The Winged Vertebrates of Prehistory: Personal and Collective Memoriesin W.G. Sebald’s After Nature

Elizabeth Barrios

After Nature, by W.G. Sebald, begins with a description of the Isenheim Altar (fig. 1)

crafted in the sixteenth century by the artist Matthaeus Grünewald. This initial focus on a

work of art evolves into a fictionalization of the painter’s life based on his work as well as the

few known facts about him. Likewise, the second section of the text attempts to reconstruct

the life of the Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller through a few historical records in

addition to Steller’s publications on natural history. While the first two sections reconstruct

events in the 16th and 19th centuries, the third and final section looks at the life of W.G.

Sebald and in the more immediate past. Given this division of time, critics such as Ruth

Franklin assume that the first two sections consist of historical reconstructions, while the third

deals with personal memories (36). Such classification of the text, however, fails to take into

account the creative process involved in reconstructing the past. The text, in fact, shows that

reconstructions are not purely “historical,” for they require narrativisation, while memories

are not simply “personal” as they involve the experiences of others. The creative vision

needed to recreate the past is emphasized in the third section, as Sebald not only recalls his

own personal experiences but also describes old photographs and paintings to evoke events he

cannot remember, such as the marriage of his grandparents and the World War II bombings

of Dresden and Nürnberg.. As he continually ties this imagery of the past with his own

memories, Sebald attempts to better understand his life and identity. Thus, rather than

depicting a series of personal memories, the third section of After Nature highlights the process

and significance of creating memories by infusing meaning into the remnants of the past.

The term “memory” generally implies a mental preservation of a moment in

time—particularly a personal experience or the impressions obtained from it. As a result,

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the idea of an individual creating a memory of an event not directly experienced may at

first seem problematic. However, as Wulf Kansteiner notes in his study of collective

memory, “Physical and social proximity to past events and their subsequent

rationalization and memorization do not have to coincide. There is no natural, direct

connection between the real and the remembered” (190). Although Kansteiner admits the

difficulty of defining the concept of collective memory, he declares that it “works by

subsuming individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible

and, therefore, meaningful” (189), further noting that in spite of the implications of its

label, collective memory “only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals”

(180). In this respect, After Nature can easily be considered a text of collective memories

insofar as Sebald envisions the inner lives of the painter Matthaeus Grünewald in the

1500s and the arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller in the 1800s through the artifacts

they left behind—in particular paintings and a book written by the explorer. The third

section, on the other hand, does not only depict a series of personal and collective

memories but self-reflexively exhibits the process of creating them.

Before exploring the final and more personal section of the text, however, it is worth

looking at the reconstruction of a remote past in the first two sections, as the invocation of

past images exemplifies the significance of making history—the more “official” form of

looking at the past—personal through collective memory. The two opening sections comprise

a historical discourse providing a series of dates and facts, in the midst of poetical illustrations

of the men’s inner lives. The historical discourse, which would seem more apt in a piece of

academic writing, provides information about documented events. Among these is

Grünewald’s marriage: “on December 17th 1512/for twenty-three guilders/twelve shillings,

already,/the documents record, he has taken/to wife the baptized Anna” (15). Similarly, the

section on Steller’s life begins in a dry tone: “Georg Wilhelm Steller/born at Windsheim, in

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Franconia/while pursuing his studies at the University of Halle/repeatedly came across/news

items in journals…” (43). This impersonal, factual tone contrasts greatly with some of the

passionate re-enactments of the men’s lives. For instance, a particular painting that

Grünewald possibly painted leads to speculations about the emotions behind the creation of

the piece: “The martyrdom depicted is/the representation, to be sensed/even in the rims of

the wounds, of a male friendship wavering/between horror and loyalty” (19). Likewise, the

chapters about Steller often connect his writings about the natural world to tremendous

feelings of despair felt—though not personally described—by the explorer: “When he wrote

these down he felt some comfort/although he knew […] that even these would not/arrest the

slow corrosion/that had entered his soul” (55). These particular sensations—the men’s

horror, loyalty, comfort and corrosion—, however, cannot be objectively accounted for.

Rather, they prove to be the projection of the author’s own imaginings, yet within the text

they do not seem any less real than the listings of factual information. Thus, the disparity

between the historical and the poetic discourses draws attention to the possible ways of

depicting and understanding the past. On the one hand, the past can be relegated to records

and artifacts, without possessing greater meaning than a general historical and cultural value.

Nonetheless, this signification of past lives and events through dry facts or mere artifacts

proves insufficient for it can amount to little more than “a chart of signs barely/to be

deciphered” (95).

