| W.G. Sebald | |
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| Born | 18 May 1944 Wertach im Allgäu, Germany |
| Died | 14 December 2001 (aged 57) Norfolk, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | writer, academic |
| Nationality | German |
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W. G. (Winfried Georg) Maximilian Sebald (18 May 1944, Wertach im Allgäu – 14 December 2001, Norfolk, England) was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a 2007 interview, 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.[1]
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Sebald grew up in Wertach, Bavaria, one of four children of Rosa and Georg Sebald. From 1948 to 1963, he lived in Sonthofen.[2] His father joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. His father remained a detached figure, a prisoner of war until 1947; a grandfather was the most important male presence in his early years. Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Oberstdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. The Holocaust and post-war Germany loom large in his work.
Sebald studied German literature at the University of Freiburg, where he received a degree in 1965.[3] He was a research student at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969. He returned to Germany for a year hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA). He married Ute in 1967. 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 while at UEA.
Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001, losing control after suffering a heart attack.[4] He was driving with his daughter Anna, who survived the crash. He is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived.
Sebald's works are largely concerned with the themes of memory / 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. In On the Natural History of Destruction (1997), he wrote a major essay on the wartime bombing of German cities and the absence in German writing of any real response. His concern with the Holocaust is expressed in several books delicately tracing his own biographical connections with Jews.
His distinctive and innovative novels were written in an intentionally somewhat old-fashioned and elaborate German (one passage in Austerlitz famously contains a sentence that is 9 pages long), but are well-known in English translations (principally by Anthea Bell and Michael Hulse) which Sebald supervised closely. They 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 traveling 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 (2002), and Unrecounted (2004).
The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", were a major influence on Sebald. (Tlön appears in The Rings of Saturn.)[5]