by W. G. Sebald
Rites of Melancholy
This realization of the impossibility of salvation matches the unrelated condition of melancholy which, in developing its own rituals, promises some relief but not release from suffering and the “feral deseases” so often mentioned in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.36 Among these rituals, in the narrator’s case, are the nocturnal reading of telephone directories and timetables, the unfolding of maps, and the making of plans for imaginary journeys to the most distant of lands, countries that might well lie beyond the sea shown in the background of Dürer’s Melencolia. Like Robert Burton, who was familiar with melancholy all his life, the narrator is a man “who delights in cosmography … but has never travelled except by map and card.”37 And the summer bed with room enough for seven sleepers where he meditates on stories such as that of the Black Death, with all its paths and coincidences, is of the same century as Burton’s compendium, an era of anxiety when the fear was first uttered “that the great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designes.”38 The narrator’s digressive excursions from the starting point of this realization open up the view—again, a reminiscence from Hamlet—of a world lying far below melancholy, a “dead globe crawling with parasites” whose power of attraction is spent and forfeit.39 The icy sense of distance as the narrator turns away from all earthly life represents a vanishing point in the dialectic of melancholy.
However, the other dimension of the Saturnian circumstances responsible for melancholy does point, as Benjamin has said and in the context of the heavy, dry nature of that planet, to the type of man predestined to hard and fruitless agricultural labor.40 It is probably no coincidence that the narrator’s only utilitarian occupation seems to be growing herbs. He sends these herbs, dried and in carefully adjusted mixtures, to various delicatessens in Milan and Amsterdam as well as to Germany, to Hamburg and Hannover. Perhaps they bear the words “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance” written in Ophelia’s hand.41
The Ideal of Lightlessness
This last, tenuous connection with the outside world also expresses the wish for a progressive and gradual removal from the society of mankind. It is complemented by a tendency toward dematerialization that in the text has its symbolical counterpart in a painting—a work that ranks very high in the narrator’s estimation—so dark and black “that it gives not the slightest idea of what it may once have shown.”42 The “ideal of blackness” of which this picture, signed by one Jean Gaspard Muller, is an example, is, as Adorno remarked in his Ästhetische Theorie, “one of the deepest impulses of abstraction.”43 To follow that impulse, to reach a place “where no star, no light is visible, where there is nothing, where nothing is forgotten because nothing is remembered, where it is night, where it is nothing, nothing, void,” is the deepest emotion to move the narrator when, in the darkness, he explores the spaces between the stars with his telescope.44
But as the narrator well knows, the search for the ideal of absolute lightlessness remains a hopeless undertaking, for the more he reduces the angle of his lens to exclude the stars still perceptible in his field of vision, the farther he sees into the depths of space from which heavenly bodies previously darkened by distance now shine out. Here, then, we are dealing with something far from nihilism in the usual sense of the word; it is more like an approximation to death, that black point which, in the narrator’s imagination, is always becoming “blacker and thicker, ever thicker and ever longer,” and to which his melancholy clings like “the fat weed / that roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,” a provocative gesture of resignation.45
Melancholy, of all entities, will make no pact with death, for it knows him as “the most gloomy representative of a gloomy reality” and therefore, like the traveler who, at the beginning of The Castle, voluntarily crosses the bridge into unsurveyed country, speculates on whether death might not be vulnerable to an invasion of his own territory.46
The area that melancholy thus sets out to explore stretches out before us in The Castle as a snowy, frozen landscape, and its exact counterpart is Tynset, a place in the north of Norway that the narrator ventures to visit. Tynset is the penultimate stage on his journey. After it comes Röros, which “[lies] like a last camp on the way to the end of the world, before that way is lost in inhospitable regions, a territory so incalculable, so menacing, that its exploration has been postponed year after year, until the camp has become eternal autumn quarters inhabited by aging explorers who have lost sight of their goal; have forgotten it, and now look vaguely for the geographical origins of a melancholy … that they have long been seeking, but on which they can never lay hands.”47
The Cold Mamsell
The inhospitable region that the melancholy disposition adopts as its home in this reflection is its idea not just of the anteroom of death, but also of the place where we are all continually entertained by a sinister lady who, as Hildesheimer confided to his friend Max in a recently published letter, regularly awaits us after midnight. She is “the cold Mamsell,” a name accurately denoting her profession, similarly remembered by Grass in evoking Dürer’s Melencolia. Among her avocations—as Hildesheimer describes them with some malice—are rolling up salami slices and wrapping cold asparagus in strips of ham, arranging olives on savory breadsticks, slicing cheese thinly, cutting gherkins into fan shapes, carving tomatoes into eighths and radishes into water lily shapes, splitting onions into rings, and laying cubed brawn on platters and sliced cold meats on a bed of lettuce. So that Max will know just who he is dealing with, Hildesheimer adds to this description: “You see, she comes from Germany. In line with her name, she is rather cold, especially her shoulders.”48
If anyone needs further information to identify this lady, let us add that we are already familiar with one of her sisters-in-law from Kafka’s novel quoted above; she keeps house in the castle and “it is usually cold in castles and always winter / for the sun of righteousness is far from them … so courtiers shiver with cold, / fear and sadness.”49 That sister-in-law of the Cold Mamsell who presides over this drafty place can boast several chests of grand dresses, and whenever she, this Madame la Mort, goes to fetch someone she has a new one made, which she then adds to those already in her wardrobe, and consequently she also gives the surveyor the opportunity of entering her service as a tailor: a compromising offer, which in view of his own mission he must decline.
