10: DICTIONARY

“To Sebald the landscape is a dictionary. Each place is an entry in the gloss of the second half of the 20th century German landscape. There is a dictionary since city S to W under to slogan “my land is the world”. There is the etymology of the emigrants and their anonymous stories. To this author history does not only unravels through time, but also through space. In his pages the orthography of the Baviera area is emphasized. The syllabic separation of the witnesses’ names is indicated. The traveler narrator moves by car, train or walking to explore firsthand the memory of places and shape an individual and collective glossary. Sebald explores the grammatical form of the country houses, of the asparagus fields, of the sanitariums in the mountain. Landscape is a text. Each generation left behind an epigram of symbols. Interrupted texts with an enigma. It is a history of inscription and erasure, the suspicion that something happened there. Sebald writes the dictionary of fugitives. The landscape is the dictionary of the colony of crows, a rhubarb compote with liquid cream, the green and grey pointed leaves of two willows. The façades of the housed in Riga, the room with 26 desks arranged in three rows. The drawing of the deer with a jersey. The gardened wood with blue hyacinths, white crees and yellow salsify where Hauser says his “yes, I dreamt”. The words in German, Yiddish and English. ‘Every time I realize that some things have a gift of coming back, unexpectedly and surprisingly, often after a long period of absence’. To Sebald the landscape is a dictionary.”