Melancholy Competitions: W.G. Sebald Reads Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer

Abstract

This article examines how W.G. Sebald's melancholy understanding of history influences his reading of Günter Grass's Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke und Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Tynset. Sebald pits Grass against Hildesheimer in a melancholy competition which tests the authenticity of 1960s discourse on 'Trauer'. His criteria for the standard of authentic sadness are obscured, however, by his analysis of the writers' use of symbols and references from Western writing on melancholy. Going beyond this surface of literary criticism, the article finds that Sebald's understanding and representation of history as melancholy is motivated by complexities of generational affiliation, ethnic identity and historical absenteeism. It is argued that Sebald's preference for what Dominick LaCapra terms the 'transhistorical' overlaps with aspects of American trauma theory, and that this tendency, alongside his critique of postwar Germany and his identification with the Jewish victims of history, accounts for his literary judgment in this instance. The article concludes that Sebald's strategy of argumentation favours an understanding of 'Trauer' as terminal melancholy, and further, that this register, as distinct from modes of mourning and 'working-through', is the only acceptable discourse in which to commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

W.G. Sebald: image, archive, modernity

“…And yet from Vertigo onwards, Sebald shows that autonomous subjectivity is threatened by modernity. Sebald's melancholy, then, is best seen less as an ontological and transhistorical position, as Mary Cosgrove (2006a) argues, than as a response to a profoundly historical understanding of subjectivity in modernity.…”

An uncanny journey: W. G. Sebald and the literature of protest

“…e.g. Cosgrove, 2006). Then again, others of Sebald's literary themes, such as 'melancholy', 'apocalyptic negativity' and an 'all-encompassing myth of destruction' (Morgan, 2005: 75), along with the very long view of history that characterizes his later writings, also suggest that Sebald's concerns transcend any local and historical specificities.…”

In the contact zone: W. G. Sebald and the ethnographic imagination

“…In terms of the salvage paradigm, it has often been pointed out that Sebald's texts are situated at the end of time, with the Holocaust as the caesura that, as Fuchs puts it, divides a pre-war period of historical plenitude from a post-war era of emptiness and amnesia (Fuchs, 2004: 165;cf. Fritzsche, 2006;Cosgrove, 2006). I have argued elsewhere that these claims ignore those patterns of historical continuity in Sebald's work which co-exist with the sense of the Holocaust as rupture (Long, 2007: 170), and the notion of salvage anthropology can help us to elucidate the matter further.…”