W. G. Sebald, Humorist

I met W. G. Sebald almost twenty years ago, in New York City, when I interviewed him onstage for the PEN American Center. Afterward, we had dinner. It was July, 1997; he was fifty-three. The brief blaze of his international celebrity had been lit a year before, by the publication in English of his mysterious, wayward book “The Emigrants.” In a review, Susan Sontag (who curated the PEN series) had forcefully anointed the German writer as a contemporary master.

Not that Sebald seemed to care about that. He was gentle, academic, intensely tactful. His hair was gray, his almost white mustache like frozen water. He resembled photographs of a pensive Walter Benjamin. There was an atmosphere of drifting melancholy about him that, as in his prose, he made almost comic by sly self-consciousness. I remember standing with him in the foyer of the restaurant, where there was some kind of ornamental arrangement that involved leaves floating in a tank. Sebald thought they were elm leaves, which prompted a characteristic reverie. In England, he said, the elms had all but disappeared, ravaged first by Dutch elm disease, and then by the great storm of 1987. All gone, all gone, he murmured. Since I had not read “The Rings of Saturn” (published in German in 1995 but not translated into English until 1998), I didn’t know that he was almost quoting a passage from his own work, where, beautifully, he describes the trees, uprooted after the hurricane, lying on the ground “as if in a swoon.” Still, I was amused even then by how very Sebaldian he sounded, encouraged thus by a glitter in his eyes, and by a slightly sardonic fatigue in his voice.

During dinner, he returned sometimes to that mode, always with a delicate sense of comic timing. Someone at the table asked him if, given the enormous success of his writing, he might be interested in leaving England for a while and working elsewhere. (Sebald taught for more than thirty years, until his death, in 2001, in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia.) Why not New York, for instance? The metropolis was at his feet. How about an easy and well-paid semester at Columbia? It was part question, part flattery. Through round spectacles, Sebald pityingly regarded his interlocutor, and replied with naïve sincerity: “No, I don’t think so.” He added that he was too attached to the old Norfolk rectory he and his family had lived in for years. I asked him what else he liked about England. The English sense of humor, he said. Had I ever seen, he asked, any German comedy shows on television? I had not, and I wondered aloud what they were like. “They are simply . . . indescribable,” he said, stretching out the adjective with a heavy Germanic emphasis, and leaving behind an implication, also comic, that his short reply sufficed as a perfectly comprehensive explanation of the relative merits of English and German humor.

Comedy is hardly the first thing one associates with Sebald’s work, partly because his reputation was quickly associated with the literature of the Holocaust, and is still shaped by the two books of his that deal directly with that catastrophe: “The Emigrants,” a collection of four semi-fictional, history-haunted biographies; and his last book, “Austerlitz” (2001), a novel about a Jewish Welshman who discovers, fairly late in life, that he was born in Prague but had avoided imminent extermination by being sent, at the age of four, to England, in the summer of 1939, on the so-called Kindertransport. The typical Sebaldian character is estranged and isolate, visited by depression and menaced by lunacy, wounded into storytelling by historical trauma. But two other works, “Vertigo” (published in German in 1990 and in English in 1999) and “The Rings of Saturn,” are more various than this, and all of his four major books have an eccentric sense of playfulness.

Rereading him, in handsome new editions of “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” and “The Rings of Saturn” (New Directions), I’m struck by how much funnier his work is than I first took it to be. Consider “The Rings of Saturn” (brilliantly translated by Michael Hulse), in which the Sebald-like narrator spends much of the book tramping around the English county of Suffolk. He muses on the demise of the old country estates, whose hierarchical grandeur never recovered from the societal shifts brought about by the two World Wars. He tells stories from the lives of Joseph Conrad, the translator Edward FitzGerald, and the radical diplomat Roger Casement. He visits a friend, the poet Michael Hamburger, who left Berlin for Britain in 1933, at the age of nine. The tone is elegiac, muffled, and yet curiously intense. The Hamburger visit allows Sebald to take the reader back to the Berlin of the poet’s childhood, a scene he meticulously re-creates with the help of Hamburger’s own memoirs. But he also jokily notes that when they have tea the teapot emits “the occasional puff of steam as from a toy engine.”

Elsewhere in the book, Sebald is regularly provoked to humorous indignation by the stubborn intolerability of English service. In Lowestoft, a Suffolk coastal town that was once a prosperous resort and is now impoverished and drab, he puts up at the ghastly Albion hotel. He is the only diner in the huge dining room, and is brought a piece of fish “that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years”:

The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it. Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was a hideous mess once the operation was over.

