The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W.G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten

Abstract

WG. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten begins at the end, with a photograph of a cemetery in the shadow of an enormous tree.' Encountering this image, the reader may initially assume that the photograph perhaps presents the location in which the narrative will unfold, and this assumption appears to be reinforced when within the first ten lines of the work, the narrator refers to einem Rasenfriedhof (A 8) and its trees.2 However, one soon finds that the graveyard is only peripheral in fixing the location of the narrator's eventual destination. No scene will be explicitly set in the graveyard, thus leaving us to wonder at its inclusion. As we continue to read, we may conclude retrospectively that the photograph had provisionally announced the subject matter pursued thematically in the book-namely, the deaths of the four men whose biographies will follow, and more broadly those of all who perished in the Holocaust. The photograph would thus serve to prepare us for the text, to underscore pertinent themes, and to illustrate abstract ideas. Examining the picture more closely, we note the visual details: the tombstones are askew and the grass is overgrown, presenting a scene of neglect, of a cemetery that has been forgotten. This quality of neglect certainly resonates throughout the pages of the text, for example in the descriptions of the run-down English estate in the first section or the accumulating debris and disintegration of the city of Manchester found in the fourth section. Further, the photograph is later doubled in the images of an overgrown Jewish cemetery that the narrator visits toward the end of the work (A 334-36). In a work that includes so many photographic imagesseventy-eight in the German edition-we must ask, however, do they merely serve to illustrate the narrative?3 Alternatively, is their function only that of introducing a mode of factuality into a narrative that might otherwise be read as fiction? Or is there something in the nature of photography, in the temporal and spatial frame of the photographic image, that presents a particular relationship to death and to memry that exceeds the symbolic mode of the linguistic text in which the images are embedded? Sebald will include visual images not because they underscore the written narrative but because they present the reader with that which the text alone cannot. In a recent interview, Sebald addresses the question concerning the difficult classification of his books by saying: Facts are troublesome. The idea is to make it seem factual, though some of it might be invented (Atlas 282). Here, Sebald seems to acknowledge the problematic position of aesthetics in relationship to the representation of the Holocaust introduced at least since Adorno. Seen in this light, one could conclude that Sebald employs photographs in his works not for their pictorial value but only their referential character-in other words, the photographs verify something in the world, or to borrow from Roland Barthes, they are the certificate of presence for the thing that has been there