The Angel's Enigmatic Eyes, or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic ...

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J U L I A H E L L 

The Angel’s Enigmatic Eyes, 

or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic 

History in W. G. Sebald’s 

“Air War and Literature” 

I have drunk too deep of the black blood of the dead. 

Jules Michelet 

W. G. SEBALD THOUGHT of his 1997 lectures on “Air War and Literature” as his 

essay on poetics. These lectures first attained a certain notoriety because of 

Sebald’s assault on postwar authors for having turned Germany’s bombed-out 

cities into a “terra incognita.” 1 For those of us interested in Sebald’s own authorship, 

the lectures merit attention for a different reason: they include a passage on 

the aftermath of the bombing raids on Hamburg in 1943 authored by Sebald himself. 

This passage, Sebald’s own literary text on the bombings, tells us about the 

central concerns and constitutive conflicts of Sebald’s postwar authorship. I 

explore here the question of Sebald’s authorship by focusing on the Hamburg 

part of the lectures, but taking as my point of departure the iconic image, Benjamin’s 

angel of history, that Sebald evokes at the conclusion of his lectures. 

I am certainly not proposing yet another reading of Sebald through the lens 

of Benjamin; on the contrary, I would like to find out what this cultural icon of 

the (academic) left—by now so worn out, so terribly fatigued—might be glossing 

over, if not concealing. At stake in this political-aesthetic repetition with a difference 

is the angel’s “enigmatic gaze” and the anxieties about what this gaze 

might be confronting. 2 In “Air War and Literature” Benjamin’s angel allegorically 

embodies a theory of history (Sebald’s natural history of destruction), it thematizes 

a political project (to look at and make visible what has been hidden from 

view: the burnt bodies in the streets of bombed-out German cities), and it symptomatically 

expresses the aporias of an aesthetic project that involves the confrontation, 

if not fascination, with what was hidden. Sebald’s angel thematizes at 

Criticism, Summer 2004, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 361–392 

Copyright © 2005 Waye State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 

361

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362 Julia Hell 

once the author’s/historian’s gaze, the object of that gaze, and the representation 

of both object and gaze—and thus helps us to reflect on Sebald’s dictum that the 

aesthetic representation of catastrophic history demands a “synoptic and artificial 

view” (AL, 26). Sebald’s angel takes us right to the core of questions about 

how literature writes history, questions of mediation and immediacy, of distance 

and immersion, of knowledge and desire—and thereby to the very core of fantasies 

of reenactment. 3 

The Gothic Imaginary of Postfascist Germany: History as 

Catastrophe, or Benjamin’s “Luckless Angel” 

“We see railroad tracks somewhere and inevitably think of Auschwitz,” 

Anselm Kiefer once remarked. 4 When Gunter von Hagen brought his BodyWorlds 

to Berlin in 2001, he chose an abandoned train station as the site for his exhibit. 

The “plastinated” corpses were carefully aligned along old railroad tracks. With 

this particular arrangement, von Hagen tapped into the visual archive of post- 

Holocaust Germany, one of of mass murder and destruction, and mobilized a 

gaze with very specific historical memories, desires, and anxieties. 5 Exhibited in 

a German train station, BodyWorlds inevitably partakes in a psychosymbolic 

order that makes the aestheticized display of dead bodies more than just a scientific 

exhibit for the lay public. And it makes the gaze of the spectator more than 

the interested, yet distanced, gaze of someone intrigued by the complexities of 

human anatomy. 6 

In von Hagen’s BodyWorlds we take a walk among the dead. This is a rudimentary 

plot structure that we find again and again in the (post)war period, from 

Sartre’s Les jeux sont faits (written 1943; filmed 1947), Jean Cocteau’s Orphée 

(1949), and Hans Erich Nossack’s “Orpheus und . . .” (1946) to Heiner Müller’s 

“Bildbeschreibung” (Explosion of a Memory, 1985) and Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte 

Abdeckerei (Knacker’s Yard, 1989). In this text, Hilbig’s protagonist stumbles 

across abandoned railroad tracks, endlessly circling around an eerie, decrepit 

place, the ruin of a former slaughterhouse, now Germania II, which disappears 

from the earth in an apocalyptic scene of baroque dimensions. In this postfascist 

nightmare, people flee across a land consisting of mass graves, across a leaden soil 

littered with bones thrown up by plows; their language is one of “vowelskulls” 

and “consonantbones.” 7 

Sebald too confronts us with this postfascist imaginary when he discusses in 

rather Gothic terms the “foundations” of postwar Germany and the energy that 

fueled the “economic miracle,” a “stream of psychic energy . . . which has its 

source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our 

state” (AL, 13). Here too Germany is a country whose citizens walk across dead 

bodies—metaphorically speaking. Yet as we will see, Sebald’s lectures on the failure 

of German literature to represent the destruction wrought by the air raids on

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The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History 363 

German cities during World War II also contain a passage in which the narrator 

literally walks through the streets of Hamburg in the aftermath of the attack, 

streets littered with dead, mutilated bodies. 

The postwar, post-Shoah imaginary that these literary texts bring to life— 

the image of Germany as the land of the dead strewn with ruins and corpses—is 

part of a powerful discourse on German history as catastrophe. 8 We find its 

strongest formulations—and indeed the trope of walking among the dead as its 

organizing structure—in the arts, where the unconscious fantasies and overdetermined 

anxieties come to the fore, often producing violently apocalyptic scenarios. 

While the political discourse of German history as catastrophe tends to be 

marginal, its aesthetic manifestations are not; they alert us to a sensitivity, or 

groundtone, that suffuses much of German postwar culture. 

The most famous embodiment of this catastrophic discourse is, of course, 

the angel of history, the figure that condenses Benjamin’s political-philosophical 

reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920) in his “Theses on the Concept 

of History” from 1939. 9 Do I need to point out that this angel too walks 

among the dead? (Or to be more precise, that Benjamin captures him at a moment 

of standstill, caught between the desire to stay with the dead and the momentous 

force of “progress”?) And do I need to point out that Benjamin begins his famous 

description of Klee’s angel by focusing on his eyes? “This is how one pictures the 

angel of history,” Benjamin writes: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ 

shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he 

is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are 

spread.” 10 After 1945, Benjamin’s angel appears in an even more apocalyptic, 

more pessimistic guise. Thus Heiner Müller’s 1958 version shows us a “luckless” 

angel “waiting for history in the petrification of flight, glance, breath”: we see this 

angel as he is buried by the rubble of the past, while the future “explodes his eyeballs” 

and “strangl[es] him with its breath.” 11 While there is continuity in German 

culture between the apocalyptic thinking after World War II and the 

catastrophic visions so prominent after World War I, there is also a significant difference: 

after World War II, the belief in redemption, or in the redemptive potential 

of violence and revolution, no longer exists. 12 

However, Benjamin’s angel still functions today as the “icon of the Left.” 13 

Only recently have several critics begun to shed a more critical light on this figure 

of left-wing theory and praxis. In particular, Yves de Maesseneer radically questions 

its political implications. 14 If we are interested in the political consequences 

of Benjamin’s image, Maesseneer argues, we need to read it in the context of his 

essays on revolutionary violence. In these essays Benjamin develops the notion of 

“redemptive destruction” in the form of a “pure,” or “purifying,” violence, which 

he hopes will break the eternal cycle of violence and counterviolence. Beatrice 

Hanssen notes the affinity of Benjamin’s theorizing to the rhetoric of both fascism 

and Stalinism; 15 taking her observation a step further, Maesseneer argues that

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destruction is preserved in the figure of the angel as a “terrifying amalgam of 

redemption and destruction.” Benjamin’s angel, Maesseneer argues, is both a 

“purifier and an exterminator” with the potential of heralding not a time of 

redemption but a time of terror. 16 Ultimately, however, Benjamin’s “explosive figure,” 

Maesseneer concludes, implies the “end of politics, either in resignation, or 

in (state) terror.” 17 Given this crystallization of themes around the angel—the 

necessity of the “messianic break” to arrest the catastrophic progress of history— 

the political implications of Benjamin’s “predatory angel,” 18 Maesseneer writes, 

are simply deeply problematic. If we appeal to Benjamin’s angel, Maesseneer submits, 

we either risk “an endorsement of the posture of a powerless witnessing of 

catastrophe—the angel being too immaterial to make a difference,” or else we are 

endorsing terror: “when the angel enters history in the form of radical destruction, 

it ends up producing terror.” 19 

How does the angel figure in Sebald’s “Air War and Literature”? Sebald 

evokes Benjamin’s angel at the very end of his lectures, subjecting him to a reading 

that removes all traces of (a dialectical or messianic) marxism from its image. 

He begins with an analysis of Kluge’s gaze at Halberstadt: “Here [that is, in Kluge’s 

text] Kluge is looking down, both literally and metaphorically, from a vantage 

point above the destruction.” Kluge “registers the facts” with “ironic amazement.” 

Yet Sebald discerns more than ironic distance in Kluge’s analytic gaze: it veils the 

desperate, “horrified” eyes of the angel of history. 20 For Kluge’s gaze belies any 

residual optimism that we might actually learn from the catastrophes we produced 

and “looks at the destruction with the horrified fixity of Walter Benjamin’s 

angel” (AL, 67; my italics). Sebald then quotes at length Benjamin’s text on the 

angel and the “horrified fixity” of his gaze at the “single catastrophe that keeps piling 

wreckage upon wreckage” (AL, 67). 

Sebald thus ends his lectures focusing on the writer-historian’s gaze as 

symptomatic of a total loss of faith in the possibility of change, radical or otherwise. 

In Sebald’s reading, Kluge “knows” that Marxism’s belief in progress has 

run its course. What remains is Sebald’s own version of catastrophic history, or 

what he calls the Natural History of Destruction. 21 This radical rereading of Kluge 

logically implies a revision of Benjamin’s dialectical image: the storm that propels 

the angel forward is progress at its deadliest, the progress that Theodor 

Adorno and Max Horkheimer analyzed in the 1940s as that form of reason— 

instrumental rationality—that destroys both first and second nature. It destroys 

nature, the nature made by man, and the nature of man. The reason for Sebald’s 

interest in the representation of Germany’s annihilated cities is thus not only 

motivated by the desire to “work through” another aspect of the German past 

that was left unarticulated, both for “objective” reasons and for reasons of political 

strategy. It is also motivated by his political-philosophical interest in the 

notion of a natural history of destruction: Germany’s cityscapes represent the fall 

back into natural history, the utter annihilation and unraveling of second nature

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as ruins: at the end of the war, bomb sites change, and trees spring up in bedrooms 

and kitchens (AL, 39). 

