A Simultaneous Gesture of Proximity and Distance:

W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona

Lewis Ward

Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2012, pp.

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Published by Indiana University Press

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A Simultaneous Gesture of Proximity and
Distance: W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative
Persona

Lewis Ward
University of the West of England

W.G. Sebald’s prose narratives exist at the borderline of the novel form. Their self-
conscious hybridity, combining memoir, historical account, travelogue, and fiction, may
be seen as pushing the boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator-figure with
some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the action, enables
an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and his-
tory, and current and previous generations. This insertion of what I call an “empathic
narrative persona” between author and subject helps enable an approach to the past in
which proximity and distance occur simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy.
By situating these narratives in the context of the Sebaldian persona, I show how the
author self-reflexively foregrounds the process of LaCaprian “empathic unsettlement” by
establishing close personal connection with the victims of history while simultaneously
inserting several layers of structural and epistemological distance.

Keywords: W.G. Sebald / empathy / Dominick LaCapra / Holocaust representa-

tion / narrative voice

N
ear the beginning of  W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), the narrator describes
his visit, in 1967, to the historic fortress of Breendonk in Belgium, which
was used by the German occupying forces during World War  II as an
internment camp. Walking through the grounds, he passes through an area
where, he tells us, prisoners were forced to move overwhelmingly large quantities
of earth using crude wheelbarrows. This is his response:
I could not imagine how the prisoners, very few of whom had probably ever done
hard physical labour before their arrest and internment, could have pushed these
barrows full of heavy detritus over the sun-baked clay of the ground, furrowed by
ruts as hard as stone, or through the mire that was churned up after a single day’s
rain; it was impossible to picture them bracing themselves against the weight until
their hearts nearly burst, or think of the overseer beating them about the head with
the handle of a shovel when they could not move forward. (28–29)
2 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

An odd contradiction is in evidence here. The reader’s sympathy is apparently

elicited: the ground is “hard as stone”; the prisoners’ “hearts nearly burst” with
effort; they are even “beat[en] about the head.” Yet simultaneously the narrator
insists on his distance from the victims: he “could not imagine” their labor, which
is, moreover, “impossible to picture” or even “think of.” Thus while the scene is
“pictured” for the reader in prose, the narrator paradoxically asserts his inability
or unwillingness to imaginatively conjure the scene in his own mind. The next
passage complicates the issue further:
However, if I could not envisage the drudgery performed day after day, year after
year, at Breendonk and all the other main and branch camps, when I finally entered
the fort itself and glanced through the glass panes of a door on the right into the
so-called mess of the SS guards with its scrubbed tables and benches, its bulging
stove and the various adages neatly painted on its wall in Gothic lettering, I could well
imagine the sight of the good fathers and dutiful sons from Vilsbiburg and Fuhlsbüt-
tel, from the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps, sitting here when they came off
duty to play cards or write letters to their loved ones at home. After all, I had lived
among them until my twentieth year. (29, emphasis added)

In making this distinction between unknown victims, of whom he has no direct

experience, and the Germans running the camp, a cultural group he knows from
childhood, Sebald’s narrator sets out a clear ethics of representation in which
what is beyond one’s own experience is not to be explicitly imagined. While
the description of the working prisoners contains some emotive and descriptive
material, it stops short of the common fictional trope of trying to imaginatively
enter the mind of an individual victim. Sebald thus maintains his distance. Yet
the second passage troublingly hints at an identification with the perpetrators,
an acknowledgement of understanding and perhaps even complicity. Here Sebald
counters his position of detachment with a suggestion of closeness through per-
sonal connection. It is my contention that this combination of proximity and
distance constitutes an “empathic” narrative approach to the past.
A number of critics have used this term in relation to Sebald. Mark McCulloh
detects a theme of “democratized empathy” in which the suffering of all nature has
equal value, because, in Sebald’s world, “everything is part of the same monism”
(“Stylistics” 39–40). Surprisingly, McCulloh does not take up the implications of
this for Sebald’s portrayal of the Holocaust and its victims — surely as important
in Sebald’s universe as the natural world. Jan Ceuppens does, noting Sebald’s nar-
rator’s “prohibition against picturing or imagining another person all too vividly,”
but argues that this results in a staged opposition between “a cool and distanced
approach [and] an empathic one” (253). J.J. Long makes a similar opposition,
arguing that Sebald’s The Emigrants is situated “between the extreme positions
of an uncritical empathy on the one hand and a pseudo-objective empiricism on
the other” (“Intercultural Identities” 526). But this “in-between” position is not
somewhere between “uncritical empathy” and “pseudo-objective empiricism” but
is empathy in the terms set out in the present article.
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 3

