CALL FOR PAPERS
The Sydney German Studies Symposium 2006
on
W. G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Goethe-Institut, Sydney, Australia
20 – 23 July 2006
The work of W.G. Sebald will be the focus of an international scholarly forum, the 8th Sydney German Studies Symposium, which will take place at the Goethe-Institute in Sydney, Australia, from 20 – 23 July 2006. The conference is being held under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales, and is organised by the University’s Department of German Studies. Offers of contributions to the conference, in the form of individual papers or panels/clusters, are invited along the lines of discussion outlined in the following paragraphs.
1. On W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001)
Five years after the untimely death of Max Sebald, as he preferred to be called by his friends and colleagues, the Sydney Symposium will present an opportunity for a critical and scholarly assessment of the Gesamtwerk of an author whose highly personal, idiosyncratic writing has received international recognition in a comparatively short span of time. Sebald’s work is not easily categorised; it meanders and scintillates between fiction and (auto)biography, essay and travelogue, with frequent excursions into art history, literary and cultural criticism, and historical scholarship.
2. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
The notion of expatriate writing could offer a useful point of departure to describe and to analyse the specificities of Sebald’s innovative literary creation. The experience of authors living and writing abroad is common enough in recent cultural history - compare for instance the group of “modernist” American writers in Paris of the 1930s or, in the context of postcolonial literature, the internationally recognised authors from India (and other Commonwealth countries) living and working today in the U.K., Canada or the U.S. However, the expatriate writer is comparatively rare in German literature. The lack of an adequate term in German for the English expatriate already points to a special case. Its closest approximation, vaterlandslos, characteristically conjures up associations with a stereotype of German history characterised by pre-modern, authoritarian and illiberal tendencies. To be sure, exile and emigration, mostly for political reasons, constitute an important part of the life experiences of German intellectuals in the 20th century, and much of German literature of that period, as well as of others, is Exilliteratur. Some of the most important and innovative among the literary exiles might be also be called expatriates - e.g. Elias Canetti, Jean Amery or Paul Celan. It is also true that over the last few decades the Federal Republic has become a significant place for expatriate writing, i.e. the so-called Migrantenliteratur produced by “foreigners” (Ausländer) living in Germany and writing in German. While there are similarities with such writers which are worth exploring, Sebald’s case fits – strictly speaking – none of the above categories.
Born in 1944 in Bavaria, Sebald studied in Germany before living in Switzerland and in the U.K., settling, finally, in Norwich in 1970 where he lived for the rest of his life. As an immigrant, memories of his postwar German childhood and youth inform Sebald’s writing as much as the conscious attempt of the adult to explore the fabric of social and cultural life of his adopted new country. This is a two-fold process: to come to terms with the legacy of his German history, albeit from a distance, and to appropriate for himself the political, socio-economic and ecological history of the East Coast of England where he made his home. Not surprisingly, the issue of identity, questions of identity formation and aspects of identity performance, play an important part in his work. Similarly, the use of (mostly) literary role models allows for freqent self-reflective insights into his own practice as a contemporary expatriate writer.
Like many expatriates, Sebald’s first person narrators seem to feel rather ill at ease in their old country while not entirely comfortable in the new one. Yet again, his narrative perspective is substantially different from that of other writers who became expatriates without having a choice. It is quite unlike, for example, the fremder Blick of Herta Müller which is the result of that author’s experiences with a repressive, totalitarian regime that has left indelible traces in her language and her perception of the world. By comparison, Sebald’s situation as a writer and academic is a fairly privileged one. He was neither an economic migrant nor a political refuge; his exile from Germany, if that is a correct designation, was voluntary, and it did not prevent him travelling frequently back and forth across the Channel. It seems that he gladly accepted the one luxury available to him, a certain amount of free and unstructured time. But he was not a jet-setting academic; his favourite mode of travel was by train, by bus and on foot. Thus, on the one hand, Sebald is not unlike the postmodern, uprooted expatriate in the age of global exchange and communication; but his work is, on the other hand, very much committed to the exploration and the preservation of a cultural sphere which is distinctively the “old” Europe. The contemporary presence of what is left of this Europe and its special quality as an historical, literary and cultural artefact, is being traced by Sebald in much of his work, sometimes in a seemingly anachronistic and even nostalgic mode, but always as a vital effort to preserve a precious and, in view of current developments towards a homogenizing global market, a potentially emancipatory cultural memory that resists the pull of a single, hegemonic world culture.
