SEBALD AND PHOTOGRAPHY

The most conspicuous surface feature of Sebald's texts is the fact that they incorporate reproductions of photographic images. While early reviewers of Sebald's texts found the photographs particularly fascinating and innovative, literature has drawn on the resources of the photograph since the inception of the latter medium, from the photographic activities of Emile Zola and Lewis Carroll, through the nineteenth-century fashion for photographically illustrated books, to more genuinely integrated text-image composites in the work of Georges Rodenbach, André Breton, Kurt Tucholsky, Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann, Alexander Kluge and Javier Marías, among others. Since the publication of Sebald's first prose text, Vertigo, the German book market has experienced a sudden glut of books that incorporate photographic images: Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (Pawel's Letters, 1999), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (An Invisible Country, 2003), Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (Children of the ‘Zone’ – i.e. East Germany, 2002), the reissue of Peter Henisch's 1975 novel Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (The Diminutive Figure of my Father) and a series of fictions by Peter Finkelgrün, to name just a few.

The notable thing about all of these recent texts is that they deploy photography as a way of exploring questions of memory. For Sebald, too, the mnemonic capacity of photographs is of central importance. This emerges implicitly in Renate Just's description of his study: apart from a wooden table, a camp bed and a battered German dictionary, all that this room contains is a wallet file bursting with old photographs and maps: ‘family photos, glaciers, volcanic eruptions, girls in 1930s clothing, a child on a rocking horse whose head has faded away over time’ (1997a: 40).