SEBALD Memória e Imagens de Catástrofe

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ISSN: 17056411

Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

The Novelist of Memory and the Catastrophe of Images: Sebald’s TheEmigrants and the Thought of Jean Baudrillard.

Dr. Gerry Coulter(Bishop's University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada)

I. Introduction

1. Sebald, The Emigrants (page 27).

Every photographed object (in its silence) is merely the trace left by thedisappearance of everything else – the state of the world in our absence(Baudrillard, 1999:13031, 136).

We shall never know whether Nazism, the concentration camps orHiroshima were intelligible or not, our amnesia is the amnesia of images(Baudrillard, 2002a:17).




W. G. Sebald’s novels are unusual in that they include found images

(usually old photographs) which the author imbeds at frequent intervals in the text.

These images are seldom mentioned directly in the text and are not accompanied by

subtitles. It is assumed that the reader understands that these images are

strategically placed to stimulate the imagination and that they are not actual

photographic representations of characters or events described in the text. The

reader is put to work in an active manner as s/he must interpret the images to

determine their possible meaning(s) and how their presence might influence our

reading of the text (see Appendix One for a sample page from The Emigrants).

The presence of images in Sebald’s novels is also a point of intersection with

contemporary theory of the image – especially the writing of Jean Baudrillard. An

investigation of Sebald’s The Emigrants, attentive to Baudrillard, points to important

intersections between art (literature) and contemporary theory. Before turning to

Sebald’s novel I begin with an outline some of Baudrillard’s thought on the image.

II. Baudrillard on the Image

Every image is an ephemeral vanishing act, in its countlesscontemporary forms, its only magic is the magic of disappearance, andthe pleasures it gives are bloodless ones (Baudrillard, 1990:67).

Baudrillard alerts us to the “vital illusion” – the problem that we have never

know the real – merely the appearances behind which it hides. This ancient but

underacknowledged problem is heightened in our age of hightech simulation as

we are buried ever deeper under images. Efforts to give or take meaning from

history, never easy, are now deeply problematic. For Baudrillard the strong lesson of

contemporary simulation is that the old relationship between sign and referent have

become reversed. Among the thought provoking patterns he points to includes

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become reversed. Among the thought provoking patterns he points to includes

Disneyland which he says is set in hyperreal America to preserve a sense of the

reality of America: “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the... real America that

is Disneyland” (2002b:23). This is not unlike the view we derive of prisons from

reading Foucault (they are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal

omnipresence, that is carceral). In Baudrillard’s example it is Los Angeles and the

America surrounding it that now belong to the order of the hyperreal and simulation.

In an age of simulation, Disneyland ironically has an important role in preserving the

reality principle (1994:1213).

Baudrillard maintains that we do not get closer to the reality of a thing or an

event by burying it under layer upon layer of images. Indeed this takes us further

away from the vital illusion to the point where any firm distinction between reality and

representation tumble over the abyss of hypersimulation. These ideas sit well

alongside contemporary understandings of media and advertising which are

understood to lead us to acquire things not due to real needs, but due to desires that

are constantly manufactured by the images which keep us one step removed from

the reality of our bodies and the world around us. Whatever relationship the image

and reality may have been said to share in historical time is now stretched beyond

credulity in the era of CNN and real time (Baudrillard, 1992:90). Baudrillard marks

our passage from the ever problematic “real” of the vital illusion to the hyperreal,

where simulation engulfs the real. Here simulacra move toward the force of reality,

although this is not based on any counterpart in the real world – it is experienced as

being more real than any reality.

As we began moving deeper into the hyperreal during the 1990s Sebald

crafted a novel in which about 10 percent of its pages are occupied by images.

These images are very powerful in their stillness and silence. Sebald attempted to

make us aware of the problem of the image in reference to writing about historical

time in our era of real time. Sebald’s understanding of the image is not, as it turns

out, so very different from Baudrillard’s.

