Literature, memory, restitution

Skimming through the stack of New Yorkers that arrived over my three-week Canadian odyssey, my eye springs to the word Stuttgart in an article entitled An attempt at restitution by W.G.Sebald. It is a translation of the speech he gave at the opening of the Literaturhaus in Stuttgart in 2001, shortly before his death.

Sebald's purpose is to position Literature as a watchtower in the fight against injustice, and this is in itself a worthy, even noble, undertaking. He continues: literature exists "perhaps only to make us remember, and to teach us to understand that some strange coincidences cannot be explained by causal logic".

An instance of the kind of coincidence he has in mind is that connecting Stuttgart with the French town of Tulle, site of an SS massacre on 9. June 1944 "almost exactly one hundred and one years to the day after Hölderlin's death".

What exactly is special about "one hundred and one years"? Would the massacre having occurred exactly on the anniversary of Hölderlin's death make it better or worse? The connection between the two places, is that Hölderlin lived in Stuttgart and once passed through Tulle on his way to Bordeaux.

Were Sebald not a local boy (born a few valleys to the south) I would think that he was gently mocking our tenuous links to greater events: Poor Stuttgart, always standing just slightly offside of History. Backwaters may be dull, but they are on the whole pretty comfortable places to be.

Readers interested in the role of literature in detecting and fighting injustice, and the place of literature after the Holocaust in particular, are referred to the works of George Steiner, in particular Language and Silence.