W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) was a German writer who spent most of his adult life in England and created, in four prose works published between 1990 and 2001, one of the most distinctive and important literary achievements of the late twentieth century. His books — Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz — defy categorisation: they are not novels, not memoirs, not essays, not travel writing, not history, but a form that partakes of all these modes without being reducible to any of them. Written in long, melancholy, sinuous sentences and illustrated with uncaptioned black-and-white photographs that seem to document the narrative but may not, they are meditations on memory, loss, destruction, and the way the past persists in the present — in landscapes, buildings, objects, and the minds of those who survive. Sebald’s death in a car accident on 14 December 2001, three months after the publication of Austerlitz, cut short what many readers and critics regarded as the most significant literary project of his generation.

Life and Career

Sebald was born Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald on 18 May 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, a small village in the Bavarian Alps, just over a year before the end of World War II. His father, Georg Sebald, was a soldier in the Wehrmacht who was captured by the Allies and spent the years until 1947 in a prisoner-of-war camp; his mother raised the children alone. Sebald grew up in postwar Germany in an atmosphere of collective silence about the war and the Holocaust — a silence that would become one of the central subjects of his writing. He has described discovering, as a schoolboy, photographs and films of the concentration camps and being unable to reconcile this knowledge with the apparent normality of his parents’ generation, who simply refused to speak about what had happened.

He studied German literature at the University of Freiburg and then, disenchanted with the Federal Republic and with what he perceived as the unbroken continuities between the pre-war and postwar German academy, moved to Switzerland and then to England. He arrived at the University of Manchester in 1966 as a teaching assistant, and in 1970 joined the faculty of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he would spend the rest of his career. He became a professor of European literature and, in 1989, founded the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA. He wrote his academic work in German and published studies of Austrian literature, including books on Carl Sternheim, Alfred Döblin, and the writers of the Austrian literary tradition.

His literary career began late. Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo, 1990) — four interconnected narratives that interweave Sebald’s own travel experiences in Italy and Austria with the lives of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka — established his method: the wandering first-person narrator, the digressive structure, the uncaptioned photographs, and the pervasive sense of a world haunted by its own history. Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, 1992) — four stories of Jewish exiles and their descendants, tracing the long, slow, devastating reach of the Holocaust across generations and continents — is his most emotionally shattering work. Each story follows a different figure: a Lithuanian émigré doctor in Norwich, a retired elementary school teacher, Sebald’s great-uncle who emigrated to America, and the painter Max Ferber (based partly on the real painter Frank Auerbach), who works and reworks his canvases in a Manchester studio.

Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn, 1995) — nominally the account of a walking tour along the Suffolk coast — is his most formally inventive and intellectually expansive work. The walk becomes the occasion for meditations on Roger Casement, Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, the decline of the herring industry, the Taiping Rebellion, the silkworm trade, the destruction of the Chinese summer palace, and the bombing of German cities — all woven together by the narrator’s melancholy observation that everything, eventually, is subject to decay and destruction.

Austerlitz (2001) is the masterpiece and the closest thing Sebald wrote to a conventional novel. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, a retired architectural historian who discovers, in middle age, that he was a Kindertransport child sent from Prague to Wales in 1939, and who embarks on a search for his lost parents and his extinguished past. The novel is about memory — its persistence, its fragility, and its relationship to place and architecture — and it is also about the Holocaust as an event that is not past but ongoing, a wound that continues to shape the present through its absence, its silence, and its traces in the built environment.

Major Works and Themes

Sebald’s great subject is the relationship between memory and destruction — the way catastrophe (the Holocaust above all, but also the bombing of German cities, the decline of empire, the extinction of species, and the ordinary erosion of individual lives) persists in the landscape, in architecture, in objects, and in the minds of those who survive. His prose enacts a kind of archaeological attention: it moves slowly, layer by layer, uncovering connections and resonances that are invisible to the hurried eye.

His use of photographs — reproduced without captions, presented as though they document the narrative but often ambiguous in their provenance — is central to his method. The photographs create a reality effect while simultaneously undermining it: they seem to guarantee the truth of what is being told, but since we cannot verify their relationship to the text, they introduce an element of doubt that is perfectly calibrated to Sebald’s themes of uncertain memory and unreliable testimony.

His influence on contemporary literature has been enormous. Writers as varied as Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald’s own student Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer, and Ben Lerner have acknowledged his impact, and the “Sebaldian” — a mode of hybrid prose that blends personal narrative, historical digression, and documentary images — has become a recognisable genre.

Key Works

• Vertigo (1990)
• The Emigrants (1992)
• The Rings of Saturn (1995)
• Austerlitz (2001)
• On the Natural History of Destruction (2003, essays)
• Campo Santo (2005, posthumous essays)
• A Place in the Country (2013, posthumous essays)

Collecting Sebald

Sebald is one of the most collected European writers of the late twentieth century, with a divided market between German originals and English translations that reflects the unusual trajectory of his reception — he was read and celebrated in English almost as quickly as in German, and the English translations (by Michael Hulse, Anthea Bell, and Max Ferber) are themselves regarded as literary achievements.

German first editions — published by Eichborn (Frankfurt) and later Fischer — are the authoritative texts. Schwindel. Gefühle. (1990, Eichborn), Die Ausgewanderten (1992, Eichborn), and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995, Eichborn) were published in modest runs and are genuinely scarce. Fine copies bring $200–$800 depending on title and condition. Austerlitz (2001, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich) — the most widely available German first — brings $100–$300.

English first editions are collected in both UK and US forms. The Harvill Press UK editions — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999), and Austerlitz (2001) — are the preferred English-language editions for collectors, with their distinctive plain covers. Fine copies bring $50–$200. The New Directions US editions — beginning with the paperback originals that first introduced Sebald to American readers — are more affordable at $15–$50 but carry their own cachet as the editions through which many English-speaking readers discovered Sebald.

Signed copies are uncommon. Sebald did not do extensive book tours, though he signed at academic events and readings in Norwich and London. His death at fifty-seven, just as his international reputation was reaching its peak, means the supply is very limited. Any signed or inscribed copy commands a significant premium — $500–$2,000 or more, depending on the title and the nature of the inscription.