Second nature reverting to nature, human beings returning to dust—this is 

the baroque concept of history as decay that Benjamin analyzed as the ruinous 

aftereffects of secularization, as the very condition of modernity. 22 In “Air War 

and Literature” modern industrial warfare and its “innermost principle” of utter 

destruction become the highest expression of instrumental rationality’s inexorable 

march toward total destruction. Against this dark picture what are the 

small steps of political reforms? And what is left but to mourn the things that we 

destroyed? Once more we seem to have reached the “end of politics,” the unproductive 

choice between powerless witnessing and apocalyptic terror. 

However, the present article is only indirectly concerned with this political 

problematic, that is, the political implications of Sebald’s catastrophic versions of 

German history or the radical intervention that Benjamin’s “satanic angel” seems 

to promise. 23 Not only do I share Maesseneer’s critical view of Benjamin’s angel 

as embodying the unproductive tension between resignation and revolutionary 

terror; 24 I also agree that we ought to understand Benjamin’s theses as a “document 

of the collapse of the revolutionary phantasmagoria that haunted the 

Weimar Republic.” 25 In my view, the angel of history belongs to the twentieth 

century as does the theory of history as catastrophe conceived at one of the darkest 

moments of modern history, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact. 26 

As we have seen, Sebald takes recourse to Benjamin’s angel. What exactly is 

at stake in this appropriation? 27 Sebald’s central political project in “Air War and 

Literature” is to make visible what postwar German literature left invisible: the 

“images of this horrifying chapter of our history” (AL, 11), the “real scenes of horror 

during the catastrophe” (98), the “corpses built into the foundations of our 

state” (13)—that is, images of dead, burnt, mutilated bodies. (And in this respect, 

Sebald’s text inevitably skirts the limits of the postfascist Gothic, a point I take up 

later.) This project rests on an undaunted belief in the power of (textual) 

images. 28 Sebald is adamant: these grisly images have to become part of our visual 

archive, and we ought to look at them. This political project and its gesture of 

unveiling entails a pronounced focus on the literary production of visibility. The 

central aesthetic project, the core question with which Sebald grapples in his lectures—including 

his Hamburg passage—is that of representation: how can literature 

make us look at these images of dead bodies? And what ought to be the gaze 

of the writer-historian who makes us look at the charred corpses? 29 

In his unwavering insistence on the need to look, to confront catastrophic 

images, Sebald thus clearly differs from an author such as J. M. Coetzee, who 

raised the question in his most recent novel, Elizabeth Costello (2003). Coetzee’s 

protagonist, herself a writer of fiction, wonders whether confronting the reader 

with images of (Nazi) atrocities is justified, whether making readers look at 

scenes of horror doesn’t risk their humanity (and the writing of the scenes, the

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humanity of the author). 30 National Socialism and its legacy is of course Sebald’s 

context, if not his obsession, and with his texts he enters the fraught territory of 

a postfascist culture and its scopic regime. This regime is characterized by two 

things: first, a paradoxical constellation where a crisis of vision and a striking 

recurrence of the empiricist belief in the connection between seeing and knowing, 

vision and knowledge, coexist side by side. 31 Second, this scopic regime is 

routinely conceptualized in the dichotomous terms of “looking at” versus “looking 

away.” 

Yet the issue never was, and never is, that simple: called upon to confront the 

images documenting Nazi crimes, Germans were also faulted, or faulted themselves, 

for not looking “the right way,” that is, for being voyeuristic, for lacking 

compassion, for facile identifications with the victims of National Socialism—in 

other words, for not finding the right balance between an analytical gaze and its 

possible affective registers. The scopic regime of postfascist Germany is therefore 

best described as a cultural formation that follows a logic of visual confrontation 

and is characterized by a more or less conscious, more or less pronounced, anxiety 

of looking. 32 

Sebald himself makes use of the language of visual confrontation in his lectures. 

In his introductory remarks, he writes: “[W]hen we [Germans] turn to take 

a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking 

and looking away at the same time” (AL, ix). This is not the straightforward 

metaphor it seems at first glance. For one thing, Sebald more than anyone else 

has problematized in his writings the visually mediated relation to the (National 

Socialist) past, its presence as mnemonic images and the unreliability, or often 

irretrievable loss, of these images. 33 Moreover, Sebald complicates the isssue by 

asserting a doubled act of looking that is simultaneously a “looking at” and “looking 

away,” an act that is highly conflicted and fraught with anxiety. Sebald 

demands an alternative way of looking in his lectures, “a steadfast gaze bent on 

reality” (51). 

“Demand” is not too strong a word, given Sebald’s strongly ethical, if not 

moralizing, tone. At stake in his poetics is a “moral imperative” (AL, 51) that functions 

as the very basis of his postfascist authorship. Praising Nossack’s “dispassionate 

language” (52) in “Der Untergang” (the literary account of the bombing 

of Hamburg in 1943 that Sebald privileges throughout his lectures), Sebald 

writes: “The ideal of truth inherent [in Nossack’s text’s] in entirely unpretentious 

objectivity . . . proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce 

literature in the face of total destruction” (53). While Sebald does not explicitly 

make the point, we can safely assume that he would argue that Nossack’s dispassionate 

text is informed by an equally dispassionate gaze. For Sebald also observes 

that only Nossack tried “recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible” 

(51)—without affect. Yet legitimate authorship does not merely require a sober 

gaze; it also needs to refrain from any aestheticizing strategies. Nothing delegit-

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imizes German authorship more, Sebald maintains, than “the construction of 

aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world.” Aesthetization—and 

its attendant pleasures—simply deprives “literature of its right 

to exist” (53). Translated into the language of visuality, this categorical statement 

means that both the author’s and the readers’ gaze need to be contained, that the 

pleasures of aesthetic production need to be reined in. 

Not all literary texts thus create a gaze that resists the temptation “to look 

away” and the temptations of aesthetic pleasures and remains focused, sober, and 

devoid of pleasure. The genre of eyewitness accounts tends to be structurally 

“blind” and therefore needs, Sebald writes, “to be supplemented by what a synoptic 

and artificial view reveals” (AL, 25–26). Thus not every literary text succeeds: 

neither literature that aestheticizes destruction nor texts that turn away 

from the sight of destruction to focus on mythicizing, or, worse yet, melodramatic 

stories. Only documentary literature, Sebald submits, successfully creates 

this artificial and synoptic view. There is only one way of representing catastrophe: 

literature that is both “concrete and documentary” (58), guided by an “artificial” 

and “synoptic” gaze. Ultimately, Sebald arrives at the conclusion that 

literature ought to be based on the combination of “precision and responsibility” 

(52)—and it ought to keep aesthetic pleasure at bay. 

I have argued elsewhere that this aesthetics of the documentary as an aesthetics 

of the visible comes surprisingly close to a naive empiricist epistemology 

and realism that contrasts sharply with Sebald’s own modernist writing practice. 

34 In “Air War and Literature,” Sebald goes as far as to echo Ranke’s infamous 

dictum—“So it had been” (AL, 52) 35 —in a passage that confronts us again with 

a (textual) image of dead bodies: “A group of people were burned to death in a 

bombproof shelter because the doors had jammed. . . . So it had been. They had 

all fled from the hot walls to the middle of the cellar. They were found there 

crowded together, bloated with the heat” (52). 36 “So it had been”—how does the 

mimetic imperative underlying this Rankean statement work with Benjamin’s 

antihistoricism? Perhaps it doesn’t, perhaps that simply is the wrong question to 

ask. As I wrote above, I am not interested in reading Sebald through Benjamin, 

but in the possible meanings of Sebald’s evocation of the angel’s gaze at the end of 

his lectures. 

As a first step, I closely examine Sebald’s Hamburg passage, its narrative 

strategies and the gaze, or rather gazes, that inform it. My overarching thesis is 

that Sebald creates a stylistically hybrid form of narration that combines symbolic 

and imaginary registers and works on the levels of both epistemology and fantasy, 

or affect. That is, Sebald’s text draws on both modernist and realist historiography 

and involves both an analytic, mediated gaze and a nonanalytic, 

unmediated gaze. I then read the transformation of what Adorno rightfully calls 

the angel’s enigmatic eyes into a gaze fixed in horror symptomatically, that is, as the 

author’s awareness of the risks associated with this narrative mode as his attempt

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to ward off assimilation to Ernst Jünger’s fascist modernism or Rainer Maria 

Rilke’s neo-Romantic death metaphysics. To make this point, I return to Sebald’s 

Hamburg passage in order to explore what I call the angel’s Orphic shadow and 

the deadened, ruined eyes produced in the Hamburg section, giving Sebald’s synoptic 

and artificial gaze one last interpretive twist. The angels’ horrified gaze does 

indeed express the author’s confrontation with catastrophic history; but it also 

signals a horrified recoiling from an aesthetic production at the core of which we 

find a fascination, if not obsession, with death. 

The Destruction of Hamburg, or The Author’s Backward Glance 

This section of Sebald’s text (AL, 26–28) is organized around a photograph 

that Sebald paradoxically never mentions, 37 thus leaving it undescribed. 38 The 

photo that takes up the upper third of page 28 is difficult to make out: we see a 

street and some “objects” lying on the ground that we cannot identify. The text 

itself starts in a sober, impersonal tone: “In the summer of 1943, during a long 

heat wave, the RAF, supported by the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, flew a second 

series of raids on Hamburg” (26). It maintains this impersonal tone as it leads the 

reader through a familiar historical narrative that gestures at a knowledge common 

among the experts of the profession through simple, familiar narrative 

devices: “The aim of Operation Gomorrha, as it was called, was to destroy the city” 

(my italics). Equally simple markers establish the chronological parameters and 

the distance between “then” and “now”: “In a raid early in the morning of July 27, 

beginning at one A.M., ten thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary 

bombs were dropped on the highly populated residential areas east of the Elbe.” 

The density of detail that begins to accumulate in this last sentence spills over into 

the next with the effect of foreshortening the distance between present and past. 

Sebald’s “close-up description” takes narrator and reader back in time—or the 

past into the present: 39 “A now familiar sequence of events occured: first all the 

doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive 

bombs weighing four thousand pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings 

were ignited.” The effect of immediacy is then reinforced in the following sentences 

by temporal markers that introduce a dramatic acceleration of the event: 

“Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning”; “Another five minutes later, at 

one-twenty A.M., a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have 

thought possible arose”; “The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky.” 