Often misunderstood, empathy is not identification or sympathy but “the

ability to share and understand the feelings of another” (OED).1 The key point
is that it has a dual structure, a movement both towards and away, which forms
a simultaneous gesture of proximity (identification, subjectivity) and distance
(objectivity, critical understanding). This definition is based on the work of  Domi-
nick LaCapra, who has done more than anyone to clarify and revitalise the
concept. In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), he describes empathy as “an
affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as
other” (212–13), “a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself
in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and
hence not taking the other’s place” (78). LaCapra develops this clarification of
terms into a theory of “empathic unsettlement.” Conceived as a response to the
dilemma faced by historians who address a traumatic past in which they took no
part, empathic unsettlement is a reflexive approach that includes “a sensitivity or
openness to responses that generate necessary tensions in one’s account” (105) and
that acknowledges “the implication of the observer in the observed” (36). The goal
is a better understanding of the past through new written approaches, which for
LaCapra should include experimental departures from traditional historiography:
“The problem that clearly deserves further reflection is the nature of actual and
desirable responses in different genres, practices, and disciplines, including the
status of mixed or hybridized genres and the possibility of playing different roles
or exploring different approaches in a given text” (110).
Sebald’s works constitute precisely “mixed or hybridized genres” in that they
combine fiction, (auto-) biography and history, and, moreover, include the element
of reflexivity that as we have seen is crucial to a productive notion of empathy.
Indeed, these texts2 actively foreground their engagement with the problems of
how to approach the past by inserting a version of the author into the narrative
(“playing different roles”). Thus the key to Sebald’s balanced empathic posture
is his first-person narrator, a figure with some biographical correspondence to
the author who enters the world of the fiction and takes part in the action. This
insertion of what I call an “empathic narrative persona” between author and sub-
ject helps enable an approach to the past in which proximity and distance occur
simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy.3
Sebald himself was very conscious of the ethical implications of his narrative
choices, describing his qualms as follows:
Anything one does in the form of writing, and especially prose fiction, is not an
innocent enterprise. It is a morally questionable enterprise because one is, of course in
the business — however honest one attempts to be as a writer — of arranging things
in such a way that the role of the narrator is not an entirely despicable one. . . . Writ-
ing is by definition a morally dubious occupation, I think, because one appropriates
and manipulates the lives of others for certain ends. When it is a question of the
lives of those who have survived persecution the process of appropriation can be very
invasive. (Bigsby 153)
4 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

Nevertheless, the subject central to much of Sebald’s work is precisely “the lives of
those who have survived persecution.” So the question is: how does he deal with
the problems of appropriation and invasion, and what part does the “role of the
narrator” play in this negotiation? How has he arranged this role so as not to be
entirely “despicable” — and how does he simultaneously build in acknowledgement
of the moral dubiousness of the enterprise?
Sebald’s narrator is notoriously hard to pin down. Nicola King calls him a
“neutral mouthpiece, not intruding with his own response or experience” (274).
This might encourage a simplistic psychoanalytic reading in which the narra-
tor is held to act as a “therapist,” distanced from his “patients” (characters) by a
posture of professional neutrality. A more productive analogy suggested by the
idea of neutrality is that the narrator is akin to a journalist or archivist whose
work involves collecting the testimony of others. Both Mark Anderson and Lil-
ian Furst argue that Sebald’s texts depend on “reported speech” (Anderson 106,
Furst 87). For Anderson, Sebald’s narrator presents others’ lives “not as they ‘really
happened’ but as they were ‘really reported’ to him” (107).
The question remains, however, how far this supposedly neutral and objec-
tive listener intervenes and manipulates the material “reported” to him. On the
one hand, it is notable how during long periods of narration by other characters,
the narrator seems to melt away. Indeed, for Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau: “The
narrator disappears as mediator between the character and reader” (149). Yet the
repeated grammatical reminders (“said Austerlitz” “said Ferber”) mitigate against
this absence; as Furst points out, Sebald’s discourse is in fact “cited speech, which
never allows us to forget the mediating presence of the narrator” (87). This appar-
ent contradiction between presence and absence is at the heart of Sebald’s project,
corresponding as it does to the empathic combination of proximity and distance
found in both the content and structure of his prose narratives.
The ambiguous stance taken by the Sebaldian narrator is not without its
socio-political implications. Philip Schlesinger reminds us that “behind the nar-
rator is a German writer-in-exile who chooses to bear witness to Jewish suffering”
(50). While Sebald is not quite an exile — more an emigrant, as we will see — and
bears witness to non-Jewish suffering too, his nationality is undeniably impor-
tant. Yet such analysis conflates the author with the narrator, which, though
understandable given the close relation between the two, is nevertheless to make
a crucial misunderstanding. I would like to suggest that the way to avoid this
problem is to consider Sebald’s narrator neither as the mouthpiece of the author,
nor as a reporter, therapist, observer, or witness, but instead in terms of a persona.
Originally the mask worn by actors in Classical Greece, persona has come to
mean a part that is played, whether in writing or ordinary life. Its designation of
“an assumed character or role, esp. one adopted by an author in his or her writing”
(OED) dates back to Richard Bentley’s 1732 preface to Paradise Lost, and has since
gained wide currency in both poetry and prose. A second, related definition, “the
aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others” (OED),
only emerged in the twentieth century, and it was this connotation that Jung
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 5

