Trip to Norwich for the launch of W.G Sebald’s Shadows of Reality

Royal Arcade Norwich

Writing starts with a photograph, W.G Sebald said on a German TV arts magazine programme about the publication of his book The Emigrants. This clip was played under the looming 15th Century timbered roof of the Dragon Hall in Norwich on Wednesday at the launch of Shadows of Reality – A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials
(Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr). The event also marked what would have been Sebald’s 80th birthday, in the city where he worked for much of his life and made his home. I decided to make the trip to Norwich to attend the event, meeting a friend there who had been taught German literature by ‘Max’ Sebald at UEA in the 1980’s. My walk from the station to meet Duncan passed through the Art Nouveau Royal Arcade, built in 1899. Such arcades are intimately connected with strolling poets, flâneurs, through an association with Baudelaire and described at length by German philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. Sebald was himself a notable strolling poet and would have passed through the Royal Arcade on many occasions.

Swan Yard Norwich
Swan Yard

Duncan and I looped round the narrow medieval streets of Norwich in the hours before the event at the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall. Along with a group of Sebald’s former students, Duncan had reprised the Austerlitz walk from Liverpool Street to Alderney Road in Stepney that I’d filmed with artist Bob and Roberta Smith in 2019 using notes provided by Iain Sinclair, who’d been taken on the walk by poet Stephen Watts. It was Watts who’d led W.G Sebald on those original Austerlitz research walks through the East End. The UEA alumni walk of Max’s former students was carried out on the 18th May 2024, the day that would’ve been Sebald’s 80th birthday. There’s an account of the walk on the University of East Anglia website, where W.G Sebald taught for thirty years.

The Music House, King Street, Norwich
The Music House, King Street, Norwich

With still some time to kill we admired the exterior of the Music House in King Street, the oldest house in Norwich, built in the 12th Century.

Shadows of Reality event
W.G Sebald Shadows of Reality event, Norwich
W.G Sebald Shadows of Reality event, Norwich

As a writer of unclassifiable prose, Sebald drew heavily on photographic images and was notable for embedding them within the text in intriguing ways. The Shadows of Reality book collects Sebald’s photographic materials together into a single catalogue with commentary and presented in chronological order. Friends and former colleagues read from Sebald’s works, often in German – the language Sebald wrote in. The conclusion to the evening was its most impactful. An audio recording of W.G Sebald reading from the Emigrants in English at an event at UEA in the 90s that reverberated around the packed medieval hall. It was a poignant and magical event.

W.G. SEBALD: Shadows of Reality – is published by Boiler House Press

The event took place on 12th June 2024

Landscape and the transformation of reality

Patrick Keiller London book
Abbey Creek West Ham p.10-11 – near where Patrick Keiller taught at North East London Polytechnic 1983-92

Patrick Keiller, Mark Fisher, W.G. Sebald and Will Self on the possibilities created by engagement with the landscape

I came across an edited extract of the following quote from Patrick Keiller in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. This is the full passage from Keiller’s essay Landscape and cinematography published in cultural geographies 16 in 2009:
“I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality. I recently came across a description, in Kitty Hauser’s Bloody old Britain, of O.G.S. Crawford’s photography: ‘Like photographers of the New Objectivity, clarity was his goal. Like them, he favoured stark contrasts, with no blurring or mistiness. His focus, like theirs, was on the object or the scene in front of him, which it was his aim to illuminate as clearly as he could. [. . .] It was commitment that lit up his photographs [. . .] Such photographs suggest a love of the world that was almost mystical in its intensity.’ I had forgotten that photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one, even if only by improving the quality of the light.”

Patrick Keiller - The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet

Elsewhere in the essay, Keiller cites Fredric Jameson. ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the break-down of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’ (The seeds of time, 1996). Mark Fisher also drew on Jameson’s statement for the animating thesis of his book Capitalist Realism, published in the same year as Keiller’s essay, 2009. Fisher identified Capitalist Realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” He argued that capitalist realism could only be overcome through the development of a new collective imagination, one that is capable of envisioning and creating alternatives to the current system. His proposed “politics of possibility” would open up new avenues for collective action and social transformation. Much like Keiller had seen the possibility of transforming reality through landscape film-making.