At this point a subtle shift has occured. The reader no longer follows a historical 

account; instead, she has been converted into a spectator as distance is 

withdrawn through vivid description. Sebald thus relies on the effect of “ideal 

presence,” whose workings an eighteenth-century historian described in the following 

ways: “Writers of genius, sensible that the eye is the best avenue to the 

heart, represent every thing as passing in our sight; and from readers or hearers,

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transform us into spectators.” 40 Until this point Sebald narrated the attack from 

the point of view of the bombing crews: “the whole airspace was a sea of flames 

as far as the eye could see” (AL, 26). Now, the text “descends” into the city and 

we, that is, narrator and reader, are walking through the streets of Hamburg in 

the middle of a deadly firestorm: “Those who had fled from the air-raid shelters 

sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting 

asphalt.” 

But Sebald does not maintain a consistent distance. With one sentence, he 

reestablishes a gap between past and present—”No one knows for certain how 

many lost their lives that night”—and resorts to the aerial view: “A wavering heat, 

which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes.” The 

section ends with a passage in which the narrator takes us back into the streets 

and among the dead; this is the effect of a detailed description that “elaborates” 

most graphically on the photograph—but, as I said before, without ever referring 

to it: 

Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorous 

flames still licked around many of them; others had been roasted brown 

or purple and reduced to a third of their size. They lay doubled up in 

pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. 

The central death zone was declared off-limits in the next few days. 

When punishment labor gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing 

it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people still 

sitting at tables or up against walls where they had been overcome by 

monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of 

bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other 

victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, 

which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families 

consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry 

basket. (AL, 28) 

Anyone having typed in this quote will realize that Sebald has achieved his purpose, 

that this piece of “documentary” literature has indeed carried “the images 

of this horrifying chapter of our history” beyond the threshold of consciousness, 

has forever fixed them in our visual memory. This passage displays the “corpses 

built into the foundations of our state,” makes them visible—by drawing us into 

the past, dragging us into medias res. 

Is there more to say about this exercise in the “literary description of total 

destruction?” 41 What strikes me about the passage is its hybrid character. The 

text seems to suspend us somewhere between an immersion in the past and a subtle 

awareness of an estrangement effect, between the past as past and the past as 

present. It positions us between the illusion of immediate visual access and the 

consciousness that our “seeing” is highly mediated, both through the narrator’s

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gaze and the gaze captured by the texts that the narrator relies upon. How should 

we read this hybridity? I think we have the choice between two readings. Either 

we read the text as a form of “modernist realism,” that is, a text that paradoxically 

achieves “a realist effect through modernist means,” 42 or we hold its different registers 

apart and explore what is at stake in its oscillation between unmediated 

presence and mediated representation, that is, in its collision of imaginary and 

symbolic. In the first case, we understand the passage as the successful attempt 

to represent a modernist event, whose very structure resists representation 

through modernist means. 43 From this perspective, moments of visual immediacy 

would then be momentary illusions self-consciously exposed, moments that 

position us “as if” we were participating in a reenactment in the present. 44 The 

alternative would be to think about what is at stake in these textual moments of 

imaginary access and presence, what fantasy might drive these moments, which 

desires might produce them. And in the first instance, the figure to embody this 

form of representation would be Benjamin’s angel, while in the second instance, 

we might want to enlist the help of a nineteenth-century historian of the French 

revolution, Jules Michelet. Both are historians, guardians of the dead and their 

hopes, and both, like Sebald, present their historiography as a walk among the 

dead and forgotten. 

The Angel’s Photographic Gaze 

What can we say about the narrator’s gaze in Sebald’s Hamburg text? What 

is striking is the utter absence of affect: this is a dispassionate gaze; it is clinical 

if not cold, deadened if not dead. Conventional wisdom has it that Benjamin’s 

angel is melancholic. But what does that mean with respect to the angel’s gaze? 

Let us return to Benjamin’s text: stopped in his movements, the angel’s “eyes are 

staring”; he “sees one single catastrophe.” 45 In the German original, we find: 

“seine Augen sind aufgerissen”—his eyes are opened wide. 46 This is first and foremost 

an analytical gaze, the description of someone who registers destruction 

attentively, is captured by this “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage 

upon wreckage.” 47 But we ought to pay attention to another level of this gaze, 

one that is not about affect, saturnine or not, but instead has to do with Benjamin’s 

epistemology. 

Before I pursue this point, let me briefly return to the stated goal of Sebald’s 

lectures: to bring the horrifying images of World War II into collective consciousness, 

to force them once and for all into the nation’s visual archive. Sebald 

discusses one of these “disgraceful images” (AL, 89), 48 the burning of thousands 

of bodies on funeral pyres in Dresden’s city square. Sebald seizes this occasion to 

raise the problem of voyeurism. The voyeuristic scenario he depicts concerns the 

core scene of the Hamburg passage: we witness an exchange of “photographs of 

the corpses lying in the streets after the firestorm” (98). While the scene addresses

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the issue of voyeurism for Sebald’s own writing, it also resonates with a certain 

photophobia. 

In our present context Sebald’s photophobia is rather intriguing. In contrast 

to the postwar author, Benjamin famously celebrated photography as one of the 

new materialist media. More significantly, the discourse of photography thoroughly 

shapes Benjamin’s thinking about historiography. After all, as the incarnation 

of the materialist historian, the angel captures the “true image of the past” 

very much as a camera does: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be 

seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized 

and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by 

the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” 49 

These statements about the image of the past that “flashes up” constitute the core 

of Benjamin’s critique of historicism, with which we are all familiar: historicism 

establishes distance, since it is driven by nothing but an antiquarian interest; its 

most fundamental and most mistaken assumption is that there is a past to be captured 

at a glance—“the way it really was.” 50 

In contrast to this historicist gaze, the gaze of the materialist historian works 

like a camera’s lens, capturing the remnants of a past that is in the process of vanishing. 

Like a photographer sitting in a darkroom, 51 the historian catches sight of 

the catastrophic image as it emerges from the past into the present and translates 

invisible remnants into partial visibility. In Benjamin’s photographic discourse on 

history there is no fully developed picture of the past for us to seize, only a negative 

that we need to develop at the moment of danger. And if we fail to produce 

this constellation of past and present, the past will remain but a negative, unseen, 

unread, and unredeemable. Historicism works on the “representation of an ‘eternal 

past,’” while the materialist historian’s labor involves the production of an 

image engaging a “history that does not give itself to sight.” 52 

From this photographic perspective, history becomes a discontinuous series 

of dialectical images deeply marked by the process of their production. 53 If 

Sebald had written the Hamburg passage and its central image—the image of 

burned bodies—in the spirit of Benjamin, if he had written the passage entirely 

from Benjamin’s photographic perspective, he would have left the textual 

wounds unstitched and the representational seams open, and he would have further 

distorted the picture in the direction of the symbolic, forcing into the foreground 

the picture’s “photographic” constructedness. 54 As I pointed out in my 

close reading of the passage, these estranging modernist traces are present, they 

are visible, but barely so. Then which other logic, which other gaze, counters this 

modernist attempt to “articulate the past historically”? 55 

Benjamin’s angel is a figure of representational violence; he explodes time 

and destroys even that most basic story, the story of the angel walking toward the 

dead. What Maesseneer called this “terrifying amalgam of redemption and 

destruction” remains on the side of destruction, committed to witnessing that

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destruction and pointing it out for us to see. Benjamin presents him at a moment 

when he is torn between his desire to stay with the dead and the storm that propels 

him into the future, disrupting the angel’s momentum. Michelet, on the 

other hand, takes that walk among the dead, with the dead, in the hope of 

redeeming them and their desires. 

The Participant’s Empiricist Gaze 

Not surprisingly, Michelet’s self-understanding resonates strongly with Benjamin’s 

romantic sensibility. In 1872 Michelet professed his motives in writing the 

history of the French revolution (and people): “[E]ach dead person leaves . . . his 

memory, and demands that someone take care of it. For him who has no friends, 

a magistrate must care for it. . . . This magistrate is History.” 56 Looking back at his 

career as the historian of France, Michelet claims he never lost sight of “the Historian’s 

duty.” Ending on a Gothic note, he writes that his dedication to the dead 

“too soon forgotten” made him take on the work of a grave digger: “I have 

exhumed [the dead] for a second time.” 57 This writing of history as thanatography 

involved a “ceremonial approach,” a sort of “primitive communion” with the 

dead; ultimately Michelet, Barthes writes, “is . . . one of them.” 58 Exhuming the 

dead, redeeming their hopes and desires—this is a project dear not only to Benjamin 

but also to Sebald. Though in Sebald’s case, the desire to exhume the dead 

has less to do with giving them their voice and/or the redemption of their hopes 

than the polemical, even angry, desire to make them visible, 59 to shock the reader 

into seeing and remembering them. Although this emphasis on the resurrection 

of forgotten voices seems to take us away from the whole complex of vision and 

visibility in Benjamin and Sebald, Michelet’s mode of historiography—driven by 

the claim to relive the past—will take us back to the historian’s gaze. 

Although they share Romanticism’s investment in the world of the dead and 

the defeated, 60 Benjamin and Michelet engage in radically different forms of historiography. 

Jules Michelet not only imagined being present at the event; he made 

this fantasy the very mode of his historiography. While Sebald takes us on an 

imaginary walk through Hamburg the day after the catastrophe and Benjamin 

has his angel frozen in the face of the dead, Michelet propels us into the streets of 

Paris on the day of the storming of the Bastille. He narrates the events of this dramatic 

day from the perspective of someone immersed in the rebellious crowds: a 

participant and eyewitness to revolutionary events. 61 Using the inclusive “we,” 

Michelet thus stages the historian’s identification with the “people” in his very 

writing, inventing a form of historiography that allows him to “identify with, resurrect, 

and relive the life of the past in its totality.” 62 Michelet himself named this 

form of writing history “resurrection,” 63 and this resurrectional historiography 

carries decidedly Gothic undertones that come to the fore in the story of his 

dreams. 64 In these dreams, “a weeping, lamenting crowd” appears, a crowd of

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people who “have not lived enough” and “wish to live again.” 65 Michelet promises 

to “exhume” these shades “for a second life” and to do everything in his power 

to keep them and their betrayed ideals from being silenced: 66 he becomes the 

custodian of the dead. Once their voices are restored, the “shades” will be 

“appeased” and “permit their urns to be closed.” 67 

Thus at the moment when professional history establishes itself by constructing 

a barrier between historiography and the novel, between professional 

distance and affective proximity, Michelet invents a form of writing history that 

reaches deep into the realm of the literary, indeed into the realm of the Gothic. 