* The title of a 1931 novel filmed by the Austrian director Bernhard Wicki in 1961; the plot concerns the miraculous removal of a dance hall called the Garden of Eden from the city where it is giving offense.
* Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) was the first president of the Weimar Republic, and had become chairman of the Social Democratic Party in 1913. Gustav Noske (1868–1946) was also a prominent politician during the Weimar Republic period.
Des Häschens Kind, der kleine Has
(The Little Hare, Child of the Hare)
ON THE POET ERNST HERBECK’S TOTEM ANIMAL
Most of the recent literature we persist in reading seems inane only a few years later. Or at least, and so far as I am concerned, very little of it has stood the test of time as well as the poems written by Ernst Herbeck from around 1960 onward in his mental hospital in Gugging.
I first came upon Herbeck’s eccentric figures of speech in 1966. I remember sitting in the Rylands Library in Manchester reading a work on the calamitous Carl Sternheim, and every now and then, as if to refresh my mind, picking up a little volume published by dtv, Schizophrenie und Sprache (“Schizophrenia and Language”) and finding myself amazed by the brilliance of the riddling verbal images conjured up, evidently at random, by this most unfortunate of poets. Today, such sequences of words as Firn der Schnee das Eis gefriert (“Firn the snow the ice freezes”) or Blau. Die Rote Farbe. Die Gelbe Farbe. Die Dunkelgrüne. Der Himmel ELLENO (“Blue. The Red Color. The Yellow Color. The Dark Green. The sky ELLENO”) still seem to me to verge on the frontiers of a breathless other world.
Again and again pass
ages of slight distortion and gentle resignation remind one of the way in which Matthias Claudius sometimes manages, with a single semitone or pause, to induce a momentary feeling of levitation in the reader. Ernst Herbeck writes: “Bright we read in the misty sky / How stout the winter days. Are.” There is probably no greater sense of both distance and closeness anywhere in literature. Herbeck’s poems show us the world in reverse perspective. Everything is contained in a tiny circular image.
It is astonishing that over and beyond his own poems Herbeck also gave us a theory of poetics in a few statements of principle. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an oral way of shaping history in slow motion.… Poetry is also antipathetic to reality, and weighs more heavily. Poetry transfers authority to the pupil. The pupil learns poetry; and that is the history in the book. We learn poetry from the animal in the woods. Gazelles are famous historians.”
Ernst Herbeck, who spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital, hardly knew the contemporary history of Austria and Germany at first hand, but he remembered Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the enthusiasm with which Vienna received him, and other festive occasions of the past. A Christmas poem not only mentions the inevitable snow and lighted candles, but contains references to banners, warfare, and downfall.
Wartime Christmas as Goebbels envisaged it, and as recalled to memory by Kluge and Reitz, flares up again in Herbeck’s poetry. A poem entitled “Ins Stammbuch” (“Taken to Heart”) and beginning with the lines “der Tag ist auf die gut Deutsche / Eiche Tot der vergangen Heid” (“the day is risen the good German / oak Dead the departed heathen”) gives us more to think about than does the professional disposal of our burden of guilt and the past. It seems to me actually uncanny that Herbeck wrote the following poem in that historic year 1989. I wish all my countrymen would take it to heart.
Das Schwert ist eine seriöse deutsche
Waffe und wird von den Gothen und
wird von den ausserstehenden Germanen
verwendet; bis auf den
heutigen Tag. Dies im gesamtdeutschen
Raum (Germanien).
(The sword is a serious German
weapon used by the Goths
and used by the Germanic
peoples farther afield; up to the
present day. And this in the whole
German area [Germania].)
However, I do not mean to write on Ernst Herbeck’s concept of national history here, but on his attempts to record the history of his own family and descent in complex mythological terms. In her book Die Ver-rückung der Sprache (“The Dis-placement of Language”), Gisela Steinlechner has shown that the work of Herbeck is full of anthropomorphic portraits of animals. One reason for this is that the poet’s psychiatrist often gave him titles such as “The Zebra,” “The Giraffe” as exercises, so that the patient could write about them. Since Herbeck in general kept closely to the subjects he was offered, he produced a whole bestiary—a child’s primer confirming, if ironically, the general validity of the taxonomic order we have devised. “The raven leads the devout,” “The owl loves children,” “The zebra runs through broad fields,” and “The kangaroo leans on its support”—none of this is very disturbing. Yet Herbeck also writes of unknown species not listed in zoological encyclopedias, making us suspect that the animals are not so very different from each other, or we ultimately as different from them as we would like to think. We come upon a being that is half lamb, half cat in Herbeck, as we do in the synagogue mentioned by Franz Kafka.
