Diary: W. G. Sebald on Literature after Fascism

Reckoning with a notion of “home” that demands abolishing all dissent and nuance, elevating narrow-mindedness to a universal principle

Wolkenstudie (ca. 1840), by Adalbert Stifter. Wien Museum

The singular, often traumatic, evolution of Austria—from the vastness of the Habsburg Empire to a diminutive Alpine republic, via the Anschluß by Nazi Germany to its refounding in the years after the war—means that concepts such as Heimat, Provinz, Grenzland, Ausland, Fremde, and Exil—home/land, provinces, borderland, abroad, foreignness, and exile—occupy a strikingly prominent position in the Austrian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is room for the view that the preoccupation with the idea of Heimat is—despite all the irruptions of history—one of the constant features of that otherwise rather indefinable entity which is Austrian literature.

The concept of Heimat is a relatively recent one. The more difficult it became to remain in the home country, with individuals and entire social groups finding themselves forced to turn their back on their country of origin and to emigrate, the greater the currency the term Heimat acquired. Thus, as is often the case, the concept stands in an inverse relationship to that to which it refers: the more Heimat is talked about, the less it exists in reality. As might be demonstrated anywhere in the works of Adelbert Stifter,* it is clear that mankind’s relationship to its original home is fractured from the very moment it becomes a theme in literature. Those who attempted to reclaim Stifter as a Heimatschriftsteller (local or provincial writer) overlooked the extent to which, for him, the Heimat had already become unheimlich: a strange, uncanny, even inhospitable place.

For writers of Jewish provenance, the theme of Heimat was of paramount importance during the whole period of assimilation and westward migration. As the writings of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos show, at the latest from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, for those who had left the confines of the ghetto the question presented itself as to whether, arriving in Vienna, they had finally come home, or whether they had in fact forsaken their one true Heimat, the shtetl. In this respect, the nineteenth-century German-language tales from the ghetto are full of ambivalence; nor does the literature of the fin de siècle offer any solutions. What becomes ever more apparent, from Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg to Hermann Broch and Joseph Roth, is a complex illusionism, fully conscious of its own untenability, which, while still developing the idea of a home country (Heimatland), was at one and the same time a rehearsal for exile.