W. G. Sebald

Abstract

At Christmas two years ago, I was given a reproduction silk map of the city of Berlin. Seeing the map triggered a memory for my father. He was a captain in the Fifty-first Highland Division as it moved slowly through Holland into Germany in the Allied advance late in 1944. He remembers seeing a flat expanse of land bordering the river, across which, he recounts, his four guns had just fired a small high explosive barrage as part of an air landing exercise on the other bank. They watched the planes flying over, and when they came back, he saw that one of them was smoking and, to his horror, losing height and heading straight toward him. He could not bear to see it crash, so he ducked into his slit trench. The plane crashed into muddy soil about a hundred yards away, and when he walked over, the only recognizable object was an envelope lying on the ground marked map. And then my father went upstairs and returned remarkably quickly with the map he had kept for fifty-seven years, which he gave to me. The envelope was made of what felt like rubberized cotton and had the words MAPS ONLY printed on the front. Inside was a large, folded silk map of Germany and its border with Holland and France. They were made for pilots from the Royal Air Force and printed on silk so as not disintegrate in water. We opened the map, poignantly unused, and my father tried to find the place where he had found it. There, he pointed to a tiny dot, there: I found it in Goch. I was in Amsterdam for the palindrome date of 20.02.2002. The following morning, I caught an early train to Arnhem, where I was picked up at the station by Rita Kersting, director of the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf, the gallery where I was going to have a show later in the year. We drove to the Kroller-Mfiller Museum in Otterlo. It was a clear February day, and everything felt tamed and safe and