Observer review: On the Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald

WG Sebald takes on the task of confronting Germany's past in On the Natural History of Destruction

On the Natural History of Destruction
by WG Sebald
translated by Anthea Bell
Hamish Hamilton £16.99, pp205

More people than ever before now believe that the most important thing about themselves may be the things that they cannot remember. And we are always being encouraged to come to terms with the past - a phrase that is used in this remarkable book always in inverted commas, always ironically - as though the past is always at least potentially bearable, and can save us from something.

For Sebald, in this posthumous collection of lectures and essays about the Germans' unwillingness to describe their devastation after the war: 'The issue... is not to resolve but to reveal the conflict.' And the conflict, whatever else it is, is a conflict between remembering and forgetting. 'To this day,' he writes, 'any concern with the real scenes of horror during the catastrophe still has an aura of the forbidden about it, even of voyeurism.'

On the Natural History of Destruction is about how, in Sebald's view, the Germans tried to destroy not only their memory of what they had done, but of what was done to them. At the end of the war, he reminds us, 7.5 million Germans were left homeless, and that 'rats and flies ruled' the bombed cities, along with what he calls, 'that silence, that reserve, that instinctive looking away' that is part of the natural history of destruction.

One can never know one's past off by heart, but it is possible to feel that one is living after events that have had rather more significance than one realises. What Sebald has been preoccupied by, in a series of extraordinary books, are the ways in which people can feel that they are living in the aftermath of their own lives. And that the things they are driven to recover are the things that they are least able to bear.

The ghostly characters in his books are involved in a forlorn but spirited attempt to reconstruct the pasts of the landscapes they are travelling through. They are tenacious historians but they are melancholic because what always comes to light is a history of cruelty and carelessness; and because the act of recovery itself is an acknowledgement that something has gone missing.

Like all historians - and Sebald is more like a new kind of historian than a new kind of novelist - he is working out the nature of his nostalgia; and there is something akin to a longing in his writing for a truthfulness about the past, especially perhaps about Germany's past. But it is a longing for a truthfulness that redeems nothing. He doesn't believe that the truth will save us, he believes that the truth is the only thing we have got to work with.

Sebald was one when the war ended, and he grew up in a region of Germany - the northern outskirts of the Alps - that was relatively untouched by the fighting. 'I can hardly have an impression of that period of destruction based on personal experience,' he writes. 'Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war, I feel as if I were its child so to speak, as if those horrors that I did not experience had cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge.'

It is this shadow that haunts all of Sebald's books and that makes this book, among so many other things, a kind of code to his other work. His comments on the artifice and evasion of German writing after the war give, by implication more than anything else, a stark and unguarded account of his own sense of what writing should be, of what writing is for for the writer who thinks of himself as responsible to anything other than the market, and the wishful thinking of progress.

'Few emotions,' he writes, 'are more difficult to repress than resentment'; and a great deal of resentment is expressed in this book about all those who were 'always looking and looking away', all those who used 'literature as a means of straightening out one's own past life', where straightening out means, in Anthea Bell's characteristically subtle translation, covering up a history that was in no way straightforward, and acknowledging that one's own past is not the kind of thing that can be straightened.

Germany between 1930 and 1950 was not a country, in Sebald's view, suited to 'lavish word painting' or 'aesthetic extravagance in any form'. Indeed, the absence of what he calls in this book 'literary scruple' - literature as a cure for egotism, not its promotion - he regards as a kind of complicity with the political ethos of the times. In Sebald's writing, nothing is ever flaunted and nothing is ever resolved.

It is Sebald's project in this book, on the one hand, to make it clear that the sheer horror of being bombed, of living in a bombed landscape, made it impossible for people to name what was happening to them. So 'the quest for a form of language in which experiences paralysing the power of articulation could be expressed' seems, quite literally, a contradiction in terms (trauma is the experience you must never know has happened to you).

But despite this, or because of it - and Sebald's equivocation on this point clearly matters - what he calls 'encouraging the will to reconstruction' in Germany after the war was a form of hypnotism akin to fascism. It was a determined disavowal of reality. But despite his horror about the 'persistent avoidance of the subject or aversion to it', he is left with a paradox that mitigates his resentment. Perhaps, he reflects, only those who were not present are able to give an accurate sense of the devastation.

'The accounts of individual eye-witnesses are of only qualified value,' he concludes, because they are, of course, too disturbed by events. These accounts 'need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals'. Only those who are not present are in a position to tell the truth.

Sebald is too clear-sighted to believe that knowing the truthful horror of wars could ever prevent them. On the Natural History of Destruction is such a timely and startling book because Sebald is not proud to be telling the truth about Germany after the war, he is just dismayed that it might always need to be told. Coming to terms with the past may be a contradiction in terms, because the past never gives up.

Adam Phillips

The GuardianTramp

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