adopted as a contrast to the inner being or anima. Such doubleness fits well with
the opposing impulses contained within the empathic gesture. Sebald’s empathic
narrative persona always includes a trace of his anima — the inner self who feels
and mourns the losses narrated in his texts.
But the impetus for the Sebaldian persona also comes from the author’s
knowing critique of traditional narrative assumptions. He told one interviewer:
“There’s still fiction with an anonymous narrator who knows everything, which
seems to me preposterous” ( Jaggi 6). Instead, Sebald, an expert on Austrian
literature, created a structure influenced by the work of Thomas Bernhard. For
Sebald, Bernhard “only tells you in his books what he has heard from others.
So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always
sure that what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or
three” (Silverblatt 83). Thus, Sebald says, “I content myself with the role of the
messenger” ( Jaggi 6). However, this is somewhat disingenuous. Sebald’s narrator
comes with an (admittedly shadowy) personality and biography of his own, which
the reader cannot help but relate to the author to a varying extent dependent on
his or her knowledge of Sebald’s own history. Indeed, Jaggi, quoting a friend of
Sebald, suggests that this reveals an element of playfulness on the part of the
author: “He [the narrator] has obvious affinities with Max, but it’s playing on our
naivety, because the reader is always tempted to identify the narrator with the
writer. He’s taunting us” ( Jaggi 6).
A couple of examples will demonstrate Sebald’s ambiguous use of personal
biography in constructing his narrative persona. We learn about his place of birth
during the long final section of Vertigo, “Il ritorno in patria,” which recounts a
visit to the German village of “W,” “where I had not been since my childhood”
(171). In the “Paul Bereyter” section of The Emigrants, meanwhile, we hear about
the narrator’s later childhood in the nearby town of “S.” These two single-letter
towns, which appear throughout his books, would seem to refer to Sebald’s real
childhood homes of Wertach im Allgäu and Sonthofen. Yet according to the
author, they “have more of a symbolic significance than anything . . . in the texts
they are in fact imaginary locations” (Bigsby 141).
But the narrator’s basic history usually, but not always, matches that of
Sebald. Although he is never named in the texts, the reproduction of the narra-
tor’s passport on page 114 of Vertigo clearly shows the name “W Sebald.” In the
story of “Max Ferber” in The Emigrants, the narrator arrives in Manchester in
1966, and describes how he “left the city in the summer of 1969 to follow a plan
I had long had of becoming a schoolteacher in Switzerland” (176). These facts
chime perfectly with Sebald’s biography. But the “All’estero” section of Vertigo
contradicts this: “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then
been living for nearly twenty-five years” (33). Sebald, and indeed the narrator of
“Max Ferber,” had been living there for only fourteen years, so there is not even
consistency between the narratives, let alone between Sebald and his narrator.
Elsewhere Sebald seeks to further mystify the relationship between himself
and his persona. As others have noted, despite all the factual information, he
6 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

contrives to remain obscure, a “shadowy pronoun” (Atlas 283), a “spectral annun-

ciatory presence that engenders the texts” (Blackler 93). For example, Rings of
Saturn opens as follows:
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the
county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me
whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized,
up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the
day through the thinly populated countryside. . . . I wonder now, however, whether
there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit
and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At
all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense
of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times
when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that
were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year
to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of
almost total immobility. (3)

