise here on earth, has
been broken? In “Franz Kafka: on the Tenth Annversary of His Death,”
Walter Benjamin observes that, “The man who whitewashes [walls] to earn
a living has epochs to move, even in his most insignificant gesture. On
many occasions, and often for strange reasons, Kafka’s figures clap their
hands.” And, he adds, referring to Kafka’s story, “At the Gallery”: “Once
the casual remark was made that these hands are ‘really steam hammers.’ ”8
Paradise is remembered once again, this time when a cripple that Bib-
erkopf befriends in a bar, a man angry about the reduction in his pension
and about to join the Communists in protest, tells him: “The fellow who
drives us out of Paradise with a flaming sword is the archangel, and so we
won’t go back there” [BA 82/58]. Paradise, for this man, belongs to another
 PARADISE IN WO RDS / 81

time, another world: in any case, it belongs irretrievably, irrevocably to the

past. The scene soon changes, as Döblin sets us down in the Friedrichstraße
arcade at Potsdamer Platz, where, according to the narrative, we are once
more reminded of Paradise—but this time, it is a Paradise that the future
will judge to have been a tragically catastrophic fantasy:

Franz now peddles racist-pro-Nordic papers. He is not against

the Jews, but he is for law and order. For law and order must
reign in Paradise, which everyone should recognize. [BA 82/59]

This, of course, is precisely not the Paradise that most people would rec-
ognize—or want to recognize. But its law and order—the “Paradise” prom-
ised by the One Thousand Year Reich—is unquestionably appealing to
Biberkopf, who, despite choosing to live in the lawlessness of the criminal
underworld, desperately longs for existential certainties, moral direction,
and purpose. He is too exhausted, and too wary, to take part in mass rallies
and political action; but he is obviously tempted by the National Social-
ist propaganda that he peddles on the street. Nothing seems to remain of
the utopian image of happiness briefly spelled out in remembrance of the
original story of Paradise. Nothing seems to make possible the release of
its spirit from the grip of the past and make possible the fulfillment of its
utopian, emancipatory promise in a future that we have prepared.
There are two other images of Paradise interrupting the narrative, but
in these, what is remembered is not the beauty and joy, and the harmony
between the first human beings and the plants and animals of nature, but
the potential for evil, a disruption of that harmony:

Once there was a wonderful Paradise. The waters teemed with

fish, out of the soil there sprouted trees, animals played about,
beasts of the earth, of the sea, and birds.
A tree rustled. A serpent, serpent, serpent stuck out its head,
a serpent dwelt in Paradise, more cunning than all the beasts
of the field, and began to speak to Adam and Eve. [BA 111/83]

A second image likewise remembers the serpent, whose presence in Paradise

foretells a time of hunger, strife, suffering, the curse of Fate:

The serpent had rushed down from the tree. Thou art cursed
above all cattle, upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between
thee and the woman. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,
 82 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Eve. Adam, cursed is the ground for thy sake, thorns also and
thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb
of the field. [BA134/102]

Perhaps Döblin’s final farewell to theodicy and eschatology, and even to the
vision of happiness in a new world order, takes place in the final volume of
the last of his great novels, the trilogy Amazonas, where the reader is faced
with a challenging question: “Why did they go on babbling about a Paradise
that once was?” “Was faselten sie von einem Paradies, das irgendeinmal war?”9
Has Döblin lost all his faith, all his hope? Perhaps not entirely, if Novalis
was right when he declared that, “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of
history.”10 Because Döblin left his practice of psychiatric medicine, which
served the predominantly Jewish community in which he lived, in order to
write novels for the world—novels that aspired to salvage, from the promise
and missed opportunities of history, from the wreckage of human existence,
which he portrayed with unflinching veracity, what otherwise might have
been forgotten and discarded.
In a very early writing, “The Religious Perspective of the New Youth,”
Benjamin argues that, “No thing or human being should be discarded [. . .],
for in everything (in the advertisement board and the criminal) the symbol
or the holy can take hold.”11 Nearing the end of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the
author or narrator tells us that, “We have come to the end of our story.
It has proven a long one, but it had to unfold itself, on and on, until it
reached its climax, that culminating point which at last illuminates the
whole thing.” The message continues, drawing on the familiar biblical and
theological language of light and dark, revelation and illumination, to mark
Biberkopf’s supposed moment of transfiguration—his redemptive rebirth,
like St. Augustine, with a different disposition of character:

We have walked along a dark road, at first there was no street-

lamp burning, we only knew it was the right road, but gradually
it grew bright and brighter, till at last we reached the light and
under its rays were able to make out the name and the street. It
was a process of revelation [Enthüllungsprozeß] of a special kind.
Franz Biberkopf did not walk along the streets the way we do.
He rushed blindly through this dark street, knocking against
trees, and, the more he ran, the more he knocked against trees.
Now it was dark, and, as he knocked against the trees, he shut
his eyes in terror. And the more he knocked against them, the
greater became his terror, when he shut his eyes tightly. His
 PARADISE IN WO RDS / 83

head all banged up, full of holes, almost at his wits’ end, at
last he reached his goal. As he fell down, he opened his eyes.
Then the street-lamp shone bright above him, and he was able
to read the sign. [BA 453/376]

The first thing to notice in this passage is that what Biberkopf undergoes
is not an “Offenbarung,” but only an “Enthüllungsprozeß.” Although both
words may be translated as “revelation,” only the first signifies revelation as
an opening. The latter merely indicates that something concealed or not
known has been shown. This tells us little, however, about Biberkopf’s expe-
rience as an authentic process of learning. It should be noted that the text
does not tell us where Biberkopf ends up. What has he actually learned? The
English translation suggests, but without actually specifying, a specific goal.
The German is looser, more cryptic: “Mit zerlöchertem Kopf, kaum noch
bei Sinnen, kam er schließlich doch an.” We also need to consider that:
(i) we are not told what the sign says, (ii) and since, as Aristotle taught, a
disposition can exist even when it is not actualized, we do not know whether
he actually read that sign; moreover, (iii) we cannot determine what, if
anything, he might have learned from it, if in fact he did actually read it.
Finally, it is important to note that there is no adumbration of any social
dimension, any social meaning in this experience, despite the metaphorical
universality of the light. In fine, the passage announcing his “revelation” is
as full of holes as his head. Words—crucial words—are missing.
The reader’s attention is again directed to “a slow process of dis-
closure,” “eine langsame Enthüllung,” at the very beginning of the sixth
chapter, where it refers to a clarification of the significance of events that
the reader will be granted, “just as Franz experienced it” [BA 217/173]. If
the earlier use of that word is ambiguous, and might suggest a theological
meaning, here at least, the word certainly bears none. Nevertheless, Döblin
has given his story an unmistakably theological dimension.
Let us recall what Benjamin argues in “Fate and Character”: “character
is usually placed in an ethical, fate in a religious context. We must banish
them from both regions by revealing the error by which they were placed
there.” Whilst it is certain that Döblin wants to end the intertwining of Fate
and character, banishing Fate’s supposed power, if not from our continuing
inheritance of the ethical and religious contexts that have regulated our
past, then at the very least from its representation, its mimetic repetition,
in the contemporary novel, it is no less certain that, in the end, or at the
end, he could not find, in his attempt to imagine both the development of
Biberkopf’s new character, new life, and, correlatively, the social-political
 84 / REDEEMING WO RDS

development of his urban life world, the words that would express this
necessary banishment of Fate. Nor, therefore, could he wrest his character
away from that causality.12
But the future of freedom is by no means totally dark and grim. There
is, for example, a memorable scene in the second book, an extraordinary
scene, in fact, taking place in a small bistro, a Kneipe, where the custom-
ers, including Biberkopf, are talking politics and revolution. A metaphorical
light of enchantment, an uncanny light suddenly fills the room, its rays
touching and affecting everyone gathered there, disseminating the utopian
prospect of enlightenment:

A bee, a wasp, a bumblebee circles up there on the ceiling

near the stove-pipe, in winter a perfect miracle of nature. Its
tribal companions, companions of its own species, sentiment
and gender are dead and gone or else not yet born: this is the
Ice Age which the lonely bumblebee endures without knowing
how it came about or why this particular bee. But that sunlight
which spreads silently over the table in front and on the floor,
divided into two masses of light by the sign Löwenbräu Patzen-
hofer, is age-old and makes everything else seem perishable and
unimportant, when you see it. It comes from over x miles away,
it shot past the star y, the sun has been shining for millions of
years, since long before Nebuchadnezzar, before Adam and Eve,
before the ichthyosaurus, and now it shines into the little beer-
shop through the window-pane, divided into two masses by a tin
sign, spreads out over the table and on the floor, imperceptibly
gaining ground. It spreads over them, and they know it. It is
winged, light, over-light, light-light [lichtleicht], from heaven high
I come to you. [BA 85–86/61–62]

These are light-bringing words, words disseminating a light capable of bring-

ing those gathered into a dimension where an experience of unity, solidar-
ity, and a shared sense of humanity might be possible. But that redemptive
moment of opportunity passes—passes without transformation.
I am reminded here of something that is said in Heinrich von Kleist’s
dialogue “On the Marionette-Theater”:

But Paradise is sealed and the cherub stands behind us; we must
make the journey around the world and see if perhaps it is open
somewhere from behind.13
 PARADISE IN WO RDS / 85

Another way to slip in is not very likely—which is why this remark elicits
from the interlocutor an immediate laugh. Of course, Paradise is no ordinary
place. But there can be no cheating in Paradise! Nevertheless, perhaps
Döblin hoped that, since Franz has, in a metaphorical sense, journeyed
around the world, died and been returned to life, it is not inconceivable
that, denied admission through the glorious gate in the front, he might
still chance to find in the back a decent way in. In any case, the story
breaks off without confirming his new life. All we know is that the world
into which his new life is cast seems destined for catastrophe. If a paradise
is possible on this earth, Döblin seems compelled to believe that it could
take place only in a time beyond our poor powers to measure.
It will be recalled that Döblin frames his story with a “prologue” that
concludes with a moral exhortation: “To listen to this,” he says, “and to
meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live
in a human skin and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a
piece of bread and butter” [BA 12/2]. In dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Adorno
formulated in lucid terms the persistent structural forces in political life that
deny some families even their daily need for bread and butter:

There is something that all people, whether they admit it or

not, know in their heart of hearts: that things could have been
different, that that would have been possible. They could not
only live without hunger and also probably without fear, but also
freely. And yet at the same time—and all over the world—the
social apparatus has become so hardened that what lies before
them as a means of possible fulfillment presents itself as radi-
cally impossible.14

The force field of tensions even figures in the conditional perfect grammar
of his observation: in the “could have been” and “would have been,” he
turns our attention only toward the lost freedom of the past and the missed
opportunities to create a just order of society. Nevertheless, appropriating
another thought from Adorno, we might find hope even in the adversity,
and the bitter paradoxical irony, of the negative dialectics with which his
thinking makes us struggle, encouraged to suppose, if only on the most
meager grounds, that the utopia of our hope “remains alive precisely because
the moment of its realization was missed.”15
“The way leads to freedom, to freedom it goes.” So ends the story.
But these final words lead, in fact, nowhere. Unable, writing in a time
of political turmoil and economic stress, to imagine Biberkopf living in
 86 / REDEEMING WO RDS

a utopian world, or even his living in a significantly better one, Döblin

has settled for representing the imminent dangers in this one.16 Despite
his hope, language as the causality of freedom, fails him. It fails to come
in any compelling way. But Döblin’s integrity as a writer consists in the
fact that he does not forget, nor let his readers deny, the regressive force
field within which the narrative project is situated and by which it is
accordingly conditioned. Thus, reiterating the dialectical aporia within
which Adorno’s last thought-image in Minima Moralia leaves us, I suggest
that, if there is a utopian, redemptive possibility, then for the sake of
that possibility, Döblin’s narrative, rigorously allegorical, must somehow
“grasp even its own impossibility.”17 This, perhaps, is what it attempts
to convey. In any case, the narrative reflects its time by registering, in a
partially “decomposed” language, the damage that language has suffered.
Döblin accordingly turns to materials that contain “the ruins of words to
which history binds him.”18
The narrative moment that Döblin calls Biberkopf’s “redemption” is,
however, introduced abruptly, without aesthetically sufficient preparation;
and it brings the narrative to an equally abrupt end.19 This, I think, is
how we know that what the ideologically reactionary conventions have
demanded of the narrative structure is in reality a false redemption, a
false reconciliation. Moreover, because of the undeniable obviousness of
his failure to make that moment compelling as knowledge, as reality, his
treatment of this moment not only reveals its semblance-character with
exceptional lucidity; it also indicates the difficulties which at that moment
were confronting this great storyteller, struggling to imagine a narrative in
which the causality of freedom would truly exist and not appear restricted
to the realm of fiction. Adorno argues that, “In each authentic work of
art, something appears that does not exist.”20 Such art forever promises
something that it cannot possibly deliver. In fact, as Adorno remarks: “Even
radical art is a lie insofar as it fails to create the possible to which it gives
rise as semblance.”21 Döblin’s narrative form brings us to the very edge of
catastrophe in the semblance, the guise, of redemption. But at least for a
brief time, Fate has been rendered speechless.
In a commentary on Adorno that I think also sheds light on Döblin’s
narrative crisis, his struggle to find words for a still unnamable future, Ger-
hard Richter observes that, “the emancipatory hope in Adorno’s philosophi-
cal thought, if any is to be found, resides in the ways in which language,
forever at odds with its own intentions and strivings, gestures toward a
futurity that does not yet possess a name, toward a form of community that
has yet to be imagined, and toward that most difficult of all tasks, a learning
to ‘live together’ for which no ethico-political model exists.”22 Recalling
 PARADISE IN WO RDS / 87

the quotation from Kraus with which this chapter opened, I suggest that
what Döblin gets is nothing but the shimmering hint of the words—the
“Stolpersteine” along the way, as it were—for which, in a turbulent time
of destitution and danger, he is longing.23 Neither Biberkopf nor his author
has the words needed to realize the desired narrative. So it now becomes
the readers’ task, our practical task, to continue the story,24 creating from
the death, destruction and suffering that the language of Fate took part in
causing, the language—the words, the discourse, the communicative prac-
tices and institutions—that might vanquish forever the forces of Fate and,
having liberated itself from the spell of historical and political inevitability,
finally begin a revolutionary chapter in history, realizing the causality of
freedom and its promise of happiness.
The possibility of redemption can survive in the world only insofar
as we are able to experience, as such, the unavailability, the silence, of
the language that might mediate that possibility, and are able, recalling
the utopian promise inherent in the communicative nature of language,
to sustain for as long as necessary a compelling sense of the significance of
our deprivation—and of the surmised promise patiently borne by language
that has not yet been kept.
With great sympathy, Döblin’s story tells of a life unfolding in unful-
filled historical time, documenting the longing for redemption, for the
fulfillment of the promise of happiness, in its struggle against the dae-
monic forces of Fate. But everything hinges, as Benjamin has argued, on
the counterforce of memory. When will we remember? When will we have
the words?
Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in 1929, using words that were
already suffering stress, already showing premonitory signs and symptoms of
the disease of the spirit that would soon take over. In 1976, thirty-one years
after the so-called “end” of the Holocaust, the poet Paul Celan, still needing
to bear witness to the unending cruelties and horrors that claimed so many
lives during those years, wrote a brief poem that ended with these words:

from the drum beat of fate falls

the measure of our course.
[aus der Lostrommel fällt/ unser Deut.]25

In the words of Döblin’s story that drumbeat was already exceedingly loud,
interrupting the narrative with its persistent warnings. Very soon, the mean-
ing of those warnings would be clearly known—“deutlich.” Where, though,
were the words of promise, where the promise of the words? When will
they come? When will the ancient promise be kept?
 Part II

Damals
The Melancholy Science of Memory
in W. G. Sebald’s Stories

Opening Conversation

How little moral the world would look without this forgetfulness! A
poet might say that God had placed forgetfulness as door-keeper in the
temple of human dignity.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human1

[T]he true measure of life is memory [Erinnerung]. Retrospectively, it

traverses life with the speed of lightning.
—Walter Benjamin, “Notizen”2

Originally, ‘memory’ means as much as devotion [An-dacht]: a constant

concentrated abiding with something [das unablässige, gesammelte Blei­
ben bei]—not just with something that has passed, but in the same
way with what is present and with what may come. What is past,
present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being.
Inasmuch as memory—the concentration of our disposition, devo-
tion—does not let go of that on which it concentrates, memory is
imbued not just with the quality of essential recall, but equally with
the quality of an unrelinquishing and unrelenting retention. . . . The
gathering of thinking [Andenkens] into what must be thought is what

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we call memory. . . . Memory, as the human recalling of what must

be thought about, consists in the ‘keeping’ of what is most thought-
provoking. Keeping and protecting the truth [Verwahrnis] is the fun-
damental nature and essence of memory.
—Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?3

The life of Man in pure language-mind was blissful. Nature, however,

was mute. True, it can be clearly felt in the second chapter of Gen-
esis how this muteness, named by Man, itself became bliss, only of
lower degree. [After he names the animals, Adam sees them leap away
from him with joy.] But after the Fall, when God’s word curses the
ground, the appearance of nature is deeply changed. Now begins its
other muteness, by which we mean the deep sadness of nature. It is a
metaphysical truth that all of nature would begin to lament if it were
endowed with language. [. . .] This proposition has a double meaning.
It means, first: she would lament language itself. Speechlessness: that
is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the
life and language of Man—not only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in
nature). This proposition means, secondly: she would lament. Lament,
however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language;
[. . .] and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is
always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns. Yet the inversion
of this proposition leads even further into the essence of nature: the
sadness of nature makes her mute.
—Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man”4

History is written across the countenance of nature in the sign language

of transience. [. . .] In nature, the allegorical poets [of the German
Baroque] saw eternal transience, and here alone the saturnine vision
of these generations recognized history.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama5

Whereas in the symbol, with the glorification of death and destruc-

tion, the transfigured face of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light
of redemption, in allegory, the observer is confronted with the facies
hippocratica of history, a petrified, primordial landscape.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama6
 DAMALS / 91

[Art] embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom.

The fact that through its very existence it stands outside the evil
spell that prevails allies it to a promise of happiness, a promise it itself
somehow expresses in its expression of despair. [. . .] It is certain that
after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible
for the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable. [. . .]
In fact, this impossibility [i.e., lighthearted art after Auschwitz] was
already sensed [gespürt] by great literature, first of all by Baudelaire,
almost a century before the European catastrophe.
—Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?”7
 1

Telling Stories
A Question of Transmissibility

§1

Writing in Belatedness

After reading Walter Benjamin’s essay on the historian Eduard Fuchs, Max
Horkheimer wrote to his friend concerning the question of the incomplete-
ness of history, arguing that our relationship to the past must be treated
dialectically if the victims of injustice are not to suffer even more injustice.
Past injustices cannot, he said, be undone: The slain are really dead. In
Convolute N, written for his Paris Arcades Project, Benjamin formulated
his answer:

The corrective to this line of thinking may be found in the

consideration that history is not simply a science, but also and
not least a form of remembrance [Eingedenken]. What science
has “determined,” remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness
can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete,
and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That
is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that
forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological,
little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately
theological concepts.1

Retrieving the claim of justice and the promise of happiness, insurgent

remembrance takes over the work that must redeem suffering, taking
responsibility for ending its causes and conditions. However, as Benjamin
argues in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “our image of hap-
piness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption” and “only

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a redeemed mankind can receive the fullness of its past.” But Benjamin
concedes, here, that this work of remembrance, a task to which the past
has an indeclinable claim, is only “a weak Messianic power.”2 But, if the
past “carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemp-
tion,” this “power” is nonetheless, he thinks, our only measure of hope.
W. G. Sebald’s sense of obligation as a writer, his sense of the story-
teller’s vocation as under moral compulsion—a need, for the sake of hope,
to remember the past—could not have been more intensely expressed, per-
haps, than in words he gives to the emigrant artist Max Ferber, reading his
mother’s memoirs a second time, many years after her death.

On that second occasion, the memoirs [. . .] had seemed to him

like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are
under the spell [Bann], you have to carry on to the finish, till
your heart breaks, with whatever work you’ve begun—in this
case, the remembering, writing, and reading.3

(I want to recall here Döblin’s use of the Hänsel and Gretel nursery tale,
evoking, as it does, the promise of happiness. Perhaps, as he worked on the
story of Franz Biberkopf, Döblin fell into a mood like Max Ferber’s, carry-
ing on to the finish under the “evil spell” that hangs over the children’s
innocent happiness, but struggling, with a broken heart, to deny the failed
salvation of his protagonist.) An even more intense experience is attributed,
doubtless with Kafka in mind, to Uncle Adelwarth:

[. . .] telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt

at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself [eine Art von
Errettung], in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.4

Although Sebald was only a child during the Second World War, his post-
Holocaust writing as a German was nevertheless very much a matter of
historical conscience: the peculiarly guilty conscience of the latecomer.5
My argument in this chapter, drawn from remarks that Sebald himself
made, is that his storytelling—“Prosa,” or “Fiktion,” he calls it, refusing with
good reason to identify his literary works as “Romane”6—is motivated by
a commitment to the redemptive work of remembrance in something like
Benjamin’s “weak messianic” sense: a task forever on the verge of hopeless-
ness and yet somehow drawing strength from the very depths of a reflec-
tively conditioned melancholy—a melancholy that, according to Sebald,
constitutes an essential experience in his own version of an “aesthetics of
resistance.”7 It is, for Sebald, only in the faithful recording of suffering borne in
 TELLING STO RIES / 95

expressions of lamentation and melancholy, only there, exposing traces in mourn-

ing, that language is permitted to bear the promise of happiness. If this promise
may be said to have embodied the idealism that, in early German Roman-
ticism, was called the “Absolute,” in Sebald’s post-Holocaust inheritance
of that cast of mind, the tragic dimension of that dream—the skepticism
and despair already felt by his illustrious predecessors, Hölderlin, Novalis,
Schelling—has turned much darker, so that now even the outline of that
“Absolute” can no longer be discerned with any confidence.8 As Adorno
avers, affirming what one might call the grace of language, trusting it even
in the aftermath of the Holocaust:

That it is spoken, that distance is thus won from the trapped

immediacy of suffering, transforms suffering just as screaming
diminishes unbearable pain. Expression that has been objectivated
as language endures; what has once been said never fades away
completely, neither the evil nor the good, neither the slogan of
“The Final Solution” nor the hope of reconciliation [Versöhnung].
What accedes to language enters the movement of a humanness
that does not yet exist; it is compelled towards language and
alive only by virtue of its helplessness.9

There is promise, there is hope, for the happiness of a future humanity in

the gift of language, he believes, despite the corruption into which it has
fallen in the course of a brutal history. But in Sebald’s stories, that hope,
that promise, has for the most part retreated into allegory, the safety of
ciphers sometimes almost illegible. And the helplessness is itself registered
in narrative images, as when the narrator recalls noticing a doomed beetle
that had fallen into a well and was swimming in futile circles, unable to lift
itself out of the water [R 228/190]. The mood of the prose, its “Stimmung,”
is by no means always impassive, serene, or saturnine; flowing heavily, like
the silted Nile, and as if somehow beyond the reach of the law of time, it
becomes at times an exquisitely sensitive register, even in its belatedness,
its self-protective “Nachträglichkeit,” of the narrator’s acute vulnerability,
a consciousness readily “entsetzt,” startled, horrified, shocked, immobilized
in vertiginous distress, when exposed even in the most ordinary situations
to events that seem uncanny or enigmatic, despite their common every-
dayness, and even vaguely minatory, as somehow threatening to confirm
the unnerving contingencies, fatalities, and nothingness of creaturely life,
abandoned to survive without promise, without hope.
Reminded, no doubt, of the images of the funeral barque bearing
the undead body of Schlag, the Doppelgänger of Kafka’s Hunter Graeccus,
 96 / REDEEMING WO RDS

one critical reader has commented, with regard to Rings of Saturn (1995),
Sebald’s first published novel, that, “If there is an underworld where the
darkest nightmares of the twentieth century dwell, W. G. Sebald could be
its Charon.”10 Though in fact describing Sir Thomas Browne’s prose style,
Sebald could have been characterizing his own, when, with unmistakable
admiration, he wrote of this Renaissance author’s “labyrinthine sentences
that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble pro-
cessions or a funeral cortège.”11 If, as Heidegger says, language is “the house
of being,” Sebald’s writing is a “charnel-house,” his language a weave of
word-images, “Schriftbilder,” haunted by atrocities and devastations, ghosts
and remnants, the moral claims of the undead, and what can still, if only
weakly, be recalled and remembered: a past in creaturely life and nature that
has irrevocably passed away, but is not yet dead—not yet dead, but also,
despite the persistence of its claims, its need for narratives of remembrance,
not recuperated or redeemed.12
In fact, subtly structuring much of Sebald’s prose fictions, structur-
ing and shaping his sentences, casting them into seemingly interminable
mourning, is what, following Derrida, one might find it suggestive to call
the trace. On the one hand, there are, in the language, in the sentences,
traces of death and dissolution, traces of things that have vanished, are in
the course of vanishing, or are fated to vanish. Often recognizable only
by indirection, these trace-structures that Sebald’s use of language bears
are the acknowledgment, within language and by language, of natural his-
tory, the ontological impermanence of everything in our world. But there
are also trace-structures of remembrance bearing witness to atrocities and
suffering that history has forgotten. Often, these traces sustain a sense of
loss that cannot be mastered. As vessels of remembrance, however, traces
not only hold on to what remains after death and destruction; they also
carry intimations of what could possibly emerge from so much negativity,
so much loss. For the sake of the promise of happiness, Sebald cannot
permit himself to abandon what faith he might still have in this work of
remembrance, seeking it, above all, whenever his attention is drawn to
something of beauty, appearing like the prophecy of a miracle.13

§2

The Gravity of the Sentence

It is not his individual words, but instead his sentences and sentence con-
stellations—distinguished by their slowness and length and rhythm—which
 TELLING STO RIES / 97

express and enact, as if bearing the weight of an irrepressible memory, a

post-Holocaust mourning and melancholy. Sebald’s words are mostly com-
monplace, the words of congenial conversation among friends; but they
often take part in sentences and sentence constellations whose physiog-
nomy shows traces of an interior suffering that they leave unsaid. That
suffering is frequently acknowledged only in the structure of the trace. The
principal aesthetic material of Sebald’s art is not the word—the invention
of a new word, the restoration of an archaic word, the transmission of
our philological and etymological inheritances, the play of possibilities in
a word’s ambiguities, the beautiful resonance of a word—but rather, the
physiognomy of the sentence and sentence constellations. More specifically,
what matters in his storytelling is the affective mood that he can induce
by giving the sentence or constellation a certain emotionally suggestive
physiognomy. Making the sentence or constellation, not the word, the
major aesthetic unit gives his narrative its distinctive stylistic form.
What, then, does the physiognomy of his sentences and sentence
constellations—above all their rhythm, cadence, and length—tell us? It
seems to me that what they often impart, among other things, is a certain
reluctance to come to an end, as if retarding and deferring that decisive
moment could, by prolonging the time of languishment, intensify the felt
need for a redemptive experience whilst deepening the counter-experience
in which that desire is compelled to acknowledge its disillusionment, its
ruination. We might say that it is as if Sebald’s sentences have submitted
to the detours and delays constitutive of a structure of postponement or
deferral. The rhythm and cadence of his languorous sentences and constel-
lations, though seldom as long and intricate as those in Flaubert, Proust,
and James, ensure nevertheless that their moment of disillusionment, bring-
ing its “shadow of annihilation” [R 35/24], or else their brief and precari-
ous moment of consolation, if not happiness, will be temporarily deferred,
encouraging in any case a certain measure of hopefulness; but precisely
thereby, that moment, when after some subordinate clauses the sentence
inevitably comes its end, will be all the more deeply felt, whether in frustra-
tion or in fulfillment. Drifting in melancholy slowness toward their inevi-
table ending, such sentences and constellations recall Hölderlin’s remarks
about the “counter-rhythmic interruption” at work in Sophocles’ tragedies:
their retarding rhythm adjusts the momentum, tightens the tension and
intensifies the reader’s experience of the resolution that comes at their end-
ing. This intensification involves not only a distinctive experience of the
specific content imparted, but also a distinctive experience of the formal
qualities that the sentence or constellation engages in coming to an end.
The retarding of the end is often a symbolic resistance to the foreclosure of
 98 / REDEEMING WO RDS

transcendence: it briefly defers but of course cannot avoid that end, almost
invariably, for Sebald, an allegorical experience of eternal transience, con-
firming the overwhelming power of natural history, the melancholy truth of
an impoverished immanence only faintly illuminated, if at all, by the prom-
ise of transformation. (Might we experience the melancholy mood distinc-
tive of Sebald’s prolonged, artfully constructed sentences, especially those
in The Rings of Saturn, to be expressing, or at least manifesting, what, in
Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard characterizes as “true patience”—“that which,”
he says, “contends against time”?14 And might this be part of what Sebald
means by an “aesthetics of resistance”?) Hence the ominous dark cloud that
always seems to hover over his sentences, weighing heavily even on those
that temporarily stop the flow of time to celebrate something arrestingly
beautiful. The rhythm Sebald frequently adopts—one that, with Benjamin
in mind, I am tempted to call “messianic”—is singularly fitted to receive
and express the melancholy rhythm of memory, as it lingers to evoke absent
things with a tenderness of love that is unfathomably redeeming, or as it
searches in the tiniest, most unimpressive nooks and crannies of the mind
for what has been forgotten, reluctant to end the search with a recognition
that what is past might really be irretrievable, irrevocably lost, yet resistant
most of all to the forgetting of the loss. At the same time, however, the
rhythm and cadence of the prose mimetically reproduce—in miniature, as
it were—the seemingly interminable waiting that relinquishes closure for
the sake of a redemptive possibility that, in the world outside the sentence,
has been endlessly deferred. But it is characteristic of his long, intricate,
carefully composed sentences that, as they calmly wind their way through
subordinate clauses, or through a series of evocations recording the names
of things, toward their conclusion, they save for the very ending the critical
judgment to be remembered.
What frequently prolongs his sentences and their constellations are
catalogues of things, things commonly ignored and neglected, upon which
Sebald, however, lavishes a timeless, extraordinarily loving attention, as if
he believed that the simple act of naming or recalling these things could—
indeed would—somehow, redeem them. As if names were blessings, prayers
for their salvation. Nothing is too insignificant for recognition; as if it were
a matter of principle that nothing deserves to remain without a name, or
without some other form of attentive acknowledgment.15
Some examples of the author’s sense of rhythm and cadence in his
prose style could, at this point, be useful, although extracting sentences
from their larger context risks distorting and abusing them, perhaps making
it quite difficult, if not impossible, to experience the effect my argument is
claiming. In any event, what I want to suggest is that, even more than in
 TELLING STO RIES / 99

their mere length, frequently an effect of the sheer accumulation of details,

a characteristic of his style especially noticeable in Austerlitz, the last of his
stories, it is in the rhythm or metrics of his sentences and constellations,
and in their cadence, that, even if only vaguely or ambiguously, something
felt to be evocative of a relation to the messianic might be transmitted. In
an essay on Nabokov’s prose that recalls Benjamin’s discussion of Kafka,
Sebald wrote:

To set something so beautiful in motion, according to both

Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show
is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the
ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around
in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good
sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in
its place.16

In this telling description of Nabokov’s sentence constructions, Sebald

reveals his own predilections: not only with regard to how he writes, but
also with regard to how he understands what his sentence constructions are
meant to communicate. Permit me now to register here some illuminating
examples of Sebald’s prose style, rendered of course in English translations
sometimes neither literal nor exactly isomorphic, yet for the most part
remarkably faithful to both the physiognomy and the spirit of his style.
More examples are presented in the endnotes.17 If they do nothing else,
I hope they at least whet the reader’s appetite and become a provocative
temptation to read the stories themselves.
(1) Here, the narrator records Thomas Abrams’s confession as he
contemplates the model he has built, representing Jerusalem’s first Temple.
The sentence slowly builds with its words a detailed image of this Temple,
taking its time as it moves toward a sudden vision of eternity. “Now, as the
edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if
I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not
been a wretched waste of time. But on other days, when the evening light
streams in through this window and I allow myself to be taken in by the
overall view, then I see for a moment the Temple with its antechambers and
the living quarters of the priesthood, the Roman garrison, the bath-houses,
the market stalls, the sacrificial altars, covered walkways and the booths
of the moneylenders, the great gateways and staircases, the forecourts and
outer provinces and the mountains in the background, as if everything
were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity” [The Rings of
Saturn 291–94/245–46].
 100 / REDEEMING WO RDS

(2) “A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thor-

oughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power
of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never under-
stood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as
I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed
away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find every-
thing as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time
have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us
would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so
at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up
the bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish” [Aus-
terlitz 151–52/143–44]. The sentence moves swiftly through a succession of
brief assertions boldly denying the conventional order of historical time,
gradually slowing down in longer clauses, before coming to its dialectical
counterpoint, ending in a moment of disenchantment, a moment of truth
shattering the futile hope invested in a quixotic metaphysical fantasy of
transcendence.
(3) “When Austerlitz had brought the tea tray in and was holding
slices of white bread on a toasting-fork in front of the blue gas flames, I
said something about the incomprehensibility of mirror images, to which
he replied that he often sat in this room after nightfall, staring at the
apparently motionless spot of light reflected out there in the darkness, and
when he did so he inevitably thought of a Rembrandt exhibition he had
seen once, many years ago, in the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, where he
had not felt inclined to linger before any of the large-scale masterpieces
which have been reproduced over and over again, but instead stood for
a long time looking at a small painting measuring at the most nine by
twelve inches, from the Dublin collection, as far as he remembered, which
according to its label showed the Flight from Egypt, although he could
make out neither Mary and Joseph, nor the child Jesus, nor the ass, but
only a tiny flicker of fire in the middle of the gleaming black varnish of
the darkness which, said Austerlitz, he could see in his mind’s eye to this
day” [Austerlitz 176–77/169]. In this long sentence, memory slowly weaves
a story around that source of illumination, tenderly protecting it, and the
salvation it represents, from vanishing into nothingness.
(4) “If I now think back to that desolate place [Lagerplatz], I do not
see a single human being, only bricks, millions of bricks, a rigorously per-
fected system of bricks reaching in serried ranks as far as the horizon, and
above them the Berlin November sky from which presently the snow would
come swirling down—a deathly silent image of the onset of winter, which I
sometimes suspect may have originated in a hallucination, especially when
 TELLING STO RIES / 101

I imagine that out of that endless emptiness I can hear the closing bars
of the Freischütz overture, and then, without cease, for days and weeks,
the scratching of a gramophone needle” [The Rings of Saturn 213–14/179].
The rhythm of this sentence is the unhurried rhythm of reflective memory;
but using repetition, it creates some powerful, compelling emphases, before
moving toward an abrupt ending in words that, both in their meaning and
in their rhythm, evoke brick-by-brick a triumphant repetitiveness that is
experienced as emptied of meaning. Is turning toward redemption possible
in a world ruled by the law that, like a gramophone record spinning round
and round, dictates a forever-the-same?
(5) The narrator tells us that, “The low-lying cloud drifting in from
the Alpine valleys and across that desolate country was conjoined in my
mind’s eye with a Tiepolo painting which I have often looked at for hours.
It shows the plague-ravaged town of Este on the plain, seemingly unscathed.
In the background are mountains, and a smoking summit. The light diffused
through the picture seems to have been painted as if through a veil of ash.
One could almost suppose it was this light that drove the people out of the
town into the open fields, where, after reeling about for some time, they
were finally laid low by the scourge they carried within them [wo sie, nach
einer Zeit des Herumtaumelns, von der aus ihrem Inwendigen hervordrängenden
Seuche vollends niedergestrekt wurden]” [Vertigo 59/51]. This constellation of
sentences, beginning with the announcement of a cloud, slowly moves, as
if inexorably, toward the judgment of fate that sweeps away all hope and
ordains its order through the course of natural history.
(6) In a constellation shaped by its own distinctive pattern of rhyth-
mic rising and ebbing, Max Ferber recounts his experience of Matthias
Grünewald’s paintings for the Isenheim altar, telling the narrator: “The
extreme vision of that strange man, which was lodged in every detail,
distorted every limb, and infected the colours like an illness, was one I
had always felt in tune with, and now I found my feeling confirmed by
the direct encounter. The monstrosity of that suffering, which, emanating
from the figures depicted, spread over the whole of Nature, only to flood
back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death, rose and
ebbed within me like a tide” [The Emigrants 253/170]. The sentences seem
here to reproduce a felt sense of that movement of the tide, sparing no
mortals from nature’s eternal rhythms.
(7) “If before then he had marveled with envy at the tulips and
starflowers behind the windows, and at the crates, bales and chests of tea,
sugar, spices and rice that arrived in the docks from the faraway East Indies,
from now on, when occasionally he wondered why he had acquired so little
on his way through the world, he had only to think of the Amsterdam
 102 / REDEEMING WO RDS

merchant he had escorted on his last journey, of his big house, his splendid
ship, and his narrow grave” [The Rings of Saturn 61/45]. After testifying to
great wealth, taking its time to document in detail a procession of worldly
goods, the sentence moves on to picture, like some seventeenth-century
Baroque still-life, the inevitable scene of death, when all those riches must
be left behind.
(8) “They went to the house at Arbois where Pasteur grew up, and in
Arc-et-Senans they had seen the saltern buildings which in the eighteenth
century had been constructed as an ideal model for factory, town and society;
on this occasion Paul, in a conjecture she felt to be most daring, had linked
the bourgeois concept of Utopia and order, as expressed in the designs and
buildings of Nicolas Ledoux, with the progressive destruction of natural life
[und der immer weiter fortschreitenden Vernichtung und Zerstörung des natürlichen
Lebens]” [The Emigrants 67/44–45]. To be noticed here is how, first, a certain
ideality, and then a conception of utopia are invoked or affirmed, but only
to be annulled, after a brief delay by the words that end the sentence.
The eight examples we have just read in this florilegium are rela-
tively long. Sometimes, though, Sebald resorts to sentences that are quite
short and abruptly ended. As might be expected in such an atmosphere,
extremely brief, condensed sentences can create an overwhelming sense
of fate, pronouncing a sentence that has, in its cadence, the finality and
irrevocability of a natural, perhaps chemical process: “And so they are ever
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” [The Emigrants 36–37/23].
But, despite death, there are always some remnants, traces of what was—or
once, perhaps, was possible.

§3

Traumatized Meaning:
The Remnant Between Destruction and Restitution

In Sebald, as in Benjamin, the remnant is a trope that summons into

remembrance a theological, messianic story, evoking what in our histori-
cal world survives the eschatological catastrophe, persisting in the time
that tolls the passing of creaturely life between destruction and salvation.
As such, the remnant is the peculiarly metaphysical product of a negative
dialectic, a material revelation of infinite resistance to all forms of worldly
power, all forms of fate: precisely in its abject condition, it proclaims the
 TELLING STO RIES / 103

impossibility of totality, the impossibility of complete subsumption, even

the impossibility of any absolute, stable identity. The remnant is what,
despite its debased, degraded material condition, despite its proximity to
nothingness, infinitely resists finality and closure in all demarcations, all
determinations.18
At times, his writing turns uncompromisingly clinical, “micrologicial,”
exposing itself—and us, his readers—to the temptations of a guilt-laden
fascination, the awe and the horror in macabre scenes that reveal with
unflinching exactitude the gruesome condition of the victims of human
malice and the monstrosities of nature’s invention.19 Although one can
sense, in these word-images, the pure passion of natural science, they always
somehow register a tone of the deepest moral compassion for what Adorno
described as “damaged life.” This compassion, resisting forgetfulness and the
power of oblivion, is, I think, the source of the mood of melancholy that
shrouds Sebald’s writing. His writing bears witness, even if only in media-
tion, by recording what others tell him, to all kinds of suffering: suffering
in battles, epidemics, famines, genocides, floods, and storms. And not only
the suffering of human beings, but also the suffering of animals and the
devastation he sees in forests, rivers, marshes, and meadows.
These compassionate “obsessions” account for the gravity of his
prose—its somber “sobriety,” if I might take over the unique sense of a
word that Hölderlin used for defining his own position in relation to Jena
Romanticism. The telling of stories—Sebald’s indefatigable, and at times
unsettling commitment to memorialization, to the defiance and resistance
in memorialization—must serve the working-through of mourning, sustain-
ing a preponderant sense of loss: a loss of freedom, of reason, of meaning.
At the very heart of all the stories that Sebald wants to tell, the reader
always encounters remnants—the mere remnants of some earlier form of
life. Weighty questions arise here. Might the storyteller’s art of remem-
brance bring back disavowed, encrypted memories? Sebald’s writings are
singularly exposed to textual haunting, because they enter the zone of
collective social consciousness between acknowledgment and avoidance,
calling attention to what we know but do not want to know. Could the
telling of stories revive or redeem the remnants of natural life? Could
stories reflexively take account of their fictional composition, their turn to
semblance, so as to bear witness to a truth that emerges most compellingly
only in a work of art? Could the writing of stories release language from
its fate as the sepulcher of fading memories and lost dreams? Could ashes
have at least the semblance of an afterlife?20
Is recollection, then, the only Paradise out of which we cannot be
driven? For survivors of the Holocaust, nothing is more terrifying than
 104 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the painfully repressed return of their Holocaust memories; however, their

immeasurable suffering consists, in part, in being forever denied the recol-
lection of a past before the Holocaust in which they might find again, in
the Paradise they lost, the promise of happiness.
Sitting in the Sailors’ Reading Room in the Southwold Library, the
narrator in The Rings of Saturn, presumably Sebald, tells of his ruminations
as he leafs through the log of the patrol ship anchored in 1914 off the
Southwold shore:

Every time I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that

a trail that has long since vanished from the air or the water
remains visible here on the paper. That morning, as I closed
the marble cover of the log book, [I found myself] pondering
the mysterious survival of the written word. . . . [R 115–16/93]

Words may be, when all their referents have vanished, the only traces to
bear and transmit their memories. But precisely because so much depends
on the written word, Sebald never ceases to struggle against the danger that
this word can become “a dead product of the past”—what Wilhelm von
Humboldt calls a “mummified preservation.”21 Sebald’s strategy as a writer
is to filter “living speech” through the precarious mediations of narrated
memory, telling stories in which his characters are telling stories. His stories
engage narrators who are conscious of their role in the transmission of the
stories they have gathered from their interlocutors. But the transmission
is never secure.
Sebald is a keen observer of processes of ruination and destruction—
the devastation of nature, the abandonment of factories and fortresses, the
dilapidation that has befallen once flourishing urban neighbourhoods, and
the ruination overtaking historically significant buildings; and he demon-
strates on many occasions a profound submission to skepticism, especially
with regard to the reliability of our perceptions and memories. In fact,
few other contemporary writers have so relentlessly, so uncompromisingly
consecrated their prose to the natural history of destruction and mortifica-
tion. His prose style conveys to a remarkable degree a reasonable faith in
language as such. And yet, I think, he knows with deep pain that his writing
cannot avoid what Paul Celan lamented in a 1953 poem: “Whatever word
you speak—you are thinking the disaster [Verderben].22 As a storyteller,
Sebald must rely on words to bear witness to the reality of destruction and
the signs or traces of redemption. The testimony of words may be all that
remains. But he cannot shake off the feeling that the redemptive process
set in motion by that testimony will always be threatened by the agents of
 TELLING STO RIES / 105

destruction. Like all writers of the twentieth century, he is worried about

overcoming the inadequacy and obsolescence of inherited words; but wor-
ried above all about finding a form of prose fiction, and a rhetorical style,
the formal and expressive qualities of which would not betray the object
of representation.
Describing the making of one of Max Ferber’s portraits in charcoal,
the narrator in The Emigrants is moved to remark:

an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long

lineage of grey ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there,
as ghostly presences, on the harried [geschundenen] paper. [AE
239–40/161–62]

The portrait that appears, true to the life it represents, is “ultimately,”

however, nothing but a product of dust, something formed by rubbing the
surface of paper with the carbonized remnants of dead plant life, then by
erasing, smudging, dusting, destroying. In Sebald’s stories, the prose often
assumes a similarly stressed quality. As Strathausen points out,

Ferber’s portraits and Sebald’s prose demonstrate what happens

to the Romantic ideal of art in an incredulous age that is no
longer able to “suspend disbelief” by taking the ideal of the
Absolute as the Absolute itself. As it seeks material proof to
validate its quest, such an art literally grinds itself down in a
desperate effort to transcend signification. This is why Sebald’s
narrator digs deeper and deeper into the earth of language, much
as Ferber scrapes off the surface of the paper he paints upon.23

But the earth of language turns to dust. Reading Sebald’s prose, one often
gets an uncanny sense that the words in print are turning before one’s
very eyes into dust or ash—so many shadows of death crossing the page.
Observing with an almost “paralyzing horror” the “traces,” everywhere, of
processes of destruction, some of them recent, others “reaching far back
into the past,” Sebald turns to writing, leaving his testimony to the facts,
the truth that he sees, in tracings of ink, tracings burnt into the wood of
paper [R 11/3].
If, however, as I would claim, Sebald is a conscious inheritor of Jena
Romanticism, it is necessary to realize, first, that he understood the histori-
cal dangers in this Romanticism; consequently, second, that his critique
of the present is not at all the expression of hostility to modernity, not
some Romantic nostalgia for the past. The “nostalgia” in his melancholy
 106 / REDEEMING WO RDS

outlook is metaphysical or transcendental, what Novalis would have wanted

to describe as a “transcendental form of homesickness”: a critical moment,
in fact, in the enactment of a negative dialectics.24 But he cannot escape
believing that, in certain crucial ways, the past is not past; compelling this
belief is the conviction that the past demands remembering because it still
requires a moral responsibility from us.
In The Emigrants (1992), the narrator says, thinking of our obligation
to remember the past, that, “they are ever returning to us, the dead.”25 This
theme recurs in the course of an interview in which Sebald was asked to
discuss the question of veracity in works of fiction. He says, in response:

I have always had at the back of my mind the sense that of

course these people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere
at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits.
And photographs are, for me, as it were, one of the emanations
of the dead, especially the older photographs of people no longer
with us. Nevertheless, [. . .] they do have what seems to me
some sort of spectral presence.26

However, somewhat defensively, and, I think, not very convincingly, he

hastens to insist that, “It’s got nothing to do with the mystical or mys-
terious.” It is about our responsibility to keep the past in remembrance.
Whatever we wish to make of this disclaimer, the fact remains that, in
the world that Sebald’s stories construct, the “normal” boundary of defense
separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead is repeatedly
breached by the remembrance and recalling of the undead. Is this archaic;
is it primeval? Or is it in fact a way of expressing a critique of our modern
world? The normal boundaries are breached by a commitment of language
to resisting the power, the spell, of forgetfulness that is a distinctive feature
of the future-oriented economy of our modernity. Sebald’s stories also ques-
tion other boundaries our culture has constructed: boundaries separating the
known from the unknown, the human from animal, the human life from
plant life, presence from absence, and even the division of time itself into
past, present, and future. Ever ready to be “diverted” by an item in an old
newspaper, a painting on a restaurant wall, a resemblance he happens to
notice, the strange behavior of an animal, or something said in conversa-
tion, Sebald’s writing is a writing strikingly disseminated and dispossessed, a
writing that belongs to the claims of the Other—what Adorno calls “non-
identity.” And since, as Benjamin argued in Origin of the German Mourning
Play, the symbol affirms a connection without any remaining otherness or
transcendence, whereas the allegory makes manifest its non-identity, its
 TELLING STO RIES / 107

failure to attain such a totalized connection, Sebald relies on the allegorical

possibilities in literature and turns to them instead of to symbolic construc-
tions for the provocative presentation of historical meaning.
According to Heidegger, “saying sets all present beings free into their
presence.”27 But for Sebald, this release, this rescue, is not at all a cer-
tainty. Although he believes that saying—above all, saying in the service
of remembrance—represents the only possible hope, and perhaps would
not agree with Blanchot’s argument that language names and recalls only
to cover in its black shroud of letters what words have dared to invoke,
he cannot avoid the nagging anxiety that fiction is ultimately doomed to
failure because of its belonging to the art of semblance, an art, moreover,
that, as Adorno argues, is also guilty of turning the realm of nature as
well as the world of human life into “raw material” for its production of a
“higher” truth, inevitably doing them a certain violence.28
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues against the exclusion of other-
ness under the domination of the logic of identity, which, he maintains,
is at the bottom of all that is wrong with our civilization. He writes there:

However void [hinfällig] every trace of otherness in it [the world],

however much all happiness is marred by revocability: in the
breaks that belie identity, entity [das Seiende] is still pervaded
by the ever-broken pledges of that otherness. All happiness is
but a fragment of the entire happiness men are denied, and are
denied by themselves.29

Sebald’s attention is drawn more to the present reality and its forgotten
past, which melancholy is singularly able to perceive, than to any possible
future of happiness; but his writing is unquestionably obsessed by a struggle
for the sake of every form, every claim, of otherness, committed to the
“rights” of alterity, in a way that, I think, not many other contemporary
writers can sustain. What are all the improbable coincidences, superve-
niences, surprising encounters, unexpected events, correspondences, rep-
etitions, resemblances, shifting identities, interruptions, literary citations,
echoes, and mirrorings in his literary works, if not so many ways—despite,
or perhaps precisely because of, their frequently striking implausibility—to
acknowledge and finally attempt to redeem the truth of the otherness that
we have denied?30 In his stories, chance events, improbable occurrences,
surprises of all kinds, are ways of protesting against the fatalism that rules
in (a certain interpretation of) natural history. And it could be argued,
I think, that, drawing on the mimetic faculty, the archaic persistence of
which can be mobilized, as Benjamin and Adorno propose, for resistance
 108 / REDEEMING WO RDS

to the violence of the logic of identity that rules in our time, Sebald sub-
stitutes hidden resemblances—which he, like Foucault, finds to have been
noticed in the time of the Renaissance—for the reified, rigidly bounded
identities of a later modernity. Like Benjamin and Adorno, Sebald is con-
stantly calling into question our supposedly settled identities and constant
conjunctions: in their writings, therefore, mimesis, instead of copying and
confirming identity, as it has since Plato, paradoxically promotes the claims
of the long-suffering non-identical. I take this to be a measure of Sebald’s
resistance as a storyteller to the destructive reification and totalization dis-
tinctive of modernity. Above all, what his writing resists in every way it
can, as it faithfully registers the rhythms of memory, reflection, and the
unhurried flow of a story, is the separation of language from experience,
hence their separation from the untapped possibilities in historical mean-
ing. In this separation, both language and experience suffer petrification, a
death-like paralysis. Instead of taking his readers into abstract possibilities
of the imagination, Sebald prefers to record dates and places and numbers,
prefers to catalogue by name all the local plants, and prefers to register
seemingly insignificant details, such as the character of the weather on
the day of a particular event. But both his stories and the photographs
that accompany them also resist the will to knowledge as a form of power,
frustrating certainty, and even, sometimes, the very possibility of knowledge.
And they resist moral complaceny by evoking unsettling and disquieting
events, objects, and situations. With the photographs, the disturbing effect
of the subject matter, resisting peace of mind, is often intensified by images
that are out of focus, obscuringly dark, or in some way damaged. Ghostly
apparitions. Images in which whatever comes into the light of appearance
appears only in the process of disappearing. Like his prose, so often elegiac,
bound to the grammar of what has been, “das Gewesene,” the photographs
that Sebald interpolates into the narrative text—or with which he inter-
rupts the narrative—invariably show themselves in their submission to the
phenomenological structure of eternal mourning.31

§4

Melancholy Science: Modernism as an Aesthetics of Resistance

In the Preface to his Lectures in the Philosophy of Art, Hegel famously

declared his conviction that “philosophy is its own time apprehended in
thought.”32 It seems that Sebald has adopted the parallel principle that
 TELLING STO RIES / 109

literature must likewise be its own time—not only, however, by represent-

ing this time in its content, but by expressing and manifesting this time,
both its tragic failures and its remaining promise, in and as its narrative
mode and rhetorical style. Since reflection is inherently dialectical, Sebald’s
writing accordingly produces work that is both of its time and not of its
time, both timely and, in Nietzsche’s sense, untimely. It is, in brief, a form
of writing, a form of prose, quietly engaged in an “aesthetic of resistance.”
In the wake of the Holocaust, incontrovertibly the event for Sebald’s
consciousness that defines the present experience of modernity, the Enlight-
enment conception of history as an irrevocable continuation of progress
has been obliged to yield its place to a conception of history as the fateful
continuation of the same: more of the same cruel suffering, more of the
same unfelt destructiveness. Sebald’s contributions to German literature are
a labor of despairing love, a post-Holocaust writing unquestionably commit-
ted to the moral critique of the modern world. This means that his writ-
ings call into question in a number of different ways the prevailing modes
of production of historical knowledge, questioning our normative notions
of witnessing, remembering, believing, inheriting, and handing down—
especially, of course, with regard to the Holocaust and the Second World
War.33 Neither reactionary nor revolutionary, his writings constitute rather
a critique that assumes the form of a guilty conscience: from the depths of
his own sense of guilt, his writings call to the guilty, disavowed conscience
of our time; and with considerable sensitivity, they attempt to do justice
to the need for a critical examination, not only of the most fundamental
assumptions, convictions, and shibboleths of our modern culture, but also
of the forms of greed, indifference, rage, and violence that have made our
world what today it is.
Sebald, however, does not make this critical task easy for himself
because, as a writer, he is acutely conscious of the distinctive character and
temperament of the objective spirit prevailing in our contemporary culture.
In his narrative forms (anecdotes, memoirs, diaries, travel reports, excerpts
from scientific treatises, historical documents, inventories of natural and
artifactual curiosities, biographies, autobiographies, hallucinations and
dreams) and in his rhetorical devices (intertextual citations, literary quo-
tations and allusions, glaring inconsistencies, dizzying repetitions, uncanny
resemblances, deceptive semblances of identity, improper games with proper
names, and interweavings of texts and photographs that raise more questions
than answers), he exemplifies and reflects with uncompromising aesthetic
rigor—and indeed compelling power—the reflexive, self-critical moment
constitutive of modernism.34 This modernism is essentially a question of
 110 / REDEEMING WO RDS

using the reflexive, self-critical resources that modernity itself provides to

protest against—and resist—its authority, its rule of assumptions.
In an early text, a fragment dated 1919, Walter Benjamin observes
that, “The currently effective messianic elements [Momente] of the work
of art manifest themselves as its content [Inhalt]; the retarding elements, as
its form.”35 In regard to the reading of Sebald, that way of understanding
the old conceptual distinction between form and content seems not only
legitimate but also, I believe, especially effective. How does our world, our
time, show itself, how is it illuminated by the linguistic form and narra-
tive content of his work? How does our world come to appearance in and
as Sebaldian modernism, through the design of his language, his narrative
structures, and his way of telling stories? Of course, Sebald is painfully
sensitive to the fact that he is a German writing in the wake of the Holo-
caust. The victims who perished in that time of hell on earth can never be
brought back to life; so his dedication to the work of memorialization takes
place in a time when the passing away of all that matters seems utterly
bereft of an afterlife—and yet, paradoxically, there is always, trembling in
the felt sense of his narratives, the uncanny conviction, or say impression,
that what we have irretrievably lost can nevertheless, somehow, still persist,
if only in ghostly forms of haunting. The past, the undead, thus persists;
and Sebald’s task must consequently be to persist in keeping his narra-
tive formations receptive, open to its uncanny moments of breaching. So
“transcendence” somehow appears to break through the order of ordinary,
everyday life, even though there is also an insistent recognition that we
are living through a time in which the nullification of transcendence is a
process that can no longer be denied.
Sebald’s alchemical obsession with processes of mortification—with
the alembications of dying, decay, disintegration, decomposition, pulveriza-
tion—and with the traces, fragments, and remnants of the destroyed and
the vanished, simultaneously proclaims and resists fatality in its finality. In
the slow-motion, almost immobilized world that he, together with his nar-
rators and protagonists, often inhabits, it seems that the possible is always
both possible and impossible; and that, although the impossible is impos-
sible, it somehow can also become possible. This duplicity requires that
the narrative construction tolerate, or rather make way for, a necessary
looseness. This looseness, though, is among other things a manifestation
or symptom of the fact that we of today find ourselves cast adrift, like
fishermen after a shipwreck, without any absolutely authoritative sources
of normativity. Hegel, whose influence on Sebald, though unacknowledged,
is nevertheless everywhere to be detected, anticipated this moment when
he observed that, “the course [Weg] of the spirit lies in errancy, in digres-
 TELLING STO RIES / 111

sion, in detour [Umweg].”36 But who is to say what is to count as minor,

marginal, digressive, incidental, inconsequential, insignificant?
Sebald’s writing is faithful to the way that, in ordinary life, the tell-
ing of stories “naturally” flows: seemingly filtered through reflection and
memory, the attitude is conversational, unhurried—as if the storyteller and
his readers had infinite time and infinite patience. The telling of stories
takes time; but Sebald’s stories also give time—time lost and even time
to come—to those willing to give the stories their time. Perhaps it is this
untimely timelessness, this defiance of time’s urgency, and indeed of time’s
obliteration of pastness, weaving a languorous, contemplative mood in a
world of frenetic movement, feverish haste and vertiginous speeds, that
makes his prose so compelling, so spellbinding.
In “An Attempt at Restitution” [Campo Santo, 2003], Sebald, reflect-
ing, after one of his visits with his close friend, the painter, Jan Peter Tripp,
on the influence this painter’s work has had on him, remarks that

in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently

engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in
the manner of a still life, I have kept asking myself since then
what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and
how the threads run.37

Sebald’s style of writing—long, complicated, intricately woven sentence

formations, a coldly saturnine prose, moving sometimes with the heavy,
impassive slowness of a determined gravity, passing by the reader’s eyes like
a funeral cortège, or like a lazy river traversing the flat lowlands at the end
of its journey—draws readers into labyrinthine syntactical structures that
make orientation difficult and often erase or unsettle memory, compelling
even the most attentive readers to turn back some pages in order to over-
come their uneasy sense of being at a loss and having somehow lost some-
thing.38 Convinced that there are always mimetic correspondences, always
connecting threads, even when nothing is visible, even when everything
seems contingent, random, an exceedingly improbable coincidence, Sebald
makes narratives that carry the reader on a serpentine, meandering, but
absolutely irresistible, and seemingly implacable flow. Fate can thus seem to
be cunningly at work in every coincidence, every turn of the corner—and
every movement of the hands of a clock. Recounting his conversation
with Jacques Austerlitz in the Salle des pas perdus of the Antwerp railway
station, the narrator, recalling the great clock in that station, remarks that
they both “noticed what an endless length of time went by before another
minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of that hand,
 112 / REDEEMING WO RDS

which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every

time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from
the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s
heart almost stopped” [A16–17/8–9]. So much narrative richness, so much
metaphysics, condensed into just this one sentence, itself moving, rhythmi-
cally, as if toward an inexorable, fated arrest! (Sebald’s image is homage to
the seventh of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 Texts for Nothing, in which Beckett’s
narrator describes waiting interminably in the third-class waiting room of
the South-Eastern Railway Terminal, located somewhere in the south of
England; in this word-image, the one who is waiting notices on the wall
a gigantic clock, the hands of which, in their movement, provoke in him
metaphysical thoughts about the temporal and the eternal.)
But the frequency of the coincidences also works against the impres-
sion of fatalism. These coincidences thus show that the notion of Fate in
Sebald’s narrative universe cannot be the traditional notion, which requires
a linear determinism. Moreover, because of too many strange coincidences,
too many inconsistencies in his repetitions, making their claim to veracity
difficult to believe, and because of what we are wont to call the “digres-
sions,” relying on a word that misses the point, the narrative, though tightly
woven, with its associative transitions so mildly and smoothly effected that
they become almost unnoticeable, is often on the verge of disintegration, an
irreversible fragmentation and dissemination, a process that can be arrested
and resolved only by the reader’s greatest exertion of attention and memory.
Stated summarily but paradoxically, instead of creating a reassuring sense
of continuity, the drift and flow of free associations his sentences make
sometimes can leave the reader feeling, retrospectively, in a dissociated
state of mind. As if the randomness, the unpredictability of these drifts
should leave caesurae in the reader’s memory—a disquieting feeling, akin
to the experience of parataxis, revealing that the world, despite the appar-
ent coherence that the associative continuity of the narrative suggests, is
actually out of joint. This, too, is a subversive mimesis of the amnesias and
dissociations distinctive of our contemporary world.
Reading Sebald, finding my attention perpetually drawn to the
strangely familiar, the ordinary suddenly appearing uncanny, I am reminded
of some lines of verse by Paul Celan. The first strophe of a poem in his
Zeitgehöft says: “Das Fremde / hat uns im Netz, / die Vergänglichkeit greift
/ ratlos durch uns hindurch.”39 Once ensnared by the things Sebald has
called to our attention, we are abruptly made aware of their inevitable,
fated transiency. Can there be, in that experience, any hope, any promise?40
I want to carry that question in reading Benjamin’s “Theological-Political
Fragment”:
 TELLING STO RIES / 113

