W. G.

Sebald

Not to be confused with William G. Sebold. road and collided with an oncoming lorry. He was driving
with his daughter Anna, who survived the crash.[8] He is
buried in St. Andrews churchyard in Framingham Earl,
Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 14 December
2001), known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a close to where he lived.
German writer and academic. At the time of his death In 2011, Grant Gee made the documentary Patience (Af-
at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary ter Sebald) about the authors trek through the East An-
critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been glian landscape.[9]
tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in
Literature.[1] In a 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, for-
mer secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Se- 2 Work
bald, Ryszard Kapuciski and Jacques Derrida as three
recently deceased writers who would have been worthy
laureates.[2] Sebalds works are largely concerned with the themes of
memory and loss of memory (both personal and collec-
tive) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical ob-
jects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile him-
1 Life self with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of
the Second World War and its eect on the German peo-
ple. In On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), he
Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria and was one of three wrote a major essay on the wartime bombing of German
children of Rosa and Georg Sebald. From 1948 to 1963, cities and the absence in German writing of any real re-
he lived in Sonthofen.[3] His father joined the Reichswehr sponse. His concern with the Holocaust is expressed in
in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. several books delicately tracing his own biographical con-
His father remained a detached gure, a prisoner of war nections with Jews.
until 1947; a grandfather was the most important male
presence in his early years. Sebald was shown images of His distinctive and innovative novels were written in
the Holocaust while at school in Oberstdorf and recalled an intentionally somewhat old-fashioned and elaborate
that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. German (one passage in Austerlitz famously contains
The Holocaust and post-war Germany loom large in his a sentence that is 9 pages long), but are well known
work. in English translations (principally by Anthea Bell and
Michael Hulse) which Sebald supervised closely. They
Sebald studied German and English literature rst at the include Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and
University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fri- Austerlitz. They are notable for their curious and wide-
bourg, where he received a degree in 1965.[4] He was ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection
a Lector at the University of Manchester from 1966 to and ction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-
1969. He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the
year hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle. Se- narrative rather than illustrating it directly. His novels are
bald married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967. In presented as observations and recollections made while
1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East An- travelling around Europe. They also have a dry and mis-
glia (UEA). There, he completed his PhD in 1973 with chievous sense of humour.
a dissertation entitled The Revival of Myth: A Study of
Alfred Dblins Novels.[5][6] Sebald acquired habilitation Sebald was also the author of three books of poetry: For
from the University of Hamburg in 1986.[7] In 1987, he Years Now with Tess Jaray (2001), After Nature (1988),
was appointed to a chair of European literature at UEA. and Unrecounted (2004).
In 1989 he became the founding director of the British
Centre for Literary Translation. He lived at Wymondham
and Poringland while at UEA. 3 Works
Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in December
2001. The coroners report, released some six months 1988 After Nature. London: Hamish Hamilton.
later, stated that Sebald had suered an aneurysm and had (Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht) English ed.
died of this condition before his car swerved across the 2002

