A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  across the central portion of the picture, in which the black shoes stand between two areas of shadow; all this taken together produces a geometric pattern of a complexity which is incapable of expression in words. From a combination of this pattern—illustrating the intricacy of the various proportions, relationships, and interlocking connections—and the mysterious pair of black shoes, there arises a kind of picture puzzle that the observer, knowing nothing of the previous history, will scarcely be able to solve. Who was the woman the shoes belonged to? Where has she gone? Do the shoes now belong to someone else? Or are they, in the end, simply a paradigm for the fetish which the painter is compelled to make of everything he paints? It is difficult to say more about this picture than that notwithstanding its imposing scale and deceptive simplicity, it remains locked in the most intimate private sphere. The shoes give nothing away. Two years later, however, the painter brings his enigmatic picture at least a little further into the open. In a work of significantly smaller format (100 × 145 cm), the large picture reappears, not just as a quotation but as a mediating element of the painting. Filling the upper two-thirds of the canvas, it is evidently now hanging in its rightful place, and in front of it, in front of the Déclaration de guerre, perched sideways on a mahogany chair with white upholstery, a woman with flaming red hair sits with her back to the observer. She is smartly dressed but still gives the appearance of someone weary at evening from the burdens of the day. She has removed one of her shoes—the same shoes as the ones she is gazing at in the large picture.

  Originally, so I have been told, she was holding this one shoe in her left hand, then it was placed on the floor to the right of the chair, and finally it vanished altogether. The woman wearing one shoe, alone with the mysterious declaration of war—alone, that is, apart from the faithful dog at her side, who, however, is not in the least interested in the painted shoes but gazes straight ahead out of the picture and looks us directly in the eye. An X-ray would show that previously he was standing in the middle of the picture. In the meantime, he has been on a journey and has retrieved a kind of wooden sandal from the fifteenth century, or, as the case may be, from the wedding portrait which hangs in the National Gallery in London, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434 for Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife in morganatic “left-handed” marriage, Giovanna Cenami, in token of his witness to the union. “Johannes de Eyck hic fuit,” it says on the frame of the circular mirror in which

  the scene can be seen again, in miniature, from behind. In the foreground, near the bottom-left-hand edge of the painting, lies the wooden sandal—that strange piece of evidence—next to a small dog who has somehow strayed into the picture, probably as a symbol of marital fidelity. The red-haired woman, who in Jan Peter Tripp’s painting is meditating on the fate of her shoes and an inexplicable loss, has no idea that the revelation of the secret lies behind her—in the form of an analogous object from a world long since past. The dog, bearer of secrets who leaps easily over the dark abysses of time, because for him there is no difference between the

  fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, knows many things better than we. His left (domesticated) eye looks straight at us; the right (untamed) eye has just a shade less light, seems remote and strange. And yet, we feel, it is precisely this eye in shadow which can see right through us.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

  In the “extended marginal notes and glosses”—as he modestly characterizes the essays in A Place in the Country—W. G. Sebald chooses to dispense with the usual scholarly accoutrements of footnotes (with a single exception) and bibliography. In reintroducing such apparatus as an aid for the English reader, I have accordingly tried to keep these notes as unobtrusive as possible, refraining from footnoting the numerous embedded quotations, half-quotations, and allusions. Instead, works cited in the text are, as far as possible, listed and referenced in the Bibliography, where details of the English translations of the authors in question, to which my own translation is indebted, may be found.

  FOREWORD

  1 recollection of things The phrase “Aufzählen der Dinge” (recounting or recollection of things) would seem to be a reference to the title of the 1993 catalog of Jan Peter Tripp’s work in which this essay was first published: Jan Peter Tripp, Die Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten: Arbeiten von 1985—92 (Offenburg: Reiff-Schwarzwaldverlag, 1993). Part of the essay on Robert Walser appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on May 23, 1998. The essay on Mörike was given as an acceptance speech for the Mörike Prize in Fellbach (near Stuttgart) on April 22, 1997 (see Mörike-Preis der Stadt Fellbach: Ein Lesebuch 1991—2000 [Fellbach, 2000]), while the essay on Rousseau was first published, with minor variants, under the title “Rousseau auf der Île de Saint-Pierre” in Sinn und Form 50:4 (July/August 1998); neither of these includes any images.

