Life & Wisdom Quote by W. G. Sebald

Sebald’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at a comfortable fiction: that historical catastrophe is primarily the work of monsters, not neighbors. He frames “forgetting” and “overlooking” not as passive lapses but as a practiced civic skill, a moral technology. The sting is in the phrasing “ability to forget” - amnesia as competence, as something learned and even admired in a society that needs to keep functioning while reality becomes unbearable.

The line’s quiet nastiness comes from its bureaucratic calm. “Seldom put to the test better” borrows the tone of an examiner marking performance, as if the Third Reich were a stress test for conscience that Germany, on the whole, passed by failing. Sebald isn’t interested in spectacular evil; he’s tracking the ordinary mechanisms that make evil livable: selective attention, motivated ignorance, the social rewards of not asking. “What they do not want to know” points to desire as the engine. Not ignorance, exactly, but preference.

Context matters: Sebald, born in 1944, writes as part of the postwar generation haunted by what was not spoken at home, in classrooms, in public memory. Across his work, he circles the gaps - the bombed cities, the displaced bodies, the polite silences - and treats them as evidence. This line lands as an accusation and a diagnosis: the catastrophe wasn’t only in the camps or at the front, but in the daily decision to treat what was “before their eyes” as if it weren’t. The subtext is contemporary, too: any society can rehearse this “ability,” and will, when the costs of knowing feel higher than the costs of denial.