1
2 5
1990 Vertigo. London: Harvill. (Schwindel.
Gefhle) English ed. 1999
1992 The Emigrants. London: Harvill. (Die Aus-
gewanderten. Vier lange Erzhlungen) English ed.
1996
1995 The Rings of Saturn. London: Harvill. (Die
Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt) English
ed. 1998
1998 A Place in the Country. (Logis in einem Land-
haus.) English ed. 2013
1999 On the Natural History of Destruction. Lon-
don: Hamish Hamilton. (Luftkrieg und Literatur:
Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch) English ed.
2003
2001 Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton.
(Austerlitz)
2001 For Years Now. London: Short Books.
2003 Unrecounted London: Hamish Hamilton.
(Unerzhlt, 33 Texte) English ed. 2004
2003 Campo Santo London: Hamish Hamilton. [13] Netting the Buttery Man: The Signicance of Vladimir
(Campo Santo, Prosa, Essays) English ed. 2005 Nabokov in W. G. Sebalds The Emigrants by Adrian
2008 Across the Land and the Water: Selected Po- vol. 9, nos. 34, pp. 258283, 1 November 2005
ems, 19642001. (ber das Land und das Wasser.
Ausgewhlte Gedichte 19642001.) English ed. Sources
2012
4 Inuences
The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially "The Gar-
den of Forking Paths" and "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius",
were a major inuence on Sebald. (Tln and Uqbar ap-
pear in The Rings of Saturn.)[10] Sebald himself credited
the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard as a major inu-
ence on his work,[11] and paid homage within his work to
Kafka[12] and Nabokov (the gure of Nabokov appears in
every one of the four sections of The Emigrants).[13]
5 References
Notes
[1] Gussow, Mel (15 December 2001). W. G. Sebald, Ele-
giac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57. The New York
Times.
[2] Tidningen Vi STNDIGT DENNA HORACE!
[3] W.G. Sebald, Schriftsteller und Schler am Gymnasium
Oberstdorf (in German)
REFERENCES
[4] Eric Homberger, WG Sebald, The Guardian, 17 De-
cember 2001, accessed 9 October 2010.
[5] James R. Martin, On Misunderstanding W.G. Sebald,
Cambridge Literary Review, IV/ 7 (Michaelmas, 2013),
pp. 12338. (PDF). Retrieved 4 March 2016.
[6] The Revival of myth: a study of Alfred Dblins novels.
British Library EThOS. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
[7]
[8] Gussow, Mel (15 December 2001). W. G. Sebald, Ele-
giac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57. The New York
Times.
[9] Patience (After Sebald): watch the trailer video, The
Guardian (31 January 2012)
[10] McCulloh, Mark Richard (2003). Understanding W. G.
Sebald. University of South Carolina Press. p. 66. ISBN
1-57003-506-7. Retrieved 23 December 2007.
[11] Sebalds Voice, 17 April 2007
[12] Among Kafkas Sons: Sebald, Roth, Coetzee, 22 Jan-
uary 2013; review of Three Sons by Daniel L. Medin,
ISBN 978-0810125681
Curtin and Maxim D. Shrayer, in Religion and the Arts,
Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.). W. G. Sebald. Munich,
2003 (Text + Kritik. Zeitschrift fr Literatur. IV,
158). Includes bibliography.
Bewes, Timothy. What is a Literary Landscape?
Immanence and the Ethics of Form. dierences,
vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 63102. Discusses
the relation to landscape in the work of Sebald and
Flannery O'Connor.
Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining
the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure
and Disobedience. Camden House, 2007.
Breuer, Theo, Einer der Besten. W. G. Sebald
(19442001)" in T.B., Kiesel & Kastanie. Von
neuen Gedichten und Geschichten, Edition YE 2008.
Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh (eds.). W. G.
Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin, Walter
de Gruyter, 2005.
Grumley, John, Dialogue with the Dead: Sebald,
Creatureliness, and the Philosophy of Mere Life,
The European Legacy, 16,4 (2011), 505518.
 3

Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity.

New York, Columbia University Press, 2008.
Long, J. J. and Anne Whitehead (eds.). W. G. Se-
bald: A Critical Companion. Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press, 2006.

McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W. G. Sebald.

University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Patt, Lise et al. (eds.). Searching for Sebald: Pho-

tography after W. G. Sebald. ICI Press, 2007. An
anthology of essays on Sebalds use of images, with
artists projects inspired by Sebald.

Wylie, John. The Spectral Geographies of W. G.

Sebald. Cultural Geographies, 14,2 (2007), 171
188.

Zaslove, Jerry. W. G. Sebald and Exilic Memory:

His Photographic Images of the Cosmogony of Ex-
ile and Restitution. Journal of the Interdisciplinary
Crossroads, 3,1 (2006).

6 External links
Complete bibliography of Sebalds works
Professor Max Sebald, homepage at the time of
death, University of East Anglia
Jaggi, Maya (20 December 2001). The last word.
The Guardian. The last interview
Mitchelmore, Stephen (1 November 2004). W. G.
Sebald: Looking and Looking Away. Spike Maga-
zine.

Audio interview with Sebald on KCRWs Book-

worm

Sebald-Forum

BBC Radio4 Program: A German Genius in

Britain
4 7 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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