In happiness [Glück], all that is earthly seeks its downfall [Unter-

gang], and only in good fortune is its downfall destined to find
it. [. . .] To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces
immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the
eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient
worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also
in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is hap-
piness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total
passing away [Vergängnis].41

On this invocation of the “rhythm of messianic nature,” Irving Wohfarth

comments:

Not in theological perspectives and teleological prospects but [.  .  .]

in the “rhythm of messianic nature,” the transient intensity of
the moment, in Glück, Vergängnis, and Untergang, is fulfillment
“destined” to be found.42

The only real eternity we can ever hope to know lies in the realm of
transience: “unending dissolution,” “eternal ephemerality.”43 Thus, Jacques
Austerlitz recalls for the narrator the wonderfully dreamy summer days he
passed, years ago, as a guest at the Fitzgeralds’ Lodge:

All forms and colours were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there

were no contrasts, no shading any more, only flowing transi-
tions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from
which only the most fleeting visions emerged, and strangely—I
remember this well [daran erinnere ich mich genau]—it was the
very evanescence [Flüchtigkeit] of those visions that gave me, at
the time [damals], something like a sense of eternity. [A 143/135]

For Benjamin, it is in “the great drama of the passing away of nature” that
“the resurrection of nature repeats itself as an act.”44 So, when Sebald calls
attention to this drama of passing away, his words, flowing in a rhythm
expressive of “eternal ephemerality,” are in effect allegorical repetitions
of the miraculous resurrection of nature. In Sebald, one encounters that
“messianic” rhythm in a prose that often sounds elegiac, nostalgic, serenely
mournful; and instead of expressing an unmediated happiness, that hap-
piness forms in a rhythm that must be lifted out of an abyss of suffering,
stolen, as it were, from the prose of spirits lost in the history of the unhappy
consciousness. For his is a prose that in its very form is determined by a
 114 / REDEEMING WO RDS

paradoxical yearning for the impossible: a meaning that can be presented

only indirectly, obliquely, allegorically. The most striking indication of this
longing and languishment will be found in his many restless journeys, espe-
cially in the long hike—Sebald calls it a pilgrimage—that he makes along
the southeastern coast of England and that he records in The Rings of Saturn.
This yearning concerns a struggle over the very meaning of the human—a
struggle to illuminate, or say redeem, our troubled sense of humanity. In
Aesthetic Theory, Adorno remarks:

What accedes to language enters the movement of a humanness

that does not yet exist; it is compelled towards language and
alive only because of its helplessness. [AT 179/117]

Adorno did not, of course, read any of Sebald’s work. But nothing could,
I think, more exactly convey the motivating spirit of Sebald’s prose. In
Austerlitz (2001) and other writings, Sebald evokes passages from Hugo von
Hofmannsthal’s “The Lord Chandos Letter.” Sebald leaves little doubt that
he thought its representation of the writer’s helplessness to be a significant
reflection of his own struggles, as a storyteller, to find within the lan-
guage he inherited from an unspeakably evil past this “movement towards
a humanness that does not yet exist.” In the von Hofmannsthal story about
a fictional letter to Francis Bacon, a certain “Lord Chandos” explains why
he is no longer able to write. Echoing this letter, Sebald has Austerlitz
describing an experience that might be said to represent the crisis of lan-
guage distinctive of the modernist sensibility:

The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of

parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the
nouns denoting ordinary things were all enveloped in impen-
etrable fog. [. . .] The very things which may usually convey
a sense of purposeful intelligence—the exposure of an idea by
means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me nothing
but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise. I could see no
connections anymore; the sentences resolved themselves into a
series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters,
the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray
trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it
by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled
me with feelings of horror and shame.45

The vertigo represented in this passage is much more than the experience
of a crisis of faith in the communicative power of language; it is, above all,
 TELLING STO RIES / 115

for Sebald, the experience of a crisis in the power of language to transmit

historical memory in a humanly redeeming way. This experience is some-
thing with which Sebald and his narrators are all too familiar; but his read-
ers, too, can sometimes, quite suddenly, feel that they are enveloped in an
impenetrable fog of unknowing, falling helplessly into the vortex created
by the turns and twists, elusively familiar repetitions, shifting identities,
shifting boundaries and contexts of meaning, hypotactic constructions, and
swirling evaporations of his vertiginous prose. Sebald’s readers can thus
be overcome by a felt sense of exile, carried by the linguistic quality of
the prose into a landscape that is at once familiar and yet inexplicably
unrecognizable—and in subtle ways, pervasively disorienting or unnerving.
In writing about the works of Robert Walser, Sebald asks: “What is
the meaning of all these similarities, coincidences, and correspondences?
[. . .] Do they merely constitute the picture-puzzles of our memory [Vex-
ierbilder der Erinnerungen], deceptions or self-deceptions, or do they signify
instead the schemes of an incomprehensible order that extends over both
the living and the dead and has been programmed [einprogrammierten] into
the chaos of human relationships and extends over both the living and
the dead?”46 If one reads Sebald’s literary works from the point of view of
a writer, one expects a story that is compelling, hence without episodes
or events—coincidences—that would seem improbable. And indeed, in all
conventional models teaching the art of writing fictional narratives, one is
taught to avoid mere coincidences. Sebald, though, uses them knowingly
because, I suggest, he believes that, at bottom, there are no mere coinci-
dences, that everything is connected to everything else, so that what seems
coincidental never really is. Thus he wants to provoke us to think past the
disintegration we experience in the appearances of coincidence, past the
uncanniness that unsettles our habits of thought, especially our rational-
izing assumptions regarding the causal order of nature, to contemplate the
possibility of a “metaphysical,” or natural-historical truth awaiting recogni-
tion in a pattern of underlying sympathetic affinities and interconnections.
Beyond the logic so far interpreted, there is another explanation for all
the strange and improbable coincidences in Sebald’s stories. In this regard,
it is of decisive importance to bear in mind that Sebald was a thought-
ful reader of Benjamin’s writings. And as we know, Benjamin sought to
rethink the prevailing experience and conception of time—especially his-
torical time. Considered in this light, the coincidences in Sebald’s stories
represent challenges resisting the standardization and linearity of time: they
require us to question and break out of an irreversible, one-dimensional
temporality that not only excludes a return of the repressed, but conse-
quently also the very possibility, the very meaning, of salvation, redemp-
tion, and the promise of paradise. Like Benjamin, Sebald is convinced
 116 / REDEEMING WO RDS

that the storyteller must struggle against, must resist, the “rationalized”
economy of a temporality that, like a terrible sword of justice, is ultimately
in the service of death and eternal damnation. For both men, the role of
memory in storytelling requires rescuing the “metaphysical” or “transcen-
dental” dimension of temporality from its reduction to that “rationalized”
order. The redemptive art of memory cannot take place in the confines of
such an order. The uncanny coincidences and correspondences that Sebald
folds into his stories resist the operation of time as fate, creating a sense
of multiple temporalities. Somehow, however, all worldly events are inter-
connected, even the most improbable coincidences, within an ultimately
enigmatic dimension of natural history, a dimension it might be tempting
to think of as redemptive.
Like the tragic figure of the collector in Benjamin’s writings, the
Sebaldian storyteller, as a writer reflecting on his time, must struggle to
satisfy somehow two opposing demands: on the one hand, an uncompromis-
ing resistance, distinctly modernist, to the violent logic of identity that,
in making repetitions, conceals crucial differences, tensions, and contradic-
tions, and, on the other hand, a movement to arrest the prevailing chaos, in
which spirit has become subject to powerful forces of dispersion, fragmen-
tation, and disintegration, with an accompanying loss of memory—a loss
that is also a convenient amnesia, splitting off and suppressing a past that
cannot be acknowledged without conceding unpardonable guilt. Thus, on
the one hand, Sebald will make the compelling, hypnotic flow of his nar-
ratives—using associative transitions so inconspicuous that they are notice-
able only belatedly—encourage a disorienting sense of disconnectedness,
casting the reader adrift in the baroque intricacies of the flow. There are
also, though, missing transitions, disconcerting gaps and inconsistencies
in the tension between text and image, and features of the prose and the
narrative structure that are no less disorienting than the hypnotic flow.
For example, there are textual passages that make a specific factual claim,
which the accompanying photograph is too dark, too blurred, or too faint
to confirm. And the long sentence formations, forming subordinate clauses
within subordinate clauses, postpone and delay their ending, making a com-
prehensive grasp of the meaning in its unity more than a little difficult. In
this form, the sentence formations are a mimetic expression of the social
and psychological disintegrations that have emerged in our time.
And yet, on the other hand, the writing is also obsessed, driven by
the desire to discover the secret, seemingly unrepresentable connections—if
there are any—that would make a deeper, redemptive sense of the world
come to light, holding everything together: “I have slowly come to realize
that everything is connected with everything else across times and places,
 TELLING STO RIES / 117

[. . .] dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with unhappiness, the
history of nature with that of our industry, and the history of home with
that of exile.”47
So, in order to bring these unrealized connections, these associations,
to consciousness, Sebald attempts to construct linguistic presentations—
“Darstellungen”—that are somehow able to express limitlessly more than
it would ever be possible for them explicitly to say. And he composes
sentence formations that, solely by their form, namely, by long, intricately
interwoven clauses, mimetically project the affinities, associations and con-
nections that are felt to be absent from contemporary reality—as if they
were able actually to produce them. And as if this form of prose might
translate into an aesthetic practice what Adorno argues, in his essay on
“Presuppositions,” concerning the redemptive “rudiments” of language con-
cealed in “associations that do not disappear into the conceptual meanings
and nonetheless join themselves to the words with a delicate necessity.”48
Thus, the most deeply meaningful of these associations must remain in
a spectral presence, in order to elude the forces of reification that have
instrumentalized language and rendered it unfit to bring into expression
the spiritual, utopian-emancipatory potential in social-historical experience
that the prevailing law of identity, its forces ever hostile to the negative
dialectic in mimetic associations, must suppress.
But Sebald’s disruptions of this oppressive rule of identity are not
at all comforting. For the forms of interconnectedness that, apart from
the narrative content, Sebald’s syntactical constructions achieve are often,
however, just as disorienting and just as deceptive as the gaps and fluctua-
tions in identity that these same constructions also produce. For the only
forms of connection and association available to us now cast us, he suggests,
into the natural history of disintegration and destruction. I am reminded
of Beckett’s ironic reflection in this regard: “All things hang together, by
the operation of the Holy Ghost, as the saying is.”49 Which is to say, of
course, not merely that we cannot know the principle, or cause, of this
unity, but that perhaps this unity, this connectedness, might be nothing but
a delusion—essentially a ghost story; essentially mere ideology.
Sebald’s writings—not only his stories, but also his literary criticism
and his discussions of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and other
world-historical events—want to assume the meaningful interconnectedness
of everything that takes its place in reality. At the same time, however,
they are forced to make these interconnections, which, despite the struggle,
nevertheless often seem to have only a ghostly, uncanny presence, ulti-
mately conceding their failure to transcend traditional empiricism. Should
we call his conviction a “regulative principle,” a “speculative hypothesis”?
 118 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Whatever its epistemological status, it has enabled him to construct a pow-

erfully compelling narrative, weaving dispassionate documentation into a
subtly haunting, subjectively mediated response to the contradictions, the
diremptions—and the abysses of forgetfulness—that mark our time.
I have been calling attention to Sebald’s paradoxical deployment of
the mimetic as a way of questioning the conceptual framework of moder-
nity, deconstructing its powerful system of associations and identities, break-
ing down the barriers that have excluded or denied the Other. Even his
narrative use of repetition—“Phantome der Wiederholung”—paradoxically
subverts the claims of rationalized identity whilst encouraging at the same
time a sense of the world as a weave of secret connections and affinities
[R223/187]. His writing has many ways of unsettling the habits of thought
and experience that dominate our time. If, in the world that Sebald’s weave
of prose shows us, there are disconcerting lacunae, caesurae, and inconsis-
tencies that by their design mirror real disconnections, real contradictions
in our world, his storytelling weave also shows us that there are some deep
connections, deep correspondences, where we have been tempted to see
absolutely no connections at all: connections broken, or suppressed, by our
collective schizophrenia and amnesia, casts of mind that function to deny
a history of guilt and a corresponding burden of responsibility which the
recognition of those connections would require us to acknowledge. Thus,
at the same time that Sebald’s mimetic prose works for the sake of justice,
justice for the nonidentical, against false identities, false connections, it also
works for the sake of justice against forces of dissociation, fragmentation, and
disintegration—convenient amnesias, that serve to obscure true identities,
true connections, the real consequences and implications of our actions, to
which our modern paradigm of empiricism makes us tragically blind.
In The Rings of Saturn, we are urged to reflect: “Across what distances
in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect?” [R217/182].
Is there no connection, no morally just way to recognize a connection,
between the silkworm breeding industry in nineteenth-century Germany,
monitoring “productivity and selection, including extermination [Ausmer-
zung], to preempt species degeneration [zur Vermeidung rassischer Entartung],”
and the Nazi’s systematic extermination of the Jewish people?50 Is there
nothing at all to be learned from conceptualizing a connection? Accord-
ing to Sebald, there is in fact a deep connection of moral significance that
demands to be thought between, for example, the heap of dead herring on
a ship in Lowestoft and the human corpses piled up under trees in Bergen-
Belsen.51 Moreover, the blurred and degraded quality of the two photo-
graphs that accompany these two themes not only reenacts the processes
of decomposition to which their subjects are exposed; it also mimicks our
 TELLING STO RIES / 119

repression of the unspeakable. It is not at all a question of equating herring

and human beings; it is not at all a question of diminishing the horror
of the Holocaust; it is a question of seeing the larger picture, recognizing
something of the greatest significance in regard to the violence, the work
of the death-drive, that seems to keep what we call “civilization” going. As
Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” argues, “There is no document of
civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”52 Taking
this point to heart, Sebald interprets it, as would Adorno, to include works
of art, despite their struggle to avoid further violence and make some mea-
sure of restitution. What makes Sebald’s writing such a melancholy science
is its revealing of connections that bespeak the cruelty of our “civilization.”
Two representative episodes, narrative passages, one taken from The
Emigrants (2001) and one taken from Vertigo (1990), will show how Sebald
draws the work of memory into his attempts to make morally haunting,
morally challenging mimetic connections. Max Aurach, a refugee from the
Holocaust living and working as an artist in Manchester, tells the narrator:
“I am here, as they used to say, to serve under the chimney” [AE 287/192].
Using this image to convey a double meaning, Sebald connects the artist’s
present reality to the past from which he escaped. Auschwitz appears here,
but only by not appearing; paradoxically, then, its presence, its horror, is
thereby actually intensified, because it takes on a ghostly, haunting quality.
The horror of the death camp likewise makes a ghostly appearance in one
of the stories in Vertigo. Sebald tells of venturing out on a midnight boat
excursion to see from the water the city of Venice. He is guided by Mala-
chio, whose name suggests a “mal occhio,” an evil eye—or perhaps an eye
capable of seeing evil. Sighting in the distance a “deathly silent concrete
shell beneath a white pall of smoke,” Sebald hears the man invoke “the
miracle of life born of carbon [. . .] going up in flames” and learns that
what he is seeing is the “Incineratore Communale.” This prompts him to
ask his guide “whether the burning went on throughout the night.” In
reply, Malachio says, chillingly: “Sí, di continuo. Brucia continuamente.
The fires never go out.”53 In Sebald as in Derrida, Auschwitz is invoked as a
subtext, invoked without being named, without being directly represented;
in this way, the significance of the Holocaust comes to our attention as
an unexpected interruption, an unsettling breach, haunting the defensive
boundaries that we construct around the present.54 In fact, it is all the
more disturbing precisely because it is never named and never is permit-
ted to appear in the open, where its unspeakable historical reality could
be domesticated by the civility of prose. At the same time, however, this
narrative strategy is also an acknowledgment of the overwhelming discon-
nection that contemporary consciousness effects. As if it were necessary to
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defend against some fatal danger in directly relating to the Holocaust. In

an interview, Sebald said: “I don’t think you can focus on the horror of
the Holocaust. It’s like the head of Medusa: you carry it around with you
in a sack, but if you looked at it, you’d be petrified.”55
But Sebald will not cease to invoke and reflect on the immeasurable
significance of this holocaust, returning again and again, not only to the
horror, but also to the questions that it raises with regard to hope and
redemption. The subtextual allusion in Vertigo to the crematoria of Aus-
chwitz becomes an opportunity for such reflection when “Sebald” reports
that his guide told him that, “he had been giving a great deal of thought
to the resurrection and was pondering what the Book of Ezekiel could mean
by saying that our bones and flesh would be carried into the domain of
the prophet” [SV 71/62]. Would not this domain be the redemptive future
beyond history as we know it? The narrative offers no answers. The ques-
tion is, in that way, left to continue reverberating, haunting us even as we
move on with the narrative, temporarily finding ourselves relieved to be
disconnected from its pressure.
As Eric Santner argues in his work On Creaturely Life, Sebald’s char-
acters are all people left stranded somehow amid the desolate ruins of the
post-Holocaust years.56 They are, all of them, traumatized victims: some
are victims of the Holocaust and the war, of course, but others are victims
of their particular circumstances, victims of the specific time and place
in which they happen to be living. Sebald has deep sympathy for these
people and tells their stories, their singular “Leidensgeschichten,” with
sympathy and sensitivity.57 As Santner notes, Sebald “is forever exposing
himself to the fragments and traces of other lives—traces often available
only in objects, in bits of ‘material culture’—and to the enigmatic address
that issues from them.”58 Telling stories through these materializations of
unredeemed suffering, of traumatic memory, thus becomes the substance
of what I would like to describe as his “moral vocation.” It is his way of
consoling, offering those who have suffered some small measure of moral
lucidity, and somehow, perhaps, tipping the scale of justice—even if only
slightly—in their favor.

The disconnection and disorientation constitutive of our contemporary

experience of the world we inherited, especially in regard to memory,
is given a number of different, but related allegorical interpretations in
Sebald’s construction of narrative scenes. In The Emigrants, for example, the
principal narrator, who would seem to represent Sebald himself, recounts
 TELLING STO RIES / 121

how, having just arrived in Manchester and found a hotel to stay in, he got
lost in the hotel’s “maze of dead-end corridors, emergency exits, doors to
rooms, toilets and fire escapes, landings and staircases” [AE 225/153]. Is this
episode readable as an allegorical reflection on the fate of the exile—the
refugee, in particular, from the Holocaust? Is there a sense in which the
writer, having chosen out of protest to live in exile, is bound to feel lost
in the maze of a foreign tongue? Or at least, like Jacques Austerlitz, exiled
from the mother tongue? “Recently,” he tells the narrator,

I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying

away [Absterben] of my native tongue, the faltering and fading
sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while,
like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something
which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one
tries to listen to it. And certainly the words I had forgotten in
a short space of time, and all that went with them, would have
remained buried in the depths of my mind [im Abgrund meines
Gedächtnisses verschüttet geblieben] had I not, through a series of
coincidences, entered the old waiting-room in Liverpool Street
Station that Sunday morning, a few weeks before it vanished
forever in the rebuilding. [A 203/136]

Imagining the country he left behind, Max Ferber, the emigrant in one of
Sebald’s stories, says:

The scene is always a silent one. I think the grey lady under-
stands only her mother tongue, German, which I have not
spoken since I parted from my parents [. . .] and which survives
in me as no more than an echo, a muted and incomprehensible
murmur. [AE 271/182]

And he evokes Wittgenstein’s well-known statement in the Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus, but gives it a post-Holocaust reverberation it did not have: “Of
those things we could not speak of, we simply said nothing” [AE 273/183].
In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was an
Austrian in exile, and whom Sebald invokes by paraphrase in Austerlitz,
suggests that we might think of language as an ancient city.

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze [Gewin-

kel] of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of
houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded
 122 / REDEEMING WO RDS

by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and

uniform houses.59

Sebald draws on this imagery to construct an allegory about the crisis of

language that began in the nineteenth century: a crisis all twentieth-century
writers have inherited in even more aporetic conditions. Beginning to con-
fess the crisis he experienced when he attempted to set down his thoughts
in writing, Austerlitz says:

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and

squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from
far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up
and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into
the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been
abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban
sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or
what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.
[A 180–84/172–76]

Is something like this estrangement, this lostness, perhaps the universal

condition that all of us are now undergoing? Are we all perhaps in a certain
exile within our language? Is there a collective amnesia affecting even our
language, taking away from us, as if making us strangers in our own city,
the ability to understand the plight of our world and express in words the
meaning of this experience—this loss, deprivation, and disorientation? Is
there a connection between the disorientation we often experience in our
cities and the invisibility of the stars in the night sky? We no longer have
the visibility of an infinite distance by which to take in proper measure the
meaning of our earth-bound lives. Are we exiled from our past in the cities
we have built? Is the language of the metropolis changing so rapidly that
we are losing its roots, hence our roots? Manchester, which Disraeli, accord-
ing to Sebald’s poem, once called the most wonderful city of the present,
a “heavenly Jerusalem,” seeing its emergence as a symbol of enlightened
progress, its great promise lighting up the beginning of the era of indus-
trialization, now is instead, as “Sebald” surveys it through the eyes of an
exile, a city of inconsolable melancholy, a city that shows only its “facies
hippocratica,” its devastation and desolation. An abject, disorienting, alien-
ating place, its industrial area is emptied of people and work, its life gone
elsewhere, but it is filled, in Sebald’s narrative, with subjectively constituted
meaning, a moral lesson for the prideful spirit. For much of its industry is
no longer needed, is obsolete, or has moved elsewhere.60 Manchester has
 TELLING STO RIES / 123

become a city suffering its own form of exile, displaced from the center of
future progress. Reminded of Brueghel’s paintings, Sebald can only ponder
this fate. Expressing himself in the theological terms that the understand-
ing of these paintings calls for, he asks, doubtful and without much hope:
“will the whole of nature somehow turn away from the unhappiness of the
Son?” [NN 90–91/106]. In commenting on Alexander Kluge’s argument,
“that a proper understanding of the catastrophes we are always setting off
is the first prerequisite for the social organization of happiness,” Sebald,
taking the viewpoint of the “Angelus Novus” in Benjamin’s meditation on
the concept of history, contends that the systematic destruction effected
by a mode of industrial production organized according to the dictates of
capitalism “hardly seems to justify the principle of hope.”61
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno observes that, “[t]he cultural landscape,
which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand, embodies a wail-
ful lament that has since fallen mute” [AT 102/64–65]. Born in Germany
and living in exile in England, in a sense a refugee, after the fact, from
the destruction and destitution of the spirit that followed the ending of
the Second World War, Sebald experienced what he wanted to say in his
native language as if it too could survive moral distortion and corruption
only by undergoing its own time in a condition of exile and estrangement.
But to be living for a long time in a foreign country is to be in exile from
one’s native language and threatened with the loss of that tongue whilst
lost in the one that remains foreign. Native words imperceptibly slip away;
but their replacements in the language of exile can fail to come. Unlike
Nabokov, who made the transition to English, Sebald persisted in writing
in German. But, as time goes by, even this determination cannot entirely
protect the exile from an uncanny, disorienting experience of exile from his
native language. In isolation from other speakers, one’s own native language
can begin to sound strange, unfamiliar. Perhaps the elegiac tone in Sebald’s
writing is not only a tone consciously adopted to be in keeping with the
subject-matter, the content; perhaps it also manifests, more unconsciously,
the author’s languishment, his longing for the native’s familiarity and ease
in the use of his own language. In any case, exile from language capable
of bearing the memory of meaning manifestly figures as a recurrent subtext
in his writings, exerting pressure on both narrative content and prose for-
mation. The elective affinity with Nabokov accordingly is unfathomably
deep. For, in a sense, Sebald is himself a “butterfly man,” and maybe even
to be identified with the “Schmetterlingsfänger” who appears in his tale
about the painter, Max Ferber, because he is forever attempting to capture,
in the memory-net of his prose, the butterfly souls of the departed—and
even to catch the living before they, too, fall into the realm of the dead.
 124 / REDEEMING WO RDS

“Logis in einem Landhaus” (2002), a collection, at present not trans-

lated into English, of Sebald’s critical commentaries on literature, suggests
that the characteristics of his writing on which we have been reflecting,
namely the drifting and shifting of meanings and stable identities—for
example, the scene we encounter in Vertigo, figured by the barque on which
Schlag the Hunter, undead but laid out on a bier, slowly drifts into the
harbor at Riva—are symptomatic of a certain trauma, indicating a pervasive
crisis of language peculiar to our time, a desperate condition—call it exile—
that is not merely his own—and not even merely a threat to the writer.62
There are places in Sebald’s text where the narrator’s words, representing,
we may assume, the author, fall, as it were, into a certain traumatized mute-
ness, as if turned to stone. Suddenly the rhythm is broken and the words
point into an abyss of silence, “the whispered secrets of the last spoken
syllable hanging in the air, the last written word of a paragraph stranded
on its own line.”63 It is as if the writer has been denied even the possibility
of finding, or receiving, the right words for lamentation.
But Sebald perseveres, because he has not abandoned—or not been
abandoned by—all hope. Hence his response in Campo Santo (2003) to
Peter Handke. In Wunschloses Unglück, Handke had written about the writ-
er’s struggle against the “curse” in communication: that “the utmost need
to communicate [das äußerste Mitteilungsbedürfnis] comes together with the
utmost speechlessness.” Without denying the struggle, Sebald nevertheless
argues that,

[l]iterature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith

with the unsocial, banned and exiled resources of language
[un­gesellschaftlichen, verbannten Sprache] and by learning to use the
opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.64

And at the beginning of the essay on Handke he cites what Foucault says
in Madness and Civilization regarding the moral obligation of the writer’s art:

We must therefore listen attentively to every whisper of the

world, trying to detect the images that have never made their
way into poetry, the phantoms that have never reached a waking
state. No doubt this is an impossible task in two senses: first,
because it would force us to reconstitute the dust [den Staub] of
those actual sufferings and foolish words that nothing preserves
in time; second, and above all, because those sufferings and words
exist only in the act [Geste] of separation. [CS 57/53]
 TELLING STO RIES / 125

By composing narratives in which he as author withdraws into conceal-

ment, displaced by a narrator who listens with great attentiveness to the
stories of others, Sebald emphasizes the origin of storytelling in the art of
listening and suggests that this concern for the lives and stories of oth-
ers—above all, those whose suffering is a moral claim without any voice—
constitutes the storyteller’s first and most demanding responsibility.
As Sebald’s readers will know, dust is a significant allegorical ele-
ment in his writings, evoking what is to be recovered for remembrance and
redeemed. Sebald’s narrator relates that Max Ferber felt closer to dust than
to light, air, or water. Indeed, “he loved the dust more than anything else in
the world” [AE 238, 161]. The “reconstitution” of the dust that tells of that
suffering is precisely what his writings are all about: a “reconstituting,” in
fact, that is not entirely without hints or traces of a weak redemptive hope:
a hope always shrouded, always verging on a fall into melancholy despair.65
It may be recalled that, in Goethe’s “World Soul,” there is a line of verse
in which the poet declares: “every particle of dust lives.”66 Even the driest
of dust? Even ashes? “Only in traces and ruins,” says Adorno, “is [reason]
prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality.”67
Traces and ruins—in the dust. Dust always has a story to tell—belat-
edly, as an afterlife. It speaks of what has been missed. Whence its allegori-
cal value for the storyteller, who is always both too early and too late. In
a scene in Vertigo, a scene set in Desanzano where villagers are waiting in
vain for the Prague Vice-Secretary of the Workers’ Insurance Company, a
man who never appears, never comes, one of those waiting observes that,
“those on whom we invest our hopes always come when they’re no longer
needed, when no one can use them any more” [SV 168/154]. But this
citational echo or trace is not only a way of expressing homage, and not
only a way of invoking redemptive hope; it is also a way of commenting
on the estranged and aporetic position of the storyteller in our time. Isn’t
the storyteller always somehow in exile, always searching in a foreign land,
a no-man’s land, for the sake of what needs redeeming—lost memories, lost
words? And, like the owl of Minerva which, in Hegel’s image of the rela-
tion between philosophical thought and its time, always awakens belatedly,
long after the night with its terrors and violence has already passed, so the
storyteller seems fated to have stories to tell—stories of injustice, stories of
suffering—only after the fact. This “Nachträglichkeit,” and the consequent
sense of helplessness, account for the preponderant mood of melancholy.
Readers have called attention to the numerous distinctive qualities of
Sebald’s prose—qualities such as those I have already characterized here.
They have also taken note of a distinctive coldness, aloofness, and flatness
 126 / REDEEMING WO RDS

of tone, a quality in his writing that might be described as expressionless.

Paradoxical though it might at first seem, I want to suggest that the mel-
ancholy truth is never registered in his prose more authentically than by
its expressionless, matter-of-fact tonality. In his essay on Goethe’s Elective
Affinities, Benjamin discusses at length this strange quality, first introduced
in the “Prologue” to his study on the German mourning play, in which
he argues that truth is—that is to say, it requires—the death of authorial
intention, the erasure or breaching of sovereign subjectivity, whose inter-
ventions inevitably affect the presentation of truth. Here, because of its
illumination of form and content in Sebald’s three literary works, is what
he says in the essay on Goethe’s novel:

Form [. . .] enchants chaos momentarily into the world. There-

fore, no work of art may seem wholly alive, in a manner free
of spell-like enchantment, without becoming mere semblance
and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must
appear petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment. That
which in it has being is mere beauty, mere harmony, which
floods through the chaos [. . .] but, in this flooding-through,
seems only to enliven it. What arrests this semblance [of life],
spellbinding the movement and interrupting the harmony, is
the expressionless [das Ausdrucklose]. The expressionless is the
critical violence that, while unable to separate semblance from
essence in art, prevents them from mingling [and legitimating
false semblance with the authority of essence]. It possesses this
violence as a moral dictum. In the expressionless, the sublime
violence of the true appears as that which determines the lan-
guage of the real world according to the laws of the moral world.
For it shatters whatever still survives of the legacy of chaos in
all beautiful semblance: the false, errant totality—the absolute
totality. [T]he expressionless compels the trembling harmony to
stop and through its objection [Einspruch] immortalizes its quiver-
ing. Only the expressionless completes the work, by shattering
it into a thing of shards, into a fragment of the true world, into
the torso of a symbol.68

Invoking an analysis of poetic meter in Greek tragedy in which Hölderlin

shows its dependency on the caesura, “the pure word, the counter-rhythmic
interruption,” Benjamin argues that this rhythmic interruption is the exact
correlate of the expressionless:
 TELLING STO RIES / 127

One could not characterize this rhythm any more aptly than by
asserting that something beyond the poet interrupts the language
of the poetry.

In other words: “Every expression comes to a standstill in order to give

free reign to an expressionless power,” an inherently unrepresentable power,
operating nevertheless both within the work of art and outside it. Nothing,
I think, better explains Sebald’s dull-gray, impassive prose style and the
often elegiac rhythm, a rhythm interrupted every so often by the inclu-
sion of a photograph that crystallizes the melancholy form and truth con-
tent of his narratives, than this understanding of what Benjamin calls the
expressionless. It even enables us to interpret Sebald’s customary strategy
of withdrawing behind a situated narrator, a figure who serves as the one
upon whom, by force of circumstance, the obligation has fallen to hear
the testimony of the protagonist and bear witness to the experience in
question. Sebald’s withdrawing is, I want to suggest, one of the ways in
which he achieves in his writing something like an “expressionless” prose
in Benjamin’s sense. Sebald’s evacuation of interiority, his relinquishing of
authorial sovereignty, of “enlightenment,” serves the disclosure of truth.
Indeed, everything in Sebald tends to unsettle our sense of mastery, our
confidence in claims to knowledge, and even our conviction that there is
a final truth to be known.
It might be argued, though, that his distinctive avoiding of expres-
siveness, unquestionably an attempt to withdraw or efface the subjective
factor, distinctively impassive, not only addresses the problem of presenting
the truth in a work of fiction, but also intensifies the exposure of words to
the things they are signifying and naming, silently approximating, though
without ever regaining, the “pure language,” or “language as such,” in its
prelapsarian immediacy, the natural or necessary connection unifying word
and thing in compelling truth. This intensified exposure, however, only
intensifies the work’s self-sacrifice in compensation for the failure of fallen
language, as it intensifies the tension between words and things, their irre-
mediable lapse into an estrangement from one another that no exquisite
arabesques in the prose can conceal or redeem; for the energy of this prose
is almost completely exhausted in its attempt to register the moral truth and
impact of things within its weave. This is writing as a melancholy science.
For Benjamin, the “truth content” of a work of art—say, a novel—is
not what corresponds to features of the world we take as our reality; it is
not a question of empiricism, as that is customarily understood, but of a
revelation or illumination of the decisive and essential meaning immanent
 128 / REDEEMING WO RDS

in the appearance of the world, as constructed by the narrative. Immanent:

neither an interpretation imposed on the narrative world from outside its
frame, nor a transcendental significance disclosed behind the phenomena—
as if it were like the Kantian “Ding an sich.” The “truth content” is that
which makes the concrete material reality of that narrated world mor-
ally intelligible, morally recognizable.69 But this truth is a content that
shows itself most lucidly precisely to the degree that language approximates
“the expressionless,” no longer colored by human willfulness, but exposed,
instead, to what otherwise would remain unrecognized. At stake is the pos-
sibility of a self-presentation of the truth content that is at work, always
at first unrecognized, within the narrative material: the free, spontaneous
emergence and presentation of the essential meaning—something like the
Kantian “Idea”—that alone makes compelling critical—and perhaps dev-
astating—sense of the configuration, or constellation of material elements
signified by the narrative. Approximating expressionlessness, Sebald’s prose
can let the recessive truth content emerge on its own, illuminating, if only
for the briefest of intuitive grasps, how everything in history, including
utopian projects that failed and revolutionary opportunities that were left
behind, might be redeemed by taking part in the realization of a radically
different ordering of time and history.
In specifying his methodology in the Trauerspiel work, Benjamin
stated: “[The] method of the treatise is essentially presentation. Method
is digression or indirection [Umweg]. Presentation as digression or indirec-
tion—such is the methodological nature of the treatise.”70 Sebald’s writ-
ing similarly works by digression, or indirection, and also by a carefully
constructed rhythm which, by virtue of its slowness, its syntactic retarda-
tions, permits the reader’s thought to linger with the narrative material so
that the truth content might freely emerge, manifesting its critical edge
in the form of what Benjamin calls a “dialectical image”: “Where think-
ing comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there
the dialectical image appears.”71 Elaborating this definition in relation to
Goethe’s understanding of truth, Benjamin remarks: “The dialectical image
is that form of the historical object which satisfies Goethe’s requirement
for the object of analysis: to exhibit a genuine synthesis. It is the primal
phenomenon of history.”72
Sebald’s prose thus exhibits, in one and the same moment, both a
longing for the redemptive history-shattering possibility—language with a
commitment to the truth strong enough to overcome our tragically flawed
relationship to historical reality—and a persistent skepticism, despite find-
ing hope, dialectically, precisely in the irreducibility of the non-identity,
the insistent autonomy, or anarchy, of language in relation to the prevailing
 TELLING STO RIES / 129

reality. But as long as a world of corruption persists, a rebellious non-iden-

tity, breaking the spell of an oppressive order of identity, is necessary—and
the language of literature needs not only to show the corruption that has
befallen language, denying us the prelapsarian unity of word and thing, but
it must also sustain the trauma; for by sustaining in our memory the loss of
the creative power of the name, and consequently the loss of the paradisia-
cal unity of name and thing, literature nevertheless keeps the prophetic,
utopian dimension in operation. By maintaining an expressionless tonality
in his prose, Sebald preserves as a felt sense this loss of creative power,
whilst at the same time opening and exposing the evacuated interiority
constitutive of the narrative structure to redeeming possibilities, the dimen-
sion of the absolutely unforeseeable. All the redemptive potentiality that
now remains in language is kept in the prose form of the expressionless:
it is there, Benjamin says, and only there, that a weak messianic power
survives. Sebald’s distinctively expressionless prose is thus an expression of
this weakness, an expression, if I may state my claim in a paradoxical way,
of the author’s experience of deprivation, language catastrophically deprived
of nominative, referential, and symbolic power, the power to redeem what
it names and recalls.
In his essay on the German mourning play, Benjamin concedes criti-
cism must assume a “sovereign attitude” in order to comprehend this literary
form; but he also warns:

Even then the danger of allowing oneself to plunge from the

heights of knowledge into the dreadful depths [ungeheuren Tiefen]
of the baroque state of mind is not a negligible [unverächtlich]
one. That characteristic feeling of dizziness [Schwindel], which
is induced by the spectacle of the spiritual contradictions of
this epoch, is a recurrent feature of the improvised attempts
to capture [vergegenwärtigen] its meaning. Only by observing
the scene from some distance and, initially, foregoing any view
of the whole, can the mind be led, through a more and more
ascetic apprenticeship, to the position of strength from which
it is possible to take in the whole panorama and yet remain in
control of oneself.73

In a later chapter, we will also read this textual passage again, reflecting
on its critical appropriation of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. And I will
take up the question of distance, height, and panorama in Sebald’s Vertigo,
interpreting it in relation to Hegel’s account of stoicism and skepticism.74
There unquestionably is, in Sebald’s work, a certain Baroque sensibility. Just
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how Benjamin’s experience with regard to the “sovereign attitude” as an

approach, within literary criticism, to the peculiarities of German Baroque
theatre might bear on the interpretation of stoicism and skepticism in
Sebald’s work will be taken up in that chapter. For now, I want to con-
tinue thinking about the sovereignty of author and narrator in modernist
literature as a question primarily of narrative form.
Readers of Sebald’s stories cannot fail to be struck by the fact that his
narrators do not enjoy the epistemic sovereignty that the narrators in tra-
ditional fiction have, with only a few exceptions, always possessed. Sebald’s
stories repeatedly obstruct the temptations of omniscience: not only do
they refuse a transcendent point of view, casting doubt on the possibility
of a comprehensive representation of the whole in its unity of sense; they
even multiply points of view and call attention to their limitations, their
uncertainties, their internal and external inconsistencies. Neither Sebald’s
narrators nor his protagonists ever enjoy total control over the meaning of
their situation. Moreover, as his “digressions” show, anything at all—any
object, any event, any circumstance—can generate a story, virtually writing
itself, if the author is sufficiently attentive. The primary Sebaldian narrator,
in some crucial sense representing the author, is frequently compelled to
submit to the commanding presence, the tyranny, of things in the world
over which he has no control. Pronouns can subtly shift so that, before
the reader realizes what has happened, the narrator’s voice and that of the
protagonist whose story is being told have lost, by exchange, their original
identity. This moment is perhaps an objective correlate of the experience
of the modern subject, whose authenticity, subjective reality, and auton-
omy have been radically threatened by the terms and conditions of the
contemporary world order. But if the traditional forms of literature have
obscured this violence, perhaps there is promise in Sebald’s interweaving
of voices—and, above all, in the ways in which, without drawing narcis-
sistic attention to the shift, the voice of the narrator yields in hospitality
to the voices of others.
Concluding this section, I want to observe that what I have been
attempting to show here is how, in many of its characteristics, Sebald’s liter-
ary works take part in—that is, both reflect and reflect on—the contempo-
rary spirit that appears in cultural modernism. What is the connection this
implies? As a cultural movement, modernism might be characterized with
great abbreviation in terms of nine intricately related positions and argu-
ments: (1) an unsettling of constant, absolutely total presence; (2) a repu-
diation of the subject’s claim to enjoy absolute self-presence; (3) a denial
of certainty; (4) an undermining of foundations, any ultimate bedrock of
beliefs, first principles, and compelling intuitions; (5) the abandonment of
 TELLING STO RIES / 131

the myth of a metaphysical origin; (6) a breaching of all enclosures; (7) a

rejection of all claims to systematic total determinacy; (8) the renuncia-
tion of all teleologies, theodicies, and eschatologies; and (9) a rejection of
the domination of the logic of identity and subsumption, what in Negative
Dialectics, Adorno characterized as a “rationalized rage at non-identity.”
Sebald’s writings exhibit all nine dispositions, emphasizing chance, coinci-
dence, surprise, unrecognizability, obdurate indeterminacy, undecidability,
forgetfulness, and deception. His writings, like those of Montaigne and Sir
Thomas Browne, wander and drift, undertake long digressions, bound to no
fixed center, no ruling origin, no ruling end, no settled boundaries. Even
the border between fiction and factual document, a founding axiom for
both literature and science since the time of Plato, is repeatedly breached,
called into question.
In a note for his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin
records his intention to argue for the “liberation of the destructive forces
that lie in the thought of redemption.”75 Dust, soot, and ashes, which are
the products and traces of the “divine justice” in such destruction, are pro-
fane substances, transfigured and returned to their paradisal origin. And like
smoke, fogs, mists, haze, clouds, and shadows, they are significant allegorical
figures repeatedly appearing in Sebald’s writings; and in keeping with the
traumatized photographs that frequently accompany the narrative, images
often faded, damaged, overexposed or underexposed, out of focus, or too
grainy to be legible, these metaphorical presences not only put in question
our arrogant claims to recognize and know what we are seeing; not only
remind us of our finitude and mortality; more gravely still, they also put in
question our confidence in our ability to recognize what Benjamin would
call a moment of redemptive interruption, a moment that could suddenly
erupt and vanish in a flash at any time, having indicated a real possibility,
a real chance, for revolutionary change.76 Sebald’s distinctive montage of
narrative text and photographs—borrowing Levi-Strauss’s term, he calls
his literary works “Brikolage”77—shows the “scarring” of meaning that, for
Adorno, bespeaks our time:

The artwork wants to make the facts eloquent by letting them

speak for themselves. Art thereby begins a process of destroy-
ing the artwork as a nexus of meaning. For the first time in
the development of art, affixed debris leaves visible scars in the
work’s meaning. [AT 155/232–33]

Moreover, Sebald’s traumatized photographs—and also in fact some of his

distinctive rhetorical and narrative devices, for example, inconsistencies in
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repetition, incongruous juxtapositions, and improbable synchronicities—

nicely demonstrate Levinas’s claim, in “Phenomenon and Enigma,” con-
cerning the effective operation of alterity:

The alterity that disturbs order cannot be reduced to the differ-

ence visible to the gaze that compares and therefore synchronizes
the same and the other.78

Levinas states his analysis in terms of vision; but the analysis is equally
true of Sebald’s rhetorical and narrative strategies: the alterity that they
introduce similarly resists reduction to the difference that appears when
the reader attempts to compare and synchronize. It is, in fine, the rescue
of alterity, the non-identical, that motivates Sebald’s turn to allegorization.
And I read Sebald’s art as attempting this rescue in precisely the ways for
which Levinas is calling:

Everything depends on the possibility of vibrating with a mean-

ing that is not synchronized with the speech [or the writing]
capturing it, and that cannot be fitted into its order; everything
depends on the possibility of a signification that would signify
in an irreducible disturbance.79

Such disturbances in signification, dissolving into the dialectic of natural

history the reifications that alterity has endured, abound in Sebald’s works:
in the photographs, in the rhetoric and narrative formations, and in the
interactions that take place between the photographs and the narratives.
As if they were the debris of past catastrophes, the photographs that
interrupt the text are often in expressionless shades of gray that obstruct
their readability, sometimes even thwarting the reader’s efforts to connect
them as illustrations to the text. In the reader’s attempt to grasp the nexus
of meaning and understand how everything hangs together, cognitive or
moral lucidity can suddenly be induced to shudder, falling precipitously into
a prolonged vertigo as assumed sense loses its reliability.
Some of Sebald’s word-images—dust, ashes, and smoke—also of course
evoke a traumatic subtext, the exterminating crematoria of the Holocaust,
but in a respectful discretion that intensifies remembrance whilst subvert-
ing their exploitation in the hypocrisy of sentimentalism or sensationalism.
Explaining the ash-gray zones in the black-and-white photographs incorpo-
rated into the narrative text, Sebald suggests that they represent the realm
between life and death, a place not to be found on any rational map, where
people are wandering, hopelessly lost.80 They also metaphor the gray, colorless
 TELLING STO RIES / 133

mood of melancholy and, as in the grisaille paintings of Gerhard Richter,

they reflect the moral density of a historical reality that neither perception
nor knowledge can ever totally penetrate.81 But, in an interview with Sara
Kafatou, Sebald also recognized in the presence of ash and dust an indication
that redemption is, or has been, at work in the world. Expressing a thought
no doubt inspired by Benjamin’s argument that the redeeming Idea becomes
present only in “the combustion of the work,” Sebald declares: “It’s the most
humble substance there is! It’s the very last product of combustion, with no
more resistance in it. [. . .] It represents the borderline between being and
nothingness. Ash is a redeemed substance, like dust.”82
By taking into themselves these indices of a post-Holocaust modern-
ism, these modalities of disenchantment, not only as content, but, more
importantly, as form, Sebald’s literary works are attempting to make what
appear to be mere externalities in the historical life of the spirit, matters
over which we are powerless, vividly recognizable as shapes of spirit—that
is to say, recognizable as of our own making. Interpreting his modernist nar-
rative strategies in this Hegelian way—namely, as reflexively mirroring the
consciousness of his time, makes the most sense, I think, of the peculiarities
of his literary works; it also illuminates his reflections on the moral calling
and responsibility of the writer. What I am arguing is that all the modernist
strategies deployed in his writing strain toward making the spirit that rules
in our time conscious of itself and responsible for itself, released from the
spell of repressed memories, unavowed guilt, unmourned loss.
Although Sebald’s writings are intrepid and relentless investigations
into the disenchantments of the modern, post-Holocaust world, they are
also, I suggest, efforts to engage, even in the most unlikely situations, even
in the certainty of failure, easily overlooked indications of a different kind of
enchantment in this world. For the author’s gaze and glance are not bound
by the habits of perception that dispose most of us to neglect so much
that is taking place in our environment—not only the most familiar and
ordinary things, but also even the strange, the perplexing, and the uncanny.
Thus, it is not surprising that, in an interview with Arthur Lubow, Sebald
acknowledged that the urge “to connect bits that don’t seem to belong
together” fascinated him all his life.83 Could it be that this modernist “bri-
colage” is an unconscious expression of a longing, a “Sehnsucht,” for the
reconciliation of all the contradictions, all the antagonisms, that have torn
our world apart? Perhaps. But, if so, it must nevertheless be acknowledged
that today, as one critical reader put it, “all that survives of the Absolute
are traces of its fading memory.”84 For Sebald, this means that the writing
of fiction for a world without memory in a time that is out of joint cannot
avoid becoming, in some way, a work of “melancholy science.”
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§5

Redemption in Attentiveness: A Tender Empiricism

In Sebald, the longing for reconciliation, for connectedness, for a solidarity

of sympathies extending into the realm of nature, is understood to require
the greatest discipline: the “melancholy science” of keen observation, a
receptive perceptivity for which nothing encountered in the world is too
minor, too marginal, too ephemeral, too coincidental or too insignificant.
Sebald’s art is, in this sense, committed to a redemptive form of material-
ism; but this materialism is phenomenological—and, moreover, hermeneuti-
cally spectral. For the boundaries of his world are haunted, inhabited and
breached by specters that remain undead or unacknowledged, refusing to
renounce their claim to our attention, our memory, our sense of justice.
Sebald lived and wrote in a time he recognized as ordering the remains of
a disenchanted world; and it was out of this consciousness that he lived and
wrote, mindful that we belong, as he did, to a post-Holocaust world. But, in
a peculiar way, his work attempts to bring about a re-enchantment of the
world—a post-Holocaust re-enchantment, namely, that neither evades the
truth of the past nor undertakes a romanticized return to the earlier forms
of enchantment. Paradoxically, it is precisely by virtue of his unblinking
attention to our world in all its disenchantment—its destitution, devasta-
tion, ruination, and pathological disorder—that he somehow re-enchants
it. Re-enchants it otherwise, showing us at times the extraordinariness of
the seemingly most significant, most ordinary things.
Catching something of Kafka’s singular mode of attention and engage-
ment, Benjamin observes:

Kafka’s work is prophetic. The precisely registered oddities that

abound in the life it deals with must be regarded by the reader
as no more than the little signs, portents, and symptoms of the
displacements [Verschiebungen] that the writer feels approaching
in every aspect of life without being able to adjust to the new
situation. His only reaction to the incomprehensible distortions
of existence [Einstellungen des Daseins] that betray the emergence
of these new laws is a sense of astonishment [Staunen], mixed
with elements of panic-stricken horror [panisches Entsetzen].
Kafka is so possessed by this that he is incapable of imagining
any single event that would not be distorted by the mere act
of describing it. Kafka’s fixation on the sole topic of his work—
namely, the distortion of existence—may appear to the reader
 TELLING STO RIES / 135

like obsessiveness. But this impression, as well as the inconsol-

able earnestness, the despair, in the writer’s gaze, is merely a sign
that Kafka has abandoned the idea of a purely poetic prose. His
prose may prove nothing; but it is so constructed that it can be
inserted into passages of argument at any time. [. . .] Like the
haggadic parts of the Talmud, these books, too, are stories, they
are a Haggadah that constantly pauses, luxuriating in the most
detailed descriptions, in the simultaneous hope and fear that
it might encounter the halachic order, the doctrine itself, en
route. [. . .] Kafka’s stories are pregnant with a moral to which
they never give birth.85

I have quoted Benjamin at length here because in so many ways this pen-
etrating characterization also fits Sebald: one thinks at once of the numer-
ous episodes of panic and astonishment, the obsession with compulsions,
displacements and distortions; but also similar is Sebald’s propensity for
becoming spellbound by little signs, portents, and symptoms, the seem-
ingly insignificant things that most people would overlook. In Campo Santo
(2003), for example, Sebald’s narrator visits a cemetery on Corsica and takes
notice of the plant life surrounding the gravestones, virtually apologizing
for his ignorance of all their names: “the vetch, wild thyme, white clover,
yarrow and chamomile, cow wheat, yellow oat grass, and many other grasses
with names unknown to me” [CS 22/18]. Although, as in this textual pas-
sage, the “names” are in fact general terms, not proper, they function more
like proper names: they are expressive invocations, forms of acknowledg-
ment, returning to the things they invoke a touch of redemption. They are
not terms assigning categories to organize the plant life he sees according
to the logic of subsumption.
An attentiveness, or “Aufmerksamkeit,” such as Benjamin discerns in
Kafka, but I find also in Sebald, is beautifully described by Malebranche,
whom Benjamin quotes, as “the natural prayer of the soul.”86 In Sebald, this
attentiveness is receptive to everything: nothing is too small, too ordinary,
too insignificant to deserve notice, deserve tending and naming—deserve
redemption.87 For, just as in Schelling’s essay on the connection between
nature and the spirit-world, where “each thing carries within itself a liv-
ing word [. . .] that is that thing’s heart and inner being,”88 everything in
Sebald’s world is endowed with the capacity “to register the persistence of
past suffering.”89 Thus, indeed, Sebald seems to feel himself under a certain
moral obligation, its origin deeply unfathomable, to respond to the calling,
or say importuning, of things, endowing his writing with a corresponding
capacity to lend his voice, his words, to all this neglect and suffering, finding
 136 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the “living words” that the things bear but cannot themselves speak. As if
our attending to the “little things,” the “Kleinigkeiten,” could somehow be
a prophetic anticipation of the “slight adjustments” that might be presumed
to take place in the messianic era, when, as Kafka would have it, everything
would still be recognizable, only, “just a little different.”90
The unfiltered, extremely vulnerable responsivity of Sebald’s charac-
ters—their exceptional capacity to be strongly affected by what they see,
read, and hear, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—is remi-
niscent of some words from Celan’s “Meridian”:

And once, given the attentiveness devoted to things and crea-

tures, we even got near something open and free [in der Nähe
eines Offenen und Freien]. And at last near utopia.91

But unambiguous intimations of “utopia,” traces of the messianic, seldom

appear in Sebald’s writings—and even when they do, their moments of
radiant splendour soon fade away, lost in a residue of ashen-gray dullness.
(Sebald allegorizes this process in recording, for example, the way that the
marvelously glowing phosphorescence of living herrings fades into gray as
the fish decay) [R 58/75–76]. The enigmatic dimension of the materialism
at work in Sebald’s rigorous attentiveness can be illuminated by a thought
that, in his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno brings to bear on the enigmatic in art:
what Sebald’s naming solicits is, using Adorno’s words, “the physiognomy of
an objective spirit that is never transparent to itself in the moment in which
it appears” [AT 194/128]. In this solicitation, there is an attentiveness that
derives, as Adorno might put it, “entirely from felt contact with its objects”
and longs, as it were, to rescue things in the realm of objective spirit from
fatality, a process it knows to be inevitable, by giving them at least a
redeeming moment of recognition, hence intelligibility, and keeping their
names in narratives of remembrance. Adorno’s phrase, just quoted, appears
in the final note in Minima Moralia, a note in which, despite considerable
skepticism, he cautiously invokes a redemptive perspective on this world:

Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the

world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent
and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely
from felt contact with its objects [ganz aus der Fühlung mit den
Gegenständen heraus]—this alone is the task of thought.92

This seems nicely to characterize one of the perspectives that Sebald’s

writings attempt to engage. But it is constantly in conflict with other per-
 TELLING STO RIES / 137

spectives, more gloomy and hopeless. If, in the age of reification, artworks
are, as Adorno says, “afterimages of the primordial shudder,” “Nachbilder
des vorweltlichen Schauers,” Sebald’s passion for naming, cataloguing, and
remembering should be read as a symptom, or expression, of this anxious
shudder—an indication of melancholy despair over the prospect of inexo-
rable loss and a desperate attempt to give what is doomed to perish some-
thing of an afterlife. But how can this be thought redeeming?
Writing about the art of Jan Peter Tripp, Sebald muses on the thought
that, “things know more about us than we know about them; they carry
the experiences they have had with us inside them. . . .”93 These experi-
ences that things carry are stories awaiting the moment of their telling.
Practicing Husserlian phenomenology as a narrative art, Sebald’s writing
will at times suspend the rhythm of its movement and return in its stillness
“to the things themselves,” “zu den Sachen selbst,” in order to let them,
as it were, speak for themselves.94 Perhaps like the way that, according to
Sebald, Pisanello’s frescoes in the Chiesa Sant’ Anastasia depict numer-
ous animals. Visiting this church in Verona, the narrator reflects on the
manifest love in Pisanello’s art, painting his subjects, as if by prayer, with
the “greatest attentiveness” [SV 84–87/72–76]. Ironically, though, Sebald’s
attentive naming, collecting, and cataloguing, invoking, say, a large num-
ber of plants one after the other, instead of testifying to the reality of the
things named and collected in this way and vouchsafing them an afterlife
in language, sometimes intensifies the reader’s consciousness of the work’s
artifice, overpowering the impression of reality and reducing the linguistic
rescue to the condition of mere semblance.95 But that is, after all, the truth
that art must acknowledge. Its redeeming efforts are fiction. Sebald’s unique
version of materialism, his “natural history,” is challenged not only by this
fatally aporetic condition, but also by the presence of dark, sun-shrouding
clouds, impenetrable fogs, heavy, thick rains, layers of dust, and numerous
other phenomena, situations of limitation and possibilities for deception
that compel our realization of the uncertain or unknowable nature of reality.
Valéry once remarked that, “Thought is the work that makes live in
us what does not exist.”96 What about art that makes live in us what it has,
in semblance, withdrawn from our reality? It could perhaps even be argued
that Sebald’s narrative constructions use language in a way that releases
things from the familiar and ordinary, the reality-grip of the world—in
order precisely to rescue things from reification and disenchantment. In “Le
Paradoxe d’Aytré,” Blanchot, no doubt inspired by Mallarmé and Valéry,
seems to suggest as much, saying that, in “authentic” language, the word
“is not the expression of a thing, but the absence of this thing. [. . .] The
word makes things vanish and imposes on us the impression [le sentiment]
of a universal lack and even of its own lack.”97 But in Sebald, what the
 138 / REDEEMING WO RDS

culture of our society has repressed or neglected can return to attention.