As exemplified by the passages cited above, some of the most poignant moments in

the text come from the infusion of meaning and pathos into “these charts of signs.”

Admittedly, this is possible only by destabilizing the historical discourse through

narrativisation and fictionalization, since the invocation of undocumented emotions and

sensory details does not correspond to a factual text. Nevertheless, these added elements

transform the historical into a “comprehensible” and “meaningful” (Kanstainer 189)

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collective memory. Some may claim that this reinterpretation of historical events presents a

problem, in so much as it grants individuals the power to give any desired meaning to history,

putting narrativisation above truth. Although legitimate, such a concern works under the

assumption that the past can be objectively presented and understood in the present through

an empirical historical view. Nonetheless, After Nature, shows an instance in which the State

tampers with history as “a book about the historical/Grünewald” (14, italics mine); written in

Germany in 1938, it omits his marriage to Anna, a Jewish woman, for obvious political

reasons. The reference to the book and this “historical Grünewald”—as if a different

character in his own right—shows that even official history does not necessarily present an

absolute vision of the past for it too reflects the interests and ideology of individuals. For this

reason, cultural critics such as Peter Burke question the impartiality of history, noting that

“neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer. In both cases we are learning to

take account of conscious and unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion”

(Kansteiner 184). This is not to say, however, that history and memory are intrinsically

similar, as their purpose, scope and viewpoint often differ. Instead, acknowledging that

history is a particular type of representation, reminds us of the value of memory—be it

personal or collective—in helping create a more comprehensive image of the past.

As already noted, the initial sections of the text fill the gaps left by the conventional

artifacts of history with collective memories. The third section appears to accomplish a similar

objective, as it also invokes events that occurred before the author’s birth. However, in these

latter chapters, the gaps of official history take a secondary role to a more pressing absence:

that of collective memories in post-war Germany. To this end, this final section of the text

opens by stating, “For it is hard to discover/The winged vertebrates of prehistory/Embedded

in the tablets of slate” (83). These lines express the text’s continual attempt to find life (“the

winged vertebrates”) “embedded” in the physical remnants of the past (“tablets of slate”), thus

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providing a thematic transition from the previous “historical” sections to this more personal

chapter. This opening, however, contrasts with the relatively recent past Sebald revives soon

after, as he asks, “How far, in any case, must one go back/to find the beginning” (83). His

“beginning” does not take him to “prehistory,” or even to the lives of Grünewald and Steller

as in previous chapters, but to “that morning of January 9th, 1905” (83), when his

grandparents married. Sebald wonders “what was in their minds” (84) during the events of

that day; soon after, he repeats the question while looking at two pictures of his parents taken

in 1917 and 1943. The latter photograph was taken a few days before the bombings of

Nürnberg, which his mother saw from a distance while pregnant with him. Years later,

Sebald asks her to describe the flames of the city, and his father to recall the beauty of

Dresden before the Allied bombings in 1945. Their memories, however, “retain no trace”

(86) of these sights. Significantly, the text reflects this absence of memories by not explicitly

mentioning the names of Nürnberg and Dresden or the bombings of World War II again.

Rather, these places and events reappear through allusions that tie the past events with the

author’s life.

Sebald’s parents, in their unwillingness to remember the catastrophes of World War

II, reflect a more general loss of memory explored by Sebald in a previous (non-fiction) book,

On the Natural History of Destruction, which documents a cultural amnesia afflicting Germany

after World War II: in an attempt to forget a harrowing past, the German people rebuilt their

bombed cities without properly addressing the trauma caused by the destruction that had

taken place. Sebald writes, “Even in later years, when local and amateur war historians began

documenting the fall of the German cities, their studies did not alter the fact that the images

of this horrifying chapter of our history have never really crossed the threshold of the national

consciousness” (11). The effects of such unattended trauma haunt After Nature as the text

continually alludes to a ubiquitous sense of despair and decay—“a silent catastrophe that

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occurs/almost unperceived” (89). The source of this trauma, however, does not appear until

Sebald addresses his family’s past and depicts the process in which the horrors of these events

“cross the threshold” into his “consciousness,” becoming part of his collective memory and

identity.