Michelet’s books carry the traces of “the emotions of [his] heart”; 68 he participates 

vicariously in the story of the dead, reliving their pains, and claims a poetic sensibility 

that allows him to depict the past more “realistically” than his colleagues. 

69 This resurrectional realism demands an empathic immersion in the 

past and rests on an ability to “see” that others are lacking—and it discloses a story 

of things previously not seen. 70 

What Michelet expresses so (melo)dramatically is a wish, or fantasy, that we 

find operative in both narrative history and, of course, the historical novel: 71 the 

desire to bring the past back to life or, seen from a different angle, the desire to 

return to the past, to witness the event. An analysis of this desire can be found in 

Freud’s essay on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. Like Sebald’s lectures, this is a text 

about ruins, the ruins of Pompeii, the ruins of childhood desires. Analyzing the 

protagonist’s dream, “which transports him to old Pompeii on the day of the eruption 

of the Vesuvius, and makes him an eyewitness of the destruction of the 

city,” 72 Freud observes that to be present at the (catastrophic) event is after all the 

fervent wish of any “antiquarian.” 73 It is this particular desire that sustains 

the dream and the archeologist’s search for the “real” footprints of the woman he 

loves, a figure on an ancient relief, whom he has named Gradiva. 74 

Exploring the content of the form, Hayden White uncovered different 

rhetorical modes that slightly shift the “manifest” stories historians tell. I propose 

to complement White’s rhetorical analysis by thinking about how the historian’s 

desire, the libidinal investments that inform her writing, shape her story about 

the past. After all, scopophilia is a powerful drive, and the connection between 

the desire to see and the desire to gain mastery is difficult, if not impossible, to 

disentangle. 75 In the present context we ought to ask what form the historian’s 

desire to be present at the event, to “see” the past, takes in Sebald’s text. Writing 

history in the narrative mode, one that promises to disclose a new story and render 

the past alive, involves a desire for total, transparent knowledge and total representation 

that takes the empiricist link between vision and knowledge as a 

given. The narrative historian, or historical novelist, who claims to bring the past 

back to life, in essence tells his reader: I see what no one else has seen, and I will 

represent it for you in the form of a story unraveling the events in front of your 

very eyes so that you can experience them with me. And this is precisely the

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Micheletean level of Sebald’s Hamburg passage with its imaginary point of view, 

the view of the (historicist) participant. 

I would thus argue it is this same scopophilic desire—to be there, to see, and 

to make us see the dead bodies—that has the narrator of the Hamburg section 

narrow the distance between now and then, past and present. Sebald’s catastrophic 

tableau is produced by the powerful fantasy of being present at the 

event: narrator and reader are walking through the streets of Hamburg after the 

bombing, registering its deadly effects—with a “steadfast gaze.” Yet let us not too 

quickly understand this as an ontological issue, as the universal and timeless 

desire of the historian or the historical novelist/essayist. A very specific logic is at 

play in this text and its context. Or to put it differently, the imaginary viewpoint 

that partially informs Sebald’s Hamburg passage is overdetermined: at work is 

not simply the historian’s desire to be present, but, as I have argued elsewhere, 

this scopic fantasy is also driven by the wish of the Nachgeborene, the one born 

after the Nazi regime, to be present at the cataclysmic events that formed his/her 

very subjectivity. 76 In both instances, visual immediacy, the desire to “see” the 

past, is crucial. 

Orpheus, or The Angel’s Horrified Gaze 

Sebald’s Hamburg passage is thus a text in which two different, if not opposing, 

representational projects are closely entangled, creating a text in which an 

“aesthetics of transience” is contained by a realist mode. 77 I read this text on two 

levels: the symbolic and the imaginary. With Benjamin I read it as a modernist 

account of a modernist event, the production of an image by the historian as photographer. 

Reading it with Michelet I drew out another level of writing, one in 

which the historian appears as participant. This tension between symbolic and 

imaginary modes of representation entails a difference of scopic registers, both 

on the epistemological and the affective level. On the epistemological level, the 

text stages a difference between the photographer’s gaze and the gaze of the participant. 

While the photographer’s urgent, flashlike gaze renders the fleeting 

images of history legible and produces visibility out of a “flux of images” catching 

but momentary traces of what has vanished, the participant’s unmediated 

gaze drinks in what history offers to his sight and revels in the presence of a past 

that he reproduces for the reader.On the affective level, these scopic registers 

range from the coldly analytical to the saturnine to the compassionate elation— 

and later despair—of Michelet. Ultimately, this text and its constitutive tension 

between different modes of representation with their different forms of looking 

are produced by the collision between diverging desires: the desire to represent 

what an articifial and synoptic view would reveal of a particular forgotten or 

repressed moment in German history, and the desire to relive a past that determines 

the postwar subject. 78

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This does not, however, exhaust the question of the author’s/historian’s gaze 

in Sebald’s lectures. I began this article with a cautionary note on Benjamin’s 

angel: not to gloss over its appearance as a self-evident conclusion to a series of 

lectures on a particularly gruesome chapter in Germany’s catastrophic history. In 

order to pursue this question I must address yet another intriguing puzzle in 

Sebald’s “Air War and Literature”: Sebald describes the angel’s gaze as entsetzensstarr, 

thus bringing to the fore the affective (that is, melancholic), not the analytic 

(that is, epistemological) dimension of the gaze. But more significantly, 

Sebald heightens the emotional intensity of Benjamin’s original by transforming 

the angel’s “wide opened eyes” into eyes that are “entsetzensstarr” (LL, 73), 

“frozen in horror.” 

A panoramic gaze at the lectures reveals that Sebald keeps these two visual 

registers wide apart. In the Hamburg passage the gaze is analytical: the narrator 

coldly registers the catastrophe in a scene of artificially constructed visual immediacy 

maintaining the “essential distance of an observer” that Sebald at first attributes 

to Kluge’s gaze. In stark contrast to this gaze of objective sobriety we then 

encounter at the end of the lectures the angel’s horrified and compassionate gaze. 

Why this emphasis on affect at the end? Why this affective, ethical dimension 

coming after a representation informed by a gaze devoid of all affect and ethics? 

Does Sebald provide the ethics to his aesthetics post facto? And does he do so as 

a gesture of legitimation? Let me remind you of this most categorical of statements 

at the beginning of his lectures: no German postwar authorship is legitimate 

unless it avoids aestheticizing destruction or refrains from detecting beauty 

in ruins and death. 

While this gesture of legitimation certainly comes into play in Sebald’s textual 

reenactment of the angel, I would propose an additional interpretation of this 

dichotomous constellation of backward glances: I see in the reemergence, indeed 

the intensification, of affect the symptomatic expression of a constitutive tension. 

For what the angel’s gaze tells us is that Sebald “knows” his authorship rests on a 

fundamental dilemma. The angel’s “entsetzensstarrer Blick,” I would submit, is 

mesmerized by death and destruction and seduced by a natural history of 

destruction. Sebald’s Benjaminian angel “knows” about the Gothic beauty of catastrophic 

history—in Sebald’s text he is as saturnine as he is “barbaric.” 79 

If we look more closely, we discern in, or behind, Sebald’s Benjaminian 

angel the shadow not only of the Angelus Novus but of Orpheus, the poet who 

walked among the dead. We usually think of the Orphic myth as a story about 

the artist’s deadly gaze and the power of his art, about love and its fatal moment 

of madness. While Michelet used Oedipus and Prometheus as figures for the historian, 

he never mentioned Orpheus, and yet he might have done so just as 

appropriately. For we can also read the Orphic myth as a story about the historian 

facing a vanishing past—catching sight of it before laying it once more to 

rest. 80 In both versions—that is, Orpheus as artist, or as historian—Eurydice

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figures as the object of desire. Eurydice is woman as the artist’s most conventional 

object of representation, and she is woman as the “living” incarnation of 

the historian’s object of representation, the past. In both cases the woman 

(woman as beauty, or woman as past) vanishes, and what survives is a beautiful 

story—of literature, of historiography. 81 

In Jensen’s Gradiva the historian’s scopophilic desire, the desire for total 

visual access to the past, takes the form of Zoe, the childhood friend whom he 

mistakes for Gradiva. Zoe is what he can see, the past come alive in all its alluring 

beauty—while Gradiva fades from view. In Sebald’s “Air War and Literature” the 

object of this desire takes the form of corpses and burned, mutilated bodies that 

fascinate and attract the historian’s/artist’s gaze. At the end of Sebald’s lectures, the 

angel’s entsetzenstarrer Blick is fixed on this ghastly image, this odd aesthetic 

object. Its affective quality, the horror it expresses, is not simply a response to Germany’s 

calamitous history but the horrified reaction to an act of aesthetic creation 

that engages the imaginary and its Gothic objects of desire, objects of both fascination 

and repulsion. 

This superimposition of the Orphic artist/historian onto the Benjaminian 

angel—and of Sebald’s dead bodies onto Eurydice—is not far-fetched. We know 

of Paul Klee’s admiration for Rilke, the poet of the Duineser Elegien and the Sonnets 

to Orpheus. But we need not stray that far from “Air War and Literature” to 

find the story of Orpheus. In an article that preceeded the lectures, Sebald discusses 

a brief text by Hans Erich Nossack titled “Orpheus und . . .” (1946) in 

which Nossack rewrites the Orpheus myth, radically changing the fatal moment 

when the poet turns around to cast a look at his beloved. In Nossack’s story the 

poet meets the eyes of Persephoneia, the goddess of the underworld and “goddess 

of death,” not the eyes of his beloved Euridyce. 82 The plot of the artist 

descending into the realm of the dead to rescue his lover surfaces as a kind of 

afterthought to “Der Untergang,” Nossack’s walk through the city of the dead. 83 

What Nossack’s Orpheus finds is not a living woman who is granted a second life 

thanks to the poet’s artistry and his passionate love, but a woman who is the very 

incarnation of death—yet one who is therefore no less alluring. 

In the context of Nossack’s soberly descriptive report on Hamburg’s annihilation 

in “Der Untergang,” the appearance of the Orpheus myth with its focus on 

woman/beauty testifies to the forbidden pleasures of artistic production at that 

moment, in that setting. For the artist entering the city of the dead in search of his 

beloved is also in search of woman as the embodiment of beauty and its pleasures. 

