A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  There is another way, too, in which the history of the Jews, as depicted in Keller’s work, mirrors that of the people they live among. As a result of the political upheavals and the expansion of the market economy—which created at least as many bankrupts as it did nouveaux riches—all through the nineteenth century a growing number of Germans and Swiss found themselves forced to emigrate for a life in the diaspora, ending up just as far from home as any of the guests from the East in Frau Margret’s house. For this reason, no doubt, in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel of emigration the Germans are referred to as the Jews of America. Only on foreign soil is it brought home to them what it means to be cut off from one’s homeland and treated with contempt abroad. The fact that after the failure of the 1848 revolution, eighty thousand people emigrated to America from the region of Baden alone shows that the emigrants of that time were not merely adventurers, fortune seekers, or a few desperate individuals. Keller’s analysis of this social phenomenon, too, is more accurate and more sympathetic than that of most of his literary contemporaries. While Heinrich Lee is learning about hardship firsthand abroad, back at home meanwhile his uncle has died, his children long since scattered in the bustle and confusion of the highways, along which, he notes with characteristic irony, they went dragging their little ones in carts behind them as in former times the Children of Israel in the wilderness. Then there is the famous scene in which, standing to attention on the parade ground, Heinrich can only look on, his heart lurching in his breast, as the coach carrying the emigrants passes by, among them the woman who could have been mother, sister, and lover to him. The chapter is entitled “Judith Goes Too” [“Auch Judith geht”]. The fact that this episode follows immediately upon Anna’s funeral makes it clear that for those left behind, Judith’s departure, too, is like a death. Indeed, at that time it was generally as rare for emigrants to return home as for the dead to come back to life. For every one who, like Martin Salander, succeeded in making his fortune in Brazil, there were dozens who never managed to scrape together enough money working in the coffee plantations to pay their fare back home. Even Salander pays no small price for his success. Or we need only think of the young unmarried Swiss women, many of whom, as we know from the autobiographical writings of Conrad or Nabokov, could only find positions as governesses or tutors in lands far distant from their home cantons. Imagine their isolation as they stood gazing out of their windows at dusk, year after year, on some estate in the Ukraine or outside St. Petersburg, for a moment believing that they could see, in the gathering clouds, a glimpse of the far-distant snow-white Alps. Fräulein Luise Rieter, for example, to whom Keller fruitlessly declared his affection, spent a long time in Paris and in the household of a doctor in Dublin. And how many more, down to and including Robert Walser and his siblings, did not end up scattered Lord knows where. In Keller’s own case, his stays in Munich and Berlin were quite enough to give him a taste of the bitterness of exile. For this reason, Heinrich Lee’s dreams of home, which take up a whole chapter and more in Der grüne Heinrich, are filled in equal measure with beauty and fear. He sees himself walking along the highway, staff in hand, and in the distance, on an interminable road which intersects with his own, catches sight of his long-dead father with a heavy knapsack on his back. Exile, as Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory located just outside this world. Anyone who has visited it will forever after be a stranger in his own country. When, in his dream, Heinrich finally arrives back home and mounts the steps hand in hand with his childhood sweetheart, he finds all his relations assembled in the living room, his uncle, his aunt, all his cousins, the living and the dead together. Without exception they all wear contented, cheerful expressions, and yet this homecoming is anything but reassuring. Oddly, all those present are smoking long clay pipes filled with sweet-smelling tobacco, as a sign perhaps that in this in-between region, different customs prevail. The way, too, in which they cannot stay still for a moment but are compelled to wander ceaselessly up and down and back and forth while an assortment of animals—hunting dogs, martens, falcons and doves—scurry along the floor in the opposite direction: all of this strange and restless to-ing and fro-ing would seem to suggest that these poor departed souls are anything but quiet and at one with their lot. Keller did, though, seek in another passage to rise above his fear that the return from exile, like exile itself, amounts to a premature encounter with death, in the wanderer fantasy in which we see Heinrich Lee heading for home through a nocturnal Germany. “I went through woods, across fields and meadows,” Lee writes, “past villages whose dim outlines or faint lights lay far from my path. At midnight, as I was going over some wide open fields, the deepest solitude reigned over the earth, and the skies, interspersed with the slowly turning stars, became the more full of life, as invisible swarms of migratory birds passed high overhead with an audible rustling of wings.”