Evelyn Waugh would have been quite content to have written such a passage. The secret of the comedy lies in the paradox of painstaking exaggeration (as if the diner were trying to crack a safe, or solve a philosophical conundrum), enforced by Sebald’s calm control of apparently ponderous diction (“operation”). It is the same at the guest rooms of the Saracen’s Head, in Harleston, where the mirror makes the occupant look “strangely deformed,” and all the furniture seems to be tilting, so that the narrator is pursued even while asleep “by the feeling that the house was about to fall down.”

In “The Emigrants,” Sebald lovingly seizes on eccentric British materials and contraptions. The narrator and his wife dine at the home of Dr. Henry Selwyn, the food pushed into the dining room on “a serving trolley equipped with hotplates, some kind of patented design dating from the Thirties.” Later in the book, Sebald tells the moving story of how, in 1966, he gave up Germany for England. He was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student, who had studied in Germany and Switzerland, and was now on his way to take up a junior teaching job in the German department at the University of Manchester. He arrives in the city of Manchester in the early morning. As his taxi rolls past “rows of uniform houses, which seemed the more run down the closer we got to the city centre,” Sebald reflects on the fate of this mighty place, one of the engines of the Victorian age, now more like “a necropolis or mausoleum.” The narrator is met at the door of his small hotel, called the Arosa, by its owner, Mrs. Irlam, who is wearing a pink dressing gown “that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick.” (That “unaccountably called candlewick” is a nice example of how Sebald and his English translators often contrived to make of his prose a strange, homeless melody, neither quite English nor quite German but some odd mixture of the two.)

Mrs. Irlam is a kindly soul, and quickly brings him, “on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before,” called a “teas-maid.” This was an ungainly machine, popular at the time, that contained a clock and an electric kettle; it could wake you up with morning tea. Sebald approaches this cozy English object with mock-solemn gingerliness, as if he were an anthropologist presenting one of his exhibits. He places a large photograph of the relic at the center of his page, and notes that the lime-green phosphorescent glow of the clock face was familiar to him from childhood:

That may be why it has often seemed, when I have thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea maker brought to my room by Mrs. Irlam, by Gracie—you must call me Gracie, she said—as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become completely submerged. Very useful, these are, said Gracie as she showed me how to operate the teas-maid that November afternoon; and she was right.

How quickly, in this passage, he turns from amusement to something approaching desperation. Sebald’s talent for repression—for sounding out the repressions of others and for dramatizing his own—is a central element of his writing. When he tells us that the first weeks and months he spent in Manchester were “a time of remarkable silence and emptiness,” he simultaneously discloses and hides what must have been an intensely lonely period.

It is hard to imagine how reduced and straitened life in northern England still was in the nineteen-sixties; the war dragged a long, gray shadow. Manchester was an unfamiliar city to Sebald. He had applied for the teaching job at the city’s university largely because he was keen to get out of his native country, and because he had liked the classes given by an Englishman, a former Manchester professor, at his German university, Freiburg. (While at Manchester, he also earned a graduate degree in German literature.) Sebald did not stay at the Arosa Hotel, as his lightly fictionalized account has it, but was housed by the university in a single room in a semi-detached nineteen-thirties house. After a couple of weeks there, he moved to another single room, in a tall, red brick, turn-of-the-century house about three miles outside the city center. A black-and-white photograph of this building, reproduced in “Saturn’s Moons,” a book collecting various reminiscences about Sebald, has a sooty northern grimness that makes it hard to imagine a color version of it. A colleague of his describes the room as “dark, dingy, and freezing cold.” It contained nothing more than a bed, a table, and a chair. At night, mice ran along the curtain rail.

The contrast with Sebald’s childhood landscape must have been acute. He was born in 1944, in a village in the Bavarian Alps, not far from the Austrian and Swiss borders, and today about two hours by car from Munich—a region of lakes, rivers, and mountains that loom over daily life like natural cathedrals. Sebald’s father was away, fighting in the German Army; he didn’t return till 1947, having spent about two years in a French P.O.W. camp. In his study of the Allied bombardment of the German cities, “On the Natural History of Destruction” (published in German in 1999 and translated into English by Anthea Bell in 2003), Sebald juxtaposes this remembered paradise with the inferno all around it:

I know now that at the time, when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe . . . over the ruins of the German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt . . . there was scarcely a place in Europe from which no one had been deported to his death in those years.

