W. G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei by Michael Niehaus, Claudia Öhlschläger

Abstract

MLR, I02.3, 2007 9I3 authors such as Neumann, Hilbig, and Heiner Muller discover utopian potential in Kafka's work. Neumann finds inhis predecessor both amodel and an allywith whom he can conduct a productive dialogue in the search forhis own language and his own literary identityas non-ideological alternatives to those imposed by officialdiscourse. In 'Der Heizer', Hilbig uses the firstchapter ofDer Verschollene inmuch the same way as Schlesinger uses Der Prozess, namely as amirror to reflectand criticize power structures in theGDR, but he also followsNeumann inadopting Kafka as his ally in the search foran authentic language which will enable him to articulate 'reality'. Winnen's valuable study is exhaustively referenced and includes a helpful biblio graphy. UNIVERSITY OF BATH IAN WALLACE W G. Sebald: Politische Archdologie und melancholische Bastelei. Ed. by MICHAEL NIEHAUS and CLAUDIA OHLSCHLAGER. (Philologische Studien und Quellen, I96) Berlin: Schmidt. 2006. 275 pp. E39.80. ISBN 978-3-503-07966-7. It has become a cliche of itsown that the initial reception ofW G. Sebald's prose focused toomuch on the cliche of 'Holocaust trauma' inhis work. The second wave of criticismwhich has started to emerge in the last fewyears consists to a large extent in refiningand expanding this reductive interpretation, a wave which now includes this latestvolume of essays, theproceedings of a conference held in Munich in March 2004. The volume concentrates on twomain methodologies in Sebald's work: an 'archaeological approach to history', and the 'poetics ofmelancholy' with which he enacts thisapproach. Its origin in the2004 conference is,however, one of theunderlying problems of this book. The two-year gap between conception and publication means thatmuch of the research gathered here already feels dated, superseded in particular by the volume Sebald: Lektiiren, ed. byMarcel Atze and Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2005). The latterbook makes extensive use of the section of Sebald's libraryheld in theDeutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, which was not yet available inearly 2004. Thus much of the research collected in thisnew volume, inparticular with regard to intertextual sources, now needs tobe revised ingreater detail. The book is in any case the proverbial curate's egg. Some of the essays, such as Helmut Lethen's application of the art-historical term 'Raster' to Sebald's use of photographs, or Jonathan Long's reading of Sebald's 'confessional' narrative style through Foucault's discourse of power, are original and thought-provoking. Yet it is hard to see how some of the others contribute anything new to existing scholarship, particularly since toomuch of thematerial here is simply recycled: Marcel Atze's essay on the debate about theAllied air raids at the time of the Frankfurt trials in the I960s isdirectly reprinted fromSebald: Lektiiren, and both Doren Wohlleben's interesting thoughts on Sebald's 'effet de flou' and Anne Fuchs's typically scrupulous reflections on the relationship between the concept of 'Heimat' and an 'aesthetic of ruins' in Sebald's work are summarized from separately published books. There is also simply toomuch that is superfluous in this volume: neither Holger Steinmann nor Claudia Ohlschlager, for instance, has anything particularly new to say about Die Ringe desSaturn (the textwhich receives themost attention in thisbook), while Scott Denham's thoughts on Sebald's English-language reception are largely self-evident (in particular for theEnglish-language reader). Yet there remain some interesting essays here. Claudia Albes investigates the ecphrasis inNach der Natur of several key paintings-for a writer who otherwise makes extensive use of images inhis prose, these pictures byGriunewald, Diirer, and 9I4 Reviews Altdorfer are indeed conspicuously absent fromSebald's printed text.Anja K. Maier explores the relationship between theorganic and the inorganic inSebald's work, con centrating inparticular on representations of pain as an expression of the process of writing. And Michael Niehaus attempts some fundamental definitions of the 'status' of the Sebaldian textby referringtoSchiller's classic distinction between the 'naive' and the 'sentimental': despite an irritatingoveruse of italics,Niehaus at least poses some important questions about Sebald's self-conscious narrative technique. For this isanother problem with thevolume, indeed a recurringproblem with Sebald scholar ship: there isvery littleclose reading of his syntax and sentence structure, very little engagement with the rhythms of his...