  What is remarkable about this passage is the way in which Keller’s prose, so unreservedly committed to earthly life, attains its most astonishing heights at precisely those moments where it reaches out to touch the edge of eternity. Anyone traveling along this path as it is unrolled before us, sentence after lovely sentence, over and over again senses with a shudder how deep is the abyss on either side, how sometimes the daylight seems to fade as the shadows gather from afar and often is almost extinguished by the suggestion of death. There are many passages in Keller which could pass for the work of a baroque poet of mortality and vanitas. We need only think of Zwiehahn’s wandering skull in Heinrich’s luggage, the little ivory skeleton on the table of the Landvogt von Greifensee, and the poet’s mania for collecting, which sees him furnishing almost all his stories with a kind of treasure chest (or Schatzkästlein), in which, as in the cabinets of curiosities and jewel caskets of the seventeenth century, the most improbable relics coexist side by side: a “cherry stone carved with the passion of Christ, and a box made of filigree ivory inlaid with red taffeta, containing a little mirror and a silver thimble; further … another cherry stone wherein rattled a tiny game of ninepins, a walnut which when opened revealed a little image of the Virgin behind glass, a silver heart with a small perfumed sponge inside, and a bonbonnière made of lemon peel

  with a strawberry painted on its lid, containing a golden pin on a piece of cotton in the shape of a forget-me-not, and a medallion with a monument of hair; further, a bundle of yellowed papers with recipes and secrets, a bottle of Hoffmann’s drops, another of eau de Cologne and a box with musk; another with a scrap of marten dropping in it, and a little basket plaited from fragrant palm leaves, as well as one made of glass beads and cloves; finally a little book with silver edges bound in sky-blue ribbed paper and entitled Golden Rules of Life for the Young Woman as Bride, Wife and Mother, and a small book of dreams, a guide to letter writing, five or six love letters, and a lancet for letting blood.” We find all of this in the story of Die drei gerechten Kammacher [The Three Righteous Combmakers], in a lacquered chest belonging to Züs Bünzlin, which Wolfgang Schlüter, in his essay on Benjamin as collector, refers to as a microcosmic intérieur. If the baroque imagination, which we see here once more dwelling upon the insignificant trifles we fashion and hoard during our brief time on earth, itself already embodied a kind of vogue for death, then its afterlife, as shown to us by Keller in this miniature world within a world belonging to a Swiss spinster, is determined by a narrative position which, as Wolfgang Schlüter writes, is circumspect even in its mockery, and whose underlying ironic perspective—as Schlüter also notes—is derived not from distance but from painfully focused images viewed from the closest possible proximity. For this reason it would be wrong to see Keller as a latter-day preacher of death and damnation in disguise, even though there can be no doubt that his inspiration derives from the baroque tendencies still latent within him. What is unique about Keller’s philosophy of transience is the serene glow with which it is suffused, stemming from the particular brand of Weltfrömmigkeit [secular piety] the young scholar from Zurich had bec
ome acquainted with during his time with the Heidelberg atheists. There were few things Keller could abide less than the self-righteous authority of religion, nothing he loathed more than the bigotry that seeks to wield the rod to make of poor little Meret an honest Christian child. This liberation from the age-old prison of religion is what lets in the light which he sees illumining even the darkest hours. There can scarcely be a brighter eulogy than Heinrich’s funeral oration for his young cousin Anna, who passed away long before her time. When the carpenter is rubbing down her newly finished coffin with pumice, Heinrich recalls, it becomes “as white as snow, and only the very faintest reddish touch of the fir shone through, giving the tint of apple blossom. It looked far more beautiful and dignified than if it had been painted, gilded, or even brass-bound. At the head, the carpenter had according to custom constructed an opening with a sliding cover through which the face could be seen until the coffin was lowered into the grave; now there still had to be set