Elsewhere in this book, he writes strikingly about how, after the war, Germany preferred not to examine its crimes but to repress “the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them.” In interviews, he often said that a large reason he didn’t settle in Germany in 1966 was his awareness that postwar academic life there was as compromised, and as secretive, as life in the home. His work obsessively returns to the idea that, as Walter Benjamin famously put it, every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. In “The Rings of Saturn,” Sebald describes at length the murderous machine of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, and depicts Brussels, with its “distinctive ugliness,” as “a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies.” In “Austerlitz” (translated by Anthea Bell), the novel’s protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, learns that the brand-new French national library he is working in, the Bibliothèque Nationale, stands over the old Austerlitz-Tolbiac depot, an enormous clearing house “to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.” Thus the whole sordid business, he continues, “is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations” of the library.

By most accounts, the young Sebald was an unassuming presence at Manchester. When he was not teaching or writing his master’s thesis, he visited junk shops and walked a great deal, taking photographs of the city’s disused factories and cleared slums. At the University of East Anglia, whose School of European Studies he joined in 1970, and where he spent the rest of his life, he taught well-liked classes on Kafka, German cinema, nineteenth-century German fiction, and twentieth-century European drama. But many of his colleagues were only faintly aware of his creative work. The university was well known for its graduate creative-writing program, then one of the few in Britain, but only toward the end of his life, when his fame was inescapable, did he teach in the program. On December 14, 2001, near Norwich, he lost control of his car, swerved in front of a truck, and was killed.

He was fifty-seven, and his sudden death came as a desolation. There was to be no more work from a writer who had rapidly established himself as one of the most deeply serious and ambitious contemporary authors, whose fraught intelligence had reckoned, and self-reckoned, with the gravest questions of European history, and who had fearlessly founded a new literary form—combining essay, fiction, and photography—in order to probe those questions in new ways. The loss was acute not only because of his work’s undoubted seriousness but also because the playful side of Sebald’s originality made him a consumingly interesting and unpredictable artificer. You wondered what he would do next, what odd precarious success he would come up with; his books were such strange hybrids. Writing and illustration have long coexisted (Sebald admitted to me that he admired Stendhal’s histrionic autobiography, “Vie de Henri Brulard,” which combines Stendhal’s words with his drawings). But few writers have used photographs in quite the way Sebald does, scattering them, without captions, throughout the text, so that the reader can’t be sure, exactly, how the writing and the photographs relate to each other, or, indeed, whether the photographs disclose what they purport to. Roland Barthes’s great essay on photography, “Camera Lucida”—a book that greatly influenced Sebald’s work—is relatively conventional, by contrast. Where Barthes’s photographs are captioned and faithfully reproduced, Sebald’s photographs have a fugitive, offbeat atmosphere. They are anti-illustrative, not least because many of them are low-quality snaps, dingy, hard to decipher, and often atrociously reproduced. Sebald plays with this unreliability in “The Emigrants,” when he includes a photograph of himself standing on a beach in New Jersey, probably taken by his uncle in late 1981 or early 1982. Is it really Sebald? All you can do is stare and stare. The image is so poor—the author’s face little more than a generic blur—that the reader, too, is left standing on shifting sand, where all surety is tidally erased and replaced.

And then there is the oddity of Sebald’s prose. If you don’t care for his writing, you can feel that he’s just a postmodern antiquarian, a super-literate academic who stitched together a pastiche of his many nineteenth- and twentieth-century influences, and infused the result with doomy melancholy and unease. The Anglo-German poet Michael Hofmann accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog—or perhaps a 19th-century ready-made fog.” There may be something in that complaint. Probably the most frequent sentence in all of Sebald is some variant of “Nowhere was there a living soul to be seen.” Wherever the Sebaldian narrator finds himself, the landscape is uncannily unpeopled. He may be walking down an Italian street, or arriving in Lowestoft, or describing Edward FitzGerald’s childhood home, or driving through Manchester in the early morning, or meeting Jacques Austerlitz on the promenade at Zeebrugge. Rarely is there a single “soul” to be seen—and the slightly antique locution of “soul” (Seele, in German) is almost invariably used.

