Free Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) by W.G. Sebald Page B

will not envisage. On the other hand, he knows that conjugal life may eventually produce a hare. It is not so easy to describe how the act of procreation works. Perhaps it is not so much a sexual act as a kind of spontaneous reproduction, even magic.
    Der Zauberer zaubert Sachen:

Kleine Hasen. Tücher. Eier
.
Er zaubert wiederholt
.
Er steckt das Tuch in den Zylinder

und zieht es wieder heraus

es ist ein zahmer Hase dabei
.
(The conjuror conjures things up:
little hares. Scarves. Eggs.
He keeps on doing magic.
He puts the scarf in the top hat
and brings it out again
with a tame hare in it.)
     
    The hare so miraculously produced from the top hat is undoubtedly the totem animal in which the writer sees himself. The harelip with which he was born, and which was operated on several times, probably played a crucial part as a premorbid disability in the genesis and particular development of Herbeck’s schizophrenia and the specific form it took. It is an identifying mark; in his mind, Herbeck takes this blemish much further back in time than his childhood. When he is asked to write a poem on “the embryo,” he forgets that strange new word, and instead writes the following lines on an unborn fabulous animal more closely related to him, which he calls the empyrum.
    Heil unserer Mutter! Ein werdendes

Kind im Leibe der Mutter. Als ich

ein Empyrum war, hat sie mich

operiert. Ich kann meine Nase

nicht vergessen. Armes Empyrum
.
(Hail to the mother! A future
child in the mother’s womb. When I
was an empyrum, she operated
on me. I can’t forget
my nose. Poor empyrum.)
     
    Gisela Steinlechner, in her studies of the work of Ernst Herbeck, was the first to try to describe the preexistential trauma that, to the damaged subject, later became his own myth. Among other sources, she drew on the three-page autobiographical account written by Herbeck in 1970, in which he describes how at the age of eleven he was in a Pathfinder group under a leader called Meier; their group was called the Pigeons, unlike the others, who were Eagles or Stags.
    The Pathfinders organization is one of the last in which human beings give themselves the names of totem animals, but this odd little fact is less important in itself than Herbeck’s Pathfinder reminiscence of only a few lines which, in an entirely agrammatical context, uses the very odd word
Thierenschaft
(“beastship”). The old German spelling
Thier
, instead of modern
Tier
for “animal” (the “h” long ago became silent), suggests a time before human beings were even capable of speech.
    Since in the history of our species ancient strategies of thinking and mental organization regularly occur in those described as mentally ill, it is not at all far-fetched to look back to the basic rules governing the totemic imagination in order to find out what Herbeck meant. Gisela Steinlechnerhas interpreted the harelip as the symbol upon which Herbeck himself fixed for his divided personality. In this connection she looks at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that in American Indian myths the harelip was the remaining trace of a twin who was never actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. But part of the messianic vocation is to be elect in the context of salvation, and at the same time ostracized and persecuted in the secular world. Not for nothing did Ernst Herbeck, who probably felt the grief of the despised more than any sense of mission as the Son of Man, place four exclamation marks after the title that he was given for a poem one day, “The Hare.” The poem runs as follows:
    Der Hase is ein kühnes Tier!

Er läuft bis ihm die Strappen

fassen. Die Ohren spitzgestellt; er

lauscht. Für ihn—ist keine Zeit

zum Rasten. Lauf läuft läuft
.
Armer Hase!
(The hare is a bold animal!
He runs until the snare
catches him. Ears pricked; he
listens. For him—there is no time
to rest. Run runs