Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape

Abstract

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.

Notes

1. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7.

2. See Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

3. Pim den Boer, “Loci memoriae – Lieux de mémoire,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünnings (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2010), 19−26.

4. Nora, “Memory and History,” 7.

5. Gerhard Fisher, “Introduction: W. G. Sebald’s Expatriate Experience and His Literary Beginnings,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 72 (2002): 15−24. See also John Wylie, “The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald,” Cultural Geographies 14 (2007): 171−88.

6. W. G. Sebald and Gordon Turner, “Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald,” in W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 24.

7. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 174.

8. See Silke Horstkotte, “Recollective Processes and the ‘Topography of Forgetting’ in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex & Race 13.1 (2007): 193−200.

9. Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau, “Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 154.

10. See Gabriele Schwab, “Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss,” and Gudrun Brockhaus, “The Emotional Legacy of the National Socialist Past in Post-War Germany,” in Memory and Political Change, in Memory and Political Change, ed. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17−33 and 34−49, respectively; Jürgen Reulecke, “Generation/Generationality, Generativity, and Memory,” in Erll and Nünnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 119−26.

11. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 23.

12. See Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci, eds., Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011).

13. For a more comprehensive view on trauma, see Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics,” Paragraph 30.1 (2007): 9−29, and Ron Eyerman, “Social Theory and Trauma,” Acta Sociologica 56.1 (2013): 41−53.

14. Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival,” Cultural Values 5.1 (2001): 10.

15. For a comprehensive analysis of trauma in Austerlitz using a psychoanalytic approach, see Dora Osborne, “Blind Spots: Viewing Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43.4 (2007): 517−33. For a very detailed analysis see Richard Crownshaw, “The Limits of Transference: Theories of Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Auterlitz,” in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 67−90.

16. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: The Harvill Press, 1996), 61; hereafter cited in the text.

17. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 72; hereafter cited in the text.

18. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 24.

19. Mark McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 29.

20. Karin Bauer, “The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 250.

21. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 23.

22. Martin Klebes, Wittgenstein’s Novel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. For a comprehensive analysis, see chap. 3: “W. G. Sebald: Family Resemblances and the Blurred Images of History,” 87−130. On the connection of the “language games” (Wittgenstein) and Sebald’s use of photographs, see Deane Blackler, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006).

23. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 183.

24. Silke Arnold-de Simine, “Memory Museum and Museum Text: Intermediality in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Theory, Culture & Society 29.1 (2012): 6.

25. Aliaga-Buchenau, “Presence and Absence,” 154.

26. Katja Garloff, “The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 162.

27. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 171.

28. Daniel Weston, “The Spatial Supplement: Landscape and Perspective in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn,” Cultural Geographies 18.2 (2011): 175.

29. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 176.

30. Sebald and Turner, “Introduction and Transcript,” 22.

31. See Jay Winter, “Introduction: The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 11−23.

32. Gray Kochhlar-Lindgren, “Charcoal: The Phantom Traces of W. G. Sebald’s Novel-Memoirs,” Monatshefte 94.3 (2002): 373.

33. Karen Remmler, “Against the Integration of Atrocity into Disaster: W. G. Sebald’s Work of Memory,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 72 (2002): 133, 149.

34. Ann Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing,” in Erll and Nünnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 345.

35. See Harald Weinrich, Léthé. Art et critique de l’oubli (Paris: Fayard, 1999).

36. Carol Bere, “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz,” The Literary Review 46 (2002): 184.

37. Stephen Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173.

38. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 183.

39. Weston, “Spatial Supplement,” 178.

40. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981−1991 (London: Granta Books, 1992), 12.

41. Bere, “Book of Memory,” 189.

42. Cligman, Grammar of Identity, 22.

43. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 5, 6.

44. Maya Barzilai, “On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 209.

45. Stephanie Harris, “The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” The German Quarterly 74.4 (2001): 384, 385.

46. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 379. See also Brett Ashley Kaplan, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (New York: Routledge, 2011), and Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

47. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 387.

48. See Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Erll and Nünnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 109−25.

49. J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 11.

50. Long, W. G. Sebald, 161, 171.

51. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 85.

52. McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald, 23.

53. See Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Erll and Nünnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 53−71.

54. Kochhlar-Lindgren, “Charcoal,” 368.

55. Brad Prager, “Sebald’s Kafka,” in Denham and McCulloh, W. G. Sebald, 107.

56. Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schokens Book, 2007), 202.

57. See also Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, “The Calamitous Perspective of Modernity: Sebald’s Negative Ontology,” Journal of European Studies 41.3–4 (2011): 341–58.

58. Bauer, “The Dystopian Entwinement,” 243−44.

59. Wylie, “Spectral Geographies,” 178.

60. See Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, “Cultural Memory: A European Perspective,” in Erll and Nünnings, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 127−37.

61. See Chiara Bottici, “European Identity and the Politics of Remembrance,” in Tilmans, van Vree, and Winter, Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, 334−59.

62. Harris, “Return of the Dead,” 383.

63. Aleida Assmann, “To Remember or to Forget: Which Way Out of a Shared History of Violence?” in Assmann and Shortt, Memory and Political Change, 65.

64. Charles Maier, “Hot Memory/Cold Memory: The Political Half-Life of Fascism and Communism,” at: http://www.project-syndicate.org; accessed 7 December 2012.

65. Clingman, Grammar of Identity, 169.