At the end of “Untergang” Nossack brings up the lure of ruinous beauty and 

the illicit pleasures of aesthetic production: “The glimmering, burnt-out frame of 

a piano was lying on a pile of rubble in the yeard. A rose pushed through the 

charred debris and the broken piano strings and blossomed.” 84 Murderous 

destruction offers unexpected scenes of beauty, fascinating images of decay, but 

in the context of total war these beautiful images are ethically no longer possi-

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ble. 85 While these passages by themselves already allude to the illegitimacy of an 

authorship born in ruins, the plot of Orpheus searching for Euridyce makes the 

artist’s love affair with death explicit. It is this authorship seduced by the beauty 

of death and decay that Nossack thematizes at the end of “Orpheus und . . . .” As 

he turns around, Orpheus loses Eurydice and goes blind, but, Nossack explains, 

the story really ought to be called “Orpheus and Persephoneia,” because that 

would explain much better why the blind author was later torn apart by Thracian 

women. They realized “that he no longer sang for an earthly woman, but for the 

goddess of death.” 86 Looking at death, decay, and destruction, Nossack tells us, 

can be as intoxicating, as pleasurable, as looking at a beloved woman—that most 

conventional object of the male artist. 

Nossack’s “Orpheus und . . .” thus tells us about the author’s awareness of his 

love affair with death, his knowledge that his sober description belies a gaze that 

involves pleasure. Nossack’s texts are aware of the fragility of postwar authorship, 

and they know that they always operate in close proximity to a morbid, Gothic 

imagination from which they are trying to separate themselves. It is this same 

knowledge that we find in the entsetzenstarrer Blick of Sebald’s “cannibalistic 

angel.” 87 This gaze is horrified not because the angel/author/historian realizes 

that history is but one single catastrophe; it is horrified because it remains fixed 

in fascination and cannot avert its gaze from an object of aesthetic pleasure: 

Sebald’s artfully composed tableau of dead bodies. Sebald’s angel is an Orphic 

angel, in love with a beautiful, and beautifully dead, object. 88 

But if this conflict between aesthetics and ethics were all we learned from 

scrutinizing the angel’s Orphic shadow, we might rightfully be disappointed. For 

what could be more trite than the insight that all literature, even literature about 

catastrophe, involves aesthetization and therefore (aesthetic) pleasure. If nothing 

else, that was the insight produced by the endless debate about Adorno’s dictum 

that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric: artistic representation without 

aesthetization and its pleasures simply does not exist. I therefore propose to take 

one last look at Sebald’s Hamburg passage, giving its synoptic and artificial gaze 

one last reading, one more interpretive twist. 

The text’s gaze strives to forestall, if not control, the readers’ voyeuristic tendencies. 

89 But not only the reader’s gaze is subject to control; the text’s gaze is as 

well. We do not find a trace of the possible affective registers that a Micheletian 

historiography would encourage or permit. We might even go further: the synoptic 

and artificial gaze of this passage is a mortified, deadened gaze—devoid of 

Entsetzen, or horror, but also of any sorrows and any pleasures. And that is what 

we ultimately glean from Sebald’s monstruous angel: that Sebald moves in “Air 

War and Literature” from the demand for intense scrutiny to a practice of descriptive 

writing that operates with dead eyes—not eyes that are blind, nor the transcendent 

gaze of the Romantic poet, but deadened, ruined eyes that look upon 

the world without pleasure. 90

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I started this essay with a question: what does Benjamin’s angel tell us about 

Sebald’s authorship? Only in connection with the ruined eyes of Sebald’s narrator 

does the full significance of the angel’s gaze, of Sebald’s repetition with a difference, 

become visible. The opposition between the gaze that sustains Sebald’s 

Hamburg passage and that of Benjamin’s angel, the oppostion between the deadened 

eyes of Sebald’s narrator and the horrified fixity of the angel’s stare, points 

to the constitutive conflicts at the core of Sebald’s postfascist authorship. Or to 

put it differently: in “Air War and Literature” the narrator writes with dying 

eyes—under the angel’s horrified stare. 

Conclusion: Authorial Legitimation and the Yawning Chasms of History 

Sebald’s “Air War and Literature” is a text about ruins. In the wake of the 

French revolution, ruins signified the dissolution of the prerevolutionary order 

and a radical break between past and present. 91 With Europe literally in ruins, the 

context of the ruin texts written during World War II is of course entirely different. 

These texts are concerned with the gradual erosion of the “familar” world of 

Nazi Germany and its sudden collapse; they also confront the emergence of a new 

world (in ruins) that needs to be discovered, needs to be seen. Vision and visuality 

become central preoccupations as German writers start to represent the demolition 

of their cities; focusing on ruins, they also begin to thematize acts of intense 

scrutiny that ceaselessly move from the visible to the invisible and back. 92 Sebald 

is often discussed as the example of the German left-wing melancholic. That may 

be one way of characterizing this author, but only if we remember the euphoric, if 

not aggressively euphoric, dimensions of the melancholic mind-set. While texts 

like The Rings of Saturn and Sebald’s Hamburg passage are permeated by an awareness 

of loss, they are also suffused by a euphoric sense of discovery, a barely contained 

excitement about the relics of destruction, about ruins and dead bodies, 

and about the complex political and aesthetic project of making them visible. 

Photographs documenting Germany’s murderous history are central to this 

project. Although Sebald expresses a strong aversion to photography, this photophobia 

nevertheless founds his authorship: while he criticizes the medium’s 

historicist essence and abhors its closeness to death, his powerfully visual writing 

is produced by those photographs and remains fixed on them with a searching, 

relentless gaze. Sebald transforms photography’s Leichengeschäft into art, 

into a prose that seduces by the “patterns it finds in destruction,” by finding “a 

kind of beauty in death.” 93 And that authorship is deeply problematic. It runs 

into unsurmountable conflicts between the political project(s) to which it is committed 

and the lures of its Gothic aesthetics. This authorship ruins your eyes, 

deadens them, and it is deeply in need of legitimation. 

Since 1945, since the Holocaust and the Nazis’ exterminatory warfare, German 

non-Jewish authorship has had to relegitimize, refound itself with every

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single text. 94 In “Air War and Literature” the legitimatory dimension involves two 

projects: the politico-ethical project of making visible what has been repressed 

with the intent finally to unveil Germany’s postwar “secret” (AL, 13), that is, the 

full extent of the catastrophic end of the Nazi regime. As we have seen, authorial 

legitimation also involves a critical engagement with the left’s philosophy of history, 

from Benjamin’s messianic Marxism to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic 

of Enlightenment to Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn, resulting in the deeply pessimistic, 

if not apocalyptic, notion of a Natural History of Destruction. The legitimatory 

dimension of this latter project makes “Air War and Literature” a warning, 

a Cassandrian text. I suspect that this hortatory function of the text is merely a 

matter of surface, and that the desire that drives Sebald’s writing is in tune with 

the apocalyptic furor operating at the heart of many texts that represent German 

history as catastrophe: a melancholic rage, a desire to annihilate that Germany. 95 

But there is another level of legitimation, one that ties Sebald’s writing to 

Romanticism, or German neo-Romanticism. In Sebald’s case, the endlessly 

repeated act of ethical refoundation circles around what has been made visible, 

what has been seen: images from the camps, images from the war. These images 

play a central role in Sebald’s explanation of his own authorship as traumatic. 

Sebald articulated this nexus of authorship and historical trauma twice. In 2001, 

reflecting on postwar Germany’s consensus of silence, he recalled his first 

encounter with images from the Nazi camps: “Only when we were 17 were we 

confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it 

was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it.” 96 As I mentioned above, 

in the afterword to the lectures Sebald thematizes the impact of the war on his 

own imaginary, claiming that events he never experienced still cast a shadow over 

him “from which I shall never emerge.” When he reads books about the idyllic 

landscapes of his childhood, pictures start to merge “before my mind’s eye— 

paths through the fields, river meadows and mountain pastures mingling with 

images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely 

unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming 

home, perhaps because they represent the more powerful and dominant reality 

of my first years of life” (AL, 71). 

We have the choice of following Sebald’s hints and calling this authorship 

traumatic. Alternately, we could look at this language of living in two eras, two 

times, as another legitimatory gesture. For the language of unconscious generational 

transmission, the transmission of historical experience from one generation 

to the next provides the members of that second generation with an 

experience, if not knowledge, of the past that sets it apart from others. Moreover, 

in the context of historical trauma, this transmission includes a familiarity, if not 

knowledge, of death. 97 

The poet’s openness to the realm of the dead surfaces with Romanticism and 

resurfaces after the great wars. Both Rilke and Hans Erich Nossack claim this

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knowledge. 98 Let me quote Maurice Blanchot on Rilke’s conception of art as an 

Orphic space: “To live is always already to take leave, to be dismissed and to dismiss 

what is. But we can get ahead of this separation and, looking at it as though 

it were behind us, make of it the moment when, even now, we touch the abyss 

and accede to the deep of being.” 99 No one knows better than Sebald that this 

Heideggerian death metaphysics, this celebration of art as the expression of an 

ecstatic experience of death, 100 is deeply problematic since it has more than a 

passing affinity with the Nazis’ own cult of death, their own love affair with Wagner’s 

Götterdämmerung. 101 But as we have seen, Sebald claims the Romantic persona 

of an author who lives both in the present and the past, an author who is, 

like Michelet, “himself partly dead.” 102 “Air War and Literature” also participates 

in an ecstatic discovery of the beauty of death that makes it one of Sebald’s most 

conflicted texts—a text whose gaze uncomfortably mirrors both the cold gaze of 

Jünger’s fascist modernism and Rilke’s neo-Romantic gaze. 103 In his afterword 

Sebald poignantly expresses history’s vertiginous contingencies: “Such are the 

yawning chasms of history. Everything lies all jumbled up in them, and when you 

look down you are overcome by vertigo and dread” (AL, 74; my translation). But 

does he not also, however inadvertently, point to the unpredictable hazards of 

representation, revealing his horror at his own writing that comes so close, so 

dangerously close, to what it tries to keep at bay? 

Notes 

University of Michigan 

I would like to thank friends and colleagues who have read versions of this essay and were 

more than generous with their feedback: Russell Berman for discussions of Benjamin’s 

luckless angel and the often vexing politics of literary criticism; Yopie Prince, from whom 

I learned a lot about what Orpheus is looking at; Nancy Kaiser for her impatience with 

sloppy thought; colleagues at Toronto for a lively debate; and Judith Ryan, John Zilcosky, 

and Bianca Theisen for sharing their unpublished manuscripts. To my knowledge, Bianca 

wrote the first essay pursuing Sebald’s Benjaminian investment in seventeenth-century 

thought. As always, I am endebted to my colleague George Steinmetz and his obsession 

with the abyss of epistemologies. Finally, I would like to thank Vanessa Agnew and 

Jonathan Lamb for giving me this unique opportunity to work with Todd Presner, whose 

parallel reading of Sebald’s Hamburg text (and everything else he has written on Sebald) 

was immensely inspiring. 