“Dispelling the emptiness,” “ailments of the spirit,” “paralysing horror,” “state

of almost total immobility”: the cumulative effect of these phrases is surely to
encourage the idea that the narrator’s internment in hospital, revealed on the
next page, is the result of psychological or emotional disturbance. This is com-
pounded by the next section, which describes the narrator’s increasingly tenuous
hold on reality. Indeed, as Maya Jaggi relates, “one reviewer assumed he had been
incarcerated in a mental asylum” (6). Yet as Sebald later explained:
“Walking along the seashore [of East Anglia] was not comfortable — one foot was
always lower than the other. I had a pain, and the following summer, I stretched,
and something broke in my back.” Threatened with paralysis, he had a four-hour
operation for a shattered disc. ( Jaggi 6)

Thus Sebald has taken a prosaic incident from his own life and subtly transformed
it for his persona into something more nebulous, suggestive, and literary. The
exact relationship between author and narrator is never set fast, but hovers in a
state of ambiguous uncertainty.
Elsewhere, this uncertainty seems to reflect a wider existential concern. Later
in Rings of Saturn, the narrator recounts a “strange feeling” (183), a combination
of identification and déjà vu, experienced during a visit to his friend Michael
Hamburger. Hamburger, like Sebald’s narrator, was a German émigré writer liv-
ing in East Anglia, though he moved to England much earlier, in 1933, at the age
of nine. Hamburger’s shadowy memories of childhood in Berlin are recounted in
paraphrase from Hamburger’s published memoirs. Then we learn of Hamburger’s
current thoughts about the meaning of his life, recounted to the narrator in the
garden, in which Hamburger ponders his links to one of the German writers he
has translated, the lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Their birthdates,
for example, are just two days apart, and the water pump in Hamburger’s garden
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 7

has the same year written on it as that of Hölderlin’s birth. These links amount
not just to coincidences but also Hamburger’s sense that his personality has taken
on aspects of the earlier writer. Hamburger wonders: “Across what distances in
time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one
perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, one’s precursor?” (182)
Hamburger’s existential conundrum is itself a precursor of the narrator’s odd
experience that follows. Indeed, it is not clear (partly due to Sebald’s avoidance of
speech marks) whether Hamburger, the narrator, or both, are articulating these
questions:
why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had
once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know
is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing
windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer
worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked
of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were
not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters
and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north
light had once been my spectacles cases, my letters and my writing materials. (183)

Continuing through the house, noting his feelings of affinity with other
objects scattered around, the narrator has the same feeling of being one’s own
precursor that Hamburger had reported: “the quite outlandish thought crossed
my mind that these things, the kindling, the jiffy bags, the fruit preserves, the
seashells and the sound of the sea within them had all outlasted me, and that
Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time
ago” (184–85).
There are different ways in which to interpret this uncanny experience. It
could be described as normal déjà vu enriched by a sense of connection to oth-
ers that collapses time. It could also be seen as a way of identifying with one’s
antecedents or even a kind of reincarnation, thereby claiming a connection to
the past. More problematically, Hamburger could be seen to over-identify with
Hölderlin, and the narrator with Hamburger, in gestures of appropriation of the
other’s life and memory.
This final possibility becomes an important issue when Sebald deals with
Holocaust victims, in, for example, Austerlitz and The Emigrants. When deal-
ing with traumatic historical events, which touch us and arouse our sympathy, a
degree of identification with victims is perhaps inevitable, yet seems inappropri-
ate and ethically dubious, given the gulf between our experience and theirs. This
dilemma has been exhaustively played out in literary studies in recent decades,
but it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the key debates.
In psychoanalytic theory, identification refers to the process by which a
patient may unconsciously incorporate attributes of another person into his or her
personality, while in over-identification an excessive level of this incorporation
leads to the denigration of the patient’s individuality or subjectivity. Identification,
8 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

then, is best understood as a pathological condition or tendency with potentially

