Winfried Georg SebaldIn a number of interviews, Sebald claimed that his third given name was "Maximilian" – this has, however, turned out not to be the case; see Uwe Schütte, W.G. Sebald. Leben und literarisches Werk. Berlin/Boston, MA: de Gruyter, 2020, p. 8. (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was according to The New Yorker "widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature."
Life
Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria on 18 May 1944. He was the second of the three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald, and their only son. Though he was born in Wertach, he lived and spent much of his youth, roughly between the ages of four and nineteen, in the nearby town of Sonthofen.W.G. Sebald, Schriftsteller und Schüler am Gymnasium Oberstdorf His father had joined the Reichswehr in 1929 during the Weimar era and served in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis, participating in the Invasion of Poland in 1939. His father remained a detached figure, as he was held as a prisoner of war until 1947. Sebald's maternal grandfather, the small-town police officer Josef Egelhofer (1872–1956), was the most important male presence during the boy's early years.
While at school in Oberstdorf, Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. He later explored the Holocaust and European modernity, especially its modes of warfare and persecution, as central themes in his fiction.
Sebald studied German and English literature first at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received a degree in 1965.Eric Homberger, "WG Sebald," The Guardian, 17 December 2001, accessed 9 October 2010. He was a lecturer at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969. He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a year, hoping to work as a teacher, but could not settle. Sebald married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967.
In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA). There, he completed his PhD in 1973 with a dissertation entitled The Revival of Myth: A Study of Alfred Döblin's Novels. Sebald acquired habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1986.
In 1987, he was appointed to a chair of European literature at UEA. In 1989 he became the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He lived at Wymondham and Poringland in Norfolk County while serving at UEA.
Final year
The 2001 publication of Austerlitz (both in German and English) would bring Sebald worldwide recognition:Uwe Schütte, 'Rezeption | Anglo-amerikanischer Raum'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 305–309, pp. 305 and 306. "Austerlitz was received enthusiastically on an international scale; literary critics celebrated it frenetically; the book established Sebald as a modern classic."Christian Hein, 'Rezeption | Deutschsprachiger Raum'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 300–305, p. 300: "Austerlitz wurde international begeistert rezipiert, von der Literaturkritik frenetisch gefeiert und verlieh Sebald den Status eines modernen Klassikers." He was tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.In 2007 Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Sebald, Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida as three recently deceased writers who would have been worthy laureates. By then he was in high demand by literary institutions and radio programmes throughout Western Europe.Philippa Comber, 'Autorbiographie'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 5–9, p. 9. Newspapers, magazines and journals from Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and the U.S. urged him for interviews.Uwe Schütte, W.G. Sebald. Einführung in Leben und Werk. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011, p. 33. "Condemned to unrest I am, I am afraid", he wrote to Andreas Dorschel in June 2001, returning from one trip and setting out for the next.
For a considerable time, Sebald had been aware of a congenital cardiac insufficiency.Uwe Schütte, Figurationen. Zum lyrischen Werk von W.G. Sebald. Eggingen: Isele, 2021, p. 49. To a visitor from the US, he described himself in August 2001 as "someone who knows he has to leave before too long".Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 162.
Sebald died while driving near Norwich in December 2001.Vanessa Thorpe, 'Cult novelist killed in car accident', The Observer, 16 December 2001. The event threw the literary public into a state of shock.Scott Denham, 'Foreword: The Sebald Phenomenon', in: Scott Denham, Mark McCulloh (eds.), W.G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma, Berlin/New York, NY: de Gruyter 2006, pp. 1–6, p. 2: ”Sebald's premature death in December, 2001, shocked the literary world in Germany as well as in his home, Britain, and in the U.S.” Sebald had been driving with his daughter Anna, who survived the crash. The coroner's report, released some six months after the accident, stated that Sebald had suffered a heart attack and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an oncoming lorry.
W.G. Sebald is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived.Uwe Schütte, W.G. Sebald: Einführung in Leben und Werk. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011, p. 33.
