"Ein Penelopewerk des Vergessens"? W. G. Sebald's Nietzschean Poetics of Forgetting

Abstract

W. G. Sebald is generally seen as an exemplary modern writer of “memory”. This essay seeks to demonstrate that in fact his understanding of memory is equally dependent on the importance – and paradoxically the impossibility – of forgetting. Based on archival work in his own private library, it explores how Sebald's annotations in his copies of thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Sir Thomas Browne consistently interpret memory as a double-edged sword. A particular focus is Sebald's reading of Nietzsche's seminal thoughts on the dialectics of remembering/forgetting in “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben” and Zur Genealogie der Moral. It is perhaps the ability to forget, Nietzsche suggests, that is the guarantor of peace and sanity; Sebald's notorious melancholy, conversely, can arguably be linked to his inability to forget, for, as Nietzsche writes, “nur was nicht aufhört, weh zu thun, bleibt im Gedächtnis”.