Sebald’s stories, in fact, often bring back what cultural memory had banned
or destined for oblivion.
In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson asserts that “perception is not whimsical
but fatal.”98 Could it not be both? Fatal even when “whimsical” in the sense
of random or accidental or contingent? In any case, perception is “fatal” in
the sense that the witness necessarily takes part in the fate of the event
perceived. For Sebald as for Emerson, everything is connected to the fate
of everything else.99 Hence there can be no moral protection, no defense
against complicity and guilt; the witness, the one who sees and knows, must
assume some part of responsibility in regard to the unfolding of subsequent
events. (This is not meant to deny, though, that there are differences among
witnesses, hence differences in their responsibilities as witnesses.) Subject
and object are inextricably, fatefully intertwined. In his “Foreword” to On
the Natural History of Destruction (1999), Sebald observes: “We are always
looking and looking away at the same time” [N ix]. Our lives are lived
out between acknowledgment and avoidance. For Sebald, this is why he is
committed to showing our lives haunted by insurgent memories—why his
stories constantly disturb the defensive, repressive conceptual boundaries
that our culture has constructed.
Art, according to Adorno, seeks “truth” in “the evanescent and the
fragile” [AT 119/76]. It also seeks it in the forbidden, the banned and
abandoned. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, Sebald is a writer who collects odd
stories from random encounters and makes never-told stories out of the
overlooked, the trash, the discarded and rejected materials of life, makes
stories out of the fragments and traces of what remains after the terrible
forces of destruction have claimed their due.100 We might therefore with
some reason call him, to use a phrase that appears in Beckett’s The Unnam-
able, one of the true “renegades” of the charnel house, making residues of
destruction and mortification into sites of memory, hence of resistance.101
Sebald’s writing on death and the life of survivors in the wake of the
bombing of Hamburg is descriptively exact, avoiding no detail, however
gruesome: it is writing exposed, writing that has exposed itself to extremely
traumatic material and not hidden the damage it has suffered thereby.
Nevertheless, Sebald is acutely aware, as was Plato before him, that, even
when it is committed to preserving memory, art can also destroy it. For
Sebald, there is no way for the language of literature to sustain memory
without making it vulnerable to commodification and destruction. More-
over, as Ruth Franklin points out, “as he [Sebald] searches for patterns in
the constellations of grief that his books record, he runs the risk that the
patterns themselves, by virtue of their very beauty, will extinguish the grief
 TELLING STO RIES / 139

that they seek to contain.” Thus, as she notes, Sebald’s “peculiar alchemy
of aestheticism and sorrow” consciously risks subverting his post-Holocaust,
modernist commitment to a morally constituted materialism of truth. It is
always teetering vertiginously on the verge of making the fatal into mere
whimsicality or making the whimsical seem like fatality. Although his liter-
ary works are freighted with factual information—descriptions, for example,
of the mating practices of herrings and the history of the silk industry—
fiction, as Franklin says, “pulls at them with the force of gravity.”102 The
boundary between fact and fiction, hence both “Gegenständlichkeit” and
“Tatsächlichkeit,” the objective character and the factuality of the facts,
will inevitably be called into question when facts are woven into a work of
fiction. Nevertheless, in the end, Sebald’s engagement with fiction somehow
always intensifies the emotional impact of the factual truth that he wants at
all costs to record and preserve. His writings show that fictional narrative
can be, in sensitive and skillful hands, a better medium for the transmis-
sion of truth than an uncomplicated prose straightforwardly reporting the
facts. But he always leaves us with an unsettling, uncomfortable sense that
the traditional ways of separating fact and fiction are no longer holding,
no longer, perhaps, sustainable—especially in regard to the horrors of the
War and the Holocaust. In Sebald, however, this unsettling of the differ-
ence between fact and fiction is not a way to deny historical truth. On the
contrary, it becomes a way to oblige the reader to reflect more intensely,
more critically, on facts of such monstrosity or such painfulness that they
seem to exceed the expressive, representational powers of words.
Discussing Günther Grass, Sebald finds himself compelled to wonder,
“whether the dominance of fiction over what really happened does not
militate against the recording of the truth and the attempt to commemo-
rate it” [CS 115/111]. Thus, for example, in “Between History and Natural
History: On the Literary Description of Total Destruction,” he argues that,
“In such conditions, writing becomes an imperative that must dispense with
artifice for the sake of truth” [CS 85–86/81–82]. And yet, he was equally
convinced that fiction—semblance—can sometimes be a more effective
way of transmitting and commemorating the truth. Above all, a painful
truth that is disavowed, whether to avoid acknowledging guilt or to avoid
more trauma and victimization. It is my impression that he was constantly
struggling with this aporetic situation.103
In “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” Ador-
no, developing some of the arguments that Benjamin formulated in “The
Storyteller,” points out the writer’s paradoxical, aporetic position: “it is,” he
says, “no longer possible to tell a story, but the form of the novel [the liter-
ary form specific to the bourgeois age] requires narration.”104 The stimulus
 140 / REDEEMING WO RDS

for the emergence of the novel was, he argues, disorienting experiences of

the disenchantment of the world. But how is the writer to present this—
how make it present in the lucidity of its dialectic history? Adorno holds
that, “If the novel wants to remain true to its realist heritage and tell how
things really are, it must abandon a realism that only serves the façade in
its work of camouflage by reproducing it.” This is exactly what Sebald does,
writing stories in which realism, objectivity, factuality are presented in a
way that heightens consciousness of the conventions within which they
are registered and goes behind the ideological constructs, but acknowledges
the impotence of the novel to overcome the world into which it is cast.
Sebald understands how his attentiveness, his materialism, effects a sub-
versive moment, a moment of negative dialectics. Thus, as Adorno says:

The anti-realistic moment in the modern novel, its metaphysical

dimension, is called forth by its true subject matter, a society
in which human beings have been torn from one another and
from themselves. What is [contrastingly] reflected in aesthetic
transcendence is the disenchantment of the world.105

Sebald’s depiction of suffering in human beings—and other animals—

shows and condemns the terrible sacrifice that is hidden behind the tri-
umph in this modern-age rationalized disenchantment. I am thinking, for
example, of the mute desperation of Mrs. Ashbury, compulsively collecting
and drying flower seeds, hanging them in the library of their house, and
the loneliness of the three unmarried Ashbury sisters, enduring the pas-
sage of time by making a bridal gown that never would be used, working
on it “like giant children under an evil spell” [R252/212]; and I recall,
too, the boredom and spiritlessness of the Seelos sisters, Babett and Bina,
who, as befitted their last name, ran the forlorn Café Alpenrose in the
Tyrolean village of Sebald’s youth, and who avoided complete emotional
disintegration by compulsively repeating useless tasks, folding tea napkins
and preparing cakes in the vain hope of attracting some guests to the café
[SV 229–36/210–17]. Sebald tells us there that they were “destroyed by
the years of continuous disappointment and perennially revived hope.” As
works of art, these stories that Sebald tells record the disenchantment; they
are, by artful subversion, a severe critique of the modern world; but they
also set in motion, if only by indirection, by their negative dialectics, the
“aesthetic transcendence” of what-is that would remind us of the hope for
a better world we must never abandon. Adorno’s analysis of the modern
novel continues:
 TELLING STO RIES / 141

By uncompromisingly embodying the horror and putting all the

pleasure [Glück] of contemplation into the purity of expression,
such works of art serve the cause of freedom. [. . .] They bear
witness to what has befallen the individual. . . .106

But, since the novel must confront “a reality that cannot be transfigured
in an image, but only altered concretely in reality,” Sebald registers this
impossibility in a narrative form of prose that, though interwoven with
photographs which frustrate recognition and knowledge, sustains an over-
whelming sense of loss and destitution without betraying its capacity to
function as a powerful critical consciousness of social existence and the
historically unprecedented destruction of nature taking place in our time.107
And yet, in the languorous, melancholy beauty of his prose, Sebald casts a
magic spell that can seem, for a passing moment, to re-enchant the world
and give us a glimpse of what its redemption might be like. But only for
a passing moment, for he never fails to interrupt the movement of the
dialectic, keeping it in the unhappiness of skepticism.

§6

The Question of Transmission

Reflecting on Kafka in a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin notes how

clearly Kafka’s writings reveal his recognition that the “consistency of truth”
has been lost in the weakening and decaying of tradition. “Kafka,” he
observes, “was far from being the first to face this situation. Many had
accommodated themselves to it, clinging to truth or whatever they hap-
pened to regard as truth and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its
transmissibility.” This thought leads him to an astonishing insight:

Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he

sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its
haggadic element.108

What Kafka understood, according to Benjamin, is that the “manifest

truth,” the claims of which constituted the time-honored wisdom of the
tradition, no longer speaks to us with any authority. We find ourselves
today cut adrift from the reflective, critical resources of the tradition; and
we have lost the authoritative sources of normativity that made artworks
 142 / REDEEMING WO RDS

into incalculably powerful forces for cultural self-examination, self-under-

standing, and revolutionary transformation. Our modernity is confronting
a historically unprecedented isolation from its past: a crisis involving “the
erosion of confidence in the power of representation to record a knowable
world adequately” and affecting cultural transmission and inheritance—
conditions necessary for the continuity and consequently the very identity
of a cultural world.109 “Only the products of its decay remain.” There are,
according to Benjamin, only two:

One is the rumour about the true things (a sort of whispered

theological intelligence dealing with matters discredited and
obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly—which,
to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but
nevertheless preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which
rumour invariably lacks.110

Transposing these thoughts, I would like to suggest that, in Sebald, “folly”

has become the strangely inexplicable, uncanny coincidence, the contin-
gent, the incidental, and the digressive, whilst “rumor” has become the
unreliable testimony, ravaged by the passage of time, of awakened memory.
To be sure, Sebald is a hunter in search of a lost truth; but what is driv-
ing him is an obsession to ensure the transmission of the truth to which
historical memory bears witness. Thus, the question of transmissibility is at
the very heart of his devotion to writing. To the telling of stories: some of
his own, of course; but more importantly, the stories of others.
When, in Austerlitz, the narrator, presumably Sebald, visits Breen-
donk, a fortress in Belgium used as a prison by the Nazis in the years of
the Holocaust, he relates that, even in the effort to hold on to a memory,

the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how
little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing
into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it
were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and
objects, which themselves have no power of memory, is never
heard, never described or passed on. [A 38–39/30–31]

Sebald’s writing is moved by a strongly felt need—a moral imperative—to

preserve the memory in things and vouchsafe its transmissibility. In this
regard, it is striking that Sebald’s narrators are never in a hurry; they invari-
ably take their time telling their stories, for they know that buried memories
 TELLING STO RIES / 143

return to life only in unhurried time—the time that belongs, not to our
lives of distraction, but to the claims of transmissibility.
The truth that must sometimes be sacrificed for the sake of trans-
missibility—but of course only with the greatest of caution—is truth as
information, hard, cold facticity: the correctness, “Richtigkeit,” of the cor-
respondence theory of truth. There is, however, another sense of truth that
literary fiction is sometimes in a better position to transmit and vouchsafe
to memory, namely, truth as the opening up of redeeming possibilities for
perception, imagination, understanding, and action.
“Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” This is Hölderlin’s anguished ques-
tion, which Sebald reproduces in French, thereby echoing Sartre: “À quoi
bon la literature?” In “An Attempt at Restitution,” Sebald formulates
his answer: “Perhaps to help us remember and teach us to understand
that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic” [CS
247–48/204–205]. For instance, the thought-provoking question regarding
the connection between Stuttgart, near where Hölderlin lived, and Tulle,
through which the poet passed on his journey to Bordeaux. It so hap-
pens that Tulle is where, “almost exactly a hundred and one years after
Hölderlin’s death, the entire male population of the town [. . .], men of
all ages, were hanged and the rest deported to labour and extermination
camps in Germany.” The poet’s words are, he says, “both overshadowed and
illuminated by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was
done.” Acknowledging that there are, of course, “many forms of writing,” he
argues that, “only in literature can there be an attempt at restitution over
and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship” (CS
248/205).111 No mere recording of facts can get at the many other dimen-
sions of the connection. Factual documents are indispensable, of course,
registering causal connections. But only literature, faithful to its “moral
imperative,” can undertake the task of remembrance, the task of restitu-
tion, keeping the other dimensions accessible to the justice of thought.112
Taking up Hölderlin’s question in another context, and mindful, no doubt,
of Adorno’s asseveration, subsequently retracted, that, after Auschwitz, the
writing of poetry is no longer possible, Sebald says,

The ideal of truths inherent in its unpretentious objectivity

[. . .] proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to
produce literature in the face of total destruction. Conversely,
the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the
ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of
its right to exist. [N 53]
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However, when Sebald’s narratives yield to what seem to be facticities—sta-

tistics, historical documentation, and apparently authoritative photographs
of train tickets, a cancelled passport, the façade of a nightmarish restaurant,
and a forest of corpses—his compositional artifice, his technique, invari-
ably creates nagging anxiety and doubt, not only about the specifics of
the moment, but even about the very nature and moral status of witness-
ing and testifying to the truth. Why, if not to raise questions about the
transmissibility of truth, or the rightness of our looking without complicity,
without responsibility, would he occasionally prefer to publish poor-quality
photocopies of photographs, instead of reproducing the photographs by
procedures that would give them much greater representational visibility
and legibility?
Transmissibility is impossible, though, without the testimony of mem-
ory. As Benjamin notes in “Central Park,”

If it is imagination that presents correspondences to the memory,

it is thinking that consecrates allegories to it. Memory brings
about the convergence of imagination and thought.113

But in Sebald’s stories, memory is often deceptive, unreliable: as for exam-

ple the stories about Henri Beyle (in Vertigo) and Jacques Austerlitz (in
Austerlitz) demonstrate, its representations can lead one treacherously into
dizzying aporetic vortices of doubt and despair. In The Emigrants, the Jewish
artist, called in the story “Max Ferber,” refers to getting lost in “lagoons
of oblivion,” “Lagune der Erinnerungslosigkeit” [AE 259/174]. But he is
nevertheless an exemplary figure for the writer in destitute times. He tells
the narrator that, despite circumstances of great adversity, he for one will
continue, “until the heart breaks” with the work of “remembering, writing,
and reading.”114 Ferber’s story ends, however, with an allegorical interpreta-
tion of a photograph showing three women weavers working in a factory
in the Lodz ghetto; Sebald transforms them into the three mythic Fates—
Nona, Decuma, and Morta, daughters of the Night—working away with
spindle, scissors, and thread [AE355/237]. One of the things this interpreta-
tion perhaps suggests is that the art of the storyteller is a ceaseless struggle
with the forces of fate—a struggle against forgetfulness, against oblivion, in
which even the greatest victories are as easily turned into defeat as when
what the night’s weaving wrought is unraveled the next morning, all the
threads pulled apart and severed with a scissors.
Despite the problematic nature of memory, for Sebald as for Benja-
min the working-through of individual and collective memory is, for the
solidarity of the community, hence for the community of the storytellers,
 TELLING STO RIES / 145

a morally imperative undertaking, whatever the struggle may require.115

Reflecting on “The Next Village,” one of Kafka’s short stories, Benjamin
is moved to argue that

[t]he true measure of life is remembrance. Looking backwards, it

runs through life with the speed of lightning. In the little time
it takes to turn back a few pages, memory moves from the next
village to the place where the rider decided to set off.

This he takes to mean:

Those for whom life has transformed itself into writing—as with
the Ancients—can read such writing only backwards. Only thus
do they encounter themselves—and only thus—fleeing from the
present—can they understand life.116

For Sebald, writing arouses memory from its slumber in order to compel a
reluctant attentiveness to register the present and serve the transmission
of the truth that this attentiveness is compelled to suffer.
 2

Natural History
Becoming in Dissolution

§1

Saturn’s Scythe: Tarrying with the Negative

In “Aesthetica in Nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose” (1762), J. G.

Hamann asks: “But how are we to raise the defunct language of Nature from
the dead?” The evocations of nature in Sebald’s stories seem as if written
in meditation on this still troubling questions.1 Natural history is, in fact,
at the very heart of all Sebald’s writings, provoking questions about how
the writer, compelled by a sense of responsibility, can bring the memory
of this history into the mediations of language. And its representation in
his writings makes possible at least an intuitive grasp of the gravity of our
contemporary conditions.
But Sebald’s writings are marked, afflicted, and indeed scarred, because
of their preoccupation with natural history, the setting for representations
of a ceaseless strife between the forces of nature—what Heidegger calls
“earth”—and the world that we human beings have created by grace of
nature’s tolerance. His works register the terrible strife that rules natu-
ral history, not only in their narratives, taking the causes and effects of
this strife as their subject matter, their thematic content, but also in their
form; for his works, like all things that human beings have created and
built, though belonging to the world, are vividly conscious of the fact that
they are ultimately made of earth and reducible to dust, deeply affected
by the terms of their engagement with the natural history of the world.2
Understanding themselves as part of the very nature whose processes they
register in words and images, these works of literature do not conceal their
fragmentation, their interruptions, their disorder, the contingencies that

147
 148 / REDEEMING WO RDS

shaped them, the strife they cannot comprehend. In “The Origin of the
Work of Art,” Heidegger observes:

The opposition [Der Gegeneinander] of world and earth is strife.

But we would surely all too easily falsify its essence if we were
to confound strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it
only as disorder and destruction [Störung und Zerstörung]. [. . .]
In essential strife, the opponents raise each other into the self-
affirmation [Selbstbehauptung] of their essential natures. [. . .] In
strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus, the
strife becomes ever more intense as striving, and more properly
what it is. [. . .] In setting up a world and setting forth the
earth, the work is an instigating [Anstiftung] of this strife. This
does not happen so that the work should at the same time settle
and put an end to strife by an insipid agreement [in einem faden
Übereinkommen], but so that the strife may remain strife. Setting
up a world and setting forth the earth, the work accomplishes
[vollbringt] this strife. The work-being of the work consists in the
instigation [Bestreitung] of strife between world and earth. It is
because the strife arrives at its high point in the simplicity of
intimacy [im Einfachen der Innigkeit] that the unity of the work
comes about in the instigation of strife.

And he follows this by asking us to think: “In what way does truth hap-
pen in the work-being of the work, which now means to say, how does
truth happen in the instigation of strife between world and earth? What is
truth?”3 Whatever unity, whatever truth Sebald’s works achieve has come
about because they have exposed themselves to this strife between world
and nature—exposed themselves to it, and even made sacrifices, for the
sake of bearing witness to its significance in natural history.
Natural history figures in the dissolution of reification, transforming
petrified forms of life by showing their true condition in the context of
historical processes; moreover, at the same time that it effects this transfor-
mation, it brings to light the damage that things in their disenchantment
have undergone and of course the sufferings that all life has endured, draw-
ing our attention not only to the processes of destruction that have been
wrought by reification, but also, through them, to the fragile promise that
lies, awaiting its moment of recognizability, in the processes of becoming.
Waking up to the noises of Venice resounding through its narrow
canals, the narrator in “All’estero,” presumably, as often, a fictionalized
double of the author, tells us that:
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 149

For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this
din that the life is being born which will come after us and
will spell our gradual destruction [zugrunde richten wird], just as
we have been gradually destroying what was there long before
us. [SV 73/63]

Manchester, where Sebald settled during the first year of his chosen exile
from Germany, was at one time the very center of England’s industrializa-
tion; but what he saw when he arrived there was not its life, but instead “the
chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation” [AE 231/156–57]. Is
this merely a perception distorted by an inveterately gloomy cast of mind?
Or is it detecting what might be called a “metaphysical” truth—a truth,
that is, which requires the mediation of insight into what more immediately
strikes the physical eye? Another dimension of this thought finds expression
in Mme. Landau’s recollections regarding Paul Bereyter, the beloved teacher
from the narrator’s childhood: It seems that he had always “connected the
bourgeois concept of utopia and order [. . .] with the progressive destruc-
tion of natural life [immer weiter fortschreitenden Vernichtung und Zerstörung
des natürlichen Lebens]” [AE 67/45].
But in the narrator’s brooding on his impressions of Somerleyton Hall,
the once grand estate he visits in the course of his solitary walk of several
weeks along the east coast of England, there is an unmistakable indica-
tion of what Hölderlin described as “becoming in dissolution,” an uncanny
alchemical process that reveals to him the sublime beauty of what has
suffered ruination and destruction:

How uninviting Somerleyton must have been, I reflected, in the

days of the industrial impresario [. . .], when everything, from
the cellar to the attic, from the cutlery to the waterclosets, was
brand new, matching in every detail, and in unremittingly good
taste. And how fine a place the house seemed to me now that
it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent
oblivion. [R50/36]

Like aesthetic Romanticism, Sebald’s aesthetics here turns the ruination

that is the inexorable effect of natural history into a thing of beauty, some-
thing bearing intimations of the promise of happiness. But is the aesthetic
attention to this beauty in dissolution merely a distraction? Is it a cheat?
Is an aesthetic rescue a satisfactory substitute for what, through human
greed, ignorance, and indifference has been irrevocably lost? In spite of the
disenchantments of the modern world, Sebald’s aesthetics finds a way to
 150 / REDEEMING WO RDS

see re-enchantment and bequeath it to the reader. But the enchantment

he makes possible is itself never more than a passing moment, for the
spell of beauty will immediately be dispelled by the return of attention to
a ruination or pathology that seems beyond such redemption.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that,

The activity of dissolution [Tätigkeit des Scheidens] is the power

and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mighti-
est of powers, or rather, the absolute power. [. . .] Death, if that
is what we want to call nonactuality, is of all things the most
dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest
strength. [. . .] But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks
from death [sich vor dem Tod scheut] and keeps itself untouched
by devastation [Verwüstung], but rather the life that endures it
and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter
dismemberment [absolutem Zerissenheit], it finds itself. [. . .]
Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face
and tarrying with it [ins Angesicht schaut, bei ihm verweilt]. This
tarrying with the negative is the magical power [Zauberkraft]
that converts it into being.4

Benjamin relates this thought to the role of the storyteller:

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell.

He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is
natural history to which his stories refer back.5

As a masterful storyteller, Sebald tarries with the negative, with death,

with processes of dissolution, fearlessly and coldly giving the negative
the attention it demands. “History,” he suggests, “is but a long account
of calamities” [R 350/295]. Calamities, however, are not necessarily a pre-
lude to redemption. As Kafka understood, for the light of redemption to
embrace our world, there must first be extreme attentiveness. For Sebald,
this means telling stories that show everything to be irrevocably con-
ditioned by the terms of natural history, stories that at the same time,
cast our world nevertheless in an uncnny light of hope, recollecting the
redeeming promise. There is little of Hegel’s redemptive, magical power
to be found in his writings: not nothing, but very little—almost nothing.
Only the ephemeral, spectral beauty of his prose, awakening memory and
stirring attentiveness, can redeem things for hope even in their time of
ruination and destruction.
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 151

In his commentary “On the Final Scene of Faust,” Adorno declares

that, “Hope is not memory held fast but the return of what has been
forgotten.”6 We hold fast to what memories are comforting and consoling
whilst we suppress by a kind of forgetfulness those memories that we cannot
easily accommodate or tolerate. Part of what this hope requires the two
authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment have beautifully expressed in the
phrase “Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt”: “remembrance of nature in the
subject.”7 When, in The Emigrants, the narrator, presumably Sebald himself,
reports Max Ferber’s visit to see Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece,
he has him speak of the “monstrosity of the suffering that, emanating from
the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of nature, only to flood back
from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death.”8
Sebald’s Pauline vision of the whole of creation groaning in its end-
less suffering, a vision of natural history that was echoed by Schelling and
later recapitulated by Benjamin, attempts to give words to this speech-
less suffering: words that could bear just such remembrance. Indeed, The
Rings of Saturn (1995), an early work of fact and fiction, recording Sebald’s
pilgrimage on foot along the coast in Suffolk, passing through rural vil-
lages, hamlets, farmlands, and forests, with visits along the way to country
houses and estates and abandoned fortresses, so persistently compels this
remembrance of nature and natural history—a nature forever shadowed by
death—that the work could with perhaps greater cause have borne instead
the grim title “Saturn’s Scythe,” “Die Sense Saturns,” a phrase that does
in fact appear one time in the text [R 97/79]. It is possible, though, that
the title Sebald chose was inspired by his reading of the poet, Friedrich
Klopstock (1724–1803), and in that case, we might conjecture that the
allusion was intended to indicate, however inconclusively, the possibility
that the suffering of the world might undergo a redemptive transformation.9
Investigating an abandoned Cold War weapons research facility in
Orfordness, the narrator imagines himself “amidst the ruins of our civiliza-
tion after its extinction in some future catastrophe” [R 282/237]. Looking at
the world through the eyes of Sebald’s narrators—noticing the slow rotting
away of wood in the old homes of Ireland; vestiges of the old village of
Dunwich, still visible above the sea which has overpowered and claimed
it; the desolate condition of Lowestoft, once a bustling resort and fishing
port, reduced now to an impoverished and ghostly presence; the extensive
deforestation around Dunwich, turning noble trees into charcoal; the dying
of these trees, the oaks, elms, ash, poplars, and beeches, suffering from para-
sites and diseases; and the toxic pollution of rivers, streams, and waterways,
causing fish to suffer strange deformities and excrescences and threatening
the health of all those who live nearby—readers can easily lose all hope.
 152 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Just as the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment show, within mod-

ern life, the surprising persistence of mythology, archaic symbolic forms,
despite manifest progress toward social enlightenment, so Sebald repeatedly
shows the phenomenal world invaded by pre-modern or even mythical crea-
tures and spirits: fallen trees, bleached by weather, look like the fossilized
remains of an extinct race of prehistoric creatures; fishermen in Lowestoft
look like the last survivors of a biblical tribe; and a couple seen copulating
on a beach look like a two-headed, many-limbed sea-monster stranded on
the sand [R 68, 83, 88/ 51, 64, 68]. Sebald’s stories are telling us that we
ignore at our peril the return of the pre-modern and archaic, repressed by
enlightenment rationality, for what has been repressed will return with a
vengeance. But there is another dimension to this work of remembrance,
for life can be redeemed only by remembering and reintegrating what has
been split off, rejected, and left to its death in our “march of progress.”
In his dark reflections on the fate of “creaturely life,” Eric Santner
argues, with Sebald’s stories in mind, that,

Natural history is born out of the dual possibilities that life

can persist beyond the death of the symbolic forms that gave it
meaning, and that symbolic forms can persist beyond the death
of the form of life that gave them human vitality. Natural his-
tory transpires [in the zone] between real and symbolic death,
this zone of the “undead.”10

Sebald’s stories take place in this uncanny zone of remembrance—natural

history. In The Rings of Saturn, both possibilities are represented. If the
story of the Ashburys of Somerleyton, a once rich and powerful family
whose surviving members are reduced now to genteel poverty and desper-
ate attempts to fill their days with meaningful activities, takes us into the
pathos of empty lives persisting beyond the death of their aristocratic form
of life, the description of the factories in Manchester evokes, in a haunt-
ing symbolic register, what can persist forlornly in decay and ruination,
beyond the death of the earlier form of capitalism, in the life of which they
played a vital role; and the desolation Sebald experienced on the docks
in Lowestoft, once a bustling resort and fishing port, is all that remains of
the form of life that, years ago, made it an important town in England’s
maritime economy.11
For Benjamin, “natural history contains the two great processes of
dissolution and resurrection [Auflösung und Auferstehung].”12 It is not only
a matter of dissolution. In alchemy, the source of Benjamin’s assertion,
“mortification” is a phase in a more elaborate process, a process in which
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 153

a certain mode of reflection enters into the transubstantiation of base

materials, rendering them sublime. Similarly, in the writing of criticism,
the work of art is submitted to a process of mortification—in order to
release its immanent potential as a “negative” medium for the signs and
symbols of redemption in what Adorno will call a “negative dialectic” [UT
357/182]. In this Benjaminian sense, Sebald’s prose undertakes—and also
undergoes—the literary equivalent of a process of mortification, not merely
making death its theme, but acknowledging its weaknesses, its limitations,
and submitting at times to a solemn, mournful, death-like rhythm and
tone. In his stories, as in those of Stifter, everything somehow comes into
appearance under the aspect of death, sooner or later revealing its distinc-
tive vulnerability, its submission to corruption and dissolution.13 But, as I
will argue in subsequent chapters, there is always a hint, nevertheless, of
becoming: “Werden im Vergehen.”
The conception of natural history that Benjamin, drawing on Hegel
and Schelling, formulated in his study on the Baroque “Trauerspiel” and
that Adorno developed in his Negative Dialectics, provocatively suggests a
way of reading Sebald’s writings. My claim in this chapter will be not only
that Sebald has inherited this conception, but that it takes on a major role
in setting both the form and content of his writings, and it consequently
becomes one of the keys to what I think will be the enduring significance
of his literary production. According to this conception of natural history,
nature is always historical, hence never visible or legible in and for itself,
“an und für sich,” never to be encountered outside the violent constructs
of our historically situated consciousness; correlatively, however, the world
that we have built, forging a historical existence in irreconcilable struggle
against nature’s forces of destruction, can never escape its violent conditions
and mortifying alembications.
As the only fragment of Anaximander’s philosophical thought that
we have inherited would remind us, all the things that surround us in the
world, all the things we take for granted, are ultimately subject to nature’s
inexorable laws, already marked from the very beginning of their time by
laws that bind them—and us—to the invisible presence of eternal death.14
Looking at the Palais de la Justice in Bruxelles, Jacques Austerlitz remarks
that we gaze in “a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning
horror [Entsetzens], for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings
cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed
from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins” [A 31–32/23–24].
Anaximander would see all our buildings, and indeed all our institutions, in
this “naturgeschichtliche” light.15 But our achievement of autonomy is sup-
posed to have succeeded in breaking the archaic spell of nature’s ­mindless
 154 / REDEEMING WO RDS

normativity, releasing our ethical and political life from the violence of its
prejudices. Although no longer normative for us, nature still takes back
into itself all that it brings forth, or enables to come forth. And Sebald’s
stories suggest that it will forever lay claim to all that is, ruling over life
and death, the time of things beginning and the time of things ending.
Expressing this in more philosophical terms, his stories suggest that, if the
earth serves to ground the world, it also reminds us from time to time that
it is also an annihilating abyss, the nullification of all possible grounding.
For Sebald, life and death are not only inseparable; each, as Herak-
leitos had observed, is already present in the nature of the other. In his
stories, Sebald documents the slow transformations in nature from life to
death; but, as I will explain later, he also shows us, in regard to the bridal
gown and the reproduction of the Jews’ destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, the
marvelous transformations that are possible in the human spirit, when it is
revived and sustained by the creation of beauty and meaning. Comment-
ing on the first kind of transformation, Sebald calls our attention to the
color of the common mackerel that appears in two still life paintings by
Jan Peter Tripp. What Sebald observes is that, when these fish are alive,
they have a “wonderful shimmering appearance,” but that “at the moment
of their death, indeed as soon as they felt the mere touch of the strange,
dry air, the iridescence quickly faded and was extinguished, fading to a
leaden hue” [CS 211–12/170–72]. This brief reflection on mortification
echoes Peter Handke’s longer meditation, in Langsame Heimkehr, on the
color of a dead salmon that his principal character encounters washed up
on a beach.16 For Handke, as for Sebald, encounters in our present world
with dead and dying nature can no longer be complacently sublated and
their meaning reconciled within the old eschatology. Handke calls atten-
tion to the contrast between the beautiful rose of the salmon and the drab,
colorless landscape and sky: despite being, in death, of a “weak color,” the
salmon still retains a wondrous, though fading beauty—a death-defying
beauty that symbolically indicates, to borrow a phrase from Kant’s Critique
of Judgement that Handke might have been calling to mind, a “weak ray
of hope” for the possibility of redemption.17 The salmon’s “weak” coloring,
its alchemical mortification, which Sebald cannot resist lingering over in
his critical study on Handke, evokes once again Benjamin’s thought of a
“weak messianic power.”18
In Sebald’s stories, “natural history” becomes the object of a rigorous,
exacting method of observation, a cold materialism registering processes
of dissolution—a melancholy science of death, tarrying with the negative
and longing for the consolation of a metaphysical dimension of meaning,
yet firmly resisting the temptation to settle for what today could only be a
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 155

delusion. But mortification, in his stories, is an essential phase in the process

of remembrance: in fact, it keeps alive the dying of nature; and, because
it brings dying nature into the work of art, it also preserves intimations of
the perhaps still possible reconciliation between nature and spirit, nature
and freedom, nature and history, the restless longing for which art can
faithfully materialize in its sensible and narrative dimensions. The epigram
that appears before the first of the stories in The Emigrants reads, somewhat
ambiguously:

Zerstöret das Letzte

die Errinerung nicht. [AE 5/1]

Does this mean merely, as a “correct” translation would have it: “The last
remnants memory does not destroy”? Or does it not perhaps incline toward
meaning: “May memory not destroy the last remnants!” Is the epigram
stating a truth—or is it expressing, against the odds, a still unforgotten
hope? Strangely, inexplicably, the English translation by Michael Hulse
reads: “And the last remnants memory destroys.” I do not fathom how
this can possibly stand as a faithful or indeed correct translation; but the
thought that it expresses could nevertheless be true—a possibility Sebald
might want to recognize. For whilst what he recognized as the ever-increas-
ing degeneration of our capacity for remembrance greatly distressed him,
since that decline might mean the obliteration of remnants that memory
alone could have preserved, he also understood how, paradoxically, before
memory itself effectuates a process of mortification—how leaving things
in the keeping of inherently faulty memory perpetuates their decay and
dying. Thus not even the sacred remnants, not even the “eschaton,” might
be saved by memory.
In the final part of his poem, After Nature (1992), Sebald reflects
on his experience of the “natural history” of Manchester, near where he
settled: “Many times in those days, I wandered over the untilled Elysian
Fields and saw with utter amazement the work of destruction.” The thought
is more moving in the original German: “Viel bin ich damals / über die
brachen elysaïschen/ Felder gegangen und habe das Werk / der Zerstörung
bestaunt . . .” [NN 83/97]. In drawing this long poetic work to its ending,
“Sebald” gives expression to one of his most provocative thoughts, firing
off in rapid succession the questions he wants to leave with us: “Is this,”
he asks, with words recalling T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland,” “the promise’d end?”
“Oh,” he says, writing a sentence in English, “you are men of stones.” The
poem continues its staccato: “What is dead, that / remains dead. Out of lov-
ing / comes living [. . .]” [NN 95/110–111]. The rhythm tears at our senses.
 156 / REDEEMING WO RDS

The “After” in the title After Nature is of course ambiguous. It asks

us to think: What is to come after nature—after the death of nature? What
is to become of us? Can we survive the death of nature? Can an endlessly
dying nature be rescued? But the title also asks us, by way of its alterna-
tive reading, to think what it might mean, in today’s disenchanted world,
to follow nature, to live according to nature, to live on its terms—that is
to say, within the terms of nature’s own normativity. Whatever that way
of living might mean, it cannot of course be a question of naively reading
into nature the norms of our culture; nor can it mean simply learning how
to live wisely in today’s world by reading the “book” of nature.
In narrating his walking tour of the English coast, described in
The Rings of Saturn, the narrator, a fictionalized “Sebald,” gives way to a
depressing thought as his gaze takes in the ruination and desolation that
has claimed the English landscape, lit up, years ago, by the many bright
windmills and wind pumps that still remain in place, but now abandoned
to their natural fate: “Sometimes I think, when I look over there, that
everything is already dead.”19 According to Sebald’s poem, After Nature, the
great Northern Renaissance painter, Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528),
could in fact already intuit the coming danger, prophetically painting a
“brown scorched earth,” a “mountain landscape weeping,” and an ominous
“yellow dust” covering the land [NN 25–27/28–31]. For the eye wont to
see things in the light of natural history, there is, cast across the face of
our civilization, cast across all that has been built on the earth, an unmis-
takable “shadow of annihilation,” as Sebald, doubling as fictional narra-
tor, asserts in The Rings of Saturn [R 35/24]. But this shadow, this cipher
of an implacable divine judgment, sentencing everything on earth to a
time of perishing, can also be discerned by anyone whose critical facul-
ties register the violence of life—and the violence against life—ruled by
the imperatives of industrialization and capitalism. The spectral haunting
of our world is what Marx saw, what Derrida speaks of seeing in Specters
of Marx, and what Sebald saw as he wandered on foot down the eastern
coast of England.20 As Freud showed us, every civilization is built on repres-
sion. He also showed that what has been repressed eventually returns to
haunt the civilization that has repressed it. But industrial capitalism, as a
particular form of social organization, requires its own distinctive measures
of repression—and exclusion. And so, what capitalism represses for the
sake of its form of desire returns to haunt the life that sought to deny
it. In the disenchanted world of modern industrial capitalism, the world
of Sebald’s stories, what haunts are still, despite centuries of progress, the
forces and conditions of natural history—above all, the unmasterable fact
of death. So much death in our history: the ending of ancient ways of life,
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 157

the desertion of ancient villages, fatalities in the mines, factories, mills,

and construction sites, and the slow, secret deaths from working in a toxic
environment or with toxic substances.
Indeed, as already noted, Benjamin makes death the very source of
the storyteller’s moral authority. “Death,” he says, “is the sanction of every-
thing that the storyteller can tell.”21 This means: “it is natural history to
which his stories ultimately refer back.” The telling of stories that com-
pel us to acknowledge the presence of death in our world—death and all
its allegorical traces, portents, auguries, and shadows—has become all the
more important in a time—ours—when death and dying are, as Benjamin
observes, “hidden away,” denied not only their passage into transcendence,
but even their material reality, their power to touch our lives.22 Benjamin
unfolds this thought, asserting that

the epoch in which man could believe himself in harmony with

nature has expired. [But] the storyteller keeps faith with it, and
his eyes do not stray from that dial in front of which there moves
the procession of creatures of which, depending on circumstances,
Death is either the leader or the last wretched straggler.23

But the time of the storyteller is, he says, passing away, almost unnoticed,
as “Erfahrung,” meaningfully interwoven experience—experience that, like
a journey, takes time and yields its substance to narration, increasingly
gets reduced to mere “Erlebnisse,” isolated fragments of experience that,
resisting the working-through of memory and the art of narration, are only
superficially comprehensible. Having carefully studied Baudelaire, Benjamin
became convinced that storytelling could not survive the reduction, atomi-
zation, and atrophy of experience that had already begun to take place in
the poet’s day under the pressures of industrialization and modern urban life.
Sebald’s writings never cease to struggle against this reduction, this atrophy,
attempting through personal stories and impersonal histories to give back
to the telling of stories the natural power of memorialization it has lost.
His stories, composed in a prose that is never in a hurry, are attempts to
redeem the experience of time—Henri Bergson’s “durée.”
Natural history is always a question of stories. There was a time when
mythology and legend configured the stories that summoned collective
memory and sustained cultural life. But the later, more “modern” conscious-
ness, for whom mythology could no longer, of course, be the representation
of a credible reality, found instead in natural history the perspective it
needed for reading, interpreting, and renewing the older stories—the myths
and legends of the ancient world. Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins the story of
 158 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the creation of the world with the words: “Of bodies changed to various
forms, I sing.” The poet, true to his word, tells in noble verse epic stories
of marvelous metamorphoses: of earth into human beings, of human beings
turned into trees, flowers, animals, stone, and heavenly constellations. In
the oil paintings of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), some of these stories
have been transformed into narrative images of incomparable beauty that
make visible the poet’s assumption of a certain harmonious relationship
between the human world and the realm of nature: an assumption that
Poussin and his contemporaries could no longer unreservedly share. Of
course, nothing less than an abyss would still separate their disenchanted
attitude toward such metamorphoses from the experience of extreme alien-
ation that figures in the metamorphoses, uncanny and unsettling rather
than simply marvelous, about which Franz Kafka wrote in the early years
of the twentieth century. In “Apollo and Nymph,” for example, Poussin
conveys in the refinement of his neoclassical style the harmonious partici-
pation of the mythic in the human world as Ovid understood it, showing
the nymph’s outstretched arm repeating the angle of the tree limb above
her; and in “The Death of Eurydice,” we see Eurydice’s prostrate body as
a heap on the ground that likewise repeats in harmony the contours of
the mountain in the background; and Aristaeus, discovering her, extends
an arm that repeats the contours of the hills. In these mimetic repeti-
tions, a harmony no longer taken for granted is brought to expression in a
way that still validates the possibility of metamorphoses. But the mood of
these paintings is very different from the more melancholy, baroque mood
that, without diminishing the quality of attentiveness to nature’s exacting
laws, colors the narrative scenes represented in many of the painter’s other
works, dark canvases with dramatic skies and landscapes, in which nature
manifests not only its eternal beauty, lawfulness, and powers of regenera-
tion, but also its transience, its capriciousness, its dangers, its indifference,
and its destructiveness—and unfailingly reminds us of our vulnerability, our
ever-fateful mortality. Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Being Killed by a
Snake” is a compelling reminder of our subjection to nature’s omnipotent,
irrational rule. In this painter’s extraordinary art, legendary and mythologi-
cal themes are translated into narrative images that underwrite, as it were,
the processes of natural history.
There was, as yet, though, no premonition of the catastrophic destruc-
tiveness already—even then—taking place in the dialectical intersection
where nature and history cross. Nature could be violent and dangerous; and
history might seem to be nothing but a never-ending record of strife, wars,
and suffering. But if, nevertheless, Poussin’s paintings seem to suggest that,
for him and his contemporaries, the destruction of nature by commerce and
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 159

industry, the alteration of nature by roads, dams and irrigation channels,

and the expansion of villages, cities, and pastures replacing forests did not
arouse a critical consciousness urging them to question the values of their
civilization, perhaps we should pause to consider the possibility that, pre-
cisely in the aesthetic idealization of the intersection of nature and history,
precisely in images of classical beauty, nature and history in harmony and
balance, that very premonition was already indeed operative, moving the
painter and the poet to record for future generations the glorious vision of
a world order that, contrary to appearances, they already recognized to be
showing signs of passing away. The images, then, would already be epitaphs,
prolonging in a mythologized natural history the semblance of a classical
harmony, a wish-fulfillment paradise of reconciliation between nature and
mankind, captured for all time in that fateful moment just before its eternal
passing away.
It would not be long before the truth could not be denied. Nature was
slowly dying, dying under the guardianship of human beings. There was a
time, perhaps, when human beings could live in fundamental harmony with
nature. But the progress that our civilization has achieved required—and
still does require—an unsustainable exploitation; in our struggle to enjoy an
extreme autonomy from nature, we have carelessly plundered its resources,
possibly leaving it in a condition already beyond its powers of regeneration.
It seems that we have gained our freedom from nature only by destroying it.
In 1778, writing a treatise on the art of sculpture, Johann Herder,
recalling, no doubt, Herakleitos’s observation that nature loves to hide,
lamented that “Nature has departed and is hidden from us.” This much had
already become clear to him by the later years of the eighteenth century.
But why this had happened, primarily because of Europe’s rapid industri-
alization, was not so clear, otherwise he might have settled the weight of
responsibility for this “departure” and “hiding” not on nature, but instead
on our shoulders. Nature’s “departure” and “hiding” are manifestations of
its “resistance” to our will to power, our will to dominate and control.24
By the eighteenth century, it was already becoming disturbingly
apparent to poetic thought that our separation from nature for the sake
of autonomy was compelling the domination of nature—and that, in the
violence of the struggle to succeed, we were in the process of destroying
the very ground and condition of our survival. The landscapes with ruins
that the Romantic painters set on their canvases and the poets set down in
words were not merely beautiful or sublime fantasies designed for aesthetic
deep pleasure; they were expressions of a longing for what was already
in their lifetime vanishing; they were works of memory and mourning;
they were works of protestation and resistance. They were prophecies of a
 160 / REDEEMING WO RDS

nearing catastrophe. Sebald’s stories belong to and recall this courageous,

passionately critical Romanticism; but they continue it in a much darker
register, somehow even more compelling, more urgent, because of the virtu-
ally expressionless gravity weighting down the prose voice.
In some of William Turner’s paintings of London, a black smog com-
ing from the burning of coal hovers ominously over the city, shrouding the
radiance of the sun. From an airplane flying over England’s industrial center,
Max Ferber says he could see innumerable chimneys “belching out smoke
by day and night” [AE 250–51/168–69]. At this place in the narrative,
Sebald inserts a photograph showing buildings with tall chimneys—pre-
sumably factories—with smoke rising from them. In the German edition,
however, there is an uncanny reversal: the chimneys and the smoke are
white, the sky black. This gives the photograph a double meaning in which
the memory of the Holocaust erupts as a disturbing subtext. At the same
time that he reinforces the indictment of an uncontrolled industrialization
damaging to the environment, he also is saying that the heavens turned
black with anger at the gassing of the innocent, their remains rising as
pure white smoke into the embrace of the waiting heavens. Is the author
not suggesting that there is some connection between the history of human
violence against other human beings and the history of human violence
in plundering the resources of nature? Our survival still today depends on
a flourishing nature.25 It might also depend on a peace of law among the
nation-states and on laws of justice prevailing within them. In any event,
no matter how successful we might be in dominating nature and wresting
independence from its power, we will never find ourselves absolutely free
of its causalities, its conditions, its fatalities. In the end, natural history
will always be victorious. There must be reconciliation; but there can be
no returning to some prelapsarian past. This past, claiming the harmony of
Paradise, is nothing but an imaginary projection. But what new terms could
there be? Whatever these terms might be, it could perhaps be argued that,
for Sebald, it is one and the same sensibility, something like the Kantian
“sensus communis,” that will both resist the reckless destruction of nature
and also commit itself to ending the cruelties, the brutalities, the atroci-
ties beyond all measure, to which we human beings subject one another.
This violence, directed against other human beings, is also natural history;
but it is by no stretching of the imagination a matter of fate beyond the
nature of our power.
In 1872, during his confinement in prison for supporting the Com-
munards, Gustave Courbet produced two paintings of dead trout. In one of
these paintings, the fish is depicted with the hook still in its mouth. This
visionary painting conveys, beautifully but poignantly, the double bind, the
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 161

aporia, in which, because of our single-minded pursuit of economic enrich-

ment, the dream of endless economic development, we now find ourselves
entangled—much more now, in fact, than in the lifetime of this painter.
Courbet’s “La truite” implies a struggle to the death between nature and
man—a struggle in which the secret connection between freedom, freedom
understood as domination over nature, and death, a struggle whose story
Hegel tells in his Phenomenology of Spirit, finally reveals its terrible grip. In
the dying away of nature, it is we who are finally hooked. The storyteller—
painter or writer—is desperately needed, for the conception of nature in
modern science makes it impossible even to think in a coherent way the
sense and significance of this historical experience with nature. Only the
notion of “natural history” that Sebald inherits from the writings of Adorno
and Benjamin can do justice to the moral dimensions of this experience. It
is a question of a discursive form capable of bearing witness to what exceeds
the conceptual grasp of both natural science and history—history, that is
to say, as we have known and practiced it. “Naturgeschichte” is a concept
that simultaneously deconstructs the “nature” of the natural sciences and
the “history” of the historical sciences, revealing our concept of nature to be
a historical construction through and through and, correlatively, reminding
us that everything we have built and achieved in the course of our history
is subject to the fate that the laws of nature dictate.26
The absolute inseparability, within the realm of nature, of the pro-
cesses of birth and death, formation and dissolution, creation and destruc-
tion is also clearly the theme of Friedrich Hölderlin’s essay, “Becoming in
Dissolution.”27 But, whilst the poet wants us to acknowledge the necessity
of dissolution, the natural history of destruction, he is, in this essay, more
concerned to encourage a felt sense of the possible: within every dissolution,
every disintegration, something new will always be emerging, will always
be becoming. It is as if nature were always attempting to secure a just
equilibrium. But this conception of natural history is ultimately a matter of
blind faith, for there can be no certainty that what is taking shape, what
is coming to be, is better than its past—or will last. For Hölderlin, as for
his friends, the chaotic, violent aftermath of the French Revolution—the
lawless reign of terror—was cause for an inconsolable disillusionment. The
course of these events seemed to demonstrate that the history of humanity
cannot escape the conditions of natural history: the dream that reached
its heights of expression in German idealism, the dream of transcendence,
an absolute break with the iron laws of nature, proved to be nothing but
tragic delusion. And, as if to confirm an inevitable finitude, anticipating
the moment of dissolution, this essay remains unfinished, its last sentence
interrupted, broken off, a compelling reminder that even the most sublime
 162 / REDEEMING WO RDS

metaphysical reflection is hostage to the contingencies and other conditions

of natural history. We cannot ignore the dissolution. But when comes the
becoming-otherwise?
Just how far Sebald is from the spirit of Romanticism becomes strik-
ingly obvious when we juxtapose his writings to Hölderlin’s Hyperion
(1792–1797), an early work. Volume I, Book II ends with the confident
assertion, addressed to Nature, that

[a] rejuvenated people will rejuvenate you, too, and you will
be as its bride, and the old union of spirits will renew itself in
you. There will be but one Beauty, and man and Nature will be
united in one all-embracing divinity [eine allumfassende Gottheit].

Volume II, Book II likewise ends with an affirmation of hope that the poet
himself, in his later years, would not want to sustain:

Like lovers’ quarrels are the dissonances of the world. Reconcili-

ation [Versöhnung] is there, even in the midst of strife, and all
things that are parted find one another again.28

But in fact, the experiences that Hyperion undergoes in the course of the
novel belie the optimism, making these words sound irremediably hollow.
Reconciliation with nature might be possible; but its future realization is
not merely contingent, it is at best precarious.
In The Spirit of Christianity, a text from his early years, Hegel argues
for the Enlightenment project of disenchantment and turns against the
false spiritualization of material substances, denying dust any redemptive
potentiality, any role in a story of redemption:

In an Apollo or Venus, we must forget the marble, the break-

able stone, and see in its shape the immortal only. [. . .] But
grind the Apollo or Venus to dust and say “This is Apollo, this
is Venus,” and then the dust confronts you and the images of
the immortals are in you, but the dust and the divine never
coalesce into one.29

Dust is a reminder, of course, of the vulnerability, fragility, impermanence,

and finitude of all things. For Sebald, dust bears witness to what was; it is
a material memory, guarding the unforgettable; thus he seeks to make even
this most inanimate substance, a substance seemingly deprived of spirit,
speak to us, yielding its story, bringing something to life out of its poverty.
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 163

In his profoundly original treatise, Of Human Freedom (first published

in 1809), Schelling declared, setting the tone for the historical influence
of German Romanticism, that

Man never gains control over the condition [that constitutes and
determines human existence], even though in evil he strives to
do so; it is only loaned to him independent of him; hence his
personality and self-hood can never be raised to complete actu-
ality [i.e., the fulfillment of the potentiality that composes the
human being]. This [incompleteness] is the sadness that adheres
to all finite life, and inasmuch as there is even in God himself
a condition at least relatively independent, there is in him, too,
a source of sadness, which, however, never attains actuality but
rather serves for the eternal joy of triumph. Thence the veil of
sadness that is spread over all nature, the deep, unappeasable
melancholy of all life.30

“Man,” blessed with the gift of language, is therefore “the redeemer of

nature toward whom all its archetypes strive. The Word that is fulfilled
in man exists in nature, but only as a dark, prophetic (still incompletely
spoken) Word.”31 But Aristotle realized that the emergence of human lan-
guage required the suppression of the voice of nature—that voice within
us into which many of the voices of nature have been gathered.32 Human
language is thus the tomb of the voice of nature. Nature’s mourning, and
its longing for a way to communicate its lamentation, will depend on the
responsivity of human beings. But could the literary presentation of beauty
ever be enough to create and inform this responsivity? What words could
have saved from extinction the Luna Moth, family Saturnidae, which once
graced the humid summer nights of New England with its incandescent
but ephemeral beauty?33
As is well known, Benjamin recapitulates Schelling’s thought in his
study on the German Baroque mourning play:

Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns. But the converse of

this statement leads even deeper into the essence of nature: its
mournfulness is what makes it become mute. In all mourning,
there is an inclination to silence, and this infinitely more than
any inability or reluctance to communicate.34

Nature was already speechless, though not without voices and songs, in
the world that existed before the Fall; but after the time of the Fall, she
 164 / REDEEMING WO RDS

fell silent in a different way. Thus, in a later work, “On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin maintains that

[a]fter the Fall, when God’s word curses the ground, the appear-
ance of nature is deeply changed. Now her other speechlessness
begins. [. . .] It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would
begin to lament if language were granted her. This proposition
has a double meaning. It means, first: she would lament language
itself. Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for
the sake of her redemption the life and language of man—not
only, as is supposed, of the poet—are in nature). This proposi-
tion means, secondly: she would lament. Lament, however, is
the most undifferentiated, most impotent expression of language;
it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even
where there is only a rustling of plants, within it is always the
sound of a lament. It is because she is mute that nature mourns.35

How might the storyteller take up this lament and give speech thereby to
nature? How might the storyteller release the voices of nature from their
burial in the emergence of human language? It seems to me that Sebald’s
prose style shows us one of the ways in which the art of storytelling can
keep the dying of nature alive, reminding us of what we are losing. In his
stories, it is not only nature we are losing; in a vertiginous deception, we
are also losing ourselves.

§2

Creaturely Life: Under the Judgment of Eternity

“Et in arcadia ego.”36 Natural history reigns even in Arcadia. Two important
painters, Guercino and Poussin, depicting a scene in Virgil’s “Eclogues,”
have shown us where, if we attempt to deny our mortality by escaping into
an imaginary utopia, we will eventually find ourselves.
In the chapter on Hegel in Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno con-
tinues his reflections, first set in motion many years earlier in “The Idea of
Natural History” (1932), on the question of natural history. In this chapter,
he argues that,

[t]he moment in which nature and history become commen-

surable with each other is the moment of passing [Vergängnis].
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 165

This is the central cognition in Benjamin’s Origin of the Ger-

man Mourning-Play. The poets of the Baroque, we read there,
envisioned nature “as eternal passing, in which the Saturnian
eye of that generation alone recognized history.” And not just
that generation’s eye; natural history still remains the canon
of interpretation for philosophers of history: “When history, in
the mourning-play, makes its entrance on the stage, it does so
as writing. The countenance of nature is inscribed ‘History’ in
pictographs of passing. The allegorical physiognomy of nature’s
history, brought to the stage by the mourning-play, is readily
present as a ruin.”

Adorno, continuing his commentary, observes:

This is the transmutation of metaphysics into history. It secu-

larizes metaphysics in the secular category pure and simple, the
category of decay. Philosophy interprets that pictography, the
ever new Mene Tekel, in microcosm—in the fragments which
decay has chipped, and which bear the objective meanings. No
recollection of transcendence is possible any more, save by way
of perdition; eternity appears, not as such, but defracted through
the most perishable. Where Hegelian metaphysics transfigures
the absolute by equating it with the total passing of all finite
things, it simultaneously looks a little beyond the mythical spell
it captures and reinforces.37

Quoting from his much earlier text, he argues that the task for thought
is, therefore,

to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as

history, and all history as nature—“to grasp historic being in its
utmost historic definition, in the place where it is most historic,
as natural being, or to grasp nature, in the place where it seems
most deeply, inertly natural, as historic being.”38

The historical is, in its transience, its contingency, returned to nature, whilst
nature returns to haunt a remorseless history and exact its just revenge.
Nature thereby becomes a subject for different types and ends of history—as
can be seen in the history of nineteenth-century landscape painting and
in some important twentieth-century photography, documenting the fate
of our immeasurably destructive transformations.
 166 / REDEEMING WO RDS

In one of the most moving, most beautiful moments in all of his

writings, Sebald finds himself in Padua, brooding on the angels in Giotto’s
frescoes, their colors still glowing in the somber lighting of the Cappella
Scrovegni:

I was overwhelmed by the silent lament of the angels, who have

kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven
centuries. Their lament resounded in the very silence of the
chapel and their eyebrows were drawn so far together in their
grief that one might have supposed them blindfolded. And are
not their white wings, I thought, with those few bright green
touches of Veronese earth, the most wondrous of all things we
have ever conceived of? Gli angeli visitano la scena della disgrazia
[. . .]. [SV 96/83–84]

Drawing the eyes of the beholder into the sky, these frescoes compel one
to regard the misery of the world from the sublime perspective deemed
most appropriate for the lucidity of moral judgement; but, despite finding
himself overwhelmed by the sadness of this scene, Sebald is also affected
by the “wondrous” sensuous beauty of the colors—as if this beauty, drawn
from nature’s elemental materials to exalt and glorify the presence of the
divine in our world, could somehow be a redeeming influence, assuaging the
endless suffering of creaturely life. This is one of several significant scenes
in Sebald’s writings in which we are brought to a position high above the
world of human life, making it possible to contemplate the miseries of
this world in a detached frame of mind—and perhaps to imagine the idea
of natural history from the transcendental perspective of redemption, sub
specie aeternitatis.

§3

Fatalism or Freedom?

