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27 January 2025

How WG Sebald found his form

His studies of Austrian writers, at times more fiction than fact, offer a guide to the artist he would become.

By Chris Power

“If you look carefully,” WG Sebald told his students at the University of East Anglia, “you can find problems in all writers. That should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.” As an academic Sebald enjoyed finding problems, particularly in writers beloved by the German establishment, and his analyses could be excoriating. He believed ethics to be indivisible from aesthetics, and his attacks on a writer’s work became personal. His PhD on the modernist Alfred Döblin was a character assassination.

By the time Sebald was issuing that advice to his students, shortly before his death in 2001, he had garnered world renown as author of the famously uncategorisable novels Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. These texts blend history, biography and invention, and are frequently interrupted by (supposedly documentary) photography, blurring our sense of truth. They deal obsessively with time and memory, nature’s collapse, suicide and decay. But perhaps the most strikingly repeated themes are Germany’s war guilt and the fate of the Jews. Sebald was born in Bavaria in 1944, and his father served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The timing of Sebald’s birth, and the complicity of his family with the Nazi regime informed his life and work. He left the country as soon as he could, first for Switzerland and then the UK, where he lived for most of his life.

The themes that inform his novels are approached from a different angle, in a very different style, in his earlier essay collections Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune,1985) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland, 1991), studies of Austrian writers now translated into English by Jo Catling and published together as Silent Catastrophes. Unless the novel Sebald abandoned in the 1960s should be made available, this is the final “new” work of his we will get.

It should be said that readers looking for another hit of Sebald the novelist, or the fluent essayist of A Place in the Country, will be disappointed by Silent Catastrophes. This is academic writing of the “in this essay I will show” variety, although there are occasional glints of style: his description of Franz Kafka’s “40-year-long tactical withdrawal from life”, or how Thomas Bernhard, with his “highly sophisticated language, habitually prepares the most unwholesome meals”. And many of the authors Sebald discusses are unfamiliar to Anglophone readers.

This inevitably reduces the undignified pleasure we might take in, say, the beating Sebald gives Gerhard Roth. Roth, he writes, “no doubt in spite of his best intentions, continues to fall back on obsolete forms of depiction and narrative”: a blow that lacks the appropriate crunch unless one has read Roth.

Similarly, Sebald’s forensic analysis of the Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter, in which he accuses him of repressed paedophilia, will only deliver the intended shock if one knows how bold a claim this is. Sebald wanted to disrupt and, with any luck, appal. For those of us whose knowledge of Austrian writing doesn’t extend far beyond Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Bernhard and Peter Handke, parts of this book will remain as sealed chambers.

But if Silent Catastrophes struggles to achieve its intended effects when put before a general audience, it is considerably more interesting as a guide to the artist Sebald would become. The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte has described the essay on Stifter as more fiction than fact. As such, Sebald’s biographer Carole Angier notes, it seeds the ground for the fictionalised portraits of writers, including Stendhal, Swinburne and Kafka, that would follow in Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn. The restlessness Sebald felt as an academic – his urge to transition, as one of his heroes Jacques Austerlitz does, “from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details” – is also made clear by his tendency, as Catling identifies in her introduction, to adapt quotes to suit his arguments, “not always, it has to be said, completely accurately”. In an essay on the poetry of Ernst Herbeck, Sebald discusses the recurring figure of a dwarf being “a kind of secret self-portrait” of the poet. Might they perform the same function in Sebald’s novels, where dwarfs appear with bizarre frequency? As for the use of the photographs that would become one of their defining elements, his quotation of Susan Sontag’s “persuasive analogy” about photography as the modern counterpart of artificial ruins, and Roland Barthes’s judgement that “every photograph inevitably bears within it the sign of a future death”, are forecasts of how they would operate in his later work. In Austerlitz we read that time doesn’t exist, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like”. The photographs, which were often edited or did not show who they purported to, are one of the portals through which this traffic moves.