As the repressed memories of the World War II bombings are kept from Sebald, he is

compelled to create his own vision of the events. He does so in part by looking at the

photographs and consciously trying to recapture the depicted moments. However, the

depiction of the catastrophic bombings—already evoked in the 1943 photo—is also displaced,

reemerging in a seemingly unrelated image: a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer depicting the

Biblical Lot and his daughters (fig. 2):

As for the burning city,in the Vienna Art-Historical Museumthere hangs a paintingby Altdorfer depicting Lot with his daughters. On the horizona terrible conflagration blazesdevouring a large city […]In the middle ground there is a stripof idyllic green landscapeand closest to the beholder’s eyethe new generation ofMoabites is conceived.When for the first time I sawthis picture the year before last,I had the strange feelingof having seen all of itbefore, and a little latercrossing to Floridsdorfon the Bridge of PeaceI nearly went out of my mind. (86-87)

On a literal level, the painting depicts the rebirth of a people after the fiery punishment of

Sodom and Gomorrah. The opening line of the passage, however, clearly identifies the

Biblical cities with those of Nazi Germany, heavily bombed—we might even say

punished—by the Allies. More precisely, Sebald ties the image in the painting to the bombing

of Nürnberg, which his pregnant mother saw from afar. By tying this image to his mother’s

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repressed memory, Sebald comes to hold a dual position in regards to the painting, for he sees

himself mirrored in its subjects, while also being its viewer. He identifies with the figures in

the painting because, like “the new generation of/ Moabites,” he was born soon after, and

nearby, the catastrophic destruction of the city. He is part of a new generation of Germans,

who, according to his own accounts, grew up knowing little about their country’s recent

history (Janni). As he looks at the smoke and flames in the horizon and has “the strange

feelings of having seen all of it/before,” he comes to replicate the role of his mother in her

own past spectatorship. This splitting of roles infuses the last line—“I nearly went out of my

mind”—with meaning beyond its obvious expression of distress and confusion. The line

ultimately plays with the uncanny idea of literally leaving one’s mind in order to think, see

and remember as another, which Sebald does by envisioning an event once seen by his

mother.

That the bombing of Nürnberg emerges in Sebald’s mind through visual

representation resonates with a statement by historian Daniel J. Sherman on imagery and

memories: “Sight is the only sense powerful enough to bridge the gap between those who

hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such ‘experience,’

nonetheless seek to share the memory” (191). Indeed, the Altdorfer painting of “Lot and His

Daughters” helps bridge1 the gap between his mother’s experience of the event and his new

conception of this memory. It is also worth noting that After Nature, even as a work of poetry,

attempts to make sense of the past by incorporating other visual media. However, unlike

other works by Sebald such as Austerlitz and The Emigrants, After Nature does not contain actual

photographs. These are, instead, textually described. The physical absence of imagery,

coupled with its allusion through description, highlights once more the process of creation.

1 An interesting word-choice by Sherman, given the last lines of Sebald’s passage: “crossingto Floridsdorf /on the Bridge of Peace/I nearly went out of my mind” (87). This citation also workswell with Sebald’s statement in On the Natural History of Destruction, about history not crossing thethreshold of national consciousness (11). In just three lines Sebald successfully incorporates thesemore abstract concepts into personal experience.

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Not only are particular—we might say “collective”—memories being created through

associative imagery, but the paintings and photographs themselves are also remembered and

verbally reconstructed. They too become an object of memory. However, as the image is, at

times, emphasized above the event it evokes—as is the case with the Altdorfer painting that

reminds Sebald of World War II—we get the sense that the reconstruction of the past can

ultimately take precedence over the past itself as it becomes tangled in its subsequent

representation. This is not to say, however, that the past loses its significance through its

depiction; on the contrary, reinterpreting the past as Sebald does is an attempt to make it

relevant to the concerns of the present by giving it new meaning. Indeed, Sebald attempts to

come to terms with his national, familial and personal identity through grasping the horrors

of the bombing of Nürnberg, an event that symbolically marked the beginning of his life.

However, that reconstructions and allusions are his only way of making sense of this repressed

past would have still been true had his mother shared her memory with him, for memory—as

well as art and history—proves to be a crafted representation of a moment in time.

As we speak of creating memories through beholding an image, what Ezra Pound

called “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” we must also recognize

the significance of creating image itself. After all, the making of an image—be it painting or

photograph—requires the capturing and freezing of a moment in time. It makes sense, then,

that as After Nature deals with the attempt to comprehend the past through memory, it features

not only paintings but the painters themselves, who become, as Wulf Kansteiner would call

them, “the memory makers” (180). This idea is in fact alluded to in the fictionalized

biography of Matthaeus Grünewald, as it describes the artists’ relationship to his work: “To

him, the painter, this is creation,/image of our insane presence/on the surface of the earth”

(26). As the image proves more stable than human life, the painting becomes an imprint left

by the painter, an extension of his life that will outlast him. According to this view, the

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creation of an image involves the assertion of the painter’s identity as he becomes the creator

and re-interpreter of a moment in time. Furthermore, the paintings come to embody his

otherwise fleeting vision of the world, which, through its physicality on the canvas, will

potentially become a site for the collective memories of others.