3. A Literature of Transmigration
At the end of the opening chapter of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald uses the term “transmigration” to refer to the silkworm’s change from moth to caterpillar, a motif taken up and expanded in the final chapter where the author presents a veritable short history of the silk industry, across millenia and continents. Earlier in the first chapter, the first-person narrator, undoubtedly Sebald, compares himself to Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. While such metaphors of transmigration, or processes of transformation, are characteristic both of Sebald’s literary technique of associative and thematic linkages, as well as of his often stylized self-references, the notion of transmigration describes his work on an even more elementary level. Both Sebald’s narrators and his fictional heroes are constantly on the move. Just like their author, who seems most at home and at peace with himself when he durchwandert (transmigrates) the countrysides of Switzerland or Italy, for example, his literary characters are migrants who cannot rest. Sebald’s work amounts to a transmigration of European landscapes, of geographical as well as historical and cultural spaces, across borders and time zones. It is also transmigratory in the sense that it crosses literary genres; like many travel writers. e.g. Bruce Chatwin whose name is often evoked as a kindred spirit, he moves effortlessly between documentary or autobiography and belles lettres, and he does so always in his very own, lyrically inspired and elegant prose. The use of photography in Sebald’s essayistic and fictional work, as well as frequent allusions to the visual arts and to specific painters, also attests to Sebald’s crossings, or wanderings over, into other areas of artistic creation.
4. German Issues: Sebald and the German Past and Present
While Sebald’s literary world is clearly shaped by a European sensitivity and while he is very much an international writer, his work is nevertheless characterised by a strong presence of “German issues”. Sebald’s visits to scenes of his Bavarian childhood, his attempts to find traces of the history of his village and its regional surroundings, his reconstruction of family trees and local histories, all of these relate to an ongoing exploration of a lost and irretrievable sense of Heimat. Similarly, the central concern of postwar German intellectual history, the coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, serves as an important motivational impetus in Sebald’s work. Characteristically, it is again his perspective as an expatriate writer which accounts for his own, unique approach to the experience of the Holocaust: as a student and, later, as a lecturer in England he meets the surviving victims of the Nazis’ policies of genocide, and it is through the Aufarbeitung of their narratives that he formulates his response, as an expatriate German writer in England, to the horrors of his native country’s past. Sebald’s double perspective, that of the child who remembers growing up in view of the rubble of the destroyed cities in the vicinity of his rural home in the Allgäu, and that of the adult living in the English countryside not far from the place from where the Allied bombers started on their missions of mass destruction and burning, is again a key factor in his interest in the literary aftermath of the war in Germany. In his controversial essay, Luftkrieg und Literatur, he claimed that his German colleagues, by and large, failed “morally” in their duty to adequately document the horrific experiences of ordinary German civilians during the bombing raids. Sebald’s thesis was received with a great deal of criticism, but also with considerable amount of support, by historians and literary scholars and authors alike. The essay sparked a hotly contested debate which as yet is far from resolved.
5. A Writer’s Writer
Sebald, who for many years was foremost a scholar and critic of German and, notably, Austrian literature, is very much a writer’s writer. Perhaps the most typical of Sebald’s narrative position is that of a writer/narrator who finds himself re-tracing the journeys of other writers in the past, like Stendhal, Kafka or Conrad, to discover that their paths and that of the narrator’s life itinerary have crossed and are linked in a myriad of mysterious ways, contingent or otherwise. Other writers, as different as Nabokov and Casanova, frequently make appearances in his work, as fictional or “real”, historical personae, or in the form of intertextual references. Many contemporary colleagues of Sebald have found his peculiar style stimulating, the subject matters he deals with attractive and challenging. To give only three examples: In Germany, Hans Magnus Enzensberger included an obituary poem about Sebald in his latest collection of poetry; earlier he had “discovered” Sebald for the German literary market by publishing his first works in the famous Andere Bibliothek. In the United States, the late Susan Sontag’s critical, highly appreciative appraisal of Sebald’s work contributed a great deal to cementing his reputation among writers in the English-speaking world. And in Australia, where he now resides, J.M. Coetzee found elequent words of praise for what he called Sebald’s literary “genius”. In Australia, in particular, a number of authors have been fascinated by Sebald’s work to which they feel a strong affinity. Thus, one of the aims of the Sydney Symposium will be to present a round-table or panel discussion of Australian authors who will speak about their views on, and their responses to Sebald’s writing. This public forum, intended as part of the larger academic conference, will also provide an opportunity for Australian writers to meet interested literary scholars from overseas (primarily Europe and the U.S.), to discuss their own work and to exchange ideas and opinions on matters of mutual interest.
Call for Papers
Enquiries, expressions of interest and proposals for papers in English or German are invited. Offers of contributions that address the questions and topics outlined above are particularly welcome. It is planned that the question of expatriate German writing will be at the centre of the conference; however, papers dealing with other aspects of the work of Sebald will be considered. Offers should include a title and a one-page abstract.
The conference language will be English. All presentations are to be not more than 45 minutes in length (30 minutes paper, 15 minutes discussion time).
Please direct all correspondence to the conference convenor:
A/Prof. Gerhard Fischer
German Studies, UNSW
Sydney 2052 Australia
Phone 61 2 9385 2327
E-mail: G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au