Sebald’s work can put you in mind of Diderot selling his library to Catherine the Great: he seems to be downloading everything he has ever read. There is the ghost of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (the menaced but curious traveller, afoot in a strange, forbidding landscape); of Walter Benjamin (the elaborate analogies and formal diction); of Thomas Bernhard (the tendency toward insistent, comic exaggeration); of Peter Handke; and, above all, of Kafka. As with Kafka’s protagonists, the Sebaldian narrator is easily thrown off balance by what should be ordinary negotiations: booking a hotel room, driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, sitting in a London railway station, taking a train in Germany. As in Kafka, too, there are an unusual number of physically odd, deformed, or dwarfish figures. In “The Emigrants,” Dr. Henry Selwyn is looked after by a housemaid called Elaine, who wears her hair “shorn high up the nape, as the inmates of asylums do,” and who has the disquieting habit of breaking into “strange, apparently unmotivated, whinnying laughter.”

There are times when Sebald seems to be overdoing the gothic pastiche. In “Vertigo,” the Sebald-like narrator spends some time wandering around Vienna, then takes a train to Venice. Everything is odd and unsettling. The narrator appears to be only a step from a nervous breakdown, but the neurasthenic sensitivity is gestural, unearned, a bit melodramatic. Lying on his hotel bed in an Italian town, waiting for room service, he feels himself becoming colder and stiffer, “so that when at length the waiter arrived with the red wine and sandwiches I had ordered, I felt as if I had already been interred or laid out for burial, silently grateful for the proffered libation, but no longer capable of consuming it.” In “The Rings of Saturn,” the atmosphere at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport strikes the troubled narrator as “so strangely muted that one might have thought one was already a good way beyond this world.” What the reader might take on faith if encountered in Büchner’s “Lenz” (a novella that Sebald taught at Norwich, which provides a garish account of a man’s fall into madness) is a little stagy when it concerns merely an academic who happens to be doing a bit of book research in Italy, or passing through an ordinary European airport.

Yet Sebald also extracts from this self-conscious antiquarianism something unaccountable: a mysterious contemporary stillness, an otherworldliness of the present. His very prose functions like an old, unidentified photograph. Consider this troublingly lovely description, from “Austerlitz,” of the German Army entering Prague:

Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up Narodní a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going.

Who is speaking? It is characteristic of Sebald that what we are reading here is not ascribed directly to the narrator. Jacques Austerlitz, on the hunt for his origins, has travelled to Prague, where he tracks down Vera Ryšanová, who was his nursemaid in the nineteen-thirties. So in this passage Austerlitz is recalling, to the book’s narrator (back in contemporary London), what Vera told him about the German occupation of that city—a chain of at least three storytellers (Vera-Austerlitz-narrator/Sebald), and more decades. This perhaps accounts for the smothered, recessed diction. The prose has Sebald’s usual formality, along with his strain of almost pedantic exaggeration (“and from that moment they walked more slowly”). It is powerful because it is both real and unreal, at once a vivid picture and a frozen allegory. Sebald is describing a collective death, a falling away; the people in this word picture, like the felled trees he describes in “The Rings of Saturn,” are as if caught in a kind of swoon. There are people here, but they are in the process of becoming unpeople.

Sebald’s landscapes are often places like this, where the living have disappeared into death, or where they have fallen into the obscurity of death even while still alive. “The Emigrants,” which is probably his best book, is a set of stories about people who have fallen in this way, as if having been dispossessed by history. The book is closer to documentary than is any of his other creative work. Names and some details have been changed, yet the written lives of its characters follow very closely their actual biographical contours. Sebald told me that ninety per cent of the photographs in the book “are what you would describe as authentic, i.e., they really did come out of the photo albums of the people described in those texts and are a direct testimony of the fact that these people did exist in that particular shape and form.”

The book opens with Dr. Henry Selwyn, whom the narrator and his wife encounter in 1970, on the grounds of a country house in Norfolk. A retired physician, Selwyn appears to live like a patrician hermit, having largely abandoned the big house for a stone folly he has furnished in his garden. Sometime after encountering Sebald and telling him his life story, Dr. Selwyn commits suicide. Paul Bereyter, a character based on one of Sebald’s childhood teachers, is another late-life suicide, and Sebald sets out to discover the reasons. Bereyter, it emerges, was one-quarter Jewish, and under Nazi law was banned from teaching in the mid-nineteen-thirties, just as he was embarking on his cherished career. A woman he courted, Helen Hollaender, from Vienna, was doubtless deported, “probably to Theresienstadt in the first instance.” Bereyter never fully recovers from these terrible deprivations.

The third story concerns one of Sebald’s great-uncles, Adelwarth, a German immigrant who worked as a valet in the United States, and whose life, as an immigrant and a closeted homosexual, bore immense strains. Uncle Adelwarth ends up in an Ithaca asylum. The fourth story, “Max Ferber,” probably the most fictive of the tales, is based on the life of the British painter Frank Auerbach, who, at the age of seven, was sent from his native Germany to Britain, and whose parents died in the Holocaust.