  A COMET IN THE HEAVENS

  1 the feuilleton which Walter Benjamin wrote Walter Benjamin, “Johann Peter Hebel (I): On the Centenary of His Death,” English translation by Rodney Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1913—1926, vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.i, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, pp. 277—80).

  2 Robert Minder (1902—1980), French scholar of German and comparative literature, was born in Alsace to French-speaking parents at a time when Alsace-Lorraine was under German rule. During his university career he was a tireless promoter of Franco-German cultural cooperation, the historical vicissitudes of the twentieth century notwithstanding. His publications focus particularly on writers from the Rhineland. The essay referred to here is “Heidegger und Hebel oder die Sprache von Messkirch,” in Dichter in der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966). For Heidegger’s other articles on Hebel, see the Bibliography.

  3 Bloch On Ernst Bloch’s reception of Hebel, see the article by Johann Siebers, “Aufenthalt im Unerhörten: Bloch’s Reading of Hebel (1926—65),” in Remembering Johann Peter Hebel: Anniversary Essays, eds. Julian Preece and Robert Gillett, Oxford German Studies 40:1 (2011). This special anniversary issue of OGS contains a number of further interesting articles on Hebel.

  4 Föhn … Wermuth The Föhn is a warm Alpine wind blowing from the south. Wermuth (wormwood) denotes vermouth or absinthe.

  5 flowering of the wheat This metaphor, with the promise of a good harvest, is a reference to the tale “Die Weizenblüte” in the Kalender of 1814. An equivalent English saying would be “my ship has come in,” or, to continue the botanical analogy, “being in clover.”

  6 “For to count the stars” “Für die Fixsterne zu zählen gibt’s nicht Finger genug auf der ganzen Erde” (“Die Fixsterne”).

  7 “The great Emperor Napoleon” “Das sah der große Kaiser Napoleon wohl ein, und im Jahr 1806, ehe er antrat die große Reise nach Jena, Berlin und Warschau, und Eylau, ließ er schreiben an die ganze Judenschaft in Frankreich, daß sie ihm sollte schicken aus ihrer Mitte verständige und gelehrte Männer aus allen Departementern des Kaisertums” (“Der Große Sanhedrin zu Paris”). Compare the standardizing translation by John Hibberd (see Hebel, Treasure Chest, p. 29).

  8 The words are As quoted in the German original.

  9 the rules of German syntax Standard German word order places the verb at the end of a subordinate clause. Note that Sebald’s own usage on occasion also deviates from this rule, particularly in longer sentences, a feature on which German critics are fond of commenting.

  10 the gold background Walter Benjamin, “A Chronicle of Germany’s Unemployed: Anna Seghers’ novel Die Rettung,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, pp. 126—33 (German text in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III, pp. 530—38).

  11 that home, in fact Probably a reference to Ernst Bloch at the end of Das Prinzip Hoffnung: “etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat” (Bloch, Werkausgabe: vol. 5: Das Prinzip Hoffnung [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985], p. 1628). English translation by Ne
ville Plaice et al.: “something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland” (The Principle of Hope, vol. 3 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], p. 137).

  12 Weltfrömmigkeit The term was coined by J. W. von Goethe in Wilhelm Meister (Wanderjahre, II, ch. 7).

  13 in a warm room Sebald omits Hebel’s description “warm” here. In Hebel’s original (“Traumbilder,” in Werke, vol. I, p. 495) the date of this dream is given as November 6, 1805.

  14 “Esslingen” The battle actually took place at Essling (on the Danube near Vienna), but no doubt Esslingen (a town on the Neckar in Württemberg) would resonate more readily with a local Alemannic readership. (“Die Kometen.”)

  15 Das Unglück der Stadt Leiden The pun in the title on Unglück (misery, disaster) and Leiden, which in German means suffering or sorrows, is untranslatable here.

  16 “if only all men would cultivate” Johann Kaspar Hirzel, Die Wirtschaft eines philosophischen Bauers (Zurich, 1761): see Hannelore Schlaffer, ed., Johann Peter Hebel: Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds; Ein Werk in seiner Zeit (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag Hermann Leins, 1980), note p. 364.