In this essay I use the term “Gothic” in the broadest sense as referring to a sensibility that 

deals with the attraction of things that are horrifying, if not repulsive, and the illicit pleasures 

associated with it. On the genre of the Gothic, see Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 

Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point, 1998), and 

Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996).

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1. W. G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures” (hereafter, AL), in On the 

Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 

2003), 31. 

2. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson 

(London: Verso, 1986), 194. Adorno concludes with Benjamin’s reading of Paul 

Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). 

3. Reenactment is a strategy of “placing modern individuals in a simulation of past situations.” 

See Alexander Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: 

Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” in the present volume. As I argue, the 

desire underlying this strategy informs even the seemingly modernist texts by 

Sebald; as a matter of fact, it operates at the heart of both literary and historiographical 

writing. See also Guiseppina d’Oro, “Re-enactment and Radical Interpretation,” 

History and Theory 43 (May 2004): 198–208. 

4. Quoted in Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 277. 

5. When I walked through the exhibit, its location cast a shadow over an event that in 

itself was macabre enough. There was no way I could look at these bodies without 

the intervention of images that I share with many Germans, Jewish or non-Jewish. 

6. It makes the gaze of the spectator more than the interested yet distanced gaze of 

someone intrigued by the complexities of human anatomy. For an insightful discussion 

of von Hagen’s BodyWorld and the tradition of gazing at dead bodies, see 

Franz Josef Wetz, “Totenruhe, Leichenwürde und die Macht des Blicks,” in Schöne 

neue Körperwelten: Der Streit um die Ausstellung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 

88–134. 

7. Wolfgang Hilbig, Alte Abdeckerei (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1990), 82–83. See also 

Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade: “We few survivors / walk over a quivering bog of corpses / 

always under our feet / every step we take / rotted bones ashes matted hair” (Peter 

Weiss, Marat/Sade, The Investigation, and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, ed. 

Robert Cohen (New York: Continuum, 1998), 62. Weiss continued to revise his play 

while working on The Investigation (1965) and his reflections on Dante’s Divina 

Comedia. We encounter the Orpheus/Dante plot in two of the novels Sebald discusses 

in “Air War and Literature”: Herman Kasack’s Stadt hinter dem Strom (1949) 

and Peter de Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedrale (1983). The myth also structures Gerhard 

Richter’s so-called RAF Cycle, October 18, 1977. On this topic, see my reading 

of the cycle in Julia Hell and Johanes von Moltke, “Unification Effects: Imaginary 

Landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” forthcoming in Germanic Review, special issue 

on The Cultural Logics of the Berlin Republic, ed. Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke. 

8. This discourse is a version of the so-called Sonderweg thesis, that is, the claim that 

after the failure of the democratic revolution of 1848, Germany’s political development 

inexorably veered in an authoritarian, if not murderous, direction. For immediate 

postwar accounts from diverging political perspectives, see Alexander Abusch, 

Der deutsche Irrweg (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1960 [originally published in 1949]), 

and Friedrich Meineke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus 

Verlag, 1946).

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9. On Benjamin and Klee’s drawing (which Benjamin owned), see Gershom Sholem, 

Walter Benjamin und sein Engel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983). 

10. The rest of the passage reads: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive 

a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon 

wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the 

dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; 

it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close 

them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, 

while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call 

progress.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” in Illuminations, 

trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 258. 

11. Heiner Müller, Germania (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 99. Müller composed his 

“Luckless Angel” in the wake of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising (1956). 

12. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse 

and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8–9. 

13. Asad Latif, quoted in Yves de Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum: Terrorist Structures 

in the Eyes of Walter Benjamin, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Rilke, and Slavoj _i_ek,” 

Modern Theology 19, no.4 (October 2003): 512. 

14. See also Otto Karl Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or The Transfiguration 

of the Revolutionary into the Historian,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22 (1996). 

15. See Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory 

(London: Routledge, 2000), 16–24. For a scathing reading of the affinity 

between left- and right-wing thought in the 1930s, see Richard Wolin, The Seduction 

of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism From Nietzsche to Poststructuralism 

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). We find traces of this affinity in 

Slavoj _i_ek’s recent advocacy of redemptive revolutionary violence, an odd mixture 

of Slovenian surrealism and good old-fashioned Stalinist Leninism, in his “Afterword: 

Lenin’s Choice,” in Revolution at The Gates: _i_ek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings 

(London: Verso, 2004), especially the section “Redemptive Violence,” 250–63. 

16. Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum,” 515. 

17. Ibid. The reference here is to Jacobin terror. 

18. Quoted in Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, 

Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 122. Not 

interested in the actual political implications of the figure, Hanssen sees Benjamin’s 

“disturbing call for violence” and his “satanic angel” (122) tempered by the “ardent 

belief in the redemptive power of language” (126). 

19. Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum,” 515. Maesseneer is mainly concerned with the 

aftereffects of Benjamin’s problematic notion of politics in contemporary cultural 

theory. While less concerned with the terrorist potential of Benjamin’s angel, Russell 

Berman also argues for the need to rethink “the privileged knowledge” of Benjamin’s 

angel, that is, the truth of permanent catastrophe. In 1940, this cultural pessimism 

makes sense; according to Berman, what is problematic is the contemporary reception 

of Benjamin and its attraction to the angel’s “image of helplessness.” Russell 

Berman, “Literature and Catastrophe in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg,” unpublished 

paper delivered at the German Studies Association, 2002. I fully agree with this

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critique, but not with Berman’s conclusion that renouncing the political powerlessness 

of this kind of Benjaminian criticism ought to translate into unconditional support 

for the war against Iraq. That is a bit of a leap. 

20. It is useful to compare the original and translations. In the German original: “Kluges 

Blick auf seine zerstörte Heimatstadt ist . . . auch der entsetzenstarre Blick des Engels 

der Geschichte” (Luftkrieg und Literatur [Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2001], 73; cited 

in this text as LL). In the English translation: “For all of Kluge’s intellectual steadfastness, 

he looks at the destruction of his hometown with the horrified fixity of Walter 

Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’” (AL, 67). The original formulation in Benjamin, 

“Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind aufgespannt” 

(Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980], 255), 

translated into English as: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are 

spread” (Illuminations, 257). The added—affective—dimension of “horror” plays a 

crucial role in my reading of Sebald’s evocation of the angel at the end of his lectures. 

21. On Sebald’s rewriting of Kluge, see Andreas Huyssen, “On Rewritings and New 

Beginnings: W. G. Sebald and the Literature about the Luftkrieg,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft 

und Lingustik 31, no. 124 (2001): 83–84. Huyssen critically discusses 

Sebald’s natural history as metaphysical, a view that I share. 

22. In Walter Benjamin’s book on ruination we also find a passage about Europe being 

covered with corpses that sounds rather familiar; see Hallmann’s “Leich-Reden,” in 

Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2004), 207. 

Sebald’s concept is derived from Benjamin, Adorno, baroque philosophies of history, 

and perhaps also from evolutionary theory (on this topic, see Bianca Theisen, 

“A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn,” forthcoming 

in PMLA). 

23. Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 123. 

24. See Benjamin’s reflections on the creative power of destruction in Hanssen’s Walter 

Benjamin’s Other History, 120. 

25. Gerard Raulet, quoted in Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum,” 514. 

26. For an argument in favor of rethinking German history after 1989 outside of this catastrophic 

model, see Michael Geyer, “Germany, or The Twentieth Century as History,” 

South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1997), special issue on German 

Dis-Continuities, ed. Martin Morris, 663–702. For a decidedly optimistic reading of 

the history of the European left, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the 

Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000). 

27. In his discussion of “Air War and Literature” as traumatic repetition, a “literary version 

of transgenerational traumatization,” Andreas Huyssen understands the evocation 

of the angel as Sebald’s attempt to lend his “metaphysics of nature” more 

legitimacy (Huyssen, “On Rewritings and New Beginnings,” 84). Although I agree 

with Huyssen on this point, I think Benjamin’s icon has a more central function in 

Sebald’s text. 

28. This is linked, of course, to Sebald’s philosophical project, the story of the natural 

history of destruction. On the particular power of “images of horror,” see “Air War 

and Literature,” 92. He is aware of the risk of voyeurism: “To this day, the concern 

with the real scenes of horror still has an aura of the forbidden about it, even of

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voyeurism, something that these notes of mine have not entirely been able to avoid. I was 

not surprised when a teacher in Detmold told me, a little while ago, that as a boy in 

the immediate postwar years he quite often saw photographs of the corpses lying in 

the streets after the firestorm brought out from under the counter of a Hamburg secondhand 

bookshop, to be fingered and examined in a way usually reserved for 

pornography” (AL, 98; my italics). On the topic of voyeurism, see my “Eyes Wide 

Shut, or German Post-Holocaust Authorship,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 

2003): 9–36. 

29. I use Pierre Macherey’s notions of political-philosophical and aesthetic project as a 

way to get to the contradictions that characterize, if not produce, Sebald’s text. To 

recall Macherey’s seminal antihistoricist intervention: (literary) texts are not (ideological) 

reflections; they “work” with (and on) ideological formations. It is on the 

level of formal inconsistencies that this work becomes readable as a tension between 

ideology and the text’s particular aesthetic project. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of 

Literary Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). 

30. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 171–73. “Let me not 

look,” pleads Elizabeth Costello when she arrives at the vivid evocation of the execution 

of Stauffenberg and his coconspirators in a fellow writer’s book. Readers 

familiar with German literature will think of the last part of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics 

of Resistance and the clinically detailed scenes of the Plötzensee executions. 

31. On the empiricist connection between vision and knowledge and its critique in 

twentieth-century philosophy, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of 

Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1993). 

32. Thanks to Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington: 

University of Indiana Press, 1996), and Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: 

Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger 

Edition, 2001), we know more about the Allies’ visual reeducation, in particular the 

strategies of confrontation. What the study of (literary and nonliterary) texts about 

these moments of confrontation with photographic or filmic material tells us is that 

(1) studies of Germany’s visual archive need to be complemented by a study of individual 

acts of looking; and (2) acts of looking are inherently risky and cannot be 

rescribed, neither by allied regulations nor by the attempt to interiorize these regulations. 