Sebald’s quiet, bashful, mysteriously subaqueous prose brings alive the paradoxical combination of drift and paralysis that has afflicted these lives. These men hid their wounds, but their lives have been stained with the effort of that subterfuge. Sebald is generously adept at making these wounds speak. Dr. Selwyn, for instance, appears at first to be an eccentric English gentleman—at one moment, he fires a rifle from the window of his house, a rifle, he explains, that he needed in India when he worked there as a young surgeon. But, in the course of little more than twenty pages, a new revelation emerges. First, there is the oddity of the doctor’s isolation in the garden folly. (The narrator and his wife rent rooms in the big, empty house.) Then there is the erotic and emotional deadness of Selwyn’s marriage to Elli, a wealthy Swiss heiress. At dinner one evening, Selwyn speaks about the time he spent in the Alps, just after he had graduated from Cambridge, in 1913. This was when he developed an intense fondness for his mountaineering guide, a much older man of sixty-five. There is the suggestion, faintly implied but discernible, that Selwyn’s admiration was probably love.

A year or so later, when Sebald has moved out of Selwyn’s house, the two men meet again, and Selwyn tells the author the rest of his story. He was a Lithuanian Jew, who left for England in 1899 and changed his name from Hersch Seweryn. For a long time, he concealed his “true background” from his wife, and now wonders whether the failure of his marriage had to do with “revealing the secret of my origins, or simply the decline of love.” We realize that Selwyn’s life has been structured by repression, mimicked in this regard by Sebald’s writing, which is similarly structured by omission. When Selwyn talks about revealing “the secret of my origins,” he officially means his Jewishness, but perhaps subconsciously he also means his homosexuality?

Sebald has been an extremely influential writer (Teju Cole, Aleksandar Hemon, Edmund de Waal, Garth Greenwell, and Rachel Cusk have all learned from him), and no more so than in the way he writes about whole lives. Released from the formulas of falsity that contaminate much realistic fiction—drama, dialogue, the pretense of “real time,” the cause-and-effect of motive—the writer proceeds like a biographer who sees everything after it has happened. Sebald understands that a life is an edifice, which we build partly to hide its foundations. And the difference between an edifice and a ruin may be hard to detect. Of course, even the godlike biographer cannot “see everything”; perhaps all he can see of a life, at first, is the beginning and the ending. The form of a life is only a frame. Dr. Selwyn told the author only what he could bear to tell, in a narration honeycombed with elisions: we know little, truly, of even a close friend’s interiority.

Because we are not God, our narration of another’s life is a pretense of knowledge—simultaneously an attempt to know and a confession of how little we know. Most conventional fiction, with its easy, inherited confidence, conceals the epistemological difficulty of this task; the concealment is what we find consoling about even quite demanding fiction. Sebald makes the unreliability of this labor a central element of his writing: it is why the stories in his books, like the one Vera tells Jacques Austerlitz about the Germans entering Prague, tend to be passed along chains of narration, a narrative flow of traffic that produces the characteristic repetitive formulation “said Austerlitz,” or even “as Vera had told me, said Austerlitz,” or my favorite: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once . . .” The point of these chains—which resemble those columns of Berliners passing along buckets of rubble just after the war—is that the reader is necessarily at the very end of them. Dr. Selwyn tells his repressed tale to the narrator, who then passes a slightly less repressed version on to us. Likewise with Vera to Austerlitz. Sebald’s attempt at decipherment must become, in part, ours: we are trying to puzzle this material out, just as Sebald, the fanatical author-researcher, is.

This effort of retrieval can be felt whenever we stare at one of Sebald’s dusky, uncaptioned photographs, and it is not coincidental that photography plays the largest role in the two Sebald books that deal centrally with the Holocaust, “The Emigrants” and “Austerlitz.” In a sense, retrieval is the very theme of “Austerlitz,” whose protagonist grows up thinking of himself as a Welsh boy named Dafydd Elias, only to discover as a teen-ager that he is a wartime refugee whose true name is Jacques Austerlitz. Even then, it takes many years before Jacques Austerlitz learns exactly how he came to England and where he came from, and this journey of recovery consumes the entirety of Sebald’s dense novel. In the early nineteen-nineties, Austerlitz travels to Prague and learns from Vera that he was put on a train for London in 1939, and that his mother was sent to Theresienstadt. Later, he discovers that his father, who escaped to Paris, was last heard of in the French internment camp of Gurs, from where many Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