in a pane of glass which had been forgotten, and I rowed home to get one. I knew that on top of a cupboard there lay a small old picture frame from which the picture had long since disappeared. I took the glass that had been forgotten, placed it carefully in the boat, and rowed back. The carpenter was roaming about a little in the woods looking for hazelnuts; meanwhile, I tested the pane of glass, and when I found that it fitted the opening, I dipped it in the clear stream, for it was covered with dust, and clouded, and with care I succeeded in washing it without breaking it on the stones. Then I lifted it and let the clear water run off it, and when I held up the shining glass high against the sun and looked through it, I saw three boy-angels making music; the middle one was holding a sheet of music and singing, the other two were playing old-fashioned violins, and they were all looking upward in joy and devotion; but the vision was so thinly and delicately transparent that I did not know whether it was hovering in the rays of the sun, in the glass, or merely in my imagination. When I moved the glass, the angels instantly vanished, until suddenly, turning the glass another way, I saw them again. Since then I have been told that copperplate engravings or drawings which have lain undisturbed for a great many years behind glass communicate themselves to the glass during these years, in the dark nights, and leave behind upon it something like a reflected image.” The solace Heinrich derives from this chapter of his life story has nothing to do with hope for eternal bliss, as might perhaps initially appear to be the case. The angels with their gaze turned heavenward are only an illusion, virtual vignettes giving the appearance of a miracle which is in fact merely the result of a chemical reaction. Rather, Keller achieves this reconciliation with death in a purely earthly realm: in the satisfaction of work well done, in the snowy gleam of the fir wood, in the peaceful boat journey across the lake with the pane of glass, and in the perception, through the gradually lifting veil of mourning, of the beautiful clarity, undimmed by any hint of transcendence, of the air, the light, and the pure shining water.

  This attachment to earthly life is borne out by the fact that nowhere in these stories of Keller’s does the desire for redemption emerge more clearly than in the repeatedly imagined evocation—quite contrary to Keller’s own experience—of the consummation of love. Just as Heinrich, on his nocturnal walk with Judith, listens eagerly to the rustle of her dress and every few moments feels the need to glance furtively across at her “like a fearful pilgrim at whose side walks a specter of the woods,” so, too, Keller’s gaze, as he writes, is always directed at the unknown and mysterious nature of woman, who only becomes truly familiar to him as a figment of the imagination. The scenes in which the lovers are united, which he pictures in such loving detail, are not only among the most touching in literature; they are unique, too, inasmuch as in them desire is not immediately betrayed by the fixed masculine gaze. It says much that in Keller’s work the true lover is barely more than a child—for example, the young Heinrich Lee in the chapter in which, locked in the theater overnight, still wearing his monkey costume and with Mephistopheles’ cloak around his shoulders, he wanders around by moonlight on the stage amid all the rustling paper splendors, raising the curtain, and in the orchestra pit, at first tentatively and then with increasing force, begins to make the kettledrums roll until finally a veritable crescendo of thunder echoes through the darkened auditorium and rouses the beautiful actress who shortly before has breathed her last upon the boards. “It was Gretchen, just as I had last seen her,” thus Lee’s account in his recollection of his theatrical adventures as a monkey: “I shuddered from head to foot, my teeth chattered, and yet at the same time a powerful sensation of joyful surprise flashed through me and made me glow. Yes, it was Gretchen, it was her spirit, although the distance was too great for me to distinguish her features, making the apparition seem even more ghostly. With mysterious gaze, she appeared to be searching the hall; I pulled myself upright, I was drawn forward as if by powerful, invisible hands, and, my heart beating audibly, I stepped over the benches toward the front of the stage, pausing at every step. The fur covering muffled my