In Berlin Chronicle, Walter Benjamin wrote: “Memories, even when they go into great breadth, do not always represent an autobiography.” Memory appears as text in Benjamin’s fragmentary reminiscences of Berlin, but the pieces unfold beyond memoir: the form dissolves, widens, draws in philosophical and political undercurrents.
Adorno once wrote that it was “as if [Benjamin] had paid a horrible price for the metaphysical power of what he saw and what he attempted to express in infallible words; as if he spoke as a dead man in return for his ability to recognise, with sobriety and calm, things which the living are not normally capable of recognising.” The same could have been said of Sebald. Adorno and Benjamin were not peripheral influences on Sebald’s work: their books occupied more of his shelves than any others.
When I first read The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, six years ago, I began collecting everything else Sebald had published. I set the prose fictions, Sebald’s own term, apart, thinking of them as the major works, expecting the poems and literary essays to function as appendices. After reading After Nature and A Place in the Country, that division no longer holds.
Each book, regardless of form, forms part of a continuous composition: memory, place, image, and voice assembled into an unbroken lattice. The arrangement shifts but never its principles. In Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin wrote: “I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map.” Sebald, in his own mapping of subjective histories, completes the cartography Benjamin only imagined.