Theodor Adorno once suggested that the dead are at our mercy, and memory their only rescuer: “So our memory is the only help that is left to them. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.” This sounds like an expression of survivor’s guilt, but Adorno wrote these words before the war, in 1936. Commenting on Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” (a song cycle set to some of Friedrich Rückert’s poems, which mourn the death of the poet’s two children), Adorno makes the argument that the dead can be thought of as our children—we mourn not only their absence but everything they had not yet become. Just as we wait for children to return home (one of Rückert’s most famous lines is “Often I think they have only gone out”), so we await the return of the dead. From his student days onward, Sebald was a deep reader of Adorno, and the passage might be an epigraph for all Sebald’s writing. What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation. That paradox is most acute when we look not at words about people but at photographs of people, since they have a presence that words cannot quite capture. As Roland Barthes writes in “Camera Lucida,” photographs declare that what you’re looking at really existed, and as actuality, not as metaphor.

But what happens when a novelist inserts into his text uncaptioned photographs of ambiguous veracity? Barthes says that photography incarnates “the presence of the thing,” but what can that mean when it comes to a photograph whose authority we doubt, and that we encounter in a text that is a hybrid of document and fiction? Like “The Emigrants,” “Austerlitz” is full of uncaptioned black-and-white photographs—of Wittgenstein’s eyes; the prison at Breendonk, in Belgium, where the Nazis tortured the Jewish resistance fighter Jean Améry; Liverpool Street station, where the young children of the Kindertransport first arrived in London; human skeletons; what appears to be an old staircase inside a prewar apartment building in Prague; the deserted town center of Theresienstadt; still photographs from a famous propaganda film, made by the Germans to convince the outside world that Theresienstadt was a model community for the Jews; the Bibliothèque Nationale; and, notably, a photograph of Jacques Austerlitz as a small boy, the picture supposedly handed to Jacques by Vera, his childhood nursemaid in Prague. This image, of a fair-haired child dressed as a page boy, in cape and knickerbockers, adorns the cover of the American edition of Sebald’s novel.

Some of these pictures are what they purport to be (Wittgenstein’s eyes, the Bibliothèque Nationale). In the case of others, one can’t be sure—that staircase, for instance, could be from any number of prewar apartment buildings, from anywhere in Europe. And what does it mean to stare at a photograph of a little boy who is “supposed” to be Jacques Austerlitz, when “Jacques Austerlitz” is nothing more than a fictional character invented by W. G. Sebald? Who is the actual boy who stares at us from the cover of this novel? We will probably never know. It is indeed an eerie photograph, and Sebald makes Austerlitz say of it:

I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was. . . . I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.

The boy does seem to be demanding something from us, and I imagine that this is why, when Sebald came across the photograph, he chose it. Presumably, he found it in a box of old postcards and snapshots, in one of the antique shops he enjoyed rummaging through. In 2011, while working on an introduction to “Austerlitz,” I had a chance to examine the Sebald archive—manuscripts, old photographs, letters, and the like—at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in Marbach am Neckar, and there I found the postcard that bears the boy’s image. Eager for a “clue,” I turned it over. On the reverse side, there was nothing more than the name of an English town and a price, written in ink: “Stockport: 30p.”

Scandalously, where documentary witness and fidelity is sacred, Sebald introduces the note of the unreliable. Not, of course, because he disdained the documentary impulse but, rather, in order to register that he himself, who was not Jewish and had only an indirect connection to the Shoah, was merely a survivor of the survivors—and even then only in a figurative sense. And also perhaps to register that the novelist who writes, of all outrageous things, fiction about the Holocaust cannot have a comfortable and straightforward relation to the real. For there I was, standing in a German library, searching for clues, peering intently at a photograph of a boy whose name will likely be forever lost, and replicating the very gesture of decipherment that the fictional character Jacques Austerlitz describes in Sebald’s novel.

Sebald has some beautiful words in “Austerlitz” about how, just as we have appointments to keep in the future, it may be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, “in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished.” We must go there, he writes, into the past, in search of places and people who have some connection with us, “on the far side of time, so to speak.” That last phrase puts me in mind of a famous passage from “Middlemarch,” in which George Eliot says that if we were truly open to all the suffering in the world it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would die “of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Most of us, she finishes, manage to live by wadding ourselves with stupidity. We survive only by ignoring the faint but terrible roar. In his great work, Sebald visited that far side of time which was also the other side of silence. He could not ignore it. ♦