W.G. Sebald

�

�

Q. Who was he

A. W.G. 'Max' Sebald was born on 18 May 1944 in the small village of Wertach im Allg�u, Bavaria. The world in which Sebald grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was conservative and staunchly Catholic. His village had prospered during the Third Reich and not suffered unduly when the Allies invaded Germany. He went to university in Freiburg, later in Switzerland and then in Manchester, where he moved in 1966. In 1970, he transferred to the University of East Anglia at Norwich, where he was professor of European literature from 1987 until his death, and where he was the founder and first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.

�

He wrote a series of critical books on German writing and German theatre as well as poetry, but it is his four novels for which he is best known and will be best remembered. All four novels were written in German - even though he lived and worked in England and wrote perfect English, he felt, given the nature of his subject matter, that his native language was the most appropriate medium.

�

Q. What was his subject matter

A. Essentially, Sebald wrote about memory and the Europe which emerged from wreckage of the Second World War. In particular, he dealt with the way in which Germany allowed itself to forget the horrors unleashed upon the Continent. However, he scorned the Holocaust 'industry' and what he referred to as an official culture of mourning and remembering.

�

He cited the occasion of being shown a newsreel film of Belsen while at high school as seminal in giving him a moral direction. He recalled that there was no discussion afterwards, and no one knew what to think about what they had just seen or how to explain it. So people just swept it under the carpet. In Germany the causes of the destruction of an entire society were never discussed: Sebald sought to address this.

�

Q. Why was he such an important writer

A. 'I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position,' he said. And he didn't, as his novels - Schwindel Gefuhle (1990; Vertigo, 2000), Die Ausgewanderten: Vier Lange Erzahlungen (1992; The Emigrants, 1997), Die Ringe Der Saturn: Eine Englische Walfahrt (1995; The Ring of Saturn, 1998) and Austerlitz (2001) - show. His writing has been compared to authors as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Kafka, but Sebald was unique and not in a category with any other.

�

Q. What about Austerlitz

The eponymous Austerlitz was raised in Wales as the son of a Calvinist preacher, but eventually learns that he is actually a Czech Jew, who, as a very young child, was sent to the United Kingdom. Suddenly deprived of the memory and culture he thought was his, he finds himself unable to cope. So he sets out to track down his parents, and it is only when he finds the truth about their fate at the hands of the Nazis that he finds an element of peace. But he never fully returns to the world, remarking how outside of everything he feels, how out of touch and unconnected.

�

Anthea Bell, who translated Austerlitz, told us that Sebald's death was a 'tragic blow to all who knew and worked with him'. More than that, it is a blow to the conscience of modern Europe.

�

Sebald's final novel, Luftkrieg, is to be published in English later in 2002.

�

For more on Arts & Literature click here

�

By Simon Smith