The most instructive example in this regard is Martin Walser, who has thematized 

the act of looking at images of atrocities starting with his 1965 essay “Unser 

Auschwitz.” The artist who most provocatively addressed the issue is Gerhard 

Richter. Richter juxtaposed iconic photographs from camps liberated by the allies 

with sexually explicit stills from pornographic movies (see his Atlas [New York: 

D.A.P., 1997]). Richter’s intervention was directed against the complacent consumer 

culture of Germany’s economic miracle (and as such part of Richter’s “capitalist 

realism”). These provocative images “force viewers to ask uncomfortable 

questions of themselves” (James E. Young, “Foreword: Looking into the Mirror of 

Evil,” in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt [New York: 

Jewish Museum, 2001], xvii); yet they also thematize the anxiety of looking. The full 

extent of this problematic becomes clear only once we connect the montage of pho-

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tographs in Atlas to the erotic portraits that Richter painted in the mid-1960s. The 

series of paintings ends with The Student (1967); with this painting the viewer faces 

a naked model whose legs are spread wide and whose gaze meets that of the 

beholder, or rather looks at the beholder in the act of looking. 

33. See the beginning of Sebald’s Vertigo; on this “vertiginous” passage and Sebald’s neo- 

Romantic reflections on the loss of the memory images and the importance of imageideas, 

see James Chandler, “About Loss: W. G. Sebald’s Romantic Art of memory,” 

South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (2003): 243–47. 

34. For a more extensive discussions of the tensions of this poetics, see my “Eyes Wide 

Shut.” 

35. This is Sebald’s version of Ranke’s original statement, who wrote that the task of history 

is “merely to show what really happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Quoted in 

Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical 

Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 

1968), 67. 

36. The quote is from Hans Erich Nossack’s “Der Untergang,” in his Interview mit dem 

Tode (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966). 

37. In the tradition of Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, Siegfried Kracauer, Susan Sontag, 

and others, Sebald associates photography and death. In his essay “Wie Tag und 

Nacht—Über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps,” Sebald juxtaposes art as the medium that 

thematizes death to photography as the medium addicted to death. In W. G. Sebald, 

Logis in einem Landhaus (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2000), 178. His collaborative 

project with Jan Peter Tripp then thematizes his obsession, vision itself (W. G. 

Sebald, Unerzählt [Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2003]). 

38. For the most extensive discussion of photography in Sebald so far, see Stefanie Harris, 

“The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” 

German Quarterly 74, no.4 (2001): 379–91. 

39. Mark Salber Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition 

from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,” PMLA 118, no.3 (2003): 

439. 

40. Historian Henry Home, Lord Kames, quoted in Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness,” 

445. 

41. This is the title of one of Sebald’s essays (on Hans Erich Nossack and Alexander 

Kluge), reprinted in W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich: Carl 

Hanser Verlag, 2004), 69–100. 

42. Todd Presner, “‘What an Artificial and Synoptic View Reveals’: Extreme History and 

the Modernism of W. G. Sebald’s Realism,” 000 in the present volume. 

43. Hayden White, The Modernist Event,” in his Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis 

Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86. Alternately, we 

could of course read this passage from the Derridean perspective underlying 

Eduardo Cadava’s theses on photography and history as the self-reflexive construction 

of history after the event—that is, if we wanted to and were not too tired of the 

“Leerlauf” of the deconstructive machinery. See Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses 

on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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44. Todd Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals,’” 000. 

45. Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” 257. 

46. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 255. One might even translate the 

phrase as “ripped open.” 

47. As Panofsky argued in his reading of Dürer’s Melencolia, her gaze is that of the genius, 

both analytical and withdrawn, oscillating between “abject despondency and divine 

elatedness.” See Beatrice Hanssen, “Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Panofsky, 

Warburg),” in Benjamin’s Ghosts, ed. Gerhard Richter, 179. 

48. The translation is modified. In the original, Sebald uses “schmachvolle Bilder,” a 

term that carries the connotations of humiliation and shame, a language close to that 

of Martin Walser; see Luftkrieg und Literatur, 104. 


50. Benjamin quoting Ranke, ibid. In thesis VII, Benjamin diagnoses a fundamental 

melancholia at the heart of the historicist caused by his despair “of grasping and 

holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly.” In Benjamin’s reading this 

“acedia” is overdetermined: at the root of the despair experienced by “historians who 

wish to relive an era” is the “disavowed” knowledge that they are identifying with 

history’s “victor” (“Theses on the Concept of History,” 256). 

51. Ariella Azoulay, Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy 

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 98. 

52. Cadava, Words of Light, 72–73; on Benjamin’s photographic language and analogies 

to photographs and the dialectician’s photographic gaze, see quote on p. 4: “The tradition 

of bourgeois society may be compared to a camera. The bourgeois scholar 

peers into it like the amateur who enjoys the colorful images in the viewfinder. The 

materialist dialectician operates with it. His job is to set a focus [feststellen]. He may 

opt for a smaller or wider angle, for harsher political or softer historical lighting— 

but he finally adjusts the shutter and shoots. Once he has carried off the photographic 

plate—the image of the object as it has entered social tradition—the concept 

assumes its rights and develops it. For the plate can only offer a negative. It is the 

product of an apparatus that substitutes light for shade, shade for light. Nothing 

would be more inappropriate than for the image formed in this way to claim finality 

for itself.” 

53. See Hanssen, “Portrait of Melancholy,” 173–74, on cultural history as “an archive of 

images rendered legible by the historian.” See also Judith Ryan’s reading of Sebald’s 

Austerlitz as “haunted” by surrealism, in particular the closeness between Benjamin’s 

analysis of the photographic nature of the surrealist image. Judith Ryan, “Fulgurations: 

Sebald and Surrealism,” unpublished manuscript. 

54. I use “photographic” not in the referential sense, i.e., the belief that clings so tenaciously 

to the medium that the photograph “captures” the object, is an actual emanation 

of it. 


56. Roland Barthes, Michelet, quoted in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination 

in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1979), 159.

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57. Ibid. 

58. Barthes, Michelet, 83. Michelet’s attention to the dead is a form of identification; 

according to Barthes, Michelet enters into “a sort of primitive communion with the 

dead” based on a “ceremonial approach,” a form of “exorcism”: “Death becomes the 

necessary and sufficient object of the historian’s life. Michelet devours the dead” 

(83). 

59. Michelet’s ultimate goal was to “make the silences of history speak.” White discusses 

two figures central to Michelet, the figure of Oedipus and that of Prometheus. The 

historian as Oedipus is the one who will solve the deads’ riddle, that is, who will 

explain to them retrospectively what never made sense to them, their own words 

and their own actions. The historian as Prometheus will melt the ice in which their 

voices have been frozen so that the dead will be able to speak again (White, Metahistory, 

159 and 158). This commitment to have the voices of the forgotten heard again 

resurfaces in E. P. Thompson as does the problem implicit in Michelet: does the historian 

speak about them, or does she let them speak (see White, Metahistory, 158)? 

Thanks to Geoff Eley, who directed me to Thompson’s The Making of the English 

Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) and its wonderful resurrectional 

prose: “Only the successful are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and 

the losers themselves are forgotten. I am seeeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the 

Luddite cropper . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). 

60. On this topic, see Ted Underwood, “Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife,” PMLA 

117, no. 2 (March 2002): 237–51. 

61. Michelet imagines himself among the women and children: “From the priest to the 

king, from the Inquisition to the Bastille, the road is straight but long. Holy, holy revolution, 

how slowly dost thou come!—I who have been waiting for thee for a thousand 

years in the furrows of the Middle Ages,—what! must I wait still longer?—Oh! 

how slowly times passes! Oh! how I have counted the hours! Wilt thou never 

arrive?” Quoted in White, Metahistory, 156. 

62. Ibid., 149. 

63. Ibid., 152. 

64. Michelet talks about himself as someone “partly dead,” writing in “the most awful 

circumstances that can attend human life, between death and the grave,—when the 

survivor, himself partly dead, has been sitting in judgment between two worlds” 

(ibid., 153). 

65. Ibid., 159 and 158; for full quote, see Barthes, Michelet, 102. 

66. Quoted in White, Metahistory, 159; see also Barthes, Michelet, 82. 

67. “Precious urn of forgotten times, the priests of history carry it and transmit it with 

what piety, what tender care! . . . as they might carry the ashes of their father or their 

son. Their son? But is it not themselves?” Quoted in White, Metahistory, 159. 

68. Ibid., 157. 

69. Ibid., 154, 149. 

70. Immersion as suffering, if not death: “He who through the medium of history has 

participated in that long torture, will never recover from it; whatever may happen, 

he will be sad; the sun, the joy of the world will never afford him comfort; he has 

lived too long in sorrow and in darkness, and my very heart bled in contemplating

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the long resignation, the meekness, the patience, and the efforts of humanity to love 

that world of hate and malediction under which it was crushed” (ibid., 154). Or in 

Barthes’s words: Michelet “dies of history the way one dies—or rather the way one 

does not die—of love” (Barthes, Michelet, 19). This Romantic claim to have suffered 

through history—and the claim to have a special affinity to the dead, to be one of 

them—is alive in Sebald, a point I will return to in my conclusion. 

71. Nowhere is this more forcefully expressed than in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s preface to 

his Last Days of Pompeii (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898; originally published in 1834): 

“On visiting those disinterested remains of an ancient city which . . . attract the traveler 

to the neighborhood of Naples; on viewing, still fresh and vivid, the houses, the 

streets, the temples, the theatres of a place existing in the haughtiest age of the Roman 

Empire,—it was not unnatural, perhaps, that a writer who had before labored, however 

unworthily, in the art to revive and to create, should feel a keen desire to people 

once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the 

bones which were yet spared to his survey, to traverse the gulf of eighteen centuries 

and to wake to a second existence the City of the Dead! And the reader will easily 

imagine how sensibly this desire grew upon one whose task was undertaken in the 

immediate neighborhood of Pompeii.” Historian and novelist Bulwer Lytton writes 

that his goal is to “raise scholarship to the creative, not bow the creative to the scholastic.” 

He strives to “breathe the breath of life into his creatures” and to create characters 

who “‘live and move’ before the eyes of the reader” (pp. vii and xi; my italics). 

72. Sigmund Freud, “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva” (Kobenhaven: 

Integer Green 86), 152. Writing about the two wishes that produce this dream, 

Freud observes: “This was the wish, comprehensible to every archaologist, to have 

been an eyewitness to that catastrophe of 79” (283–304). Freud quotes from the 

dream: “As he stood thus on the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple, he suddenly 

saw Gradiva a short distance in front of him” (152). Freud quotes Jensen on 

the moment when this wish is fullfilled: “[T]here stirs in him the ability to transport 

himself back into the buried life, but not with the aid of science. ‘What it taught was 

a lifeless, archeological view and what came from its mouth was a dead philosophical 

language. These helped in no way to a comprehension with soul, mind, and 

heart, as the saying is, but he who possessed a desire for that, had to stand alone here, 

the only living person in the hot noonday silence, among the remains of the past, in 

order not to see with physical eyes nor hear with corporeal ears. Then the dead 

awoke, and Pompeii began to live again’” (158). 