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The essays in Silent Catastrophes have the air of a failing quest. Time and again the works Sebald holds up to the light are seen to possess some flaw, to succeed in some ways but not others. The book’s hidden message is the inability of literature, as Sebald finds it, to describe the mystery, and most prominently the horror, of the 20th century. The sense grows that he is looking for something he will ultimately have to create himself.

So what was the form Sebald arrived at that would be up to the task? This has proven a difficult question, especially given the way it combines the real and the imagined. Sebald often takes figures from history, or people he encountered, and appears to recount their stories as a historian or biographer might while also incorporating a great deal of fictional detail. We can surely do better, though, than the publisher’s note to the posthumous collection Campo Santo, which describes its contents, with almost thrilling laziness, as “touching, in typical Sebaldian fashion, on a variety of subjects”. By that measure, which writer isn’t Sebaldian?

Sebald’s preferred term for his literary writing was the open-ended “prose work”. My copy of Vertigo lists three genres on its front flap: fiction, travel and history. (Angier notes that the book’s publisher, Christopher MacLehose, wanted a fourth but wasn’t allowed.) JM Coetzee has pointed out that by the time Sebald began publishing his literary works, the German reading public was already accustomed to “the crossing and indeed trampling of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction”. He is referring to a spate of documentary-like novels that appeared in the 1970s, which Sebald referred to as “an important literary invention, but… an artless form.” Gabriele Annan identified a considerably more elevated source, invoking the mix of Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”) that Goethe used as both title and method for his autobiography, and James Wood contorted himself adjudging the levels of these constituent parts, writing that, “Sebald so mixes established fact with unstable invention that the two categories copulate and produce a kind of truth which lies just beyond verification: that is, fictional truth”. But the best and pithiest definition was minted by Sebald’s friend, the poet Michael Hamburger, who also became, in The Rings of Saturn, one of his characters, and so knew the Sebaldian effect from both inside and out. In a letter sent after reading the section in which he appears, he complimented Sebald for finding “a most satisfactory form of essayistic semi-fiction”.

The irony embedded within the new form Sebald created is that it should be constructed from so many elements of what came before, his borrowings weaving between homage and plagiarism. We encounter some of these in Silent Catastrophes. His admiration for Bernhard is expected, given his free and obvious borrowing of elements of Bernhard’s style, but it is more surprising to discover his summary of a scene from Stifter’s My Great-Grandfather’s Portfolio, describing a fall into a ravine and the subsequent shooting of a crazed dog, which he presented in Vertigo as an episode from his childhood. A less direct transposition is found in the closing essay’s consideration of Handke’s novel Repetition, in which a young man called Filip searches for his missing brother. Recounting the story, “It is almost as if [Filip] himself… is the lost brother on whose trail the younger Filip Kobal sets out.” In Austerlitz this is reversed: Jacques Austerlitz is searching for his own forgotten or suppressed identity as a Jewish child who escaped Prague via the Kindertransport, but when he studies a picture of himself from this lost childhood it is as if the adult and the child are two separate people.

Just as our knowledge of what was to come colours our reading of Silent Catastrophes, so Sebald’s death in a car accident, one month after Austerlitz’s publication, can give his work a false teleology. From this vantage his final book – which reworks one of the biographical sections of The Emigrants, deepens his philosophy of time, and, in the monstrous 11-page sentence describing the Theresienstadt ghetto, represents Sebald’s most direct confrontation of the Holocaust – feels like a summation. Yet his ambitions as a writer were continuing to grow; within a month of completing Austerlitz he was on a research trip to battlefields in France. His next book, referred to in his papers as the “World War Project”, would span both wars from the perspective of five German and French characters. It is tantalising to think how Sebald might have developed to meet the challenge of this larger canvas. Instead we are held in stasis, along with the expectant reviewer of Austerlitz who ended her piece, “I await the next volume with quiet intensity.”

Silent Catastrophes
WG Sebald, translated by Jo Catling
Hamish Hamilton, 544pp, £25

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[See also: How we misread The Great Gatsby]

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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War