III. Sebald Through a Baudrillardian Lens

Reading Sebald with an eye on Baudrillard allows us to see his use of

photographs as a problematization of the role of images in our time – especially for

writing about history. Today, images are not only interesting because they work as



writing about history. Today, images are not only interesting because they work as

mirrors, representations, or counterparts of a “real”, but also when they “contaminate

reality and to model it” (Baudrillard, 1987a:16). It is the very reference principle of

images that now must be subjected to radical doubt.

It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most inconformity to reality that the image is most diabolic – and our technicalimages, whether they be from photography, cinema or television, are inthe overwhelming majority much more figurative, realist, than all theimages from past cultures... the immense majority of present dayphotographic, cinematic and television images are thought to bearwitness to the world with a fine resemblance and a touching fidelity. Wehave spontaneous confidence in their realism. We are wrong. They ofseem to resemble things, to resemble reality, events, faces (Ibid.)

The key to Sebald’s thoughtful use of images is that he has a similar understanding

of this Baudrillardian insight and he wants to use it to problematize images while

inserting them in his fascinating stories. As Sebald’s stories allude to events

surrounding the Jews in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s – he deploys his found

photographs from this period to make allusions to specific characters in his novel

which in turn raise vital questions. Sebald shares Baudrillard’s mistrust of the image

and this is precisely what allows him to use it so masterfully. Sebald, like

Baudrillard, may not have liked our contemporary circumstance and found it almost

intolerable, but he did embrace the challenge of his time as far as images are

concerned.

I am not convinced that Sebald has been given sufficient credit for his

understanding and his ability to play with and against our contemporary media

saturated society. This does not prevent his use of images from being necessary,

beautiful, or sublime – or stop him from attaining other goals as a writer – indeed it is

what makes it possible. Sebald knows that while we cannot trust the image we

simultaneously thirst for them (and who more so than Sebald?) He understands that

people’s memories are obliterated today by artificial memories which in turn

obliterate people from memory (the actual historical people for whom the characters

[simulations] in The Emigrants stand in). Here Sebald plays a realtime game with

images from historical time in a powerful manner. He creates artificial memories in

an effort to make us remember something (we can never know or remember) that is

increasingly buried beneath images – the holocaust.

History is a very serious problem for us today living in the world Baudrillard



describes. Seldom is the problem more painfully evident than when we deal with

negationists such as Robert Faurisson who deny the holocaust. The ironic role

played by Faurisson and his ilk is to raise the question: how do we know the

Holocaust? For my generation, and younger people, we know it mainly through the

movies or television images or the many simulations of an increasingly popular

holocaust tourism.

Contemporary theory (Baudrillard and others such as Giorgio Agamben),

remind us that we cannot trust even (especially) the news, and both give the

example of the massacre at Timisoara, Romania which was faked for the

international news media – a simulated massacre Similarly, The Emigrants is a

simulation of history and so Sebald uses images for a readership thoroughly familiar

with the problem of screens. Each photograph in The Emigrants opens a virtual

screen on the past which is dependent upon, but entirely separate from, the text.

Sebald knew that we have passed a point where we can tell each other histories

and as such novels are as important as narrative histories – both are simulations –

we cannot trust images yet we feel we must remember – it is who we believe we are

as a species. These are of course very problematic waters to negotiate when your

subject includes the holocaust.

IV. From the Historical to the Mythic

A common and unfortunate feature among many commentators on Sebald is the way

in which his use of text and images is understood as somehow taking us closer to

the events of the holocaust. Sebald is well aware that the images he uses do not

take us closer to the real event – indeed, his images deliberately keep us at a

distance from it as though he recognizes the value of images in creating an artificial

depth of field between event and interpretation that is stronger than text alone can

provide. Sebald also understands that his novels cannot take us closer to these

events because of the problem of image uncertainty in our time. The Emigrants

demands memory at a time when we are losing direct contact with the event as the

last survivors are passing and the event is now known to billions only through

images (including film and television) His allusive use of images from historical

time, often found in antique shops, alongside of his fictional text, participate in the

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same levels of simulation and uncertainty as does a film like Holocaust Sebald

does this without showing the kind of contempt for the image that kills the imaginary

– indeed he positions his images in such a manner as to stimulate our imagination

as readers. They are like traps set for us to fall into and we find pleasure in them.