Although we noted earlier that collective memories fill some of the holes left by

history and instill personal meaning into the past, these observations are perhaps the effects of

the memories rather than the force behind their existence. The desire to share memories, be

it through depicting one’s own or by absorbing someone else’s vision, ultimately stems from a

need to connect with others. In this regard, it is perhaps worth expanding on Daniel J.

Sherman’s statement about imagery and memories, for the wish to share someone else’s

“bodily experience” proves to be more than just a matter of collectivizing memories for the

sake of knowledge because its ultimate goal consists of understanding and sympathizing with

someone else’s perspective. The significance of this act increases when individuals do not

know each other, as connection with an absent other is at times only possible through

collective memory. In After Nature, Sebald attributes this desire to connect as the principal

reason behind Grünewald ’s artistic endeavors as well as the study his works:

Indeed it seemed as though in such works of artMen had revered each other like brothers, and

Often made monuments in each other’sImage where their paths had crossed. (6) 2

In his emotive depiction of the lives of Matthaeus Grünewald and Georg Steller, Sebald

makes his own monument to their image. Through writing, he creates a space in which the

lives of these men, who never knew one another, cross, as they become associated with a

single text where the recurring themes of destruction, art, memory and isolation, create a

thematic bond between them. However, as Sebald reconstructs the lives of the men and

2 Interestingly, Altdorfer’s early work was heavily influenced by Grünewald (Pioch). If we were toinfuse the past with our meaning we could easily imagine the two men “revering each other likebrothers” through their art, much like Sebald reveres their art through his poetry.

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projects his own visions into their representation, he also constructs a persona for himself: that

of the artist and “memory maker,” extending his visions of the past into the page.

Nonetheless, we must not forget that the most compelling moment of identification and

reconstruction occurs when Sebald duplicates his mother’s experience of watching Nürnberg

in flames. By depicting his identification with his mother, Sebald illustrates that the necessity

for collective memory manifests itself on the personal level, as it allows for the strengthening

of the most basic human bonds.

The narrativisation of past images throughout After Nature can perhaps best be

explained within its lines:

But if I see before meThe nervature of past lifeIn one image, I always thinkThat this has something to doWith truth. Our brains after all,Are always at work on some quiversof self-organization (83)

According to this passage, one must look outside the confines of the self and the present

moment in order to achieve a certain degree of ‘self-organization.’ Or, to put differently, the

individual—in this case Sebald, but this could also apply to us as readers—asserts his own

identity by looking elsewhere. He looks in particular to a past that, although not directly

experienced, potentially contains a narrative that helps explain the present moment. Thus, to

look for life in the remnants of the past as Sebald does in After Nature, is not simply a matter of

reviving or understanding historical events, but of finding a reflection of one's own self

embedded in these artifacts. Yet, to see oneself reflected in the remnants of history one must

see the human in the material: to visualize the experience of others as if it were our own. To

do this however, is an implicit way of “going out of our minds”—to use Sebald’s own

words—for we come to view the world as somebody else. This empathy with “the winged

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vertebrates of prehistory” is ultimately a way of expanding the life of an individual as it

becomes linked to the lives of others.

Figures and Notes on the Figures

Figure I: Figure i: An interesting word-choice by Sherman, given the last lines of Sebald’spassage: “crossing to Floridsdorf /on the Bridge of Peace/I nearly went out of my mind” (87).This citation also works well with Sebald’s statement in On the Natural History ofDestruction, about history not crossing the threshold of national consciousness (11). In justthree lines Sebald successfully incorporates these more abstract concepts into personalexperience.

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Figure ii: Interestingly, Altdorfer’s early work was heavily influenced by Grünewald (Pioch). Ifwe were to infuse the past with our meaning we could easily imagine the two men “reveringeach other like brothers” through their art, much like Sebald reveres their art through hispoetry.

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Works CitedFranklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The New Republic 227.13 (2002) 32-9.

Janni, Maya. “W.G. Sebald: The Last Interview.” The Guardian. 21 Dec. 2001. TheGuardian Newspaper. 01 March 2009. .

Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective

Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41.2 (2002) 179-197.

Pioch, Nicholas. “Albrecht Altdorfer: The Battle of Alexander at Issus.” WebMuseum. 14 Oct.2002. WebMuseum Paris. March 11, 2009.

< http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/altdorfer/battle-issus/>.

Sebald, W.G. On The Natural History of Destruction. New York: Random House, 2003.