Informant38

Nevertheless, it has significance. I mean, the first section of "Vertigo" is about Stendhal, and this rather short piece finishes with Stendhal's death in a certain street in Paris, which is now called the Rue Danielle-Casanova. I didn't know who Danielle Casanova was�Casanova meant something for me in the context of that book, but not Danielle Casanova. The following summer I went to Corsica. I was walking through the mountains, and I came to the coastal village of Piana, and there was a little house with a plaque on it, and it said it was a memorial plaque for Danielle Casanova, who had been murdered by my compatriots in Auschwitz. She'd been a dentist and a Communist and was in the French Resistance. And I went past the house three or four times, and it always seemed closed. On one occasion, I went round the back, and there was her sister. And then I talked to her for a week. [Laughter from the audience.] These things do happen. I have all her papers, and now I don't know what I shall do with them. But it's that sort of connection. And if that sort of thing happens to us then we think, perhaps, that not everything is quite so futile. It gives one a sort of passing sense of consolation, occasionally.

W.G. Sebald interviewed in The New Yorker