W.G. Sebald’s Last Speech

On November 17, 2001 the writer W.G.Sebald spoke on the occasion of the official opening of the  Literaturhaus in Stuttgart.  A translation of the speech is published in this week’s The New Yorker magazine: An Attempt at Restitution: A memory of a German city.  Unfortunately, the piece is not available on the magazine’s Web site.  Also, I have not been able to locate the original German (any thought?).  The speech is quite remarkable, if you can find it.  Sebald had really found his great theme: the destruction of Germany in the war. Memories of the war and the bombing weigh heaviiy on his memory of his first encounter with the city of Stuttgart.  Sebald then evokes Friedrich Hölderlin, whose name is often associated with Stuttgart.  Like Hölderlin, Sebald often felt like a stranger in his own country, and he quotes from Hölderlin’s great poem Stuttgart: "Receive me kindly, stranger that I am."  (Glückliches Stuttgart, nimm freundlich den Fremdling mir auf!)

Sebald then connects the fate of Suttgart with the French town of Tulle, which Hölderlin passed through on his travels on foot from Stuttgart to Bordeaux.  Tulle was the site of one of the worst atrocities of the German occupation of France in World War II: on one day in 1944 the SS executed 99 men of all ages from the town in retribution for some action of the Resistance.  In light of such horror, Sebald asks, what is literature good for?

So
what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asks himself, to fare like the
thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love but
were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently
betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild
confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost
and drought and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of
death presented by the poet in these lines both overshadowed and illuminated,
however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done. There
are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an
attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and
above scholarship.

Just three weeks after delivering this speech, Sebald died tragically in London.