by W. G. Sebald
When I entered my room on the fifth floor I suddenly felt as if I were in a hotel somewhere in Poland. The old-
fashioned interior put me curiously in mind of a faded wine-red velvet lining, the inside of a jewellery box or violin case. I kept my coat on and sat down on one of the plush armchairs in the corner bay window, watching darkness fall outside. The rain that had set in at dusk was pouring down into the gorges of the streets, lashed by the wind, and down below the black taxis and double-decker buses were moving across the shining tarmac, close behind or beside each other, like a herd of elephants. A constant roar rose from below to my place by the window, but there were also moments of complete silence from time to time. In one such interval (though it was utterly impossible) I thought I heard the orchestra tuning their instruments, amidst the usual scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, in the Free Trade Hall next door; and far off, far, far off in the distance, I also heard the little opera singer who used to perform at Liston's Music Hall in the Sixties, singing long extracts from Parsifal in German. Liston's Music Hall was in the city centre, not far from Piccadilly Gardens, above a so-called Wine Lodge where the prostitutes would take a rest and where they had Australian sherry on tap, in big barrels. Anyone who felt the urge could get up on the stage at that music hall and, with the swathes of smoke drifting, perform the piece of his choice to a very mixed and often heavily intoxicated audience, accompanied on the Wurlitzer by a lady who invariably wore pink tulle. As a rule the choice fell upon folk ballads and the sentimental hits that were currently in vogue. The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train, began the favourite of the winter season of 1966 to 1967. And there to greet me are my Mama and Papa. Twice a week, at a late hour when the heaving mass of people and voices verged on the infernal, the heroic tenor known as Siegfried, who cannot have been more than one metre fifty tall, would take the stage. He was in his late forties, wore a herringbone coat that reached almost to the floor and on his head a Homburg tilted back. He would sing O weh, des Höchsten Schmerzenstag or Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön or some other impressive arioso, not hesitating to act out stage directions such as "Parsifal is on the point of fainting" with the required theatricality. And now, sitting in the Midland's turret room above the abyss on the fifth floor, I heard him again for the first time since those days. The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown, of the Litzmannstadt ghetto that was established in 1940 in the Polish industrial centre of Lodz, once known as polski
Manczester. The photographs, which had been discovered in 1987 in a small suitcase, carefully sorted and inscribed, in an antique dealer's shop in Vienna, had been taken as personal souvenirs by a book-keeper and financial expert named Genewein, who came from near Salzburg and who was himself in one of the pictures, counting money at his bureau. The pictures also showed the lord mayor of Litzmannstadt, one Hans Biebow, on his birthday, well scrubbed and with a neat parting, at a table adorned with asparagus ferns and groaning beneath potted plants, bouquets, cakes and cold cuts. There were German men too with their girlfriends and wives, all - without exception - in high spirits. And there were pictures of the ghetto - street cobbles, tram tracks, housefronts, hoardings, demolition sites, fire protection walls, beneath a sky that was grey, watery green, or white and blue - strangely deserted pictures, scarcely one of which showed a living soul, despite the fact that at times there were as many as a hundred and seventy thousand people in Litzmannstadt, in an area of no more than five square kilometres. The photographer had also recorded the exemplary organization within the ghetto: the postal system, the police, the courtroom, the fire brigade, soil disposal, the hairdresser's, the medical services, the laying out of the dead, and the burial ground. More important to him than anything else, apparently, was to show "our industry", the ghetto works that were essential to the wartime economy. In these production sites, most of which were designed for basic manufacture, women were sitting making baskets, child apprentices were busy in the metalwork shop, men were making bullets or working in the nail factory or the rag depot, and everywhere there were faces, countless faces, who looked up from their work (and were permitted to do so) purposely and solely for the fraction of a second that it took to take the photograph. Work is our only course, they said. - Behind the perpendicular frame of a loom sit three young women, perhaps aged twenty. The irregular geometrical patterns of the carpet they are knotting, and even its colours, remind me of the settee in our living room at home. Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women's names were - Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.
Photograph of the author by Jan Peter Tripp
W. G. SEBALD was born in 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany. He studied German language and literature in Switzerland and Britain. Beginning in 1970 he taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of The British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, The Natural History of Destruction, and After Nature won many international awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Berlin Literature Prize. He died in December 2001.
MICHAEL HULSE has translated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Jakob Wassermann's Caspar Hauser as well as contemporary German writing by Luise Rinser, Botho Straus, and Elfriede Jelinek. An award-winning poet, he is the author of Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis.
