Postscript

When you grow up promises are held up in front of you. Get your O levels done and your A levels and then everything will be fine. And then you do your BA and your PhD, but the more you are lured along this road, the more is taken away from you, the less the scope becomes. Day by day you leave things behind, ultimately your health, and so loss becomes the most common experience we have. I think somehow this has to be accounted for and as there are few other places where it is accounted for it has to be done by writing. It is quite clear to me that many people can identify with this view of life. It is not necessarily a pessimistic one; it is just a matter of fact that somehow this whole process is one in which you get done out of what you thought was your entitlement....

Austerlitz (2001)

This chapter explores Sebald’s ‘problematic’ work, Austerlitz, focusing on its central themes of transience, threat and death. It explores the book’s foundations – two real biographies of racial persecution – and Sebald’s aversion to it being categorised as a ‘novel’. Schütte argues that the work raises the question of how (or how not) to use empathy to describe unimaginable suffering, using the narrator’s precarious exploration of the Holocaust as an example.

W. G. Sebald: Emigrant and Academic

In this chapter, Schütte introduces Sebald as a writer caught not only between two cultures, but between the worlds of academia and literature. It explores the beginnings of Sebald’s life, from his remote childhood in an Alpine village tohis ‘poisonous’ family inheritance – Sebald considered his parents complicit in the crimes of National Socialism. Schütte goes on to consider Sebald’s emigration to the UK, charting his development as an intellectual and his taking up of writing due to a dissatisfaction with the majority of German post-war literature.

After Nature (1988)

This section considers Sebald’s narrative prose poem and literary debut, After Nature. The first section of the poem is a fragmented literary portrait of German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller; the second a profile of Matthias Grünewald, the reclusive German painter. Schütte encourages the reader to see all three sections as self-portraits of the author, the latter being Sebald’s account of his self-exile from Germany to England. He argues all three pilgrimages reflect Sebald’s interest in exile, melancholia, and man’s increasingly troubled relationship with nature.

The Cult of Sebald

This chapter challenges common misconceptions about Sebald, including the assumption that he wrote in English and that Austerlitz was the final work published in his lifetime. It goes on to discuss his misplaced label as a ‘Holocaust author’ and touches on the disappointing film adaptation of The Rings of Saturn. It also addresses controversies surrounding Sebald’s writing: how he deliberately situated himself as an academic outsider, was criticised by those who disliked his confrontation of German history, and his general animosity towards established champions of post-war literature.

The Rings of Saturn (1995)

In this chapter, Schütte considers The Rings of Saturn as Sebald’s masterpiece. He presents the book as much more than a portrayal of Suffolk and its environs, instead a work that freely crosses genres such as autobiography, biography, travelogue and meditative essay.It explores many of Sebald’s literary preoccupations including human’s natural history of destruction, and the author’s belief in the Holocaust as not a singular, incommensurable event, but part of a recurrent chain of disasters we all have a degree of guilt for.

The Emigrants (1992)

In this chapter, Schütte analyses the work that transformed Sebald’s career. The Emigrants is a collection of four stories which reflect on the suffering of the victims of Nazi terror. They explore the tragic phenomenon of ‘survivor syndrome’, where victims repress the burden of escaping persecution before being compelled to end their lives. Two of the narratives, Dr Henry Selwyn and Paul Bereyter, end in forms of redemptive suicide as the characters are troubled by long-repressed memories and feelings of collective responsibility for the Holocaust. Reflecting on the title, Schütte argues that Sebald, thinly cloaked as the narrator, believed the loss of one’s homeland as a result of forced migration to be a paradigmatic experience of modern life.

Vertigo (1990)

This chapter introduces the reader to Sebald’s poem, Vertigo. Another fragmented epic, it opens with a short biography of Stendhal (the French writer Marie Henri Beyle) which Schütte relates to Sebald’s preoccupation with memory. The second part is an unnamed narrator’s travelogue of two Alpine journeys, whilst the third is a semi-fictional reconstruction of Franz Kafka’s stay in an Italian sanatorium. The fourth is a recounting of a homecoming, mirroring Sebald’s own return to Germany and the repressed fears of his childhood. Schütte presents Vertigo as an example of Sebald’s ability to blur the dividing line between the authentic and the fake, manipulating sensations of memory and dizziness as suggested in the poem’s title.