Sebald’s contempt, implicit in his novels, is reserved for a reader who wishes to

remain passive.

Sebald appears to have been well aware that both images and text exist

beyond the reach of a shared meaning. He also seems to have understood that his

text would be stronger for the presence of images – not simply for reinforcing the text

(which they do not necessarily do), but by doing what historical images do best –

serving as strange attractors drawing us more intently to the events to which the text

alludes (Baudrillard, 1999:132).

Baudrillard’s assessment of images takes us to the core of the problem

Sebald is negotiating as an author who uses images to accompany writing about

events from historical time while living in the image saturation of real time:…where the holocaustdeniers are plainly absurd and wrong is when theythemselves espouse realism and contest the objective, historical reality, of theholocaust. In historical time, the event took place and the evidence is there. But weare no longer in historical time; we are now in real time, and in real time there is nolonger any evidence of anything whatever. The holocaust will never be verified inreal time. Holocaust denial is, therefore, absurd in its own logic, but by its veryabsurdity it sheds light on the irruption of another dimension, paradoxically termed“real time” – a dimension in which, paradoxically, objective reality disappears. ...andthis is indeed the undoing or defeat of thought and critical thought – but in fact it isnot its defeat: it is the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over anyform of logical articulation of reality whatsoever (Baudrillard, 2002a:108109).

Reality, says Baudrillard, has “preferred to disappear behind the perfect alibi of

images” (1990:181). Images become very important because they stand in for reality

now, their magical status possessing something of the radical illusion of the world

(the fact that we do not know the real but the appearances behind which it hides,

1999:140). In Sebald’s novel we have a vivid example of what Baudrillard means

when he says “the intensity of the image matches the degree of its denial of the real”

(Ibid.:130). Many of the photographs Sebald selects do possess something of a

magical status as images in that they possess something of the radical illusion of the

world.

While Sebald deploys images from historical time he does so in a manner

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While Sebald deploys images from historical time he does so in a manner

which is entirely contemporary in its ironic understanding of the circumstance

Baudrillard delineates. There is no question in my mind that Sebald’s use of images

in The Emigrants is based on an appreciation of a contemporary fact that, as

Baudrillard would have it: “between reality and the image, exchange is impossible”

(1999:147). This insight is precisely the one which allows Sebald to use his found

images not to support the text, but to challenge it – in the sense of constantly

reminding us that we are partaking of a fiction – but a fiction devoted to remembering

(against those like Faurisson who would like us to forget). While writing about the

events leading to the holocaust Sebald refuses the desperate effort to recreate an

historical time which has passed into images – indeed even the images he uses

from historical time are used in the same creative manner as those of contemporary

image makers. For example, Sebald does not use any recognizable or “stock”

images. Further, his use of images to represent people have no direct relationship

with the character in the novel. The photograph will be of a person say, dropped into

the text at an appropriate point, who we, the reader make into that character through

our own creative imagination (see my example from page 94 of The Emigrants in

Appendix One). It is remarkable how well this approach works and it works because

Sebald understands that we attempt to be thoughtful in our thirst for specific images

today – despite our very distrust of them.

Sebald’s use of images around something so political as the holocaust is of

course political, but it is so in the contemporary sense of the word, as he recognizes

that politics has taken on new shapes and meanings – many of which are

unrecognizable. Baudrillard calls this the transpolitical – our time in which the

medium and screen exempt us from social realism (Baudrillard, 1998:86).

Baudrillard also refers to Elias Canetti’s understanding that we have passed a point

[of radicalized uncertainty], after which, we do not know with confidence what is

going on (1987b:113). Sebald understands himself to be a powerful contemporary

simulationist (beyond written text) who understands that within our current situation,

the image (whether true or false), still maintains its power to provoke memory.