undesirable results, and as such has emerged as a major issue in Holocaust studies.
As Geoffrey Hartman noted in 1995: “The predicament [for those who consider
the traumatic past] is how to acknowledge the passionate, suffering, affectional
side of human nature without sympathy turning into over-identification” (545).
Such a transformation might occur, warns Hartman, if one makes the mistake of
thinking about trauma as a universal experience related to loss of the Lacanian
“real.” For Hartman, such ideas can lead to “a temptation to politicize the fact of
trauma and to broaden, even universalize, the perspective of victimhood” (546).
But for our purposes, Hartman’s implication is clear: it is impermissible for non-
victims to identify with victims, especially Holocaust victims, whose experience
and suffering must not be subjected to comparison or relativization.
Fiction, in this context, has drawn criticism for its tendency to encourage
free movement across boundaries. In Between Witness and Testimony, for example,
Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer argue that fictional narrative tends
towards redemption, whether through identification with the protagonists of the
story or by gaining knowledge of the event being narrated. For these authors,
neither of these outcomes is possible in the case of the Holocaust, which “exceeds
our ability to identify with or come to know [it]” (ix).
Such critiques, based on the philosophical view that the Holocaust is
unknowable and unrepresentable, have led to efforts to split Holocaust literature
into separate genres of differing ethical value. For example, Robert Eaglestone
in The Holocaust and the Postmodern makes a firm distinction between fiction and
testimony, the latter being preferable because it by nature aims to “prohibit iden-
tification” (42). Yet Eaglestone acknowledges that testimony cannot wholly reject
identification. “ ‘Doubleness’ is central to the genre of testimony: the texts lead to
identification and away from it simultaneously. This stress between centrifugal
and centripetal forces is played out, but not resolved, in the texts of testimonies
and it is this that characterises the genre of testimony” (43). For Eaglestone this
“stress” can only exist in testimony, not fiction, because “the reading that fiction
requires too often demands the sort of process of identification that ‘consumes’
the events” (132). Novels tend to encourage us to identify with ethically dubious
subject positions, such as perpetrator, passive victim, or bystander, leading to a
“tension — between the demand of fiction that we identify and the demand of the
Holocaust that we cannot and should not — that unbalances even the most subtle
of . . . novels” (132).
However, Eaglestone’s opposition between the categories “fiction” and “testi-
mony” appears to elide the possibility that fictionalization is present in all forms of
writing, including (perhaps especially) autobiographical forms such as testimony.
Moreover, his argument implicitly discounts the possibility of narratives that sit
somewhere between fiction and testimony, of which Sebald’s prose works are a
prime example. It is my contention that such works enact not identification, with
all the ethical and epistemological problems Eaglestone identifies, but the more
complex gesture of empathy.
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 9

Eaglestone’s argument also rests on assumptions about the relation of reader

response to real-world actions. He seems to imply that identifying with prohibited
subject-positions must lead to ethically inappropriate attitudes or actions beyond
the actual moment of reading. It logically follows that the opposite is the case,
and the right kind of text (testimony) will lead to ethically responsible behavior in
the real world. This kind of thinking has been seriously compromised by Susanne
Keen’s recent important work Empathy and the Novel. Keen investigates claims
that reading boosts empathic response, thereby leading to altruistic actions in
the real world. It turns out there is little evidence for this, despite a seeming
longing for it to be so, particularly in humanistic literary studies (exemplified, for
example, in Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit (2010)). Like the debates around
the relationship between video games and violent behavior, inferences about the
“effect” of literature should always be treated with skepticism. The important
point is that in these critiques of narrative ethics, the central relationship at stake
is that between reader and text, but in Sebald, the key dynamic is between nar-
rator and subject. This is Sebald’s contribution to the literature of the Holocaust:
he helps us move beyond arguments about what can or should be represented, by
staging that very debate in the empathic relationship between his persona and
his characters and stories.
LaCapra argues that writing should draw on empathy to create “a discursive
analogue of mourning as a mode of working through a relation to historical losses”
(213). He labels this mode “empathic unsettlement,” in which the position of the
writer is self-reflexively utilized, explored, and expressed. Suggesting how this
might be achieved, LaCapra describes narrative in terms of movement:
Empathic unsettlement also raises in pointed form the problem of how to address
traumatic events involving victimization, including the problem of composing nar-
ratives that neither confuse one’s own voice or position with the victim’s nor seek
facile uplift, harmonization, or closure but allow the unsettlement that they address
to affect the narrative’s own movement in terms of both acting out and working
through. (78)

LaCapra is of course drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic terminology for

his analogy. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914), Freud
describes a certain kind of neurotic patient who “does not remember anything at
all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces
it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without being aware that he is
repeating it” (36). Therapy enables the patient to “work through” the resistance
that is causing this repetition, and properly to remember and accept the (often
traumatic) past event. Acting out is unconscious and involuntary, while working
through is a process of deliberate remembrance.
Sebald’s narrator in Austerlitz moves from one state to the other. The book
opens as follows: “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from Eng-
land to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were
never entirely clear to me” (1). This unconscious repetition “affect[s] the narrative’s
10 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