Because of the importance of natural history in Sebald’s stories, it might

not seem entirely unreasonable, despite all the improbable coincidences
and correspondences, and all the events attributed to chance, to wonder
whether he believes in fatalism, a world of irrevocable, irreversible, irre-
mediable predetermination, governing even the most minor entities and
events. There could, after all, be something mysteriously at work behind
the scenes, behind the appearances of chance, the unlikely coincidences
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 167

and correspondences. And Sebald certainly encourages that suspicion. In

interviews and essays discussing his literary works, Sebald seems to take
haunting seriously: despite the frequency in his stories of chance events,
he encourages the impression that there must be a concealed meaning, a
secret source of greater intelligibility. If there is such a dimension, does that
necessarily imply fatalism? Might there be at work, in Sebald’s stories, a
notion of fate not merely independent of fatalism, but actually in opposition
to it—a notion of fate that in fact presupposes freedom and responsibility?
What sense of “fate” is inherent in Sebald’s invocations of natural
history?39 If Sebald’s aesthetic use of natural history, or what some com-
mentators have called his “naturalism,” involves a notion of fate, does
this aesthetic subvert the moral authority his descriptions of evil might
otherwise possess? Does his representation of the natural history of destruc-
tion—destruction understood, that is, as natural history—deny us, as human
beings, the freedom and the responsibility to struggle against the “natural”
human causes of this destructiveness?
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald chronicles the Belgian colonization of
the Congo, telling of their justificatory declaration to bring “the blessings
of civilization” into the “darkness” of the Congo. And he writes there
that, “In the nature of things [Naturgemäß], the lofty spirit expressed in
this declaration was later lost from sight” [R 144/118]. “Naturgemäß”: “In
the nature of things” or “In accordance with its nature.” Is this word an
expression of fatalism? Or is it simply habitual language, metaphysically
innocent? If I am disposed to assume the latter, that is because I take the
consistent sense and spirit of his writings to be an appeal to our freedom—or
rather, a responsibility for remembrance that is demanded of our freedom.
I am of course calling attention to a word—in English, a phrase—that is
commonly used without thinking about its presuppositions and implica-
tions. So perhaps it is metaphysically innocent, not to be given too much
significance. Once we pause to reflect on it, however, it can begin to seem
of questionable innocence: everything depends on the conception of nature
implicitly invoked as normative, as the authoritative measure.
For Kant, there is a “universal law of nature” that is constitutive of
the moral exercise of freedom.40 This means, I take it, that the moral will
in its freedom must also be considered “naturegemäß”; but in that case,
fatalism is certainly not the only way to interpret being “in the nature of
things” or being “in accordance with nature.” Nevertheless, the moral will
is limited by its nature: its understanding of the world and its effective-
ness are conditioned, though not rigidly determined, by its situatedness in
natural history. Hence, even people of “good will,” even philosophers such
as Kant and Hegel, their vision limited, despite remarkable autonomy, by
 168 / REDEEMING WO RDS

their historical position, might have admired and embraced the “lofty spirit”
presumed and proclaimed in that colonial declaration.
In The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, Hegel follows Kant in remark-
ing the radical difference between (1) the empirical causality of nature,
which is mechanical, deterministic, impersonal, and (2) the transcendental
causality of freedom, a necessary axiom of reason. (Surprisingly, Kant calls
our “moral personality,” our being disposed and under compulsion to heed
the moral law, a “fact of reason,” abandoning thereby all hope for a ground-
ing of the moral law absolutely free of contingency.) But, undoubtedly
thinking of Greek tragedy, Hegel also appeals, there, to the notion, first
introduced by Kant, of a “causality of fate,” suggesting that this causality,
not to be confused with the “mechanical” causality of nature, which it in
fact resists, actually expresses the causality of freedom, imposing the impos-
sibility of avoiding responsibility. This mysterious causality of fate eventu-
ally finds its way into Benjamin’s essay on “The Critique of Violence.” In
Benjamin’s bold argument, its metaphysical authority is further illuminated:
this causality is said to be an intervention of divine justice—a mediated
intervention, however, working its restitution through the freedom of human
agents and working out the moral conditions of that freedom. Eventually
the ethical significance of this causality is interpreted by Habermas, who
proposes, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, to explain it in terms
of a history of guilt, suggesting that it should be understood as an “aveng-
ing force,” a force, namely, that “causes the one at fault to suffer until he
recognizes in the annihilation of the life of the other the lack in his own
life, and in the act of repudiating another’s life, the estrangement from
himself.” “In this causality of fate,” he says, “the ruptured bond of the
ethical totality is brought to consciousness.” Thus, reconciliation is possible
only when there is “a longing for the life that has been lost—and when
this experience forces those involved to recognize the denial of their own
nature in the split-off existence of the other.”41 Although these interpreta-
tions differ in certain respects, it should be observed that they all engage
the moral significance of our capacity for freedom, illuminating its nature,
its character, as a compelling moral force in the world.
Paradoxically, in the nature of things, the moral law works on human
conscience somewhat like a causality of fate, because genuine, true freedom,
for Kant, is action compelled by the force of the moral law. We need to
recall here Kant’s supplementary, more pragmatic formulation of the moral
law. Rewriting the original version of the criterion, namely, “Act only on
such a maxim that you could also want it to become a universal law,”
Kant proposed the following less abstract, more practically useful version
of the categorical imperative, taking into account, this time, the disposi-
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 169

tion of human nature: “Act as though the maxim of your action were to
become by your volition a universal law of nature.”42 Precisely because Kant
recognizes in human nature both a rational capacity for freedom and an
inherent weakness of will, he formulated the test for morality in terms of a
“universal law of nature.” In this way, he could simultaneously acknowledge
the “fallen” character of human nature and also give expression to a weak
redemptive force, representing his hope that “all maxims which stem from
autonomous self-legislation” might “harmonize,” as they ought to, “with a
possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature.”43 This is Kant’s recognition
of the inseparable intertwining of human nature and morality within natu-
ral history. It is also an interpretation that recognizes the fact that nature
accommodates normativity: implicitly evoked by the phrase “naturgemäß,”
“in the nature of things,” is the uncanny fact that, despite its mechanical
causality, nature is hospitable to human freedom and moral life.
As I think the preceding discussion, brief though it is, demonstrates,
“Naturgeschichte,” “natural history,” is a complex concept, complex because
its formation involves the intersection of so many concepts: not only
“nature” and “history” as conditions, but also “causality,” “fate,” “freedom,”
and how we understand “ethical life.” If this complexity is ignored, the
concept can become treacherous, easily reactionary. Thus, for example, as
Adorno states in Negative Dialectics:

The thesis that society is subject to natural laws becomes ideology

if it is hypostatized as immutably given by nature. [ND 349/355]

Sebald’s approach to matters that carry moral significance is a kind of

materialism—a “tender empiricism,” to use Goethe’s felicitous phrase. In
Sebald’s stories the narrative always concentrates precisely and exactly on
the object, without expressing moral judgements. Paradoxically, however, as
I am sure he realized, the more “objective” his account of things feels, the
more strongly the moral significance comes through! When, for example,
he describes the compulsively repetitive movements of a caged animal, the
death throes of a fish, the dilapidation of a once flourishing city neighbor-
hood, or the smoke from factory chimneys darkening the skies, the factual
truth at stake speaks for itself. Without imposisng ideology. He is indeed
engaged in a struggle within the history of the language of representation,
avoiding false hope, false consolation, but equally, avoiding the betrayal
involved in mystification, in pleading ineffability—as if there were no way
at all to refer to or speak of the horrors of the twentieth century. Without
expressing any moral position, his “naturalism” nevertheless communicates
moral significance, speaking with the most compelling eloquence precisely
 170 / REDEEMING WO RDS

because of its restraint, appealing to the reader’s conscience and giving time
for reflection and judgment.
There is, of course, as Adorno says, an ideological way of interpreting
the concept of natural history that would deny human freedom and respon-
sibility, reducing them to the causal determinism of nature—the nature, I
mean, that is forced into constant availability by the natural sciences of the
modern age. Moral conscience absolutely forbids this reduction. It would be
as if what took place in Auschwitz-Birkenau were “in the nature of things,”
something “natural,” beyond the reach of moral judgment and resistance.
Although the theatre of human action is irrevocably set within the realm
of natural history, the causality of freedom is obviously not the same as the
causality—call it, in the common and familiar sense, “fate”—that figures
in natural catastrophes, floods and earthquakes, for example; nor is it the
same as the slower natural processes, processes of ruination, disintegration,
and death—the rusting away of iron, the crumbling of stone monuments,
the decay and petrification of wood, and the diseases and dying of trees,
wild and domestic animals, and human beings. Sebald sees these inexorable
natural processes, though subject to a natural causality, as matters of intense
concern for ethical life.
Thus, when we realize the vulnerability and precariousness of all ani-
mal and plant life, planetary life assigned to its fate in the order of natural
history, we find ourselves summoned, like it or not, to commit our freedom
to the wise stewardship of this life. And when we realize that all our histori-
cal institutions are subject to the fate that works through laws of natural
history—that everything we have founded and built on this earth must
submit to the conditions of nature that, like an “avenging force” of divine
justice, sentence them from the time of their beginning to corruption and
termination, we are thereby released from the spell of a determinism and a
fatalism that would paralyze freedom, arresting action before it could even
be undertaken. The causality of fate in natural history, if understood in
this way, could therefore actually be liberating, even, indeed, an encour-
agement for revolutionary social movements, revealing opportunities for
the exercise of our freedom, since all the institutions that appear in the
light of this causality are ruthlessly stripped of their aura of enchantment,
unmasked in the truth of their finitude: our perception of their ephem-
erality, their impermanence, their vulnerability—the “natural causality of
fate”—encourages the recognition of their social constructedness; and that
in turn might encourage a more critical disposition of freedom. History
takes place within the realm of nature; but if history is nothing more than
nature, if it has no reflectively constituted transcendence, no conceptually
produced independence from the physical laws of nature, then freedom
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 171

is nothing but delusion and it will no longer be possible to judge history

from the normative standpoint of ethical life. Our responsibility—and our
guilt—would be cancelled.
If there is a “causality of fate” in Sebald’s “Naturgeschichte,” it is a
causality which, though understood as a causality belonging to nature, or
rather, to natural history, is not an empirical, physical determinism: it does
not preclude freedom and responsibility; it is, in fact, an allegorical notion
that is supposed to make sense only in the light of the strife between the
forces and conditions of natural history—the theatre in which the anguish
of freedom and responsibility is played out, often tragically—and a redemp-
tive vision of the human realm of moral action. It belongs to an allegorical
interpretation of the moral significance of the inseparable intertwining of
nature and history: a history of freedom that can never completely escape
the conditions of nature and a nature that can be known only within a
narrative of history in which its suffering needs to be redeemed by a sym-
pathetic use of freedom.
In the narrative exposition of its conceptual background, the alle-
gorical version of the “causality of fate” in natural history is set in motion
following the exile of human beings from the Garden of Eden; it rules in
a world of wrongdoing and guilt far from Paradise, where we live together
with all the plants, animals, and inanimate substances that are likewise
under its eternal judgment, the incorruptible justice of its transcenden-
tal claims. Thus it would be a mistake to identify with their traditional
conceits the “nature” and the “history” invoked by Sebald’s notion of
“natural history.” And, a fortiori, it would be no less a mistake to read the
causality of fate that constitutes the Sebaldian sense of “natural history”
as a fatalism, or determinism, incompatible with freedom and responsibil-
ity. Between the morally indifferent, “mechanical” fate of history as we
have known it—one damnable thing after another, always more of the
same—and the allegorical, morally directed fate of freedom, a causality
played out in relation to “Naturgeschichte,” there looms an immeasur-
able, virtually untranslatable abyss. Thus, if there is a causality of fate at
work in Sebald’s interpretation of “Naturgeschichte,” it must be read as
signifying the eternal laws of an ontological, cosmological justice such as
figures in the philosophical fragment attributed to Anaximander: that is
a justice which submits everything to its absolute conditions, rendering
everything in our world finite and impermanent. However, for Sebald,
the justice in natural history still leaves to us, as tasks for our freedom to
accomplish, both the redemption of nature, which we must release from
our will to power, and the redemption of history, which we must release
from the tragedy of endless repetition.
 172 / REDEEMING WO RDS

I am reminded of two lines from the seventh stanza in the final ver-
sion of Hölderlin’s poem, “Celebration of Peace”:

A law of fate is this, that each shall know all others,

That, when the silence returns, there also language shall be.44

This is not fate as the causal determinism of a now obsolete science, but fate
as reconciliation, fate as language, fate as a summons, gathering nature and
history into the project of a community reconciled in the sharing of memory.
I want accordingly to suggest that the causality in “Naturgeschichte”
is transformed into the “causality of fate” when it becomes the occasion for
allegorical reflection on the history of our guilt and responsibility, hence the
occasion for consciousness of a morally imperative summons to actualize the
disruptive causality of our freedom by bringing the apocalyptic, redemptive
force of justice, “the avenging force,” into the historical world. Allegori-
cally conceived, the “causality of fate” operates through the assumption of
freedom: freedom compelled by the law of its very nature (Kant’s phrase) to
serve the cause of divine justice, intimations of which its uncanny spiritual
light alone makes legible in the fateful processes of dissolution and becom-
ing that determine, or express, the course of natural history.
In “World and Time,” a fragment written in 1919 or 1920 and never
completed, Benjamin suggests that,

[i]n the revelation of the divine, the world—the theatre of his-

tory—is subjected to a great process of decomposition, while
time—the life of him who represents it—is subject to a great
process of fulfillment. [. . .] In its present state, the social is a
manifestation of spectral and demonic powers, often in their
greatest tension to God, their efforts to transcend themselves.
The divine manifests itself in them only in revolutionary force.
Only in the community [.  .  .] does the divine manifest itself.  .  .  .45

My argument, here, is that “the causality of fate” in the notion of “Naturge-

schichte” which figures in Sebald’s work, can be fully understood—as
Adorno’s final note in Minima Moralia struggles to acknowledge without
sacrificing the necessary dialectical tension—only in the light of redemp-
tion. Although very familiar, and already cited above, this note so fully
explains Sebald’s work that, for the sake of memory, I will quote it at
length—almost in its entirety, proposing for present purposes that, in our
reading of the text, we substitute the word “literature” for Adorno’s word
“philosophy”:
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 173

The only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in face of

despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would
present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowl-
edge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption:
all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be
fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be
[. . .] as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the
messianic light.

The note continues, beautifully articulating the very problems with which
Sebald’s writings constantly struggle: the tension between closeness and
distance, the balance between micrological singularity and panoramic gen-
eralization, the countless risks of complicity, the distortions and damage
that the narrative text must suffer and reflect for the sake of the difficult
truth it is called upon to transmit:

To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely

from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of
thought. It is the simplest of all things [. . .]. But it is also the
utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint
removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of
existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge
must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good,
but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion
and indigence which it seeks to escape.

The note concludes, refusing to permit the philosophical project to become

distracted from its attentiveness to the conditions of the world by the
perpetually tempting thought of redemption:

Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the

sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on
thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption
itself hardly matters.46

If there is any possibility of redemption remaining in the world of Sebald’s

stories, it is a possibility that persists only to haunt the restless nights of
our collective forgetfulness: a possibility Sebald can hold on to only by
sustaining in his memory-work the fateful nature of our loss.
So we see that, in Sebald’s conception of “Naturgeschichte,” “nature”
is not the nature of modern science but the nature that appears in
 174 / REDEEMING WO RDS

B­enjamin’s study of the German Baroque mourning play: a nature aban-

doned, languishing, slowly dying away, mutely suffering in an inconsolable
grief. Correlatively, this “history” is not the comforting illusions of our
history books, not an endless succession of events to be read as a linear,
unidirectional causal chain, not an archive always adding on more of the
same to the catalogue of historical progress, but instead an allegorical his-
tory of freedom, in which every fragment of destruction, every precipitate
of cruelty and violence, every trace of suffering demands to be kept in the
guilt and responsibility of memory, where fate can be opened to destiny.
The dream that came to Sebald, the telling of which is reserved for
the final part of After Nature, and which is narrated in a stark and solemn
language that sounds vaguely mediaeval, comes as a high-altitude vision,
a mimetic evocation of what we might imagine a crane to see, looking
down upon our earthbound civilization: a scene which Albrecht Altdorfer
communicates in his famous 1529 painting of the “Alexanderschlacht,”
the historically decisive battle at Issus (333 BCE) between the armies of
Alexander and Darius.47 (Goya’s “El Gigante,” likewise representing a high-
altitude perspective on war, and possibly painted with knowledge of this
earlier painting, seems, however, to offer no hope for peace, not even a
distant one.) If there is a terrifying beauty in Altdorfer’s representation of
the battle, Sebald’s poetic dream-vision takes flight, leaving the scene of
the battle and, as it extends itself farther and farther away, even sighting
the African Continent, it not only conjures up “the inconceivable beauty
of nature,” but metonymically gathers all nations, races, and peoples into
one great unifying panorama, intimating a time—a possible future time—
of international peace and reconciliation. Perhaps, for Sebald, this vision
offered a hope-filled moment in the long, tragic course of “natural history”:

Now I know, as with a crane’s eye

one surveys his far flung realm,
a truly Asiatic spectacle,
and slowly learns, from the diminished size
of the figures and the incomprehensible
beauty of nature that vaults over them
to see that side of life that
one could not see before. We look
over the battle and, glancing
from north to south, we see
a camp with white Persian
tents lying in the evening glow
and a city on the shore.
 NATURAL HISTO RY / 175

Outside, with swollen sails

the ships make headway and
the shadows already graze
the cypresses, and beyond them
Egypt’s mainland extends.
The Nile Delta can be made out,
the Sinai Peninsula, the Red Sea,
and, still further in the distance,
towering in dwindling light,
the mountain ranges,
snow-covered and ice-bound,
of the strange, unexplored,
African continent. [NN 98–99/115–16]

Incidentally, the crane in this strophe is reminiscent of the crane that

figures in the very first strophe of “The Archipelago,” Hölderlin’s poem,
worked on over many years, in which he greets the Greek islands, return-
ing to them with heartfelt rejoicing. The comparison, no doubt something
Sebald might have intended, is instructive:

Are the cranes returning to you again, and

The boats, are they heading again for your shores? Do
longed-for
Breezes breath on your quieted waters, and does the dolphin,
Lured out of the depths, warm his back in the new sunlight?
Is Ionia in flower? Has the time come? [ists die Zeit?] For
always in the spring
When the hearts of the living are renewed and youthful
Love awakens mortals and memory of golden times,
I come to you and greet you in your stillness, ancient one!48

This of course is an elegiac invocation of the Greek archipelago, a figure

in this poem that bears the poet’s allegorical longing for a return to the
time in which poetic imagination, inspired by the favors of nature, once
freely played and cavorted, its spirit renewed. Though elegiac, the season is
spring and the sun is shining warmly: the poem is an expression of hope.
The poet evokes cranes, harbingers of good tidings, but in their reassuring
nearness, not, as in Sebald’s “Schriftbild,” his “text-image,” in their com-
prehensive aerial remoteness. In both poems, nature and history are inter-
twined; but there is less cause for hope in the vast landscape that Sebald’s
crane surveys. Despite a long search, despite a flight over vast expanses of
 176 / REDEEMING WO RDS

land and water, the natural beauty of the earth remains incomprehensible,
and we cannot overlook the evidence of wars, famines, destruction, and
death. Hölderlin’s strophe brings human warmth together with the warmth
of nature; Sebald’s leaves us with a different, more ambiguous feeling: a
cold philosophical equanimity verging on the lofty metaphysical indiffer-
ence that consummates Schelling’s system of nature: This is the way the
world is. It is ultimately futile to lament the laws of nature, whatever their
dispensation. The devastation of wars appears to be, observed from the
height of the crane, as natural as floods and droughts. Nevertheless, this
despondency is a temptation that Sebald seems to hope we can resist; and
in taking us to this aerial viewpoint, I think he heightens our consciousness
of the way we are dwelling here on the earth. The crane’s-eye viewpoint,
taking in a vast landscape, cannot ignore the destructiveness of our civi-
lization; but at the same time, it is uniquely positioned to glimpse, in the
nature of things, the possibility of reconciliation—another image, indeed,
of the promise of happiness.
 3

Of Humans and Other Animals

As we know, in his Letters to the Romans (VIII, 19–22), St. Paul observes
that, although God’s world was made subject to corruption and decay, the
whole of creation is groaning together, longing for redemption, longing for
the words, the language, that could end its history of suffering. Schelling’s
1810 Stuttgart Seminars recapitulate the Pauline doctrine:

The most obscure and thus the deepest aspect of human nature
is that of nostalgia, longing for the impossible ideal [Sehnsucht],
which is the inner gravity of the temperament of the spirit [des
Gemüths], so to speak; in its most profound manifestation, it
appears as melancholy [Schwermuth]. It is by means of the latter
that man feels a sympathetic relation to nature. What is most
profound in nature is also melancholy; for it, too, mourns a lost
good, and likewise, such an indestructible melancholy inheres
in all forms of life, because all life is founded upon something
independent from itself; and whereas what is above it is uplift-
ing and encouraging, that which is below is depressing, pulling
it down.1

In Of Human Freedom, Schelling supplements his image of melancholy

nature, introducing the question of language:

The word that is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark,

prophetic, still incompletely spoken word.2

Carrying forward his argument in the study of the German Baroque

“Trauerspiel,” Benjamin elaborates Schelling’s idea, making a connection
between nature’s inability to put into words the suffering we have caused
and the mournful spirit that prevails in the realm of nature.3

177
 178 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Adorno invokes, and calls for, “the remembrance [Eingedenken] of

nature in the subject.” In Sebald’s stories, there is an overpowering identi-
fication with the distress of nature—and a sympathy that gives voice to the
ceaseless lament. As if the remembrance of nature in the language of art
could somehow break through the depths of silence that enshroud the realm
of nature. As if, communicating their condition, each kind in its own way,
the beings in the realm of nature could compel us to remember what we
have forgotten, or perhaps, rather, what we are unwilling to acknowledge.
At the very end of the eighteenth century, with mining and industrialization
already destroying nature on an unprecedented scale, Novalis observed that,
for our time, “reason and the divine spirit do not speak audibly or strikingly
enough from within the human being—stones, trees, animals must speak
in order to make the human being feel himself and make himself reflect.”4
With uncanny sympathy, Sebald opens his prose to nature’s commu-
nications: from its creatures, its plants, and even its stones, its minerals,
we learn their plight. As when fish die in a toxic river, bird species vanish
with the disappearance of their marshes, forests become deserts, and the
earth is too dry to sustain saplings. The rings on cut trees tell with awe-
some communicative clarity the history of their environment: its droughts,
abundance of rain, and the depletion of essential minerals in the soil.
At least since Aristotle, philosophers have taken it to be axiomatic
that in the use of language the human animal is differentiated in an abso-
lutely essential way from all the other animals. Language, it is thought,
establishes an unbridgeable abyss between them and us. This abyss becomes
the excuse, or justification, for our exploitation of nature and for the vio-
lence and indifference to which we subject the other animals. However,
in responding to the lament that creaturely life communicates regarding
the suffering we human animals have caused the other animals to endure,
Sebald contests and resists the conflict with nature inherent in the ancient
philosophical assumption. He shows us that, and how, language bears the
utopian idea of the promise of happiness, protecting, preserving and trans-
mitting it, in a brief moment of anticipatory reconciliation, by drawing on
the resources of language to express the unreserved sympathy of the witness
for the plight of nature and to acknowledge guilt, taking responsibility for
the diremption that precludes the possibility of universal happiness.
According to Benjamin, Kafka felt that animals are “the vessels of
the forgotten,” “die Behältnisse des Vergessenen.”5 What could an aesthetic
redemption mean with regard to the struggle between humans and other
animals that has always prevailed over peace in the history of creaturely
life? For Sebald, it seems, aesthetic redemption needs here to acknowledge
its limitations. One indication of the darker dimension, resistant to any
 OF HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS / 179

aesthetic redemption, is to be found in the narrator’s reflection on all the

stuffed animals mounted on the walls of the Engelwirt Inn taproom: “exter-
minated creatures [. . .] awaiting the time until they could take their long
overdue revenge” [SV 258/236]. What is at stake here is clearly a question
of the animals’ claims on our moral sensibility. It is these claims that have
been forgotten. But nothing can return the animals to life.
As Eric Santner has noted, Sebald’s writings are an extraordinary
“archive of creaturely life,” attentive above all to its suffering, its plight in
the present world.6 In the poetic story about the daring exploits of George
Wilhelm Steller (1709–1746), Sebald attributes to him the perception that,
in the Bering Straits, one sees “nature in a process / of destruction, in a
condition of pure dementia [Demenz]” [NN 56/65]. But the “outer nature”
we see in its destructive chaos is always a reflection of the inner nature
whose destructive madness we do not like to recognize. The men on the
expedition suffered hunger, fatigue, and perilous illness—“until finally /
there was virtually no difference between the living and the dead.” [NN
56–57/65–66] In the telling of this story, Sebald finds himself moved to
write these sorrowful words:

Ein Tier
ist der Mensch, in tiefe
Trauer gehüllt. [NN 48–49/57]
[An animal / is man, in deep / mourning shrouded.]

We human beings, animals still, are not exempt from the sufferings and
fatalities endured by the plants and animals that belong to the realm of
nature. Our fate on this planet is bound up with theirs: our suffering, our
salvation. For Sebald, there may be little hope; but nothing in nature
should be presumed a priori to be already or forever abandoned beyond
the margins of “Naturgeschichte” as a story of possible redemption in a
radically different history. Could giving names to the vulnerable species,
declining in numbers—as Sebald does, for example, in Campo Santo, be
one of the ways that a writer might acknowledge, and take responsibility
for, the historical destruction of nature? [CS 39–42/35–39]
In Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks that, “The relation of children
to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia goes disguised in these
creatures [. . .]. In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, ani-
mals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to
exchange. This makes them so beloved of children, their contemplation
so blissful.”7 Animals in Sebald’s stories are creatures beloved, present in
dialectical word-images that bear witness to the suffering of nature; yet
 180 / REDEEMING WO RDS

also, like angelic messengers, their presence evokes or awakens, as if by

the anachronism of anamnesis, a time of reconciliation and the happiness
it promises to complete.
Once upon a time, we human beings believed that we had conquered
nature, subdued and mastered it; yet, ironically, we find ourselves increas-
ingly subject to its conditions, its compulsion, its perilous revenge. Nature
is still powerful enough to disrupt the framework of historicality within
which we would imprison it. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno reflects on this
paradoxical situation:

The more relentlessly socialization commands all moments of

human and interhuman immediacy, the smaller the capacity of
men to recall that this web has evolved, and the more irresist-
ible its natural appearance. The appearance is reinforced as the
distance between human history and nature keeps growing; nature
turns into an irresistible parable of imprisonment. [ND 351/358]

Sebald is keenly aware of this imprisonment and never fails to remind us

of the suffering it involves. Animals in zoos, in chains or cages, invariably
arrest his attention. In his stories, there is something more than sympathy
for the plight of the animals forced to inhabit our world: something more
like a kind of sympathetic identification.
As Hegel pointed out in his Jena Lectures (1803–1806), for the sake
of acquiring the “voice of consciousness,” the language of our community,
we bury the “animal voice” within us. This buried or sublated voice is, I
suggest, the natural voice of infancy, the voice that we are born with and
that, in exuberant babbling, spontaneously emerges from within us before
undergoing disciplined restriction of vocalizations.8 What in this process
goes unacknowledged, however, is the fact that, for the earliest stages in the
emergence and formation of our voice, we are in fact indebted, not only to
the voices of animals, but indeed to all the voices in the realm of nature,
voices ceaselessly communicating—the murmuring of the rivers, the howl-
ing of winds, the creaking of old oaks in winter; for in unrecognized, almost
unfathomable ways, these voices in nature took part in bringing forth from
within us, as if in sympathetic response, some of the mimetic richness of
sounds with which the infant’s voice is initially endowed, although many
of those sounds are eventually suppressed and forgotten, lost forever.9 But
Sebald’s stories bring into remembrance our lost connection to the animal
voice that we were born with and that we sublated in the process of acquir-
ing the language of our community. His stories also call to mind our lost
connection to all those voices of nature whose sounds once brought forth,
by mimetic contagion, sounds of our own.
 OF HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS / 181

Many are the stories in which Sebald tells of moments of revelation

when, unexpectedly encountering some animal, he found himself moved
by an immediate sympathetic identification. In The Rings of Saturn, for
example, the narrator encounters a hare frightened by his surprise appear-
ance: “Its fear,” he says, “cut right through me. I still see what occurred
in that one tremulous instant with undiminished clarity. [. . .] I see the
hare leaping out of its hiding place, with its ears laid back and a curiously
human expression on its face [. . .] and in its eyes, [. . .] I see myself,
become one with it” [R 279–80/234–35]. And in Campo Santo, the narra-
tor, taking a hike in the Corsican mountains, encounters a lizard “frozen in
mid-movement with fear” [CS 21/17]. The fear is doubled, for his uncanny
sensitivity to the plight of this creature virtually paralyzes him, halting his
passage. Later, passing the butcher’s yard, he catches sight of some dead
deer, recently killed, “eyes wide with fear in constant expectation of death”
[CS 43/39]. This calls to mind the displays in butcher markets: cuts of
meat surrounded by ornamental plastic greens, mass-produced “for the sole
purpose of alleviating our sense of guilt about the bloodshed.” The narra-
tor remarks that this attempt to conceal the brutal truth perhaps indicates
“how strongly we desire absolution and how cheap we have always bought
it” [CS 45–48/41–44].
In our struggle for autonomy, domination over nature, we have
betrayed the animals. We no longer hear what the animals—and the
plants—are communicating, each one in its distinctive way. Most of all,
now, what they are communicating is their distress and their warnings.
Commenting on Hegel’s Jena lectures, Giorgio Agamben argues that the
animal voice is “the voice of death.” “Here,” he says, “the genitive should
be understood in both an objective and subjective sense. The voice in its
death preserves and recalls the living as dead, and it is, at the same time,
an immediate trace and memory of death, pure negativity.”10 We carry
within us, in haunting echoes and traces, the dying of nature, the dying
of the animal, and it is these echoes and traces that the great poets, and
writers such as Sebald, remember to bring back to us from the frightening
wilderness that touches on the realm of death. And when, because of our
forgetfulness, the animal voice that connects us with the other animals dies
within us, vanishing with our emergence from infancy, the voice that we,
each one of us, are accustomed to calling our own becomes a disavowed,
forgotten tomb instead of a sanctuary. Language will always be haunted by
death. In their roles in natural history, language and death are the most
inseparable of companions. Thus it should not be surprising that, in the
singular voice that addresses us in Sebald’s prose, death is an intimate
presence, a disquieting presence, compelling us to think more radically the
redeeming promise of words.
 182 / REDEEMING WO RDS

There are significant moments throughout Sebald’s writings in which

the reader’s moral sensibility is claimed by sympathetic depictions of severe
pathologies in the animal realm; and invariably, it is a question of patholo-
gies caused by their inhumane treatment. In his book On Creaturely Life,
Eric Santner argues that, in the representation of these pathologies, Sebald
is showing us the uncanny animation of nature in the time of its dying. In
one memorable scene, Sebald’s narrator tells about encountering a demented
Chinese quail suffering its captivity in compulsively repetitive movements
driven by self-destruction [R 50/36–37]. A similar pathology affects the rac-
coon that the narrator encounters in the Antwerp Nocturama [A10–11/23].
Another scene of abuse is recorded in Vertigo. Here, Sebald tells of a walk he
took with Ernst Herbeck, a walk in the course of which they encountered
a large black Newfoundland, “whose native, inborn gentleness had been
destroyed” by ill treatment and years of lonely confinement: “In ever new
efforts, the animal ran against the fence. Only occasionally did it stop to
direct its eyes at us, who were as if transfixed.” The two men walked on,
but Sebald could not avoid shuddering as he thought about that animal
he left to its interminable suffering [SV 50/43].
The dog is, of course, a Baroque emblem, a presence evoking the
mood of melancholy. In Francisco Goya’s enigmatic painting, “Perro semi-
hundido” (1819), a dog is pictured nearly drowning—or perhaps about to
drown: only its head is above the flood of water. This painting has stirred
much speculation and debate regarding its meaning. The allegorical inter-
pretation that I should like to propose is that it represents the painter’s
disappointment, hence his melancholy plight of mind, over the failure of
the revolutionary spirit of the Enlightenment: its betrayal of its own ideals,
its own promise. Ideally, moreover, this “promesse de bonheur” would not
benefit only human beings; it would also address the claims of all nature’s
creatures, redeeming the course of natural history. But when the reconcili-
ation of the human world and the realm of nature, the realm of the other
animals, that the Enlightenment project promised, failed to materialize, the
painter, as if identifying with the emblematic dog, felt himself on the verge
of drowning in melancholy despair. In Goya’s painting, the prophetic dream
of natural history—universal reconciliation, the end of the struggle unto
death between the human existence and the realm of nature, the realm of
the other animals—has been assigned a turbulent and grim future. It is, I
submit, a bitter commentary on the Biblical story of the Great Flood, in
which Noah, obeying God’s commandment, rescued not only his family, but
also the male and female pair of every species of animal, so that creaturely
life, threatened not merely with death, but with irrevocable extinction,
could try another beginning.
 4

As Time Goes By
Words from the Embers of Remembering

More than anything else, Sebald’s stories are works of memory—memory in

all its guises and disguises. Memory, often, as belated witness. So I think we
need, now, to reflect in a more concentrated way on the figures of memory
and on the particular words and phrases that Sebald uses to register engage-
ments with memory.
In Sebald’s stories, it seems that, as time goes by, memory-work fre-
quently becomes more problematic the more it matters—matters for the
identity and coherence of personal lives, matters for the acknowledgment
of historical guilt and responsibility, matters for the inheritance of a past,
matters for the formation and preservation of social and cultural solidarities.
Thus, for example, during a return to his childhood village, the narrator,
presumably Sebald, finds himself disturbed by the thought that, “the more
images I gathered from the past, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the
past had actually happened in this or that way . . .” [SV 231–32/212]. The
shocking “Historikerstreit,” the conflict that erupted in Germany among
German historians over the reasons and causes behind the horror of the
Holocaust, called attention to the fact that, in the German psyche, the
past remained “unmastered,” “eine unbewältigte Vergangenheit”: a history
of guilt that the German people still had not worked through.1 Sebald’s
stories all take place in the shadows cast by this catastrophe, this horror, this
nightmare. They are expressions, in various ways, of the longing to know,
the longing to remember.2 But he does not confine this longing to what
has taken place in those shadows; writing, as he does, with a keen sense
of natural history, everything that, through reminiscence, recollection, and
flashbacks, he makes present is undergoing or suffering, without relief, a
certain traumatism, a process of decay, fading away into the darkness of
oblivion. What befalls all of the past, not only the time of the Holocaust, is

183
 184 / REDEEMING WO RDS

a gravitational pull into vortices of forgetfulness, into obscurity, d­eception,

and bewilderment. Natural history thus means not merely the loss of history,
loss of the past; it also means that memory inevitably becomes a work of
melancholy longing and mourning, because what memory hopes to retrieve
has always already withdrawn beyond the possibility of complete recovery:
memory is always “nachträglich,” always, like the flight at dusk of the
owl of Minerva, too late. The power of forgetting—the need to forget—is
overwhelming. Writing always with this sense of natural history in mind,
a sense that it would be appropriate to describe as “ontological,” Sebald,
with a subtlety that makes his craft almost imperceptible, casts the ardu-
ous, desperately needed memory-work in allegorical roles, narrative forms
in which it anxiously attempts to wrest its objects away from the diverse
concealments into which they have silently withdrawn.3
How does memory speak in Sebald’s prose? Although in German there
are a number of different ways of expressing memory-claims and failures of
memory—locutions such as “es ist mir bis heute gegenwärtig” (“I remember
to this day”),4 “ist in den Sinn gekommen” (“came to mind”),5 “ist aus
­meinem Gedächtnis verschwunden” (“is lost to my memory”),6 and “im
Gedächtnis geblieben” (“remained in my memory”),7 in Sebald’s appropria-
tion of German, his native language, there are two especially familiar locu-
tions on which he relies for most of the narrative claims regarding memory:
the most frequent is, of course, “ich erinnere,” sometimes expressed in
one of its grammatical variations, such as “es ist mir erinnerlich” or “es
erinnerte mich”; the other, much less frequent, somewhat archaic, is “ich
entsinne mich.” These two primary locutions will often be translated into
English in a way that fails to bring out what for an attentive ear constitutes
their essential difference: “I remember,” “I recall,” “as I recollect,” “I am
reminded,” “in my recollection,” “I am minded of.” None of the English
locutions catches the difference. However, in spite of his remarkable sensi-
tivity to language, Sebald often seems to use these two primary locutions as
if there were no significant intrinsic difference, preferring to depend instead
on the narrative context to intimate subtle differences of mood, of “Stim-
mung,” in the relation between the experience and its object. Although his
prose style characteristically creates a reflective, even contemplative mood,
Sebald seldom finds occasion, or feels a need, to use the philosophically
evocative locution “eingedenk sein,” meaning not only to be mindful of
something, bringing it into remembrance, but also, as we might say, to
take something to heart. This locution is one that Benjamin, Adorno, and
Heidegger have used in moments of the most solemn, most heartfelt, most
sublime remembrance.
 AS TIME GOES BY / 185

Unfortunately, I could find only one sentence in which “erinnern”

and “entsinnen” are brought together; it is, however, a singularly telling
sentence, useful because it brings to light the subtle sense of their differ-
ence in “Stimmung,” hence useful because it shows how Sebald appropri-
ates the resources of his native language to articulate the phenomenology
of memory: “Obzwar mir vom Inhalt der Kaffeetafelansprache des Onkels
Adelwarth nichts mehr erinnerlich ist, entsinne ich mich doch, zutiefst beein-
druckt gewesen zu sein von der Tatsache, daß er anscheinend mühelos nach
der Schrift redete und Wörter und Wendungen gebrauchte, von denen ich
allenfalls ahnen konnte, was sie bedeuten” [AE 98/68. Italics added.]. In
English it says: “Although I can no longer remember what Uncle Adel-
warth said in his address, I do recall being deeply impressed by the fact
that his apparently effortless German was entirely free of any trace of our
home dialect and that he used words and turns of phrase the meanings of
which I could only guess at.” Although the content of the speech is “nicht
mehr erinnerlich,” the memory of the event itself is still available, but it
has required some effort. (There are also occasions, however, when, instead
of a struggle to remember, Sebald is involuntarily reminded of something
frightening or threatening he would prefer not to recall.)
To get a handle on the difference between the two primary locutions
Sebald uses, one has only, I think, to undertake an experiment, switching
the position of the two locutions in the German sentence. One would
immediately recognize that the substitutions make no sense. When the
narrator says that nothing more is “erinnerlich,” he is not only registering
the failure of a memory to come to him; he is also revealing, through the
grammatical form he prefers, the fact of his inner emptiness in relation to
this failure of memory. So the cast of mind that the locution represents
is, we might say, a melancholy form of subjectivity or inwardness. The
memory either comes—or it does not. By contrast, the “entsinne mich”
suggests a more active, more mediated form of memory that has gone out
of itself, away from itself, to overcome the withdrawing, the endistancing,
the elusiveness of its object. The locution conveys a sense of the difficulty,
the exertion, even though the recalling has been successful.
Many are the scenes in Sebald’s stories in which the narrator or
his interlocutors experience “Schwindelgefühlen,” sensations of dizziness,
coping with the fact that the object sought by memory—by recollec-
tion, or even reminiscence—is often frustratingly elusive, appearing before
the mind’s eye as if glimpsed through a dense fog. Sometimes, it even
seems that the object is stubbornly resistant, so that, the more intense
the pressure of longing, the more the object withdraws. Of course, there
 186 / REDEEMING WO RDS

can also be reluctance and resistance to remembering. Thus, at a certain

moment, Austerlitz painfully confesses his paradoxical “resistance to the
emergence of memory” (“Widerstand gegen das Aufkommen der Erinner-
ung”): a r­ esistance he cannot overcome to recovering the very memory for
which he is also fervently searching” [A 308/300–301]. It is this intricately
ambivalent experience that I think “sich entsinnen” recognizes. Whereas
“ich erinnere” suggests memory arising from its felt inwardness, recogniz-
ing its intimacy, its dwelling within the depths of one’s consciousness
and its emergence from those depths, “ich ent-sinne mich” bespeaks a
recovered memory felt in its alienation or otherness, its endistancing, its
withdrawing and concealing: “Ent-ziehung,” “Ent-fremdung,” and “Ent-
fernung.” If “sich erinnern” signifies a profoundly spiritual movement, a
process invoking an object of memory kept in the felt warmth of our
inner life, “sich entsinnen,” with the stress on the “-ent,” invokes instead
a relation to an object removed from this inner warmth, or perhaps an
object of “Sehnsucht,” longing and languishment, for “sich entsinnen”
seems more suitable than “sich errinern” to indicate the endistancing that
memory-work is experiencing. But if one stresses the “-sinnen,” instead
of the “ent-,” then the emphasis is not on the outward movement, but
on the in-gathering of memory.8 Both locutions, however, can articulate
all the different modalities of memory: remembering, reminiscence, rec-
ollection, and remembrance. But in Sebald’s German, as in the English,
nouns seem to register the phenomenology of differences better than verbs:
“Erinnerung,” “Reminiscenz,” and “Gedächtnis.” “Eingedenken,” which I
translate as a “gathering into heartfelt remembrance,” is an important
word for Benjamin and Adorno, and to some extent for Heidegger, too;
but it is not a word that Sebald seems drawn to use. Why Sebald does
not use it I canot fathom. It is a word one would have expected him
to like. In any case, I cannot recall coming across it in any of Sebald’s
stories.
Considering the importance of memory in Sebald’s writings, and, more
specifically, its different phenomenological modalities, it is not surprising, I
think, that some readers have thought to introduce the interpretive notion
of “postmemory.” According to Marianne Hirsch,

“postmemory” characterizes the experiences of those who grow

up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own
belated stories are hollowed out by the stories of the previous
generation, stories shaped by traumatic events that can be neither
completely understood nor completely recreated.9
 AS TIME GOES BY / 187

Thus, “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through

recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation,” draw-
ing on the testimony, unreliable though it might be, of those who lived
through the events in question.10 It is, as Austerlitz suggests, a question of
“compensatory memory,” “kompensatorisches Gedächtnis” [A 206/198], the
memory of traumatic events that we feel a desperate and compelling need
to know—as if learning the truth from the memory of the survivors could
somehow compensate for, could ever absolve, our guilt, a haunting guilt
over having been spared the actual experience—but that we also feel an
overwhelming need to keep at a safe distance, or even keep split off from
ourselves: events that, as Eric Santner puts it,

hover between personal memory and impersonal history, events

one has not lived through oneself but that, in large measure
through the stories of those who did experience them, have
nevertheless entered into the fabric of the self.11

More than the forms of “sich erinnern,” the forms of “sich entsinnen” seem
to permit the expression of a felt sense of traumatized memory, an ambiva-
lent memory-work, simultaneously compelled to recall its fateful object and
yet compelled just as powerfully to keep it split off, at a certain remove.
Before we leave our phenomenological and philological reflections on
Sebald’s languaging of memory, we should consider once again the sentence
that, because of its use of both locutions, I have abstracted from the text
of The Emigrants:

Obzwar mir vom Inhalt der Kaffeetafelansprache des Onkels

Adelwarth nichts mehr erinnerlich ist, entsinne ich mich doch,
zutiefst beeindruckt gewesen zu sein von der Tatsache, daß er
anscheinend mühelos nach der Schrift redete und Wörter und
Wendungen gebrauchte, von denen ich allenfalls ahnen konnte,
was sie bedeuten.” [AE 98/68. Italics added.]

From Sebald’s construction of this singular sentence, much can be learned

about the grammar—or say the phenomenology—of memory. If our lan-
guages, however, are today under assault, increasingly suffering the corrup-
tions of standardization and simplification, then the more subtle expressive
intricacies and intrigues of this phenomenology could suffer, as possibilities
for recognizing differences in our experiences with memory are themselves
withdrawn—perhaps forever—from our cultural memories.
 188 / REDEEMING WO RDS

What is ultimately at stake in Sebald’s stories, and in the distinc-

tive way he uses words to create the appropriate spiritual “temperament,”
is nothing less than the preservation and transmission of our capacity to
remember. Sustaining a sense of loss through stories of remembrance, his
words initiate a process of mourning which can be profoundly redeeming—
and, in keeping with that, a process by which, in a not inconsequential
measure, the words themselves may be redeemed, recovering the promise
that is their own gift of memory.
 5

Stoicism, Skepticism, and the

Unhappy Consciousness
Sebald’s Phenomenology of Spirit

§1

Reading Hegel in Sebald

In this chapter, my argument, the principal elements of which we have

already encountered, is that each of the three configurations of conscious-
ness named here, the historically unfolding spirit of which is recapitulated
in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, can be discerned in Sebald’s writings,
although there is certainly no Hegelian dialectic of progress from lower,
less self-aware stages of consciousness to higher, more self-reflective stages.
We shall nevertheless consider these “Gestalten” in turn, according to their
moment in Hegel’s historical phenomenology of the life of spirit.
According to Hegel, the realm of nature, within which Spirit as con-
sciousness arises, and out of which it develops, is “externalized Spirit” in its
“living immediate Becoming.” In this Becoming,” there is, he says,

a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images [Galerie

von Bildern], each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit,
moves thus slowly, because the Self has to penetrate and digest
this entire wealth of its substance. Inasmuch as its fulfillment
consists in perfectly knowing what it [itself] is, knowing this
substance [as itself], this knowing is its withdrawal into itself
[In-sich-gehen], in which it abandons its outer existence and gives
over [übergibt] its existential shape to recollection [Erinnerung].
Thus absorbed in itself, it is [at first] sunk in the night of its
self-consciousness; but in this night its vanished outer existence

189
 190 / REDEEMING WO RDS

is [nevertheless] preserved, and this transformed existence—the

former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s self-knowledge—is
the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. [. . .]
The realm of Spirit that is formed in this way in the outer world
constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit has relieved
another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world
from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of
Spirit. [. . .] The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows
itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as
they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization
of their realm [of activity]. Their preservation [. . .], appearing
in the form of contingency, is History; but, regarded from the
position of their [philosophically] comprehended organization,
it is the science of knowing in the sphere of appearance [die
Wissenschaft des erscheinenden Wissens]. [PG 563–64/492–93]1

Reading Hegel in this light, many scholars have taken him to be arguing
for a naïve notion of progress, a serene, easy, and complacent happiness. But
in fact, for the history that Hegel recounts, these passing, sublated shapes,
representing the progress of Spirit toward its completed self-consciousness,
self-recognition, and self-understanding, live on as ghostly remains pre-
served in “the charnel-house of the Absolute Spirit,” “die Schädelstätte des
Absoluten Geistes” [PG 564/493]. In other words, in passing through the
stages of its journey, what Spirit encounters again and again is its “caput
mortuum”: a death’s head or grinning skull, the favorite emblem of Baroque
mourning and melancholy. However, before we reflect further on the Spirit
of this mood, we must give thought, if we are to follow the dialectical logic
of Hegel’s phenomenology, to the moments of stoicism and skepticism.

§2

Stoicism: The View from Above

First, then, on our particular journey through the life of Spirit, will be sto-
icism. According to Hegel, stoicism is an abstract, hence inadequate form
of consciousness, because in its attempt to master the miserable conditions
of worldly existence and achieve its dream of autonomy, independence from
the vicissitudes of nature and power over the course of history, spirit has
risen above this world, believing its freedom to consist in an indifference,
an equanimity, that would be possible only through its detachment, its
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 191

withdrawing, its non-commitment. Such freedom, however, is nothing but

an illusion, an empty, useless freedom, because it is without efficacy in the
world. It has sacrificed world-effectiveness for absolute autonomy, a purity of
the will. To be sure, this detachment might enable consciousness to attain
a sublime point of view, looking at the world in its totality, presented in
the eternal light of the absolute, universal truth; but Hegel argues that, as
a purely abstract freedom of thought, this victory is ultimately a failure,
freedom revealed in all its self-contradictoriness. Moreover, detachment and
withdrawing are themselves commitments; freedom binding itself. Its inner
contradictions must therefore be overcome and surpassed; but unfortunately,
as Hegel shows us, it ends up being sublated in a movement that inevitably
falls into skepticism [PG 151–71/119–38].
Now, as I already indicated, my argument is that, in Sebald’s writ-
ings, there are a number of times when the narrative takes us out of and
away from the immediacy of the situation, rising to a height above it and
enabling thereby a very different perspective, a very different meaning, to
form. And so my claim will be that there is in this aerial movement, this
flight, a movement intriguingly akin to that in stoicism, but engaging a
profoundly different spirit. And noticing both the similarities and the dif-
ferences can accordingly prove to be quite illuminating.
Commenting on Jacob van Ruisdael’s painting, “View of Haarlem
Bleaching Fields,” on display in The Hague museum, Sebald’s narrator is
fascinated by its bird’s-eye point of view, necessarily “some distance above
the earth.” “Only in this way,” he reflects, “could he [the painter] see it
all together” [R 102–103/83]. However, such a point of view would have
had to be imaginary, since there are, in fact, no hills or mountains in that
region. Its supposed claim to a certain “realism” is consequently impossible;
and yet, one could argue that it is only from that imaginary perspective
that the true character of the landscape could be revealed. But, neither
here nor anywhere else is it necessary to read Sebald’s aerial perspectives
as attempts to gain a metaphysical universality.
It should be noted that, in his review of Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem
Strom, Sebald, counting on the double meaning of “Schwindel,” namely,
both vertigo and swindle or deception, is sharply critical of artworks that
cause “the real terrors of the time to disappear through an art of abstrac-
tion”: that, he argues, can be nothing but a “metaphysical swindle,” a
“metaphysische Schwindel.”2 Art must show, without deception, the truth
of the horror, must somehow make us feel it, make us shudder. So, tak-
ing a position with which Hegel could be sympathetic, he is very much
against “false notions of transcendence” [N 51]. He has no interest, he says,
in the “salvaging of metaphysical meaning” [N 52]. Indeed, in “The Air
 192 / REDEEMING WO RDS

War and Literature,” questioning the production of literature in the face

of war’s total destruction, he argues that, “the construction of aesthetic or
pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process
depriving literature of its right to exist” [N 53]. The destructiveness of war,
the burned, deserted villages, the corpses of soldiers, too numerous to count,
strewn across the battlefields: the comprehensive sight of these things, such
as one can get only from a certain distant height, makes Sebald shudder
and his head reel in vertigo. And that “Schwindel,” that vertigo—com-
municated with no deception—is what art, for him, can lucidly, calmly
reproduce.
Some readers, however, might contend that Sebald’s own writings are
guilty of precisely this offense, turning the terrors and horrors of mortal
existence into aesthetically satisfying objects. Because of the beauty of his
prose, it cannot be denied, I think, that there certainly is a perilous risk in
his narrative strategies; but I am convinced that he cannot be accused of
shielding us, neither by prose embellishments nor by conceits of narrative
abstraction, from these terrors and horrors, for his descriptions are invari-
ably extremely concrete, precise, vividly detailed, compelling a truly visceral
moral reaction. But behind this particular accusation, there is, perhaps, to
a greater or lesser degree, an indictment that all works of art, as works of
aesthetic semblance, must confront. That art is ever only semblance and
not reality is, if you will, the curse that art must suffer—and somehow avow.
Be this as it may, let us return, now, to our reflections on the high-
altitude perspective in aesthetic representations and its connection to the
phenomenology of stoicism. It will be recalled that, in a scene from After
Nature that we have already considered, Sebald reports what he says is a
dream stimulated by Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting of the battle between
Alexander and the Persians. In this dream, he rises above the battlefield
strewn with the dead, soldiers and their animals; and, in an expanding and
hurried time, he flies over land and sea, looking down on earthbound life—
traveling all the way to the continent of Africa. It is under the sway of this
high-altitude mood that Sebald recalls, no doubt with some disagreement,
the words of a chaplain, who spoke of the painter’s representation of the
battle as intending a “contribution to the history of salvation,” a “Beitrag
zur Geschichte des Heils”: With Alexander’s victory, he writes, “destiny
thus turned.” “Eben wendet sich das Geschick” [NN 97–98/114–15]. The
flight is said to be a dream—only a dream. Nevertheless, it is telling, for
the thoughts it provokes are no ordinary thoughts: taking leave of the earth,
released from earthly attachments, they rise to a sublime vision inspired by
the discourse of theology. “I now know,” writes Sebald, “as if with the eye
of a crane, [. . .] the inconceivable beauty of nature.” Although Sebald’s
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 193

high-altitude vision, withdrawing from the earth and its profane history,
does not support the chaplain’s dangerous theology, what he sees does reg-
ister a beauty that might only show itself to such a perspective. Here I
want to say that it is the stoicism of aerial detachment, the stoicism of a
mind beyond the temptations of affirmation and negation, beyond utilitar-
ian concerns, and recorded in this episode with incomparable eloquence,
which has made this experience of beauty possible. An observation that
Sebald offers in his discussion of the art of the writer, Adalbert Stifter, will
shed some further light on this experience, suggesting a stoicism—a point
of indifference—that can easily, however, become vertiginous:

The ambivalence of emotions when confronted with the beauty

of nature [. . .] reaches its point of indifference in the sensation
of vertigo.”3

For Sebald, the detached point of view does not necessarily encourage
equanimity and the indifference of stoicism; nor, therefore, does it neces-
sarily create the right conditions for the contemplation of the universal in
its absolute ideality; more often than not, it seems, it only causes fright and
vertigo. Sebald is thus calling into question the spirit of Hegelian stoicism:
in many of the experiences he relates, there is no elevation to a serenely
balanced indifference that would enable rational judgment, but instead only
an intensification of unsettling emotions: “Schwindel. Gefühle,” the words
he chose for the title of a collection of stories.
It might be illuminating at this point to read once again the argument
for the “Trauerspiel” genre in the final paragraph of Benjamin’s “Epistemo-
Critical Prologue,” written to introduce his work on the origin of the Ger-
man Baroque mourning play:

Confronted with a literature that sought, in a sense, to reduce

both its contemporaries and posterity to silence through the
extravagance of its technique, the unfailing richness of its cre-
ations, and the vehemence of its claims to value, one should
emphasize the necessity of that sovereign attitude which the idea
of form demands. Even then, the danger of allowing oneself to
plunge from the heights of knowledge into the baroque state
of mind, is not a negligible one. That characteristic feeling of
dizziness [Schwindel] which is induced by the spectacle of the
spiritual contradictions of this epoch is a recurrent feature in
the improvised attempts to capture its meaning. [. . .] Only
by approaching the subject from some distance and, initially,
 194 / REDEEMING WO RDS

f­oregoing any view of the whole, can the mind be led, through
a more or less ascetic apprenticeship, to the position of strength
from which it is possible to take in the whole panorama and yet
remain in control of oneself. The course of this apprenticeship
is what had to be described here. [UT 237/56. Italics added.]

What I think we learn from Sebald’s appropriation of this strategy for com-
prehending our time, a strategy I am calling “stoicism,” is that it is doomed
to fail, and that the danger of vertigo, the danger, ultimately, of skepticism,
cannot be avoided, although we can, occasionally, snatch a quickly passing
glimpse of our world as a coherent, meaningful whole, a glimpse revealing
it to be, despite all its horrors, its terrors, its suffering, a place, also, of
inconceivable beauty. But for the most part, what Sebald’s narratives show
us is that the heights cannot grant us the sovereignty of knowledge they
are thought to promise, for they reveal instead our all-too-human limita-
tions—hence, in particular, our vulnerability to illusion and self-deception.
Supposedly reading from his Uncle Adelwarth’s agenda book, Sebald
tells us that, according to his uncle, “Memory,” “Erinnerung,”

makes one’s head heavy and giddy [schweren, schwindligen Kopf],

as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives
of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from
one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.
[AE 214–15/145]

In his discussion of German writings about the air-war waged against Ger-
many, Sebald pictures Alexander Kluge “looking down, both literally and
metaphysically, from a vantage point above the destruction,” and he remarks
that, “For all Kluge’s intellectual steadfastness, he looks at the destruction
of his home town with the horrified fixity of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of
history’ ” [N 67]. Steadfastness can be a stoic trait; but it seems that Kluge’s
efforts to detach himself from the destruction in order to put it, as it were,
“in the proper perspective” and take in “its true measure” only, on the con-
trary, intensify the emotions. Beheld from above, and at a certain distance,
the devastation appears in a scale the magnitude of which makes it even
more horrible and even more incomprehensible. Confronting such destruc-
tion, suffering, and loss, the detachment of stoicism is humanly impossible.
Sebald contends that even observing from a great distance or a great height
the devastation left by pogroms, wars, and the excesses of nature, such as
flooding and earthquakes, we are likely to find ourselves profoundly moved,
profoundly affected, and unable to achieve the equanimity, the emotional
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 195

balance that stoicism requires. Sebald’s narratives accordingly raise skeptical

questions about the possibility of stoical indifference: observing the world
from great heights will not protect us from suffering in sympathy—nor can
that position keep us from losing our balance in a frightening vertigo. The
promise of stoicism is indeed, in both senses, a swindle—“ein Schwindel”!
Our vulnerability to vertigo would of course be of particular ethical sig-
nificance, if the attempt to attain a high-altitude perspective is not, or not
only, an attempt to possess a comprehensive intuition and understanding of
the whole, but at least in part the attempt of a guilty conscience to escape
the proximity of a world for whose devastation and destitution it feels itself
responsible. And it seems to me that, in his literary works and essays in
literary criticism, Sebald wants to appeal to our ethical consciousness. For
the suffering of creaturely life and the dying of nature, we must, he thinks,
assume responsibility and acknowledge both our guilt and our limitations.
Rising above the world we have built, we may be able to see its wondrous
beauty; but we cannot escape in stoic indifference our responsibility for all
its manifest blight, ruination, misery and suffering.
Adorno comments, in Aesthetic Theory, that “natural grandeur reveals
[. . .] that aspect in which human domination has its limits and calls to
mind the powerlessness of human bustle” [AT 110/70]. I would concur, but
supplement this remark with the thought that devastation on a vast scale,
whether it be of nature or of cities—as witnessed, for example, from a posi-
tion high above, can also put human life in a humbling, sobering state of
mind. In Sebald’s stories, high-altitude perspectives on a vast scale, some
revealing natural beauty, others devastation, induce an intense experience
of spirit in its otherness that is humbling and sobering, whilst also nullify-
ing the stoic flight from commitment.
For a gaze, such as Sebald’s, that views the world through the eyes
of Benjamin’s “angel of history,” stoicism is bound to be a difficult, if not
impossible, state of mind. Gazing down from the height of his hospital room
window, the narrator, Sebald, is struck by the thought that, as he put it,
“it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field
of rubble” [R 13/5]. Again and again, in fact, Sebald’s narratives show the
position of height, a position that, in philosophical thought, is supposed to
achieve detachment, as inducing, instead, a frightening experience. Climb-
ing the steps to the dome of the cathedral in Milano and hoping from
that height to get his bearings in relation to the layout of the city, Sebald
finds himself experiencing vertigo instead, unable to escape the frightening
image of death that overwhelms him and takes control of his mind [SV
130/115–16]. And during an airplane flight from Amsterdam to Norwich,
the brooding of the narrator, presumably Sebald, leads to the reflection that,
 196 / REDEEMING WO RDS

If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to

realize how little we know about our species, our purpose, and
our end [. . .]. [R 114/90–91]

In the move toward the heights of stoicism, or at least toward a place from
which to get a clear sense of his lifeworld in its coherent entirety, a ter-
rible fright suddenly befalls him, and he falls helplessly into the labyrinth
of skepticism. The view from above, the prospect from a position of height
that Sebald often seeks, frequently does not yield comprehension; instead,
it causes confusion, vertigo, and epistemic doubt: instead of answers, only
more questions. And although it can reveal landscapes of beauty, it can
also show us places of devastation and misery.
Another battle—the Battle of Waterloo—becomes the scene for yet
another Sebaldian reflection on the high-altitude perspective:

This then, I thought, [. . .] is the representation of history. It

requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see
everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do
not know how it was. [R151–52/125]

“Are we standing,” he asks, “on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate

vantage point? [Ist das am Ende unsere Warte?] Does one really have the
much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?” Once more, the
desired detachment, hence the realism or objectivity of stoicism, its role in
the gathering of historical knowledge, is challenged, throwing the claim to
knowledge into endless drifts of skepticism, waiting for truth. Now, “Warte”
is the German word for a watchtower; but the word is related, of course, to
“warten,” which means “wait.” So perhaps Sebald’s wording here is intended
to question, very much in keeping with his subtle allusions to Kafka and
Benjamin, the eschatological perspective, the waiting that hopes for the
end of natural history and the supervenience of a redemptive history. If
this conjecture has merit, however, it would be difficult not to hear in the
reverberations of his words the grumbling spirit of skepticism.
One might also hear, in his words, an undercurrent of Baroque mel-
ancholy. But, appearing in a different work, there is a comment about an
old photograph, said to show Dr. K. and three others as passengers merrily
posed in an amusement park airplane, pretending be in flight over the city
of Wien:

To his bemusement, Dr. K. finds that he is the only one who can
manage some kind of smile at such dizzy heights. [SV 160/144]
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 197

For the most part, what Sebald shows us is a world that, even from the
heights that a detached spirit has gained, is still deeply disturbing, a world
of endless calamities, endless violence, endless suffering. In this amusement
park episode, however, I think we learn that it is also possible to see the
tragic stories as if they were chapters or scenes belonging to an awesome
“comédie humaine.” For Dr. K’s melancholy smile, however faint it may
seem, is as much in the spirit of resistance as all the high-altitude detach-
ments of stoicism.