73. Freud, “Delusion and Dream,” 283–84. 

74. Freud’s essay deals with the work of repression, the repressed childhood love that 

reemerges in the encounter with the childhood friend in Pompeii, whom the archeologist 

takes for Gradiva. On Freud’s reading of Gradiva, see Peter L. Rudnytsky, 

“Freud’s Pompeian Fantasy,” in Reading Freud’s Readings, eds. Sander Gilman, Jutta 

Birmele, Jay Geller, and Valerie D. Greenberg (New York: New York University Press, 

1994), 211–31; Jacques Derrida reads the text as an allegory of the historian’s search 

for the ever elusive trace of the past, the original, real, and authentic remnant of a 

vanished past. See his Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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75. On this topic, see Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 

ed. Jacques Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1981), and Kaja Silverman’s discussion 

of gaze and look in her Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). 

76. In my “Eyes Wide Shut,” I discussed this desire within the framework of trauma theory; 

I modify this reading at the end of the present article. 

77. On Benjamin’s aesthetics of transience, see Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 

66–81. 

78. The contradictory logics of “travel” in this text are thus different from what John Zilcosky 

finds in Sebald’s other narratives, namely that “disorientation never leads to 

new discoveries, only to a series of uncanny, intertextual returns.” See John Zilcosky, 

“Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost,” in Sebald, eds. J. J. 

Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 

79. See Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 119; on the destructive creativity in 

Benjamin, see p. 120. 

80. Yopie Prince pointed out in a discussion that we also find traces of the photographic 

gaze in Orpheus’s backward glance, this “snapshot” capturing what is in the process 

of disappearing. 

81. In Virgil’s Georgics, Eurydice fades from view when, seized by “sudden madness,” 

Orpheus turns to look back at her. Virgil represents the fateful moment from Eurydice’s 

perspective, who laments not only the lovers’ ruin but articulates her (second) 

death as a failing of her sight: “See, once again,” she addresses Orpheus, “The cruel 

fates are calling me back and darkness / Falls on my swimming eyes.” The perspective 

then changes to Orpheus’s: “She finished, and suddenly / Out of his sight, like 

smoke into thin air, / Vanished away.” The verse continues: “unable any more / to see 

him as he vainly grasped at shadows / With so much more to say” (Virgil, The Georgics, 

trans. L. P. Wilkinson [London: Penguin Books, 1982], 141). 

82. See Hans Erich Nossack, “Orpheus und . . . ,” in his Interview mit dem Tode (Frankfurt: 

Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 257 (my translation). Nossack admired Jean 

Cocteau’s Orphée, which connects the ruined urban landscapes of World War II and 

the Orphic myth; see Nossack, Geben Sie bald wieder ein Lebenszeichen. Briefwechsel 

1943–1956, ed. Gabriele Söhling (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 488. 

83. In volume one of his marvelous Buch der Könige, Orpheus und Eurydice (Frankfurt: 

Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1991), Klaus Theweleit discusses this Orphic theme with 

respect to Gottfried Benn’s postwar writing. 

84. Nossack, “Der Untergang,” 253. Nossack continues: “It was like a picture on an old 

cup. Earlier, they would not have hesitated to add the inscription: bloom and decay.” 

85. There are other such passages that conjure up beautiful images, only to take them 

back. See, for instance, Max Frisch, Jetzt ist Sehenszeit: Briefe, Notate, Dokumente 

1943–1963, ed. Julian Schütt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), or Peter de 

Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg. Dezember 1945,” in In Deutschland unterwegs, ed. Klaus 

R. Scherpe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 301–06. 

86. My translation; Nossack, “Orpheus und . . . ,” 257. 

87. Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 122. 

88. The juxtaposition of von Hagen’s BodyWorld and Sebald’s “Air War and Literature” 

really is less incongruous than it might seem at first glance. Both artists take us for a

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walk among the dead, though using different styles: in Hagen’s exhibit we move 

among beautifully displayed cadavers whose aesthetics of lurid kitsch obeys the 

laws of postindustrial mass culture, while Sebald’s street scene confronts us with the 

austere sobriety of high modernism, albeit precariously, as we have seen. Both artists 

touch upon questions of post-fascist German culture: what can be made visible and 

what ought to remain veiled, what can be represented and how. The juxtaposition 

of BodyWorld and Sebald’s Hamburg text merely pushes into the foreground Sebald’s 

fundamental problem, that is, that his documentary aesthetics and its sober gaze are 

shadowed by a Gothic imaginary that is concerned with the link between art and 

death and forbidden pleasures. 

89. Sebald’s text guides our reading of a photograph that like many “photographs of 

agony,” lacks context and needs narrative: “Harrowing photographs do not 

inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to 

understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: 

they haunt us.” See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, 

Straus and Giroux, 2003), 89; see also John Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” in his 

Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 282. 

90. There is no trace of the Orpheus or Dante plot in Sebald’s Hamburg passage, but we 

do find this plot in Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle (1989; Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse 

[New York: New Directions, 2000]). In this earlier novel the narrator keeps losing 

his vision as he faints repeatedly, a first hint that Sebald works with another version 

of the Orpheus plot, Dante’s Divina Comedia. For doesn’t Dante faint every time the 

suffering he witnesses overwhelms him? The narrator’s moments of blindness in 

Sebald’s texts are symptomatic of a writing that wants to write with dying eyes. 

91. See Peter Fritzsche, “How Modernity Narrates Nostalgia,” in The Work of Memory, 

eds. Peter Fritzsche and Alan Confino (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 

66ff. 

92. Ruins have a particular affinity to the problem of the visual, or visibility: their dialectic 

of absence and presence, of what remains and what once was there, is also a 

dialectic of the visible and invisible, of what can be seen and what needs to be deciphered, 

imagined, made visible again. 

93. See James Chandler, “About Loss: W. G. Sebald’s Romantic Art of Memory,” South 

Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (2003): 242. 

94. Mark Anderson addresses one level of this problematic, the question of how to “signal 

solidarity with the victims of Nazi genocide without denying one’s own German 

origins” in his “The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald,” October 106 (Fall 2003): 

105. 

95. This is how I read Sebald’s discussion of the “unremittingly somber” image of a 

woman in death throes in Heinrich Böll’s Der Engel schwieg (The Angel Was Silent, 

1992) image. On the one hand, these are reflections about the disavowal of defeat: 

“The dark, stickily clotting blood described in these pages . . . symbolizes . . . the 

bleak depression . . . to which Germans might have been expected to succumb in 

view of such a horrific end” (AL, 10–11); on the other hand, it is a performance of 

destruction, a text that obeys a desire to destroy. This passage is comparable to the 

baroque apocalypse at the end of Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei, a celebration of Germania’s

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demise (100ff.). It is in this context of apocalyptic fantasy that the destructive potential 

of Benjamin’s angel reappears in Sebald’s writing. 

96. W. G. Sebald and Maya Jaggi, “The Last Word,” The Guardian, December 21, 2001; 

my emphasis. 

97. For a model of generational transmission that does not work with notions of trauma, 

see, for instance, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Notes on the Phantom: A 

Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” in their The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and 

trans. Nicholas T. Rand, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 

171–76; for the traumatic model, see, for instance, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: 

Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1996). 

98. On Hans Erich Nossack’s construction of authorship in ruins, see my “The Death of 

the Author: Nossack’s Travels through Germany’s Ruined Cities,” in Writing Travel, 

eds. John Zilcosky and Bianca Theissen, forthcoming. 

99. Maurice Blanchot, “Rilke and Death’s Demand,” in his The Space of Literature, trans. 

Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 141. 

100. Ibid., 151: “This disinterested gaze, which has no future and seems to come from the 

heart of death, this look to which ‘all things give themselves at once more distantly 

and more truly,’ is the gaze of the mystical Duino experience, but it is also the gaze 

of ‘art.’ And it is correct to say that the artist’s experience is an ecstatic experience and 

that it is, like the Duino experience, an experience of death. To see properly is essentially 

to die. It is to introduce into sight the turning back again which is ecstasy and 

which is death.” For a scathing comment on Blanchot’s philosophy and aesthetics as 

collaborationist, see Richard Wollin, “Maurice Blanchot: The Use and Abuse of 

Silence,” in his The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from 

Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 

187–219. I find Wolin’s critique utterly convincing, but Blanchot’s reading of Rilke 

is therefore no less valid. 

101. See Sebald’s discussion of Nazi culture as realization of expressionism’s “myth of 

decline and destruction” (AL, 97) and Thomas Mann’s critique of an “art that was 

increasingly inclined to take an apocalyptic view of the world” (44). 

102. Quoted in White, Metahistory, 153. 

103. Just how intense the tensions between political-philosophical and aesthetic project 

in Sebald’s writing are comes to the fore if we compare him to Ernst Jünger’s aesthetics 

without ethics; for the similarities between the two are not insignificant. As 

Russell Berman argues, Jünger opposes the soldier’s/worker’s “clarity of vision” to 

the “[e]yes trapped in the darkness of bourgeois interiority.” Referring to a portrayal 

of the “new man” in Jünger’s Arbeiter (whose “gaze is steady and fixed, trained on 

objects moving at high velocities”), Berman discusses Jünger’s attack on the “tearful 

eyes” of bourgeois interiority (and on individual identity) as an essential element of 

his fascist modernism. This opposition yields an incongruous text: a modernism 

driven by the “imaginary desire to escape writing.” As we have seen, we find in 

Sebald Jünger’s “steady gaze” (at the postwar world and at the carnage of war), and 

we do find in Sebald’s text an imaginary dimension that tries to “escape writing.” 

However, in contrast to Jünger, the text maintains a tension between symbolic and

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imaginary. Similarly, the transformation of the “world into a visual object” is one of 

Sebald’s projects, but only one. Finally, both authors share the desire to “revivify the 

anonymous cadavers of the war.” While in Jünger, “[e]kphrastic writing becomes an 

exchange, a sacrifice or atonement as payment for the absent body,” in Sebald 

descriptive writing is linked to a desire for presence. Nevertheless, as I argued above, 

Sebald’s texts share Jünger’s attraction to death and destruction, both on the level of 

Sebald’s philosophy and on the level of his aesthetic project. See Russell Berman, 

“Written Right across Their Faces: Leni Riefenstahl, Ernst Jünger, and Fascist Modernism,” 

in his Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and The Legacy of the 

Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 110, 115, and 

114.

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