St George's Lutheran Church London E1
St George’s Lutheran Church

The Jameson quote was paraphrased by the author Will Self in a talk he gave the other night (20th December 2022) at St George’s German Lutheran Church in Whitechapel, entitled: The Ghost of Future Past – WG Sebald and the Trauma of Modernity. In his talk Self noted how Sebald was far more concerned with the looming ecological catastrophe and environmental breakdown than he is given credit for. He recounts a chance encounter he had with Sebald on Dunwich Heath in 1992 while he was living in the area writing his novel Great Apes. Self was ‘knuckle-walking’ like a chimp as research for the book when he came across Sebald’s path. Sebald was embarked on a walk along the Suffolk coast for his seminal work, The Rings of Saturn. Self did not know who Sebald was at this point, and it’s not clear if Sebald recognised Will Self who, although lauded for his excellent debut collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), hadn’t yet punctured the mainstream in the way he was shortly to do. Self recalled how their conversation had centred around the subject of ecocide. This encounter was retold in the early drafts of Rings of Saturn (with the Will Self character dressed in white silk pantaloons) and later edited out.

Greyfriars Friary Dunwich
Greyfriars Friary Dunwich

The fact that Patrick Keiller, Will Self and Mark Fisher are drawing from the same critique of late-capitalism should not be surprising given their shared interest in the changing nature of place and landscape. I’m not sure what Keiller made of Sebald’s writing but I found echoes of Keiller’s Robinson character in the eponymous central figure of Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Stephen Watts, who’d guided Sebald through the East End on his research walks for Austerlitz, was in attendance at St George’s for the Will Self talk.

David Anderson links Keiller and Sebald (along with Iain Sinclair) in his book, Landscape and Subjectivity in the work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair. Anderson points out that all three draw from two principle lineages: the tradition of the ‘English Journey’, and the continental ideas generated by Surrealism and Situationism. Mark Fisher was a great admirer of both Sebald and Keiller and there are connections between their ideas of the landscape with Fisher’s promotion of hauntology. “Walking in ruins places us in a strange state of temporal dislocation, in which the past is simultaneously absent and present, for which Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ (in Spectres Of Marx, 1993)” – Frieze magazine, 2008.

Despite the pessimistic tone that emerges from all the writers mentioned here in their engagement with the landscape, Keiller does raise the possibility that a better world could be created – merely by looking at it.

Following W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz through the East End

Austerlitz walk – Liverpool Street to Mile End

A walk following the route taken by W.G Sebald through the East End of London when writing his acclaimed novel Austerlitz, in the company of artist Bob and Roberta Smith. The central character of the book, Jacques Austerlitz arrived in England at Liverpool Street Station as a young child on the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The station plays an important role in the book and was where our walk started. The route was provided to Bob and I by writer Iain Sinclair who had re-traced Sebald’s footsteps guided by poet Stephen Watts who had led Sebald on his East End drifts. An evocative account of these walks can be found in Iain’s wonderful book The Last London.

Our walk ended in the gloom of Tower Hamlets Cemetery, unable to find the stone angel pictured in Sebald’s book.

The key locations are: – The Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street Station, Toynbee Hall, Greatorex Street (home of Yiddish poet Abraham Stencl), Brady Street Jewish Cemetery, Alderney Road, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, St. Clement’s Hospital (site of).

Talking about Walking & Sebald’s Austerlitz on Resonance FM

It was a great pleasure to go on Bob and Roberta Smith’s Make Your Own Damn Music Show on the brilliant Resonance FM last night where we talked about the recent walk we did following the footsteps of W.G Sebald in his celebrated book Austerlitz.

The Sebald chat starts at about 35 minutes in and includes some contentious opinions on echoes in the book with Patrick Keiller’s early photographic work. The show also features a fascinating interview with Curator and Art Writer William Corwin.

The video of this walk will be on my YouTube channel soon.

I would also love to hear from anyone interested in participating in my Kensal Rise project for Brent 2020 – please email me via the contact form on this blog or leave a comment. Thanks.

In the footsteps of W.G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn walk Southwold to Dunwich

A walk along the Suffolk coast from Southwold to Dunwich

While on holiday in Southwold in August, I was determined to complete the walk from Southwold to ‘the lost city’ of Dunwich described in W.G. Sebald’s hugely influential book, The Rings of Saturn

The book is based around a journey on foot along the Suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Bungay and takes a number of long disgressions into the past. I purchased The Rings of Saturn on my way to Southwold in 2013, knowing only that it was set in Suffolk. When I turned to page 75 I saw a photograph of the Southwold lighthouse that we were staying beneath.

Southwold lighthouse

Sebald arrives in Southwold “footsore and weary” from his long walk from Lowestoft and rests on Gunhill. He describes a visit to the Sailor’s Reading Room. After a few days in Southwold he sets off over the bailey bridge across the River Blyth, along the disused railway line to Walberswick, then a long schlep along the beach to the ‘lost city’ of Dunwich.

I attempted to follow this route on that first holiday in Southwold, but turned back at Walberswick. Our return after an absence of a few years gave me the opportunity to finally follow Sebald’s footsteps from Southwold to Dunwich, a truly magical and memorable walk, captured in the video above.