§3

Skepticism: The Vertigo of Groundlessness,

The Swindle of Permanence

According to Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, the contradictions inherent

in the adoption of stoicism as a rational form of life will eventually cast us
into reflective labyrinths of skepticism. I now want to argue that Sebald’s
experience moves, like Hegel’s phenomenology, from stoicism to skepticism.
Hence it should not be surprising that, every now and then, Hegel’s trope
of the labyrinth appears in Sebald’s stories as an all-too-real labyrinth: on
the heath of Dunwich, in the streets of Manchester and Antwerp, in the
garden at Somerleyton. According to Hegel’s account, skepticism is “the
realization of that of which stoicism was only the Notion [Begriff], and is
the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is” [PG 154/123].
In skepticism, consciousness becomes “vernichtenden Denken,” “the con-
crete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold
determinateness” [PG 155/123]. Stoicism leads to skepticism—is, as Hegel
would say, the “truth” of stoicism—because withdrawing from the world,
detaching oneself from its life, its activities, its practices, robs freedom of
its usefulness, its efficacy, and leaves the pursuit of knowledge, of truth,
without any purpose. If one withdraws far enough from earthly life, the
differences between truth and untruth, good and bad, right and wrong,
will vanish into nothingness, for those differences can make sense, can be
meaningful, only when one is engaged.
Initially, skepticism, a form of ignorance, can stimulate the desire
for knowledge; but an extreme demand for absolute certainty, thus also an
uncompromising demand for totality, will put us on the “way of doubt,” “der
Weg des Zweifels,” which eventually becomes a “way of despair,” a “Weg der
Verzweifelung” [PG 67/49]. Failing to win such total, absolute knowledge
causes, he says, a “confusing restlessness,” the “dizziness,” or “Schwindel,”
 198 / REDEEMING WO RDS

of a perpetually self-generated disorder [PG 156–57/124–25]. Every asser-

tion, every claim to knowledge, turns out to be subject to its own skepti-
cal negation. When pathologically rigorous, abstractly demanding, reason
becomes a form of madness that is self-destructive, compelled in the end
to apply its tyrannically universal criteria to itself. Even the impartiality or
indifference of the God’s-eye position toward which the desire for stoicism
ascends is reduced by the critical powers of reason to being merely one
possible perspective among others. And ultimately, skepticism is compelled
to recognize that it is itself nothing more than another groundless position.
Sebald’s principal characters are, like the author himself, obsessed, driven,
by an overwhelming need to gather the past into memory and learn the
truth, no matter how disturbing this knowledge might be. But the heights
that were sought yield no knowledge, no comprehensive understanding.
We fall into the vertiginous vortices of radical skepticism when we
can no longer escape the realization that there is no solid ground, no firm
foothold, no absolute point of reference, no unimpeachable authority, no
final meaning. Vertigo, the frightening experience of this loss, this crisis,
is thus the condition of modernity that Sebald’s writings reflect. In The
Rings of Saturn, the narrator seems to share Sir Thomas Browne’s reading
of Hippocrates:

There is scant encouragement to dream of Paradise, not least

since in practice we are occupied above all by the abnormalities
of creation, be they the deformities produced through sickness
or the grotesqueries with which Nature, with an inventiveness
scarcely less diseased, fills every vacant space in her atlas. And
indeed, while on the one hand, the study of Nature today aims
to describe a system governed by immutable laws, on the other
it delights in drawing attention to creatures noteworthy for their
bizarre physical form or behaviour. [R 32–33/21]

This expression of melancholy, brooding over a sense that the dream of

Paradise is nothing more than a dream—an almost unbearable sense of infi-
nite loss, “encouraged,” as it were, by the empirical study of the destructive
peculiarities of natural history—is also an acknowledgment of the inevi-
tability of skepticism, because, despite the efforts of science to reveal the
lawfulness of nature, what, in the final analysis, confronts us is a nature
that mocks our pretensions to comprehend the secret of its ways.
It is into the throes of melancholy, then, that, true to the dialectic in
Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, Sebaldian skepticism finally falls, appear-
ing as a spirit that swings vertiginously back and forth between its manic
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 199

state and its depressive state—shock, agitation, a “petrified unrest.”4 In

his Trauerspiel study, bringing out, in relation to skepticism and the mel-
ancholy it induces, the double meaning of “Schwindel,” namely “vertigo”
and “swindle” or “delusion,” Benjamin writes:

As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall,

so would the allegorical intention fall from emblem [Sinnbild]
to emblem, down into the dizziness [Schwindel] of its bottomless
depths, were it not that even in the most extreme of them, it
had so to turn about that all its darkness [Finsternis], vainglory
[Hoffart] and godlessness [Gottferne] seem to be nothing but
self-delusion. [UT 405/232]

It is time, now, to give thought to the condition of melancholy, the spir-

it that, arising from the internal contradictions in skepticism, appears in
Hegel’s phenomenology bearing the name, “unhappy consciousness.” But if,
in Hegel’s phenomenology, this temperament is perhaps completely incapaci-
tating, Sebald’s stories seem to portray it more dialectically, as offering a cer-
tain resistance to the social-historical conditions from which it nevertheless
cannot escape suffering. It is impossible to tell with any certainty whether
Sebald arrests the dialectic of nature and history in its moment of abjec-
tion or whether he imagines it to continue, gambling its utopian promise.

§4

Unhappy Consciousness: Infinite Grief and the Sustaining of Loss

In the wake of skepticism, denying hope its faith in, or need for an unshak-
able ground, vertigo soon falls into mourning and melancholy. Pressing the
rationality in empiricism to the logical extremity of its claim, David Hume
ends his reflections in a skepticism that leaves him vulnerable to confu-
sion—vertigo—and finally melancholy:

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imper-

fections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated
my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and
can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than
another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive
my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose
favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings
 200 / REDEEMING WO RDS

s­urround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have

any influence on me? I am confounded with all those questions,
and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition
imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly
depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.5

Such is Hume’s “unhappy consciousness,” the “natural” outcome of the skep-

ticism that his peculiar conception of empiricism compels him to accept.
In his early Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel, saying about
himself, “I am fire and water,” tells of being caught in an aporetic struggle
within him between two equally necessary engagements or obligations: one
holds him in the conditions of the finite, the other draws him away towards
the freedom of the infinite.6 In his later Phenomenology of Spirit, this con-
flict is characterized in world-historical terms, a reflection on the state of
the world, or at least the Occident, in his time. There was a time when
historical progress called for, as he puts it,

a frenzied effort to tear men away from their preoccupation with

the sensuous, from their ordinary, private affairs, and to direct
their gaze to the stars; as if they had forgotten all about the
divine, and were ready, like worms, to content themselves with
dirt and water [mit Staub und Wasser, wie der Wurm].

But, in time, over time, dirt and dust—elemental substances that also
appear, allegorically, in Sebald—lost their deathlike hold as a higher sense
of Spirit was awakened and human beings turned with devotion toward
“a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery.” Hegel’s
story continues:

The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of light by

which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this
world’s presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread
to an other-worldly presence.

The excesses of this cast of mind needed, eventually, to be restrained. Thus,

the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to
the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the
lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate
the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things
was enveloped, and so make attentiveness to the here and now
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 201

as such, attentiveness to what has been called “experience,” an

interesting and valid enterprise.

But “now,” he thinks,

we seem to need just the opposite: sense is so fast rooted in

earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The
Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the
desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave
for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general.

His thought concludes, acknowledging our time as a time of loss, a time

of mourning and melancholy: “By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we
can measure the extent of its loss.” [“An diesem, woran dem Geiste genügt,
ist die Größe seines Verlustes zu ermessen”] [PG 14/5]. A related thought
is given expression in his Philosophy of Right: “It is only when actuality is
mature that the ideal first appears over against the real.”7 But it is pre-
cisely at this moment, which should be a moment of triumph, that Spirit
finds itself vulnerable, instead, to a strange incapacitation, the “ataraxia”
of unhappy consciousness; for in finally becoming conscious of the ideal,
it is compelled to realize how far it must journey to reach that objective
and how ill prepared it is for the trials that await it. That is the moment
when “philosophy paints its grey in grey”—the shading and indistinctness
that Sebald’s images so often manifestly favor.
The Phenomenology diagnoses the mood of this historical moment with
astonishing perceptiveness:

Faith has lost the content which filled its element, and collapses
into a state in which it moves listlessly to and fro within itself.
[PG 406/349]

As Cervantes shows in the figure of Don Quixote, it is because of an

investment in idealism as a sublime Romantic vision, an unearthly dream,
that consciousness eventually falls prey to an irrefutable skepticism, and
from there—at least for Hegel—into despair and melancholy, since skepti-
cism works like an acid, corroding the hope that lives in the very heart
of idealism. Skepticism is a swindle; taking away terra firma, revealing the
abyss that the grounding of our knowledge and beliefs had concealed, it
eventually causes confusion and vertigo. The unhappy consciousness of
modernity has lost faith in its guiding principles, values, and objects of
belief; consequently, in the end, it has lost faith even in itself. But there
 202 / REDEEMING WO RDS

are no completely satisfying alternatives to substitute for what has been

lost—seemingly forever. As consciousness realizes that the “universal” it
has been seeking is not the reflectively authoritative universal, not the
concept [Begriff] of the reconciled totality, but merely an “actual individual-
ity,” a “particular individuality,” or even just an “object of immediate sense-
certainty,” hence “something that has already vanished,” it feels compelled
to believe that what it has taken to be living reality is only, in truth, “the
grave of its life.” For it now seems to consciousness that consciousness is
nothing but a struggle doomed in advance to failure:

But, having learned from experience that the grave of its actual
unchangeable Being [das Grab seines wirklichen unwandelbaren
Wesens] has no actuality [Wirklichkeit], that the vanished indi-
viduality [verschwundene Einzelheit], because it has vanished, is not
the true individuality, consciousness will abandon [aufgeben] its
quest for the unchangeable individuality as an actual existence,
or will cease trying to hold on to what has vanished. Only
then will it be capable of finding individuality in its genuine
or universal form. [PG 164/132]

Unhappy consciousness is a consciousness which knows that it is fragmented,

agonizingly split into two, recognizing itself to be susceptible to self-deception,
and knowing itself to be caught in self-contradictions that deny the very pos-
sibility of a forever settled identity [PG 158ff/126ff]. Unhappy consciousness,
stuck in pure, infinite feeling, “reines Gemüt,” unable to grasp the totality
of meaning in its Concept, becomes an “infinite longing and languishing,”
an “unendliche Sehnsucht” [PG 163/131]. Although intensely aware that it
cannot secure absolute truth by stoical detachment, that it cannot escape
skepticism, and finally, that, challenged by the logic of reflexivity in skep-
ticism, it cannot even defend its move to skepticism without falling into
self-contradiction, unhappy consciousness nevertheless is not willing, or not
able, to renounce its idealism, its commitment to the absolute. Renouncing
neither its subjective truth nor its longing for the actualization, the truth of
the absolute, unhappy consciousness struggles to live with an almost unbear-
able aporia, swinging endlessly back and forth between the extremes of tran-
scendence and immanence, hopefulness and despondency.8 The freedom from
nature’s powers that spirit sought in rising to the heights of stoicism now
begins to feel more like eternal exile—its exclusion from the sensible beauty
of a nature that it depends on for its breath of life. Instead of an experience
of triumph, having dispelled the powers of nature, this freedom becomes an
experience of spiritual loss and disintegration.
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 203

It is thus not at all surprising that, in the “Conclusion” to Faith and

Knowledge, Hegel asserts, that

the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection solely
from this harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything,
and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground
to the most serene freedom of its shape.9

But we are living in a post-Holocaust world—a world, moreover, that is

still witnessing genocides. Sebald, therefore, finds it extremely difficult
to believe in this task of “resurrection.” As the Dialectic of Enlightenment
argued, Hegel’s “science of observing reason” cannot justify itself until it
has actually transformed the world. In my reading, however, Sebald recasts
this science, turning observation into a “melancholy science” of narratives:
narratives of melancholy remembrance and mourning, a cast of mind occa-
sionally relieved by a moment in which something of extraordinary beauty
appears, as if to confirm at least the possibility of a transfiguration of the
ordinary world we live in. And if indeed, as Hegel claims, the language
that most accurately mirrors the condition of modernity is the “language of
a disrupted consciousness,” a “Sprache der Zerissenheit,” in Sebald’s prose
we find a recognition of this condition in prolonged, languorous sentence
constellations that in their melancholy drift quietly defy and resist that
disruptive pressure, ironically revealing, precisely thereby, their recognition
of this condition, especially when the long, slow, intricate weave of the
sentence makes readers lose their grip on the meaning expressed at the
beginning [PG 370/316].
In his “Introduction” to the English translation of Faith and Knowledge,
H. S. Harris discusses “infinite grief” as an intuition of the negative infinite:

The infinite that is within the finite, and that reveals itself
negatively in the perpetual perishing of the finite, reveals itself
positively in the resurrection and perpetuation of the finite as a
pattern of “inwardized,” or “remembered” [erinnerlich], concep-
tual significance. [. . .] But nothing can be resurrected in the
spirit, no finite particular can be “resumed” [aufgehoben] into the
speculative infinite, until it has passed away into a remember-
ing consciousness which values it, and hence mourns for it and
grieves over it.10

To whatever extent there can be an aesthetic redemption of this “infi-

nite grief,” representing the possibility of reconciliation between the finite
 204 / REDEEMING WO RDS

actuality of our suffering and the infinite ideality of our longing, it is cor-
respondingly, for Sebald, the indeclinable calling of literature to bring
Spirit to a moment of self-recognition, representing this possibility—and
the liberating, utopian possibility of reconciliation—in the most compelling
constructions of language.11 And, as Hegel would have it, even the sen-
tence constructions in Sebald’s writings, languorous, drifting as if without
direction, and repeatedly deferring any comprehensive sense, but silently
taking into themselves the work of memory and mourning, replicate the
phenomenology of the Spirit’s rhythms and moods, turns and returns, as it
journeys toward self-recognition in otherness.
In the story of his return to W., the village of his childhood, the nar-
rator tells about Babett, Bina, and Mathild, the three unmarried sisters in
the Ambrose family, a family that villagers, he claims, commonly referred
to not by that name, but by the name “Seelos” [SV 217/119]. This name,
of course, suggests their being somehow bereft of soul; and indeed, the
description of their lives confirms this. Once upon a time, these three sis-
ters, none still living at the time of the narrator’s return to W., opened a
café, “The Alpenrose,” which lasted until the deaths of two of the sisters,
“although nobody ever set foot in it” [SV 235/216]. This café was a forlorn
place, a place of unspoken despair, where the sisters, sunk into a melancholy
from which it seems they could somehow find relief only through their
compulsively repetitive activity, endured “continuous disappointment and
perennially revived hope” [SV 235–38/216–19]. Certainly Sebald is telling
a tale, here, of unhappy consciousness, although he neither connects it in
any immediately obvious way to the dialectic of stoicism and skepticism
nor expressly identifies it as a scene somehow emblematic of the spirit of
modernity. And yet, I do think that he wanted to give it something of the
impact that a story of symbolic, or rather allegorical significance would have.
The narrator’s tale of his visit to the Ashburys gives us, in Sebald’s
characteristically “detached” prose, the prose, that is, of a clear-eyed observ-
er, another moving evocation, likewise, I think, allegorical, of the spirit of
melancholy. The name that Sebald has given them already bears a terrible
symbolic judgment: the family is already buried, reduced to ash, the mere
remnants of life. The Ashburys, he says, live in their house “like refugees”—
like people taking refuge, withdrawing from the world that has brought
about all their misfortunes [R 250/210–11]. “What work they did always had
about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part
of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress” [Ibid.].
Mrs. Ashbury spends her days collecting hundreds of flower seeds, putting
them in paper bags that she would hang up to dry on a line in what once
was the library of their immense house, and then storing them on shelves
 STOICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS / 205

emptied of their books [R251–52/211]. Edmund, her son, shows the nar-
rator the boat that, in the course of many years, he has been working on,
although, as he tells the narrator, “he knew nothing about boat-building
and actually had no intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge.”
In fact, he says, confessing without guile the devastating emptiness of his
life, “It’s not going to be launched. It’s just something to do. I have to do
something” [R 251/211]. Words reminiscent of the unspeakably traumatic
ending of Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Reflecting on Mrs. Ashbury, the narrator, Sebald, tells us that, “when
she stood on the library steps to hang up or take down the rustling seed-
bags, she half vanished among them like a saint ascending into heaven”
[R 251/211]. Is it possible that this exaltation is an experience that only a
melancholy spirit could be granted?
If, as Sebald says, “the describing of misfortune and unhappiness [des
Unglücks] encloses within itself the possibility of its overcoming [seiner
Überwindung],” for him, as I think for Benjamin, melancholy is not the
merely subjective and self-destructive mood it is commonly assumed to be;
it can of course be self-destructive, but it can also become a potent strategy
of resistance—resistance to the loss of a meaningful world, a constant sus-
taining of the memory, and the sense, of ontological loss. Sebald’s writing,
recounting so many stories of misfortune, suffering, of melancholy, is thus a
strategy of aesthetic resistance that takes us into the depths of melancholy,
moved by the conviction that even there, where it seems only the ashes
of spirit remain, some still burning embers of hope might be stirred and
reignited.12 Melancholy, “the contemplation [Überdenken] of the movement
of misfortune,” has “nothing in common,” he thinks, “with the wish to die”:

It is a form of resistance. And this is certainly so at least at the

level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When,
with rigid gaze [starren Blicks], it goes over once again just how
things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic
[Motorik] of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical
in their execution. The description of misfortune includes within
itself the possibility of its own overcoming [Überwindung].13

The resistance in melancholy is a stubborn refusal to abandon what has

been lost, a refusal to give it up—hence, openness to the most impos-
sible possibilities. Like Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Sebald’s melancholy
figure experiences its failure to reconcile within itself the diremptions it
suffers between the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the
p­articular, the eternal and the transient. But, unlike Hegel’s figure, Sebald’s
 206 / REDEEMING WO RDS

turns loss into meaning, suffering into resistance. In his version of the
phenomenology of Spirit, the aesthetic creation of sensuous beauty can
make the misery we experience in ethical life show itself allegorically, if
only for a passing moment, as if in the light of redemption. In a peculiar,
paradoxical way, this restless fidelity, sustaining the experience of loss, is,
perhaps, under the circumstances, the strongest form of hope.
 6

Beauty
Symbol of Morality in a Phenomenology of Spirit

§1

Beauty and the Promise of Happiness

In §59 of the Critique of Judgement, “On Beauty as the Symbol of Moral-

ity,” Kant attempts to show how aesthetic experience is connected to the
moral enlightenment and moral task of humanity.1 He argues there that
the connection between the experience of beauty and the experience of
the moral law is a symbolic one, but that, although only symbolic, it nev-
ertheless registers a cast of mind, a sensibility, exceptionally well disposed
to respond to the claim of the moral ideal. This section in Kant’s third
Critique is of singular importance for a reading of Sebald that will bring
out, in both the form and the content of his literary works, the uncanny
connection between language and the enigmatic promise of happiness. My
argument, here, is that our experience of beauty, as in Sebald’s words and
word-images, can induce a pure pleasure, a happiness, that momentarily
engages the utopian promise of happiness, awakening its appeal in recollec-
tion and enigmatically making it almost seem as if the moral utopia, which
beauty symbolically embodies, represents an ideal that could someday be
fulfilled and redeemed.
At the very heart of Kant’s Enlightenment project is the possibility
of a different experience of nature—both our own “inner” or “subjective”
nature, subject to the moral law, and the realm of “external” or “objective”
nature within which we must endeavor to realize a moral world. Although
no longer willing to believe in the Enlightenment project, Sebald neverthe-
less longs, I think, for a different relation to nature—a difference promising
at least the end of cruelty and violence. And he seems to hope that even

207
 208 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the most ephemeral appearances of beauty, something taking place in the

stories he tells or in the qualities of his prose, might perhaps make the
utopian promise of happiness somehow reveal itself, making its redemption
just a little more compelling, more believable.
Now, according to Kant, neither our obligations under the moral law
nor even the facticity of our freedom can be learned simply and directly
from innerworldly experience, for the moral law is absolutely unconditional,
hence strictly independent of experience; and freedom can have no place
in a realm of nature that obeys immutable mechanical laws. Experience can
give us only empirical laws, laws that refer only to the realm of contingent
appearances, which they systematize. We believe that we are summoned to
a moral life; we believe that we are free, free of nature’s causal determinism;
but what could possibly confirm the freedom that moral life requires? The
analysis of aesthetic experience—in particular, an analysis of the experience
of beauty in nature and in works of art—is a crucial part of Kant’s answer
to these urgent but difficult questions.
Kant argues that, in our encounter with something beautiful, we can
immediately feel, in all its unalloyed pleasure, not only the free play of
the imagination, released from its principal role, working to schematize
the pure concepts of the understanding so that we can arrive at empirical
knowledge of the world, but also the harmony, or reconciliation, that beauty
makes possible, bringing together, as such, the faculty of understanding and
the faculty of intuition. In other words, beauty enables us to experience
in the purest of pleasures our subjective capacity for freedom. Moreover,
it is the occasion for intimations of a harmony, and ultimately, a utopian
reconciliation, not only between the realm of conceptual universality and
the realm of the sensuous singularity, but also between the freedom that is
essential to our humanity and the causal determinism that prevails in the
realm of nature. That we human beings can produce beautiful works of art
using materials within that realm of nature is an indication as compelling
as we could want of nature’s availability, its congeniality, its receptivity
to the realization of our imaginative freedom—its marvelous “Angemes-
senheit,” as Kant would say. The existence of beauty in works of art that
are produced by the genius of human freedom in cooperation with the
mechanical laws of nature is, for Kant, a demonstration of the truth that
the world is not merely a realm of inhuman necessity. In the beauty of
artworks, we encounter the semblance of a purposive nature—objects that
appear as if the world from the materials of which they are made had
been designed to serve the reflective ethical life of the spirit. Expressed in
more phenomenological terms, such beauty enables us, whether we are its
creators or its recipients, to experience ourselves in the subjective moment
 BEAUTY / 209

of our freedom. The appearance of beauty in works of art is also a revealing

demonstration of the possibility that the ancient conflict between autonomy
and nature—a conflict in which a repressed nature returns with a vengeance
that threatens to destroy freedom forever—could somehow eventually be
transcended in a still inconceivable reconciliation of their “causalities”:
nature serving the cause of freedom, freedom completing the fulfillment
of nature. Intimating such a time, beauty becomes, for Kant, a symbolic
medium remembering the idea of the moral transformation of the world
and anticipating its concrete actualization.
Whereas for Hegel, this analysis reveals the ultimate dialectical iden-
tity of nature and freedom, Kant will recognize only a symbolic connection:
beauty as the symbol of morality. I think that there is a connection and
that there are examples exhibiting that connection in Sebald’s writings; but
I will suggest, drawing on Benjamin’s Trauerspiel argument, that, at least in
Sebald, the connection Kant establishes is better understood as allegori-
cal, since, as he himself of course insists, there can never be an adequate
presentation of the moral ideal in the realm of the sensible.
A crucial dimension of this connection, which first comes to the
foreground in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, concerns
the role of beauty in the actualization of the ideal moral community: what,
in §60 of the third Critique, Kant defines in terms of the “universal feel-
ing of sympathy” and the “ability to engage universally in very intimate
communication,” two dispositions of character that constitute “the socia-
bility that befits our humanity,” “Eigenschaften [. . .] die der Menschheit
angemessene Geselligkeit ausmachen.”2 According to Kant, in the judgment
that communicates the experience of beauty—it could be about the beauty
of nature or it could be instead about the beauty of art—we posit the
concurrence of others in a sensus communis, understanding that, whilst to
some extent this community necessarily already exists, given the universal
dispositions of human nature, it is also necessarily still in the making, still
tragically far, in fact, from its ideal realization.3 But it will be through the
use of language that aesthetic experience will found this new, ideal com-
munity. In other words, the communicative sharing of the experience of
beauty constitutes a “sym-ballein,” an attempt to bring people together by
way of their sensibility—the disposition of character that is essential for
ethical life and the realization of a cosmopolitan moral community worthy
of our claim to humanity. This would be a community grounded not in
coercion but in freedom, not in violence toward the other but in com-
munication, with respect for difference, not in suffering but in pleasure,
not in forgetfulness but in remembrance of the ideal, supersensible dimen-
sion of existence—because the judgment of taste does not impose itself,
 210 / REDEEMING WO RDS

but only conjectures and invites. Thus, just as the experience of beauty,
releasing the cognitive faculties for a while from the conceptual work of
acquiring empirical knowledge, engages them in a pleasurable harmony, so
correspondingly, for Kant, it may be hoped that the communication and
ensuing discussion of the experience of beauty could bring people together
in a felt sense of harmony that would contribute to the building of the
ideal moral community. Kant certainly thought that the making of beautiful
art from the materials that nature provides, this aesthetic transformation of
nature, exhibiting the appearance of purposiveness without evidence of an
actual purpose, indicates the hospitality of nature, its amenability, to the
causality of freedom and the moral transformation of this world that our
freedom of imagination might set in motion.
Adorno says, in Aesthetic Theory, that “The cultural landscape, which
resembles a ruin even when the houses are still standing, embodies a lament
that has since fallen mute.” And he warns that, “Without historical remem-
brance [geschichtliches Eingedenken], there would be no beauty” [AT 102/65].
I am convinced that Sebald, though deeply skeptical regarding this pros-
pect, nevertheless always wrote his stories in the hope that such beauty
as their remembrance could rescue from the devastations of nature and
from the remnants of “damaged life” might at the very least sustain our
faith in the promise of happiness that has been lost to history, even when
that remembrance ultimately fails, as it must, to bring about a time of
reconciliation, the time of a dream, in which a harmony in difference, and
perhaps a “purposiveness” without the enforcement of a unifying purpose,
would prevail among all human beings and between us and nature. Kant
understood this possibility to mean the realization of the “kingdom of ends,”
a moral community in the creation of which he believed that a sensibil-
ity responsive to the appearance of beauty, a sensibility therefore capable
of being touched and moved by its appeal to our humanity, could play a
significant, and perhaps even decisive role. Essential to this prospect, of
course, would be the communicative sharing of experience and judgment.
Adorno has argued that, “Only what has escaped nature [understood]
as fate [als Schicksal] would help nature to its restitution” [AT 105/67]. For
Sebald, the appearance of beauty in art is at once an indication of this pos-
sible escape from nature and an indication of nature’s own resistance to the
destructive processes of natural history; but because the literary production
of this appearance is always mere semblance, to the degree that the work
is conscious, much to its grief, of this limitation, it must come to terms
with the truth that it can never actually transform the reign of necessity,
a reign in which nature in the subject is deeply repressed and nature in
the world is endlessly dying. So the beauty that appears in his stories—
 BEAUTY / 211

the promise of freedom from the terms of fate—is an enigmatic, magical

moment perpetually threatened: we are never permitted to forget that his
evocations of beauty always confront the possibility that what they have
“promised,” as it were, could become nothing but memorials tracing the
ghostly afterlife of dead hopes. It is thus not at all surprising that Sebald’s
“Schriftbilder,” his word-images, tend to convey a melancholy mood much
like that conveyed by the still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. But this mood is always in dialectical tension with the
spirit of hope in a promise whose inevitable disappointment it faithfully
registers in determinate negations.

§2

Beauty and Truth

“Art,” says Adorno, “probes after truth in the evanescent and the fragile
[beim Entgleitenden, Hinfälligen]” [AT 119/76]. Sebald catches the spirit of
this insight—catches its truth—producing in words an image the beauty of
which does justice to its truth. Reflecting on the fact that Joseph Conrad’s
father burnt all his unpublished writings, he evokes the scene:

At times, when he did so, a weightless flake of soot ash like a

scrap of black silk would drift through the room, borne up on
the air, before sinking to the floor somewhere or dissolving into
the dark.4

This could be Sebald’s way of responding to Benjamin’s questioning “wheth-

er truth can do justice to beauty” [UT 211/31]. But if, in this passage,
Sebald answers this question, he also, I think, answers another: Can beauty
do justice to truth? Perhaps, as Jay Bernstein has argued, only beauty can
return to truth the charismatic authority that it has lost in a modernity that
our calculative, instrumental, utilitarian rationality has left disenchanted. In
Sebald’s construction of prose images, we can see how beauty does justice
to truth—and also, how truth does justice to beauty, reflecting its wondrous
presence in natural history and letting it reveal the eternal transience of
all appearance.
According to Adorno, in today’s world art is obliged to become “an
afterimage of enchantment”: this is its necessary role in the ongoing dialec-
tic of enlightenment [AT 93/58]. A fragile and evanescent beauty, likewise
faithfully registering truth, comes to appearance in Sebald’s description of
 212 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the colouration of herring in their living and dead states: in exceptionally

great micrological detail, he registers the presence of “a dark green of a
beauty one sees nowhere else” and “a glow that resembles phosphores-
cence,” turning into a rainbow of colours that ebb away as the fish slowly
dies and decays [R 70–77/53–59]. This fading of nature’s radiant splendour
is a story that gives reality, or rather, its semblance in art, to Adorno’s
remark that, “Indelible [Untilgbar] from the resistance to the fungible world
of barter is the resistance of the eye that does not want the colours of the
world to fade” [ND 396–97/404]. But fade they will. This fate, which the
narrator mourns, reminds me of David Krell’s question: “What would that
beauty be if we did not mourn from the outset the imminent destruction
of such radiance?”5 In the narrator’s story, the evocation of the herring’s
beauty is inseparable from a pervasive spirit of mourning. Beauty, insofar
as it is the threatening appearance of the non-identical, is always itself
under threat in the circumstances of our world. Thus here, the beauty of
the herring even in the throes of death becomes the truth in an indictment
of our supposedly “enlightened” relationship to nature: the truth is that, in
the struggle to survive, we have been compelled, like the animals we look
down upon, to resort to massive destruction and violence.
That Sebald’s vivid description of the herring-fishing industry should
be read in the critical spirit that Adorno and Horkheimer articulate in their
post-Holocaust work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, is suggested, I think, by the
fact that it flows seamlessly into an eerily cold and emotionally dissociated
discussion, undoubtedly meant to be read allegorically, of the properties
of light and illumination. (Reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s description,
in Buddenbrooks, of the Lübeck fish market, where a fish briefly “escap-
ing” its untimely death becomes a symbol through which Mann challenges
blind obedience to the authority of tradition, the herring industry scene in
Sebald’s story about Lowestoft, accompanied by a photograph of a massive
pile of dead herring, and almost immediately followed by the narrative
evocation of Bergen Belsen, accompanied by a damaged and decayed photo-
graph of a pile of corpses, presents an occasion for reflection on the brutality
operating within what we call “civilization.” Sebald invariably represents
the beauty of nature as vulnerable to natural processes of destruction; but
he also never misses an occasion to question the beauty of human nature,
bringing the unthinkable horror of its violence into words that compel
our moral lucidity and unmask the hypocrisy in our claims to represent an
enlightened civilization.)
For Adorno, what is at stake in today’s world is a dialectical struggle
between the spirit of non-identity and the forces of domination. And he,
like Sebald, wants us to understand how the truth in this conflict takes
 BEAUTY / 213

place even in the experience of beauty—beauty in nature and beauty in

the work of art. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno remarks:

Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under

the spell [Bann] of universal identity. As long as this spell prevails,
the non-identical has no positive existence. Therefore, natural
beauty remains as dispersed and uncertain as what it promises,
that which surpasses all human immanence [das Innermenschli-
che überflügelt]. The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more
visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the long-
ing [Sehnsucht] for what beauty promises but never unveils as it
is suffering at the inadequacy [Unzulänglichkeit] of appearance.
[. . .] [AT 114/73]

Adorno catches, here, what I take to be at stake in the story of the herring.
In my reading of this story, an account of a beauty in nature that we see
fit to destroy, there is a longing for what natural beauty promises but does
not unveil: the possibility of a radically different relationship to nature.
But natural beauty, says Adorno, can appear only in its negation—like the
negative of a photographic print [AT 85/53].
In the stories gathered into the book Vertigo, illusions and deceptions,
the “swindles” in our struggles with an unconquerable nature, abound. Nev-
ertheless, in the first of the stories, supposed to be about the life of Henri
Beyle, the author known as Stendahl, there is an account of Beyle visiting
the underground salt mines in Hallein, where his companion was presented
with a twig “encrusted with thousands of crystals.” In Sebald’s story, remi-
niscent of the visit to mines described in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis’s
poetic fairy tale, a major work in early German Romanticism, Beyle reports
that, “when they returned to the surface of the earth, “the rays of the sun
set off in it a manifold glittering such as he had only seen flashing from
diamonds as ladies revolved with their partners in a ballroom blazing with
light.” This gives Sebald, the narrator, an opportunity to observe that,

[t]he protracted crystallization process, which had transformed

the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to Beyle,
by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the
salt mines of the soul.6

Sebald thus suggests an allegorical interpretation, but only in the briefest

of terms. And what is to be said about the deadness of the twig—which,
after all, Sebald was not compelled to mention? If the interpretation were
 214 / REDEEMING WO RDS

to be expanded, the dead twig, miraculously transformed into something of

extraordinary beauty, might be said to bear the hope for a more sympathetic
relationship to nature, whilst sustaining at the same time an acknowl-
edgment of our part in the dying of nature. Benjamin sees a “semblance
of reconciliation” in the “semblance of beauty.”7 Semblance is mere sem-
blance; but it can nevertheless bear intimations that stir the keeping of
hope. Concentrating our attention on an experience of natural beauty,
the story becomes an allegorical expression of longing for a miraculous
transformation—an almost hopeless longing for reconciliation that cannot
avoid consciousness of the inhospitable place where it is growing: in the
salt mines of the soul.
Sebald’s allegorical variations on Kant’s theme—beauty as a symbol of
morality—are not limited to examples of natural beauty. They also invite
our reflection on the significance of the beauty that can appear in things
made. In search of some inspiration concerning the life of Edward FitzGer-
ald, the narrator, Sebald, travels to Ireland, and during his sojourn there,
stays in a large, dilapidated manor belonging to Mrs. Ashbury, her son,
and her three unmarried daughters, Catherine, Clarissa, and Christina [R
252–53/212]. (Sebald likes to weave stories around three sisters: besides
the three Ashburys, there are three sisters operating the Alpenrose Café
in Werbach, the village of his childhood, and three Jewish women, sisters
metaphorically, if not literally, represented as working in the Theresienstadt
ghetto. The recurrence of such groupings of course provokes the reader to
question the supposed facticity of these accounts; but it also places their
lives in a mythic or at any rate symbolic dimension). The Ashbury sisters,
he tells us, “like giant children under an evil spell,” would spend several
hours every day storing “great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multi-
coloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items”—sewing which they
mostly undid “either on the same day, the next day, or the day after that.”
But he noticed that there was something that, for some obscure reason, had
been spared this unstitching: “a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of
silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb fashion.”
Why did they persist in this sewing? And why did they later unravel their
work? They seemed not to know. But he could not cease marveling at this
gown, “a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection [von
einer Pracht und Vollendung] that it seemed almost to have come to life”
[R 253/212]. It is possible, he speculates, “that, in their imagination, they
envisaged something of extraordinary beauty, so that the work they com-
pleted invariably disappointed them.” Whatever the sisters might have felt,
the narrator tells us that the gown was a work of art so beautiful that, when
 BEAUTY / 215

he saw it, he could not believe his eyes. However, he immediately attaches
to that report a skepticism about his memory that perhaps casts—and is
intended to cast—a certain shadow or shroud over the beauty he has just
proclaimed: “at the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now
trust my memory.” To the extent that, given the apparent intensity of his
experience, we may justifiably deny that these final words call into question
the reality of this experience, hence the reality of the gown’s extraordinary
beauty, to that extent the scene demonstrates once again, I think, that, as
Kant intuited, beauty appears as a symbol—or as I would prefer to say, an
allegorical sign—of morality. In its uncanny beauty, this gown shows the
spirit’s capacity to give its shape, its non-identity, to things. In the midst
of things that testify to lives of quiet desperation, this hand-made beauty is
presented as a sign that recognizes, despite the oppressive conditions of their
lives, the absolute facticity, the poetry, of the sisters’ freedom, the release of
their imagination from the tyranny of the present, the “always-the-same,”
and a ceaseless labor of love that will not compromise their aesthetic ideal
of perfection. In Kantian terms, the beauty that Sebald perceives affords
a pleasure in the reflection that, despite all the limiting conditions that
we mortals must suffer, the world is somehow hospitable to the magical
exercise of freedom—that the world is, as it were, purposive in this regard,
although no determinate purpose could ever be empirically demonstrated.
In the second of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich
Schiller asserts that, “it is through beauty that one arrives at freedom.”8
Commenting on this thought, Herbert Marcuse argues:

Only in the medium of ideal beauty, in art, was happiness per-

mitted reproduction as a cultural value in the totality of social
life. Not so in the two areas of culture that in other respects
share with art in the representation of ideal truth: philosophy
and religion. In its idealist trend, philosophy became increasingly
distrustful of happiness, and religion accorded it a place only in
the hereafter. Ideal beauty was the only form in which yearning
could be expressed and happiness enjoyed.

Marcuse continues:

Unlike the truth of theory, the beauty of art is compatible with

a bad present, despite and within which it can afford happiness.
True theory recognizes the misery and lack of happiness prevail-
ing in the established order. Even when it shows the way to
 216 / REDEEMING WO RDS

transformation, it offers no consolation that reconciles one to

the present. In a world without happiness, however, h ­ appiness
cannot but be a consolation: the consolation of a beautiful
moment in an interminable chain of misfortune. The enjoyment
of happiness is compressed into a momentary episode. But the
moment embodies the bitterness of its own disappearance. [. . .]
Ephemerality that does not leave behind solidarity among the
survivors must be eternalized in order to become at all bearable.
For it recurs in every moment of existence and in each one, as
it were, it anticipates death. Because every moment compre-
hends death, the beautiful moment must be eternalized in order
to make possible anything like happiness. In the happiness it
proffers, affirmative culture eternalizes the beautiful moment: it
immortalizes the ephemeral.9

The extraordinary beauty of the wedding gown to which the sisters devote
their otherwise empty hours transforms that gown into a bittersweet “sym-
bol” (in Kant’s sense) of the freedom and happiness they despairingly long
for: “in the beauty of the work of art, longing is momentarily fulfilled.”10 I
am reminded of something Novalis wrote in his “Miscellaneous Observa-
tions”: “Every beloved object is the center of a paradise.”11
The story of the making of the wedding gown, noting that it has
been composed from heterogeneous materials, is thus an allegorical evoca-
tion of utopia; its beauty is neither in the subject nor in the world, since
it expresses a persistent longing for the metamorphosis of reality—a reality
no longer ruled by the logic of identity [AT 204–205/136–37]. And the
source of this longing is remembrance. Moreover, in calling attention to
the use of old remnant fabrics, diverse scraps from the past, Sebald is say-
ing that what our times need is both remembrance of what has been lost
and remembrance of what is not but might be. As Adorno says in Aesthetic
Theory: “Since the time of Platonic anamnesis, what is not yet in being has
been dreamed of in recollection [im Eingedenken]” [AT 200/132]. Adorno
stakes out the theoretical dimension, here, with admirable lucidity:

The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible.

The object of art’s longing, the reality of what is not, is meta-
morphosed in art as remembrance [Errinerung], [.  .  .] which alone
concretizes utopia without betraying its existence. [AT 200/132]

This argument must, however, be put together with one that he makes in
Negative Dialectics, dramatizing the problematic:
 BEAUTY / 217

No heartfelt remembrance [Kein Eingedenken] of transcendence is

possible any more, save by way of perdition [Vergängnis]; eternity
appears, not as such, but diffracted through the most perishable.
[ND 353/360. Translation revised.]

As we have noted in our reading of the presentation of the appearance

of beauty in the three episodes we have extracted from Sebald’s stories,
transcendence—possibilities for redeeming transfigurations in the prevailing
world—never appears without its dialectical reversal in determinate nega-
tion. The hope is always conditioned by a sobering skepticism virtually
indistinguishable from mourning and melancholy. That which is hoped for
always seems beyond approach and connection, almost impossible. Whence
the allegorical twist that, in the context of Sebald’s stories, must be given
to Kant’s argument concerning beauty as the symbol of morality.

§3

Beauty as Allegory

In section §59, that section of his Critique of Judgement where he reflects

on beauty as a “symbol” of morality, Kant introduces a distinction between
two modes of “hypotyposis,” or cognitive presentation: All “hypotyposis,” or
“exhibition,” consists in “making a concept sensible,” and is either schematic
or symbolic. In “schematic hypotyposis,” he says, there is a concept that
the understanding has formed, and the corresponding intuition is some-
thing that can be given. By contrast, in “symbolic hypotyposis,” there is
a concept, or say Idea, which is only thinkable and which, therefore, not
the understanding, but only pure Reason can provide: an Idea to which
no possible sensible intuition can be adequate; and this Idea “is supplied
with an intuition that judgement treats in a way merely analogous to the
procedure it follows in schematizing: i.e., the treatment agrees with this
procedure merely in the rule followed rather than in terms of the intuition
itself, and hence merely in terms of the form of the reflection rather than
its content.” But if, in the case of schematic hypotyposis, the form, or rule,
of the reflection is some kind of subsumption, this cannot be what happens
in the symbolic. Kant’s discussion in this section of the symbolic relation-
ship between beauty and the Idea of the good raises more questions than
it answers, but this is not the appropriate place to delve into the problems,
the most pressing of which are, perhaps, (1) the assumption that beautiful
works of art are beautiful in the same sense as nature is, so that the same
 218 / REDEEMING WO RDS

logic applies to both, and (2) the metaphysical argument for the assumption
of a supersensible substrate underlying both nature as seemingly purposive
and the subject as reflectively experiencing its freedom in the course of its
encounter with the semblance of purposiveness in natural beauty. Suffice it
to point out, here, that the distinction Kant wants to make between types
of cognitive presentation might be clarified if, following Benjamin in his
critical divergence from Kant, we were to distinguish between symbol and
allegory, using “allegory” as the name for Kant’s “symbolic hypotyposis.”
In any case, Benjamin’s distinction, the morphology that he draws in his
Trauerspiel study, is, I think, more useful than Kant’s for understanding the
moral dimension of Sebald’s evocations of beauty—especially the beauty
that comes to appearance in art, since the intentionality or purposiveness
in such objects cannot be ignored, and since Benjamin’s conception of
allegory, with which Sebald was, of course, familiar, decisively locates it in
the context of natural history. Crucially, in formulating his conception of
allegory, Benjamin brings out much more emphatically than does Kant the
sense that the connection of beauty to morality engages a remembrance of
that which can never be represented in any experience.
According to Benjamin, allegory is actually expressive in its very
structure, or form, apart from the meaning of the content. The contrast
that concerns Benjamin—and likewise Adorno—is the difference between
what can be said in concepts and what can only be expressed. For allegory
seeks to express, to present or exhibit in “Schriftbilder,” what can neither
be said in the language of concepts nor completely rendered in the imme-
diacy of sensuous intuition. Thus, in the allegory, concepts are not actually
abandoned; instead, they are employed metaphorically, in ways that carry
us beyond them, retrieving from the ideological distortions of historical
experience both the suffering history has neglected and the promise it
has betrayed—what, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno named the “utopia of
cognition” [ND 21/10].
An observation about Kafka’s art that Gershom Scholem makes in his
correspondence with Benjamin nicely elucidates, I think, what is distinc-
tive of the allegorical. He reads Kafka, he says, as attempting to evoke “a
stage in which revelation [Offenbarung] does not signify or refer [bedeutet],
yet nevertheless affirms itself by the mere fact that it is in force.”12 This
“Geltung ohne Bedeutung,” describes something “operative” or “effica-
cious,” but not fully actualized, hence not something we can point to in
the empirical world.
In allegorical “Darstellung,” the redemptive Idea appears only as a
form of illumination, an expressive factor intimating, beyond all the suf-
fering, dimensions of historical experience bearing a more hopeful truth.
 BEAUTY / 219

But this dimension of meaning makes itself manifest solely in and through
the tensions that disturb the formal surface of the work; and it is not com-
municable as a cognitively available content, a conceptual meaning ready-
to-hand for communication, as if it were a matter of imparting pragmatic
information. In his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin suggests that we think of
the Idea as an illumination that becomes present only in the “combustion,”
the “mortification” of the work: like the meaningful glow that graces the
dying embers of a fire. And, as we know, Sebald explicitly appropriated
these alchemical words to characterize his own endeavor.13
Adorno offers a different analogy, a different, but no less compel-
ling image, proposing that, in the allegorical form of presentation, the
relationship between the expressive Idea and what is literally said, legible
and intelligible immediately—on the empirical surface, as it were, is like
the relationship between a constellation and the stars themselves, which
offer themselves to be seen, or read, in some particularly meaningful way,
although the science of astronomy will never be able to confirm what the
more visionary stargazer has seen. Both the stars and their corresponding
constellations are real; but their realities require different forms of confir-
mation. However, because of the reification of language, binding even its
grammar to the diremptions in its ontology, and because of the concomitant
disenchantment of experience, its degradation and delegitimation in a time
torn between the extremes of an objectivism hostile to life and a subjectiv-
ism bereft of reflective interiority, the reality of these constellations, hence
their meaning in and for “spiritual experience” (Adorno’s term: “geistige
Erfahrung”), is not recognized. But Adorno’s analogy, despite its usefulness,
has its limitations: it cannot interpret the withdrawing of the Idea into the
concealment of the negative dialectic. Constantly casting shadows over
every aesthetic revelation, protecting ideality from our urge to possess and
master the experience we have been granted, Sebald’s stories never betray,
in their representation of natural history, this withdrawing of the Idea into
self-concealment.
Although Benjamin’s text, and perhaps also studies reading Sebald
in the light of Benjamin’s text, will be already familiar to many readers, I
would like, for the sake of completeness, to cite some of the most pertinent
passages. The first one is this:

When history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script.

The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature
in the character of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of
the nature-historical [. . .] is present in reality in the form of a
ruin. In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting.
 220 / REDEEMING WO RDS

And in this guise, history does not assume the form of the process
of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory
therefore declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in
the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.
[. . .] That which lies in ruins, the highly significant fragment,
the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in Baroque creation.
For it is common practice in the literature of the Baroque, to
pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal,
and, in unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the rep-
etition of the stereotypes for a process of intensification. The
Baroque writers must have regarded the work of art as just such
a miracle. [UT 353–54/177–78]

Now, to be sure, Benjamin is defining the allegorical character of the beau-

tiful work of art in terms of the German Baroque. However, it certainly
would be difficult to conceive a better characterization of Sebald’s literary
treatment of the bridal gown, which he has the Ashbury sisters make out of
old remnants, scraps of silk, and other fabrics. And it certainly seems that
they save it from their daily methodical destruction as if, in its extraordi-
nary beauty, it already manifested, allegorically, an extraordinary presence,
something that could accordingly appear only by not appearing—the inter-
vention, say, of a miracle, fulfilling the promise of happiness.
Whereas beauty as a symbol obeys the logic of identity, presuming
the possibility of an absolute unification between signifier and signified,
beauty as allegory exhibits the logic of disintegration in the melancholy
of the deepest longing, compelling recognition of an impossible difference,
an irreducible, transcendent otherness. Consequently, the allegorical image
inevitably fails to redeem its signifier and its signified: it cannot bring them
to rest in the material splendor of sensuous appearance. Benjamin states
the matter in this way:

Whereas, for the Romantics, the symbol achieves a perfect unity

of form and content, taking part in whatever it symbolizes, for
the Baroque, there can be no such unity.

Quoting Friedrich Creutzer, Benjamin remarks that the symbol presents

a “momentary totality”; the allegory, by contrast, offers to hope only an
“endless series of moments,” deferring what it promises.14 Thus, Schlegel
said: “All beauty is allegorical. [. . .] The highest, precisely because it is
inexpressible [undarstellbar], can be said only allegorically.”15 If beauty were
to appear in the symbolic register, it would be able to sustain the impres-
 BEAUTY / 221

sion, or semblance, of design or purposiveness, even without presenting a

conceptually determinate purpose; appearing, however, in the allegorical
register, sensuous beauty so powerfully awakens longing for what it promises
but withholds that it concentrates attention on the absence of this design or
purposiveness, intensifying the skepticism and despair—but also the long-
ing and the hope. Like Benjamin, Sebald seems to believe that, in some
significant ways, the spirit of our time resembles the spirit that languished
in the Baroque: broken-hearted, its utopian dreams finally exhausted, spirit
seems to have entered a time of extreme disorientation, lost among the
fragments of a disenchanted world of its own making.
Benjamin, obviously influenced by the early German Romantics,
defines the difference between symbol and allegory in this well-known
passage:

Whereas in the symbol, destruction is idealized [mit der Verklärung

des Unterganges] and the transfigured [transfigurierte] face of nature
is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption [Erlösung], in
allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica
of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about
history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sor-
rowful, unsuccessful is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s
head, a skull [Totenkopf]. [UT 343/166]

Thus, in the case of the beautiful object of art, such as the Ashbury bridal
gown of rescued scraps, allegory passes “beyond beauty” by virtue of being
the form in which our creaturely subjection to nature—to “natural his-
tory”—is made manifest, but manifest in mediation through our resistance
to what-is, our struggle for transcendence within immanence. The making
of something beautiful is an expression of this struggle, an expression of
longing and hope, hope for a happiness that exceeds whatever the object
can possibly promise or fulfill [UT 353–54/177–78]. And, in the case of
natural beauty, the beauty of things such as the herring and the crystalline
twig in Sebald’s stories, allegory passes “beyond beauty” by virtue of being
the form in which the processes of natural history appear in the sublimity
of a narrative of life and death, destruction and restitution, that recollects
in infinite melancholy the promised time of happiness.
 7

On a Journey through Disenchantment

For Sebald as for Benjamin, “redemption,” or the promise of happiness,

is only an “Idea”; nevertheless, it can be revealed—and demands to be
revealed—in the phenomenon, in materiality, the theatre of the empiri-
cal, register of history. But of course it is precisely in this theatre that
his writings must struggle to say what the historical conditions inevitably
distort, subvert, and disintegrate. His literary work must consequently find
some way to bring these conditions—the social context of formation—
into its rhetorical and narrative interiority without renouncing its open-
ness, its exposure, to the light of redemption and without compromising
or corrupting the Idea. It seems that, for Sebald as for Benjamin, it is
only in the form of allegorical narratives that the Idea can be protected
and preserved; for it is only in this dialectical form that it can appear
within the phenomenon and nevertheless elude reification, its reduction to
a fixed, signifying content. This makes its presence, however, and indeed
its signifying power, persistently, radically questionable. There is no way
to signify transcendence—the redeeming transfiguration of the currently
disenchanted world—without registering its subjection to a negative dia-
lectic. There is no way to signify this transcendence save by way of lan-
guage persistently haunted by the insurgent remembrance of the suffering
that is sedimented in the diremptions organizing its grammar, its rhetorical
forms, and its narrative constructions. Thus, Sebald’s stories seem to have
been wrought with the conviction that this Idea of redemption, which we
must also think in terms of reconciliation—that is to say, as expressing the
need, with its dream, for a social existence which would resolve all the
diremptions, contradictions, and antagonisms that our form of capitalism
has created in the course of its industrial, technological, and “rationalizing”
development—can appear in our time only as the negative image, almost
impossible to discern, of the history of suffering.
Eric Santner broods over the question whether Sebald’s way of narrat-
ing our historical situation “leaves open the possibility of an event, a radi-

223
 224 / REDEEMING WO RDS

cal shift of perspective, whereby something genuinely new could emerge.”1

I have come, for the time being, to the conclusion that he does leave this
possibility open, but, given the weight of disillusionment, skeptical doubt,
and discouragement he feels, open only by a crack wide enough to let in
that “weak ray of hope,” the “schwache Strahl der Hoffnung,” of which Kant
speaks in his Critique of Judgement.2 There are numerous shifts of perspec-
tive—we have already reflected on some of the high-altitude positions Sebald
assumes. But they do not necessarily—do not, certainly, always—represent
much of an opening for redeeming possibility, the radically new. Sometimes,
the high-altitude perspective seems to show nothing but an endless plane of
catastrophe—and the remaining fragments of disintegrating life. But there
still remains, nonetheless, the beauty of language in which this melancholy
thought, immersed in its own uncanny beauty, is brought to expression.
Writing about Sir Thomas Browne, Sebald, very much under the
influence of this man’s thought, says:

On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihila-

tion. For the history of every individual, of every social order,
indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening,
more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which
[. . .] leads without fail down into the dark. [R 35–36/23–24]

But whilst for Browne, “knowledge of that descent into the dark [. . .] is
inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection,” this final belief, for
Sebald, is, although deeply appealing, summoning, and tempting, no lon-
ger, for historical reasons, a possible frame of mind. He will not deny or
diminish the moral catastrophes of our time by inserting history into some
eschatological narrative. His writings belong to the disenchanted world of
post-Holocaust existence; and yet, the narratives do occasionally register,
in moments of lyrical beauty and enchantment, an attentiveness of mind
close to prayer. He observes and bears witness.
Responding, in an interview, to the suggestion that his writing regis-
ters an exceptional degree of patient attention, as if he were disposed to give
a great deal of tender love to whatever he chances to encounter, whatever
happens to cross his path or come his way, in the hope that “revelations”
might occur, Sebald says:

I suppose that, if there is such a thing as “revelation,” if there

can be such a moment in a text [. . .], then it is something that
could be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by
looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing
oneself to places that no one else goes to.3
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 225

This certainly is not much of an encouragement for eschatologies and theo-

dicies. But J. J. Long is surely correct when he calls our attention to “an
attempt, at the level of form, to counteract the dispersal, dissipation, and
rupture inherent in the natural-historical process.” However, paradoxically,
it is precisely this form that makes it possible for Sebald to bring out the
logic of disintegration that shows up when creaturely life is represented in
the light of natural history. For Sebald, as Long says, “it is only through such
aesthetic strategies that history could be redeemed.”4 But this redemption
is irremediably problematic. In “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” one of
the stories in Vertigo, Dr. K., traveling from Prague to Vienna, is said to
be on a train that, without stopping, passes through Heiligenstadt, a city
the name of which, in English, means or suggests something like “city of
the holy,” “city of the sacred,” or “city of healing and consecration.” Its
station, however, is characterized as “ominous” and “deserted” [SV 157/141].
I submit that we must take Sebald’s decision to name this city and the
description that follows it to be laden with considerable deflationary signifi-
cance.5 There is, though, another story with another journey by train; this
time the narrator, presumably Sebald, is on his way to Milano, reading an
old handbook for the learning of Italian. The narrator reflects:
Everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as
though the world was made up purely of letters and words, and as
if, through this act of transformation, even the greatest of horrors
were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming
counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and
to every lie a measure of truth. [SV 119–20/105]
But this is nothing but wishing: the “as if” leaves the possibility of
redemption without resolution—as indecipherable as the secret of redemp-
tion transmitted in the Judaic Kabbalah, to which this passage temptingly
alludes. Is there more than a wish, more than a longing, more than a
hope—more than a trace? More than, or even as much as, what Derrida will
call a “spectral messianicity”? I suppose that the passage could plausibly be
read, after all, as an ironic, disillusioned comment on Leibniz’s declaration
that this is the best of all possible worlds. In any event, Sebald attempts
to accomplish in writing what he says he admires in Pisanello’s painting,
which he went to see in Verona’s Chiesa Sant’ Anastasia:

[. . .]every feature, the birds in the sky, the green forest and
every single leaf of it, are all granted an equal and undiminished
right to exist. [SV 84/73]

Although Sebald questions the redeeming power of art, his writing, as

a practice—a practice that, beginning in an exquisite attentiveness and
 226 / REDEEMING WO RDS

c­ontinuing in the exact science of naming—seems bent on granting to

everything that appears in the textual frame “an equal and undiminished
right to exist,” as if he were attempting, despite all the horrors, despite
all the suffering of nature, somehow magically to arrange things here and
now, at least within the literary realm of semblance, in the best of all
possible ways.
Sebald tells us that Austerlitz, reflecting on the chemical metamor-
phoses that take place in the photographic darkroom, acknowledges that
he always finds himself “entranced by the moment when the shadows of
reality [. . .] emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do
in the middle of the night” [A 117/109]. For Sebald, the art of writing is
similarly a process of creation ex nihilo: “This preoccupation with making
something out of nothing,” he says, in an interview, “is, after all, what
writing is all about.”6 For him, this seems to mean somehow creating alle-
gories of promise out of the material that he, as a writer, might extract
from his everyday experience. Is this not the allegorical significance of the
story that Austerlitz tells the narrator about his visit to the museum of the
École Vétérinaire, where he sees exhibits by Honoré Fragonard, anatomist
and dissector? This man, he says,

had apparently dissected over three thousand bodies and parts

of bodies in the course of his career, and consequently he, an
agnostic who did not believe in the immortality of the soul,
must have spent all the hours of his days and nights intent
upon death, surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, and, as I
imagine, moved by a desire to secure for the frail body at least
some semblance of eternal life through the process of vitrifica-
tion, by translating its so readily corruptible substance into a
miracle of pure glass. [A 380/373–74]

To address the question, I would like here to return to a passage discussed

earlier. In the Sailor’s Reading Room in Southwold, reading logs of the
ships, the narrator reflects on the magic of writing, hence, by implication,
of literature: “Every time I decipher one of these entries, I am astounded
that a trail [Spur] that has long since vanished from the air or the water
remains visible here on the paper” [R 116/93]. For Sebald, it seems, the
writer, like the anatomist Fragonard, his allegorical double, is engaged in
a work of magic or alchemy, attempting with words to redeem what is
destined to perish—or what has already passed away, withdrawing into
oblivion. The words that take shape on the page are traces: what remains
of fading memories. Is the printer’s ink, scattered like ash on the page, a
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 227

redeemed or redeeming substance? And are not Sebald’s stories showing us

that, in their service to memory and mourning, even the words that usage
has left bereft of spirit can be reanimated and redeemed?
There is another trail that Sebald’s words follow: this time, however,
without any redeeming rescue. Waiting for a taxi at the end of his visit to
Michael Hamburger, the narrator, Sebald, sees, “with a shudder,” he says,
“that went to the roots of my hair,” a beetle “rowing across the surface of
the water, from one dark shore to the other” [R 228/190]. This passage is
interesting in two respects: first, because these words terminate the chapter,
thereby, in effect, leaving the beetle’s struggle to continue without end;
but second, because these words closely echo a passage in the “Chandos
Letter” by von Hofmannsthal, except for the fact that the Sebald story
does not report that the object of the shudder is “the presence of infinity.”
But in Sebald’s story, there is a ceaseless struggle in which the presence
of eternity becomes all the more intense because those words that would
call it into presence are withheld. For even placing that presence in words
somehow diminishes the horror, the cause of the shudder. Omitting that
phrase, Sebald leaves the beetle to swim until death. There is no rescue,
no salvation—not even in the form of semblance.
Brooding on Alexander Kluge’s discussion about learning from the
past, Sebald comments, as I noted earlier, that the destruction he relates
“hardly seems to justify the abstract principle of hope” [CS 95–96/91].
This remark, however, does not actually exclude the possibility, even the
plausibility, of hope; it merely disputes the appeal to an abstract principle.
Thus, there is no surprising contradiction when, in the very same work, we
find Sebald, captivated by the melancholy eyes in Pietro Paolini’s portrait
of a young woman with her daughter, expressing his hopeful vision of a
time—as we might say—of redemption:

I stood in front of this double portrait for a long time, seeing

in it, as I thought at the time, an annulment of all the unfath-
omable misfortunes of life [das ganze unergründliche Unglück des
Lebens aufgehoben gesehen]. [CS 9/5]

This hopeful vision, a vision without justification, without sufficient ratio-

nal grounds or reasons, is beautifully characterized by Benjamin in his
Trauerspiel book:

This is the essence of melancholy immersion [Versenkung]: that

its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure
for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these
 228 / REDEEMING WO RDS

allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are repre-
sented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest
[verharrt] in the contemplation of bones [im Anblick der Gebeine],
but faithlessly leaps forward [überspringt] to the idea of resurrec-
tion [Auferstehung]. [UT 405/232–33]

This “leaping forward”—a movement that signifies the presence of a fis-

sure or crack—recalls another “Sprung,” one that figures in a statement in
Benjamin’s “Central Park”:

Redemption [Die Rettung] depends on the tiny fissure [Sprung]

in the continuous catastrophe [that is history].7

Such “fissures,” soliciting a leap of hope—or a leap, say, of faith—also

appear, allegorically, in Sebald’s story about Dr. K. in his hotel room, half
asleep in bed, exposed to the phantoms his subconscious mind will acknowl-
edge when the censorious egological defenses are down:

The circling reflections of the streetlights on the ceiling above

him are signs that at any moment now [jeden Augenblick] it will
break open and something will be revealed [Etwas sogleich sich
auftun wird]. Already, cracks are appearing in the smooth surface
[Schon rieselt der Verputz], and then, in a cloud of plaster dust,
gradually showing itself against the half-light, a figure descends
on great silk-white wings [. . .], the upraised arm with the sword
pointing forwards. A veritable angel, thought Dr. K. when he
could breathe again, all day long it has flown towards me and I
of little faith knew nothing of it. Now he will speak to me, he
thought, and lowered his gaze. But when he looked up again,
the angel, though it was still there, [. . .] was no longer a living
angel but a garishly painted ship’s figurehead. [. . .] The sword
guard was fashioned to hold candles and catch the dripping
tallow. [SV 161–62/145–46]

In his recording of this experience, Sebald is artfully taking his readers

through the sequence of three moments in a negative dialectics that,
according to Adorno, constitutes our engagement with the truth in its
assumption of absoluteness: “rupture, estrangement, and reflection.”8 The
angel, coming from an immemorial past, is the redemptive light of the
future, breaking through the clouds of confusion to shine on the present of
a world that is unable, or unwilling, to recognize, or even see it. Neverthe-
less, near the end of Negative Dialectics, Adorno is moved to declare that,
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 229

“However slight [hinfällig] every trace of the other in it, however much all
happiness is displaced [entstellt] by its revocability, in the breaks that belie
identity, existence [das Seiende] is still saturated by the ever-broken promises
of that other.”9 The promise of happiness is still present, even if only as
the most fragile and ephemeral trace!
In analyzing the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Aby Warburg,
appropriating a phrase first formulated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote of
“reading what was never written” in the palace’s sublime images. Bearing in
mind, now, that Sebald undoubtedly encountered this enigmatic phrase in
Benjamin’s writings, and that it would be reasonable to assume, moreover,
that Sebald was also acquainted with some of Warburg’s writings, we might
conjecture that, in this representation, Dr. K. is reading on the ceiling of his
hotel room what was never written there. What Warburg claimed he “read”
in the Palazzo images, which he called “dynamograms,” were unwritten,
invisible signs: signs charged with potentiality.10 Thus, if this conjecture is
true, then what Dr. K. initially “read” on the ceiling might be interpreted as
the angel’s prophetic message, briefly announcing the messianic potentiality
in a rupture that allegorically alludes to an apocalyptic or interruptive event
in the steady continuation of history as we have known it.
But the disappointing reality soon reasserts itself. The denial of a
fulfilled utopian or messianic meaning—denial of what in the tradition of
philosophical thought has been called an Idea, is registered here in the
negative dialectic of an allegorical demonstration, a paradigmatic image:
first, there is a fissure in the prevailing predication of identity, e.g., when
a fissure appears in the ceiling as ceiling; then, in a second moment, the
breakthrough of hope takes place, expressed in a utopian or messianic
moment of non-identity, when, in this allegorical episode, the ceiling
becomes heaven and its plaster dust becomes the clouds that open up to
make way for the descent of the angel, brandishing a sword like the sword
of justice that suddenly appeared to Austerlitz as he gazed at the clock in
the Antwerp train terminal; but then, in a third moment, a moment of
reflection, this prophetic event, this apocalyptic annunciation, is revealed
to be a delusion, a swindle: the ceiling is still, after all, just a ceiling. “The
force of consciousness extends,” as Adorno observes, “to the delusion [Trug]
of consciousness” [ND 152/148]. Nevertheless, this episode testifies to the
persistence of the utopian or messianic Idea: its time has not yet come;
but the mere fact of its appearance, momentarily breaking through the
order of identity imposed by ideology, is, even though deceptive, a reassur-
ing indication of its enduring truth. “Ideas,” Adorno says, “live on in the
crevices [den Höhlen] between what things claim to be and what they are”
[ND 153/150]. They also can survive in, and sometimes take advantage of,
the fissures that open up between our language and the world.
 230 / REDEEMING WO RDS

Perhaps what Dr. K. saw was one of those ephemeral angels evoked by
the Talmud. According to Gershom Scholem, the Talmud tells of “angels
recreated constantly in countless hosts to chant their hymn to God before
being destroyed and disappearing into nothingness.”11 In any event, Sebald’s
episode is certainly reminiscent of this teaching. In Sebald’s story, signs of
hope spring forth when the ceiling cracks and appears to open up; but,
in an instant, an “Augenblick,” a mere blink of the eye, the apparition
vanishes, suddenly “vorbei.” After the sudden breakthrough of a cognitive
moment that, as Adorno notes, is a paradoxical conjunction of tempo-
ralities “saturated with memory and foresight,” bringing into the present
the messianic message, bringing hope in its remembrance of the prophetic
promise, there is a return to the world in all its disenchantment.12 Perhaps
that is because its breaking through has gone unrecognized; for it is only
belatedly, “nachträglich,” in a reflection after the fact, that Dr. K. realizes
he had caught sight of the coming of the angel. Too late! But we must
also say the vision takes place too soon, too early!
Is this angel the “Angelus Novus” that appears in Benjamin’s “Theses
on the Philosophy of History”? What does Benjamin say in this text about
the image of redemption, the image of happiness? “The true picture of the
past flits by [huscht vorbei]. The past can be seized only in an image which
flashes up [aufblitzt] at the instant [im Augenblick] when it can be recog-
nized and is never to be seen again.”13 Recognizability, “Erkennbarkeit,” as
Benjamin will repeat many times, is a crucial requirement. Redemption is
indeed announced, but, since the summons in its meaning is still unrec-
ognized, it is indefinitely deferred. “Geltung ohne Bedeutung.” The hope
is certainly real, is true, is faithful; although, when it leaps to an excessive
conclusion, its assumption is instantly shown to be nothing but delusion,
a swindle: mere “Schwindel.”
In describing Casanova’s reflections during his time in a Venice prison,
Sebald echoes the words that Benjamin uses to comment on the question
of redemption, or messianicity, in relation to Kafka’s fairy-tale figure of the
hunchback, “das bucklicht Männlein”; but whereas Benjamin’s words are
signs pointing toward redemption, Sebald’s echo turns them in the direction
of delusion and madness. Here are Benjamin’s words:

[The hunchback] will disappear with the coming of the Messiah,

who, a great rabbi once said, will not wish to change the world
by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it [nur um
ein Geringes sie zurechtzustellen wird].14

Now, according to Sebald:

 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 231

Casanova considered the limits of human reason. He established

that, whilst it might be rare for a man to be driven insane,
little was required to tip the balance. All that was needed was
a slight shift, and nothing would be as it formerly was [Es bedarf
nur einer geringfügigen Verschiebung, und nichts mehr ist wie es
war]. [SV 65/56]

Only a slight shift, a slight adjustment, is needed for language to warn of

delusion instead of prophesying redemption.
Sebald never wants, I think, to tip the scale of truth in one direction
or the other. Commenting, as narrator, on the ex libris plate in a book by
Franz Werfel that somehow came, “by a circuitous route,” into his hands,
he says that the owner of the plate, one Doctor Hermann Samson, “must
have loved Aida so dearly that he had chosen the pyramids, monuments of
death, as his insignia” [SV 153/137]. But the words are contradicted by the
image of the plate, which shows a gloriously radiant sun shining through a
window, a large sunflower growing toward the sun, and, on a table, what
seems to be a book and a small model in wood of a pyramid. The recogniz-
ably Egyptian pyramids, appearing in the background, hence belonging to
the remote past, are certainly evocations of death, monuments of death;
but the other things shown in the image, placed in the foreground, hence
in the present, suggest representations of science and technology, geometry,
architecture—objects celebrating the hope for a renewal of life to come
from human ingenuity and knowledge. The pyramid itself, moreover, is as
much a monument to eternal life as it is to the finality of death. In the
German edition, but not in the English, it is this image of hope, and not
the text of words, that, coming at the end of the chapter, immediately after
the word “wählte” (“chosen”), has the final say.
The theme of the pyramid appears in another story, one I find espe-
cially beautiful and moving. In this one, the narrator, in Verona, is “leafing
through the folio volumes in which the Verona newspapers dating from
August and September 1913 were bound.” As he is reading advertisements
and notices in the newspapers, “silent movie scenes began to be enacted”
before his eyes: anxious gentlemen nervously entering the establishment
of a physician, then a dentist working on a patient. Among these scenes,
there was one reminiscent of the story in the Kabbalah about the shatter-
ing of the vessels destined to receive the procreative emanations of divine
light. There were, he writes,

revelations of a different kind, such as the pyramid of ten million

bottles of Ferro-China table water [. . .] gleaming and glistening
 232 / REDEEMING WO RDS

in the sun like a promise of eternal life: a lion roaring soundlessly,

and soundlessly the pyramid shattered into a myriad little pieces
tumbling down slowly in a crystal cascade. [SV 133–36/118–21]

The text continues, turning images into words in an allegorical narrative

that posits this transformation in a reflexive movement of the text. The
words and images ignite and flare up; but they quickly are extinguished,
remaining enigmas. But notice the negative theology: these enigmas are
empty:

They [the fragmentary pieces] were soundless and weightless,

these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly and
instantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma.