footsteps so that the figure did not notice me until, as I climbed up to the prompter’s box, the first moonbeam fell like a streak across my strange costume. I saw how she fixed her glowing eyes on me, horrified, and then shrank back in alarm, but silently. I trod one quiet step nearer, and halted again; my eyes were opened wide, I held my trembling hands aloft while, a glad fire of courage running through my veins, I made for the phantom. Then it called out imperiously: ‘Halt! You little creature, what are you?’ stretching out its arms threateningly against me so that I stood still, rooted to the spot. We looked fixedly at each other; I recognized her features now. She was wrapped in a white nightdress, her neck and shoulders were bare and gleamed softly, like snow by night.” Adolf Muschg has said of Keller that it would have required a miracle of empathy and consideration to overcome the feelings of social and physical inferiority from which he suffered. This scene in the theater presents us with just such a miracle. The actress removes the little creature’s mask, enfolds him closely in her arms, and kisses him repeatedly on the lips, because, as she says afterward, he has not yet become the rogue he will turn into later, just like all the others, once he has grown up. The tender consummation of this childlike desire for love is soon followed by a scarcely less easeful death. Gretchen takes the monkey into her bed, where the two fall peacefully asleep, she shrouded in a royal velvet cloak and Heinrich sewn into his fur costume, thus bearing, as the narrator says, no small resemblance to those monumental tombs “where a knight of stone lies at full length, his faithful dog at his feet.” The vision here is of the body turned to stone at the moment of utmost happiness, a petrifaction which is a symbol not of punishment or banishment, but an expression of the hope that the moment of supreme bliss might last forever. Another, scarcely less peaceful end seems assured for the tailor Strapinski, far from home in Switzerland, when, his secret having been revealed by the charade acted out by his Doppelgänger, filled with a sense of shame he walks out into the winter night where presently, overcome by “the fiery drinks consumed and his grievous stupidity,” he sinks down by the side of the road and falls asleep “on the crisp frozen snow, while an icy wind begins to blow from the east.” Wenzel Strapinski’s rescue from an already certain death, as Keller then describes it, runs counter to all the prevailing erotic conventions of bourgeois literary tradition. Whereas, in the Novelle from Kleist to Schnitzler, it is invariably the male hero who, in an attitude of macabre lust, is to be found bending over the unconscious or lifeless body of a woman, in Keller’s tale it is the female gaze of Nettchen which is permitted to rove uninhibitedly over the graceful and noble body of the tailor with his slender, supple limbs and (as it tellingly says) tightly laced form. And when, by means of energetic rubbing, Nettchen finally succeeds in massaging the limp and almost lifeless tailor back to life and he slowly sits up, it becomes abundantly clear that Keller’s erotic longings were directed toward a reversal of the prevailing gender roles as prescribed by society. Possibl
y for this reason we are informed, in the following passage, that Wenzel Strapinski had, during his time in the military, served with the Hussars and worn one of those splendidly colorful uniforms as sported by that ideal masculine type for which women have pined right up to the twentieth century. The source of Keller’s identification with feminine desire cannot, though, be determined with any certainty. Walter Benjamin believed that “Keller’s gloomy composure is based on the profound equilibrium that the masculine and feminine sides of his being have reached,” arguing that this also relates to the poet’s facial appearance. In this context Benjamin goes on to comment on the history of the androgynous type in Greek antiquity, referring to the figure of Aphroditos—the bearded Aphrodite—and the Argive women whose custom it was to adorn themselves with a false beard on their wedding night. If we look closely at the drawings which Johann Salomon Hegi made of Keller at twenty-one, his eyelids lowered in sleep, with his long eyelashes and uncommonly sensual lips, it is not difficult to agree with Benjamin when he states that the idea of such androgynous faces “brings us closer than anything else to the face of this poet.”