Sebald and Baudrillard, each in his own way, challenges the reader to see that the

other side of not wanting a truth of the future (a programmed future), also means

working without a truth of the past. For Sebald, not unlike Baudrillard, the world



becomes ever more enigmatic and, most ironically where the holocaust is

concerned, this uncertainty is necessarily a happy one. Undeniably there is a joy in

the images we find in Sebald’s novels that one would not normally associate with

his subject matter. It is the joy of the happy coincidence of image and text – each

retaining something of its singularity. Sebald’s The Emigrants is a good example of

both the problem of appearances and the joy of images (Baudrillard, 2001:10). His

allusions work.

Sebald understood that his novel would be the site of the disappearance of

meaning, of the simulation of lives of the holocaust generation. He gives us that

simulation – simulated memories in the place of memory – because he understands

our time as one which knows only simulation. Of course we cannot trust Sebald but

trusting Sebald or television or cinema is not the important question in a time when

we cannot trust anything. Sebald does not expect us to believe but he wants to force

us to ask questions. Sebald knows that we know his stories (he chose the medium of

the novel after all), are simply stories. He also knows we are human and as such

want to remember. Even though he knows we know we cannot trust his story, he

also knows that if we will allow him to force those questions [and that is all a

simulationist can do in times of simulation and image saturation], he will have

attained his purpose.

Sebald is not in the reality business and he is well aware that things are

seldom as they seem and this is what he most wants us to probe. [Faurisson, or a

novelist of his ideological ilk, could use the same photographs to tell the story of the

holocaust that never took place, just as Sebald uses them to tell us stories orbiting

the one that did]. Sebald proves himself to be a novelist fully aware of the

implications of contemporary theory and the net result is a group of four stories in

The Emigrants which use both images and text to profoundly make us feel what

Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. In a time when novels are as useful to

knowing history as are the works of historians, Sebald hallucinates a simulation for

us in the place of history in an effort to make us ask questions of memory – where

did the Jews of the towns like Steinach go? What happened to their houses? Who

lived in them after 1945?




In forcing such questions Sebald’s writing does not bring us any closer to the

holocaust as an historical event, indeed it acts as a filter that takes us further from it

as all simulations do. In Baudrillard’s terms:

...the whole of our reality is filtered through the media, including tragicevents of the past. This means that it is too late to verify and understandthose events historically... the tools required for such intelligibility havebeen lost. … What is actually occurring – collectively, confusedly, via allthe trials and debates – is a transition from the historical stage to amythical stage: the mythic – and media led – reconstruction of all theseevents… The Heidegger affair, the Klaus Barbie trial, and so on, are justso many feeble convulsive reactions to this loss of reality – which is nowour reality. Faurisson’s claims are a cynical transposition of this loss ofreality into the past. The statement ‘It never existed’ means simply thatwe ourselves no longer exist sufficiently even to sustain a memory, andthat hallucinations are the only way we have left to feel alive (1993:9093).

Sebald’s concern for the holocaust preys upon our fascination with it in a

remarkably more subtle manner than the way the media play with our fascination

with images of disaster – repeating the planes hitting the tower. Sebald’s use of

images is nothing short of brilliant and in The Emigrants the vast majority of the

images he uses [there are approximately 80 of them] are placed in such a manner

that we read them into the text. His use of images deepens the fascinating tales he

tells us of Dr. Selwyn, and Max Ferber, achieving a powerful effect in the

manufacture of the stories of Paul Bereyter and Ambros Adelwarth. Sebald’s images



haunt his written text and they haunt us as readers. Three examples of this haunting

are worth mentioning at this point. The first is Kasimir’s story (the uncle of the

narrator), of his life as a Jew in late 1920s Germany. This is one of those

tremendously poignant moments we experience reading Sebald – the moments in

which he intensifies the injustices being lived by the people who characters like

Kasimir represent from Germany in the 1920s:

…people like us simply had no chance in Germany. Only once, when Ifinished my tinsmith apprenticeship ... did I get work, in ‘28, when theywere putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg. The Jewsof Augsburg had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during theFirst World War, and it wasn’t till ‘28 that they had the money needed fora new roof (Sebald, 1996:8081).