Themes and style Sebald's works are largely concerned with the themes of memory and loss of memory (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people. On the Natural History of Destruction (1999) is an essay he wrote on the wartime bombing of German cities and the absence in German writing of any real response since then. His concern with The Holocaust is expressed in several books delicately tracing his own biographical connections with Jews.Cf. Carol Jacobs, Sebald's Vision. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 72 and passim.
Contrary to Germany's political and intellectual establishment,as represented, e.g., by Richard von Weizsäcker and Jürgen Habermas. Sebald denied the singularity of the Holocaust: "I see the catastrophe caused by the Germans, dreadful as it was, by no means as a singular event – it developed with a certain logic from European history and then, for the same reason, ate itself into European history."W.G. Sebald, "Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis." Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, ed. Torsten Hoffmann, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011, p. 260: "Ich sehe die von den Deutschen angerichtete Katastrophe, grauenvoll wie sie war, durchaus nicht als Unikum an – sie hat sich mit einer gewissen Folgerichtigkeit herausentwickelt aus der europäischen Geschichte und sich dann, aus diesem Grunde auch, hineingefressen in die europäische Geschichte." Consequently, Sebald, in his literary works, always tried to situate and contextualize the Holocaust within modern European history, even avoiding a focus on Germany.
Sebald completely rejected the mainstream of Western German literature of the 1950s to 1970s, as represented by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. "I hate [...] the German postwar novel like pestilence," he said,W.G. Sebald, "Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis." Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, ed. Torsten Hoffmann, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011, p. 77: "Ich hasse [...] den deutschen Nachkriegsroman wie die Pest." Ironically, Sebald received the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 1997. and instead took a deliberate counter-stance. Sebald's distinctive and innovative novels (which he mostly called simply: prose ("Prosa")Peter Morgan distinguishes the "novel" Austerlitz from the "prose narratives" Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn ('The Sign of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald's Prose Narratives.' In: Franz-Josef Deiters (ed.), Passagen: 50 Jahre Germanistik an der Monash Universität. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2010, pp. 491–517, p. 491).) were written in an intentionally somewhat old-fashioned and elaborate form of German (one passage in Austerlitz famously contains a sentence that is 9 pages long). Sebald closely supervised the English translations of his works (principally by Anthea Bell and Michael Hulse). These include Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. They are notable for their curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly. His novels are presented as observations and recollections made while travelling around Europe. They also have a dry and mischievous sense of humour.
Sebald was also the author of three books of poetry: For Years Now with Tess Jaray (2001), After Nature (1988), and Unrecounted (2004).
Works
Novels (1990) Vertigo. London: Harvill. () English ed. 1999 (1992) The Emigrants. London: Harvill. () English ed. 1996 (1995) The Rings of Saturn. London: Harvill. () English ed. 1998 (2001) Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton. English translation by Anthea Bell won the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Poetry (1988) After Nature. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2002 (2001) For Years Now. London: Short Books. (2003) Unrecounted. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2004 (2008) Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2011
Non-fiction (1998) A Place in the Country. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2013 (1999) On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2003 (2003) Campo Santo. London: Hamish Hamilton. () English ed. 2005 (2025) Silent Catastrophes: Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton. (. 1985. . 1991.)
Influences The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", were a major influence on Sebald. (Tlön and Uqbar appear in The Rings of Saturn.) In a conversation during his final year, Sebald named Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean Paul as his literary models.Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 166. He also credited the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard as a major influence on his work,"Sebald's Voice", 17 April 2007 and paid homage within his work to Kafka"Among Kafka's Sons: Sebald, Roth, Coetzee", 22 January 2013; review of Three Sons by Daniel L. Medin, and Nabokov (the figure of Nabokov appears in every one of the four sections of The Emigrants)."Netting the Butterfly Man: The Significance of Vladimir Nabokov in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants" by Adrian Curtin and Maxim D. Shrayer, in Religion and the Arts, vol. 9, nos. 3–4, pp. 258–283, 1 November 2005
Memorials Sebaldweg ("Sebald Way")