Reading W. G. Sebald's "Paul Bereyter" in a Teacher Education Classroom

• In Event: Complacency Unsettled: Sebaldian Approaches to Injustice

Abstract

Could it be that those men [sic] who once represented the adult world to us, were so little older than we were ourselves?
Sigmund Freud (2006)

One of the four long, enigmatic stories in the 1996 English edition of W. G. (Max) Sebald’s The Emigrants concerns Paul Bereyter. A young, aspiring elementary school teacher in the small German Village of S in the 1930s, Bereyter is dismissed from the classroom by the National Socialists because he is “only three quarters an Aryan” (50). Some years after surviving the war he returns he returns to S to resume his beloved teaching practice. His unconventional, curious pedagogy leaves an indelible impression upon one of his students, the unnamed, first-person narrator Sebald employs to tell Paul’s story. After reading an obituary of the teacher’s death, the narrator pursues self-reflexive inquiry to discover the source of his teacher’s peripatetic life and to account for Paul’s deeply buried sadness which, in retrospect, beyond all fond memories, had been oblivious to students. Should we be interested in our teacher’s lives well after they have taught us? Why? This question organizes the assignment of “Paul Bereyter” as a discussable text (Haroutunian-Gordon, 2009) in a first-year introductory “foundations” course in teacher education. I analyze tensions and difficulties encountered in teaching this story of a strange teacher, and students’ uncertain resistance to read and to define a subjective relation to the ambiguity of knowledge encountered in the narrative—including the curious placement of photographs, and their refusal of clear paratextual relation to words. Pedagogical consideration of “Paul Bereyter” is informed by Freud’s small essay, “On the psychology of a grammar school boy” (2006); Britzman, “On Being a Slow Reader” (2006); Overly & Spaulding’s, “The Novel as a Metaphor for Curriculum” (1993); Salvio, “Teacher of ‘Weird Abundance’: Portraits of the Pedagogical Tactics of Ann Sexton; and the film, The Chorus (Les choristes), a film directed by Christophe Barratie (2004). I show how Sebald’s unknowable story charges teacher candidates to imaginative thought about irrecuperable pasts and to make claims of learning beyond the script of the curriculum.

Author

• Warren E. Crichlow, York University