Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Sebald W.G

Author:Sebald, W.G. [Sebald, W.G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307433039
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-18T22:00:00+00:00

We owe the story of the Danzig Jews as Grass tells it not primarily to the work of the author himself, knowledgeable as he is about the history of Danzig, but to the Jewish historian Erwin Lichtenstein. It is quite surprising to reflect that Grass—if his own text is correctly understood here—may in a way have come by the story gratis. “On my visit to Israel from November 5 to November 18, 1971,” writes Grass in a parenthesis in the Diary, “Erwin Lichtenstein informed me that his documents on ‘The Exodus of the Jews from the Free City of Danzig’ were soon to be published in book form by Mohr in Tübingen.”16 And in fact the impressively real details that lend authenticity to the account of the journey of the Danzig Jews traveling from their home into exile and from exile home again derive almost exclusively from Lichtenstein’s research.

We may leave aside the question of when, in developing his concept, Grass incorporated the exodus of the Jewish community of Danzig into the plan for his book. It is certain, however, that this chapter in the “dark, complicated story,” of which the narrator of Cat and Mouse says that it is not to be written by him “and in no case in connection with Mahlke,” could not ultimately be written by Grass himself, for German literati still know little of the real fate of the persecuted Jews.17 But as, to employ an image of Canetti’s, like all writers they follow their noses over the chasms of time, yet now, as Grass himself puts it, they have come home with “the sniffed insight that it smells everywhere, and not only in quaint one-family houses, that sometimes frankly and pungently, sometimes lavender-sweetened, here masked by refrigeration, there streaked with mold, and next door unspeakably, it stinks, because here, there and next door the cellars harbor corpses.”18

Discovering the truth is thus shown to be the business of the dog described by Benjamin as the emblematic beast of melancholy, which, as Kafka too knew, “symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy” as well as its “tenacity.”19

“A writer,” says Grass, reflecting with melancholy on his own profession, “a writer, children, is a man who loves fug and tries to give it a name, who lives on fug by giving it a name; a mode of life that puts calluses on the nose.”20 Despite this almost constitutional compulsion of the man of letters to carry out research, noted by the Mitscherlichs, “the real people we were ready to sacrifice to our master race have not yet appeared before the perception of our senses.”21 The fact that Grass succeeded in making up some of that deficit in his Diary is something he owes primarily to the efforts of a historian living in Tel Aviv, and that in its own turn shows that literature today, left solely to its own devices, is no longer able to discover the truth.

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