  17 “il lui fallait tomber” “He had to chance upon a fractured society.”

  18 Allemagne, réveille-toi! “Germany, awake!” “To shake it from its lethargy, it took nothing less than the cannons of the French Emperor. This Germany which became so terrible in the twentieth century, it is we, alas, who created it, who made it from nothing.”

  19 “Jo, wegerli, und ’s Hus” There are variant orthographies of the Alemannic dialect in this poem, “Die Vergänglichkeit” (“Transience”). What is reproduced in the German edition of A Place in the Country (the source for the present edition) differs from the edition of Hebel’s work in Sebald’s library: see Hebel, Werke, vol. 2: Gedichte: Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1968), pp. 122—26. English translation (“Transience”) by Leonard Forster, in The Penguin Book of German Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 281—82.

  J’AURAIS VOULU QUE CE LAC EÛT ÉTÉ L’OCÉAN—

  1 Seeland The Seeland (literally “sea land,” or more accurately “lake land”) is a region in Switzerland, at the foot of the Jura Mountains and bordering the cantons of Bern, Fribourg, Neuchâtel, and Vaud, comprising the three lakes of Morat (Murten), Neuchâtel, and Bienne (Biel)—the Lac de Bienne (or Bielersee) referred to here. It is a bilingual area on the linguistic boundary between French- and German-speaking Switzerland, and for this reason the city of Biel, Robert Walser’s birthplace, is in the present translation referred to in the essay on Walser by its German name, while in the essay on Rousseau it appears in the French form, Bienne. Seeland is also the title of one of Walser’s early collections of short prose pieces first published in 1919. Like Schattenrain (literally “shadow ridge”), Seeland is a “speaking name,” denoting a place but also having a clear literal meaning, as well as a literary echo, within the German text.

  2 exceedingly obliging host In his notes to the poem “In Alfermée” in Across the Land and the Water, Iain Galbraith identifies the “exceedingly obliging host” as the critic Heinz F. Schafroth. In the September 1985 issue of Manuskripte (25: vol. 89/90), an article by Schafroth on Robert Walser (“Robert Walser oder die manipulierte Buchhaltung”) immediately follows Sebald’s article “Das Gesetz der Schande—Macht, Messianismus und Exil in Kafkas Schloß.”

  3 “Il me semble” “It seems to me that, in the shade of a forest, I am forgotten, free, and undisturbed, as if I no longer had any enemies” (Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne [Oxford: World’s Classics, 2011], p. 79).

  4 “I ha in schwarzer Wetternacht” Hebel, “Der Bettler” (translation by JMC).

  5 “un jour cette petite île” “one day this small island will astonish Europe.”

  6 “linge, habits, vaisselle” “the simplest comforts of life …: linen, clothes, plates and dishes, kitchen utensils, paper, books—all these would have to be taken with me” (Confessions, Book XII: pp. 699–700).

  7 in order to hasten the moment Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Sebald quotes from the German translation by Ulrich Raulff (see the Bibliography). Goldhammer’s English translation has been adapted in places (here and below) to follow Sebald’s (and thus Raulff’s) German more closely.

  8 the long stamens of self-heal Sebald has Braunwurz, i.e. a plant from the Scrophularia or figwort family, possibly referring to S. canina, dog or French figwort, which has longer stamens than the common figwort, S. nodosa. The original Rousseau text has brunelle, i.e. Prunella vulgaris, or self-heal, which in German is usually known as Brunelle.

  9 the seed capsules of balsam and of beech Sebald writes Buchkapseln, i.e. the “seed capsules” of beech (Buche), in other words beechmast, although in Rousseau’s French text we find buis (box)—which in German is Buchs. However, Buch is the German for book, and Buchkapsel also translates as “book box.” We may assume the German pun to be intentional.

  10 Johann Joachim Becher Sebald’s text has “Becker.”

  11 “His very dog” In English in the original.

  12 “and that Mrs. Garrick” In English in the original.

  WHY I GRIEVE I DO NOT KNOW

  1 Why I grieve I do not know “Was ich traure weiß ich nicht,” from Eduard Mörike, “Verborgenheit” (“Seclusion”), in Mozart’s Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems, trans. and intro. David Luke (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 94—95.