Are they empty in that they bring no meaning? Or are they empty because
they have already bestowed, already given away, their meaning? The experi-
ence of this emptiness in language—words without enigma, words bereft
of enchantment, words the storyteller can no longer naively fill with the
metaphysical meanings of the past—is the condition, the fate or possibly
the destiny, peculiar to our time.
(Since I have just invoked the terms “fate” and “destiny,” implying a
difference, this might be this appropriate place to reiterate the distinction
between “fate” and “destiny” that I delineated in my reflections on Döblin’s
1929 novel. The triumph of fate (“Schicksal”) is the negation of freedom,
the impossibility of freedom. But in its struggle against fate, freedom shows
its sublime moral quality. Thus, in contrast to fate, destiny (“Geschick”)
requires freedom—is actually impossible without it. In Sebald’s stories, crea-
turely life seems endlessly to hover, or “schweben,” between the damnation
of fate and the salvation of destiny.)
Speaking of words, there is one word, or rather, one proper name,
that most improperly enters into two completely separate stories. I am
thinking, of course, of “Salvatore”—thinking of the name, thinking of the
man whose spirit, whose allegorical significance in the author’s more secret,
more concealed text might possibly be disclosed, or communicated, through
the singularity of that name in the historical narrative of salvation and
redemption.
Now, in one story, “All’estero,” the narrator, in Verona, goes to meet
a certain Salvatore Altamura in a pizzeria. Nothing could be more ordinary;
but in the context of Sebald’s stories, where even the ordinary can, in the
flash of an instant, assume allegorical proportions, taking on the appearance
of something extraordinary, something, indeed, eschatological, this name
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 233

cannot be dismissed without considering its theological reverberations,

implications, and intrigues. In any case, Salvatore recounts a number of
different stories, ending with a vivid description of fire in the opera house:
“A crackling conflagration. With a crash the seats in the stalls, together
with all their occupants, vanish into the orchestra pit. Through the swathes
of smoke beneath the ceiling an unfamiliar figure comes floating down”
[SV 143–50/127–34]. Once again, an angel appears. But this time it is the
angel of death, not one of Giotto’s compassionate angels in Padua, their
eyebrows expressing infinite grief [SV 96/83–84]. So no merciful angel is
coming, after all, rushing to assuage our suffering—or bring us word, once
again, of the promised salvation, right here on earth as it is in heaven:
“Di morte l’angelo a noi s’appressa. Già veggo il ciel discendersi,” he says,
before taking his leave of the narrator. “The angel of death is approaching
us. I am witnessing the heavens descending” [SV 143–50/127–34]. This
Salvatore, despite his name, is unable or unwilling to save the dead.
In the second story, “Dr. K. takes the Waters in Riva,” there is also
a man named Salvatore. In this story, Salvatore is the podestà of Riva,
receiving at midnight the announcement of a barque about to come to
shore bearing the body of Gracchus the Huntsman: “From the shadows of
autumn,” we read,

there gradually emerged the silhouette of a barque with masts

of inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds.
Three whole years it takes until the vessel [. . .] drifts into the
little port of Riva.

On the boat is the body of Gracchus, soon to be carried ashore on a bier:

“His imminent arrival was announced at midnight to Salvatore, the podestà
of Riva, by a pigeon the size of a cockerel, which flew in at his bedroom
window and then spoke in his ear” [SV 178–82/163–67]. Here, the figure
of redemption is the one who is waiting, not the one being waited for;
although, if the name “Gracchus” must be read as an allusion to Grac-
chus Babeuf (1760–1797), perhaps the first “communist,” who fought in
the dying years of the Revolution for the ideals of popular sovereignty
and participatory democracy, then the scene generates questions in rela-
tion to the ideal of political utopia which inspired Babeuf, Marx, and the
young Benjamin. In any event, in Sebald’s story, there is a certain Salva-
tore waiting for the arrival of a dead body. Thus, contrary to the story of
the Annunciation, the bird that here brings the prophetic tidings is not
announcing a birth but a death. This of course represents a major rever-
sal of the Christological narrative. And so the story unfolds. But just at
 234 / REDEEMING WO RDS

the moment when we are about to be taken in by the storyteller’s art of

enchantment, all ready to believe what we are reading, even though it has
already strained our conviction of its credibility, we are gently, if abruptly,
made aware of the fictional art. This, we are told, is nothing but a story
told by Dr. K., who is in turn, of course, nothing but the fabulous creation
of Sebald, who, borrowing from Kafka, a master in the art of storytelling,
is soon almost imperceptibly folding the master’s story into his own. So
this Salvatore, waiting to receive the dead, is an imitation savior, a mere
semblance: an ironic creation of the narrative art. And yet, this character,
however disappointing, bears a name, a word, that nevertheless serves to
remind us of “last things.”
How are these two stories connected? What might be the meaning
that Sebald wanted to suggest, creating two men named Salvatore for two
different stories? What I take both stories to be showing us, after tempting
us with the thought of imminent or immediate salvation, is the delusion,
the swindle, in that temptation. In both stories, the name, the word, fails
to deliver what it promises. Like Kafka and Benjamin before him, Sebald
understood the importance of simultaneously positing endless deferral in
regard to the timing of salvation, in order to avoid identifying redemption
with the existing condition of the world, and yet also positing the pos-
sibility of a redemptive transformation erupting into the chain of events
at any moment.
According to the Jewish narrative, the coming of the messianic era has
been announced and promised to the mortals of the world; however, since
the world continues in its moral and spiritual errancy, it is obvious that the
time of messianic transformation has not yet come, and that, because of
this persistent errancy, that time must always, at each and every moment,
still be coming: “à-venir,” as Derrida worded it. But it could be argued that,
according to the Judaic narrative, the announcement and promise already
constitute, in a certain sense, that coming: a first coming. According to the
Christian narrative, the Messiah has of course already come. Nevertheless,
it is obvious that creaturely life persists in its fateful errancy. Indeed, the
Son of God is crucified. So redemption somehow requires another mes-
sianic intervention: a second coming. It is to be hoped, at least, that we
will be given another chance. Thus, ultimately, the two narratives, whilst
maintaining their differences, are the same: two different narratives, taking
us by their different approaches, come to the very same end.
Both of Sebald’s stories, however, have many dimensions of meaning.
In the interpretation of the hunter’s death, the innermost meaning of the
second story is said to be an inability to acknowledge what one loves—or
even, perhaps, an inability, driven by guilt, to acknowledge the existence
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 235

of a longing for love; for, according to the narrator’s speculations, at a cer-

tain point in the story that Dr. K. was telling, he “surely came within an
inch of admitting to a desire which we must assume remained unstilled.”15
What this means, and how it bears on the preceding story, is certainly
very puzzling. Might it be a veiled allusion to one of Freud’s most famous
cases? Or an equally veiled allusion to Kafha’s vexed sexuality? I will forbear
further speculation. Whatever it means, we know at least that the chapter,
hence the narrator’s story, make a surprising and inexplicably abrupt shift
before ending. Having just remarked that, for Dr. K., the terrors of love
are “foremost among the terrors of the earth,” the narrator suddenly shifts
to another subject without explaining the transition:

How are we to fend off the fate of being unable to depart this
life, lying before the podestà, confined to a bed in our sickness,
and, as Gracchus the huntsman does, touching in a moment of
distraction [in einem Augenblick der Selbstvergessenheit], the knee
of the man who was to have been our salvation. [SV 182/167]

This final sentence is deeply, stubbornly enigmatic. First of all, both in

the German and in the translation, it looks like it must be a question; but
there is no question mark at the end. What significance, if any, might we
assign to the fact that, in the end, or at the end, there is no such mark?
And who is this “podestà” before whom, perhaps awaiting the eternal judg-
ment, salvation or damnation, the dying huntsman lies? Is he still Salvatore,
the “podestà” of Riva? Or is he the highest and mightiest of powers, the
one who grants redemption? In this instance, however, it seems that this
redemption might possibly be withheld. And if so, might distraction and
forgetfulness be responsible for this interminable fate? Since love is the
subject immediately before this bewildering, dizzying passage, an intriguing
interpretation comes to mind: Is it possible that the redeeming power of
love is lost whenever its true nature, whatever that might be, is not gladly
acknowledged? In this event, the redeeming power of love would be released
when its true character is entrusted to language.16 Words, then, would bear
this redemptive power. But the needed words are not forthcoming.
Dr. K. appears in another story, this time in Desanzano, Lake Garda,
where, walking about, he encounters a crowd of townspeople patiently
waiting to welcome the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insur-
ance Company. But the man for whom they are waiting never comes.
The description of the scene concludes with these words: “One of them is
reported to have observed that those in whom we invest our hopes only
ever make their appearance when they are no longer needed” [SV 170/154].
 236 / REDEEMING WO RDS

This little story would be without much significance, and certainly not
especially memorable, were it not for the fact that these words, though
thought-provoking in themselves, are echoes of Kafka’s profoundly para-
doxical words about the Messiah: “The Messiah will come only when he is
no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will
come, not on the last day, but on the day after.”17 What are we to make of
this echo? Perhaps only that, for Sebald, we are still waiting. Waiting, hence
hoping—but with infinite disappointment, still not realizing that waiting
for a messianic intervention is absurd, for the moral transformation of the
world depends solely on us. The ending of history as a story of suffering,
of violence, destruction, and guilt, is our task, our responsibility. As long
as we are doing nothing but waiting, the messianic transformation will not
happen. But once we have worked to transform ourselves and have made
the redeeming reconciliation of the world our task, the intervention of a
Messianic figure will no longer be needed. However, since that transforma-
tion is necessary if we are ever to recognize the Messiah, the storyteller
says, in what seems like a paradox, that his coming will be recognized only
on the day after his coming—that is to say, only on the day after our own
redemptive work has been completed.
In some of the stories that Sebald tells, we are shown with exquisite
poignancy how art, recapitulating the theological meaning that constituted
the inception of our historical existence, can reflect our struggles to take
responsibility for the creation of that meaning in the ways we live our lives.
In the story about Max Ferber, we are told that the painter, repeatedly
painting over canvases with which he could not be satisfied, and distraught
over his failures, was tormented at night by terrifying hallucinations and
nightmares. In one of these nightmares, he found himself in a gallery that
resembled his parents’ drawing room. And, as he tells the narrator, he there
encountered an artist of extraordinary genius, a man whose very name
expresses the happiness, the rejoicing, he feels in his sacred work:

Somewhat to one side, a stranger was sitting on the ottoman.

In his lap he was holding a model of the Temple of Solomon,
made of pinewood, papier-mâché and gold paint. Frohmann
from Drohobycz, he said, bowing slightly, going on to explain
that it had taken him seven years to build the temple, from the
biblical description, and that he was now traveling from ghetto
to ghetto exhibiting the model. Just look, said Frohmann: you
can see every crenellation on the towers, every curtain, every
threshold, every sacred vessel. And I, said Ferber, bent down over
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 237

the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life,
what a true work of art looks like. [AE 262/176]

Art, in this story, is a sacred calling; and the work itself is like a temple,
for within its sanctuary, its remembrance, it preserves the dreams and the
lamentations of the spirit. It is in the never-ending struggle for this safe-
keeping that art becomes redemptive.
In a story written some years before, another model of a temple
similarly takes on hieratic significance. The story opens with the narrator,
Sebald, continuing his “pilgrimage,” walking from Orford to a farm near
Harleston to visit again an old acquaintance. As in the story about the
angel that appears to Dr. K. whilst he is gazing up at the ceiling of his
hotel room, there is a crack, a fissure, through which something with a
seemingly redemptive promise suddenly breaks through:

At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden and

unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds. Then
the rays of the sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up
patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they
descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures
symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence.

Continuing this tale, he tells us that his destination was Chestnut Tree
Farm, where, for more than two decades, even neglecting the needs of his
farm, Thomas Abrams (in the German edition, his name is Alec Garrard)
was still passionately at work on a huge, painstakingly accurate replica of
the Temple of Jerusalem as it supposedly was at the beginning, including
more than two thousand hand-made figures to people the precincts of the
temple. Abrams tells Sebald that one of the American evangelists visit-
ing the farm once asked him whether the Temple was inspired by divine
revelation. His answer? Seemingly deflationary:

I said to him it’s nothing to do with divine revelation. [. . .] If

it had been divine revelation, I said to him, why would I have
had to make alterations as I went along? No, it’s just research
really and work, endless hours of work. [. . .] You had to study
the Mishnah, he continued, and every other available source, and
Roman architecture, and the distinctive features of the edifices
raised by Herod in Masada and Borodium, because that was the
only way of arriving at the right ideas. In the final analysis, our
 238 / REDEEMING WO RDS

entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change

over the years, and which time and again cause one to tear
down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from
scratch. [. . .] After all, if the Temple is to create the impres-
sion of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny
coffers on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns,
and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone
blocks by hand, and paint them as well.

“Now,” he confesses, “as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to

darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether
all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time. But on other
days, when the evening light streams in through this window and I allow
myself to be taken in by the overall view, then I see for a moment the
Temple with its antechambers and the living quarters of the priesthood,
the Roman garrison, the bath-houses, the market stalls, the sacrificial altars,
covered walkways and the booths of the moneylenders, the great gateways
and staircases, the forecourts and outer provinces and the mountains in the
background, as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing
into eternity.” So perhaps this work of art, this simulacrum is, after all, a
revelation. In any event, it is a creation of art that somehow puts him in
touch with a felt sense of eternity—the meaningfulness of an existence
devoted to sheltering in the temple of memory the life of the spirit.

Sebald’s long walk down the eastern coast of England, a venture without
teleology that he nevertheless calls a “pilgrimage,” a “Wallfahrt,” is a jour-
ney through destruction—the ravages of time, the devastation of nature,
and the ghostly afterlife of shifting industries and economies—a journey
that essentially ends in Orfordness, where he explores a landscape of for-
tifications once prepared for the possibility of nuclear annihilation. An
ominous end for a journey of the spirit.
Will the writer’s language, the writer’s words, bear witness to, and thus
vouchsafe, the utopian promise of happiness? Sebald’s use of language, his
prolonged sentences, leave the reader with a lingering doubt. In one of his
notes, Benjamin remarks: “Distance is the land of fulfilled wishes.”18 This,
I take it, is his lapidary recapitulation of something Novalis thought to
write in a time equally impatient, equally disheartened, torn between hope
and despair: “Everything at a distance,” he said, “turns to poetry: distant
mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic.”19 In an
 ON A JOURNEY THO RUGH DISENCHANTMENT / 239

early text, reflecting on nearness and distance, Benjamin remarked that, to

be “determined wholly by distance is the fortune [Verhängnis] of the highest
among mature men.”20 However, distance also creates uncertainty; and it
opens a space for irrefutable skepticism. Having accepted Abrams’s offer of
a ride into Harleston, the narrator finds himself in the motorcar wishing,
during this brief journey “that we could go on and on, all the way to Jeru-
salem” [R 295/249].21 This impossible desire, aroused by biblical memory,
its promise still carried by the word, longing to span that distance, seems
very different from the sentiment in Samuel Beckett’s refrain, “I can’t go
on. I go on.” But just how different, really, is it? How approachable, how
possible is this Jerusalem that Sebald, the narrator, invokes?

Hamm: “And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?

Clov: What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?22

Like Clov’s words, Sebald’s Schriftbild leaves us with unresolvable ambigui-

ties and undecidable questions.23 And yet, with that invocation of Jerusa-
lem, do his words not keep their promise?
 Epilogue

In beginning my Prologue, I quoted, as a provocation for our thought,

a question that Adorno formulates in his Minima Moralia: “What would
happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what
is?”1 Ever since I first read it, this question has haunted me, causing many
sleepless nights. Still echoing and left unsettled, the question needs to be
reiterated here, before being left again to its possibilities. With that question
in mind, I conceived this book as an experiment, taking what Adorno was
asking us to think about as suggesting a question about language—a ques-
tion his own reflections on art seemed to authorize, as when he declared
in Aesthetic Theory that, “in each genuine artwork, something appears that
does not exist” and argued that we need to reflect on how critical discourse
might “do justice to the promesse de bonheur in works of art.”2 If we take
the artworks in question to be works of literature, what calls for thought,
I think, is the critical project of reading the language out of which these
works have been composed in a way that explores how language must in
some way bear this utopian or messianic promise of happiness, the dream of
a world transformed by the reconciliation of its contradictions and antago-
nisms, ending its violence and inhumanity. At stake is a crucial experience
with language.
Reading works by Döblin and Sebald, we have explored the nature
of language, questioning the redemptive power of language and ways of
redeeming or restoring that damaged, weakened power. We have consid-
ered, accordingly, how the redemptive promise of happiness—the innermost
spirit or truth of language—is borne by the very existence of language as
such. And we have reflected on how, besides that, the promise may also
be rendered metaphorically or allegorically in the narrative content, or
signified in some way through the style, form, or structure, of the prose.3
These have been our constitutive questions, guiding our reading of works
by Döblin and Sebald.

241
 242 / REDEEMING WO RDS

According to Adorno, “artworks are ultimately enigmatic in terms not

of their composition [their narrative content, designated in German by the
word “Inhalt”] but of their [speculative] truth content [Wahr­heitsgehalt].”4
This truth content is what he will also describe as the “spirit” of the
work: “That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more
than they are: This is their spirit. [. . .] What appears in artworks and
is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply
identical with it—the counterfactual in their facticity—is their spirit.”5
Adorno argues, in this regard, that, “by their failure with regard to their
own element of rationality, artworks threaten to relapse into myth, from
which they have been precariously wrested. Art is mediated in spirit—the
element of rationality—in that it produces its enigmas mimetically, just as
spirit devises enigmas, but without being capable of providing the solution;
it is in art’s enigmaticalness, not in its meanings, that spirit is manifest.
[. . .] Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise
a magical, and later a cultic, function.” Art’s enigmatic nature is articu-
lated immanently, however, “in such a fashion that it achieves meaning by
forming its emphatic absence of meaning.” To this extent, he continues,
“every authentic work also suggests the solution to its unsolvable enigma.”
Consequently: “Enigmaticalness peers out of every artwork with a different
face but as if the answer that it requires—like that of the sphinx—were
always the same, although only by way of the diversity, not the unity that
the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise
is a deception—that is the enigma.”6 In this present study, we have been
reading some works of twentieth-century literature in order to reflect on this
enigmatic truth content, exploring how the promise of happiness is carried
by the language of literature as its implicit speculative truth content—the
enigmatic “innermost spirit” of the work.
Something that Scholem said, replying in a letter to Benjamin, might
be useful in further clarifying how the promise of happiness figures, how
it appears as spirit, as speculative truth content, in the literary works that
we have here been reading. Answering Benjamin’s question regarding what
Scholem meant by the “nothingness of revelation,” the latter said that
he wanted to refer to “a state in which revelation appears to be without
meaning, but in which it still asserts itself, a state in which it has valid-
ity but no actual significance [in dem sie gilt, aber nicht bedeutet].”7 Whether
or not immediately manifest in and as the narrative content, it is always
nevertheless in force, in operation: in operation, even though the state
of the world does not yet make possible the truth of its reference. So it
is in operation, but without “Bedeutung” because it remains unrecognized
and referentially unfulfilled, in part, because of that failed recognition. If,
 EPILOGUE / 243

as Benjamin proposes, the “dialectical image” should be defined as “the

involuntary memory of redeemed humanity [unwillkürliche Erinnerung der
erlösten Menschheit],” then it would be as such a dialectical image that the
promise of happiness should make its irremediably ambiguous appearance.8
But such an image is not something merely “poetic.”

Does Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, betray the promise of happiness

both in its narrative content and in the character of its language? Does it,
in giving implacable causality to the expressive language of Fate, rob lan-
guage of the treasure it bears? Does it give us, as an ending, not a credible
semblance of the “validity” of the utopian promise, but only, instead, an
“extorted reconciliation”—an “erpreßte Versöhnung,” to borrow a phrase
that Adorno used in a critical essay on Georg Lukács? Perhaps that must be
said. Simply asserting the triumph of the causality of freedom cannot make
it true; nor can it immediately confirm in that way the conviction that, by
its very nature, language indeed bears the promise of happiness. But even if
Fate had to be cheated by cunning; and even if the “validity” of the promise
of happiness had to be extorted from the enigmatic operations of language
by the crudest prose and the most blatant interventions in the course of the
narrative, at least that imposed construction of the ending is an indication
of irrepressible longing; moreover, by exposing the author’s heavy-handed
artifice, this unsatisfying end calls attention to the decisive role of language
in setting the conditions of creaturely life. We get words in Döblin’s novel
that we are longing to read; but they are forced and offer no reassurance.
The promise of happiness—release from the thralldom of Fate—that the
author’s words promised to deliver, never comes, never materializes: not for
Franz, not for the society in which he lives, not for the world of his time,
not for us. And yet, as long as there are words, there is hope: the very
existence of language keeps alive the redemptive promise of happiness. In
fact, ironically, because of the obvious weaknesses in the narrative endgame
and the absence, despite its evocation, of any convincing anticipation of a
time of reconciliation, readers are brought to a heightened consciousness
regarding the operations of language: how, in particular, the inauguration of
a more perfect humanity depends on what we might call the benevolence
of words, and how much the promise of happiness is betrayed, even by the
very language that continues to bear it. So if there is any sense in which
the spirit of language—its speculative truth content—does finally triumph,
bearing within itself the promise of happiness and staking out its claim
in the realm of semblance, that is only because of a cunning twist in the
 244 / REDEEMING WO RDS

negative dialectic: an experience of words without referential fulfillment,

ironically intensifying our faith in the redemptive and utopian potential
in words—or perhaps putting that faith to the test, inducing a moment
of extreme disillusionment, so that at least the deferred materialization of
that potential might be deeply and lucidly felt.
Let us briefly recapitulate the ending of the novel, invoking a revela-
tion that remains without illumination, despite the narrator’s claim:

Immediately after the trial Biberkopf is offered a job as assistant

doorman in a medium-sized factory. He accepts. I have nothing
further to report about his life.
We have come to the end of our story. It has proven a
long one, but it had to unfold itself, on and on, till it reached
its climax, that culminating point which at last illuminates the
whole thing.
We have walked along a dark road, at first there was no
street-lamp burning, we only knew it was the right road, but
gradually it grew brighter and brighter, till at last we reached
the light and under its rays were able to make out the name
of the street. It was a process of revelation of a special kind.

Soon after we read this, it seems that we enter into Biberkopf’s stream of
consciousness. If so, we overhear him saying to himself: “Once I got myself
into trouble for a single word and had to pay bitterly for it. [. . .] The words
come rolling up to us, we must be careful not to get run over. [. . .]” Not
long after this reflection, we come to premonitory words, leaving us uncer-
tain whether they belong to the narrator or to Biberkopf himself: “Keep
awake, keep awake, for there is something happening in the world.” And
shortly thereafter, the threat of imminent war is announced. The rhymes
and rhythms of the prose, however, belie the words of courage and hope
that come to oppose that horror:

Keep awake ‘mid the strife, we’re not alone in life. Let it hail
and storm, there’s no way of guarding against it, but we can
defend ourselves against many other things. So I will not go on
shouting as once I did: Fate. Fate! It’s no use revering it merely
as Fate, we must look at it, grasp it, down it, and not hesitate.

In a different and much smaller style of font, we read the final words,
reflecting on the meaning of the story: “The way leads to freedom, to
freedom it goes. The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn!” But
 EPILOGUE / 245

the thundering beat of drums, and the rhythm of the prose, imitating the
rhythm of marching soldiers, soldiers headed into war and death, almost
drown out any echoes of the promise of happiness.
And yet, despite the pervasive sense of alarm that the novel conveys,
both in its narrative content and in its qualities of prose, we must not let
that mood cause us to miss, in those last words, the Enlightenment sanity
that persists, against all odds, to summon us, even if its voice is hoarse and
shrill: Rationality must win the day. We must look at Fate, we must grasp
it; we must cease revering the mythic, the archaic; we must break the spell
of its enchantment. Finally—and forever!
Clinging to the redemptive idea and to the dream of a reconciled
world, a world of freedom, justice, and peace, Döblin tries to convince us,
and perhaps also himself, that Franz is saved and the causality of freedom
will prevail. But ironically, this untruth that he tells at the end, precisely
because it is not at all credible, draws our attention, by way of negation,
or non-identity, to the deeper, speculative content of truth that his story
bequeaths. As the drums of war beat their way through Döblin’s prose
from within the spirit of language, the promise of happiness cries out in
defiance. As long as there are words, naming what-is exposes it to the
urgency of negation: “The old world must crumble.” And as long as there
are words, there are signifiers of promise: “Awake, wind of dawn!” But what
will emerge from the crisis, the emergency? Reading these words, I cannot
avoid wondering: How might we imagine this wind related to the wind of
forgiveness that Benjamin evokes in “The Meaning of Time in the Moral
Universe” (1921) and to the storm blowing from Paradise that he will later
invoke in his reflections “On the Concept of History” (1940)?9
“Paradise”: one of our words for the promise of happiness, taken from
what Plato calls the “garden of letters” (Phaedrus 276d). Assuming differ-
ent forms, the promise of happiness makes uncanny and always ephemeral
appearances in Sebald’s stories. Near the end of Rings of Saturn, recalling his
long walking journey along the eastern coast of England, Sebald tells about
his visit to Chestnut Tree Farm, where for many years a certain Thomas
Abrams was devoting his life to the recreation of the Temple of Jerusalem
in a large model replica. After seeing the model, Sebald leaves the Farm
with Abrams, who drives him on to Harleston, the next village on the
route of the walk. Whilst on their way to the village, Sebald records that
he “wished that the short drive through the country would never come
to an end, that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem.” And I
do not need to say much, I am sure, to recall my discussion of the bridal
dress that the Ashbury sisters, all three spinsters, passed their time sewing
and re-sewing: a seemingly useless object—and, according to Sebald, a work
 246 / REDEEMING WO RDS

of the most astonishing beauty. However, it is in the beauty of his prose,

melancholy and deeply reflective in its rhythms, with cadences befitting
an expression of languishment, despair, grief, or disillusionment, as well as
in the material of the narrative content, occasionally showing something
of singular beauty, but more frequently registering the afterlife of some
catastrophe, or an unnerving exposure to the nothingness of creaturely life,
that the question of the promise of happiness arises.
If for Döblin this promise is supposed to be figured narratively in
the realization of freedom, we find that for Sebald it is figured narratively
in the auratic appearance of beauty or in an experience of the sublime,
as when something evokes an image of the eternal within the realm of
transience or an image of the infinite within the realm of the finite. How-
ever, although I want to argue that the promise of happiness is borne by
the very existence of language as such—that, in other words, it is to the
very existence of language that the promise of happiness always owes its
possibility, nevertheless, the literary works that we have been interpreting
here generate various questions—and some unresolvable doubts—regarding
the redemptive power of language and the redeeming restitution of that
power. For, to the writers we have been reading here, and to many other
twentieth-century writers as well, it seems undeniable that our languages
have become corrupt and weak, and that their spirit, bearing the promise
of happiness, has not been, and is not, easily wrested from the destructive
influences of our time. Our languages are themselves in need of redeem-
ing, restoring their power to create, reveal, negate, and transform. Thus,
in order to find some indications of a redemptive power and see how our
two authors attempt to redeem the language in which they write and tell
their stories, I realized that we needed to consider not only narrative content,
but also prose structure or form. And this involved turning our attention to
what style, form, and structure might reveal about the ways in which their
prose is compelled to struggle toward a redemptive moment in dialectical
engagement with the forces of negativity.
In Döblin’s novel, we witnessed this struggle in the various ways that
the prose, telling the story of Biberkopf’s efforts to make a new life for
himself, a prose expressing the causality of freedom, was caused to suffer
for the sake of the promise of happiness, persevering despite being repeat-
edly interrupted, contradicted, mocked, weakened, and overwhelmed by
the relentless rhythms and rhymes expressive of the causality of Fate. In
Sebald’s stories, we witnessed this struggle in a prose the very syntax of
which frequently reflects an almost hopeless longing and gives form to
the expression of sadness and mourning. Failing to redeem what has been
ruined or destroyed, Sebald’s prose aspires at least to sustain a keen sense
 EPILOGUE / 247

of loss, preserving in language some stirrings of remembrance, and resisting,

even if only in syntactic physiognomies of mourning, the vanishing of the
promise and the sublime possibility of its redemption.
In Sebald, therefore, the stages of movement in the phenomenology
of spirit that culminate in unhappy consciousness are inflected somewhat
differently from the stages in Hegel. In Sebald's stories, stoicism attempts
a detachment, or indifference, that fails; but it fails because consciousness
finds within itself an attachment of sympathy that it is not able to aban-
don, despite its suffering; and in its desperation it is tempted to flee into
a vertiginous skepticism; but when it takes in the full significance of the
transience, the ephemerality, the ultimate nothingness of the world from
which, for the sake of knowledge, it has in vain tried to detach itself,
consciousness realizes that skepticism only deepens its perception of the
ontological condition of the world. And this intensifies its suffering in
sympathy with the world. Confronting the limits to detachment and at
the same time the limits to benevolent intervention, consciousness sinks
into a state of mind that swings back and forth between mourning and
melancholia.

We might perhaps achieve a world of more inclusive prosperity, finer justice,

more responsible freedom, and more lasting peace, an enlightened world
without cruelty and meanness of spirit: a happiness, nevertheless, of tragi-
cally compromised concrete universality. But what happiness is possible,
when transience and ephemerality will still haunt all earthly things? What
happiness is possible without a reconciliation that, denied recourse to any
metaphysical transcendence, engages this ontological dimension of earth-
bound life? In different ways, it seems that, casting a peculiarly estranging
light on creaturely existence, both our authors have drawn us into reflection
not only on questions of social and political urgency, but also on this most
compelling, most ultimate of questions.
Perhaps, in a time such as ours, it will be only in signs and traces of
damage, weakness, and suffering that writing, redeeming at least its own
fidelity to truth, though not its power, can bear witness to the forever
unfulfilled promise of happiness—the possibility of an impossible dream,
the dream of a truly reconciled, redeemed world.
 Notes

Prologue

 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Occasions:

1912–1951 (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), 43–44.
 2. Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate,” in Stevens: Collected
Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1997), 179.
  3. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. VII, 205; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136. The promise must
be broken if art is to remain faithful to the utopian idea it bears.
  4. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 15. In this text, Derrida
explains that the French word “aborder,” which can mean to approach or to reach
or to move near, “is the strange slowness of a movement of approach” that does
not (yet, or perhaps ever) reach its goal, its place of arrival. In Il sentiero dei nidi
di ragno (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 146, Italo Calvino expresses a thought similar
to Derrida’s, referring to “una patria lontana che vogliono raggiungere e che è patria
appunto perché è lontana.” As regards the “strange slowness” that Derrida refers to,
I note that such slowness is distinctive of Sebald’s prose—I mean, the rhythm of
his sentences—and suggest that it is the “Messianic rhythm” about which Ben-
jamin has written in his “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 312–13.
For the German, see “Theologisch-politisches Fragment,” Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge,
in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, pt.
1, 203–204. The rhythm of what I am calling “the language of Fate” in Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz is the very antithesis of that “messianic” rhythm: the causal-
ity of Fate is expressed in fast-paced, violent explosions of words, commanding,
warning, threatening.
 5. See Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay,
Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 18–19. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Emerson:
Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 485.
Emerson wrote there: “I am ready to be out in nature, and to be born again into
this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.”

249
 250 / NOTES TO PROLOGUE

 6. David C. Wood, “On Being Haunted by the Future,” Research in Phe-
nomenology, vol. 36 (2006), 274–98.
  7. Martin Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis?” in The Cambridge Companion
to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140.
 8. See, e.g., “Wildes Denken,” in W. G. Sebald, “Auf ungeheuer dünnem
Eis”: Gespräche 1971 bis 2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 82–84
and “Katastrophe mit Zuschauer,” ibid., 154–64. And see, regarding difficulties
confronting the description of horror, “Hitlers pyromanische Phantasien,” op. cit.,
180: “Die Reproduktion des Grauens oder besser: Die Rekreation des Grauens, ob
mit Bildern oder mit Buchstaben, ist etwas, das im Prinzip problematisch ist. Ein
Massengrab läßt sich nicht beschreiben.” Also see “Anatomie der Schwermut,” op.
cit., 123. Regarding post-Holocaust literature and the need for new “Schreibmo-
dalitäten,” new ways to write literary works about the past, retrieving collectively
repressed memory, see “Wie kriegen die Deutschen das auf die Reihe,” op. cit., 93.
  9. Regarding the “sehr elegante,” style of the prose in The Rings of Saturn,
a book filled with accounts of death and destruction, Sebald suggests that “the
detached style perhaps contributes to rendering the subject matter from a perspec-
tive that is endistancing [verfremdend], so that the reader might get the feeling that
the storyteller does not derive benefit from the things he or she is describing.” See
Sebald, “Katastrophe mit Zuschauer,” in “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis”: Gespräche
1971 bis 2001, 159. My translation. There is so far no published translation of this
collection of conversations.
10. I thank Charles Curtis for urging me to weave together the thematic
threads I have introduced in this paragraph.
11. Sebald, “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis”: Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, 159.
12. Ibid., 161.
13. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 5th ed. (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1941), §3, 9; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), §3, 29.
14. Ibid., 10 in the German edition, 30 in the English.
15. Ibid.
16. Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1.
17. Reflexive modernism as I propose to interpret it translates Kant’s so-called
“Copernican revolution” into the realm of art, so that, instead of being solely
or primarily concerned with mimesis, representations of reality, and references to
reality, the work of art becomes radically reflexive, or “transcendental”: solely or
primarily concerned with the presentation or exhibition of its own conditions
of possibility, exploring and examining those conditions, testing and contesting
them, generating questions and provoking reflections. For modernist literature, this
reflexivity means that the telling of a story becomes an opportunity for the story
to explore and raise questions about, or at least call attention to, its own terms of
possibility. What are the constitutive conditions of a literary work of art? How is
language engaged in its creation, its artifice, its semblance and pleasure? How does
language reflect the multiplicity of ways by which it can express and also at the same
time reflexively exhibit—recognize, state, question, negate, conceal, or reveal—
 NOTES TO PROLOGUE / 251

the beings it engages and our relationships to them? There are, of course, many
ways for this Kantian reflexivity to function within the literary work. Mallarmé’s
“reductions” showed the way. Vladimir Nabokov’s novels—the ones he wrote in
English—are exemplary works in this regard, interrupting the narrative in all kinds
of ways to reveal its underlying material conditions of possibility—ink, paper, a flat
surface—as well as its grammatological conditions, such as punctuation, sentence
structure, and spelling. Concerning what I am wont to call this “transcendental
reduction,” see my book Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical
Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Lexington
Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). In painting, Manet unquestionably showed
the way: his “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” compels one to give up the mimetic illusion, the
semblance of dimensional reality, exhibiting the image in its flatness—just paint on
a canvas surface. To encounter that painting is to undergo the “jouissance” of an
oscillation, one’s experience hovering between a moment of aesthetic illusion and
a moment of disillusion. Charles Curtis reminded me to observe that that paint-
ing, showing a group of three friends relaxing on the grass is a “reconstruction” of
Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving, “Judgment of Paris” (1510–1520), designed by
Raphael. The Manet is therefore a work of homage; but it also of course makes
that allusion in order to register, with a certain degree of mischief, a new, audacious
development in the history of painting.
18. In 1928, thus around the same time that Döblin was working on Berlin
Alexanderplatz, attempting to give expression to a new realism, a new honesty,
George Balanchine produced for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes the choreography for
his ballet “Apollo,” with music by Igor Stravinsky. Years later, reflecting on this
work, he said that that ballet was a turning point for him: “In its discipline and
restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling, the score was a revelation.
It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I too could
eliminate” (American Ballet Theatre program notes). In this work, the traditional
costumes and stage props were indeed eliminated, reducing the work to its formal
conditions of possibility and exhibiting those minimal conditions in their essential
purity and transparency. What he wanted was a new “honesty” or “naturalism” in
the presentation of dance; at the same time, however, this reduction served a kind
of “essentialism,” exhibiting in all its beauty the very essence of the art. See my
essay, “Balanchine’s Formalism,” Dance Perspectives, vol. 55 (Fall, 1973), 29–48.
Reprinted in Marshall Cohen and Roger Copeland (eds.), What Is Dance? Read-
ings in Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 123–145.
Reprinted again, but abridged, in ed. Kathleen Higgins, Aesthetics in Perspective
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 331–336.
19. Pericles Lewis, “Preface,” The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xvii–xviii.
20. Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. 2, part 2, p. 440. For the English, see “The
Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 84.
21. Ibid., 450 in the German edition, 94 in the English. Italics added.
22. Ibid., 442 in the German edition, 87 in the English.
 252 / NOTES TO PROLOGUE

23. In the conversations published under the title “Auf ungeheuer dünnem
Eis”: Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, Sebald avers that, as a writer, it is the silent dead who
interest him more than the living; that for him, literature is very much a question
of conversations with the departed, bringing them back, in a sense, to life. See his
remarks in “Die Natur des Zufalls,” op. cit., 65; “Echos aus der Vergangenheit,” op.
cit., 78; and “Bei den armen Seelen,” op. cit., 81.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Phi-
losophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. Daniel
Breazeale (New Jersey and London: Humanities Press International, 1979), 84.
Although I quote this text, I do not wish to claim that, in the late nineteenth
century and the early years of the twentieth century, the arts, art criticism, and
aesthetics were in any way influenced by this particular text.
25. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1966), Part
I, §16, 23.
26. Ibid., §21, 29.
27. In the England of the 1950s, however, a countermovement was under-
way, set in motion by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and the writings of
John L. Austin. In “A Plea for Excuses,” Austin argued that, “our common stock
of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the
connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations:
these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up
to the long test of survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary
and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in
our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method.” See J. L.
Austin, Philosophical Papers, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1961), 130. “A Plea for Excuses” dates from 1956–7.
28. Husserl’s contributions included reflections in the 1930s on a crisis in
the natural sciences in which he proposed a phenomenologically grounded rational
reconstruction of their procedures for the formation of the concepts they need:
a reconstruction that would exhibit the fundamental concepts of the sciences in
precise, intuitively transparent language. See his Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1970).
29. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” in Gesammelte Werke: Erzählungen,
Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Verlag, 1979). For the English, see “The Lord Chandos Letter,” trans. Joel Roten-
berg. New York Review of Books, 2005, 121.
30. Ibid., 122.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. It could perhaps be argued that, in an essay Sebald liked very much,
namely, “Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Sprache,” Rapporte (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), Peter Weiss wrote something of a response to the Hof-
mannsthal “Brief.” Whilst acknowledging that “behind every word the danger of a
 NOTES TO PROLOGUE / 253

fall into silence always threatens,” his essay concludes with an image in words of
the contemporary writer’s situation that is sober, but also encouraging, for failure in
terms of the old conventions might be liberating rather than defeating: “Thus the
writer comes, in the process of writing, to a detour around the decay of language
[Zerfall] and the powerlessness of his words, for every word with which he wins
a truth has been wrested from doubts and contradictions. Once, however, he got
away from all constraints and was released into a freedom where he lost sight of
himself. But the possibility also arises that, with the language which serves him in
his work and which nowhere has a fixed residence any more, he just might find
himself everywhere at home in this freedom.” Op. cit., vol. I, 187. My translation.
34. Stefan George, Das Neue Reich, Sämtliche Werke, 18 volumes (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1982), vol. IX, 133–34.
35. See Martin Heidegger, “Das Wort,” Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen:
Günther Neske, 1959), 217–38.
36. Martin Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis?” in The Cambridge Companion
to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140.
37. Regarding the question of “communicability”—what is communicated by
language as such—in what I think of as Benjamin’s “phenomenology” of language,
see a very lucid reading by Rodolphe Gasché, “Saturnine Vision and the Question
of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language,” in Benjamin’s
Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State
University, 1988), 83–104.
38. See W. G. Sebald,”Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis”: Gespräche 1971 bis 2001,
46.
39. See Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. VII, 193; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 127: “Whether
the promise [of happiness, of a redemptive utopia] is a deception—that is the
enigma.”
40. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 135.
41. Sebald, “Echos aus der Vergangenheit,” in Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, 72.
42. See especially Sebald’s Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, 149–52: Whereas, he
argues, we have always believed that it is great figures and great events that have
moved history, in reality, it is instead “on the tiny, invisible, unfathomable details
[Einzelheiten] that hope rests—if indeed it can count on [ruht] anything.”
43. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the
Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (New York:
Routledge, 2002), §30, 67.
44. Ibid., §38, 83.
45. Ibid., §21, 56.
46. Ibid.
47. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources
of Religion, Science and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 161.
48. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” op. cit., §21, 56.
 254 / NOTES TO PROLOGUE

49. Ibid., §22, 56.

50. On Derrida’s idea of “democracy to come,” see, for example, Rogues: Two
Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005); Islam and the West: Conversations with Jacques Derrida, trans.
Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Politics
of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997). In Islam and the West,
Derrida says, giving Benjamin’s highly abstract formulations the concrete definition
they urgently require: “What distinguishes the idea of democracy from all other
ideas of political regimes—monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and so on—is that
democracy is the only political system [. . .] that accepts its own historicity, that
is, its own future, which accepts its self-criticism, which accepts its perfectability.
[. . .] To exist in a democracy is to agree to challenge, to be challenged, to chal-
lenge the status quo in the name of a democracy to come. Democracy is always to
come, it is a promise, and it is in the name of that promise that one can always
criticize, or question, that which is proposed as de facto democracy.” (42–43) Such a
democracy, he says, would “free itself from the concept of autochthony, the concept
of being born on a land and belonging to it by birth, the concept of territory [. . .].
I have nothing against the State, I have nothing against citizenship, but I dare to
dream of a democracy that is not simply tied to a nation-state and to citizenship.
And it is under these conditions that one can speak of a universal democracy, a
democracy that is not only cosmopolitical but universal.” (Ibid., 43–44) Enlarging
this conception, he also argues that, “plurality is the very essence of civilization”
and that “the principle of differences and the principle of respect for alterity”
constitute the most basic “principles of civilization.” (Ibid., 80)
51. Ibid.
52. Naas, op. cit., 164.
53. John Caputo, “Hospitality and the Trouble with God,” in Phenomenologies
of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality, eds. Richard Kearney and Kascha
Semonovich (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), pp. 90 and 92.
54. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1971), 56.
55. Ibid., 88.
56. Ibid.
57. On the “slowness” of Sebald’s prose, see note 4 above.
58. On “transmissibility,” and other “–ability” words in Benjamin’s think-
ing, see Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2008).
59. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 205; 136 in the English translation.
60. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1951, 1969), §143, 300; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso Editions, 1978), §143, 223–24.
61. Walter Benjamin, “Zum Bilde Prousts,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part 1, 313; “The Image in Proust,”
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 204.
 NOTES TO PROLOGUE / 255

62. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-

Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126.
63. Adorno, Minima Moralia, §128, 266 in the German; §128, 200 in the
English.
64. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 114; 73 in the English translation.
65. Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Clara: oder Zusammenhang der Natur mit der
Geisterwelt (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862), 101; Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the
Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2002), 72.
66. On Jacques Derrida’s approach to writing about the Holocaust, see my
study (under my other name: David Michael Levin), “Cinders, Traces of Dark-
ness, Shadows on the Page: The Holocaust in Derrida’s Writing,” first published in
Postmodernism and the Holocaust, eds. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Value
Inquiry Book Series (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 265–286. Published
in Hungarian translation in Magyar Filozofiai Szemie (Budapest, Hungary), vol.
XXXIX, nos. 5–6 (1995), 821–45. Reprinted in a revised version in International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, issue 171 (September 2003), 269–88.
67. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. I, part 2, 693–94; “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1969), 253–54.
68. Ibid. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften
I, 2, 693–94 in the German; 254 in the English. Benjamin’s phrase, in German, is
“schwachen messianische Kraft.” Kant’s phrase, in §80 of the Critique of Judgement,
is “schwachen Strahl der Hoffnung” (“faint ray of hope”). See the translation by
Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 304. And see also
Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God, or The Theory of Language in the Kab-
balah,” trans. Simon Pleasance, in Diogenes, vol. 80, 194. The text is dedicated to
Franz Rosenzweig. And see Walter Benjamin, “Theologisch-politisches Fragment,”
Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1972), vol. II, part 1, 203–204; “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die
Sprache des Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), vol. II, part 1,
140–57; and Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 204–430. The English translations of these
works are: “Theological-Political Fragment,” Edmund Jephcott, trans., in Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken
Books, 1986), 312–13; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” also
in Reflections, 328–29; and The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso,
New Left Books, 1998). The title in English is egregiously misleading, because the
whole point of that work is to distinguish between tragedy and Trauerspiel; thus,
its claim to originality consists in a refined analysis of the Trauerspiel as a distinct
theatrical genre during the German Baroque. Also see Gershom Scholem, “In
the Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,” Diogenes, vol. 79
 256 / NOTES TO PROLOGUE

(Fall 1972), 59–80 and vol. 80 (Winter 1972), 164–94; Alexander Garcia Dütt-
man, The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger,
and Rosenzweig, trans. Arlene Lyons (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000);
Giorgio Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical
Redemption,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel
Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); David Farrell Krell, The
Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2005); Dennis Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy
and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Ian Balfour, The
Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Litera-
ture in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State
University of New York, 1988); Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The
Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Nikolas Kompridis, ed., Philosophical Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 2006);
Manfred Frank, Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); Géza von Molnar, Romantic Vision, Ethi-
cal Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
1987); Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans.
Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Martin Kavka, Jewish
Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); Gérard Bensussan, Le temps messianique: Temps historique et temps vécu (Paris:
Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2001); Marc Crépon, Les promesses du langage:
Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Heidegger (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2001); and
Piero Cresto-Dina, Messianismo romantico: Walter Benjamin interprete di Friedrich
Schlegel (Torino: Trauben Edizioni, 2002). These are a few of the many writings to
which I am greatly indebted.
69. Benjamin, “Theologisch-politisches Fragment,” Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part 1, 203–204; “Theolog-
ical-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 312–13. Translation modified.
70. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The author’s Logisch-
philosophische Abhandlung, with a new translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
ness, and with the introduction by Bertrand Russell (New York, Humanities Press,
1961), remark number 6.43.
71. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte
(New York: Library of America, 1983), 22.
72. Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, eds.
Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997),
282. Stevens is of course alluding to Hölderlin’s poem, “Bread and Wine.”
73. I recall seeing an advertisement on television some years ago: “Everyone
loves liberty!” Then, after a new image appeared: “Liberty Mutual Insurance!”
74. See Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des
Menschen,” op. cit. The English title of this work is “On Language as Such and
the Language of Man.” The bibliographical details are provided in note 68 above.
 NOTES TO PROLOGUE / 257

75. But see Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York:
Routledge: 2006), 13 and 18, in which, somewhat like Benjamin, he delights in
the plurality of languages and finds a unique happiness in encountering, in the
course of translation, languages foreign to him. Also see Jacques Derrida, “Des
Tours de Babel,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Derrida likewise suggests that instead of telling a tragic story of fallenness, mourn-
ing the exile of language from Paradise and its shattering into a veritable babbling
of countless thousands of different tongues, we should recall that expulsion and
its consequences as giving a happy opportunity to learn from these languages the
distinctive treasures they bear; for each one of the languages will take us into a
fascinating and uniquely different world.
76. Jacques Derrida, Sauf le Nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 56. For the English
translation see On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 55–56.
77. See W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960),
for a discussion of referential opacity and indeterminacy in translation.
78. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Urtheil und Sein,” in Sämtliche Werke (Grosse Stutt-
garter Ausgabe), ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1943–1985), vol.
IV, 216–17; “Judgment and Being,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on
Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1988), 37.
79. But see, e.g., Anu Anand, “Storytelling Returns to Delhi’s Streets: The
Lost Art of Urdu Storytelling,” BBC Radio 4 (92–95 FM), BBC Online, April 2,
2011. “Urdu once flowered in Delhi. When Central Asian conquerors swept into
India 500 years ago, Persian, Arabic and Turkic idioms tangled with the native
tongue. The result was language so ornate, so feisty and full of pathos, it inspired
north Indian poetry, music and theatre for centuries to come. Part of its beauty lies
in the ability of the language to create long phrases that, like entwined flowers in
a garland, create a skein of thought fraught with multiple meanings. If, in English,
you said ‘The moon rose,’ in Urdu storytelling, that might become ‘The sorcerer
of this world changed his robes.’ ”
80. Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Men-
schen,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol.
II, part 1, 156; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflec-
tions: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York: Schocken, 1986), 331. And see Jean-Luc Nancy, La partage des voix (Paris:
Éditions de Galilée, 1982) as well as Werner Hamacher, “Intensive Sprachen,” in
Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin, ed. Christian L. Hart-Nibbrig (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 174–235.
81. Max Horkheimer, “Zum Rationalismusstreit in der gegenwärtigen Philoso-
phie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 3 (1934); “The Rationalism Debate in Con-
temporary Philosophy,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings,
trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1933), 249. Also see Hauke Brunkhorst, “Dialectical P ­ ositivism of Hap-
piness: Max Horkheimer’s Materialist Deconstruction of Philosophy,” trans. John
 258 / NOTES TO PROLOGUE

McCole, in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang

Bonß, and John McCole (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 67–98.
82. See Jacques Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned,” Interview with Evelyne
Grossman, June 29, 2000, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds.
Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005),
106–107.
83. See Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 162 and 198; 106 and 131 in the English
translation.
84. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 92. Also see Jacques Derrida, “The Deconstruction of Actuality,”
trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Negations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001,
ed. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
85. See Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Wal-
ter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003),
24–25.
86. G.W. F. Hegel, “Introduction,” The Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1988), 29.
87. See Derrida’s radical way of conceptualizing the future, e.g., in his early
work, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 5: “The
future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which
breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented,
as a sort of monstrosity.” This “future” is no ordinary future, no temporal form of a
future present or a future modality of the “living present.” It has, in fact, a certain
messianicity—albeit without messianism—implicit in its definition.
88. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 170.
89. See my essay, “Civilized Cruelty: Nietzsche on the Disciplinary Practices
of Western Culture,” New Nietzsche Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2002),
72–94.
90. Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,” Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 87; “In Memory of Eichendorff,” Notes to Literature,
trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
vol. I, 73.
91. With regard to Walter Benjamin’s representation of historical potentiali-
ties, aborted revolutionary projects, and missed opportunities, see Samuel Weber,
Benjamin’s “-abilities” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
92. See Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 34.
93. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Un essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 188; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 213.
94. Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974), 152; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 194.
95. Benjamin, “Theologisch-Politisches Fragment,” Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part 1, 203; “Theologico-
 NOTES TO PROLOGUE / 259

Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed.

Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 312.
  96. Adorno, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” in Philosophische Frühschriften,
Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), vol. I, 365. Italics
added for emphasis.
  97. Jürgen Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Kleine politische Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. V, 202–3; Autonomy and Solidarity:
Interviews, ed. and intro. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1986), 125–26. One could
perhaps say, regarding Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics or his later theory
of communicative action, and about Maurice Blanchot’s conception of conversa-
tion in his Entretien infini, what Gianfranco Contini says about Paul Claudel’s
Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher (Paris 1935), but of course returning dialogue
and its language, which for Claudel is to be oriented by the faith constitutive of
Christianity, back to the realm of the secular or profane life. In his Esercizi di lettura
(Torino: Edizioni Giulio Einaudi, 1974), 182, Contini reads Claudel’s conception of
the ethical spirit that should guide conversation as allegorical, as, in effect, taking
the interlocutors on a journey toward Paradise.
  98. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 117; Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays,
trans. William M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 155.
  99. See David Kleinberg-Levin, Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Respon-
sibility in the Ecology of Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Levinas (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2008).
100. Cited in Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 102–103.
101. For the first quoted phrase, translating “transzendentale Nötigung,”
see Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 324. For the second phrase, see his “Reply,”
in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s “The Theory of Communica-
tive Action,” eds. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L.
Jones (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 226.
102. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung:
Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriften 1940–1950 (Frankfurt am Main: S.
Fischer, 1987), 15; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 ), xvii.
103. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Aktualität der Philosophie,” Gesammelte
Schriften, Philosophische Frühschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), vol. I,
334; “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos, no. 31 (Spring 1977), 126.
104. Regarding “force fields of potential intelligibility,” I have borrowed this
felicitous phrase, a variation on what was originally Adorno’s term, from Michael
Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 13. It nicely characterizes the methodology
operative in the readings of literature that I have undertaken.
105. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, ed. Itta Shedletzky (München: C. H. Beck,
1995), vol. I, 463; On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York; Schocken, 1976),
57.
 260 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 1

Part I

Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz:

Language as the Causality of Fate

  1. Herakleitos of Ephesos, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, trans. Kath-

leen Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 32.
 2. Walter Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter,” in Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part 1, 171–179; “Fate
and Character” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 304, 306. Benjamin wants
to disconnect character from fate: character is not fate; one cannot predict its
future. His argument is convincing. However, in the case of Biberkopf, matters are
different, for the language of Fate has seized control of the narrative into which
he has been cast. That is what makes his story so fascinating.
 3. Benjamin, “Zur Moral und Anthropologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), vol. VI, 84; “Outline of the Psy-
chophysical Problem,” in Selected Writings 1913–1926, ed. Michael Jennings (Cam-
bridge: The Belnap Press of the Harvard University Press), vol. 1, 398.
 4. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. I, part 1, 308–09; Origin of German
Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 129–130. The
English translation of Benjamin’s title betrays the decisive difference he wants to
make between tragedy and mourning play. Indeed, the whole point of his work is
to illuminate that difference!
  5. Ibid., 308 in the German edition, 129 in the English edition.
  6. Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter,” op. cit., 174. In Döblin’s narrative,
Fate, embodied in language, becomes a causal force overpowering Biberkopf. His
happiness is never assured, because the narrative never makes it certain that Fate
has released him.

Chapter 1: Fatality: Character as Fate

  1. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf

(München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, ungekürzte Ausgabe, 1965); Berlin Alex-
anderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004). Hereafter, this work will be cited as BA, with the pages of
the original German version shown first and the pages of the English translation
appearing after, in the second position.
 2. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—
Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983, 1992),
vol. 29/30; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World—Finitude—Solitude,
trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 1 / 261

Press, 1995). For an incomparable discussion of Heidegger’s argument for an abyssal

difference between the human and the animal, I recommend Miguel de Beiste-
gui, Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003), part III, 83–118.
 3. Several books have been quite useful for defining the historical back-
ground for the fictional works and critical discourse of Döblin and Sebald: Neil H.
Donahue, ed., A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Rochester,
New York: Camden House, Boydell & Brewster, 2005); Pericles Lewis, The Cam-
bridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Graham
Bartram, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004). Although neither Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz
nor Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn can be characterized as in the “Bildungsroman”
genre, represented above all by Goethe, in variously different ways they neverthe-
less both presuppose the authority of that genre, in order precisely to sharpen the
historical significance of their divergence. They also presuppose familiarity with
the rebellious successors to the conventions of that genre in the “via negativa” of
Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In both these
works, there are innocent heroes who learn to see the world with disenchanted,
morally lucid eyes. In Hyperion’s very first letter to Bellarmin, he compares his
“Fatherland” to a cemetary, a “Totengarten”: the antithesis of Paradise. (The poet’s
use of the letter removes the narrative from immediacy, placing it in the filter and
belatedness of memory.) Döblin’s novel works with an anti-hero whose journey is
not really an inner spiritual one, as in the novels of Hölderlin and Novalis, but
a question of learning the ways of social comformity—a certain “Anständigkeit.”
Sebald’s “pilgrimage” not only weaves specific allusions, within its narrative, to
these two earlier works, but also shows some parallels and correspondences to the
adventures in Hyperion and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, although it is not a journey
of learning, a journey from innocence to disillusionment, so much as it is a jour-
ney of testimony, a work of memory, bearing witness to a time of destruction and
disenchantment. But if one reads the Döblin and the Sebald without keeping the
“Bildungsroman” genre—and also the skeptical deconstructions of that genre in
the novels by Hölderlin and Novalis, one misses a certain dimension of narrative
meaning and historical significance.
  4. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Rostock (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1971), 62.
 5. See Friedrich Hölderlin, “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” in Sämtliche
Werke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darmstadt: 1960), §2, 1063 and §3, 1065;
“Remarks on Antigone,” in Thomas Pfau, ed. and trans., Essays and Letters on
Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), §3, 111 and 113. See
also his “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” op. cit., 1056–1057; “Remarks on Oedipus,”
op. cit., §2, 102–103.
  6. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck
(New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956). Concerning the faculty of freedom, Kant
states that it is “the moral law, itself needing no justifying grounds,” which shows
itself to be “not only possible but actual in beings that acknowledge the moral law
 262 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 1

as binding upon them.” “The moral law,” he continues, “is in fact a law of causality
through freedom and thus a [transcendental] law of the possibility of a supersensuous
[dimension of human] nature, just as the metaphysical law of events in the world
of sense is a law of the causality of [our] sensuous nature.” It is thus a question
of “freedom as a causality of pure reason.” Op. cit., 49. In this regard, see Josef
Quack, Geschichtsroman und Geschichtskritik zu Alfred Döblins Wallenstein (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), esp. 324–25 for an excellent discussion of the
conflict between the “causality of freedom” and the “causality of fate.” His study
throws much-needed light on Döblin’s thinking concerning freedom and fate; it
does not, however, explore what is specifically in question in the present chapter,
namely, the relation of these two causalities to Döblin’s uses of language. Also see
Heinz Eidam, Kausalitat aus Freiheit: Kant und der Deutsche Idealismus (Würzburg:
Könighausen & Neumann, 2007).
 7. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels
Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 473.
 8. See Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963); The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas
Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). This collection of essays
opens an exceptionally lucid window to show us life and thought in the Weimar
Republic. In particular, I recommend his insightful essay, “Die Wartenden,” in
which he critically examines the different possible attitudes of hoping and wait-
ing—waiting for the moment to realize utopia or or waiting for an intervention
in history signifying the time of redemption.
  9. Döblin, “The Writer and the State,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook,
eds.Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of
California, 1994), 288–90. For the sake of a more felicitous style, I have here and
there altered the translation.
10. See Döblin’s “May the Individual Not Be Stunted by the Masses,” in The
Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 386–87.
11. Regarding a “petrifakte Geistigkeit,” a “petrified life of the spirit,” see
Otto Keller, Döblins “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Die Grossstadt im Spiegel ihrer Diskurse
(Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 20–23.
12. See Benjamin’s argument in his review of Berlin Alexanderplatz, published
in “Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 230–36.
13. This would be a fitting place to name, in no particular order, the texts
from the reading of which I have benefited: Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, in “Weimar and Now Series,” vol. 37
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Peter Bekes, Alfred Döblin, Berlin
Alexanderplatz: Interpretation, in “Oldenbourg-Interpretationen mit Unterrichtshil-
fen,” Bd. 74 (München: Oldenbourg, 1995); Gabriele Sander, Alfred Döblin (Stutt-
gart: Reclam, 2001) and An die Grenzen des Wirklichen und Möglichen: Studien zu
Alfred Döblins Roman, Berge, Meere und Giganten (Frankfurt and New York: Peter
Lang, 1988); Gabriele Sander, ed., Internationales Alfred-Döblin Kolloquium Leiden
1995 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997); Richard John Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde:
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 1 / 263

Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999); Herbert Scherer, “The Individual and the Collective in
Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic, ed. Keith
Bullivans (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman
& Littefield, 1977) and, with Bernhard Spies, ed., Literarisches Krisenbewußtsein: eine
Perzeptions- und Produktionsmuster im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Iudicium, 2001);
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Source-
book (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), including texts discussing Döblin
and texts by Döblin himself; Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in
1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Roland Dollinger,
Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson, eds., A Companion to the Works of
Alfred Döblin (Rochester: Camden House, 2004); Klaus Müller-Salget, Alfred Döblin:
Werk und Entwicklung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973; revised 1988); Wulf Koepke, The Criti-
cal Reception of Alfred Döblin’s Major Novels (Rochester, New York: Camden House,
2003); Roland Dollinger, Totalität und Totalitarismus im Exilwerk Döblins (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 1994); Michael Baum, Kontingenz und Gewalt: Semi-
otische Strukturen und erzählte Welt in Alfred Döblins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003); Ute Harst, Der Begriff “Schicksal” in
Alfred Döblins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Versuch einer neuen Methode der Text­
analyse (Aachen, 1980); Walter Benjamin, “Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin
Alexanderplatz,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1972), 230–36; Helmut Kiesel, Literarische Trauerarbeit: Das Exil- und Spätwerk
Alfred Döblins (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986); W. G. Sebald, Der Mythos
der Störung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1980); Ingrid Schuster, ed., Zu
Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1980); Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, Alfred
Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Bern and München: Francke Verlag,
1973); Armin Arnold, Die Literatur des Expressionismus: Sprachliche und thematische
Quellen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966); Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “Der Wissende und
die Gewalt: Alfred Döblins Theorie des epischen Werks und der Schluß von Berlin
Alexanderplatz,” in Materialien zu Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. Matthias
Prangel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 150–85; Kathleen Komar, “Tech-
nique and Structure in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” The German Quarterly, vol.
54 (May 1981), 318–34; Helmut Schwimmer, Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
(München: R. Oldenbourg, 1973); Dieter Mayer, Alfred Döblins Wallenstein: Zur
Geschichtsauffassung und zur Struktur (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1972); Karl H. Bless-
ing, Die Problematik des ‘modernen Epos’ im Frühwerk Alfred Döblins (Meisenheim am
Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1972); David Midgley, “The Dynamics of Consciousness:
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in The German Novel in the Twentieth Century:
Beyond Realism, ed. Midgley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1993), 95–109 and Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in Ger-
man Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Alan F. Bance, ed., Weimar
Germany: Writers and Politics (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982); Peter
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1984); Ulrich Dronske, Tödliche Präsens/zen: Über die Philosophie des
Literarischen bei Alfred Döblin (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998); David
 264 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 1

Dollenmayer, Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1988) and “An Urban Montage and Its Significance in Döblin’s Berlin Alexander-
platz,” German Quarterly, vol. 53, 1980, 317–36; Sabine Hake, “Urban Paranoia in
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” The German Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3 (Summer
1994), 347–68; Griseldis W. Crowhurst-Bond, “The Language of Violence in Alfred
Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Its Translation into English,” Journal of
Literary Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1986), 58–71; Andrew M. McLean, “Joyce’s Ulysses
and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Comparative Literature, vol. 25, 1973, 97–113;
and Robert B. McFarland, “Elective Divinities: Exile and Religious Conversion in
Alfred Döblin’s Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey), Karl Jakob Hirsch’s Heimkehr zu
Gott (Return to God), and Karl Stern’s The Pillar of Fire,” in Christianity and Litera-
ture, September 2007, vol. 57, no. 1.
14. Adorno, “Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus,” in Noten zur Literatur,
Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. II, 104–105;
“Looking Back on Surrealism,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), vol. I, 88–90. Translation revised.
15. Gabriele Sander, “Döblin’s Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf,” in A
Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, eds. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and
Heidi Thomann Tewarson (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 139.
16. See Adorno, “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität: Zum elften Band der Werke
von Karl Kraus,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974),
366–87; “Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Work of Karl
Kraus,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992), vol. II, 40–57.
17. There is a certain “obsession” with the criminal character Moosbrugger
in Robert Musil’s never-completed epic novel, The Man Without Qualities, large
parts of which were published in 1931. The Moosbrugger motif—his character, his
contemptible crime and the question of his just punishment—haunts the novel,
persistently erupting into many of the conversations that take place throughout
the novel. Much as I should like to, I cannot undertake here a critical analysis
comparing Moosbrugger and Biberkopf as allegorical figures whose lives, despite
their criminal histories—or perhaps precisely because of their pasts—challenge the
moral corruption and hypocrisy of their society and culture, their contemptible
character obliquely reminding us, as if they were mirrors, to notice our own moral
failures and the failures of our society and culture. Both novels show us characters
without character, “without qualities”: men without morally resolute, morally self-
determined character.
18. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar
Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), xiii.
19. Michael Baum, Kontingenz und Gewalt: Semiotische Strukturen und erzählte
Welt in Alfred Döblins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2003), 209ff.
20. Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,
ungekürzte Ausgabe, 1965; Düsseldorf und Zürich: Patmos Verlag, Walter Verlag,
2000), 94; Berlin Alexanderplatz, trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Continuum, 2004),
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 1 / 265

69–70. Italics added to the German by me. Hereafter, references to this novel will
be cited as BA, with the German pages first, the English second.
21. Baum, op. cit., 221.
22. See Otto Keller, Döblins “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Die Grossstadt im Spiegel
ihrer Diskurse, 52.
23. Regarding Biberkopf’s speech, his use of language, see Peter Bekes, Alfred
Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Interpretation, in “Oldenbourg-Interpretationen mit
Unterrichtshilfen,” Bd. 74 (München: Oldenbourg, 1995), 48–58 and Michael
Baum, Kontingenz und Gewalt: Semiotische Strukturen und erzählte Welt in Alfred Döb-
lins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003),
214–224. Also see W. G. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006), 121 on speech pathologies as a reflection of
disturbed social relations.
24. Michael McGillen has called my attention to a mediaeval German dia-
logue with Death, perhaps one of the earliest (around 1400), by Johannes von Tepl
(Saaz), bearing the title Der Ackermann aus Böhmen.
25. Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein Geschichtsphilosophischer Ver-
such über die Formen der großen Epik (Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand,
1974), 55; The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 64.
26. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Hegels the-
ologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907), 279–80;
Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans.
T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 228–29. In “Love and
Law: Hegel’s Critique of Morality” (Social Research, Summer 2003), Jay Bernstein
discusses Hegel’s reflections on the “causality of fate” in his early essay, “The Spirit
of Christianity and its Fate” (1788–1789). Bernstein argues that this text “provides
the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logical structure and moral content
of Hegel’s ethical vision. This is a vision of ethical life itself: the meaning of ethics,
its internal dynamic logic, and ethicality as constitutive of our relations to ourselves,
others, and the natural world. In working out the substance of ethical living, above
all in opposition to Kant’s morality of universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elabo-
rating the structural contours of human experience. [. . .] Hegel’s ethical vision is
hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical life becoming the pivot
and underlying logic for the philosophical comprehension of human experience in
general. [. . .] At the center of Hegel’s ethical vision in the “Spirit” essay is the
idea of a causality of fate, an ethical logic of action and reaction: to act against
another person is to destroy my own life, to call down upon myself revenging fates;
I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming myself. In this way
the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing
and foundering of all. Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in
which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the
structures of interaction governing everyday life. It is this that is Hegel’s great idea
since it reveals how ethical life matters independent of any particular moral norms,
laws, ideals, principles, or ends. Ethical life is not, in the first instance, about moral
principles, but about the ways in which both particular actions and whole forms of
 266 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 2

action injure, wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the secret
bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all those around us.”
27. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Hegels the-
ologische Jugendschriften, 280; Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” in
Early Theological Writings, 230. See an interesting novel by Gabriele Romagnoli,
L’Artista (Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 2004), 230: “L’amore non è
abbastanza, se non dà la salvezza.” (“Love is not enough,” he is saying, “if it does
not bring salvation.”
28. Concerning “fate,” see Ute Harst, Der Begriff “Schicksal” in Alfred Döb-
lins Roman, “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Versuch einer neuen Methode der Textanalyse
(Aachen: 1980) and Gabriele Sander, “Die philosophischen und religiösen Schrift-
en” and “Die politische Schriften,” in Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001),
293–337.
29. See Klaus Müller-Salget, “Entselbstung und Selbstbehauptung: Der
Erzähler Alfred Döblin,” in Metamorphosen des Dichters: Das Selbstverständnis
deutscher Schriftsteller von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Gunter E. Grimm
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), 348. My translation.
30. Döblin, Schriften zu Leben und Werk, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt (Olten und
Freiburg im Breisgau, 1986), 229. My translation.
31. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Tuebner; and Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1914–2000), vol. VII, 74; Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected
Works, eds. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989–2002), vol. III, 96.

Chapter 2: Natural History

  1. Adorno, “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität: Zum elften Band der Werke von
Karl Kraus,” op. cit., 367; “Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of
the Work of Karl Kraus,” op. cit., 40.
  2. Döblin, Das Ich über die Natur (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1927). Also see
“Vom Alten zum neuen Naturalismus: Akademie-Rede über Arno Holz,” in Schriften
zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1989), 263–70. And see
Ulrich Dronske, Tödliche Präsens/zen: Über die Philosophie des Literarischen bei Alfred
Döblin, 46–72; Peter Bekes, Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Interpretation, in
“Oldenbourg-Interpretationen mit Unterrichtshilfen,” Bd. 74 (München: Olden-
bourg, 1995), 102ff; Roland Dollinger, “Technology and Nature: From Döblin’s
Berge Meere und Giganten to a Philosophy of Nature,” in A Companion to the Works
of Alfred Döblin, eds. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann (Roch-
ester: Camden House, 2004), 93–109; and Leo Kreutzer, “Naturphilosophisches,”
Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1970), 81–88.
  3. Döblin, “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters,” in Schriften zu Ästhe-
tik, Poetik und Literatur, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau:
Walter-Verlag, 1989), 168–90.
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 3 / 267

 4. Döblin, “Die Natur und ihre Seelen,” in Aufsätze zur Literatur (Olten:
Walter-Verlag, 1963), 79. My translation.
  5. See Otto Keller, Döblins “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Die Grossstadt im Spiegel
ihrer Diskurse (Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 54.
 6. Regarding the separation and intertwining of “Naturgeschichte” and
“Heilsgeschichte” in Döblin’s novels, see Roland Dollinger, Totalität und Totalita-
rismus im Exilwerk Döblins (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 107–155.
  7. Döblin, “Mein Buch, Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Berlin Alexanderplatz (Olten
und Freiburg im Bresgau: Walter Verlag, Sonderband, 1967), 494; my translation.
Also in his Schriften zu Leben und Werk (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-
Verlag, 1986), 215–17.
 8. Döblin’s remark is quoted in Leo Kreutzer, “Naturphilosophisches,” in
Alfred Döblin: sein Werk bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970), 87. My transla-
tion. The description of the physiology involved in sexual potency is to be found
in Berlin Alexanderplatz, 34–35 in the German, 20–21 in the English.
  9. See Döblin, “Das Ich und die Dingwelt” and “Das Gegenstück der Natur,”
in Unser Dasein (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1988). And see Benjamin, “Über Sprache
überhaupt und die Sprache des Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part
1, 140–57; “On Language as such and the Language of Man,” in Reflections,
314–32.
10. See Michael Baum, op. cit., 161–76, 185–86.
11. Roland Dollinger, Totalität und Totalitarismus im Exilwerk Döblins, 13. My
translation.

Chapter 3: Döblin’s Conception of the Modern Novel

  1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman,”

in Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1974), vol. II, 43; “The Position of the Storyteller in the Contemporary Novel,”
in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1991), vol. I, 32.
  2. My discussion here draws on Döblin’s essays in his Schriften zu Ästhetik,
Poetik, und Literatur and his Aufsätze zur Literatur. Especially important for our
purposes are his essay “Der Bau des epischen Werkes,” written whilst he was writ-
ing Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his much earlier essay, “An Romanautoren und ihre
Kritiker.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from these two collections
of his writings are my own.
  3. Theodor W. Adorno, “Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman,”
op. cit., 42; “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” op. cit.,
vol. I, 31.
  4. Ibid., 41 in the German, 30 in the English.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werkes,” in Aufsätze zur Literatur, 106.
 268 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 3

 7. Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, eds., Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeit-
genössischen Kritik (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), 300.
  8. See Herbert Scherer, “The Individual and the Collective in Alfred Döb-
lin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” trans. Peter and Margaret Lincoln, in Culture and Soci-
ety in the Weimar Republic, ed. Keith Bullivant (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1977), 56–70.
 9. Theodor W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” in Noten zur
Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol.
II, 52; “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University, 1991), vol. I, 39.
10. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werkes,” in Aufsätze zur Literatur, 113.
11. Ibid., 123.
12. See Döblin, “Gespräche über Gespräche: Döblin am Alexanderplatz,” in
Schriften zu Leben und Werk (Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1986),
203. Also see his “Schriftstellerei und Dichtung,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und
Literatur, 202–204 for a discussion of “Wortkunst,” the “art and artifice of words.”
13. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik
und Literatur, 245. My translation.
14. Ibid., 229. My translation. In Tödliche Präsens/zen: Über die Philosophie
des Literarischen bei Alfred Döblin (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998),
Ulrich Dronske criticizes Döblin for the cardinal Derridean sin, perpetuating the
metaphysics of presence by arguing for the superiority of speech and voice over
the written word. I think his criticism comically misguided. Despite this, he is
occasionally perceptive.
15. Döblin, “Literatur und Rundfunk (September 1929),” in Schriften zu
Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 258–59.
16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cam-
bridge: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 240.
17. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik
und Literatur, 243. My translation.
18. Ibid., 244. My translation.
19. Ibid. My translation. Also see Döblin’s 1919 essay, “Reform des Romans,”
in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 148, where he compares the writing
of a novel to the art of painting. In both cases, it is a question of bringing out
and developing the deeply original potencies and latencies of the material: “die
ureigenen Potenzen und Latenzen des Materials entwickeln.” And it is out of the
lively feeling of the material that the formation of the word flows: “aus diesem
lebendigen Gefühl des Materials quillt auch die Gestaltung des Wortes [. . .].”
20. Döblin, Schriften zur Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, 284–85. My translation.
21. Döblin, Aufsätze zur Literatur, 18. My translation. Also see his “An
Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker. Berliner Program (März 1913),” Schriften zu Ästhe-
tik, Poetik und Literatur, 122–27. Regarding the “style of stone,” see Peter Bekes,
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (München: Oldenbourg-Verlag, 1995), 16 and
Dietmar Voss, “Subjektpanzer, ‘Steine’ der Lust und der Dichtung: Ein Beitrag zur
symbolischen Textur und imaginativen Poetik des Werks von Alfred Döblin,” in
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 4 / 269

Internationale Alfred-Döblin Kolloquien (Leipzig, 1997), 33–50. Also interesting is the

discussion of Döblin’s “naturalistic” style by Thomas Isermann, “Zu einer Physi-
ologie des Schreibens bei Alfred Döblin,” in Internationale Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquien
(Münster, Marbach, 1989–91), 36–43.
22. See Ulrich Dronske, Tödliche Präsens/zen: Über die Philosophie des Liter-
arischen bei Alfred Döblin (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), 97.
23. See Gabriele Sander, “Döblin’s Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf,” in
A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, eds. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke,
and Heidi Thomann Tewarson (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 147.
24. Regarding Döblin’s narrative structures, see Christoph Dunz, Erzähltechnik
und Verfremdung: die Montagetechnik und Perspektivierung in Alfred Döblin, “Berlin
Alexanderplatz” und Franz Kafka, “Der Verschollene,” Europäische Hochschulschrift-
en, Reihe I, Bd. 1458 (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1995), especially 55 and
99–116; Michael Baum, Kontingenz und Gewalt: Semiotische Strukturen und erzählte
Welt in Alfred Döblins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2003), 97–138; and Roland Dollinger, Totalität und Totalitarismus im
Exilwerk Döblins (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 171–74.
25. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schrift-
en, vol. I, part 1, 352; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London and New York: Verso, 1998), 176.
26. See Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als
Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1971).
27. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Éditions Galilée, 1994), 258; Politics
of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 231.

Chapter 4: The Language of Fate

  1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or The Prosthesis of Origin,
trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 59.
 2. James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and
Schoenberg,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 160.
 3. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1994), and “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, vol. 57,
no. 1 (Spring 1990).
  4. See the excellent essay by Neil H. Donahue, “The Fall of Wallenstein,
or the Collapse of Narration? The Paradox of Epic Intensity in Döblin’s ‘Wal-
lenstein,’ ” in A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, eds. Dollinger, Koepke,
and Tewarson, 81–88.
  5. See Döblin, Aufsätze zur Literatur, pp. 16–17.
 6. Donahue, “The Fall of Wallenstein, or the Collapse of Narration?” op.
cit., 76.
 270 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 4

 7. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik
und Literatur, 243. My translation.
  8. Döblin, “Der Schriftsteller und der Staat,” in Schriften zur Ästhetik, Poetik
und Literatur, 160. My translation.
 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
239; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), 185.
10. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., 247 in the French, 194 in the English.
11. Benjamin, “Die Bedeutung der Sprache in Trauerspiel und Tragödie,”
Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part
1, 140; “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings
1913–1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Belnap Press, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1996), vol. I, 61.
12. Donahue, “The Fall of Wallenstein, or the Collapse of Narration?” op.
cit., 77.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Ist die Kunst heiter?” in Noten zur Literatur, Gesam-
melte Schriften, vol. II, 600; “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. II, 248.
14. Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche (Wien: Die Fackel, 1924), §4, 328: “Die
Sprache hat in Wahrheit der, der nicht das Wort, sondern nur den Schimmer hat,
aus dem er das Wort ersehnt, erlöst und empfängt.” For this translation, I am grate-
ful for the collaboration of Michael McGillen. Also pertinent is another of Kraus’s
aphorisms. In my own translation: “The storyteller differs from the politician only
owing to the fact that he has [been given] time; but what is common to them is
that time possesses them both.” See Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, op. cit., §4,
329. I submit that, in Döblin’s novel, “Time” is an implacable, unconquerable power
that appears in the expressive, archaic language of Fate and Death.
15. “Ist die Kunst heiter?,” Noten zur Literatur, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
II, 603; “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. II, 251.
16. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Urfaust, ed. R. H. Samuel (London:
Macmillan, 1967, 1958) and Faust: Der Tragödie (Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1960),
Part I, ll. 4611–4612.
17. See Roberto Michels, “Psychologie der antikapitalistischen Massenbewe-
gungen,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonimik, vol. IX, Das soziale System des Kapitalismus
(Tübingen, 1926).
18. See Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Hegels
theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907), 279–92;
Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans.
T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), esp. 228–41.
19. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, ed. Jeremy J. Sha-
piro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 111.
20. See Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “Der Wissende und die Gewalt: Alfred Döblins
Theorie des epischen Werks und der Schluß von Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Materialen
zu Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. Matthias Prangel (Frankfurt am Main,
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 156–65; David Dollenmayer, Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and “An Urban Montage and Its
Significance in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” German Quarterly, vol. 53, 1980, 89;
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 4 / 271

Leo Kreutzer, “Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf,” in Kreutzer, Alfred Döblin: Sein
Werk bis 1933 (Stuttgart, Berlin: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1970), 121–34; and Otto
Keller, Döblins “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Die Grossstadt im Spiegel ihrer Diskurse, 125–29.
21. See Bayerdörfer and Gunter E. Grimm (eds.), Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische
Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur der 20. Jahrhundert (Königstein: Athenäeum,
1985), 156–65.
22. Marcuse, op. cit., 125.
23. Ibid., 127.
24. Roland Dollinger, Totalität und Totalitarismus im Exilwerk Döblins (Würz-
burg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 149, 151. My own translation.
25. See Benjamin, “Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 230–36.
26. Döblin, Briefe (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1970), 165–66.
27. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cam-
bidge: Polity Press, 1998), 99–100.
28. W. G. Sebald, Der Mythos der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart:
W. Klett, 1980), 160. Also see his “Vorerinnerung,” op. cit., 5–13. Walter Benja-
min has his own criticisms of Döblin’s novel. See Benjamin, “Krisis des Romans:
Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), pp. 230–36. But his critical review closes with this
compelling assessment: It is “die äußerste, schwindelnde, letzte, vorgeschobenste
Stufe des alten bürgerlichen Bildungsromans.” (It is “the final, most extreme, most
treacherously fraudulent, most advanced stage in the old bourgeois “Bildungsro-
man.”) Also see fragment 151, “Zum ‘Alexanderplatz,’ ” in Gesammelte Schriften
(1985), vol. VI, 184.
29. See Dronske, op. cit., 30–45 and 58–60.
30. See Dollinger, op. cit., 16. Also see Helmut Kiesel, Literarische Trauer-
arbeit: Das Exil- und Spätwerk Alfred Döblins (Tübingen, 1986), 17. Kiesel agrees
with Dollinger.
31. See Döblin’s thoughts on society and politics in his Schriften zur Politik
und Gesellschaft (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1972). In Unser
Dasein, Döblin attempts to formulate a “new” definition of “Handeln,” “action,”
taking into account not only the causes and effects of action, but also the agent’s
psychological and spiritual frame of mind. But I am not convinced that his defi-
nition is especially new; nor am I convinced that it is sufficiently rigorous to be
useful in social-political analysis.
32. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Aufsätze zur Literatur, 109–110.
My translation.
33. Adorno, “Der Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman,” in
Noten zur Literatur, 47–48; “The Position of the Storyteller in the Contemporary
Novel,” in Notes to Literature, vol. I, 36.
34. Roland Dollinger, “Technology and Nature: From Döblin’s Berge Meere
und Giganten to a Philosophy of Nature,” in A Companion to the Works of Alfred
Döblin, eds. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson, 92.
35. Michael Baum, Kontingenz und Gewalt: Semiotische Strukturen und erzählte
Welt in Alfred Döblins Roman, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 234.
 272 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 5

Chapter 5: Language as the Causality of Freedom

  1. Concerning Benjamin’s “favouring” of the left hand, see “Einbahnstraße,”

in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, part 1, 89; “One-Way Street,” in Reflections, 65:
“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength
lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.” And see my
chapter, “What Is Left Intact: Reading the Hand in Benjamin’s Writings,” in David
Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin’s Question of Measure
After Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2005).
 2. See Döblin, Der deutsche Maskenball von Linke Poot (Berlin: S. Fischer,
1921; Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1972). Also see Leo Kreutzer, Alfred Döblin: Sein Werk
bis 1933, 71–81. In Berlin’s street talk, “Linke Poot” refers to the left hand, but
by way of characterizing it as an animal’s paw; for Benjamin, it is the hand that
expresses solidarity with the oppressed, the destitute and downtrodden, the prole-
tariat worker, who struggles to rise above the condition of a “beast of burden.” The
word is meant to signify an essential connection to all of creaturely life.
  3. Benjamin, Briefe, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), vol. II, 763; Correspondence of Walter Benjamin:
1910–1940, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 565.
  4. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Kants gesammelte Schriften
(Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1900–1942), ed. Paul Natorp, vol.
V, 47–48; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: The
Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 48–49.129.
  5. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” in Noten zur Literatur, 62;
“On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. I, 49.
  6. Ibid., 67 in the German, 53 in the English.
  7. Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem
1914–1919, ed. Anthony D. Skinner (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), 257.
  8. Döblin’s letter to Else Lasker-Schuler, dated November 10, 1904, is quoted
by Gabriele Sander in “. . . A Banner I Could Not Hold Aloft,” in European Juda-
ism, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 94–113.
  9. See Döblin, Wissen und Verändern: Offene Briefe (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag
1931), 27.
10. See in this regard, Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George
Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), and Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-
Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983);
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. van den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Jean-Luc Nancy, Being
Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
11. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 3, 1235.
 NOTES TO part I, chapter 6 / 273

Chapter 6: Paradise in Words: The Promise of Happiness

  1. Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem

1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Belnap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), 144. Also see 107. The dates of the two identical
journal entries are March and October, 1916.
  2. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 124–25; Critique of Practi-
cal Reason, 129.
  3. Ibid., 130 in the German, 134 in the English translation.
  4. Ibid.
  5. See W. G. Sebald, Der Mythos der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins, 45, for a
discussion of this passage in Döblin’s novel.
 6. One work to begin this analysis could be Gunter E. Grimm, Werner
Faulstich und Peter Kuon, eds., Apokalypse: Weltuntergangsvisionen in der Literatur
des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
  7. On the theme of Paradise and happiness, see Döblin’s 1946 work, Unster-
bliche Mensch: ein Religionsgespräch (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1980). And see also discus-
sions by Bekes, op. cit., 83–85; Keller, op. cit, 108; and Dollinger, on the Amazonas
Trilogy, 126–49. And see Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, ed.
Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 46: “Infancy is the perpetual
Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return
to paradise.” In Döblin’s Hänsel and Gretel nursery rhyme (BA 97/72), the reference
to fish and fowl is an ironic allusion to the vision of life that Marx formulates in the
German Ideology. In the “Paradise” of Communism, the alienation and division of labor
will be ended. The working man can hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon.
  8. See Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,”
in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), vol. II, part
2, 410; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn,
in Selected Writings 1927–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol.
II, 795.
  9. Döblin, Amazonas, ed. Werner Stauffacher (Olten und Freiburg im Bre-
isgau: Walter-Verlag, 1988), vol. III, 117. And see note 7 above for Emerson’s
answer to the question.
10. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk,
Werke, eds. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel (München: Carl Hanser,
1978), vol. II, 829. The German reads as follows: “Der Roman ist aus Mangel der
Geschichte entstanden.” See also Werke, vol. III, 140ff.
11. Benjamin, “Die religiöse Stellung der neuen Jugend,” in Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. II, part 1, 73.
12. I came across an interesting comment in this regard in John Ruskin’s
autobiography, Praeterita and Dilecta (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 27: “But
it is the great error of thoughtless biographers to attribute to the accident which
introduces some new phase of character, all the circumstances of character which
gave the accident importance.” The apparently fateful intertwining of “accidents”
and character in Franz’s life would not have fooled Ruskin.
 274 / NOTES TO part I, chapter 5

13. Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater,” in Sämtliche Erzählun-

gen und andere Prosa (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1984), 335. My translation.
14. Theodor Adorno, “Etwas fehlt: Über die Widersprüche der utopischen
Sehnsucht,” in Ernst Bloch, Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie: Werkausgabe Ergänzungsband
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 353.
15. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975),
15.
16. See Dollenmayer, op. cit., 89–90.
17. Adorno, “Zum Ende,” Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten
Leben, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), §153,
334; “Finale,” Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1974), §153, 247. Translation altered. Also see Alexander García
Düttmann, The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger,
and Rosenzweig, trans. Arlene Lyons (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
18. Adorno, “Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,” Gesammelte Schrift-
en, vol. I, 368.
19. See Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als
Wirkungsbedingung Literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt Kon-
stanz, Universitätsverlag GmbH, 1970), 14: Iser comments there on novels that
come to a forced and contrived ending, an ending without satisfying resolution, and
he observes that such endings are often ideological or utopian clichés, since the
author must resort to strategies external to the story when no ending that really
fits can be imagined. Iser does not name Döblin’s novel; but his analysis sheds light
on Döblin’s problems with the ending he provides.
20. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 82.
21. Ibid. 83.
22. Gerhard Richter, “Introduction,” in Richter, ed., Language Without Soil:
Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press,
2010), 1. Also see his chapter, “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth
Content in Adorno,” in Language Without Soil, 131–46.
23. “Stolpersteine,” or “Stumbling Stones,” is the name of a post-Holocaust
commemorative art project undertaken by Gunter Demnig. See Stolpersteine: Gunter
Demnig und sein Projekt, ed. NS-Dokumentationszentrum (Cologne: Emons, 2007).
Cited in Richter, Language Without Soil, 5. I have imported this word because I
think it nicely expresses the character and the effect that Döblin wanted to achieve
in his prose, a style which he frequently characterized as “stony”: “I am not I, but
rather the street, the streetlights, this or that occurrence [Ereignis], nothing more.
That is what I am calling the style of stone [den steinernen Stil nennen].” See, for
example, Döblin, Aufsätze zur Literatur, 18. My translation.
24. See Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung
Literarischer Prosa, esp.15 and 30–32. As Iser points out in regard to the works of
Beckett, indeterminacies of any kind in the literary work constitute appeals to, and
claims on, the freedom of the reader, even if that appeal and claim are not at all
acknowledged by the author.
 NOTES TO part II, OPENING CONVERSATION / 275

25. See the poem taken from Zeitgehöft, one of Paul Celan’s late books of
poetry, in the bilingual edition, Last Poems, trans. Katharine Washburn and Mar-
gret Guillemin (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 189. I have modified
the translation.

Part II

Damals: The Melancholy Science of Memory

in W. G. Sebald’s Stories

Opening Conversation

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Helen Zimmern, in

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964),
part. I, 98.
 2. Walter Benjamin, “Notizen Svendborg Sommer 1934,” in Gesammelte
Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag Taschenbuch, 1985), vol. VI, 529.
  3. Martin Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1954), 92, 95, 97; What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968), 140, 145, 151. Translation modified. But, as Max Pensky
has pointed out in “Three Kinds of Ruin: Heidegger, Benjamin, Sebald,” in Poligrafi
(University of Primorska), vol. 16, no. 61–62, 65–90, in such post-War writings
as “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger completely ignores the destruction
of German cities that took place all around him; his memory-work is in a state
of idyllic denial.
  4. Walter Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des
Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppen-
häuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), Bd. II, Teil 1, 140–57; “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 328–29.
  5. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schrift-
en (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 204–430; The Origin of German Tragic
Drama (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1998), 177, 179. The title in English
is egregiously misleading, because the whole point of that work is to distinguish
between tragedy and Trauerspiel; thus, its claim to originality consists in a refined
analysis of the Trauerspiel as a distinct theatrical genre during the German Baroque.
I will cite this text at UT, followed by page numbers.
  6. Ibid., 343 in the German, 166 in the English.
  7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Ist die Kunst heiter?” in Noten zur Literatur (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, 2003), 600, 603–604; “Is Art Lighthearted?,”
in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1992), vol. II, 248, 251. Italics added.
 276 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

Chapter 1: Telling Stories: A Question of Transmissibility

 1. Walter Benjamin, “Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts,”
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V, N8, 1, 589; “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory
of Progress,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), Convolute N8,
1, 471.
  2. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
I, part 2, 693–94; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), theses 2 and 3, 254.
  3. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1992), 289;
The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), 193. Here-
after cited as AE followed by the page numbers, first in the German, then in the
English.
  4. Ibid., 146 in the German, 100 in the English. Text citations for Sebald:
I will use A to refer to Austerlitz, AE to refer to The Emigrants, CS to refer to
Campo Santo, N to refer to The Natural History of Destruction, NN to refer to
After Nature, R to refer to The Rings of Saturn, and SV to refer to Vertigo. The
page numbers in the German edition will be cited first; the page numbers in the
English translation will follow.
  5. In On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York:
Modern Library, 2004), Sebald said: I feel as if I were its child, as if those horrors
I did not experience cast a shadow over me.” (71) Hereafter cited as N, followed
by the page numbers in English only.
 6. See “Wildes Denken,” in “Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis”: Gespräche 1971
bis 2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 85.
  7. Concerning the term “aesthetics of resistance,” see Sebald, “Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On Alfred Andersch,” in On the Natural History of
Destruction, 140. That term was introduced by Peter Weiss. Sebald seems to have
appropriated it for use in expressing his own judgment. In any case, I think it fits
Sebald’s writings very nicely.
  8. See David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Lan-
guishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); David Farrell Krell,
The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2008); Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical
Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German
Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1998).
 9. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973),
178–79; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997), 117. Hereafter cited as AT, followed by page numbers,
first in the German, then in the English.
10. Ruth Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” in Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed., The
Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (New York: Seven Stories
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 277

Press, 2007), 119. There are numerous allusions to Kafka’s “The Hunter Graecchus”
in Sebald’s stories. See Schwindel. Gefühle. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag,
1994). The English translation is Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New
Directions, 2000). This work will hereafter be cited as SV.
11. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Verlag, 2004), 30; The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Direc-
tions, 1999), 19. Hereafter cited by R, followed by the page numbers, first in the
German, then in the English.
12. See “Eine Trauerhalten lernen,” in Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, 112–115,
where Sebald characterizes his work, The Rings of Saturn as a “Totenbuch,” a “Trau-
erbuch”: “a book of the dead” and “a book of mourning.”
13. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul
Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Pres,
2005), in which Derrida comments on the meaning of Celan’s line of verse, “Die
Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.” There is nothing remaining—except for the
trace that must be kept and carried in remembrance. And see Michael Naas, Der-
rida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
14. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, ed. and trans. How-
ard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol.
II, 136. I submit though, that, contrary to Kierkegaard’s claim that a life of long
suffering “cannot be portrayed artistically,” some of Sebald’s sentences are able to
accomplish precisely this.
15. See for example, the recording of names in The Rings of Saturn, 34, 43–44
and 46 in the German, 22, 31 and 33–34 in the English; Austerlitz (München: Carl
Hanser Verlag, 2001; Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003), 318–19; 310 in
the English translation, Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001). This text will
be cited hereafter as A, followed by page numbers, first in the German, then in
the English. Also see Campo Santo (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2006),
22 in the German, 18 in the English translation, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell
(New York: The Modern Library, 2005). Hereafter, this text will be cited as CS,
followed by page numbers, first in the German, then in the English.
16. Sebald, “Traumtexturen: Kleine Anmerkung zu Nabokov,” Campo San-
to, 190; “Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov,” in Campo Santo, 147. For
more on Nabokov’s prose style, showing that his play with words represents a way
of approaching the reconciliation of the two senses of “sense,” namely the sensu-
ous sense and the cognitive or intelligible sense, see my book, Redeeming Words:
A ­Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov (New York:
Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Although brief, unstable, and
incomplete, that reconciliation, I argue, is an essential moment for the utopian or
messianic promise of happiness.
17. Here, now, are some other examples. The already considerable length of
this chapter precludes providing the German originals for these translations, all of
which I have compared with their originals. Although the grammatical structures
are, in their details, different, all my claims about rhythm, cadence, length, subor-
dinate clauses, and a drifting, serpentine prose style pertain first and foremost to
 278 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

Sebald’s use of his native German language. The translations are, for the most part,
admirably faithful in style and mood. Note: Austerlitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Verlag, 2003) and its English translation by Anthea Bell (New York: Penguin, 2001)
will be cited hereafter as A, followed by page numbers, first in the German, then
in the English. AE cites The Emigrants, R cites The Rings of Saturn, and SV cites
Vertigo. [1] “The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Mont-
blanc, towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering
distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first
time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings
[ein Gefühl vermittelt für die widersprüchlichen Dimensionen unserer Sehnsucht]” (AE
68/45). Evoking beauty, the sentence raises hope, but only to cast a shadow over
the longings. [2] “At length I sat down on a bench in one of the balcony-like land-
ings off the gallery, and all that afternoon immersed myself in the sight and sound
of that theatre of water, and in ruminations [Nachdenken] about the long-term and
impenetrable process which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water,
produces the very strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth
patterns of Nature even as they are being dissolved” (AE 342–44/230). The sentence
slowly, gradually moves, like the long-term and impenetrable process of crystalliza-
tion it is describing, toward an ending in which the transient beauty is formed and
finally dissolved. [3] Waking up in Venice to the sounds of the city, the narrator
imagines that what he is hearing are the sounds of a new primeval ocean: “Cease-
lessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities,
rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak
and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is
being released from where it was held by the traffic lights.” “For some time now,”
he reflects, “I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being
born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction [uns langsam
zugrunde richten wird], just as we have been destroying what was there long before
us” (SV 72–73/63). In this constellation, the second sentence spells out with a lucid
sense of urgency and finality what the first sentence was slowly and obscurely leading
us to realize. [4] “Strangely transfixed, I remained seated [Unfähig, mich zu rühren,
blieb ich, zu meiner eigenen, nicht geringen Verwunderung, sitzen auf meinem Platz], and
when the train had left Verona and the guard came down the corridor once more
I asked him for a supplementary ticket to Desenzano, where I knew that on Sunday
the 21st of September, 1913, Dr. K., filled with the singular happiness of knowing
that no one suspected where he was at that moment, but otherwise profoundly
disconsolate [betrübt], had lain alone on the lakeside and gazed out over the weeds
in the reeds” (SV 97–98/85). The scene of happiness is soon transformed, as the
sentence draws to a close placing us in a way that leaves us sharing in Dr. K.’s
despair. (As my inclusion of the German original shows, the translation departs
from a literal, or exact translation.) [5] According to the narrator, Mathild was
“quite comfortable in her detachment, and indeed in the way in which, year after
year, she went about among the villagers whom she despised, forever dressed in a
black frock and a black coat, and always in a hat and never, even in the finest
weather, without an umbrella, had, as I might remember from my own childhood
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 279

days, something blissful [etwas durchaus Heiteres] about it” (SV 247/ 226). In a rare
reversal of fortune, this sentence, lingering over the symbolic color of mourning,
ends, even if with a certain degree of tentativeness, on a cheerful note. That mood,
however, will not last. [6] Telling about a handbook teaching colloquial Italian that
he had inherited from his maternal great-uncle, the narrator remarks that, in it,
“everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the
world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through this act of trans-
formation, even the greatest of horrors were safely banished [so als setze die Welt sich
tätsächlich bloß aus Wörtern zusammen, als wäre dadurch auch das Entsetzliche in Sicher-
heit gebracht], as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every
evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth” (SV
119–20/105). The significance of this sentence consists in its evocation of the stories
in the Kabbalah—stories which, in a certain way, Sebald, like Benjamin, found
inspiring—about the relation between the creation of the universe and the letters
of the alphabet, and in its use of the “as if” to call into question, at the same time,
those mythic stories, together with their eschatology, which projects a final redemp-
tion. [7] “Now, however, I saw how far the station constructed under the patronage
of King Leopold II exceeded its purely utilitarian function, and I marveled at the
verdigris-covered negro boy who, for a century now, has sat upon his dromedary on
top of an oriel turret to the left of the station façade, a monument to the world of
the animals and native peoples of the African continent, alone against the Flemish
sky.” Taking its time, the prose in this sentence ends by exposing metaphorically
the dehumanizing afterlife of Belgian colonialism (A 12–13/4). [8] “Even before
then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room
of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling and clearing of throats,
I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that
conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has
lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as
much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where
I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite
side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-
red chimneys, the bright and icy-blue sky, and the snow-white metal weather vane
with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure
of the sky itself” (Austerlitz 372/364–65). The rhythm and cadence in the later parts
of the German sentence are, because of certain grammatical requirements, very
different from their English counterpart here; yet, both in regard to the image and
in regard to the sensible qualities of the wording, the aesthetic effect, as the sentence
approaches its end is, I think, equally vigorous and uplifting. But the sentence defers
fulfillment; we must wait patiently before receiving that picture of happiness. [9] In
telling the story of Henri Beyle’s military adventures, the narrator writes: “That
whole summer, the general euphoria that had followed upon the Battle of Marengo
had borne him up as if on wings; utterly fascinated, he had read the continuing
reports in the intelligencers of the campaign in upper Italy; there had been open-air
performances, balls and illuminations, and, when the day had come for him to don
his uniform for the first time, he had felt as if his life finally had its proper place
 280 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

in a perfect system, or at least one that was aspiring to perfection, and in which
beauty and terror bore an exact relation to each other” (SV 17–18/14). The soberly
measured unfolding of this sentence seems by itself to confirm the possibility of that
balance between beauty and terror. [10] “They say it is rare for any of the fishermen
to establish contact with his neighbour, for, although they all look eastward and see
both the dusk and the dawn coming up over the horizon, and although they are
all moved, I imagine, by the same unfathomable feelings, each of them is nonethe-
less quite alone and dependent on no one but on himself and on the few items of
equipment he has with him, such as a penknife, a thermos flask, or the little transis-
tor radio that gives forth a scarcely audible, scratchy sound, as if the pebbles being
dragged back by the waves were talking to each other” (R 68/52). The sentence
gradually creates the setting for its devastating confirmation of the truth briefly
touched upon at the beginning, namely: the pebbles communicate with one another,
but not the fisherman. [11] “Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible
landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation
tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and time
again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left
and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling
move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other,
so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image”
(R 204/171–72). The narrator’s sentence evokes the rhythm of a gradual, belated
recognition of his deception. As in Proust, so in Sebald, deception and disillusion-
ment always eventually terminate the waiting, hoping, longing, and any brief
moments of happiness that may have been granted. Also see Sebald’s remarks on
his prose style in Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, 101–102 and 108.
18. Giorgio Agamben has with justice committed much philosophical
thought to the significance of the remnant. See Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta
di Auschwitz (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), 162–63; Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New
York: Zone, 2002), 152–53. Also see his subsequent book, Il tempo che resta: Un
commento alla Lettera ai Romani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000); The Time That
Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 56–58.
19. See, e.g., Sebald’s Austerlitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003),
377–80 in the German, 370–74 in the English Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (Lon-
don: Penguin, 2002), wherein he has Austerlitz recounting his visit to the Museum
of Veterinary Medicine. Hereafter to be cited by A followed by the page numbers,
first in the German, then in the English.
20. See David Perlman’s news article, “Physicists Convert First Known Sound
Recording,” San Francisco Chronicle (March 29, 2008), about an astonishing retriev-
al of history from the phonautograph, a device that, in 1860, seventeen years before
Edison invented the phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian
typesetter, created for making an optical recording of the human voice. The device
etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning
oil lamp. Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 281

that responded to sound. Finally, in 2008, a group of physicists discovered that they
could retrieve the human voice that Scott de Martinville had registered on the
phonautograph by converting its visible traces back into sound. What they retrieved
was the eerie sound of a ghostly voice literally emerging from the ashes: a French
soprano singing ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ in warbling tones restored by physicists at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The singer’s voice, as if patiently waiting
for its time, was suddenly transformed, brought back to life, reanimated, recovered
from barely visible waves etched on soot-blackened paper. Created on April 9,
1860, this phonautograph is the first known recording of any sound.
21. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development,
trans. George Buck and Frithjof Raven (Coral Gables: Miami Linguistic Series, no.
9, University of Miami Press, 1970), 27.
22. Paul Celan, “Welchen der Steine du hebst,” in Gesammelte Werke, eds.
Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983),
vol. I, 129.
23. Carsten Strathausen, “Going Nowhere: Sebald’s Rhizomatic Travels,” in
Searching for Sebald: Photography after Sebald, ed. Lisa Patt (Los Angeles: The Insti-
tute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), 480. It could be that Sebald had the paintings of
Gerhard Richter in mind when describing Ferber’s art.
24. See Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Allgemeine Brouillon,” Das
philosophische Werk, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Rich-
ard Samuel (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), vol. 3, 434; “Miscellaneous Obser-
vations,” 31 and “General Draft,” 135, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans.
Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
25. Sebald, The Emigrants, 23/36. And see Austerlitz 401/395: the border
between life and death is said, there, to be “less impermeable than we commonly
think.” This thought is a recurrently appearing thread unifying Sebald’s writings.
26. See Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations
with W. G. Sebald (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 39–40. And see Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Barthes’ argument for the uncanny spectrality of the
photograph, its essential reminder of death, of absence, no doubt figured in Sebald’s
use of photographs to accompany his stories.
27. Martin Heidegger, “Der Weg zur Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache
(Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959), 257; “The Way to Language,” in On the Way
to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 126.
28. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 97–98 and 104; Aesthetic Theory, 61–62 and
66. Hereafter cited as AT.
29. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966),
396; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 404.
Hereafter cited as ND, followed by page numbers, first in the German, then in
the English.
30. See Sebald’s interview with Andrea Köhler, “Die Durchdringung des
Bunkels: W. G. Sebald und Jan Peter Tripp—ein letzter Blickwechsel,” in Neue
Züricher Zeitung, 14 December, 2002.
 282 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

31. See Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris:
Seuil, 1980); Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Noonday Press, 1981). Also see, among his other works, Jacques Der-
rida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas as The Work of Mourning (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2001); Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf as Specters of Marx:
The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York:
Routledge, 1993); and Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), trans. David Wills as
The Gift of Death (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1995). Also valuable in
this regard is Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008). Unfortunately, page limitations oblige me to refrain from a longer
reflection on Sebald’s use of photographs and the relation between the images and
the prose. But destruction, decay, and death are crucial.
32. G. W. Hegel, “Preface,” The Philosophy of Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967), 11.
33. See Lisa Diedrich, “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W. G. Sebald’s Prac-
tices of Witnessing,” in Searching for Sebald, ed, Lisa Patt, 257. And see Celan’s
poem, “Ashenglorie,” “Ash-glory,” in which the poet reminds us—for it is easy
to forget—that no one can bear witness for the witness: “Niemand/zeugt für den/
Zeugen.” The poem was published in Atemwende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1967), 68. There is an English translation by Joachim Neugroschel, in Paul
Celan, Speech-grill and Selected Poems (New York: Dutton, 1971), 240.
34. See the excellent “Introduction” that Lynne Sharon Schwartz wrote for
The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2007), the collection of conversations with him that she edited. In
formulating my own thoughts in response to Sebald’s works, I am indebted to the
many insightful contributions published in this collection. I also found useful a
book edited by Scott D. Denham and Mark R. McCulloh, W. G. Sebald: History,
Trauma, Memory (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 2006); Peter Fritsch’s Stranded in the Pres-
ent: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004); Carolyn Steedman’s Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001); and the chapter on Sebald in Carol Jacobs’ Skirting the Ethical (Stanford
University Press, 2008).
35. Benjamin, “Zur Ästhetik, fr. 95,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. VI, 126; “The Currently Effective Messianic Ele-
ments,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings, 1913–1926 (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Belnap Press, 1996), vol. I, 213.
36. G. W. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.
Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), vol. XVIII, 54–55. Also see Werke,
vol. XX, 506–9.
37. Sebald, “Ein Versuch der Restitution,” in Campo Santo, 243–44; “An
Attempt at Restitution,” 200–201 in the English translation. Hereafter cited as CS,
followed by page numbers, first in the German, then in the English.
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 283

38. In The Rings of Saturn (30/19), Sebald suggests the image of a funeral
cortège to describe Thomas Browne’s prose. But I feel quite sure that he would
have been able to recognize in his own prose something of that very same qual-
ity. On his syntactical structures, see the interview with James Wood in Brick 59
(Spring 1998), 92.
39. Paul Celan, “Farmstead of Time,” in Last Poems, a bilingual edition, trans.
Katharine Washburn and Margaret Guillemin (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1986), 194–95: “Strange things/trap us in their net,/ transiency grasps us/ helpless
through and through.” My own translation revision.
40. Perhaps in another poem, one published in Schneepart, Celan permits
himself to draw hope from what in the remnants is left to memory: “Aus der
Vergängnis/ stehen die Stufen, / das ins Ohr Geträufelte/ mündigt die Vorzeit darin”:
“Out of decay / emerge the nuances / what has trickled into the ear / has brought
the past to maturity.” See Last Poems, 136–37. My translation. On this theme of
decay and maturity, see the next endnote.
41. Benjamin, “Theologisch-politisches Fragment,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. II, part 1, 204; “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays, Apho-
risms, Autobiographical Writings, 312–13. Benjamin’s remarks play off Hegel’s state-
ment in his Encyclopaedia Logic: “The highest stage and maturity that anything can
attain is that at which its downfall begins.” Only the eternity of transience and
downfall—the rhythm of Messianic nature—can keep the prospect, the promise,
of happiness alive, for it maintains futurity.
42. See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 1 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1977), 204; Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 313.
And see Irving Wohlfarth, “On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin’s Last
Reflections,” in Glyph III (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1978), 187.
43. Benjamin, “Phantasie,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1985),
vol. VI, 115; “Imagination,” Selected Writings 1913–1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. I, 281.
44. Ibid., 117 in the German, 282 in the English.
45. See Sebald, Austerlitz, 180–85 in the German, 172–76 in the English.
And see Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” Gesammelte Werke: Erzählungen,
Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Verlag, 1979), 469; The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New
York Review of Books, 2005).
46. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus: Über Gottfrid Keller, Johan Peter Hebel,
Robert Walser und andere (München: Hanser, 1998), 137–38.
47. Ibid., 162–63.
48. Adorno, “Voraussetzungen,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974), 437.
49. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles, with the author’s col-
laboration (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 41–42.
50. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 248; 294 in the English. The same questions
might be asked with regard to the herring inspector’s “cruel” experiment in the
 284 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

Rouen fish market, mutilating the herring to see how long it takes them to die:
Op. cit., 74–75 in the German, 56–57 in the English. In his writings on technol-
ogy, Heidegger drew a connection between, on the one side, the cast of mind
in today’s agribusiness and, on the other side, the calculative, technological cast
of mind in the Nazi extermination. This raises many questions about the moral
sensitivity in his drawing such a connection, even if there is factual support for a
certain similarity. The same might be said of Sebald’s argument.
51. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 71 (the herring) and 78–79 (the corpses
in Bergen-Belsen). For the English, see 54 (the herring) and 60–61 (the corpses).
This connection is meant, of course, to be taken seriously; however, just as I am
questioning Heidegger’s moral sensitivity in regard to the connection that he is
claiming, so I must question the moral sensitivity in Sebald’s drawing a connection
between a pile of dead herring and a pile of human corpses—even though I agree
that there is terrible truth in what he wants to show us. But there are other cor-
respondences and associations in Sebald that seem purely whimsical, merely coin-
cidental and without any rationally acceptable significance. Does their presence in
the narrative subvert the seriously meaningful connections he also wants to make?
52. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. I, part 2, 696; “On the Concept of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 256.
53. Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühle. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch,
1994), 70–71; Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999),
60–61. Hereafter cited as SV, followed by page numbers, first in the German, then
in the English.
54. See my essay, “Cinders, Traces of Darkness, Shadows on the Page: The
Holocaust in Derrida’s Writing,” in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, eds. Alan
Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Value Inquiry Book Series (Amsterdam and Atlan-
ta: Rodopi, 1998), 265–286. Published in Hungarian translation in Magyar Filozofiai
Szemie (Budapest, Hungary), vol. XXXIX, nos. 5–6 (1995), 821–45. Reprinted in
a revised version in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, issue 171
(September 2003), 269–88. In this hermeneutic reading of some texts by Derrida,
I bring into legibility the Holocaust subtext, which appears, and in fact appears
with all the more horror, precisely by not appearing directly and immediately.
By not appearing, yet erupting by indirection into the text, the subtext gains
unimaginable, but unrepresentable power. I argue that, for Derrida, as for Sebald,
this indirection or obliqueness of reference is always also a question of discretion,
a gesture of restraint that shows the greatest respect for the victims and survivors
of such horror: it refuses to compel them into reifying presence.
55. Sebald, “Interview with Maya Jaggi, “Recovered Memories,” in The
Guardian (September 22, 2001): http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politic-
sphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,555839,00.html.
56. See Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006). This book has been a rich source of inspira-
tion for this chapter.
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 285