4. Sebald. The Emigrants (page 81).

Here Sebald combines an actual image of workers on the roof of a synagogue with

the fictional character “Uncle Kasimir” telling of a gift that was actually made but

returned only with hatred and contempt.

A second passage of this kind occurs in the story of Max Ferber when we are

reminded that perhaps a third or more of the population of places like Steinach (near

Bad Kissingen, not far from Wurzburg, Germany) had populations that were Jewish

in the 1920s. What happened to all of those Jewish families such as this one

wearing lederhosen in this photograph:



56. Sebald, The Emigrants (pages 217218).

One is also taken back at this point to the story of Paul Bereyter where he is

recalling newspaper reports of schoolchildren in the town of Gunzenhausen helping

themselves to chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other

items in the shops wrecked the night before – Kristallnacht (Ibid.:54). These are only

three of countless examples of poignant moments in The Emigrants where the

understanding of the banality of evil overtakes the reader.

What Sebald’s novel does with images is rather like what movies about the

holocaust do – they tell us a story and they make the point the producer, the director,

or in this case the author, wish to make. For Sebald it runs something like this – he

poses a question, without directly asking it – an unavoidable question: what

happened to the houses of the Germans sent away to their deaths? He forces us to

answer it – Germans families were moved into them. What troubles Sebald

immensely is not only that is own people could have done this, but that they could

have so quickly repressed the events, occupied the houses, and continued on as if

no great event were taking place. As Sebald writes words spoken by the narrator in

Max Ferber:

I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory thatmarked the Germans, and with the efficiency with which they clearedeverything up, were beginning to affect my head (Ibid.:225).

Forgetting is an important part of the violence.

And so, as at a movie, or watching a television show, as I read the novel, the

words and images pass by and I am reminded of an event I will only know through

the words and images of others. Sebald’s way of working with this problem is, like

Borges – to remind us that memory is vital – we are our memories. Baudrillard and

Sebald each point out for us a very stark fact concerning great events of the past to

creatures who “are our memory,” that we have none beyond well crafted simulations.

Memory is a social construction just as is its forgetting in those small German (and

Austrian) towns which serve as backdrops to the stories in The Emigrants.

Sebald’s novel is beautiful – “sublime” one reviewer wrote. Sebald’s use of



images haunt the desire (and the Nietzschean need) to forget. But alas, his use of

text and images takes us no closer to being able to repudiate the holocaust deniers

than does the made for TV movie. In the age of images we can forget about a lot of

things including authenticity. These are, as Baudrillard tells us – inauthentic

hyperreal times and we are, I think, some of us anyway, coming to live with this

seemingly intolerable circumstance (and here we feel the depth of the pain of the

early loss of Sebald). For Baudrillard and other contemporary theorists all we can do

with theory now is use it as challenge – as a challenge to the real to expose itself as

illusion. In Sebald we have a gifted writer who illustrates for us the problem to which

Baudrillard points, as the novelist creates very precise documentation using

photographs he has collected that have, we are certain, no relation to the lives of the

fictional characters he is writing, yet represent very (historically) real things, people

and events. Along the rails of a contradiction between historical and real time

Sebald’s novel glides smoothly.

V. Conclusion: Art and Contemporary Theory Sebald writes his way through what is for Baudrillard the intolerable

circumstance in which we find ourselves – “the revolution of our time is the

uncertainty revolution” (Baudrillard, 1993:43). Baudrillard is very distrustful of images

from our past and present. Sebald reminds us that we may not be able to trust our

past – but neither we can hope to live without it. In a world where the Faurisson’s

flourish with their hallucinations – I am happy to have Sebald and his. I do though,

wish to give him full credit for the weight and import of his ideas and their relevance

to contemporary theory. Sebald’s novel and Baudrillard’s thought overlap in such a

way as to serve as one more powerful illustration of the coming together of art

(literature) and theory in recent years.

