W. G. Sebald
W. G. Sebald, born Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald in 1944 in Bavaria, was a prominent German literary scholar and author known for his innovative prose that interweaves fact and fiction with elements of memoir and cultural criticism. He began his literary career later in life, publishing his first novel, *Vertigo*, in 1990, which garnered attention for its unique structure and thematic depth. Much of Sebald's work grapples with the legacies of Germany's past, particularly the Holocaust and the experiences of exile, reflecting his own status as an expatriate. His notable works, including *The Emigrants* and *The Rings of Saturn*, feature a distinct style characterized by the inclusion of captionless photographs, enhancing the narrative's exploration of memory and identity.
Sebald held academic positions in England, most notably at the University of East Anglia, where he fostered his interests in Jewish literature and the melancholic elements of Austrian writing. Throughout his career, he faced disillusionment with the academic institutions and political climate of his time, which led him to focus on nonacademic writing. His final novel, *Austerlitz*, published in 2001, delves into the journeys of a Czech exile seeking to reclaim his past, further cementing Sebald's influence as a significant literary figure. Tragically, his life was cut short in a car accident later that year, yet his unique contributions continue to resonate in contemporary literature.
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Subject Terms
W. G. Sebald
German literary scholar, novelist, and poet
- Born: May 18, 1944
- Birthplace: Wertach im Allgäu, Germany
- Died: December 14, 2001
- Place of death: Norwich, Norfolk, England
Biography
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald (ZAY-bahlt) was an accomplished German literary scholar who first began writing poetry and fiction in his forties. In the last decade of the twentieth century he succeeded in creating what many regard as a new genre, combining fact, fiction, travelogue, hallucinatory imagery, cultural criticism, art history, diary, and memoir in a prose form that was both highly referential and stunningly original. A hallmark of his prose is the use of captionless photographs and other images.
The attempt to come to terms with his native country’s destructive past is the impulse behind much of Sebald’s fiction as well as his academic writing. He was born in the remote Alpine village of Wertach in Bavaria and grew up knowing little of what his fellow Germans (including his father, a soldier who served on several fronts) had participated in during World War II. The first in his family to pursue an academic career, Sebald matriculated at the University of Freiburg in 1963. The period of his studies coincided with the first Auschwitz trials and the emergence of a radical form of German theater aimed at exposing the institutionalized crimes of the German past and the survival of many Nazi Party members in positions of wealth and power in West Germany. In this atmosphere, Sebald became disenchanted with the German academic scene, which was characterized by congested lecture halls and a faculty composed of scholars who had received their degrees during Adolf Hitler’s rule. Pursuing his interest in French literature, Sebald transferred to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received a Licence des Lettres in 1966. Emboldened by his Swiss sojourn to venture even further afield, he accepted a temporary teaching position in England, at the University of Manchester, even though his knowledge of English was rudimentary. In Manchester he obtained a master’s degree in German literature and then returned to Switzerland in 1968. He taught at a grammar school for a year in St. Gallen but became disillusioned with elementary school teaching as well as life in Switzerland, which he regarded as too comfortable and too complacent. In 1969 he returned to England and taught another year at the University of Manchester. In 1970 he accepted a position in Norwich at the University of East Anglia, where he remained, with the exception of a year at the Goethe Institute in Munich in the mid-1970’s, until his death in 2001.
Sebald developed a professional interest in Jewish writers early in his career, and he wrote a number of articles and books on authors such as Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, and Jean Améry. He was especially interested in those writers’ experiences as outsiders and exiles, being himself an expatriate. Sebald was also intrigued by what he viewed as a particularly Austrian form of melancholy in the works of Adalbert Stifter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gerhard Roth, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke. By 1986 he was in possession of both British and German doctoral degrees, and had established himself as an original and provocative scholar. In 1988 he was promoted to professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia and also became director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Sebald became increasingly dissatisfied with university conditions during the regime of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose educational policies he considered meddlesome and ill-advised. He turned to nonacademic writing. In the same year as his promotion to full professor, he produced a volume of poetry titled After Nature. Sebald would not truly make his mark on the German literary scene until some time later, when the well-known writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger selected his first novel, Vertigo, for publication in 1990. The book comprises four distinct sections, two on literary figures and two on separate journeys to Italy and to Sebald’s native Wertach. Despite its variety of subjects, the novel exhibits a thematic unity rooted in Sebald’s preoccupation with artistic creativity, the nature of identity, the uncanny in everyday life, and the dynamics of memory.