57. In this regard, see, e.g., Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Sämtliche Werke,
Johannes Hoffmeister, ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 6th ed., 1952), vol. V,
27; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977),
19. Hereafter cited, wherever desirable, as PG, followed by page numbers, first in
the German, then in the English.
58. See Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, 164; see also 57.
59. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, bilingual edition, trans. G. E.
M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 8. The paraphrase of Wittgenstein
appears in Austerlitz, 183 in the German, 174 in the English. Wittgenstein’s idea
must have inspired Italo Calvino’s Le Città invisibili (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori
Editore, 1995). See especially “Un re in ascolto,” 69. And see, also, Virginia Woolf’s
1905 essay, “Literary Geography,” in Books and Portraits, ed. M. Lyon (London:
Panther, 1979), 186–89. There, she refers to “invisible cities,” and boldly rejects
accurate representation as the novelist’s task.
60. See Sebald, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch, 1995), 83–85; After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New
York: Modern Library, 2002), 97–102. Hereafter cited as NN, followed by page
numbers, first in the German, then in the English.
61. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 64–66. This text will be
cited as N, followed by page numbers in German and English.
62. On love and death, discussed in terms of a word that I can no longer
read without being reminded of Sebald’s “Schlag the hunter,” see David Farrell
Krell’s “Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On Heidegger and Trakl,” in Radi-
cal Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic
Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978), 238–58.
63. Lisa Patt, Introduction, Searching for Sebald, 81–82. See note 23 above.
64. Sebald, “Strangeness, Interpretation and Crisis: On Peter Handke’s Play,
‘Kaspar,’ ” in Campo Santo, 68; English translation, 64.
65. But see the episode in Schwindel. Gefühle., 243–44, 248; Vertigo, 223–24,
227, in which “Sebald,” or anyway, the narrator, climbs into the attic of the Café
Alpenrose, no longer a forbidden room, as it was in his childhood, and discovers
that the mysterious object of his childhood fantasies is nothing but an old military
uniform hanging on a dummy: “to my horror,” he says, it “crumbled into dust” when
he touched it. This experience seems to have confirmed his stoic and, eventually,
melancholic cast of mind, for it showed immediately tangible evidence of “the slow
disintegration of all material forms.”
66. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Weltseele,” in Werke, Hamburger Aus-
gabe, eds. Erich Trunz et al. (München: C. H. Beck, 1988), vol. I, 249.
67. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in Telos 31 (Spring 1977), 120.
68. Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. I, part 1, 180–81; “Goethe’s
‘Elective Affinities,’ ” in Selected Writings 1913–1926, trans. Stanley Corngold
(Cambridge: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), vol. I, 340–41.
69. Ibid.
 286 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

70. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I,

part 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 208; Origins of German Tragic
Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 28. Hereafter cited
as UT, followed by the page numbers, first in the German, then in the English.
71. Benjamin, “Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts,” in Das
Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982),
vol. V, part 1, Konvolut N 10a, 3, 595; “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of
Progress,” in Arcades Project, trans. and ed. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 475.
72. Ibid., Konvolut N 9a, 4, p. 592; 474 in the English translation.
73. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
I, part 1, 237; Origins of German Tragic Drama, 56. Incidentally, in the context of
Novalis’s meditation on our relation to an awesomely powerful nature, the experi-
ence of “Schwindel,” vertigo, is at issue. See his “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” in Novalis:
Three Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 13–14. The texts are
in German only, taken from the standard critical edition of his Schriften, eds. Paul
Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 4 volumes,
1929). One may reasonably assume, I think, that both Benjamin and Sebald were
familiar with “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.”
74. Concerning the function of the high-altitude perspective in Sebald, see
Carlos Thiebaut, “W. G. Sebald: Lejos y de paso, y sin embargo dentro.” in El rapto
de Europa, vol. 5 (2003), 15–21.
75. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 3, 1246: “Die destruktiven
Kräfte entbinden, welche im Erlösungsgedanken liegen.”
76. On the phrase “revolutionary chance,” see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schrift-
en, vol. I, part 2, 702–03; “Theses in the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
262: Thesis XVII. Regarding reminders of finitude and mortality, see, for example,
Schwindel. Gefühle, 243–48; Vertigo, 223–27. In the attic of the Alpenrose Inn, the
costume of the Austrian chasseur crumbled to dust when “Sebald” touched it. So
many “signs of a slow disintegration,” “Zeichen einer langsamen Auflösung,” of all
material life.
77. Sebald, “Wildes Denken,” in Gespräche, 84.
78. Emmanuel Levinas, “Phenomena and Enigma,” in Collected Philosophical
Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 68.
79. Ibid., 63.
80. See Christian Scholz’s 1997 interview with Sebald, “Pictures Remain and
Live: Remembering W. G. Sebald,” published in Lisa Patt, Searching for Sebald, 544.
81. See Adorno’s remark, in the context of a discussion of Schopenhauer,
on the meaning of colours, gray in particular, in Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 370–71; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton
(New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1973), 377–78: “Grayness could not fill us
with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered
traces of which are not absent from the negative whole. The traces always come
from the past, and our hopes come from their counterpart, from that which was or
is doomed; such an interpretation may very well fit the last line of Benjamin’s text
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 287

on Elective Affinities: ‘For the sake of the hopeless only are we given hope.’ ” I think
that there is much to be learned by considering Sebald’s turn to grays in relation
to Gerhard Richter’s series of gray paintings. Besides being reflexively modernist,
these gray paintings, resisting colour, are confessions of doubt, meditations on death,
forms of reduction and erasure, and expressions of an unfinished mourning for the
loss of redemptive power in works of art. See Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt
and Belief in Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 247–49. But
see Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 127 (81–82 in the English translation), on the
difficulty or impossibility for works of art to eliminate “radiance.”
82. See Sara Kafatou, “An Interview with W. G. Sebald,” in Harvard Review
(Fall, 1998), no. 15, 32. Benjamin’s argument against Platonism, formulated in
terms of the “burning of the husk” and the “destruction of the work,” appears in
the “Erkenntniskritische Vorrede” to his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesam-
melte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. I, part 1, 211;
“Epistemo-Critical Prologue, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 31. In his “Le
Promeneur Solitaire,” his “Introduction” to Robert Walser’s novel, The Tanners
(New York: New Directions, 2009), Sebald, translated by Jo Catling, comments
that, “in life, as in fairy tales, there are those who, out of fear and poverty, can-
not afford emotions and who therefore, like Walser in one of his most poignant
prose pieces, have to try out their seemingly atrophied ability to love on inanimate
substances and objects unheeded by anyone else—such as ash, a needle, a pencil,
or a matchstick.” (op. cit., 19) “Yet,” he continues, evoking the redeeming power
of words, “the way in which Walser breathes life into them, in an act of com-
plete assimilation and empathy, reveals how in the end emotions are perhaps most
deeply felt when applied to the most insignificant things.” (op. cit., 19) Sebald
then quotes Walser writing about ash: “Indeed, if one goes into this apparently
uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which
is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the
least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worth-
lessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that
it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more
wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more
tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of
wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash, there is actually
nothing at all. Tread on ash and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped
on something.” (op. cit., 19) Also concerning ash, see David Farrell Krell, “Ashes,
ashes, we all fall . . . ,” in The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter: Texts and Commentary,
eds. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 222–32.
And see Krell’s essay, “Stuff. Thread. Point. Fire: Hölderlin and the Dissolution of
History and Memory,” in Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger, eds.
Rebecca Comay and John McCumber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1999, 174–96. Another text from which I have learned about traces, remnants, and
debris is Gustaf Sobin’s beautiful meditation, Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestiges
in Provence and Languedoc (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Besides
Benjamin and Walser, Sebald might also have had in mind Beckett’s temptingly
 288 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 1

allegorical evocations of ash in Endgame and of dust in The Unnamable; but in

Beckett, there is no redemption, only the forever-grey disappointment of hope.
83. Arthur Lubow, “Crossing Boundaries,” in Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed.,
The Emergence of Memory, 159.
84. See Carsen Strathausen, “Going Nowhere: Sebald’s Rhizomatic Travels,”
in Searching for Sebald, ed. Lisa Patt, 480.
85. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer,” in Gesam-
melte Schriften, vol. II, part 2, 678–79; “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen
Mauer,” in Selected Writings 1927–1934, vol. II, 496–97.
86. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zum zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in
Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. II, part 2, 432;
“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 134.
87. See Sebald, “Bis an den Rand der Natur: Versuch über Stifter,” Die Besch-
reibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), for Sebald’s essay on Adalbert Stifter, 18–19,
where he describes Stifter’s materialism, a materialism akin to his own, as catching
a glimpse, for one ephemeral moment, of a possible “Heilsgeschichte.”
88. Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, Clara, oder Zusammenhang der Natur mit
der Geisterwelt, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862),
vol. IX, 101; Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, trans. Fiona
Steinkamp (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 73. I want to recommend, here, Dennis
Schmidt’s essay, “Über das Tragische: Ein Versuch zu Schelling,” in Schelling und
Heidegger, ed. Lore Huhn (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 2008). Also see
Schmidt’s book, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
89. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, 57.
90. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zum zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,”
in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 2, 432; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anni-
versary of His Death,” in Illuminations, 134: About the coming of the Messiah, a
great rabbi “once said that he did not wish to change the world by force [nicht
mit Gewalt], but would only make a slight adjustment in it [nur um ein Geringes
sie zurechtzustellen werde].” In Schwindel. Gefühle., an “old general” remarks that,
“Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything.” For the German, see 171; for
the English, Vertigo, see 156. Like Kafka, Sebald seems to think this a significant
truth. In Austerlitz (197 in the German, 189 in the English), Austerlitz tells the
narrator: “We take almost all decisive steps in our lives as a result of an obscure
inner movement [aus einer undeutlichen inneren Bewegung heraus].” The published
translation makes the remark seem even closer to Kafka, translating this phrase as
“slight inner adjustments.” Is this denying “free will”? Not necessarily. What is that
“obscure inner movement”? Might it not register precisely one of those unfathom-
able velleities that motivate judgment and action?
91. Paul Celan, “Meridian,” in Selected Poems and Prose, bilingual edition,
trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 411.
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 1 / 289

  92. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), §153, 334; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Dam-
aged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 247.
  93. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan
Peter Tripp,” in Sebald and Tripp, Unerzählt: 33 Texte und 33 Radierung (München:
Carl Hauser Verlag, 2003), 74; Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York:
New Directions, 2004), 86.
  94. See Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspen-
sion in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in New German Critique, no. 88 (Winter, 2003).
  95. See Anneleen Masschelein, “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in
André Breton’s Nadja and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in Searching for Sebald, ed.
Lisa Patt, 370–87.
 96. Paul Valéry, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1957–1960), vol. I, 1333.
  97. Maurice Blanchot, “Le paradoxe d’Aytré,” in Les Temps Modernes (June,
1946), 1580 ff.
  98. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel
Porte (New York: Viking, 1983), 269.
 99. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus, 162ff. Hence chance encounters are
to be expected.
100. See Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, 164.
101. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, n.d.), 374.
102. Ruth Franklin, “Rings of Smoke,” in Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed., The
Emergence of Memory, 123.
103. See Benjamin’s thought on the role of the fact in the critical concept
of art in “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik,” in Gesammelte
Schriften, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. I, part 1, 108–09.
104. Adorno, “Standort des Erzählers in Zeitgenössischen Roman,” in Noten
zur Literatur, 41–48; “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,”
in Notes to Literature, 30–36.
105. Ibid., 43 in the German, 32 in the English translation.
106. Ibid., 47 in the German, 35 in the English.
107. Ibid., 48 in the German, 36 in the English.
108. Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Illuminations, 143–44. The
letter to Scholem is dated June 12, 1938. See The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin
and Gershom Scholem 1933–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and
Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken, 1989), 225.
109. See John Beck, “Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebald’s
Suffolk,” in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, eds. J. J. Long and Anne White-
head (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 75.
110. Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” op. cit., 143–44.
111. And see Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 178. Sebald comments
that the “decisive difference” between the “writerly method,” “die s­chriftstellerischen
 290 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 2

Methode,” and the technology of photographing is to be found in the fact that

“describing demands remembrance,” depends on and demands “das Eingedenken,”
whereas photographing encourages forgetting.
112. Sebald, The Natural History of Destruction, 51–52. Hereafter cited by N
followed by page numbers.
113. Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 2, 668;
“Central Park,” in Selected Writings 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard
Eiland (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 2003), vol. IV, 171.
114. Sebald, The Emigrants, 289 in the German, 193 in the English. Inci-
dentally, Ferber was originally given the name “Aurach,” the letters of which can
be combined in at least four significant ways, three in German, one in Hebrew:
“Rauch,” “ruach,” “aura,” and “Rach[e],” meaning, in English, “smoke,” “breath,”
“aura,” “woe is me!” and “revenge.” I do not doubt that Sebald hoped that his
readers would hear these eerily encrypted associations reverberating in the “proper”
name.
115. See Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, 159n.
116. Benjamin, “Notizen Svendborg Sommer 1934,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
VI, 530; “Conversations with Brecht,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobio-
graphical Writings, 209–210. Translation altered.

Chapter 2: Natural History: Becoming in Dissolution

 1. Johann Georg Hamann, “Aesthetica in Nuce: Rhapsody in Cabalistic
Prose,” in Classic and Romantic Aesthetics, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), 16.
 2. And yet, Heidegger avoids, and in effect denies, even when adverting
to the shortage of housing in Germany, the destruction of buildings, of housing,
that he obviously had to have seen all around him in the wake of the Second
World War. See Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 37–38; “The Origin of the Work
of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. and ed., David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1993), 174–75.
  3. Ibid.
 4. Hegel, “Vorrede,” Phaenomenologie des Geistes, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. V,
§32, 29–30; Phenomenology of Spirit, §32, 19.
  5. Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 2, 450; “The
Storyteller,” in Illuminations, 94.
 6. Adorno, “Zum Schlußszene des Faust,” in Noten zur Literatur, Gesam-
melte Schriften, vol. II, 138; “On the Final Scene of Faust,” in Notes to Literature,
vol. I, 120.
 7. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung:
Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1971), 38–39; Dialectic
of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
32.
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 2 / 291

 8. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, 253; 170 in the English. Also see Sebald’s
Austerlitz, 262 in the German, 182 in the English, where Vera, in the course of
her conversation with Austerlitz, evokes St. Paul, referring to “gémissements de
désespoir.” And for St. Paul’s letters to the Romans, in which the suffering of nature
is evoked, see The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Weeks (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1972), 82. Also see Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta: Un commento
alla Lettera ai romani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).
 9. Klopstock might seem an improbable source of inspiration for Sebald.
However, there are several facts about Klopstock’s life and literary work that would
attract Sebald’s attention: after the death of his first wife, Klopstock fell into a
prolonged period of deep melancholy, producing writings symptomatic of confusion
and vertigo; he embraced with enthusiasm the French Revolution and the politics
of the Enlightenment; he wrote a poetic work, Der Messias, drawing on themes
from the Old Testament and Milton’s Paradise Lost; and finally, in addition to
this venture into metaphysics and theology, he wrote two books on philology and
the history of poetic language, Fragmente über Sprache und Dichtkunst (1779) and
Grammatische Gespräche (1794), works that would be of great interest to Sebald,
not least because the first of these recognized the idea of the fragment, an idea at
the heart of early Jena Romanticism.
10. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, 17.
11. According to Goethe, “The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a
quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feel-
ing of loneliness, absence, isolation.” See Maximen und Reflexionen (no. 181), in
Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe, eds. Karl Rich-
ter, et al. (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–98), vol. 17, 749; and Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, vol. I, part 2,
280. There is a kind of anti-Romantic Romanticism in Sebald’s settings: not only
his landscapes, but even his cityscapes, depicting, for example, an industrial city
district, where the factories and warehouses that once empowered an empire have
become empty, dilapidated shells; or a seaport, once buzzing with activity, that has
lost its maritime function; or a line of bunkers built for defense during World War
II and now left deserted. In such landscapes and cityscapes, Sebald’s “sublimity”
consists in the overwhelming sense of a desolation and ruination—the melancholy
effects of natural history—somehow beyond all measure, beyond all comprehension.
12. Benjamin, “Leib und Körper,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, 81; “Body
and Corporeal Substance,” “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem,” in Selected
Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. I, 395.
13. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 23.
14. See my essay, “The Court of Justice: Heidegger’s Reflections on Anaxi-
mander,” Research in Phenomenology (2007), vol. 37, no. 3, 385–416. This is also
what Heidegger’s essay, “The Origin of the Artwork,” has to say, bringing out the
strife between earth and world.
15. Ibid.
16. Sebald, “Helle Bilder und dunkle: Zur Dialektik der Eschatologie bei
Stifter und Handke,” Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 177.
 292 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 2

17. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), §80, 285; Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 304.
18. On a “weak messianic power,” “eine schwache messianischen Kraft,” see
Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part
2, 694; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 254. The phrase, an
echo of Kant’s “Schwache Strahl der Hoffnung” [see the preceding note], appears
in Benjamin’s second “thesis.”
19. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 42–43; 30 in the English translation. Italics
added in my citation. For some reason, this sentence is missing from the English
translation. See Claudia Albes, “Die Erkundung der Leere: Anmerkungen zu W.
G. Sebalds ‘englisher Wahlfahrt,’ Die Ringe des Saturn,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen
Schillergesellschaft, vol. 46 (2002), 286–87.
20. See Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagina-
tion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7.
21. Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 2, 450;
“The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, 94.
22. Ibid., 449 in the German, 94 in the English translation.
23. Ibid., 452 in the German, 97 in the English.
24. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and
Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, trans. and ed., Jason Gaiger (Chicago: the
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 82. I am eagerly awaiting the publication of
Dennis Schmidt’s book, provisionally entitled On the Unbidden: A History of the
Idea of Nature.
25. See Sebald’s elegiac Nach der Nature, 27–31; 24–28 in the English; also
see Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 351; 358 in the English translation.
26. See my essay, “Natural History: Reflections on its Representation in the
Twentieth Century Museum,” published in Poligrafi, vol. 16, no. 61–62 (2011),
3–26.
27. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Das Werden im Vergehen,” in Sämtliche Werke,
ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), 1035–40; “Becoming
in Dissolution,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed.
Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 96–100.
28. Hölderlin, Hyperion, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darm-
stadt: Der Tempel-Verlag, 1960, 497 and 557; in Eric L. Santner (ed.), Hyperion
and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990), 74 and 133.
The translation I have used is by Willard R. Trask, adapted by David Schwarz.
29. Hegel, Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl (Tübingen: J. C.
B. Mohr, 1907), 300; “The Spirit of Christianity,” Early Theological Writings, trans.
T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1948), 252. In “Love and
Law: Hegel’s Critique of Morality” (Social Research, Summer 2003), Jay Bernstein
discusses Hegel’s reflections on the “causality of fate” in his early essay, “The Spirit
of Christianity and its Fate” (1788–1789). Bernstein argues that this text “provides
the most direct and eloquent presentation of the logical structure and moral con-
tent of Hegel’s ethical vision. This is a vision of ethical life itself, of how Hegel
conceives of the meaning of ethics, what it is about and its internal dynamic logic,
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 2 / 293

and of ethicality so understood as constitutive of our relation to ourselves, others,

and the natural world. In working out the substance of ethical living, above all in
opposition to Kant’s morality of universal law, Hegel is simultaneously elaborat-
ing the structural contours of human experience. [. . .] Hegel’s ethical vision is
hence the vision of the demands and fatalities of ethical life becoming the pivot
and underlying logic for the philosophical comprehension of human experience in
general. [. . .] At the center of Hegel’s ethical vision in the “Spirit” essay is the
idea of a causality of fate, an ethical logic of action and reaction: to act against
another person is to destroy my own life, to call down upon myself revenging fates;
I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming myself. In this way
the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing
and foundering of all. Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in
which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the
structures of interaction governing everyday life. It is this that is Hegel’s great idea
since it reveals how ethical life matters independent of any particular moral norms,
laws, ideals, principles, or ends. Ethical life is not, in the first instance, about moral
principles, but about the ways in which both particular actions and whole forms of
action injure, wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the secret
bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all those around us.”
30. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über
das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände,
Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1860), VII, part 1,
399; On Human Freedom, trans. James Gutman (Chicago: Open Court Publishing
Co., 1936), 79.
31. Ibid., 411 in the German, 92 in the English translation.
32. See Part I of my book, Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility
in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Levinas’s Ethics (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008).
33. Moths, and not only butterflies, appear and reappear in Sebald’s texts—in
Austerlitz, for example: at 135–42 in the German, 127–34 in the English; and again
at 241 in the German, 233 in the English. But they always appear in the stillness
of death, concealing the violence of that death in a procedure that the cause of
scientific knowledge has always sought to justify.
34. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 349; Origin of the
German Tragic Drama, 224. In this work, concerned with the origin of the “Trau-
erspiel,” Benjamin takes the greatest possible pains to distinguish the “Trauerspiel”
from tragic drama. That is the principal contribution, in fact, of this work. The
English translation of the title is therefore singularly inappropriate and misleading.
I will therefore refer to this work by its more accurate English title.
35. Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Men-
schen,” in Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), Bd. II, part 1,
417; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott,
in Reflections, 329.
36. “Et in Arcadia ego.” A “momento mori,” for the shadow of Death haunts
even Arcadia. Whilst I like the theatricality, emotional intensity, and humanism of
the 1618–1622 painting by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) in the Galleria
 294 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 2

Nazionale d’Arte in Rome, depicting two young shepherds suddenly coming across
a skull perched on a tomb, I prefer the later, more subdued, classical representation
(1637–1638) by Nicolas Poussin in the Musée du Louvre, showing four shepherds,
one of them a woman, gathered around an austere tomb and engaged in reading
the words inscribed on it: “Et in Arcadia ego.” The elegiac serenity of the scene
of reading is, I think, decisive. These paintings were inspired by the fifth book in
Virgil’s Eclogues.
37. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 353; 359–60 in the English trans-
lation. Translation modified. For the relevant passages from Walter Benjamin, see
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 197, 199.
38. Adorno, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” Kant Society lecture given in
Frankfurt, July 1932.
39. Regarding the philosophical and theological uses of the concepts of
nature, fate, and evil, I would like here to call attention to Carlos Thiebaut, “Una
poetica del horror: W. G. Sebald y la renaturalización del mal,” in Ejercicios de la
violencia en el arte contemporaneo, eds. V. Bozal et al. (Pamplona: Ed. Universidad
Publica de Navarra, 2006), 137–73.
40. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: Text and Critical
Essays, trans. Lewis White Beck, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1969), 44–45.
41. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987), 28–29.
42. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: Text and Criti-
cal Essays, trans. Lewis White Beck, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1969), 44–45.
43. Ibid., 62.
44. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” final version, Sämtliche Werke, ed.
Paul Stapf (Berlin and Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), 309; “Celebration of
Peace,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion and Selected Poems, trans. Michael Ham-
burger (New York: The German Library, Continuum Publishing Company, 1990),
235. My translation.
45. Benjamin, “Welt und Zeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, 98; “World
and Time,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings, vol. I, 226–27. See also
“Die Bedeutung der Zeit in der moralischen Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
VI, 97; “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe,” trans. Rodney Livingstone,
Selected Writings, vol. I, 286–87.
46. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 333–34;
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 247.
47. Sebald, Nach der Natur, 96–98; 112–15 in the English. In Austerlitz (106
in the German, 98 in the English), Austerlitz tells the narrator that his teacher,
studying Napolean’s battles, always preferred “surveying the entire landscape of
those years from above with an eagle’s eye.”
48. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Archipelagus,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul
Stapf (Berlin, Darmstadt: Tempel-Verlag, 1960), 284. My own translation.
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 3 / 295

Chapter 3: Of Humans and Other Animals

 1. Schelling, “Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen,” in Ausgewählte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. IV, 77–78; “Stuttgart Seminar,” in
Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1994), 230. I have revised the translation.
  2. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen
Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VII,
part 1, 411; Of Human Freedom, 92. And see Dennis Schmidt, Lyrical and Ethical
Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2005).
  3. Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Men-
schen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 1, 155; “On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
329.
  4. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), “Logological Fragments II,” in Philo-
sophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 70.
  5. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zum zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, 2, 430; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of
his Death,” in Illuminations, 132.
  6. Santner, On Creaturely Life, xiii.
  7. Adorno, Minima Moralia, §146, 306 in the German, 228 in the English.
  8. For an argument formulating the difference between the human voice and
the animal voice, see Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard
University Loeb Classical Library, 1977), Book I, ch. 2, 1253a, 10–18 and see De
Anima, Book 2, ch. 8, 420b, where, in contrast to his position in Politics, Aristotle
will deny animals not only the “gift of speech” but also even a voice, since “voice,”
properly speaking, “is a sound with a [conscious] meaning,” hence only beings with
a soul could have a voice. And see Hegel’s reformulation of Aristotle’s distinc-
tion in Jenenser Realphilosophie I, Die Vorlesungen von 1803–1804, ed. J. Hoffmeister
(Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1932), 212 and Jenenser Realphilosophie II, Die Vorlesun-
gen 1805–1806, ed. J. Hoffmeister; Jenaer Realphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner
1967), Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. II, ed. Eva Moldauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 164, 192. Also see Hegel, System of
Ethical Life, trans. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (New York: SUNY Press, 1979), 43.
  9. See my book, Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-
Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2005). I argue there that the voice we call “our own” is indebted to the voices
of nature, and that this indebtedness constitutes a moral claim on our responsi-
bility to care for the future of nature. This moral claim is to be heard, I argue,
through a process for which the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment used the phrase
“Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt”: “Remembrance of nature in the subject.”
10. See Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della
negatività (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1982), pp. 58–60; Language and Death,
 296 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 5

trans. Karen Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1991), p. 45 ff.

Chapter 4: As Time Goes By:

Words from the Embers of Remembering
  1. In this regard, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holo-
caust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988),
Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben,
aber nicht gehalten werden konnte,” in Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung (June 6,
1986), and Jürgen Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” in The New Con-
servatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Also see “From Traumatism to Promise,”
trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. in POINTS: INTERVIEWS 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth
Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 383.
  2. See Mark McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2003) and Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The
Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in New German Critique, vol.
88 (2003), 71–96.
  3. On memory, mourning, and melancholy, see David Farrell Krell: Of Mem-
ory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990); Lunar Voices: Of Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction and Thought (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995); and The Purest of Bastards: Works on Memory, Art and
Affirmation in the Art of Jacques Derrida (College Park: Penn State University Press,
2000). Also see Edward Casey’s magisterial work, Remembering: A Phenomenological
Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
  4. Sebald, Austerlitz, 52 in the German, 44 in the English.
  5. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, 264, 177 in the English.
  6. Ibid., 259 in the German, 174 in the English.
  7. Ibid., 156 in the German, 107 in the English.
 8. I am indebted to Michael McGillen for his comments and suggestions
with regard my interpretation of these two German locutions.
  9. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
10. Ibid.
11. Santner, On Creaturely Life, xx.

Chapter 5: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the

Unhappy Consciousness: Sebald’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  1. Georg W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Georg

Lasson and Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), vol. V,
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 5 / 297

563–64; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarenden

Press, 1977), 492–93. Hereafter cited as PG, followed by pages, first in German,
then in English.
 2. Sebald, “Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte: Versuch über die
literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung mit Anmerkungen zu Kasack, Nossack
und Kluge,” orbis Litterarum, vol. 37, 345–66; On the Natural History of Destruc-
tion, 56.
 3. Sebald, “Helle Bilder und dunkle: Zur Dialektik der Eschatologie bei
Stifter und Handke,” Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 165–66. I think there can be
no doubt that Sebald was always deeply engaged in thinking about theological
questions: teleologies, eschatologies, theodicies, and the meaning of resurrection,
salvation, and redemption. And also, I would say, about failed utopias.
  4. Benjamin retrieves the phrase “petrified unrest,” “erstarrte Unruhe,” from
Baudelaire. See Benjamin’s “Zentralpark,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 2, 668;
“Central Park,” in Selected Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), vol. IV, 171.
  5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1928), 268ff. And see the magisterial work by Donald
W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy
(Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1998).
 6. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Sämtliche Werke, ed.,
H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Verlag Fromanns, 1949–1959, vol. XV, 80.
  7. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 12–13.
 8. See The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W. G. Sebald,
ed. Rüdiger Görner (München: IUDICIUM, University of London Institute of
Germanic Studies, 2003), a collection of essays, many by Sebald’s friends, written
following Sebald’s untimely death.
  9. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, Gesammelte Werke, eds. Hartmut Buchner and
Otto Pöggler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968), vol. IV, 414; Faith and Knowledge,
trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 191.
10. H. S. Harris, “Introduction” to Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, 40–41.
11. See Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, 317, 384–85 and 408, 413–14; 149,
157–58, 182, and 190 in the English.
12. But see Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar
(New York: Routledge, 2002). In §52, 100 of that text, he returns to the thought-
figure of ash and argues, denying faith any ground, that, “the dispersion of ashes is
not even promised.” Commenting on this, Michael Naas observed that Derrida is
questioning even the testimony of ash, and even its ability to serve as a testament,
“as if,” he says, “the promise of ashes already promised too much.” See Michael Naas,
Miracle and Machine, 241. Ash is said to be an inert substance, confirming the finality
of death; and yet, how often have things miraculously emerged to rise from the ashes?
13. Sebald, “Vorwort,” Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Lit-
eratur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1994), 12.
 298 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 6

Chapter 6: Beauty: Symbol of Morality

in a Phenomenology of Spirit
 1. See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vörländer (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1959), esp. §59, 211–15; Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co., 1987), esp. 225–30.
  2. Ibid., §60, 210 in the German edition, 231 in the English.
  3. Ibid., §40, 144–47 in the German, 159–62 in the English.
 4. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturns, 131 in the German, 108 in the English.
This image is reminiscent of, probably an allusion to, the image that Vladimir
Nabokov creates in his Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1989), 31–32. In this
image, which Sebald said he greatly admired, Nabokov tells of his father being
thrown up in the air by his serfs at the harmonious conclusion of a petition they
presented. There are numerous borrowings from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and from
his novels—including the figure of dust.
  5. David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2005), 358.
  6. Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühle., 30–31 in the German; 25–26 in the English.
No picture accompanies this text; however, in The Emigrants, where Max Ferber
recounts his visit to the salt frames near Bad Kissingen, there is an image of a twig.
See Die Ausgewanderten, 338–44; 227–30 in the English. During this visit, Ferber
allowed himself “ruminations about the long-term and (I believe) impenetrable pro-
cess which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water, produces the very
strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth patterns of nature even
as it is being dissolved.” Also see Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, (Frankfurt am Main: original edition, Suhrkamp, 2007); for the English,
see Heinrich von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York: Frederick Ungar Publish-
ing Co., 1964; reprinted in 1990 by Waveland Press in Prospect Heights, Illinois), in
which Heinrich visits some mines and beholds the many wondrous crystalline forms
produced by nature. Because his father was director of the Saxon saltworks, Novalis
developed a lively interest in geology, mineralogy, and mining; and he was himself,
for a while, engaged in the administration of the saltworks in Saxony.
 7. Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. I, part 1, 192; “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings 1913–1926,
vol. I, 348. The German phrase is: “der Schein der Schönheit als der Schein der
Versöhnung.”
  8. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Regi-
nald Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), 27.
  9. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Sha-
piro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 117–119.
10. Ibid., 120.
11. Novalis, “Blütenstaub,” in Das philosophische Werk, Schriften, eds. Richard
Samuel and Hans-Joachim Mähl (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1981), vol. I, §50,
432; Philosophical Writings, §50, 31. The German reads: “Jeder geliebte Gegenstand
ist der Mittlpunkt eines Paradieses.”
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 7 / 299

12. Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp

Verlag, 1988), 163.
13. See Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 210–11; 30–32 in the
English translation by Osborne. These extraordinary pages, reflecting on beauty and
truth in Plato’s “Symposium,” which Benjamin wrote for inclusion in the “Epis-
temo-Critical Prologue,” are, for me at any rate, among the most profound pages
in the entire study. They certainly propose a radically original reading; and they
are beautiful, ignited with the fire of a love awakened by philosophical reflection.
Sebald’s reference to combustion takes place in an interview with Sara Kafatou,
Harvard Review (Fall, 1998), no. 15, 32.
14. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 340ff in the German; 163ff
in the English translation. And see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,”
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207.
15. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler et al.
(Paderborn: Schöningin, 1958), vol. II, 324; also see vol. XVIII, Nr. 1168, 418
and Nr. 1200, 420. Also see Novalis, Schriften, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard
Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), vol. III, 685, nr. 671.

Chapter 7: On a Journey through Disenchantment

  1. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 133.

 2. See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kants Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), Bd. V, §80, 418, or Werke in sechs
Bänden (Berlin: Insel-Verlag, 1960), Bd. V, §80, 538; for the English, see The
Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1987), §80, 304. Also see “Justice in the Seer’s Eyes: Benjamin and Heidegger on
a Vision out of Time and Memory,” in my book, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity
in the Shadow of Enlightenment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999);
revised paperback edition, Duquesne University Press, 2003. See also Benjamin,
“Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1955), Bd. I, 494–95; “Theses in the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations
(New York: Schocken, 1969), Thesis II, 254. Benjamin’s “schwache messianische
Kraft” is surely echoing Kant’s phrase.
 3. Interview with Michael Silverblatt, in The Emergence of Memory, ed.
Lynne Schwartz, 85.
 4. J. J. Long, “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die
Ausgewanderten,” Modern Language Review (January 2003), vol. 98, no. 1, 117–37.
And see J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (New York: Columbia
University, 2007).
 5. Indeed, even the title of Sebald’s story is deflationary: it is a scholar’s
literary joke, playing with the title of Dr Katzenbergers Badereise (1809), a novel
by Jean-Paul Richter.
 300 / NOTES TO part II, chapter 7

 6. See John Sears, “Photographs, Images, and the Space of Literature in
Sebald’s Prose,” in Searching for Sebald, ed. Lisa Patt, 204–225.
  7. Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 2, 683; “Cen-
tral Park,” Selected Writings 1938–1940, vol. IV, 185.
  8. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. V, 253.
  9. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 396;
Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 404. Trans-
lation revised.
10. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, part 3, 1238–39. In a note on
“The Dialectical Image” composed for his Arcades Project, Benjamin remarks: “The
historical [historische] method is a philological one” to be read in the “Book of Life.”
And he immediately follows this by observing that, “According to Hofmannsthal,
‘We are reading what never was written.’ The reader to be thought here is the
true historian.” Benjamin then proceeds, first, to suggest that the idea of universal
history is messianic, secondly to introduce the notion of messianic actuality and
thereby, implicitly, also the notion of potentiality, and finally, to introduce the
“Idea” of an “integral prose,” a storyteller’s prose, corresponding to “the messianic
Idea of universal history, [“a world of complete and integral actuality”] that can
be understood by all mankind, just as the language of the birds can be under-
stood by children born on Sunday.” And see Aby Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften
und Würdigungen, eds. Dieter Wuttke and Carl Georg Heise (Baden-Baden: Verlag
Valentin Koerner, 1979). As we know, Sebald lived in England, not far by train
from London, home of the Warburg Institute.
11. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 132. Incidentally, Sebald’s scene in Vertigo (SV 161–
62/145–46), in which Dr. K. suddenly and briefly sees angels appearing in cracks
on the ceiling of his hotel room, was probably inspired by a scene in Beckett’s
novel, Malone Dies (New York: Grove Press, n.d.), 217. In this scene, Malone recalls
that, whilst writing, he suddenly and briefly saw, upon the ceiling of his bedroom,
a profusion of flowers, or perhaps cupids. But, he adds, all that beauty vanished,
“without leaving a trace.”
12. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (1970), 53–54. And see Alex-
ander García Düttmann: The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno,
Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, trans. Arline Lyons (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
13. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. I, part 2, 695; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 255.
14. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, part 2, 432; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary
of his Death,” in Selected Writings 1927–1934, vol. II, 811.
15. I am reminded in this connection of Freud’s diagnosis in the so-called
“Rat-Man Case”: the patient was suffering from the horror of a pleasure he could
not permit himself acknowledge. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Com-
 NOTES TO part II, chapter 7 / 301

plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, et
al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. X, 167–68.
16. On love and death, see David Farrell Krell’s “Schlag der Liebe, Schlag
des Todes: On Heidegger and Trakl,” in Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor
of Martin Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1978), 238–58.
17. Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, ed. Nahum Glatzer, trans. Clement Green-
berg, a bilingual edition (New York: Schocken, 1946), 80ff. See my commentary on
this passage in my book, Gestures of Ethical Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), n. 144, 674. One might perhaps say about the image of the coming of the
Messiah something like what Benjamin says, in “On the Concept of History,” regard-
ing the image of the past that erupts into consciousness as an involuntary memory:
it is an irretrievable image of the utopian promise of happiness in a just world, an
image that “can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its
recognizability,” an image that “threatens to disappear in any present that does not
recognize itself as intended in that image.” See Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff
der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften, 7 volumes, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser
and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–1989), vol. I, part
2, 695; “On the Concept of History,” Trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings 1938–1940
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), vol. IV, 390–91.
18. Benjamin, “Betrachtungen und Notizen,” Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965), vol. VI, 209. My translation.
19. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg), “Fragmente,” in Schriften, vol. III,
ed. J. Minor (Jena: Diederichs, 1907), 301.
20. Benjamin, “Zur Moral und Anthropologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), vol. VI, 87; “Outline of the Psy-
chophysical Problem,” in Selected Writings 1913–1926, ed., Michael Jennings (Cam-
bridge: The Belnap Press of the Harvard University Press), 400.
21. See my book, Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical
Theory Approach To Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov (Lanham, Maryland:
Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), in which I comment on a motorcar
ride in Nabokov’s novel Pnin (New York: Vintage International, 1989) that likewise
bears eschatological significance. The allegorical episode is narrated in a—to my
ears, anyway—wistful tone on p. 191 of that edition. Professor Pnin is depicted in
his motorcar, driving away from the college: “[. . .] the little sedan boldly swung
past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could
make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made
beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might hap-
pen.” And see a similar allegorical, dialectical image in Italo Calvino’s politically
charged evocation, in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Torino: Einaidi Tascabili, 2002),
of “una patria lontana che vogliono raggiungere e che è patria appunto perché è
lontana.” (Italics added.)
22. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press,
1958), 31.
 302 / NOTES TO part II, EPILOGUE

23. The wish that Sebald expresses in The Rings of Saturn, the wish, namely,
to “go all the way to Jerusalem” leaves us with some unresolvable ambiguities.
Which “Jerusalem” is in Sebald’s mind? The real, present-day city at the heart of
the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians? William Blake’s allegorical “New
Jerusalem”? The biblical Jerusalem of the first Temple? Or the city of Manchester,
where Sebald briefly lived and about which, we might remember, Sebald said that
Prime Minister Disraeli once ventured to call it the “the most wonderful city of
modern times,/ a celestial Jerusalem”? (NN 83/97) Of course, if it were only to
the distant city of Manchester that he would have liked to be taken by motor-car,
then the invocation of the name “Jerusalem” would once again raise a hope only
to lead us into disillusionment, or perhaps even “a quasi sublunary state of deep
melancholia.” (NN 85/99) Nevertheless, the invocation would still, as such, keep
in remembrance the promise that that ancient place-name holds.

Epilogue

  1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), §128, 266; Minima Moralia: Reflec-
tions from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), §128, 200.
  2. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970),
128; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota, 1997), 82.
  3. Parataxis is one of the structural ways through which language can expose
or open itself to an interruptive event—an event signifying, perhaps, a revolution-
ary moment in history for the promise of happiness. For my reading of the parataxis
in Hölderlin’s poetry, see my chapter on his writing in Gestures of Ethical Life: Read-
ing Hölderlin’s Question of Measure After Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005). The poet’s “aber Dank” in the poem “Celebration of Peace” creates a
caesura that interrupts, in proleptic semblance, the historical operations of fate, alle-
gorically opening up a “Zeitraum” for some promising utopian event to take place.
  4. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 192; 127 in the English translation.
  5. Ibid.,134 in the German; 86 in the English.
  6. Ibid., 192–93 in the German; 127 in the English.
  7. Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Ger-
shom Scholem 1932–1940, Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken
Books, 1989), 142.
  8. Walter Benjamin, “Anmerkungen,” Neue Thesen B, Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. I, part 3, 1233; “Paralipomena
to ‘On the Concept of History,’ New Theses B” (1940), trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1938–1940, eds. Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belnap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 403.
  9. See Benjamin, “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe,” in Selected
Writings 1913–1926, vol. I, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cam-
 NOTES TO PART II, EPILOGUE / 303

bridge: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 286–87. And see his
“On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings 1938–1940, vol. IV, eds. How-
ard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 392. For the German, see “Die Bedeutung
der Zeit in der moralischen Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. VI, 97–98 and “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesam-
melte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. I, part 2, 697–98.
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———. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die Phänom-
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———. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966, 1975.
———. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Drei Studien zu Hegel. Gesammelte
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———. Ästhetische Theorie. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Gesam-
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 Index
Adorno, Theodor W., xiii, xv, xvi,
xxvi, xxxv–xxxvii, xlii, xlix, liv, lv,
lvii, lix, 11, 20, 23, 29, 37–39, 47,
55, 59, 64, 66, 71, 79, 85, 86, 91,
95, 103, 106–108, 114, 117, 119,
123, 125, 131, 136–40, 150, 151,
153, 161, 164, 169–72, 177–80, 184,
186, 195, 210–19, 228–30, 241–43
Aesthetics of resistance, xxxiii, 94, 98,
108, 276n7
Agamben, Giorgio, 181, 280n18
Allegory, xx, xxvii, xxxiii, xlii, xlix,
liv, lvii, 9, 11, 34–36, 44, 51, 86,
90, 95, 98, 106, 113–14, 120–22,
125, 131–32, 136, 144, 157, 165,
171–75, 182, 184, 199–200, 204,
206, 209, 212–21, 223, 226–29, 232,
241
Altdorfer, Albrecht, 174, 192
Anaximander, 153, 171, 291n14
Angels, Sebald’s narrative images of,
166, 230, 233, 300n11; inspired by
Beckett’s cupids, 300n11
Annunciation, the, 233–34
Arendt, Hannah, liv, 22, 47, 65
Aristotle, xxxix, xl, 83, 163, 178,
295n8
Art of writing, 226
Ash, 101, 105, 132, 133, 204, 211,
226, 287–88n82, 297n12, 282n33,
287n82
Attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit),
224–26
319
Austin, John L., 252n27
Balanchine, George, 251n18
Baroque, German, 90, 102, 116, 129,
130, 153, 158, 163, 165, 174, 177,
182, 220, 221. See Trauerspiel
Barthes, Roland, 281n26
Baudelaire, Charles, xvii, xxviii, 91,
157
Baum, Michael, 13–14, 67
Beauty, xxvii, xxviii, xxxiv, xxxvii,
207–20, 246; and reconciliation,
214; as allegorical, 220
Beckett, Samuel, xxiv, 112, 138, 205,
239, 287–88n82, 300n11
Beiser, Frederick, xix
Benjamin, Walter, xxvii, xxix, xxx,
xxxi, xxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii,
xxxviii, xliii–xlv, l, lv, lix, 1, 2, 20,
24, 31, 38, 44, 47, 62–64, 69, 70,
74, 79, 80–83, 87, 89, 90, 94, 98,
99, 102, 106, 108, 110, 112–19,
123, 126–31, 133–35, 139–45,
151–57, 163–65, 172, 174, 178, 194,
195, 199, 220, 221, 214, 218, 219,
230, 239
Bergson, Henri, 157
Bernstein, Jay, 211, 265n26
Blanchot, Maurice, lii, 107, 137,
259n97
Blaue Reiter, xx
Bloch, Ernst, xxxix
Brücke, xx
 320 /
Brecht, Berthold, 42
Browne, Sir Thomas, 96, 131, 198
Calvino, Italo, 25n59, 301n21
Caputo, John, xxix
Carnap, Rudolf, xxiii, xxiv
Cartesianism, liii
Causality of fate, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii,
lviii, 1–23, 33–36, 43–67, 70–73,
83–87, 170, 172, 232, 246–49, 260,
262, 265n26
Causality of freedom, xxvi, xxvii,
xxxii, xxxiii, 1, 4, 6, 8, 50, 59–63,
69–75, 86, 87, 166–72, 210, 243–46
Cavell, Stanley, 253n40
Celan, Paul, xlix, 87, 104, 112, 136,
282n33, 283n40
Cervantes, Miguel de, 201
Claudel, Paul, 259n97
Communication, liv–lvii, 31, 209–10,
219
Communism, 273n7
Conrad, Joseph, 211
Contini, Gianfranco 259n97
Corruption of language, 246, 253n33
Courbet, Gustav, 160
Crisis, xviii, xix, xx–xxviii, xlviii, l, lvii,
40, 114, 122, 124, 142, 198, 245
Death, dialogue with, 265n24
Democracy, 8, 69, 233, 234; as to
come, xiv, xxx, 254n50
Derrida, Jacques, vii, xiii, xiv, xxix,
xxx, xliv, xlix, 45, 47, 96, 119, 156,
284n54
Destiny, 166–74, 182, 190, 193, 196,
220, 232; as different from fate, 4
De Man, Paul, xlix, l
De Tocqueville, Alexis, xiv
Dialectical image, 243
Dialogue, the promise of happiness in,
liv–lvii
Dickens, Charles, xvii
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 26
Disenchantment, 223–39
INDEX
Disraeli, Benjamin, 122, 302n23
Döblin, Alfred, xxxii, xxxiii, 94
Dollinger, Roland, 35, 62, 64, 67
Donahue, Neil, 48, 51
Dronske, Ulrich, 41
Dust, 35, 81, 105, 124, 125, 131–33,
137, 147, 156, 162, 200, 228, 229,
285n65, 288n82, 298n4
Eichmann, Adolph, 22
Eingedenken, 78, 93, 151, 178, 186,
210, 216, 217, 290n11, 295n9. See
remembrance
Elliot, T. S., 155
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xlii, 40, 41,
79, 138, 249n5, 273n7
Enigmaticalness, 242
Enlightenment, xix, xiv–xix, xxvi,
xxviii, xli, xlii, 11, 23, 26, 36, 37,
55, 59, 72, 77–87, 103, 109, 127,
151, 152, 162, 164, 171, 182, 203,
207, 211, 212, 216, 245
Enthüllung, as different from
Offenbarung, 82, 83
Erfahrung, xxi–xxii, 157, 219
Erlebnisse, xxi–xxii, 157
Expressionism, xx, 3, 8–9, 40, 48
Fate, 1–28, 47–67, 166–74, 182, 190,
193, 196, 220. See causality of Fate;
as different from destiny, 4; Hegel
on causality of, 265n26
Fiction, the promise of happiness in,
liv
Flaubert, Gustav, 5, 97
Foucault, Michel, 108, 124
Franklin, Ruth, 138–39
Freedom, xii–xv, xxiii, xxvi, xxvii,
xxxvi, xli, xlii, xliii, 5, 8, 9, 11,
34, 39, 43–47, 55, 58, 61, 66–74,
77, 84, 85, 91, 103, 141, 155, 159,
161, 163, 167, 169, 170–74, 190,
191, 197, 200, 202, 203, 208–11,
215, 216, 218, 232, 244–47. See
Causality of freedom
 INDEX
French Revolution, the, 161
Freud, Sigmund, xxiii, xxiv235
George, Stefan, xxv
Gasché, Rodolph, 253n33
Geltung ohne Bedeutung, 218, 242–43
Geschick. See destiny
Giotto di Bondone, 233
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, xvii, 37,
55, 125–26, 128, 169, 261n3
Goya, Francesco, 174, 182
Grass, Günther, 139
Grosz, Georg, 3
Grünewald, Matthias, 101, 151, 156
Habermas, Jürgen, lvi, lvii, 168, 259n97
Hamann, Johann G., 147
Handke, Peter, 124, 154
Hänsel and Gretel, 79, 94, 273n7
Happiness, in good life, xl; in moral
life, xl; phenomenology of, xxxix–xli
Harris, H.S., 203
Hegel, Georg W. F., vii, xix, l, li, lv,
lvi, 6, 11, 20, 21, 108, 110, 125,
129, 133, 150, 153, 161, 161–68,
180, 181, 189, 190–93, 197–209; on
ethical life, 292–93n29, 265n26
Heidegger, Martin, xviii, xxv, xxvi, 3,
50, 90, 96, 107, 147, 148, 184, 186
Herakleitos, 1, 154, 159
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 159
Hirsch, Marianne, 186
Historikerstreit, 183
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, xxiii, xxiv,
xxv, xxvi, 114, 227, 229
Hölderlin, Friedrich, xlii, xlv–xlviii,
liv, 5, 6, 47, 95, 97, 126, 127, 143,
161, 162, 172, 175, 176
Holocaust, xvi–xix, xxxiii, xxxvii,
xlviii, 87, 94, 95, 97, 103, 104, 109,
110, 117–21, 132–34, 138, 139, 142,
160, 183, 203, 212, 224, 255n66,
284n54
Hope, ray of, 154, 224; and weak
messianic power, 154, 255n68
/ 321
Horkheimer, Max, xxvi, xlviii, xlix,
23, 93
Humanity, xiv, xxvii, xlii, lv, 15, 62,
71, 78, 84, 95, 114, 161, 207–10,
241; as redeemed, 243
Human nature, 11, 18–34; and the
animal, 177–82
Hume, David, 199–200
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 80
Hunchback, figure of, 230
Husserl, Edmund, xviii–xix, xxiv, 137
Inhumanity, 55, 64, 241
James, Henry, 97
Jay, Martin, xv
Jelavich, Peter, 13
Jerusalem, 239, 302n23
Joyce, James, xxiv, 38
Justice, the sword of, 80, 112, 116,
228–29
Kabbalah, xliii, 225, 231–32, 279
Kafka, Franz, xxi, 9, 46, 73, 80, 94,
95, 99, 134–36, 141, 145, 150, 158,
178, 196, 218, 234, 288n90
Kant, Immanuel, xxxiii, xxxviii, xlv,
li–lviii, 6, 39, 59, 63, 70, 71, 77, 78,
128, 154, 160, 167–69, 172, 207–18,
224, 250, 251, 255n68
Keller, Otto, 15
Kierkegaard, Søren, xxxvi, 98
Krell, David F., 212, 287n82
Kleist, Heinrich, 9
Klopstock, Friedrich, 151
Kluge, Alexander, 123, 227
Kracauer, Siegfried, 262n8
Kraus, Karl, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 29, 55,
66, 87, 270n14
Language, and promise of happiness; as
hospitality, xli, lii, lv, 130; as justice, lii,
lix, lv; as skepticism, li–lvii; corruption
of, xlii–xlviii; resurrection of, xlix
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 225
 322 /
Levinas, Emmanuel, li, lii, lv, lix, 132
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 131
Lewis, Pericles, xv
Lukács, George, xxxi, 4, 18243
Malebranche, Nicolas, 135
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 251n17
Manet, Édouard, 251n17
Mann, Thomas, xix, xx, 212
Marcuse, Herbert, 60–62, 215–16
Marx, Karl, 6, 156, 233–34, 273n7
Masereel, Frans, 40
Mauthner, Fritz, xxiii, xxiv
Melancholy, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii,
xxxiv, xxxvii, xlviii, li, liii, 32,
35, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105, 107,
122, 125, 126, 137, 141, 158, 163,
177, 182, 184, 185, 190, 196, 198,
199, 201, 204, 205, 206, 211, 217,
220–24, 227, 246
Melancholy science, 108–34, 154, 203
Memory, xvi, xxi, xxvi, xxxiv, xxix,
xxxiii, xxxiv, xliv, xlv, xlix, l, liv,
lvii, lviii, 18, 75, 87, 89, 90, 93,
97, 100, 101, 104, 108, 111, 112,
115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 129, 133,
134, 138, 141–45, 147, 150, 151,
155, 157, 159, 160, 162, 172, 173,
175, 178, 181, 183–88, 194, 198,
204, 205, 210, 215, 216, 217, 227,
230, 238, 239, 243, 296n3. See
remembrance
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 50
Messianic, the, xv, xxvii–xxxi, xxxv–
xxxix, xli, xlviii, l, liii, lvii–lviii,
47, 74, 77, 79, 94, 98, 99, 102,
110, 113, 129, 136, 154, 173, 225,
229, 230, 231, 234–36, 241, 273n7,
300n10, 301n17; rhythm of, 283n41;
as a weak power, xxvii, xxxviii, 94,
129, 154, 292n18
Modernism, xx–xxv, 3, 9, 37–46,
108–10, 130, 131, 133; reflexive, xx,
250–51n17
Montaigne, Michel de, 131
INDEX
Moral law, lii, 6, 70–71, 77–78, 168,
207–208, 261–62n6; and causality
261–62n6
Mourning, xix, xxvii, xxxii, xlix, l, li,
liv, 95–97, 103, 108, 159, 163, 179,
184, 188, 190, 199, 201, 203, 204,
212, 217, 227, 246, 247
Musil, Robert, xxi, 9, 13
Nabokov, Vladimir, 99, 123, 251n17,
277n16, 298n4, 301n21;
Nachträglichkeit, 230
Naas, Michael, xxix, xxx
National Socialism, 7–9, 58, 59, 81, 118
Nature, xix, xxvii, xxxvii, xxxix, liii,
2, 4, 6, 11, 33–35, 59, 62, 64, 70,
77, 79, 81, 84, 90, 96, 101, 103,
104, 107, 113, 115, 117, 123, 134,
135, 141, 147, 148, 151, 153–82,
189, 192–95, 198, 202, 207–14, 218,
219, 221, 226, 238; and animals,
177–82; beauty of, 192–93, 207–21;
messianic rhythm of, xxxix, 47, 77,
79, 113. See remembrance
Natural history, xvii, xxii, 29–36,
48, 147–76, 167–69, 184, 225. See
remembrance
Neue Sachlichkeit, xx, 3, 8, 59
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxii, xxiii, li, liii,
65, 89, 109, 258n89
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg),
vii, xlviii, 82, 95, 106, 178, 213,
216, 238–39, 261n3, 298n6
Offenbarung, as different from
Enthüllung, 82, 83, 218
Ovid, 157–58
Paradise, xiii, xiv, xxv, xxxv, xxxviii,
xxxix, xli, xlii, xlv, lviii, lviii,
77–87, 103, 164, 171, 216, 261n3,
273n7; language of, xliii–xlv
Parataxis: xxvii, 15, 112, 302n3
Pisanello (Antonio di Puccio Pisano),
225
 INDEX
Plato, xxxix, xl, xliii, lii, 108, 131,
138, 216, 245, 287n82; Symposium,
299n13
Platonism, liii
Poetry, the promise of happiness in,
lii–liv
Postmemory: 186
Poussin, Nicolas, 158–59, 164
Promise of happiness, xiv–xvi, xxv–
xxxi, xxxiv–xlv, xlix–xl, lv–lix,
77–87, 91, 223, 230, 241, 243,
245–47; and beauty, 207–21; and
the Messiah’s time of coming, 236;
in language, lii; present only as
trace, 228–29. See redemption
Proust, Marcel, xxv, xxxv, xlix, 97
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino),
251n17
Recognizability, 230
Reconciliation, xxxvi, xxxviii, xli,
xlviii, lvi, lviii, 55, 59, 64, 71, 86,
95, 133, 134, 155, 159, 160, 162,
168, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182,
203, 204, 208–10, 214, 223, 236,
241, 243, 245, 247; and beauty
214; with nature, 64, 155; of the
two senses of “sense,” lii–liv, xlv,
277n16; the promise of, lv
Redemption, xiii–lix; and the promise
of happiness, 223, 225, 227, 230–36,
241, 243, 246, 247; as rhythm
xxxix; of language, xxxiv; of the
world, 58, 71, 86, 87, 90, 93, 98,
101, 103, 104, 107, 114, 115,
127–29, 131, 133–35, 141, 150, 153,
154, 157, 162, 164, 166, 171–73,
177–79, 203, 206, 208, 220, 221,
223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231,
233–35, 237, 246, 247
Remembrance, and the promise of
happiness, vii, xvi, xxxiv, xxxvi,
xxxviii, xlii, xlviii, xlix, lv, 32,
79–81, 87, 93, 94, 96, 102, 103,
106, 107, 109, 113, 125, 132, 136,
/ 323
137, 143, 145, 151, 152, 155, 167,
178, 180, 183–88, 203, 209, 210,
216–18, 223, 230, 237, 247; as
bearing witness, 96, 106–109; of
nature in the subject, 151, 178, 180,
181, 217, 295n9
Resurrection, 120, 203, 224, 228; and
dissolution, 152; of language, xlix; of
nature, 113
Revelation, 82, 83, 102, 127, 172, 181,
190, 218, 224, 237, 242, 244
Richter, Gerhard, 133, 287n81
Romanticism, German, xlv–xlix, 95,
105, 106, 149, 159, 160, 162, 163,
213, 221
Ruskin, John, 273–74n12
St. Augustine, 82
St. Paul, 151, 177, 291n8
Salvation, 227, 233–35
Salvatore, 232–35
Sander Gabriele, 12–13
Santner, Eric, 120, 152, 179, 182, 187,
223
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 143
Schelling, xxxvii, 95, 135, 151, 153,
163, 164, 176, 177
Schicksal. See Fate
Schiller, Friedrich, 215
Schlick, Moritz, xxiii
Schmidt, James, 47
Scholem, Gershom, l, lix, 5, 69, 72,
77, 141, 218, 230, 242
Sebald, W. G., xxxiii, xxxiv, 64, 65,
73, 94
Semblance: xv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiii,
xxxv, xli–lv, 44, 45, 65, 66, 86, 103,
107, 126, 137, 139, 159, 192, 208,
210, 212, 214, 218, 221, 226, 227,
234, 243, 250
“Sense,” two senses of, lii–liv, xlv,
277n16
Skepticism, 141, 189–206
Stendahl (Marie-Henri Beyle), xxxiv–
xxxvi, xlii
 324 /
Stifter, Adalbert, 193
Steller, George Wilhelm, 179
Stevens, Wallace, xiii, xlii, 251n17
Strauss, Richard, xxiv
Stoicism, 141, 189–206
Storytelling, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxvii, xlvii,
xlix, 23, 37, 38, 40, 71, 73, 86, 94,
97, 103, 104, 108, 111, 114, 116,
118, 125, 139, 144, 150, 157, 161,
164, 232, 234, 236, 250n9, 257n79;
in Hölderlin and Novalis, 261n3
Surrealism, xx, xxxv, 3, 9, 11, 44
Tiepolo, Giovanni Batista, 101
Tolstoy, Leo, xli
Trace, xxxvii, 96–97, 107, 125, 174,
181, 213, 225–26, 228–29, 284n54,
287n82, 300n11
Translation, xxxviii, xliv, 257n75
Transmissibility, xxxiv, xli, xlii, xlvii,
xlviii, lvii, lix, 69, 93, 97, 104, 139,
141–45, 188
Trauerspiel (Mourning Play), xlv, 2,
44, 51, 106, 128–30, 153, 163, 165,
174, 193, 194, 199, 209, 221, 275n5
Tripp, Jan Peter, 111
Truth, xvii, xix, xxii, xxiii, xxxi,
xxxiv, xxxv, xxxviii, xliii, xliv, li,
13, 23, 39, 50, 55, 57, 64, 69, 90,
98, 100, 103, 105, 107, 115, 126–28,
134, 137–45, 148–50, 159, 164, 170,
173, 181, 187, 191, 196–98, 202,
208, 210–22, 225, 228–30, 241–47
INDEX
Turner, William, 160
Unhappy consciousness, 189–206
Utopia, xiv, xv, xvi, xxvii–xxxi, xxxv,
xxxvi, xli, liii, lvii, 85, 102, 136,
149, 164, 179, 207, 216, 218, 233
Valéry, Paul, 137
Van Ruisdael, Jacob, 191
Voices, animal and human, 180–81;
emerging from the ashes, 280–81n20
Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, xxiii, xxiv,
114, 227, 229
Von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 104
Waiting, xxx, 39, 74, 98, 100, 112,
121, 125, 160, 233–36
Walser, Robert, 115, 287n82
Warburg, Aby, 229
Weber, Samuel, 254n58
Weiss, Peter, 252–53n33
Williams, William Carlos, xiii
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiii, xxiii, xxiv,
xli, 121–22
Witnessing, xv, xvi, xxix, xxxi, xxxiv,
xli, 7, 11, 37, 42, 87, 96, 103, 104,
109, 127, 138, 141, 142, 144, 148,
161, 162, 178, 179, 183, 195, 203,
224, 233, 238, 247
Wohlfarth, Irving, 113
Wood, David C., xv
Writing, the art of, 49, 226