In which I delve into personal details for some reason

W.G. Sebald, Silent Catastrophes: Essays

My German was pretty good for a few years. I was never reading in the original, but movies, news, a few pages of a book: I could hack my way through. It's been a year since I've had any reason to use it, so it's back down with my Spanish. The good grad student in me can work it back up at any time, but it's not serviceable now. 

When I started in on German literature in earnest in 2021, I was a few steps ahead, having already managed Doctor Faustus and The Magic Mountain as well as almost all of Kafka. I added to that list, dutifully, but Germany has a large literature scene because of state sponsorship and very little of it ends up in translation, it's a hit or miss enterprise. There will be gaps not only because vita brevis longa ars but also because the material is hard to get, there are not star authors in the usual sense, and there are not the established pipelines like in Spanish, which very efficiently (post-Bolaño) moves authors into English.

Sebald takes the reader through some of Austrian literature in the 20th century, and across the essays increases his focus on Heimat, home, as a sort of trauma at the root of Austrianness and its literature, both for the authors literally pulled away from their home and the authors who see their dying empire fall into lassitude, be replaced by mindless authoritarianism--welcomed by some, somehow--and then a descent into being a second-tier power with memories of a world that no longer exists. I can relate. Sebald, of course, seems to slightly dislike almost all of the authors he discusses. It makes for more interesting essays, but I must admit the project seems a little vexing--"let me try to precisely describe the delusion a number of my fellow writers suffered under".

We are far enough in this post to talk about some personal matters relating to Heimat. I was last in my hometown in 2004, for less than one weekend in the fall. I have not been back and I will almost certainly never go back--if missing out on the Covid-postponed high school reunion wasn't reason enough, there will be no reason. The thing that town was is dead; it was dying anyway and 2008 killed it off, I have seen Google Street View, there is much less than there once was. My family's gone, my friends are mostly gone, my friends' families are gone, and whatever it looks like now is not what I remember in the way that nothing can really be the same 20 years later.

And so there's nothing but memories, including the resurfacing of all kinds of memories that comes along with parenting children. I was sometimes frustrated in the last few years there, perhaps in the mistaken belief that I was destined for something great and my hometown was in some way holding me back. With a lot of hindsight I can realize that back then I wanted things I didn't really want (how striking to realize I am Meg from Little Women and in fact want exactly what I have, nothing else), and that the wanting and not having was itself part of the greatness of that time in my life. I learned from Sebald that--very German, as I ever am--there's a one-word term for wanting complete silence in a forest that was one of the things I wanted most when I was 17.

So much for nostalgia: my home is not there anymore, it's another place I have lived for over 20 years. I chose this one. And the people who live in that other place that I used to call home should have it however they want it, and not my attempt to keep it 1987 or 1993 or 1997 forever, it's not my home or my place to say.