The Emigrants appeared in German in 1992 and in English (Sebald took part in this and all other translations) in 1996. The novel, also in four distinct parts, signaled his emergence as a writer of international stature. It concerns four personalities, all affected in one way or another by exile, depression, and European anti-Semitism in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel met with unanimous critical acclaim and won numerous literary prizes. In 1995, even before the appearance of The Emigrants in English, Sebald published a third novel in German, The Rings of Saturn. The title alludes to the crushing forces of nature that produced Saturn’s rings; the book is a lengthy meditation on Walter Benjamin’s assertion that history is really an ongoing calamity, piling wreckage upon wreckage. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s first-person protagonist explores the “wreckage” of East Anglia, visiting country houses, heaths, churches, and various other sites, all the while indulging in diverse biographical, literary, historical, and cultural digressions which blend to form an eclectic narrative unity. The English translation followed closely on the heels of the success of The Emigrants, appearing less than two years later, in 1998. In the same year the novel was awarded Best Fiction Book by the Los Angeles Times.
In the meantime, Sebald had stirred up considerable scholarly controversy with a series of lectures at the University of Zurich in 1997. Elaborating on a theme he introduced in The Rings of Saturn, he used these lectures, which appeared later in book form, to illustrate how German postwar literature had remained mostly silent on the horror and mayhem of the massive aerial bombardment of German cities and had thereby failed to do justice to the human cost of the Allied bombing efforts. While some objected that Sebald had overlooked certain writers and texts, the rarity or obscurity of such exceptions only served to prove the rule.
Sebald’s last novel was his most mature and in some ways most conventional narrative. Austerlitz, which appeared both in German and in English in 2001, is a sensitive study of a Czech exile’s attempt to reconstruct his past after discovering that he was one of the Jewish children evacuated to Britain in the “Kindertransport” of 1938. Like most of Sebald’s portraits, it is a composite, combining not only fact and fiction but also several individual identities. Not long after returning from a book tour of the United States in the autumn of 2001, Sebald died in a car crash near his home in Norwich on December 14, 2001.
Outwardly, Sebald’s life was unexceptional; he went to work every day, taught his classes, helped raise a daughter, and was married to the same woman for more than thirty years. His inner life, as revealed in his erudite, allusive, and keenly inventive prose and poetry, was hardly ordinary. His perspective and methods were rightly recognized as highly original; not only was his writing unlike that of any other writer’s, but his compositions were also in large part prompted by myriad visual cues in the form of collected drawings, paintings, and photographs, many of which he provided in his texts. Because of his status as a German expatriate who was fully at home neither in his native land nor in England, Sebald’s oeuvre does not fit easily into the canon of either national literature. He occupies a place beside a number of modern international predecessors, however, including the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, and the Italian Claudio Magris. Sebald is admired as a “writer’s writer” and is considered by many to be one of the most important European novelists of the last decade of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Iyer, Pico. “The Strange, Haunted World of W. G. Sebald.” Harper’s Magazine, October, 2000, 86-90. This stylistic analysis focuses on the restlessness and unease that drives Sebald’s prose, attributing the uncanny, dreamlike mood of his work largely to the influence of Franz Kafka.
Lane, Anthony. “Higher Ground: Adventures in Fact and Fiction from W. G. Sebald.” The New Yorker, May 29, 2000, 128-136. While Lane notes that Sebald’s narratives all begin with typically “Sebaldian” prose, he nonetheless considers the author one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth century, with few English-speaking rivals in scope and imaginative power.
Lewis, Tess. “W. G. Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” The New Criterion, December, 2001, 85-90. This article, which appeared shortly before Sebald’s death, is a good introduction for newcomers to the author’s work. Lewis assesses Sebald’s four novels, praising the last one, Austerlitz, as the most emotionally powerful and the most “unobtrusively constructed.” She also discusses Sebald’s theme of German “willful amnesia,” not only in regard to the Holocaust but also in terms of the physical damage and psychological trauma inflicted by the Allied bombing raids in World War II.
Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia University, 2008. A comprehensive biography of Sebald which examines common themes in his writing, such as identity, memory, and travel. Long also looks at the function of photography in Sebald’s works, and the way his writing was perceived and analyzed by critics.
Williams, Arthur. “The Elusive First-Person Plural: Real Absences in Reiner Kunze, Bernd-Dieter Hüge, and W. G. Sebald.” In Whose Story? Continuities in Contemporary German-Language Literature, edited by Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Williams focuses on The Emigrants in his comparative treatment of Sebald and two other contemporary German writers who also treat German history within the framework of memoir and autobiography.
Williams, Arthur. “W. G. Sebald: A Holistic Approach to Borders, Texts, and Perspectives.” In German-Language Literature Today: International and Popular?, edited by Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. This chapter describes astutely the aesthetic principles behind Sebald’s prose, emphasizing the author’s eclectic but unifying blend of forms, sources, and literary allusions.
Woods, James. “Sebald’s Uncertainty.” In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random House, 1999. Woods recognizes Sebald’s debt to the nineteenth century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, whose writings possess a quiet poignancy and an almost fastidious attention to detail similar to Sebald’s.