own movement” in that it leads to the narrator’s first meeting with Austerlitz.
Indeed, the narrator moves between places and events with little apparent volition,
just like the wanderings around Europe described in Vertigo.
However, the end of Austerlitz shows the narrator “working through” his
“unsettlement” by revisiting Breendonk thirty years after his first experience.
No “uplift, harmonization, or closure” is attempted here, though there is a small
hint of historical progress: “The fortifications lay unchanged on the blue-green
island, but the number of visitors had increased” (411). Along with this evidence
of wider public interest in the past, the narrator summarizes Dan Jacobson’s family
memoir, Heshel’s Kingdom (1998). By reading this book on the grassy bank near
the fort, the narrator is engaging in a deliberate, conscious, participatory act of
remembrance. The details given from this book also serve as a countermeasure to
any “uplift” created by the progress Austerlitz makes towards tracing his father’s
history and reconciling himself with his lost lover. Jacobson’s memoir reminds
the reader of the factual losses of the Holocaust, in this case those at Kaunas in
Lithuania, where “more than thirty thousand people were killed” (Austerlitz 415).
Across the narrative time of Austerlitz, then, the Sebaldian persona has
moved from acting-out to working-through, in a process analogous to LaCapra’s
“empathic unsettlement.” Another example of this inner journey of the narra-
tor is found in “Paul Bereyter,” the second of four narratives that make up The
Emigrants. This piece foregrounds the relationship between Sebald’s empathic
narrative persona and the victims of history through a more direct personal con-
nection, by telling the story of the narrator’s erstwhile schoolteacher in post-war
Germany. It deserves a full analysis, as it is the best illustration of why Sebald’s
narrative technique constitutes an empathic relationship to the past.
The section opens with the narrator learning of Paul’s suicide on a train-track
in 1984, through an evasive article in the local paper which fails to account for the
contradictions of the teacher’s life. The narrator decides to embark on “investiga-
tions” (28) of his own. Initially, we learn, fond memories of Paul and thoughts of
his sad end led the narrator towards a series of introspective conjectures:
And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like. . . .
I imagined him lying in the open air on his balcony where he would often sleep in
the summer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I imagined him skating in
winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him stretched out on
the track. (29)

The narrator goes on to relate how he “pictured” Paul lying down to await the
approaching train, before concluding: “Such endeavours to imagine his life and
death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for
brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in
order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know
of Paul Bereyter” (29).
Since the rest of the story is an apparently dispassionate account of Paul’s
life, drawing on the recollections of those who knew him and on documentary
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 11

evidence, it is tempting to take the narrator at his word and assume that “imag-
ining” has been rejected in favour of a respectful, distanced objectivity. But this
view is soon challenged by a closer look at the Sebaldian narrator’s statement
that he wishes to avoid “wrongful trespass.” Despite this passage’s apparent aim
of distancing the subject from the narrator, it nevertheless contains within it the
seeds of personal involvement and proximity. By the narrator’s own admission, his
attempts at “imagining” are rejected, in part, because they did not “bring [him]
any closer to Paul,” suggesting that this is still his wish, should there be a way
to do so that avoids “wrongful trespass.” Indeed, no other motive for writing the
story is given.
There is also an intriguing ambiguity contained within the apparently
ingenuous statement that the narrator has “written down what [he] know[s] of
Paul Bereyter.” As Mark McCulloh has pointed out, an adjacent phrase from
the original German text, “im Verlauf meiner Erkundungen,” which McCulloh
translates as “in the course of my enquiries,” has been left out of the English
translation of this passage. McCulloh argues that this omission has the effect of
“de-emphasizing the narrator’s active role in the construction or reconstruction
of Paul Bereyter’s last years.” McCulloh continues: “The brevity of the English
discards or at least sublimates the notion of search and discovery from the narra-
tor’s attitude towards his account” (“Introduction” 16). These ideas of search and
discovery implied by “enquiries” suggest a much more active personal involvement
on the narrator’s part than “written down what I know.”
However, Sebald’s choice of word, “Erkundungen” has a meaning closer
to “reconnaissance” than to “enquiries” (usually “Erkundigungen”). Reconnais-
sance, with its implications of militarism or scientific non-engagement, would
seem to distance the narrator from his subject, rather than bring him closer.
Yet this choice of word works as a counterweight to what Michael Hulse’s
translation renders as merely “brief emotional moments” but which the origi-
nal German — “Ausuferungen des Gefühls” (45) — implies are excessive and
overwhelming (Ausufern — “to burst or break its banks”). As Sebald’s German
original expresses the whole passage in one sentence (where Hulse uses two),
the use of the term “Erkundigungen” may be seen as a stylistic repression of the
overflowing emotionality of “Ausuferungen” in a perfectly balanced linguistic
gesture of empathy.
This blend of personal connection and consciously imposed distance may also
be found in the wider trajectory of the narrative. The first movement the narrator
makes is towards proximity. Immediately after the passage above, he introduces
his own story and shows how it intersects with Paul’s: “In December 1952 my fam-
ily moved from the village of  W. to the small town of S., 19 kilometres away” (29).
“S.” turns out to be where Paul lives and teaches, and the narrator gives a vivid
account of what it was like to be in that gifted educator’s class. He also subtly por-
trays the emotional feelings that arise when remembering those childhood days.
Describing Paul’s habit of expertly whistling while leading the schoolchildren
on mountain walks, the narrator comments that these once mysterious melodies
12 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

“infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them

in a Bellini opera or Brahms sonata” (41).
Even more revealingly, the narrator implicitly claims affinity with Paul
through common “exile” or “emigrant” status. Paul was exiled to France before
the war on account of his three-quarter Aryan status, and then endured a kind of
internal exile fighting in the German army before returning to S. after the war
to live once again among those who had previously shunned him. The result of
these vicissitudes is seen in Paul’s journals that he wrote in later life. Lucy Lan-
dau, Paul’s bereaved partner, passes on this diary, in which Paul had transcribed
accounts of suicide by other writers, prefiguring his own eventual death. Lucy
comments that “it seemed to me . . . as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the
mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him
that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.” (58–9).
There is a clear parallel here with the narrator’s project of “gathering evidence”
about Paul (in the course of his enquiries, investigations, or reconnaissance), a
parallel that implies that he, too, feels that he “belong[s] to the exiles.” Indeed,
the reader already knows from the previous section of The Emigrants, “Henry
Selwyn,” that the narrator has lived at least some of his life in England, far from
his Bavarian origins. Moreover, the later sections, “Ambros Adelwarth” and “Max
Ferber,” further strengthen the narrator’s identification with the exiles whose sto-
ries he recovers and recounts, not least through his strong criticism of Germany’s
attitude towards its past that parallels the disgust Paul feels for the bystanders of
his home community. In this context, the Sebaldian narrator’s comment that his
short 19–kilometre journey from W. to S. as a young boy “seemed like a voyage
halfway round the world” (29–30) is representative not just of limited childish per-
ception and emotional upheaval, but of a sensibility that sees exile and emigration
as central to the melancholic existence of both himself and the group represented
by Selwyn, Bereyter, Adelwarth, and Ferber. In this way the narrator appears to
identify himself with his subjects to the extent that he becomes the fifth emigrant
(a point first made by Susanne Finke).
This strong personal connection, suggested by fond memories and shared
emigrant status, may suggest an unproblematized identification between the
narrator and Paul that contradicts his avowed determination to avoid “wrongful
trespass.” However, other elements of the story show that the relationship between
narrator and subject is characterized primarily by several layers of distance, at both
the textual and meta-textual level.
Exemplary of this technique is the way Paul’s childhood memories are ren-
dered through several filters of memory. Paul’s father, “a man of refinement and
inclined to melancholy” (50), ran an “emporium” in the town of S. selling every-
thing “from coffee to collar studs, camisoles to cuckoo clocks, candied sugar to
collapsible top hats” (51). Paul remembers how he travelled by tricycle around the
shop in constant wonderment, passing “through the ravines between tables, boxes
and counters, amidst a variety of smells” (51). Sebald relates these events through
several layers of narration. Paul remembers his childhood during convalescence
W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative Persona 13