Sebald embraces the problem Baudrillard elucidates and then proceeds

because he wishes to compete for our memory against those like Faurisson. As

Baudrillard says: “Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself”

(1987:23). Sebald’s image laden novel has become part of the process of the

extermination of this extermination as clashes of the World War II era continues on,

but now as a conflicts between memory and negation.



7. Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald (1944 2001).

______________________________________________________________

Appendix One: Sample page (94) from Sebald’s The Emigrants

The Emigrants

had to fetch more money, said Aunt Fini; and then on thethird evening, when he broke the bank again, Cosmo won somuch that Ambros was busy till dawn counting the moneyand packing it into a steamer trunk. After spending the summer in Deauville, Cosmo and Ambros travelled via Paris and Venice to Constantinople and Jerusalem. I cannotTell you anything of what happened on that journey, saidAunt Fini, because Uncle Adelwarth would never answerQuestions about it. But there is a photo of him in Arab

◊ 94 ◊



Gerry Coulter is the founder of IJBS.

________________________________________________________________References

Jean Baudrillard 1987). The Evil Demon of Images, Sydney: Power InstitutePublications.

Jean Baudrillard (1987b). “Forget Baudrillard: An interview with Sylvere Lotringer”,In Forget Foucault – Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (1990). Cool Memories I. New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (1992). The Illusion of the End. Stanford, California: StanfordUniversity Press.

Jean Baudrillard (1993). The Transparency of Evil (1990). New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, (1981) Ann Arbor: TheUniversity of Michigan Press.

Jean Baudrillard (1998). Paroxysm, New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (1999). Photographies: 19851998. Ostfildern, Germany: HatjeCantz.

Jean Baudrillard (2001). Impossible Exchange (1999). New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (2002a). Screened Out. New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (2002b). Cool Memories IV: 19952000. New York: Verso.

W.G. Sebald (1996). The Emigrants (c 1992) Harville Press.

Endnotes

He published three other books in English translation: The Rings Of Saturn,Vertigo, and Austerlitz). For an obituary see: The Guardian “German writer shapedby the ‘forgetfulness’ of his countrymen after the second world war” (December 17,2001): http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,619971,00.html

For Agamben “Timisoara is “…the Auschwitz of the age of the spectacle: and inthe same way in which it has been said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to writeand think as before, it will no longer be possible to watch television in the sameway”. As Baudrillard expresses the problem of Timisoara: “...this Romanian affair,and the artificial heaps of corpses… Never again will we be able to look at atelevision picture in good faith…” In this, and elsewhere, the writing of bothAgamben and Baudrillard is refreshingly devoid of mediated platitudes about theroles of Europe and America in the world. Agamben sounds quite like Baudrillardwhen he speaks of a “Europe… whose catastrophe one can already foresee”. (See:Giorgio Agamben. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis, Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press, 2000:24, 82; and Jean Baudrillard. Illusion of the End(c1992). Stanford University Press, 1994:60.

Holocaust deniers (negationists) such as Robert Faurisson (France) have seizedthis moment to claim that the gas chambers never existed. On Faurisson see JeanBaudrillard. The Transparency of Evil. New York: Verso, 1993:9293; and ScreenedOut. New York: Verso, 2002a:1819.

For Baudrillard’s thought on this film see: Seduction (1979), Montreal: New WorldPerspectives Press, 1990:160; Cool Memories I, New York: Verso, 1990:230;

1.

2.

3 .

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Perspectives Press, 1990:160; Cool Memories I, New York: Verso, 1990:230;Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,1994:4951; The Evil Demon of Images, Sydney: Power Institute Publications,1987:23 ff.; The Transparency of Evil (1990), New York: Verso, 1993:91; BaudrillardLive: Selected Interviews (Edited by Mike Gane), New York: Routledge, 1993:69,160; Paroxysm, New York: Verso, 1998:29; and Screened Out, New York: Verso,2002a: 17, 109.

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