Much more mysterious than these strange creatures, however, is the symbolic hare in Herbeck’s work, a creature that the author related to the question of his own origin. He gives only the most cursory and singular facts about his early history. Everything to do with the family and relations is a mystery to him. “One question, please!” he writes. “Are the son-in-law’s children father-in-law to their siblings? I can’t work it out! Please tell me, and thank you.” In fact to Herbeck, doomed to lifelong celibacy, the most inscrutable feature of these relationships was the idea of married life, on which he makes only a few vague and extremely innocent comments.
Die Ehe ist vorbildlich f. Mann und Frau
in jeder Hinsicht. Sie wird meistens ein
gegangen und geschlossen. Nach der Verlobung
und. Je länger sie dauert desto
kürzer und länger das Dasein. Eines Hasen
oder so.
(Marriage is the model for man and wife
in every respect. You usually enter into
it, you celebrate it. After the engagement
and. The longer it lasts the
shorter and longer the existence.
Of a hare or suchlike.)
What happens after that “and” and the full stop is something the writer cannot or will not envisage. On the other hand, he knows that conjugal life may eventually produce a hare. It is not so easy to describe how the act of procreation works. Perhaps it is not so much a sexual act as a kind of spontaneous reproduction, even magic.
Der Zauberer zaubert Sachen:
Kleine Hasen. Tücher. Eier.
Er zaubert wiederholt.
Er steckt das Tuch in den Zylinder
und zieht es wieder heraus
es ist ein zahmer Hase dabei.
(The conjuror conjures things up:
little hares. Scarves. Eggs.
He keeps on doing magic.
He puts the scarf in the top hat
and brings it out again
with a tame hare in it.)
The hare so miraculously produced from the top hat is undoubtedly the totem animal in which the writer sees himself. The harelip with which he was born, and which was operated on several times, probably played a crucial part as a premorbid disability in the genesis and particular development of Herbeck’s schizophrenia and the specific form it took. It is an identifying mark; in his mind, Herbeck takes this blemish much further back in time than his childhood. When he is asked to write a poem on “the embryo,” he forgets that strange new word, and instead writes the following lines on an unborn fabulous animal more closely related to him, which he calls the empyrum.
Heil unserer Mutter! Ein werdendes
Kind im Leibe der Mutter. Als ich
ein Empyrum war, hat sie mich
operiert. Ich kann meine Nase
nicht vergessen. Armes Empyrum.
(Hail to the mother! A future
child in the mother’s womb. When I
was an empyrum, she operated
on me. I can’t forget
my nose. Poor empyrum.)
Gisela Steinlechner, in her studies of the work of Ernst Herbeck, was the first to try to describe the preexistential trauma that, to the damaged subject, later became his own myth. Among other sources, she drew on the three-page autobiographical account written by Herbeck in 1970, in which he describes how at the age of eleven he was in a Pathfinder group under a leader called Meier; their group was called the Pigeons, unlike the others, who were Eagles or Stags.
The Pathfinders organization is one of the last in which human beings give themselves the names of totem animals, but this odd little fact is less important in itself than Herbeck’s Pathfinder reminiscence of only a few lines which, in an entirely agrammatical context, uses the very odd word Thierenschaft (“beastship”). The old German spelling Thier, instead of modern Tier for “animal” (the “h” long ago became silent), suggests a time before human beings were even capable of speech.
Since in the history of our species ancient strategies of thinking and mental organization regularly occur in those described as mentally ill, it is not at all far-fetched to look back to the basic rules governing the totemic imagination in order to find out what Herbeck meant. Gisela Steinlechner has interpreted the harelip as the symbol upon which Herbeck himself fixed for his divided personality. In this connection she looks at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that in American Indian myths the harelip was the remaining trace of a twin who was nev
er actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. But part of the messianic vocation is to be elect in the context of salvation, and at the same time ostracized and persecuted in the secular world. Not for nothing did Ernst Herbeck, who probably felt the grief of the despised more than any sense of mission as the Son of Man, place four exclamation marks after the title that he was given for a poem one day, “The Hare.” The poem runs as follows:
Der Hase is ein kühnes Tier!
Er läuft bis ihm die Strappen
fassen. Die Ohren spitzgestellt; er
lauscht. Für ihn—ist keine Zeit
zum Rasten. Lauf läuft läuft.
Armer Hase!
(The hare is a bold animal!
He runs until the snare
catches him. Ears pricked; he
listens. For him—there is no time
to rest. Run runs runs. Poor hare!)
The ambivalent nature of the hare in myth, closely combining power and impotence, boldness and fear, determines Herbeck’s concept of the nature of his emblematic animal.