from an eye operation, and describes it to Lucy; Lucy remembers this conversa-
tion decades later, and tells it to the narrator; the narrator, finally, relates Lucy’s
account to us. Here multiple seams of narration and time are interposed between
the narrator and the subject (Paul’s childhood), perhaps a common enough narra-
tive technique. But this layering is characteristic of the whole structure of Sebald’s
art. If the subject of this story is seen not just as an individual, “Paul Bereyter,” but
also as the mid-twentieth century Europe Bereyter’s story inhabits, we can begin
to model the relationship between Sebald and the victims of turbulent history.
Sebald, through an act of writing, creates a narrative persona who, through
acts of listening and of imagination, relates to, and relates the story of, “Paul
Bereyter.” Thus the story is told at one remove. Paul, meanwhile, though clearly
shown as suffering at the hands of anti-Jewish laws, which prevent his marriage
to the non-Aryan Helen Hollaender and force his exile to France, is neverthe-
less a somewhat indirect victim compared to those who were imprisoned and
murdered in concentration camps during the same period. By choosing to avoid
direct confrontation with the more obvious horrors of the Holocaust, Sebald adds
another layer of distance. Finally, the distance in time between the narrator and
his wider subject is foregrounded in the text through the thematization of memory
throughout. Distance, then, is embedded in the very structure of “Paul Bereyter,”
as in much of Sebald’s oeuvre, in which subjects are separated from the author
by several narrative layers. This serves as an exact counterbalance to the apparent
identification implied by his statements of close personal connection.
Sebald’s technique, based around a particular use of a narrative persona,
thus combines the elements of proximity and distance necessary for an empathic
approach to the victims of history, with whom he neither over-identifies nor
objectifies. As LaCapra writes, “objectivity should not be identified with objectiv-
ism or exclusive objectification that denies or forecloses empathy, just as empathy
should not be conflated with unchecked identification, vicarious experience, and
surrogate victimage” (40). Balance is all. Moreover, LaCapra’s suggestion that
empathy and empathic unsettlement can be achieved in narratives outside the
discipline of historiography has in my view been fully realized by Sebald, through
an approach that combines generic hybridity with creative use of first-person
narrative. What may deserve further thought is the question of whether empathy
and empathic unsettlement can be achieved in narratives that are more straight-
forwardly fictional. I hope this article may inspire such investigations, not least
because the stakes are so high. LaCapra hopes that working-through the past in
the empathic mode will help enable “the elaboration of more desirable social and
political institutions and practices” (85). Literature like that of Sebald can make
its contribution to such laudable aims.
14 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 1

Notes
1. The modern concept may be traced back to the eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke wrote of
sympathy as “a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man” (70). By the late
nineteenth century aesthetic theorists were using similar ideas but now in terms not of substitution
but projection, encapsulated in the German term Einfühlung (“feeling-into”), first used by Robert
Vischer in his doctoral thesis of 1873, and later taken up by fellow philosopher Theodor Lipps. Lipps’s
work in turn was evangelized, popularized and reinterpreted for English readers by the essayist and
novelist Vernon Lee, who posited a process of “aesthetic empathy,” or the “projection of our own
dynamical and emotional experience into the seen form” (29). Though Lee introduced Einfühlung to
an English-speaking audience, it was the psychologist Edward Titchener who first translated it and
coined the word empathy in his Psychology of Thought Processes (1909). (On the journey of Einfühlung
from aesthetics to psychology, see Gunn 158, Hayward 1071 and Pigman.)
In the early twentieth century, the concept of Verstehen (see Outhwaite) was developed as a
sociological method of understanding which promoted the use of empathy over objective observation
or causal analysis, an idea which survives in the contemporary “simulation” theory, defined in the
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy as follows: “Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves
deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own.” It was also a core concept for
Carl Rogers and R. D. Laing as they developed more open, patient-oriented forms of psychotherapy
(Hayward 1071), and is still the subject of much psychological and neurological research, especially
into its relation to altruism and prosocial action, or behaviour that promotes social acceptance and
friendship (see Keen 3–35).
2. Schwindel. Gefühle (1990; translated as Vertigo, 1999), Die Ausgewanderten (1993; The Emigrants,
1996), Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt (1995; The Rings of Saturn, 1998), and Austerlitz
(2001).
3. Anne Fuchs has also applied LaCapra to Sebald, talking of the latter’s use of “virtual empathy”
(Long, “Book Review” 102), but her focus is on Sebald in the context of theories of cultural memory.
What remains to be teased out is the relationship between this virtual empathy and Sebald’s narrative
voice, a task addressed by the present article.

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 Debbie Lelekis
Striking a Chord: A Review of William Scott’s 175
Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the
Fiction of the Mass Worker

Darja Leskovar
Documentary novel and literary journalism 180
in the USA and Slovenia

Notes on Contributors 186

Correction

A fourth endnote was inadvertently left off of Lewis Ward’s essay, “A Simulta-
neous Gesture of Proximity and Distance: W.G. Sebald’s Empathic Narrative
Persona” in JML 36.1 (Fall 2012), p. 1–16. This sentence from page 11 should
have had an accompanying endnote:

However, Sebald’s choice of word, “Erkundungen” has a meaning closer to “recon-

naissance” than to “enquiries” (usually “Erkundigungen”).4

4I am indebted to Anthony Fothergill for pointing out this crucial linguistic

distinction.