[In the following excerpt, Pettingell commends Sebald's depiction of suffering and the fallibility of human reason and memory in After Nature.]

W. H. Auden's much-anthologized poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” begins memorably, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.” He had in mind the Gothic painters of Northern Europe's 16th century, like Mathias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Their straightforward depictions of human bodies in the throes of various agonies and degradations were a far cry from the glowing, idealized visions of the Italian Renaissance. These artists, most of whom endured times of extreme conflict, were only too familiar with the horrors they painted. They had seen atrocities committed in the name of religion, and had watched disfiguring, fatal plagues sweep through their countries. Often they chose to reflect on the troubles of the period in Biblical or Classical terms. Some of their masterpieces imagine the Apocalypse with relish, as though their world were crying out for God's refining fires to purge humanity of its evil disposition. It is not surprising that such gruesome works were largely ignored during the idealistic 19th century, but were terribly resonant to many in the 20th. A surfeit of wars teaches the hard lesson that civilized people can turn against their neighbors, demonize them and feel justified in their destruction—or else selectively forget the cruelty they saw with their own eyes.

W. G. Sebald was clearly influenced by those dark creations of the 1500s. He lived in England for over three decades, but continued to write in his native German. Toward the end of his shortened life—he died in a car wreck last December, at age 57—several of his books were finally translated into English, and Austerlitz posthumously won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, one of his earliest efforts, After Nature, is appearing in this country for the first time. A triptych of biographical prose poems, it offers a meditation on Mathias Grünewald; an account of Georg Steller, the 18th-century botanist who traveled with a Russian expedition to the Arctic; and a reconstruction of the lives of the author's grandparents and parents, who witnessed two World Wars and did not try to understand or react to what they saw. These rather different stories, spanning four centuries, might at first appear unrelated. The reader gradually becomes aware, however, that Sebald is always circling around the same themes, and that all of them comment on his development as a writer.

The opening Grünewald section is called “… As the Snow on the Alps,” a title that remains mysterious until the poem's last line. In every Sebald book descriptions of pictures play a vital role. Here the focus is on the oeuvre of Grünewald (c. 1470-1528), an artist best known for his graphic and unflinching portrayals of the dead Christ on the cross. He made no attempt to infuse the crucifixion with any hint of transcendence. His paintings display the corpse of a man who has obviously suffered terribly for hours before his ignominious death. At the foot of the cross Mary and St. John, their faces swollen with weeping, are bowed down with hopelessness.

Another familiar Grünewald painting is almost more horrifying: a phantasmagoric rendering of the temptation of St. Anthony, the third-century desert hermit. This memorable work, explored in detail by Sebald, was part of the great Isenheim Altarpiece, the focal point of a hospital chapel where those with appalling afflictions were treated. The saint is shown being assaulted by demons that are a terrifying mixture of animal and human. Some are feathered and beaked, some have antlers or amphibious faces, or human arms and bird legs. In the foreground, an unnamed man lies mutely, his body distended and covered with the pustules of Saint Anthony's fire, or syphilis. Somehow, the presence of the wracked invalid makes the demons' attack on the saint seem all the more real. As Sebald observes, “pain … entered into the picture.” Heavenly war is being waged against fiendish illness in a broken world, yet we cannot be sure of victory.

                                   The panic-stricken
kink in the neck to be seen
in all Grünewald's subjects,
exposing the throat and often turning
the face towards a blinding light,
is the extreme response of our bodies
to the absence of balance in nature
which blindly makes one experiment after another
and like a senseless botcher
undoes the thing it has only just achieved.

The poet interweaves the story of Grünewald's life: his unhappy marriage to a Jewish convert to Christianity at a time of intense Jewish persecution in Frankfurt; his murky sexuality; the death of his only child; his apocalyptic view of the violent era he lived in. The section closes with an image that evokes the blanking out of the world. In many of Grünewald's paintings, there is a corner of intense light:

So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air,
all turns white as
the snow on the Alps.

The second section concerns Steller, the botanist who left his native Germany for St. Petersburg in the 1730s and eventually joined Vitus Bering's Arctic voyage in search of a strait to take Russian ships to the Pacific Ocean and America. Again, desolation stalks the poem. When the crew reached what is today the Bering Sea,

All was a greyness, without direction,
with no above or below, nature
in a process of dissolution, in a state
of pure dementia.

The explorers are subjected to extreme privations. Captain Bering dies of melancholia as many of his men perish from scurvy. Steller has come to see nature uncorrupted by the ills of human society, yet nature remains alternately beautiful and mindlessly cruel.

After presenting the two seemingly unconnected stories whose sole common element appears to be suffering, Sebald threads both into the account of his German family that makes up the third section. His mother watched the bombed Nuremberg burn in 1943, but could not recollect “what the burning town looked like / or what her feelings were / at this sight.” Sebald links this with Albrecht Altdorfer's (1480-1538) painting of the drunken Lot lying with his daughters while the city of Sodom blazes behind them. German amnesia about the atrocities of the Third Reich, and the terrors of war and disease are consistent motifs of the book. They prompt Sebald to recall the visions of those 16th-century painters; to shake his head over the Enlightenment's pathetic belief in a rational universe; and finally, to identify with mad King Lear on the blasted heath.

Grünewald and Altdorfer inhabited the same landscapes Sebald knew in his childhood. His grandmother's disfiguring terminal illness is associated in his thoughts with the invalids Grünewald encountered while working on the Isenheim Altarpiece. Anti-Semitism and its denial, lacunae in the history we cannot bear to remember, senseless natural disasters and malign man-made ones—all reappear from age to age. Yet as Sebald shows, we rarely achieve any better understanding of them because we are damaged, and the “truth” of such things may well be unintelligible.

Also—and here we come to the writer's particular strength—he notes that trying to put details together and calling them “history” or “science” only brings us to further rationalizations of the irrational. Our experience of war or disease is personal and social. The artist strives to express a view of nature or conflict or religion that is based on his own experience.

In After Nature, Sebald recounts part of his autobiography, frequently disguised in chronicles about Grünewald and Steller. In the process, he demonstrates how our individual histories follow recurring cultural patterns that ultimately tell us something valuable, even if fragmentary or unsatisfying, about the human condition. …

Both W. G. Sebald and Abba Kovner [in Sloan-Kettering] have enlarged their readers' understanding of suffering and enduring, and of the wonders we can perceive along the way.