  2 “Nach der Zeit ein Müller fand” Eduard Mörike, “Der Feuerreiter” (“Fire Rider”), trans. Raleigh Whitinger in Nolten the Painter (Rochester, N.Y., and Woodbridge: Camden House, 2005), p. 20.

  3 Waiblinger Wilhelm [Friedrich] Waiblinger (1804—1830) was a contemporary of Mörike’s at the Tübingen Stift (a seminary which served to prepare Protestant pastors in Württemberg) and is often referred to as “Der wilde Waiblinger.” His poems were later collected and published by Mörike in 1844.

  4 the Holy Alliance The Holy Alliance or Grand Alliance between Russia, Prussia, and Austria (1815), later joined by Great Britain and (in 1818) France. It came to an end with the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853).

  5 Kotzebue’s murderer, Sand August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761—1819), prolific German dramatist. Apparently detested by nationalist liberals, he was stabbed to death by the theology student Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften or student dueling societies. The incident led to Metternich’s Carlsbad Decrees restricting academic and other freedoms.

  6 Stuttgart Liederhalle A series of concert halls in Stuttgart, first inaugurated in 1864 (Mörike was invited but could not attend, and declined in verse). Destroyed in 1943, it was replaced in 1955 by a new building and still functions as a cultural and conference center under that name today. The present Literaturhaus Stuttgart, in an adjacent building, was inaugurated by W. G. Sebald in November 2001 (see his essay “An Attempt at Restitution” (“Ein Versuch der Restitution”) in Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell).

  7 Ludwigsburg, Urach These Swabian towns in the region of Stuttgart and the surrounding area represent a chronological sketch of Mörike’s rather restless life. It is no coincidence that the list ends with Fellbach; the Mörike Prize, which Sebald received there in 1997, and for which occasion this text was composed, commemorates the fact that in 1873 Mörike moved there for a while with his younger daughter, Marie, following the separation from his wife, Margarethe.

  8 from the Adige The original alludes to the opening verse of the German national anthem (no longer sung): [“Von der Maas bis an die Memel, /] Von der Etsch bis an den Belt” ([“From the Meuse to the Memel, /] From the Adige to the [Little] Belt”). In other words, from the Alps to the Baltic.

  9 “The clock was … heartfelt pleas” Nolten the Painter, trans. Whitinger, pp. 112—13 (translation adapted).

  10 Berté’s Dreim�
�derlhaus Das Dreimäderlhaus (The House of the Three Girls) was a hugely successful 1916 Viennese operetta giving a fictionalized account of Schubert’s romantic life, with music by Schubert rearranged by Heinrich Berté, and known in its Broadway adaptation (1921) as Blossom Time.

  11 Himmelpfortgrund The area of Vienna (now situated in the 9th Bezirk, Alsergrund) where Schubert was born. The name literally means “area of the gate of Heaven,” being the former site of a religious foundation (the Himmelpfortkloster, dissolved 1783).

  12 “So ist mein scheuer Blick” Translation (from Mörike’s poem “Früh im Wagen”) kindly supplied by Ray Ockenden.

  13 Peregrina “Peregrina,” trans. David Luke, in Mozart’s Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems, pp. 72—73.

  14 Blautopf Blue Pool (literally “blue bowl”) in Blaubeuren near Ulm, Swabia. In fact this episode is part of Lau’s dream. For an English translation of this story, see Eduard Mörike, Die Historie der schönen Lau / The Story of Lau, the Beautiful Water Nymph, bilingual edition with translation by Stan Foulkes, ed. Peter Schmid (Munich: Langewiesche-Brandt, 1996). While this edition has been consulted, the translations here are JMC’s own.

  15 Schachzagel, Bartzefant “chess set,” “servant,” “evening round the fire spinning” (cf. sewing circle), “spinning top,” “advantage.” The meaning of the terms seems less important here than the archaic impression conveyed.

  16 Fastnacht Southern German form of Fasching: pre-Lenten Carnival, the German equivalent of Mardi Gras / Shrove Tuesday.

  DEATH DRAWS NIGH, TIME MARCHES ON

  1 Death draws nigh, time marches on “Her kommt der Tod, die Zeit geht hin,” Gottfried Keller, quoted in Adolf Muschg, Gottfried Keller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 145.