Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa by Anne Fuchs (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.4,2005 1157 Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W G. Sebalds Prosa. By Anne Fuchs. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Bohlau. 2004. 252 pp. ?30.70. ISBN 3-412-08104-3. The rapidly growing secondary literature on W. G. Sebald is starting to translate his extraordinary popularity with the common reader into a place in the academy. His subtle reinterpretations of the standard discourse of Vergangenheitsbewaltigungcombine sociology, history, (auto)biography, and fiction with a measured, melancholic style, and it is this poetics of memory which Anne Fuchs's thoroughly researched new study explores. Her introduction establishes her methodology: the situation of Sebald's perspective of 'post-memory' within the context of contemporary historio? graphy. Her approach is conceived as an attempt to redress the imbalance of his reception as 'just' a Holocaust author, and to reassess him rather in much broader terms as a cultural historian. This reading is determined throughout by what she sees as Sebald's dialectical 'Geschichtsallegorese', the underlying tension between the poles of romantic and ironic retrospection. Having established the standard historiographical context of trauma theory and its empathetic impasse in the firstchapter, Fuchs turns initially to Sebald's monumental final novel Austerlitz. She interprets the 'Spurensuche' of her title as a continual search fornon-rationa\,ha\\ucmatorycorrespondances, which attempt 'eine verdrangte und in der Subjektivitat verankerte Wahrheit zum Aufscheinen zu bringen' (p. 43). Investigating how the architectural research of the protagonist Austerlitz encourages a 'Verraumlichung der Erinnerung', she explores how this poetic, metaphorical memory develops in compensation for the disappearance of his actual parentage in Auschwitz. The march of history in general is accordingly seen through what Adorno and Horkheimer called the dialectic of enlightenment, the progressive inhumanity of technology which culminates in the Third Reich. This Archaologie der Erinnerung' thus becomes one ofthe leitmotivsof this study, extending both to Sebald's subject matter and to his method. Fuchs's consideration of his use of photographs (which draws heavily on established theory) and her inves? tigation of how his 'Beziehungswahn' manifests itself as incessant intertextuality are both seen through this historiographical prism. Her study also gives ample space to Sebald's own critical writings, in particular to how his meditations on the cliche of 'Heimat' relate back to his fiction. At this point one senses a sea change in her attitude to the author: she starts to criticize not only the one-dimensionality of the notorious Luftkrieg und Literatur lectures, but more generally what she sees as Sebald's romanticization ofthe past and his 'Immunitat gegen der aktuellen Zeitgeschichte' (p. 155). Her reading of his metaphysics of misery thus implicitly becomes a critique of his preoccupation with the past as a mere museum, dotted with 'sakrale Gedachtnisinseln ' (p. 158) which suspend, if only temporarily, the decay of history. This book is the most thorough study of Sebald to have appeared so far. Perhaps inevitably, then, it leans fairlyheavily on previous work in the field, pulling together much of the research done in the last ten years into a coherent whole which, while undoubtedly more than the sum of its parts, at times adds little more to existing criti? cism. Fuchs's historiographical approach makes sense given the subject matter, yet a closer examination ofhis style and sentence structure might have usefully contributed to her poetics of memory. Inevitably, perhaps, there also seem to be imbalances and privileged texts: Die Ausgewanderten is given much less space than the other novels, while his early poem 'Nach der Natur' is omitted completely. Despite these minor misgivings, however, this book emerges as a triumph of conscientious scholarship. Marbach am Neckar Ben Hutchinson ...